Wole Soyinka
.: She wasn’t going to burn his money though. Oh Sergeant Burma
was a rich man. He searched the pockets before the police or the ambulance
came. Looting was after all the custom in the front. You killed your enemy
and you robbed him. He couldn’t break the habit.
: But this is not war.
: Liar. Even these rags (waving a newspaper) understand its nature.
Like a battlefield they always say. Like a battlefield.
(–)
Professor’s sardonic comment in this passage that monstrously predatory
acts and behavior considered “normal” in war are no less valid in peace
time because life itself is essentially “like a battlefield” shows the link be-
tween his own enigmatic philosophy of life with the personal moral codes
of the likes of Say-Tokyo Kid and Sergeant Burma. But unlike those other
characters, Professorisa quester after “truth,” after the mystery of life
and death, and this aspect of his personality has exercised considerable
fascination for many critics. His very first appearance in the action of
the play is laden with colorful enigma. He is described thus: “Professor
is a tall figure in Victorian outfit – tails, top hat, etc., all threadbare and
shiny at the lapels from much ironing. He carries four enormous bundles
of newspaper and a fifth of paper odds and ends impaled in a metal rod
stuck in a wooden rest. A chair stick hangs from one elbow, and the other
arm clutches a road-sign bearing a squiggle and the word ‘BEND’ ” (CP,
–). And Professor’s first words match this appearance of enigmatic,
unnerving eccentricity with poetic flavor – he describes a road crash with
many deaths that he has just seen with phrases amounting to perhaps
the most memorable inscription of T.S. Eliot’s concept of the “objec-
tive correlative” in Soyinka’s plays: “Come then, I have a new wonder
to show you... a madness where a motor car throws itself against a
tree – Gbram! And showers of crystal flying on broken souls” (CP,–
). This dazzling use of language is sustained throughout the play and,
more specifically, is deployed to give Professor’s interest – and trade – in
death its profoundly paradoxical combination of a tough-minded, un-
sentimental and predatory view of death as inseparable from life’s central
material process of the production and circulation of commodities and
services, and an epic quest seeking to find the means with which to strip
death of its mastery over life as expressed above all in the processes of
putrefaction and “flesh dissolution.” As he moves serially through ex-
ploration and then disavowals of, first, the liturgical rites and theological
beliefs of the Christian faith, second, traditional African ritual beliefs and
practices around institutions of spirit mediums and funerary cults, and