Wole Soyinka
beyond the edge of emptiness – you muttered, there is little that one man
can do, you left us floundering in a blind future. Your heir has taken the
burden on himself. What the end will be, we are not gods to tell. But this
young shoot has poured its sap into the parent stalk, and we know this is
not the way of life. Our world is tumbling in the void of strangers, Elesin.
(–)The skill with which Soyinka moves the action of the play from the first
point of cultural pride and spiritual composure in the face of the ravages
of slavery, colonization and internecine civil warfare to the end point of a
deep sense of the loss of that previous state is expressed mostly in terms of
carefully composed contrasts between scenes and, more crucially,within
scenes. Between scenes, the striking contrasts are betweenbackground
scenes dealing with the white colonizers and their world and thefore-
groundedscenes dealing with the African community of the colonized: in
nearly all instances, the latter scenes show much greater aesthetic invest-
ment on the part of the playwright in terms of characterization, dramatic
action and, above all, language. And within scenes, Soyinka pays metic-
ulous attention to expressive resources available for breathing vitality to
a world-view characterized by its joy of life and calm acceptance of the
stresses of existence and the fact of mortality, even as that world-view
gradually unravels as the play moves forward to the shattering climac-
tic denouement. In this play, we are a world away from the unwieldy
overload of incident, metaphor and esoteric tropes ofA Dance, but the
profound interrogation of ritual and its idioms remains as consistent in
the latter play as in Soyinka’s first major, full-length play.
The power of the modern dramatic parable, as compositely fash-
ioned by some of the great dramatists of the twentieth century – Eugene
O ’Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Derek Walcott, John
Arden, Brian Friel, Caryl Churchill and of course Soyinka himself –
derives from the self-reflexive deployment of the idioms and techniques
of performance and representation to explore and perhaps throw some
light on the existential and social ramifications of the world-historical
and structural contradictions of our age. To this extent, the most impres-
sive achievement ofDeath and the King’s Horsemanis perhaps its extremely
skillful deployment of the “ritual problematic” to make an original cri-
tique of both colonialism and the nationalist resistance to it at the level
of their impact on the social and existential complacencies of the play’s
major characters. On this point, it is putting things rather mildly to
say, in the critical idiom of conventional formal analysis, that none
of these characters – Elesin Oba, Iyaloja, Olunde, Simon and Jane