Wole Soyinka
of the numinous, regenerative forces of nature. This is the only basis on
which Iyaloja’s hesitation, as the mother of the young man to whom the
young girl is betrothed, is effectively overcome, and she can only acqui-
esce to Elesin’s wish in the same fabulous idiom: “The voice I hear is
already touched by the waiting fingers of our departed. I dare not refuse”
(). To a skeptical, agnostic consciousness, this is nothing less than a ca-
nard, a mere imposture opportunistically manipulating a symbolic order
of discourse that transmutes gratuitous lust into life-enhancing regener-
ative powers, for in the logic of such skeptical rationalism, the question
can be put: how is it certain that the bride will indeed conceive from this
onesexual union, let alone bring the pregnancy to term, and give birth to
a healthy, normal child? But this is precisely the point: such skepticism,
in the context of the play’s dramatization of the fragility of ritual and
its sanctions and claims, is redundant. Ritual efficacy is not,ab initio,
guaranteed; rather it is predicated on so many other factors beyond the
control of the internal economy of the ritual act itself. One of these fac-
tors is indeed the precondition that the ritual act must not be interrupted
or foreclosed before its completion. This is why we must take seriously
Soyinka’s insistence that the intervention of the Colonial District Officer
is only a catalyst for the more decisive protagonist agency of Elesin’s
divided, conflicted will. The tragic flaw of the protagonist of this play is
thus Elesin’s willful misrecognition of his divided volition, willful because
it is only by acting out and vibrantly playing the elaborate conceits of his
mastery of death and his self-projection as an avatar of earth’s regener-
ative powers that he is able to live the lie of being an absolutely willing
ritual scapegoat. The lie of course catches up with him – and the ritual
is aborted.
As we have remarked earlier,Death and the King’s Horsemanformalisti-
cally marks Soyinka at his most accomplished in terms of his exercise
of tight artistic control over a daunting subject matter, whileThe Bacchae
of Euripidesshows the playwright returning to some of the lapses and
excesses ofA Dance of the Forests. Soyinka is at great pains in the prefatory
note toDeath and the King’s Horsemanto emphatically deny that the play
is about the theme of culture clash, a theme which has fostered some of
the worst, formulaic writings on fiction and drama in the postcolonial
literatures of Africa and the developing world. As Adebayo Williams has
demonstrated in an engrossing essay on the play, the task Soyinka sets
himself is far more complex than this, which is to show how the undig-
nified abomination of death by self-strangulation of Elesin that replaces
the other “death” expected of him marks the cultural death of a whole