UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA

Instituto de Letras
Teatro de Língua Inglesa
Professora: Denise Carrascosa França
Aluna: Tarsila Batista Passos

Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman: the individual within the
community

Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and poet, born on 13 July 1934. He is the
first African to be honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986. This is much to
say about his importance in the field of literature. He studied in Nigeria and in the UK.
Similar to many African writers, he had an important and active role in Nigeria’s
political history, from the independence from Great Britain to the Nigerian Civil War.
As expected, unfortunately, he was arrested by the federal government, went on exile to
save his life after escaping from the prison, moving to the USA. He worked as a
professor abroad and after many years returned to his nation. Nowadays he lives in the
USA, like other African writers.

The similarity of path among some African writers, at least among Nigerian
writers, is not by chance. The country was colonized by the British Empire from 1901 to
1960. Along with the British people came their language and their religion. Despite the
British imposition of culture, there are over 500 ethnic groups in Nigeria. The three
largest ones are Housa, Igbo and Yoruba. Nowadays, religion in Nigeria is divided into
Christians and Muslims. Yet the indigenous religions of Nigeria still have practitioners,
such as the Igbo and Yoruba.

Soyinka was raised in the city of Abeokuta, Ogun State, which were under
British dominion that time. The community followed Yoruba religious tradition.
Nevertheless, Soyinka’s family was Christian. His father was an Anglican minister and
his mother, a wild Christian and a political activist within the women's movement in the
local community. In this scenario, Soyinka was influenced by both cultures and grew up
in an atmosphere of religious syncretism.

Soyinka travelled throughout the country as a researcher with the Department of

English Language of the University College in Ibadan, searching the rituals and
ceremonies that were part of African tradition. This knowledge acquired was important
for the development of his work. Soyinka believes in a ritual theatre as “an integral part
of man’s constant efforts to master the immensity of the cosmos with his minuscule
self.” His model of tragedy was the Yoruba ritual theatre, not European. However, his
attempt was to join the old and the new, to find a balance between the English aristotelic
models of theatre production and the African world view of drama. He strongly
disagreed with the idea of decolonization of the African literature. It is known that he
criticized the Négritude movement as a nostalgic and indiscriminate glorification of the
black African past that ignores the potential benefits of modernization. In the play that
is going to be analyzed in this paper he states: "The elephant trails no tethering-rope;
that king is not yet crowned who will peg an elephant." He exemplifies as follows: "A
tiger does not shout its tigritude, it acts." He was a writer with strong ideas, described as
complex, modern and cosmopolitan.

The author states in his article Drama and the African World-View that ritual
theatre “aims to reflect through physical and symbolic means the archetypal struggle of
the mortal being against exterior forces”. The post colonial drama is the tension between
the individual and the community. A communal self was the archetypal consciousness
in the origins of drama, according to Soyinka. The attempt of African writers was to try
to recover of this consciousness, lost in the process of colonization. The European
tradition was more concerned with the individual, not the collectiveness. Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin state, in their book “The Empire Writes Black” that

“This insistence on the social role of the African artist and the denial of the
European preoccupations with individual experience has been one of the
most important and distinctive features in the assertion of a unique African
aesthetic.” (p. 124)

This is a key point for the analysis of the play Death and the King’s Horseman.
It tells the story of Elesin, chief of the King’s stables, who lives a most privileged life
amongst his Yoruba tribe in return for his future role in a key tribal tradition – when the
King dies it is his duty to sacrifice himself and to follow him to the realm of the dead.
By this summary it can be understood that the play is about someone’s death, the King’s
Horseman’s death, which explains the title. But one important observation about the
title of the play has to be made: why not Death of the King’s Horseman? What is the
idea of separating the image of death and the image of the King’s Horseman in the title?
 The African aesthetics aforementioned explains the question. What is important
in the play is not the fact that the King’s Horseman dies. The important discussion is the
meaning of his death, the connection between death and the king’s horseman. By
reading the novel the reader can see the horsemen duty of sacrificing himself to follow
the dead king is seen as fundamental to the continuing well-being of the tribe. So the
main discussion is the depiction of a ritual which was prescribed by the Yoruba
religious and social system, a ritual that really existed, and how the community and the
communal self represented by the protagonist dealt with it. On Soyinka’s own words:

“The real unvoiced fear is: will this protagonist survive confrontation with
forces that exist within the dangerous area of transformation? Entering that
microcosmos involves a loss of individuation, a self submergence in
universal essence. It is an act undertaken on behalf of the community, and the
welfare of that protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community”.

