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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

WOLE SOYINKA'S CONCEPTS 0F THEATRE: A STUDY
OF A DANCE OF THE FORESTS, THE ROAD,
AND KONGI'S HNWEST

 

presented by

Inih Akpan Ebong

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Master of Arts degreein Theatre

fiA/KU

Mlior professor

Date November 11, 19§0

0-7639

 

 

’ .3 University

 

LIBRARY

Michigan State

OVERDUE FINES:
25¢ per day per item

 

RETURNING LIBRARY MATERIALS:
”N

Place in book return tom
charge from circulation records

 

 

@Copyright by
INIH AKPAN EBONG

1980

© 1981
INIH AKPAN EBONG

All Rights Reserved

NOLE SOYINKA'S CONCEPTS 0F THEATRE: A STUDY
OF A DANCE OF THE FORESTS, THE ROAD,
AND KONGI'S HARVEST

 

By

Inih Akpan Ebong

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
fbr the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Theatre

1980

ABSTRACT

HOLE SOYINKA'S CONCEPTS 0F THEATRE: A STUDY
OF A DANCE OF THE FORESTS, THE ROAD,

 

 

AND We EST
By

Inih Akpan Ebong

This is a study of Hole Soyinka's concepts of theatre,
namely: the meaning of theatre; the correspondences of time, space
and scenery; and the musical idiom of theatre. Chapter I states and
explains Soyinka's definition of theatre--a microscopic duplicate of
the "man-cosmos organisation“--and then examines Soyinka's applica-
tion of the definition to A Dance of the Forests. Chapter II exam-
ines the mutual intersection of time, space and scenery as it applies
to The Read. Chapter III examines Soyinka's concept of music--a
"communicant" and catalytic matrix of transition and a "solvent"--
and its application to Kongi's Harvest. Chapter IV concludes the
study with an appraisal of Hole Soyinka as artist, and his importance
and significance to the rapidly growing contemporary African theatre.
This study maintains that the coterminous transitional world--a
coeval world of the living, the dead and unborn--is the key to

Soyinka's total vision of theatre.

DEDICATION

To my University of Calabar Students

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was financed with a grant from the University of
Calabar Staff Development Programme. I am grateful to my Faculty
Adviser, Professor Farley P. Richmond, for his useful advice and
supervision of my work. I am also grateful to Professors Frank C.
Rutledge and Jon E. Baisch for accepting to serve on my Guidance
Committee and for the interest they have shown in my work. To my
good friend and colleague, Mr. Paul Kofi Egbo, with whom I have had
many lively, and sometimes turbulent, discussions and debates which
have, in many ways, helped the final product of my work. Mr. E.
James Nsima, Miss Ella Jones, Messrs. George Wilson, Mark Frank, and
Jim Veenstra, Mr. and Mrs. Soba Fawunmi, Ms. Nanette Marc,and Miss
Angela Logan--our family friends--for their immense contributions in
many other ways during our sojourn here in the United States. To my
mother, for her unqualified moral and financial support and the
anguish of separation these past years. My relations and friends in
Nigeria and elsewhere for their understanding and patience. My
typist, Mrs. Nancy Heath, for a job well done. And, last but not
the least, my wife Stella and my three children for their moral
support, love, patience and understanding throughout the period of

my study and research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Statement of Purpose

Justification and Significance .

Scope, Organization and Methodology of Study
A Biographical Sketch of Hole Soyinka . .

Chapter
I. SOYINKA'S MAN-COSMOS THEATRE

Soyinka' 5 Definition
The Fundamental Defining Concept . .
Cultural Background to Soyinka' 5 Theatre .
Explanation of Soyinka' 5 Definition . .
Application of Definition to A Dance of the
Forests . . . . . . . .
ot.
Applying the Definition to the Play.
Conclusion . . .

II. TIME AND THE MAGNETISM OF SPACE AND SCENERY

 

Introductory Comments .

Statement of the Concept . .
Background to Soyinka' 5 Concept of Time, Space
and Scenery. . . . .

