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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2(2), pp 287–296 September 2015.

© Cambridge University Press, 2015 doi:10.1017/pli.2015.19

Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

in Comparative Frameworks
Ato Quayson
University of Toronto

This essay places Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman in various
comparative contexts. These include the comparison with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
and Arrow of God, literary tragedy, and world literature. Setting out the difficulties in
teaching African and minority literatures in the Euro-American classroom, the essay
details the means by which such problems are negotiated and the ways in which the
text is brought alive as a dramatic text that speaks to various themes and ideas.

Keywords: Achebe, Soyinka, Aeschylus, tragedy, dramaturgy, comparison, world

literature

The teaching of African literature to undergraduate students in the Western

academy presents a number of unique problems.1 Minority literatures always run the
risk of being read as testaments to truths about other cultures. In this type of reading
the cultural “difference” of African or minority literature is taken as its essential
defining feature, thus leading to a perspective that devotes itself to testing the
“authenticity” or otherwise of such literature. This may be seen as part of an ethno-
graphic attitude to such writing. Mistakes of two kinds are common: the first has to
do with the manufacture of essentialisms that pass for “African” life and culture.
The second, and even more deadly one, is to do with the ways in which the West is
postulated as a moral entity. Not only is it rendered in a monolithic guise, but it is also
analyzed mainly in terms that have forced the postulation of African counter-identities
themselves to be couched predominantly in the form of definable (and different)
moral values in the first place. In another turn, the West is read as the beneficiary of

Ato Quayson is a professor of English and the inaugural director of the Centre for Diaspora and
Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His publications include Strategic Transformations in
Nigerian Writing (1997), African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (with Tejumola
Olaniyan, 2007), the two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), Companion to
Diaspora and Transnationalism (with Girish Daswani, 2013) and Oxford Street, Accra City: Life and the
Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014).
1 Although I have taught African and postcolonial literature to both undergraduates and graduates,
I find the problems pertain to the degree of their familiarity with minority literatures and not necessarily
to the stage in their studies when there are being introduced to this literature. Thus, even though my
remarks here are geared mainly toward undergraduates, it has often also proven useful to frame the
critical issues to graduate students in a similar manner, even if with more complex modes of
exemplification.
288 ATO QUAYSON

colonialism, and minority literatures as exposing this debt. But the flipside is also
applicable, namely, that minority literatures are essentially derivative of Western
genres and literary standards and so offer nothing but lively addenda to what has
come before. I state these problems starkly in order to highlight how much more
sensitive we have to make our students in their encounter with African literature. And
yet at the same time, it is impossible in dealing with students new to this literature to
avoid the question of cultural competence. Couched in the mode of “how can a person
of privileged background from X be able to understand a cultural product from the
underprivileged context Y,” the question frustrates students from dealing with African
literature first and foremost as literary writing, as opposed to ethnography, sociology,
or something else. My emphasis on “literariness” is not to say that using literature as
cultural testimonial is in itself harmful but that this method of reading is often
presented as if it is somehow inherently African and that the assumption is typically
made as if the issue is self-evident.
The issue of cultural competence is one I address afresh each time I have taught
African literature. My approach to this has been two-fold. First is to get my students to
understand that what appears to be a specifically cultural or ethnographic detail is only
important to the degree to which it reveals something about another level of the text,
such as characterization, historical background, ethical choice, notions of causality
and transition, and so on. Second has been to persuade them that every cultural
particularity must be seen first and foremost as a threshold rather than as a discrete
entity in itself. The relationship between particularity and threshold must be seen as
that between figure and ground, or between window and vista, or between vector and
totality, each of which can be explored in smaller or greater detail depending on what
the objectives for interpretation are. But whichever way the relationship of particu-
larity and threshold is interpreted, its meaning must be conceived as a process, that is
to say, in terms of a series of processual textual transactions whereby a seemingly
innocent and self-evident cultural detail progressively changes its status as it is read
alongside other details and dimensions of the text in question. And this procedure is
as important to those from “inside” of a culture as it is for outsiders.
As a general rule, I have always taught Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman
after introducing students to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God.
(Typically both, because if students have ever encountered African literature it will
most likely have been only Things Fall Apart). The point about teaching Achebe first is
that his Igbo-inspired texts appear to be the most culturally saturated, thus allowing
themselves to be read simultaneously in a literary and ethnographic manner. His
handling of the theme of colonialism and Christianity in the two novels also allows us
to grasp a thematic cluster that is reiterated often in African literature, and from which
starting point a number of other themes are radiated. But perhaps most important
from the perspective of teaching Death and the King’s Horseman is the problematic
understanding of causality that Achebe explores via the concept of chi. The concept of
chi in Things Fall Apart points to the belief in a personal god, personal fate if you will,
but in such a way as to defy easy explanation even to the people of the fictional
Umuofia themselves. The Umuofians believe that when a man says yes strongly
enough his chi is bound to agree. But when Okonkwo’s gun goes off at Ogbuefi
Ezeudu’s funeral and kills the dead man’s son to trigger his exile from the clan, it looks
WOLE SOYINKA’S DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN IN COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORKS 289

