Wole Soyinka
This view of the “disseminated,” unfocused and circulatory nature of
power to which Michel Foucault and Vaclav Havel have given the most
powerful theoretical formulation in the modern European context,
informs the dramatic action ofAPlayofGiantsin its focused portrayal
of four of the most odious African dictators and tyrants in the post-
independence era, Idi Dada Amin of Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokasa of the
Central African Republic-turned-Empire, Macias Nguema of Equatorial
Guinea, and Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi. Soyinka gives a direct
statement of this view of power in his preface to the play:
Power, we have suggested, calls to power, and vicarious power (that is, the sort
enjoyed by the politically impotent intelligentsia) responds obsequiously to the
real thing. Apart from self-identification with success, there is also a professed
love (in essence a self-love) which is perverse, being also identical with the love
of the slave-girl for her master. Often, on listening to the rationalizations of this
group, I see that I am listening to the slave-girl in a harem, excusing the latest
sadisms of the seraglio, exaggerating the scattered moments of generosity, of
‘goodness’, forgetting that even the exceptions to the rule merely emphasize the
slave relations between herself and the master. Our friends professed to find
in Idi Amin the figure of a misunderstood nationalist, revolutionary and even
economic genius – after all, he did boot out the blood-sucking Asians, and was
he not always to be relied upon for a hilarious insult against one super-power
imperialist chieftain or another and their client leaders on the continent? (TBE,
Preface)
According to Soyinka in this same preface, the model of dramaticform
which he chose to express this “epiphenomenon” of power which entails
complex acts of identification of the victims of dictatorial terror with the
perpetrators of these monstrous acts is that represented by Jean Genet’s
play,The Balcony.Presumably, Soyinka is responding to Genet’s repre-
sentation of power in that play primarily in terms of the seductive force
of its expressivity, the potent but secret aestheticism of itsdisplaythrough
spectacle, ceremonies, rituals, symbolism. Thus, a large “Genetian” part
of the dramatic action ofThePlayofGiantsinvolves a rather extended,
static tableau in which the “giants” of the title, Kamini, Gunema, Kasko
and Tobum – each respectively serving as very thinly disguised represen-
tations of Idi Amin, Macias Nguema, Jean-Bedel Bokasa and Mobutu –
talk about andparadethemselves as incarnations of replete, fulfilled power.
However, another part of the play,departing from Genet’s model, ef-
fectively desacralizes power by dramatizing the relentless loosening of
Kamini’s grip on power as some of his henchmen either countermand
his orders or desert him, while inter-state, multilateral institutions like the