Born in 1934 to a middle-class Nigerian family, Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was educated at University College at Ibadan and at the University of Leeds, where he studied with G. Wilson Knight, the virtual dean of Shakespeare critics, and with Arnold Kettle, a major practitioner of Marxist criticism. As a Reader to London’s Royal Court Theatre from 1957 to 1959, he produced his one-act play, The Invention, a few months after two of his plays, The Lion and the Jewel and The Swamp Dwellers, were first performed in a “Soyinka Festival” at University College. A series of stunning artistic successes, commencing with the production of his play on Independence Day in 1960, seemed to guarantee for him an international reputation comparable to that of his fellow Nigerian, Chinua Achebe. As Penelope Gilliatt described his poetic diction in a review of The Road in the Observer in 1965, “Soyinka has done for our napping language what brigand dramatists from Ireland have done for centuries: booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot into the middle of next week.”1 But it was precisely his status as a writer that compelled him to become the dark and foreboding voice for a certain moral order, much to the annoyance of various Nigerian governments. Soyinka has eschewed the familiar role of spokesman against colonialism and racism for the more difficult and politically dangerous role of spokesman against those forms of tyranny which black people practice against each other. “I knew from childhood,” Soyinka says, “that independence in my country was inevitable. Freedom, I felt, should be as normal as breathing or eating, and I was interested then in what kind of society we were going to have. When I saw what was happening, I found it difficult to be silent to the point of criminality.”2
Less than a month after The Road took first prize in London’s 1965 Commonwealth Festival, Soyinka was imprisoned. On October 15, following the dubious elections in what was then Western Nigeria, the purported victor, Chief Akintola, taped a speech in which he announced that his party had officially won the elections. “What happened then,” said the Times of London, “could variously be regarded as a serious crime or a riotous practical joke. Instead of the voice of Chief Akintola, the public heard a broadcast which began, ‘This is the voice of free Nigeria,’ and continued, in uncomplimentary terms, to advise Akintola to leave Nigeria, along with his ‘crew of renegades.’”3 Soyinka was incarcerated shortly thereafter. A host of American and British writers, including Lillian Hellman, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, William Styron, Norman Podhoretz, and Penelope Gilliatt, wired their protest to the Nigerian government. Not until late December was he released, with all charges dismissed.
He was incarcerated yet again in 1967. This occurred one year after he received the drama prize at the First World Festival of the Negro Arts at Dakar, where one critic called him “the most original man of letters in Africa,”4 and less than one month after receiving, with Tom Stoppard, the John Whiting Drama Award, Soyinka was picked up for interrogation just outside the gates of Ibadan University shortly after returning from a writers’ conference in Sweden. There he had wondered aloud about the African writer who felt he “must, for the moment at least (he persuades himself) postpone that unique reflection on experience and events which is what makes a writer”5 and substitute a more directly political commitment. Eleven days before being arrested, Soyinka had held a clandestine meeting at Enugu, the capital of Biafra, with the secessionist leader, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, to implore him to reconsider the Ibos’ decision to secede from Nigeria.
This time, protests from Western writers would have no effect. For the next twenty-seven months, Soyinka languished in prison, where he spent some ten months in solitary confinement, in constant fear of his life under the most unbearable conditions. His cell measured four feet by eight: “Sixteen paces by twenty-three,” as he writes in the prison poem, “Live Burial.”6 A Nigerian military government at war refused hundreds of pleas for Soyinka’s release. Deprived of human contact, books, medical care, and writing implements, only the last-minute intervention of nameless informers saved him from murder. On the ninth anniversary of Independence and of his production of A Dance of the Forests, the victorious military government announced that Soyinka would be released in a general amnesty.