as if his chi has begun to say no to his self-affirming yes. But because the chi is an
abstract concept and not a material entity its main terms cannot be understood except
through grasping a range of sociocultural relations as set out within the novel: the
relations of gender exchange and reciprocity that are manifest at different material and
symbolic levels of the clan, the relation between a proverbial language of cultural
interpretation and a rapidly changing world, and the economy of exclusions that
peripheralize certain constituencies within the culture despite the essentially meritocratic
impulses upon which the culture has been constructed (osus, twins, “effeminate” men,
etc.). In other words, Achebe suggests that the chi must not be understood exclusively as
pertaining to personal choice or action but must be grasped instead through a form of
embedding that takes the whole range of possible and potential sociocultural relations
into account. It is a particularity that is also a threshold. The question of how to embed
the chi concept within other sociocultural dimensions of Things Fall Apart provides a
useful illustration of how this procedure might be used for exploring Death and the
King’s Horseman and other texts of African literature.
Soyinka’s play raises another set of difficulties that pertain specifically to its status
as a play rather than a novel. For one thing, the play has a highly elaborate sonic and
poetic dimension that is easy to miss when reading it merely as a play text. To
highlight this mistake, I will have asked my students in that week to read Tejumola
Olaniyan’s “Festivals, Rituals, and Drama in Africa.”2 Olaniyan provides an in-depth
discussion of the continuum of festival theater and art theater, showing for example
the degree to which art theater typically severs the stage action from the music,
dancing, mime, and call-and-response that are endemic to festival theater. In Death
and the King’s Horseman, the question of drumming and its function in this sonically
rich text is placed firmly in the foreground from the very first stage directions:

A passage through a market in its closing stages. The stalls are being emptied, mats
folded. A few women pass though on their way home, loaded with baskets. On a cloth-
stand, bolts of cloth are taken down, display pieces folded and piled on a tray. ELESIN
OBA enters along a passage before the market, pursued by his drummers and praise
singers. He is a man of enormous vitality, speaks, dances and sings with that infectious
enjoyment of life which accompanies all his actions. (9)

To get my students to keep the sonic dimension of the play firmly in view at all
times, I bring to class a large djembe drum, along sometimes also with a small
xylophone. After getting some of them to tap a rhythm on the drum or the xylophone
(it must be from the heart, I tell them), I then play a series of beats on the instruments,
alternating between the two to establish a sense of variety. From time to time during the
course of the discussion, I also stop to play quickly on the instruments, in each instance
reminding them that had they been watching the play rather than reading it they will
have been hearing different types of drumming and other traditional instruments
throughout the course of the action. The other thing that I do to animate the opening

2 Tejumola Olaniyan, “Festivals, Rituals, and Drama in Africa,” in The Cambridge History of African and
Caribbean Literature, eds. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi. Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 35–48.
290 ATO QUAYSON

