Themes of Soyinka’s The

Lion and the Jewel

Theme of Trickery and Manipulation
This is one of the dominant themes of the play. Baroka, Sadiku and Sidi are
all involved in trickery and manipulation of other characters but Baroka, the
king, outwits all of them as a fox that he is called. As a cunning man, Baroka
on learning that Sidi turned down his offer of marriage as she has become
highly conceited, especially with the coming of the magazine that placed her
in a position in which she deems herself more important than him the king of
the land, resorts to trickery and manipulation as a more effective strategy to
have her with all her beauty and fame as his latest wife. He makes a fake
revelation to her head-wife Sadiku that he has lost his virility after many years
of his lordship and reign over his wives, knowing that she will not keep it to
herself as such a fate has some gender and cultural significance in Ilujinle.
 Just as he expected, Sadiku revealed his ‘shame’ to another woman Sidi as she
can’t hide the joy of her (and her fellow womenfolk’s) supposed sexual victory over
their lord, the king. Sidi is also delighted by the king’s alleged defeat and goes to his
house to mock him for his impotence under the ploy that she has come to apologize
to him for turning down his offer of marriage in a disrespectful manner. Ironically,
Sidi, who went to trick the king under the auspices and manipulation of Sadiku,
ended up being tricked rather as the king turned out to be full of masculinity and
virility,: ‘…the strength/The perpetual youthful zest/Of the panther of the trees’.
Thus the play presents, as a theme, a complex situation of trickery and
manipulation in which the women are a mere pawn in the project of actualizing the
dream of Baroka (the king) without their knowing that they are actually being
tricked and manipulated by the fox, Baroka.
Theme of Tradition Versus Modernity
Tradition and modernity are caught up in a web of struggle in the play. Tradition which is
represented by Baroka, the old village king , wins over modernity which is represented by Lakunle,
the young schoolteacher.
This is so since Lakunle’s crusade for the eradication of the tradition of Ilujinle, especially the
tradition of bride price, is met with massive resistance from Sidi, Sadiku and even the entire village.
In his superficial obsession with the modern way of life as obtainable in Lagos and Badagry where
he had been to, Lakunle condemns paying the bride price of a woman on the ground that it makes
the woman a mere chattel of the man instead of an equal partner in the relation. He deems the
natives of the village a savage race who do not understand and value modern ways of life,
describing their culture as ‘A savage custom, barbaric, out-dated,/Rejected, denounced, accursed’
and the like. He prefers the modern style of where a man and his wife will be walking along the
street hand in hand, eating food with spoons and forks and breakable plates and not with hands,
and providing simple machine to do certain household chores. But all these superficial ways of life
do not move Sidi; she firmly stands her ground that if he wants her to be his wife that her bride
price must be paid lest the people think she is no virgin.
 Sidi’s full confidence and convictions that their traditional way of life
is good enabled the ascendancy of the tradition over modernity as
championed by Baroka. Baroka cherishes the traditional ways. That is
why he bribed railway track builders so that they would not cut a railway
track along Ilujinle which might expose it to modernity from the outside
world, though he argues that he doesn’t hate progress.
Meanwhile, it becomes an ironic twist that modernity instead of
winning over taditional ways ended up being won by traditional ways
when Baroka wrestles Sidi from Lakunle and proves that the old and the
new could exist side by side and form a synergy, that ‘old wine thrives
best/Within a new bottle’.
Theme of Vanity
The theme of vanity revolves around the character of Sidi. Sidi is a beautiful maid, the belle of Ilujinle, who is
proud of her looks. In one of her interactions with Lakunle, she lets Lakunle realise that nobody can make lewd
jokes of her saying: ‘Is it Sidi who makes the men choke/In their cups…’
She becomes more and more conceited and full of vanity and pride to the level of a narcissist with the return
of the man from the capital city who made concrete her glories as a beautiful maid—the Jewel of Ilujinle—by
means of having her picture adorn a magazine. This makes her start thinking that she is more popular and
important than the king, describing herself as a beauty queen while dismissing the king as an ugly monster in the
following verse:
Compare my image and your lord’s—
An age of difference!
See how the water glistens on my face
Like the dew-moistened leaves on a Harmattan morning
But he—his face is like a leather piece
Torn rudely from the saddle of his horse
Sadiku is greatly troubled by this height of vanity and prays the gods to restore her(Sidi’s) wit but she never cares.
 Out of vanity, she also says that by asking for her hand in marriage
now that her fame has been established everywhere, that Baroka is
merely trying to raise his manhood above her beauty. But ironically, she
ended up being captured by the man she apparently depicted in a bad
image. And it is her vanity that led to her falling ‘prey’ to Baroka’s ‘trap’.
She intends to display her youthful beautiful body to Baroka to torment
him emotionally not knowing that Sadiku was misinformed.