In his poignant prison notes, published in 1972 as The Man Died, Soyinka details the terror of his confinement, the torture and death, “the inhuman assault on the mind.”7 The book, whose name derives from a cable describing the brutal murder of Segun Sowemimo, a Nigerian journalist, for an imagined slight, has been called an African J’accuse. Cast in an artistic idiom which few have mastered, it chronicles the starvation of the human spirit, and the poet’s struggle to survive through words. When at last he was allowed a few books in prison, including Radin’s Primitive Religion, he “proceeded to cover the spaces between the lines with [his] own writing.”8 Soyinka survived by writing, secretly and in any matter he could. The only visit allowed his wife was announced with new clothes, haircut, a radio, typewriter, and paper, pen, and pencils, all of which were removed upon her departure. Aware of the coming raid, Soyinka allowed himself to enjoy only the luxury of the typing paper, which he stroked and caressed. Only narrowly did he escape murder; only through an act of enormous will did he remain sane. But Soyinka did not die; rather, he emerged from prison a great writer. As Angus Calder wrote in a review of The Man Died, “He seems to have accepted now, more fully even than his limitations let him, the weight of duty which that verdict implies. And I think he is, now, a great writer.”9
“The Man Dies,” Soyinka writes, “in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”10 Yet in Soyinka’s writing, the protest against tyranny is as subtle as certain forms of tyranny. Just as the Caribbean Marxist, C. L. R. James, had written a full-length study of Melville twenty years earlier during an unlawful internment on Ellis Island, so too had Soyinka displaced his critique of tyranny. The play, Madmen and Specialists,11 was rather a return to his earlier, ritual form. According to Mel Gussow in the New York Times:
Because of the genesis of Madmen, one might expect a political play, but in solitary confinement Soyinka obviously had more important, timeless concerns on his mind. The theme, as described by the author, is the corrupting effect of power on one’s natural vocation. The central figure is a young doctor, a specialist who has given up medicine to become a tyrannical political force. The play is not at all topical and only peripherally political. The symbolic, ritualistic, and especially, the religious are of much interest in Soyinka.12
We can begin to understand such a complex artist, who refuses to allow his own horrendous prison experience to intrude in an obvious sense upon his play, by understanding something of his idea of tragedy and the nature of the tragedian. Two statements seem especially meaningful here, one excerpted from “The Fourth Stage,” an essay written in honor of G. Wilson Knight and published while Soyinka was in prison,13 the other a critique of the Western idea of tragedy, which oddly enough appears in The Man Died. Soyinka writes in “The Fourth Stage”:
Nothing but the will . . . rescues being from annihilation within the abyss. . . . Only one who has himself undergone the experience of disintegration, whose spirit has been tested and whose psychic resources laid under stress by the forces most inimical to individual assertion, only he can understand and be the force of fusion between two contradictions. The resulting sensibility is also the sensibility of the artist, and he is a profound artist only to the degree to which he comprehends and expresses this principle of destruction and recreation.14
It is the human will, “the paradoxical truth of destructiveness and creativity in acting man,”15 with which Soyinka the artist and Soyinka the activist are both concerned: the integrity of the will and a fundamental belief in its capacity to structure and restructure this world in which we live. Along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other politically committed writers, he never declaims this notion, nor becomes didactic. His critique of Western definitions of tragedy, along the lines of Brecht, written after his release fro
m prison, and published in The Man Died, helps to explain why this is so:
History is too full of failed prometheans bathing their wounded spirits in their tragic stream. Destroy the tragic lure! Tragedy is possible solely because of the limitations of the human spirit. There are levels of despair from which the human spirit should not recover. To plunge to such a level is to be overwhelmed by the debris of all those anti-human barriers which are erected by jealous gods. The power of recovery is close to acquisition of superhuman energies, and the stagnation-loving human society must for self-preserving interest divert these colossal energies into relatively quiescent channels, for they constitute a force which, used as part of an individual’s equipment in the normal human struggle, cannot be resisted by the normal human weapons. Thus the historic conspiracy, the literal brain-washing, that elevates tragedy far and above a regenerative continuance of the promethean struggle.16
It is this regard for the status of the will in the face of terror, combined with the unqualified rejection of the indulgence of pity, and a belief in the communality of individual struggle, that most characterizes Soyinka’s metaphysics.
In response to the adage of Nietzsche’s sage, Silenus, that it is an act of hubris to be born, Soyinka responds that “the answer of the Yoruba to this is just as clear: it is no less an act of hubris to die.”17 Not surprisingly, Soyinka’s muse is his patron god Ogun, god of creativity and the Yoruba “proto-agonist,” he who dared to cross the abyss of transition that separates the world of men from the world of the gods in the primal enactment of individual will.
I first confronted Death and the King’s Horseman in 1973, two years before it was published. Soyinka, who was supervising my graduate work in English at the University of Cambridge, invited me to listen to the first reading of his new play. For three hours we listened as Oxford accents struggled to bring the metaphorical and lyrical Yoruba text to life. Although by now I had become accustomed to this densely figurative language of Soyinka’s plays—indeed had begun to hear its peculiar music—I was stunned by the action of the play. That the plot was an adaptation of an actual historical event was even more stunning. And if the play’s structure was classically Greek, the adaptation of a historical action at a royal court was compellingly Shakespearean. This, I thought, was a great tragedy.
Perhaps I should describe in outline the historical events before I recount the plot. In December 1944, Oba Siyenbola Oladigbolu, the Alaafin, or King of Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city in Nigeria, died. He was buried that night. As was the Yoruba tradition, the Horseman of the King, Olokun Esin Jinadu, was to commit ritual suicide and lead his Alaafin’s favorite horse and dog through the transitional passage to the world of the ancestors. However, the British Colonial District Officer, Captain J. A. MacKenzie, decided that the custom was savage and intervened in January 1945 to prevent Olokun Esin Jinadu from completing his ritual act, the act for which his entire life had been lived. Faced with the anarchy this unconsummated ritual would work upon the order of the Yoruba world, Olokun Esin Jinadu’s last born son, Murana, in an unprecedented act, assumed his hereditary title of Olokun Esin, stood as surrogate for his father, and sacrificed his own life. The incident, Soyinka told us following the reading, had intrigued him ever since he had first heard of it. It had, he continued, already inspired a play in Yoruba by Duro Ladipo called Oba Waja.18
Soyinka adapted the historical event rather liberally in order to emphasize the metaphorical and mythical dimensions, outside of time, again reflecting implicitly the idea that an event is a sign and that a sign adumbrates something other than itself by contiguity as well as by semblance. The relation that a fiction bears to reality is fundamentally related to the means by which that relation and that fiction are represented. For Soyinka, a text mediates the distance between art and life, but in a profoundly ambiguous and metaphorical manner. In that space between the structure of the historical event and the literary event, that is to say, the somehow necessary or probable event, one begins to understand Soyinka’s idea of tragedy. The plot of a play, certainly, can indicate what may happen as well as what did happen, and this concern with what a protagonist will probably or necessarily do, rather than what he did do, distinguishes Soyinka’s universal and poetic art from particular and prosaic Yoruba history. It is this central concern with the philosophical import of human and black experience which so clearly makes him unlike many other black writers. A summary of the play’s plot suggests this relation.