stage directions is to bring to class a number of African-print cloths that I drape along
the desk at the front of the class. This is to highlight the rich visuality of the market in
the opening scene and also to focus attention on the role of Iyaloja, the chief of the
market women, who comes to perform a very important function in articulating
cultural values and also acting as a sharp critic of Elesin Oba when he fails in his
obligation to successfully perform the ritual suicide. I also embed the entire market
scene within Yorùbá cultural processes, pointing out how the proverb Ayé lọjà; ọ̀run
nilé (the earth is a marketplace; heaven is home) points to the conjunctural nature of
the market in Yorùbá culture as a place of the meeting of the living, the dead,
and the yet-to-be-born.3 This also provides an opportunity to give them examples of
other markets in African literature (say in Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Amma Darko,
and others) and to show how the market is often the place where important things
happen.
Throughout the course of exploring the play, I get students to try and identify the
different points at which drums are played and whether there is any significance to the
contrast between that and other sounds within the action. Thus, for example, they
come to see that there is a slight dissonance at the start of Scene 2 when we see
Mr. and Mrs. Pilkings dancing to the tango in the costume of the egungun. Because the
affective dissonance has already been established in the musical transition between
Scene 1 and Scene 2 and in the relationship between the tango from the gramophone
and the traditional costume they are wearing, it is easy then for us to appreciate
Amusa’s shock when he enters the parlor to deliver his message and first sets eyes on
his boss. His refusal to deliver his “message of death to man wearing cloths of death”
seems entirely appropriate, but the point is for the students to have recognized the
dissonance before Amusa’s own somewhat comic protestations. And in the same
scene, when Mr. Pilkings is baffled by the sound of the faraway drum, we note the
modulation that the sonicscape introduces into the play, both at the level of the
enigmatic character of the drumbeat in the distance (is it for a funeral or for a
wedding?), the pace of the action, and also in establishing the ethical choices that each
of the characters is perforce making with regard to the presentation of different
worldviews couched in the shape of culture.
The status of Death and the King’s Horseman as a tragedy raises another set of
pedagogical opportunities. A central principle of my teaching of African literature over
the past two or so decades has been to get my students to see it as part of their general
training in literary studies. I insist on not allowing them to see African literature in

3 Special thanks to Adeleke Adeeko for providing me the Yorùbá language translation of the proverb at
very short notice. Adeeko also pointed out in personal communication that there is a Yorùbá proverbial
etiquette that enjoins principal actors in a spectacle to be singularly mindful of their task and not turn
themselves into spectators, with “ẹni à ǹwò kiì ́ wòran” being the formulaic expression. This is to say that
the well-being of the spectacle should be the actor’s only preoccupation. Soyinka’s interpretation of
rituals, Greek or Yorùbá, entails the mindful and forceful exercise of will. Anything less is tragic. A full
account of the ritual dimensions of the play requires students to be additionally introduced to Soyinka’s
reflections on the god Ogun, to be found especially in his essay “The Fourth Stage,” in Myth, Literature,
and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). I provide a lengthy discussion of
this in Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and
Indiana University Press). In courses in which I have placed special emphasis on exploring orality and
ritual with my students these works have been indispensable.
WOLE SOYINKA’S DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN IN COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORKS 291

terms of an enclave but rather as providing insights into other areas of literary studies
and vice versa. Sometimes this has entailed exploring African literature in a com-
parative and world literature framework, but my most preferred mode has been to
teach it in relation to the tradition of tragedy. By the time my students and I get to
Soyinka, we will have raised Oedipus Rex in relation to Things Fall Apart. True, the
two texts are remarkably different in their essential emphases, and yet the universe of
assumed mythological verities that forms the backdrop to Oedipus’s choices compares
well with Okonkwo’s while the absolute certainty with which both undertake every
enterprise shows they share strong literary kinship. The dialectical relationship
between determinism and contingency that we find in plays such as The Oresteia,
Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Hamlet, Othello, and others will also have been raised
sporadically in the course of discussing the Achebe novels, but it is with Soyinka that
I establish an explicit dialogue with the tragic tradition. This is done both at the level
of concepts (such as tragic responsibility, pity, and fear) and of dramaturgy.
Starting with Soyinka’s dramaturgy first. After the sequence with the drum and
xylophone and before we move on to the rest of the play, I turn to Aeschylus’s
Prometheus Bound to illustrate the relationship among stasis, mobility, and specta-
toriality in the unfolding of that Greek tragedy. As people familiar with the play will
know, throughout the action Prometheus is bound to the rock in one place and
remains completely fixed, while other characters enter and exit the action. The most
important of these characters is Io. But the example of Aeschylus is mainly to focus
attention on the changing nature of spectatoriality that the play provides us with.
Sometimes I have found it useful to bring to class for the students to look at the
lengthy extract from Prometheus Bound (lines 436–505) where Prometheus details his
services to man. We conclude from this extract, among other things, that far from just
bringing man fire, what Prometheus brought were different skills of interpretation that
allowed mankind to master numbering, agriculture, astronomy, medicine, and augury,
among others. And yet these skills of interpretation, at least according to Aeschylus’s
play, fall short of giving man the capacity for knowing themselves, in other words, of
seeing into their bewildered souls the face of a universe that they have been given the
tools to transform. And at issue in Prometheus Bound is who is a spectator within the
diegesis of the action. After the discussion of the dramaturgy and concepts from the
Greek play, I then pose the question to my students as to who is a spectator in Death
and the King’s Horseman and how we come to know this. The question pertains
predominantly to the first scene but has implications for how we interpret the rest of
the play. This takes us back to how to visualize the action. In an ideal situation,
I would have liked a classroom in which I might get students to enact the first scene by
distributing them across a stage and showing how the varying functions of speaker
and spectator alter as the scene progresses. Having not as yet had this opportunity,
I have relied mainly on painting the scene with language and getting my students to
imagine it in as much detail as they can.
A number of elements of Scene 1 become especially pertinent in this exercise.
As we saw from the first stage directions, the scene opens onto the closing stages of a
market, with bolts of cloth being taken down by the market women at dusk. Into this
liminal temporal setting enters the energized Elesin Oba pursued by drummers and
his Praise-Singer. The entire market is immediately converted into an interactive
292 ATO QUAYSON

