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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 between
background
scenes dealing with the white colonizers and their world and the
fore-
grounded
scenes 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 of
A 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 of
Death and the King’s Horseman
is 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
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
one
death 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
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