The Alaafin of Oyo is dead. To guide the Alaafin’s horse through the narrow passage of transition, as tradition demands, the Horseman of the King, Elesin Oba, must on the night of his King’s burial, commit ritual suicide through the sublime agency of the will. The action of the play occurs on the day of his death. Death for Elesin is not a final contract; it is rather the rite of passage to the larger world of the ancestors, a world linked in the continuous bond of Yoruba metaphysics to that of the living and the unborn. It is a death which the Elesin seems willingly to embrace—but not before he possesses a beautiful market girl, a betrothed virgin whom he encounters as he dances his farewell greeting before the ritual marketplace. Though Iyaloja, the “mother” of the market, protests the Horseman’s paradoxical selection, she consents to and arranges this ritualistic union of life with death.
Revolted by the “barbarity” of the custom, a British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death at the precise moment of the Horseman’s intended transition. Notified by his family, Olunde, the Horseman’s eldest heir, has returned from medical school in England intending to bury his father. Confronted with his father’s failure of will, the son assumes this hereditary title only to become his surrogate in death to complete the cosmic restoration of order. In a splendidly poignant climax to the action, the women of the market, led by Iyaloja, unmask the veiled corpse of the son and watch placidly as the Horseman of the King breaks his neck with his chains, fulfilling his covenant with tradition and the communal will, alas, too late. Two men have died rather than one.
As adapted by Soyinka, this is no mere drama of individual vacillation. Communal order and communal will are inextricable elements in the Elesin’s tragedy, which not only reflect but amplify his own failure of will. In this sense, Soyinka’s drama suggests Greek tragedy much more readily than Elizabethan tragedy, and is akin to the mythopoeic tragedies of Synge and Brecht and to Lorca’s Blood Wedding. Nor is this merely a fable of the evils of colonialism or of white unblinking racism. Death and the King’s Horseman is a classical tragedy, in which structure and metaphysics are inextricably intertwined.
Structurally, the play is divided into five acts and occurs almost exactly over twenty-four hours. Its basis is communal and ritualistic; its medium is richly metaphorical poetry which, accompanied continuously by music and dance and mime, creates an air of mystery and wonder. The cumulative effect defines a cosmos comprised at once of nature, of human society, and of the divine. The protagonist’s bewilderment and vacillation, his courage and inevitable defeat, signify a crisis, confrontation, and transformation of values, transfixed in a time that oscillates perpetually in an antiphonal moment. Finally, the reversal of the peripeteia (“situation”) and the anagnorisis (“recognition”) occur at the same time, as they do in Oedipus Rex.
The characterization of Elesin, the protagonist, is also classically Greek. The play records the reciprocal relationship between his character and his fate. Elesin’s grand flaw does not stem from vice or depravity, but from hamartia (“an error of judgment”), a sign of his weakness of will. Although not eminently good or just, he is loved. His will and his character are neither wholly determined nor wholly free. His character is at once noble and prone to error. The nine-member chorus again and again speaks against Elesin’s special hubris, his unregenerate will. His, finally, is the great defeat, but suffered only after the great attempt. The play’s action is timeless, as timeless as the child conceived by Elesin on the day of his death. Its plot unfolds in “the
seething cauldron of the dark world will and psyche,”19 where ambiguity and vacillation wreak havoc upon the individual.
Although self-sacrifice is a familiar motif in Soyinka’s tragedies, Elesin’s intended sacrifice is not meant to suggest the obliteration of an individual soul, but rather is an implicit confirmation of an order in which the self exists with all of its integrity but only as one small part of a larger whole. Elesin Oba, after all, is a conferred title, the importance of which derives from its context within the community and from its ritual function. The Elesin’s character is determined in the play, not by any obvious material relationships, however, but rather by the plot itself, as the formal dramatic elements of any tragedy are determined by a silent structuring principle. Great tragic plots always determine the tragic character of their protagonists. To paraphrase Pilkings’s servant, Joseph, the Elesin exists simply to die; he has no choice in the matter, despite the play’s repeated reference to the ambiguity inherent in his role. And Pilkings’s intervention, a kind of self-defense, challenges fundamentally the communal defense of self which this ritual embodies.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 27