theater space, where the market women are the primary observers and Elesin and
Praise-Singer are the main actors. Praise-Singer begins to sing Elesin’s oríkí (praise
names and epithets) as a means of eliciting his ritual self and ascertaining his pre-
paredness for the ritual crossing that is to take place later that night. The elicitation
takes place through a careful process of call-and-response, where Praise-Singer says
something about communal history in a dense proverbial language and Elesin
responds accordingly, again in matching proverbial discourse:

PRAISE-SINGER: In their time the world was never tilted from its groove, it shall not be
in yours.
ELESIN: The gods have said no.
PRAISE-SINGER: In their time the great wars came and went, the little wars came and
went; the white slavers came and went, they took away the heart of our race, they bore
away the mind and muscle of our race. The city fell and was rebuilt; the city fell and our
people trudged through mountain and forest to found a new home but—Elesin Oba do
you hear me?
ELESIN: I hear your voice Olohun-iyo. (10)

This steady ritual process of elicitation is, however, interrupted three different times
in the course of Scene 1, and in each instance the interruption is by Elesin himself.
The three times are, first, when he arrests the procedures to declaim the lengthy story of
the Not-I Bird. The introduction of the song of the Not-I Bird is initially baffling to the
Praise-Singer and to the market women who have been partly singing and dancing
along and partly watching the proceedings. This is what we see:

PRAISE-SINGER: There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one
home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one
world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of
the great void, whose world will give us shelter?
ELESIN: It did not in the time of my forebears, it shall not in mine.
PRAISE-SINGER: The cockerel must not be seen without his feathers.
ELESIN: Nor will the Not-I bird be much longer without his nest.
PRAISE-SINGER: (stopped in his lyric stride): The Not-I bird, Elesin?
ELESIN: I said, the Not-I bird.
PRAISE-SINGER: All respect to our elders, but is there really such a bird?
ELESIN: What! Could it be that he failed to knock on your door?
PRAISE-SINGER: (smiling): Elesin’s riddles are not merely the nut in the kernel that
breaks human teeth; he also buries the kernel in hot embers and dares a man’s fingers to
draw it out. (11)

It turns out that the Not-I bird is an entirely made-up mythical character that
Elesin has created on the spot in order to tell his own story of fearlessness and courage
in the face of death. The ritual call-and-response between him and Praise-Singer is to
resume after the lengthy story of the Not-I bird, but Elesin stops almost immediately
after the resumption of his routine with Praise-Singer to declare that he is bitterly
offended by something. This throws everyone into a state of shock and horror, but
WOLE SOYINKA’S DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN IN COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORKS 293

especially the market women, who think they must have done something terribly
wrong. It turns out that Elesin is pretending to be offended because the women did not
drape him in resplendent cloths when he entered the market. They oblige him in great
relief, and the imminent crisis of his disapproval on the day he is a potent ritual
sacrificial carrier is averted. The ritual call-and-response continues but now explicitly
incorporates the dancing and praise-singing of the market women themselves as Elesin
swirls round and round in the colorful cloths they have draped him with. Things seem
to be going reasonably well, Praise-Singer has resumed his call-and-response routine
with Elesin, and then, all of a sudden, the third and final interruption. And this time it
is to call attention to the beautiful young woman who has just come through the
passageway into the market. What appears to be a momentary distraction turns out to
have major consequences for the rest of the action. For Elesin now insists that he must
have the young girl on this night of monumental crossing. He thus suddenly presents
his culture with a large and hitherto unanticipated problem. For it turns out that the
young woman has already been betrothed to Iyaloja’s own son. Iyaloja’s initial hesi-
tation is, however, overcome by the assertion that because he is standing astride the
space between the living and the dead his every wish must be obeyed to smoothen the
way for the crossing:

IYALOJA: Oh you who fill the home from hearth to threshold with the voices of children,
you who now bestride the hidden gulf and pause to draw the right foot across and into
the resting-home of the great forebears, it is good that your loins be drained into the earth
we know, that your last strength be ploughed back into the womb that gave you
being. (22)

What this rationalization really means is that Iyaloja and the cultural disposition
she represents is prepared to countenance the suspension of the foundational ethics of
familial relationships in favor of the apparently higher ethics of communal security
and cultural survival. This turns out to be a terrible mistake, as we later come to find out.
The key element that each of the three interruptions share is not the fact of their
being interruptions, but that they are moments in which the other people on stage
are converted into spectators of Elesin Oba. This is different from what we see
in Prometheus Bound because the spectatoriality is inherently tied to Prometheus
himself, and his status does not change from start to finish of the action. In Death and
the King’s Horseman, what spectatoriality entails is the conscription of the other
characters into a dramatic spectacle/scene of which Elesin alone knows the script
and can control its preferred outcome. This comes out particularly strongly in the
interregnum of the Not-I bird story but is replicated in each of the other instances. In
each of them, Elesin proffers himself decisively as the object of total attention and
enacts a script that appears to follow the discursive rules of communal comprehen-
sibility and yet is totally private, at least in its preferred outcomes. The market women
and Praise-Singer are transformed into momentary spectators, and Elesin becomes the
only actor in the one-man scene that unfolds before them. The fact that these one-man
scenes arise without explicit demarcation except for the sudden turns of language of
Elesin himself also suggest that this is ultimately a tool of suspension, as if to defer the
process of the elicitation of his ritual self that everyone assumes is prepared to die for
294 ATO QUAYSON

the community. Read another way, the dramaturgical structure of interruptions and
the fact that they are instigated by Elesin himself goes to reveal his subliminal
reluctance to becoming the sacrificial carrier for his community. This reluctance, or at
least lack of preparedness, is in the play given ample illustration through his desire to
be betrothed to the young girl on the very day that he is going to commit the ritual
suicide. Iyaloja warns him of the consequences of failure, but he insists nonetheless.
The focus on the precise dramaturgy of Scene 1 then prepares us to arrive at a fuller
understanding of the moment when Elesin actually fails to achieve the crossing. One
of the themes that I introduce when teaching Arrow of God is that of giving an account
of oneself. The echo of the title of the book by Judith Butler is not entirely accidental
given that what I have in mind is precisely the mechanisms by which the characters
attempt an account of themselves to interlocutors, only some of whom are necessarily
embodied in the form of other characters. In the case of Ezeulu, the primary inter-
locutor in his case is the skeptical interlocutor inside of his own mind that afflicts him
with second thoughts about his status as the potential leader of his clan. At all times
Ezeulu wants to see himself as either the supreme expression of tradition or as possibly
the representative of his clan’s will. Unlike the generally unanimist ethos of Things Fall
Apart, which my students and I will also have noted in discussing the earlier novel,
however, the clan community in Arrow of God is governed by an inherently agonistic
debating structure, such that nothing is immediately subject to consensus. The
debatelike structure within the novel is seen everywhere: among the Christian com-
munity, between Captain Wintabota (Winterbottom) and both his superiors and
inferiors in the colonial administration, among Ezeulu’s children, and between Ezeulu
and the secular leaders of the clan. The structure of skeptical interlocution we find in
his mind must thus be understood as a correlative of a larger structure of disagreement
and debate within the entire representational nexus at large, whichever way we
might choose to dissect it. The failed moment of Elesin’s ritual crossing provides
us with an opportunity to look at another installment of the problematic of giving
an account of oneself. In this instance, the shifting spectatoriality that we will have
noted to be central to Scene 1 will come into play again, but this time to postulate
an unanticipated difficulty for Elesin because of the grander sacred scale upon which
his community not just views his ritually sanctioned action but derives comfort
from it.
One of the peculiar features of the character of Elesin Oba is that despite the
many praise names that are showered upon him at the start of the play, not a single
one pertains to military prowess. This is decidedly odd for someone whose position as
guardian of the king’s stable automatically implies the powerful position of com-
mander of the king’s army. If not one oríkí is delivered regarding his skills as a military
commander, might this not be interpreted as Soyinka’s subtle critique of the culture’s
fixation on the flawed vessel that is their chosen conduit for salvation? For all the
culture has is the hedonistic, womanizing, and overall haughty Elesin Oba. Thus,
Iyaloja’s mistaken ethical choice in delivering him her son’s betrothed marks the larger
failure of a cultural praxis whose terms may have been thoroughly compromised but
masks itself as the design of a necessity (he is at this moment the most sacred figure
astride living, dead, and yet unborn, and therefore every wish of his must be acceded
to). The compromise we see in her decision is not in the simple terms of colonialism’s
WOLE SOYINKA’S DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN IN COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORKS 295

