WOLE SOYINKA's Death and the King's Horseman: Tragedy and Ritual Drama

This episode will focus on Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner’s most well-known play. The presents an almost perfect interpretation of the elements of error of judgment, reversal of fortune and anagnorisis that would have been much appreciated by Aristotle. It also has a number of other elements that that are reminiscent of the Greeks, such as a strong degree of disputatiousness, a carefully choreographed chorus-function, and an idea of the pharmakos that aligns sacrifice directly to the welfare of the polis. What prevents us from asserting a simple line of Greek influence to Soyinka’s dramaturgy is his explicitly acknowledged debts to Yorùbá cosmogony, especially with respect to the stories of Ogun and Esu, both of whom provide explicit ideational templates for several of his plays. Death and the King’s Horseman draws inspiration from a real historical event that occurred during the colonial period, and which Soyinka adroitly manipulates to generate what he terms the “threnodic” essence of his play. The emotional crux of the play centers on the failed ritual suicide of Elesin Oba, the king’s horseman of the title, who by tradition is supposed to extinguish himself some forty days after the death of the King. We shall see how the play stages a confrontation between personal weakness and the expectations of the community in the face of a metaphysical crisis and how this is exacerbated within the context of colonialism.
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Suggested Readings
David Richards, “Òwe l’esín óró: Proverbs Like Horses in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 13.1 (1984): 89-99.
Tejumola Olaniyan, “Festivals, Rituals, and Drama in Africa”, in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature vol 1, eds. Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 35-48.
Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformation in Nigerian Writing, (Oxford and Indiana: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Goffling, (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
Karin Barber, “Oríkí, Women and the Proliferation and Merging of Oríṣa,” Africa 60.3 (1990): 313-336.
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Bolaji Idowu, Oludumare: God in Yoruba Belief, (London: Longman, 1994).
Adeleke Adeeko, Arts of Being Yoruba: Divination, Allegory, Tragedy, Proverb, Panegyric. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).