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Wole Soyinka
“confession” of the psychological vulnerabilities and professional jeal-
ousies which prompted him to pluck his apprentice, Oremole, to his
death from his perch above his master at the crown of the Araba tree.
There are also passages of mature verse drama which gather genuine folk
and oracular wisdom into impeccably modern ideas about the perpetual
obstacles to social equality and environmental responsibility, obstacles of-
ten exacerbated by the march of “progress” itself. The testimony of the
phalanx of ants in the ritual masque scene is one of such instances of dra-
matic forcefulness and thematic depth fashioned out of the combination
of traditional Yoruba rhetoric associated with cultic, esoteric knowledge
and the symbolism of Western expressionist drama:
: If the hills are silent, who are these, if the sun is full and the
winds are still whose hand is this that reaches from the grave?
: We take our color from the loam and blindness hits them, and
they tread us underfoot.
: Are you my sons?
: We are the blazers of the trail; if you are Forest Father, we think
we are your sons.
: But who are you?
: We take our color from the fertile loam, our numbers from
the hair-roots of the earth and terror blinds them. They know we are the
children of earth. They break our skin upon the ground, fearful that we
guard the wisdom of earth, our mother.
: Have you a grievance?
: None Father, except great clods of earth pressed on our feet. The
world is old but the rust of a million years has left the chains unloosened.
: Are you not free?
: Freedom we have like the hunter on a precipice and the horns
of a rhinoceros nuzzling his buttocks.
: Do you not walk? Talk, bear and suckle children by the gross?
: Freedom indeed we have to choose our path to turn to the left
or the right like the spider in the sand-pit and the great ball of eggs pressing
on his back.
: But who are you?
(The leader retreats, and another takes his place.)
: I thought, staying this low, they would ignore me. I am the one that tried
to be forgotten.
: I am the victim of the careless stride.
: I know the path was thin, a trickle in the marsh. Yet we mowed the
roots, our bellies to the ground.
: Have you a Cause, or shall I preserve you like a riddle?
: We are the ones remembered when nations build . . .
: . . . with tombstones.
Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex”
: We are the dried leaves, impaled on one-eyed brooms.
: We are the headless bodies when the spade of progress delves.
: The ones that never looked up when the wind turned suddenly,
erupting in our heads.
: Down the axis of the world, from the whirlwind to the frozen drifts,
we are the ever legion of the world smitten, for – ‘the good to come’.
: Once my eyes were earthworms dragging in my tears.
(shouting): What is this? For what cursed future do you rise to speak?
: Then the ring of scourges was complete and my hair rose on its
tail like scorpions.
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CP
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This exchange between, on the one hand, the Ant Leader and his co-
horts and, on the other hand, Forest Head and Aroni, is an almost
perfect microcosm of the entire play in terms of the tension between, on
the one hand, imaginative boldness and metaphoric richness and, on the
other hand, lack of formal, technical mastery of materials threatening
always to overwhelm the reader and the audience. The central idea in
the exchange is an old, timeless theme of engaged literature: workers
as ants trodden underfoot in the march of progress. The way in which
Soyinka transforms this theme into one of the most resonant and lay-
ered tropes in the ritual masque scene is worthy of review, as are the
risks and slippages incurred in the process. First, the irruption of the ants
into the scene is shrouded in mystery and enigma, for even Forest Head
himself, the “father of secrets,” does not immediately recognize them.
Moreover, their ascension to centre stage within the scene is clothed in
a myriad of metaphors that considerably enhance their associative link
with too many forms, too many communities of exploitation, suffering
and drudgery. They are said to be a collective “hand that reaches from
the grave” (countless generations of the oppressed of past ages); they
take their “color from the fertile loam,” their “numbers from the hair
roots of the earth” (peasants who live close to the land and base their
supreme ethical values, their identity on the “soil”); they are the ones who
try “to be forgotten” by “staying low” (anonymous toilers and drudges
in their mass, “forgettable” existence); they are the ones remembered
when nations “build with tombstones” (millions of war dead memorial-
ized in the absurdity of cenotaphs erected in the name of the “unknown
soldier”); and they are “the ever legion of the world smitten for the good
to come” (the poor expropriated and disenfranchised by the promise of
a better tomorrow which has been made to the countless generations
of the ancestors of the present generation of the expropriated). The fact
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