Wole Soyinka
Only a comprehensive and sympathetic study of the historic conditions
which produced the theatre of Hubert Ogunde in particular and, more
generally the travelling theatre tradition, could have generated the acu-
ity and precision of the observations and analysis that we find in this
quote. This underscores Soyinka’s immersion in the vigorous traditions
of Africa’s “theatre belt” in West Africa, traditions shaped by a history
of resistance to colonial cultural aggression as well as a pronounced
tendency to make appropriations from, and recombinations of diverse
other indigenous and foreign forms and media of performance. These
are the fundamental roots of the great technical and formalistic range of
Soyinka’s dramaturgy, of the scope of his experimentation with a great
diversity of literary and nonliterary sources, with elite forms as well as
popular idioms, and with both the “legitimate” theatre and its performa-
tive “others.” In other words, if it is now generally accepted by students
of Soyinka’s drama that the fashioning of an extremely flexible, eclectic
and synthetic dramaturgy is perhaps the ultimate mark of his formal
achievement as a dramatist, the roots of this accomplishment are to be
found in the precursors in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial perfor-
mance traditions that Soyinka acknowledges and celebrates in that essay,
“Theatre in Traditional African Cultures.”
This last observation is particularly relevant to the centrality which
has been ascribed to ritual in scholarly discussions of Soyinka’s drama.
In the fourth chapter of this study we will explore the interface between
drama and ritual in Soyinka’s theories of drama and theatre and in his
most ambitious plays. The present chapter gives a profile of the general
features, the accomplishments, and some weaknesses of his drama. To
do so, it is useful to first give a sense of the general shape of his dramatic
corpus.
Soyinka is best known and celebrated as a playwright and dramatist,
even though he has written extensively in all the genres of literature. The
plays bulk much larger in his corpus than either poetry or fiction, and
Soyinka’s greatest critical successes have come from his dramas. The
Nobel Prize citation specifically mentions this point: “Who, in a wide
cultural perspective and with poetic overtones, fashions the drama of
existence.” (Nobel citations are usually short, succinct, incomplete sen-
tences). Also, Soyinka’s influence on younger African authors has been
more decisive, more evident in his plays than the impact of his writ-
ings in other genres and forms.Moreover, his dramatic theories have
been more favorably received and more seriously engaged by schol-
ars than his general theories on transcultural aesthetic experience in