Application of Concept to The Road.
The Plot. .
Applying the Concept to the .Play.
Scenery . . .
Scenery and Space .
Time .
The Magnetism of Space and Scenery
Conclusion . . . . . . . .

III. THE MUSICAL HERITAGE AND ITS THEATRICAL RESTORATION .

Introduction . .
Statement of the Concept

iv

Page

ooowm

Chapter Page
Explanation of the Concept . . . . . . . . 74

 

Background to the Concept. . . . . 76
Application of Concept to Kongi' 5 Harvest . . . 79
The Plot. . . . . . . 79
Appying the Concept to the Play . . . . . . 83
Music as a Communicant Medium and Language . . 83
Music as Catalyst . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Music as Solvent . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

IV. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

An Appraisal . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Re- -stating the Concepts . . . . . . . . . 98
Hole Soyinka, the Artist . . . . . 99

Soyinka and Contemporary African Theatre . . . 104

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

INTRODUCTION

Hole Soyinka is, perhaps, the most prolific and best known
African writer throughout the world. Since the first appearance of
his work in the late 19505, the study of his drama has been largely
infbrmed by two critical approaches, namely, the literary and the
literary-theatrical. The fbrmer views his drama purely as literature,
and emphasizes mainly the style, themes, language, plot, etc. The
latter approach tries to discuss his drama partly as literature and
partly as theatre scripts, but lays more emphasis on the literature
of the drama. The reason, perhaps, is that a majority of Soyinka's
critics are men with a stronger background in literature than theatre.
However, both critical approaches have been largely and equally influ-
enced to date by three principal critical attitudes, namely, the
referentialist, evolutionist, and mythic or folkloristic.

The referentialist attitude is a selectivist approach: it
selects sections or parts of the drama, and tries to establish an
intimate correspondence or correspondences between the playwright's
mythic, and sometimes fictive, imagination and the socio-political
realities, institutions and personages of his time. The evolutionist
attitude tries to trace the development of Soyinka's drama from
Yoruba ritual archetypes through Western dramatic and theatrical

traditions. The evolutionist critics agree that Soyinka is (1) an

African writer with a stronger Western than African style, (2) a
writer with a stronger African than Western theatrical bias, and

(3) midway between African and European traditions; that is, his
drama is a perfect synthesis of both traditions. The mythic perspec-
tive fbcuses mainly on the traditional Yoruba mythological, theatri-
cal, and cosmological precepts that best inform all of Soyinka's
work.

In view of these, comparisons between Soyinka and Western
dramatists such as Beckett, Arthur Miller, Brecht, Shakespeare, the
Jacobeans and Victorian writers, are frequently made by Soyinka's
critics. References to traditional Yoruba theatre, rituals and
mythologies such as those of the Alarinjo theatre, the Egungun cult,
and the gods Obatala, Sango, Esu, and especially Ogun, are also
frequently made about Soyinka's drama.

While these critical stances are valid and just, and are
germane matrices for understanding Soyinka's work, none of them has
given any considerable and sustained attention to Soyinka's concepts
of theatre and the dramatic arts. The importance of these concepts
can no longer be ignored, because they provide a vital and signifi-

cant basis for a better understanding of Soyinka's work.

Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this study is to fulfill this need by first,
identifying Soyinka's definition of theatre and two of his theatre

concepts and, secondly, to apply both the definition and the two

theatre concepts to three of Soyinka's published plays with the sole

purpose of establishing their cognitive and aesthetic potentials.

Justification and Significance

 

Since Wole Soyinka began his career as a writer about the

mid-l9505, several books and articles on his work have been published.

I 2

Of these, three books, Wole Soyinka, The Writing of Wole Soyinka

 

and The Movement of Transition,3 by Gerald Moore, Eldred Durosimi

 

Jones and Oyin Ogunba, respectively, are exclusive publications on

Soyinka's works--drama, poetry and novel. Other books such as A Dance

4 5

of Masks by Jonathan Peters, African Literature: A Critical View

6 7

by David Cook, Long Drums and Cannons and Mother is Gold, by

 

 

1Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka (New York: Africana Publishing
Corporation, 197l).

