Wole Soyinka
these in turn inflect the theme of power itself. This observation demon-
strates how, on the same basic theme, Soyinka’s dramaturgy expresses
itself with great variation in technique, idiom and tone. Three examples
will serve to illustrate this point:Kongi’s Harvest,Opera WonyosiandA Play
of Giants.
The “Kongi” of the title of the play,Kongi’s Harvest, is a wildly para-
noid dictator of the imaginary state of Isma. The central conflict of the
play ranges those with Kongi against the dissidents who are opposed
to him. With Kongi is his elaborate state apparatus comprising bureau-
crats, spies, brigades of “loyalist” conscripts in “voluntary” workers and
youth movements, and a conclave of retained intellectuals who write
the dictator’s speeches and books, and are also periodically sequestered
from the rest of the nation to “think” for the dictator. At the time of
the first staging of the play, it was widely believed that these particular
expressions of paranoid autocracy and the claim of authorship of books
ghostwritten by intellectual hirelings constituted unmistakable allusions
to Kwame Nkrumah, an ascription Soyinka never exactly refuted, al-
lowing only that his Kongi was a composite of many African dictators
of the period.Against Kongi and this apparatus are ranged a loose
coalition of dissidents comprising Daodu and his lover, Segi, and their
farmers’ and womens’ producers’ collectives. In its mixture of verse and
prose dialogues, music and song, dance and spectacle,Kongi’s Harvestis
perhaps the liveliest of Soyinka’s dramatic explorations of the theme of
corruption of power in the then newly independent African states. There
is a grim, dark moment at the play’s climactic denouement with palpable
allusions to the biblical narrative of Salome and John the Baptist when
the decapitated head of the father of Segi, the play’s only speaking fe-
male character, is presented in a covered bowl to the dictator in place
of the prize yam he expected as the “Spirit of Harvest.”(Segi’s father,
a veteran political dissident himself, had been shot while trying to es-
cape from political detention.) But the horror of the moment is highly
aestheticized, and it devolves into a bloodless, symbolic “coup de grace”
in which, frothing at the mouth, the mad dictator wordlessly harangues
the crowd gathered at the ceremonies while singing and dancing by
Segi’s “women” increase in volume and energy, thereby “festivalizing”
this whole sequence as a mimed, spectacular denouement. The sugges-
tion is that this is a symbolic neutralization of the antihumanism of the
deranged dictator. Indeed, most of the dramatic action ofKongi’s Harvest
entails a romantic, even elegiac evocation of social and natural forces
of regeneration against their vitiation by the life-denying corruptions