Wole Soyinka
(Iya Agba, Iya Mate, Si Bero and, ambiguously, the Old Man) and who
have a keen, unromantic knowledge of evil and are thus not themselves
averse to using evil to fight evil. It is the underlying polarity of this mythos
which provides Soyinka with tight artistic control over the extreme radi-
cal discontinuities and disjunctures in the action of the play. The endless
parodic improvisations of the four mendicants on just about every in-
stitution, every value propping up power, rank, duty and respectability
are anchored in this underlying substructure of the duality of good and
evil, the disease and its cure. Thus,Madmenshares many features with
The Road; this comparative profile of the considerable dramaturgic and
thematic similarities between these two radical and enigmatic dramatic
parables on evil enables us to engage the enthralling textual and ideo-
logical inscriptions that the parable entails in each play.
“If they threaten me, I shall counter with a resurrection, capital R,”
says Professor inThe Road. This is in reference to his epic battle with the
Christian church and the congregation from which he has been expelled
and in whose very frontage he has set up an oppositional redoubt in the
form of his palm wine bar and “Aksident Store.” But Professor’s profane
eccentricities extend beyond his parody of Christian ritual and liturgi-
cal motifs to embrace also traditional African matrices since in fact his
threats of a counter “resurrection” rests on Murano, his deaf-mute ser-
vant who is none other than the masquerade who was knocked down and
presumed dead on the day of the drivers’ festival. The traditional meta-
physical assumption being that Murano in cultic “egungun” masquer-
adery became transubstantiated into an ancestral spirit or a deity, this
amounts to nothing less than Professor willfully holding “a god captive.”
In stark contrast and simmering conflict with this studied “irreverence”
of Professor are the more conventionally “pious,” reverential attitudes
and beliefs of his subaltern confreres of drivers, apprentices and thugs:
they hold Ogun in awe and reverence, just as they are enormously im-
pressed by the poetry and drama of Sunday worship in the Christian
church from which Professor has been expelled. It is this conflict which
erupts at the end of the play leading to the slaying of Professor when
he apparently makes good on his threat of a counter “resurrection” by
finally allowing Murano to don his ritual “egungun” costume.
Oyin Ogunba’s impressive work of uncovering the ethnographic back-
ground of the extensive cultic ritual materials deployed by Soyinka in
The Roadhas been very helpful to students in tackling the “difficulty” of
the play.Nonetheless, there remains a tremendous challenge of uncov-
ering “meaning” from the play’s esoteric, though scintillating parodies