2Eldred Durosimi Jones, The Writing of Male Soyinka (London:
Hienemann Educational Books, Ltd., l973).

 

30yin Ogunba, The Movement of Transition:_The Study of the
Plays of Wole Soyinka (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1975).

4Jonathan Peters, A Dance of Masks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka
(Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1978).

5David Cook, African Literature: A Critical View (London:
Longman, 1977).

 

6Margaret Laurence, Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Drama-
tists and Novelists l952-l966 (London: Longman, l968.

 

 

7Adrian Roscoe, Mother is Gold: A Study in West African
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

 

Margaret Laurence and Adrian Roscoe, respectively, contain valuable
chapters and infbrmation about various aspects of Soyinka's works.
However, none of these sources either develops or examines Soyinka's
definition and concepts of theatre.

Gerald Moore's Wole Soyinka is a valuable book: it examines

 

some of Soyinka's plays especially the tragedies, some poems, and

Soyinka's novel The Interpreters. Gerald Moore focuses attention on

 

Soyinka's themes, structure and meanings. Besides the biographical
information he provides about Soyinka and his early work in the
theatre, particularly at the Royal Court Theatre, London, Gerald
Moore's book provides some of the important philosophical and meta-
physical grounds for serious interpretation and understanding of
Soyinka's works. He writes, for instance, apropos of Soyinka's
tragedy: "Soyinka restores to the word 'tragic' its proper weight

"8 Moore bases his conclusions, which later critics and

of meaning.
scholars have acknowledged, elaborated and explained, on his inves-
tigations of Soyinka's works and essays, on the actual performances
of the plays and the critical responses and reactions that followed
the performances, and on his personal knowledge of, and acquaintance

with, the playwright.

The Movement of Transition by Oyin Ogunba is the first (and

 

perhaps the only) publication to examine the plays exclusively.
Ogunba undertakes a more detailed, multi-directional study of Soyinka's

plays, and by so doing accomplishes at greater depth one of Eldred

 

8Gerald Moore, p. 46.

'11

Jones' objectives in The Writinggof Wole Soyinka: the thematic and
structural study of eight of Soyinka's published plays. In A Dance
of Masks2 a comparative study of the poetry of Leopold Senghor, the
novels of Chinua Achebe, and the poetry, novel and drama of Wole
Soyinka, Jonathan Peters examines some of Soyinka's vital contribu-
tions to the socio-cultural "awareness in post-independence Africa."9
A considerable chapter of Roscoe's Mother is Gold examines Soyinka's
satire and language and the playwright's fusion of European and
African "literary" traditions to create the modern "African" theatre.
Roscoe also makes an attempt to establish Soyinka's ritual and cathar-
tic process of re-unification and re-integration of man with the
enduring and imperishable strands of primordial beginnings.

Amongst the most valuable articles on Soyinka's work are

‘0 Nick

"II

Dan Izevbaye's "Language and Meaning in Soyinka's The Road,"
Wilkinson's "Demoke's Choice in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests,
and Femi Osofisan's "Tiger on Stage: Wole Soyinka and Nigerian

"12

Theatre. Izevbaye critically examines the use and the dynamics

of language, as well as the depth and meaning of the poetry, in

 

9JonathanPeters, p. 225.

10D. S. Izevbaye, "Language and Meaning in Soyinka's The
Road," African Literature Today 8: 52-65.

1lNick Wilkinson, "Demoke's Choice in Soyinka's A Dance of
the Forests," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature l0 (3): 22-27.

 

 

12Femi Osofisan, "Tiger on Stage: Wole Soyinka and Nigerian
Theatre," Oyin Ogunba and Abiola Irele (eds.), Theatre in Africa
(Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, l978), pp. lSl-l75.

The Road. Wilkinson is particularly concerned with the interpreta-

tion of the symbolism of the Half-Child in A Dance of the Forests,

 

and finding the moral equation that most informs Soyinka's work.

