Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

Abstract

ACADEMIC COMMENTARY ON THE NIGERIAN DRAMATIST and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka reveals a level of consensus with regard to the personal mythology he has developed for his artistic purposes. Returning to his native Yoruba cosmology and the rituals that derive from it, Soyinka elicits from ritual a drama of archetypes, developing in the process a vision of history, society, and tragic drama. A range of critical work has shown this vision to be based on a sociocultural passion, even as the playwright's oeuvre constitutes an attempt to work through the passion by means of art.' This understanding of Soyinka gives a sociological accent to his mythopoeic vision and aesthetic; that is, his refashioning of the traditional Yoruba worldview emerges as, on the one hand, a theory of historical being and the often brutal adventure of the social and, on the other, of art as witness to both. If there is one work that concisely bears out the validity of this critical consensus, it would be Death and the King's Horseman.2 But even as this play has emerged as a magnum opus of sorts, it has also been the site of an instructive controversy in African literary criticism. For if Soyinka elevates his mythopoeic vision to the status of a theory of being as well as the organizing principle of his craft, his choice has generated some ideological contestation. In the mid-seventies, he was taken to task by a generation of influential Marxist critics who attacked him for being romantic in his attitude to, and use of, Yoruba mythology. There are always lessons to be drawn from critical debates, and the one surrounding Horseman is no exception. From a metacritical perspective, there is a certain logic to the political heat the play draws (and drew). Indeed, this logic is so comprehensive that it transcends the specific context of African literary criticism and becomes intertextually relevant to theories of postcoloniality in current Anglo-American literary theory and cultural criticism. If one looks closely at the reasons Soyinka's work was a problem for Africanist-marxist criticism in the seventies, it is possible to draw analogies between the debates as they were conducted then and some of the issues at the heart of the Anglo-American discursive formation that has come to be known as postcolonial cultural studies. However, an in-depth exploration of such analogies is beyond the scope of this paper; principally, what I wish to do here is to examine Horseman in order to tease out the theoretical relevance it might be said to have for contemporary