Wole Soyinka
festivals today, they survive precariously under the combined weight of
repressive Christian proselytization, the rise of secular, rational world-
views, and the material forces of technology and economic production.
From the perspective of the onslaught of these forces, cultic rituals are
little more than archaisms without the dynamism they may have once
had. In other words, the historic context of the ritual idioms that Soyinka
deploys in his dramas corresponds remarkably to what Rene Girard in
his seminal book,Violence and the Sacred, has called “the sacrificial crisis.”
By this term Girard means the relentless and inevitable decline of the
social and metaphysical sanctions which once gave sacrificial rituals their
ethical legitimacy and psychological efficacy. As Girard blithely puts it:
“If, as is often the case, we encounter the institution of sacrifice either
in an advanced state of decay or reduced to relative insignificance, it is
because it has already undergone a good deal of wear and tear ().” It
is part of Girard’s ethnocentrism in this otherwise seminal work that for
him, “the sacrificial crisis” has taken place only in the Western world,
whereas a rigorous application of the logic of his insights should indi-
cate that this “crisis” cannot but eventuate everywhere in the modern
world. We will return later to the implications of this for Soyinka’s most
ambitious plays.
The second aspect of Soyinka’s interest in ritual that has generally
escaped the attention of students of his works seems like a direct obverse
of the first aspect. This is the fact that in his writings as a theorist and
critic, Soyinka has tended to approach other playwrights, writers and
artists with the paradigm and values of what he calls the “ritual matrix.”
This practice has fostered a remarkably flexible and subtle deployment
of the paradigm and has produced often compelling, highly idiosyn-
cratic readings of diverse African and Western playwrights, directors and
artists. Among Western dramatists in particular, this supple application
by Soyinka of the paradigm of the “ritual matrix” has produced extraor-
dinarily fresh readings of Aristophanes’Lysistrata, Shakespeare’sAnthony
and Cleopatra, Edward Albee’sWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,MaxFrisch’s
Count Oederlandand Bertolt Brecht’sBaal, and the work of the director
Ariane Mnouchkine.More generally, Soyinka’s comments, through the
symbolic prism of ritual, on such artists as Vassily Kandinsky, Francis
Bacon and Peter Brook have provided a fresh approach to their works.
And among African dramatists and writers, he has, through this rubric
of ritual and its alleged liberating values, produced notable if contro-
versial readings of Duro Ladipo, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe and Femi
Osofisan.