Dsofisan is concerned with the "self-exploration and self-mystifi-

13

cation" of Soyinka's metaphysical world, his "metaphysical . . .

cathartic exploration of communal chaos [which] invariable concludes

"14

on a tragic tone, and, in part, Soyinka's importance and signifi-

cance to the Nigerian stage. Two other important articles, "The

"15

Origin's of A Dance and the Forests and "Tragedy--Greek and Yoruba:

 

A Cross-Cultural Perspective,"16 by James Gibbs and Robert Plant Arm-
strong, respectively, provide valuable insights into Soyinka's drama.
While Gibbs traces the origins and development of, and the influences

that moulded Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests, Armstrong undertakes a

 

comparative study both of Yoruba and Greek tragedy from a psycho-
cultural and anthropological perspective. Claiming that tragedy is
the enactment of the dialectics of synthesis gone awry, Armstrong
advocates a "cultural" and an "anthropologically probable definition
of tragedy“ as

a work of affecting presence which enacts at the substantive
level a perversion or a denial of the cultural myth, doing

 

13Femi Osofisan, p. 152.

14111131., p. 157.

15James Gibbs, "The Origins of A Dance of the Forests,"
African Literature Today 8: 66-71.

16Robert Plant Armstrong, "Tragedy-~Greek and Yoruba: A
Cross-Cultural Perspective," Research in African Literatures 7 (1):
23-43.

so in such a way that with the defeat of the tragic protagon-

ist a paradoxical terminal situation 3gevails, taking the

protagon1st down but the aud1ence up.
James Gibbs, on the other hand, identifies Soyinka's tragedy with the
Nietzschean parallel of the struggles between Dionysus and Apollo.

Very few dissertations have been written on Soyinka in the

United States and Canada, according to the Humanities International
Dissertations Index in the fields of linguistics, speech, literature,
and theatre. Three doctoral dissertations pertain to the socio-
political and cultural concerns of Soyinka, his dramaturgy, and the
traditional Yoruba theatrical elements that inform his work. "From
Swamp Dwellers to Madmen and Specialists: The Drama of Wole Soyinka"

by Joseph Okpaku18

is a chronological study in the development of
Soyinka's dramaturgy and thematic vision. "The World in Search of
Viable Leadership: A Study of Structure and Communication in Soyinka's
Scripts" by Oluropo Sekoni19 is principally concerned with the intrin-
sic relationship between structure and meaning in Soyinka's drama,

and in the socio-political and cultural concerns of the playwright.

June Balistreri examines the elements of the traditional Yoruba

Alarinjo Theatre and how they have influenced Soyinka's drama in

 

17Armstrong, p. 43.

18Joseph 0. O. Okpaku, Sr., "From Swamp Dwellers to Madmen
and Specialists: The Drama of Wole Soyinka" (Ph.D. Dissertation:
Stanford University, 1978).

19Oluropo Johnson Sekoni, "The World in Search of Viable
Leadership: A Study of Structure and Communication in Soyinka's
Scrigts" (Ph.D. Dissertation: The University of Wiscosnin, Madison,
1977 .

"The traditional Elements of the Yoruba Alarinjo Theatre in Wole
Soyinka's Plays."20 Twenty other theses and dissertations pertain
to Soyinka and his African contemporaries--poets, novelists and
playwrights--grouped into thematic, structural and other studies.
After reviewing the relevant sources, this study, it is hoped,
will be of significant interest to theatre critics and practitioners,
to scholars and ordinary readers of Soyinka's plays. The study pro-
poses to identify the cognitive implications of Soyinka's theatre
concepts, which will be significantly useful to theatre directors
and actors who invariably need to know and understand the playwright's
vision of theatre in order to interpret and produce his plays. The
objective also is to contribute to a knowledge of Soyinka's theatre
and drama, and to aid the interpretation and better understanding and
appreciation of his plays. It is hoped that this study will also
give some insights into the current trends in African, especially
Nigerian, theatre.
This is the first study in the United States and Canada
(and, perhaps, elsewhere) on Soyinka's concepts and definition of

theatre.

