Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” Pilkings – remains unscathed at the end of the play, that is, at the end of
the forcible prevention of the rite which would have secured Elesin Oba’s
ritual passage and at the end of the equally abortive reactivation of that
ritual passage by Olunde’s successful suicide. It is closer to the mark to see
that by the operation of a stringent dialectic, Soyinka converts the futility
of the forcible prevention of the rite to expose a conjunctural moment
in the drama of imperialism and the resistances it generated, a moment
which produces ramifications and consequences totally unanticipated by
colonizer and colonized alike, a theme that has been brilliantly explored
by Olakunle George in one of the most illuminating essays on this play.
Let us explore this point carefully.
On the part of the colonizers, nearly everything that Pilkings does and
says undermines and negates the liberal humanist and rationalist values
on the basis of which he acts to prevent the ritual suicide of Elesin.
For in the course of the dramatic action of the play, we come to see
that he is the representative of a social power that is nearly as feudal,
nearly as shaped by expressive, ceremonial codes constructed around
premodern patriachal-aristocratic values as the culture of the “subject
race” over which he rules. Moreover, in word and deed, Pilkings does
not place any real worth on the lives of those he presumes to teach
respect for the worth of human life. Like the much-discussed hollow,
self-serving “benevolence” of the reformist claims of the imperialist ban
of the institution of “sati,” widow-burning, in colonial India, Pilkings
is motivated to intervene in Elesin Oba’s suicide and thus “contain”
the institutional matrix which sustains it because it stands beyond, and
confounds, the spheres of his secular, political-administrative authority.
Jane Pilkings is something of an incipient “border crosser” who sees and
acts beyond the rigid boundaries of the world inhabited by her husband,
the manichean world of incommensurable polarity of colonizers and
colonized. But ultimately, she is the gendered, domesticated “helpmeet”
of the colonialist patriarchy that pits Pilkings against Elesin Oba and
against Olunde.
In the light of this reading of the essential conflicts of the play, Olunde
is the ultimate nemesis of the authority and hegemony on which Pilkings
can count for the stability and perpetuation of colonial rule. This is not
only because his suicide literally ensures that Pilkings’ efforts to prevent
onedeath in fact leads to two deaths; more significant is the fact that
Olunde’s death completely undermines the brutal, reified dichotomiza-
tion of the secular and the sacred, positivist, instrumental rationality
and “mythical thought” and “irrationalism” that is the most serviceable