The play was based on a historical incident. In 1946, a British colonial district
officer interrupted the ritual suicide of a village notable, the King’s Horseman without
realizing how his interference would affect the village and the King’s Horseman son. It
is a post-colonial play, so the issue cultural clash is notable. The interference of colonial
district points out the issue, but Soyinka wanted to be very clear about his main point of
discussion that he wrote a note when publishing the play explaining that the cultural
clash was not his focus. He wrote that

“the Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The

confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical, contained in the human
vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind – the world of
the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links

all: transition”.

Following Soyinka will, the analysis of this work is going to focus on whether or
not Elesin manages to carry out his duty. Even though his duty is clear to him,
something to which he was prepared his whole life, a family tradition, one can face
confrontation in the process of transformation. This is exactly what happens to him.

The play starts in the day he is supposed to perform the ritual of sacrifice. And
since the beginning Elesin was distracted from his responsability. Confronted with his
imminent death, Elesin succumbs to the desires of the life-instinct and decides to take a
new young bride – thus delaying the act that will allow him to follow his King away
from the world of the living. He says that he wanted to conceive a child in order to be
remembered. The hesitation allows the local colonial officer (Simon Pilkings) to
intervene in what he sees as a barbaric primitive ritual. Pilkings arrests and imprisons
Elesin before he could complete his ritual duty to “protect Elesin from himself”, to save
“the native” from his superstitious (pre-modern) barbarity. Elesin’s hesitation causes a
huge damage by his failure to complete the ritual. He tells to Pilkings: “You did not save
my life, District Officer. You destroyed it” In the end it is Elesin’s son Olunde who
completes the ritual in his father’s place, sacrificing “himself in his stead to try to ensure
the continued spiritual wellbeing of his community” Elesin, after witnessing his son’s
sacrifice kills himself using his prison chains.

The play is divided into five acts and the first is a key one concerning the
discussion of the struggle of a person to fit in the tradition and to consider the wills of
his own self. The first scene of the play is a dialogue between Elesin and the Praise-
Singer about Elesin’s “trip” to the “other side”. They infer what is going to happen
when Elesin reach the other side, trying to imagine what it is like and also the
importance of the act and also the consequences for their world if Elesin fails in the
ritual. The Praise-Singer is concerned about that as it can be illustrated in the dialogue
below:

PRAISE-SINGER: Our world was never wrenched from its course.

ELESIN: The gods have said No.

PRAISE-SINGER: 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.

Elesin’s body is here seen as a shell for a soul that is part of a larger continuum
of spirits. But he is also a man, a human being, and his imminent death was something
real. Maybe he was not prepared for this huge step as he thought he was. Maybe his will
to take a last bride was less to impregnate her to have a baby to be remembered and
more related to the fear he had to fulfill the ritual. He is also accused by the Praise-
Singer of struggling with the officers in order to avoid the arrest and fulfill the ritual:

PRAISE-SINGER: You sat with folded arms while the evil strangers tilted
the world from its course and crashed it 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.

Nobody knows what is going to happen that moment on. Even Elesin’s son
completing the ritual himself, he who was supposed to follow his father and become the
King’s Horseman as a family tradition, had to anticipate his own duty. It is interesting
that this confrontation can be faced by someone who seemed to be really grounded in
tradition. Olunde, his son, travelled to Europe to study medicine, had been in contact
with another culture and had everything not to follow his path. However, being away
from the place he was born, away from his culture, was the great issue that led him to
complete the ritual suicide. He was more aware than never the importance of the duty
for his community, his family. He tried to return the honor of his family, lost with his
father failure.

Thus, the origin of the community was threatened by the contemporaneous

experience of being. The individual detachment of the community was a reality and the
process of coming back to the origins was the aim of African arts in general and a
challenge for the post colonial society.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

ASHCROFT, GRIFFITHS and TIFFIN. The Empire Writes Back. London and New
York: Routledge, 2002, second edition.

GEROULD, Daniel. Drama and the African World-View (1976). In: Theatre Theory
Theatre: the major critical texts from Aristole and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel. New
York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2000.

SOYINKA, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. 1975.

Wole Soyinka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wole_Soyinka#Since_1986 Accessed on:

July 12, 2014.

Death and the King’s Horseman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_the_King's_Horseman Accessed on: July 12,
2014.