Wole Soyinka
be glimpsed in the following dramatic exchange in the tenth chapter of
Things Fall Apart. The exchange is based on the trial of the wife-beater,
Uzowulu, by theegwugwu, a group of masqueraders representing an-
cestral spirits and acting on the occasion as the most powerful judicial
institution in the land:
“I don’t know why such a trifle should come before theegwugwu”, said one elder
to another. “Don’t you know what kind of man Uzowulu is? He will not listen
to any other decision”, replied the other. As they spoke, two other groups of
people had replaced the first before theegwugwuand a great land case began.
In this quote, first theegwugwutry the trifling case of the unrepentant
wife-beater, Uzowulu, and then proceed to the trial of “a great land
case,” just as inA Dance, the masked spirits summoned by Forest Head
to “try” Demoke and the other humans are constantly distracted from
this important task by the “trifling” quarrel of Eshuoro and Ogun. Con-
sistent with his celebrated fictional method of using condensation and
understatement to encompass vast socio-historical experiences and the
institutional expressions through which they are mediated or negoti-
ated, Achebe in this quote subsumes the middling case of Uzowulu to
the “great land case,” hopeful that his narrative art will easily secure the
endorsement of the perceptive reader for his separation of “trifling” from
serious matters in the cases that come before theegwugwufor adjudica-
tion. The extraordinarily dense and cryptic nature of the dramatization
of the “ritual problematic” inA Danceis predicated on the fact that the
ritual idioms that Soyinka appropriates for the climactic trial scene in the
play derive their expressive and thematic intricacy and complexity from
this same kind of judicial-adminstrative ritual, withhowever, nothing
approaching the authority and legitimacy of its invocation in Achebe’s
novel which, after all, is set in the past, before the onset of the “sacrificial
crisis.” Nonetheless, Soyinka shows great originality in his conflation
of both this pristine West African judicial-administrative ritual matrix
and, in the persons of Forest Head and his servitor, Aroni, elements of
the absolutist-monarchical paradigm of Prospero’s trial of his enemies in
The Tempest. The originality of this conflation of such disparate expressive
idioms, as well as the signal weaknesses that derive from it and consider-
ably compromise the artistic merits of the play, can only be established
by a careful exegesis of plot, dramaturgy and symbolism inA Dance.
The surface plot of this complex play can be rapidly summarized. The
humans are gathered for a festive celebration, “a gathering of the tribes,”
and they ask the deities and spirits of the sacred groves of the forest to send