well-documented attempts at undermining indigenous structures of thought and

feeling, but that of making the idiom of hierarchical power infinitely replaceable in the
mind of traditional cultural agents. Elesin Oba’s own lament to the vociferous Ijaloja
when she comes to visit him in detention after the failed crossing is of a piece with
this idiom:

ELESIN: What were warnings beside the moist contact of living earth between my
fingers? What were warnings beside the renewal of famished embers lodged eternally in
the heart of man? But even that, even if it overwhelmed one with a thousand fold
temptations to linger a little while, a man could overcome it. It is when the alien hand
pollutes the source of will, when a stranger force of violence shatters the mind’s calm
resolution, this is when a man is made to commit the awful treachery of relief, commit in
his thought the unspeakable blasphemy of seeing the hand of the gods in this alien rupture
of his world. I know it was this thought that killed me, sapped my powers and turned me
into an infant in the hands of unnameable strangers. I made to utter my spells anew but
my tongue merely rattled in my mouth. I fingered hidden charms and the contact was
damp; there was no spark left to sever the life-strings that should stretch from every
finger-tip. My will was squelched in the spittle of an alien race, and all because I had
committed this blasphemy of thought—that there might be the hand of the gods in a
stranger’s intervention. (69; italics added)

Note the nature of the admission of failure here: the real blasphemy and thus the
cause of the failure was in the concession, for one elusive moment, that there might be
the hand of his own gods in the white man’s intervention. In other words, in the
liminal status of the crossing, the categories that had organized his world are warped
such that he is able to mistake the white man as one of his own gods and vice versa.
That he also admits to succumbing to the renewed embers lodged deep in the heart of
man and thus of his essentially pleasure-seeking orientation must not becloud the
nature of what he describes as his blasphemy. Iyaloja spits out disdainfully that she
wishes she could pity him; his reply is that he wishes to be understood and not pitied.
But his action in failing the ritual crossing is of such dramatic consequence that it
represents no mere failure but the sign of an epistemological impasse. He cannot
receive understanding within the terms provided in his own culture. At this point,
Elesin’s condition illustrates the difficulty of giving an account of oneself when the
cultural instruments by which such an account might be given prove either inadequate
or otherwise contaminated. At such points the tragic protagonist is entirely alone in a
world that is itself at a loss in the face of transition. By this point in the class, I will
already be inviting my students to look forward to us revisiting the theme of giving an
account of oneself later on in the course with respect to characters such as Mustafa
Sa’eed in Tayib Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, Hamida in Naguib Mahfouz’s
Midaq Alley, Nyasha in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Mazvita in Yvonne
Vera’s Without a Name, and the Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the
Barbarians, all texts that have paired well with Achebe and Soyinka in my courses on
African literature.
What I have explicated of Death and the King’s Horseman in a pedagogical
context by no means exhausts what might be done with the text. For my part,
296 ATO QUAYSON

however, my teaching of this terrific play has been guided by a number of core
principles that I would enumerate as:

1. To provide my students with a way to grasp the nature of African cultural details as
opportunities for investigation of literary process
2. To encourage my students to think of the play first and foremost as a drama rather than as
narrative and to try and visualize and imagine in as much detail as possible the experience
it would be to see it performed as opposed to just reading it
3. To persuade the students to see Soyinka’s play as part of wider literary studies and thus to
read it in the primary instance in comparative terms both in relation the rest of the African
literary tradition and in the context of world literature
4. To enliven their capacity for close reading and by this their capacity for taking pleasure in
discovering things that might not readily appear on first reading, or, more importantly, that
alter in their appearance once read in relation to other elements of the text

Thus the entire process of teaching the play is structured around the ebb and flow
of various dimensions, demonstrating how much vitality can be derived from the
encounter with it.