Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” of both Western and African religious rituals and their associated ideas
of the sacred. But if “meaning” in this play is elusive and its articulations
shrouded in esoteric discourses and symbols, nobody, reader or stage au-
dience, could possibly miss what the play, phenomenologically, isabout,
what it powerfully evokes throughout its dramatic action: the carnage
of human lives on the roads and highways of the coastal strip of West
Africa. As we shall demonstrate later, Soyinka’s achievement in this play
is above all expressed in the manner in which he transforms this power-
fully elegiac invocation of life and death on the roads into an allegory of
larger and more complicated crises and dilemmas of technological and
social change in modern-day West Africa.
ThoughThe Roadprovides a more fully realized dramatization of a
sublime conception of the evil that men do and must endure than any
other Soyinka play, it presents us with a more formidable exegetical chal-
lenge. For there are no literal monstrously evil acts to be ritually exorcised
in this play as in others likeA DanceandMadmen and Specialists, and no
autocratic rulers who unwittingly cause terrible havoc and suffering like
Pilkings inDeath and the King’s Horsemanand Pentheus inThe Bacchae of
Euripides. Moreover, the play’s action contains perhaps the most zestful
celebration of life and the struggle to survive in adverse, destructive con-
ditions in all of modern African drama. Herein indeed lies the catch
in the carnivalesque exuberance of the play: beneath the robust humor
and the romance of the characters in this play lies the reality of life lived
daily at the edge of inevitable disaster and ruin. The physical and verbal
motifs which give the play this scale of representation of a world in which
destructivenessisthe medium in which everyone has his or her being are
too many to enumerate. Apart from the many references to horrible road
crashes involving mass slaughter of lorry drivers, their apprentices and
their passengers, there is the enormously crucial fact that the huge void
which exists where there should be a cohering or stable moral order is
filled by the extremely bizarre personal moral codes of many characters
of the play, all of these private codes revolving around the banality of
meaningless, violent death or destruction. Three of these characters are
worthy of brief scrutiny – Say-Tokyo Kid, Sergeant Burmah and, above
everyone else, Professor.
Say-Tokyo Kid’s personal and professional identity is perhaps the
most colorful in the play because it is synthesized out of diverse models
and sources African and foreign, traditional and modern. These in-
clude the veneration of Ogun, patron god of drivers and other workers
in metalware; the heroes, values and discourses of American B grade