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Wole Soyinka
For beside this mystic integrity of Nature, this wisdom of the ages, Soyinka
also erects the remorseless exactions of historical experience, the ultimate
of which is the example of the “economic laws” of the Slave Coast:
:
Hush! Mulieru, I knew you in the days of pillaging, in the days
of sudden slaughter, and the parting of child and mother. I knew you in the
days of grand destroying and you a part of the waste. Mulieru, you were
one of those who journeyed in the market-ships of blood. You were sold
Mulieru, for . . .
(who has been consulting his barks): . . . a flask of rum.
(
–
)
And significantly, this historical negation not only mutilates humans and
their relationships, but also worsts the forest-nature. The villagers attempt
to drive off their unwelcome lead with petrol fumes from the belching
exhaust of the hellish transport lorry, “Chimney of Ereko” and Agboreko
of “the sealed lips” and cryptic knowledge, medium of animist wisdom,
cautions:
The Chimney of Ereko. Ah, Baba, will you never believe that you cannot get
rid of ancestors with the little toys of children. (
)
No doubt Agboreko intends in this admonition a cautionary lesson that
the sins and follies of the past, of the ancestors, cannot be wiped out by the
inventions and “sophisticated” artifacts of the present civilization, but still
the ancestors and the forest beings do retreat before the noxious petrol
fumes. They are after all vulnerable, their domination of the humans
not absolute. Indeed another aspect of their “vulnerability” is worthy
of mention, for not only petrol fumes but the first shafts of sunlight
send even Ogun and Eshuoro scampering away deeper into the dense,
impenetrable heart of the forest:
Noise of the beaters from a distance. Dawn is breaking. Ogun enters bearing
Demoke,
eying the sky anxiously
. He is armed with a gun and cutlass. The sun
creeps through; Ogun lays down Demoke, leaves his weapons beside him, flees.
Eshuoro is still dancing as the foremost of the beaters break on the scene and
then he flees after his Jester. It is now fully dawn. Agboreko and the Old Man
enter, Murete, very drunk, dragging them on. The sound of the main body of
beaters with the drummers continues in the distance (
) (My emphasis)
A Dance
is not only an appreciation of the wisdom of animist thought
in its full respect for the integral totalization of the nature
outside
and
inside
of man, it is also a criticism of it, a revelation of its historically determi-
nate limits. It shows the dialectical self-dissolution of animist-mythical
Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex”
thought in history in the face of the relentless weight of new forms
of consciousness: the shafts of sunlight dispel the spirits and gods be-
cause they are the fantasized creations of alienated consciousness, and
the petrol fumes – a pollutant, mark – irritate the forest beings because the
elements of a new mode of production rupture the ecological balance
and the material base which subsume and validate the alienated ani-
mist consciousness.
Christopher Caudwell, in his brilliant but ignored
monograph,
Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture
, has expressed the
social and epistemological basis of this conjunctural crisis:
The religious distortion of consciousness is produced by the structure of the
society in which it is generated. It is the outcome of an illusion, a flaw, an
infection, in that society. Thus the criticism of religion is also a criticism of
the society that produced it, and this does not mean a criticism of that society
in the abstract but of its concrete reality, a criticism of all the social relations
engendered by its level of economic production.
In a way,
A Dance
shows the dialectic of artistic discipline and formal-
istic venturesomeness at its most fraught in Soyinka’s major plays. Given
the fact that the play was written and staged as part of Nigeria’s indepen-
dence celebrations, many critics have pondered the motivations which
encouraged Soyinka to crowd, or even overload the plot and dramatic
action of this play with a surfeit of incident and rather obscure metaphor
and symbolism, especially in the climactic scene of the masque-dance in
the forest. This is a play which, after all, is designed in its themes and con-
flicts to shock its expected middle-class audience out of amnesia about
the past and out of euphoria about the present, these being the pervasive
complacent spiritual and ideological attitudes of the elites of the then
newly independent African countries. What could be more subversive of
these attitudes than the play’s central theme that the “nation-building”
myths of a glorious past, of great, heroic ancestors, were dangerous ob-
fuscations of both that past and a present deeply compromised by cru-
elty, cowardice and venality? But then, why shroud this theme in layers
of “inscrutable” symbolism and metaphysics? This question leads us di-
rectly into the specific expressions of the “ritual problematic” in this play,
especially as rendered in the climactic scene of the trial of the humans
through a cultic ritual masque in the denouement of the play.
There are of course many extraordinarily insightful revelations of hu-
man character and motivation in this play. Among these are the rev-
elation of a cowering insecurity beneath Mata Kharibu’s blustering
tyranny and Demoke’s half-remorseful, half-unrepentant and boastful
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