Scope,ugrganization and Methodolggy of Study
This is a study of Soyinka's definition of theatre and two

of his ideas or concepts of theatre, namely: his concept of time,

 

20June Clara Balistreri, "The Traditional Elements of the
Yoruba Alarinjo Theatre in Wole Soyinka's Plays" (Ph.D. Dissertation:
University of Colorado at Boulder, 1978).

space, and scenery, and his concept of theatrical music and dance.
The study examines and analyzes Soyinka's application of his theatre
definition and two concepts to his plays, namely: A Dance of the

Forests (1960), The Road (1964)21 and Ruggi's Harvest (1965).22 The

 

study concludes on an appraisal of Wole Soyinka as artist, and of
his importance and significance to contemporary African theatre.

The approach to this study is basically cultural, and is
based on extensive library research of published and unpublished
materials. The principal culture of reference is the Yoruba culture,
which is adopted in this study against a general background of the
African culture. The choice of this approach has been greatly influ-
enced by a desire to comprehend the cultural roots to and basis of
Soyinka's perception of theatre, and to show how those roots have
served his creative efforts.

The study is divided into four chapters: Chapter I states
and explains Soyinka's definition of theatre, and its application to

A Dance of the Forests. Chapter II examines and discusses Soyinka's

 

concept of time, space, and scenery, as it applies to The Road. The
musical heritage which is at the heart of Soyinka's theatre, is
examined as it applies to Kongi's Harvest in Chapter III. Chapter IV
concludes the study with an appraisal of Soyinka as artist, and of

his importance and signficance to contemporary African theatre.

 

21Published in Wole Soyinka, Collected Plays 1 (Oxford:
0xfbrd University Press, 1973).

22Wole Soyinka, Death and the Kigg's Horseman (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1975).

10

Each chapter opens with introductory comments, fbllowed by a
statement of the problem or subject matter of the chapter. The cul-
tural background to the problem is then presented, and fbllowed by an
explanation or examination of the problem against its background.
This is then applied to a detailed study of the plays, fer the sole
purpose of discovering and delineating the playwright's application
of the concepts in the writing of the plays, as outlined above. The

plot of each play is examined befbre a discussion on it fellows.

A Biographical Sketch of Wole Soyinka

More familiarly and internationally known as Wole Soyinka,
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was born on July 13, 1934, in Abeokuta,
Nigeria. The Yourba town, Abeokuta, literally means the city "under
the rock," and derives its name from two Yoruba words: “abe” mean-
ing iunder" and "okuta" meaning "rock." Geographically, the town of
Abeokuta is surrounded by rocks, the most significant (and a tourist
center) being the Olumo Rocks. River Ogun also runs through the
town. The river is important to this study because its name (Ogun)
links directly with Soyinka's chosen patron and god--Ogun. "One of
the master images of all his writings," says Gerald Moore, “is a
swift, rocky river-bed bridged by the striding and reckless road
of man's modernity, or by the effbrt necessary to pass from one
phase of existence to anather."23 As a poet, novelist, critic, and
playwright, whose plays have been successfully perfbrmed in London,

New York City, Washington, Chicago, Paris, and elsewhere besides

 

23Gera1d Moore, Wole Soyinka, p. 4.

11

Nigeria and other African states, Soyinka writes with a profound
tragic sense of the obstacles to human progress.
Having completed his primary school education in Abeokuta,
Soyinka went to Ibadan (about 50 miles from Abeokuta) where he
attended the Government College, a leading secondary school in
Nigeria at that time. Later, he worked for eighteen months as stores
assistant in the Government Medical Stores in Lagos. At the age of
eighteen, he entered the newly completed University College of
Ibadan (the first University College in Nigeria) in 1952. He left
Ibadan to read English at the University of Leeds (England), where
he had studied under the distinguished literary critic G. Wilson
Knight. He graduated from Leeds in 1958.
His career as a writer probably began about 1950-51. While

"in school," he had begun to write

the usual little sketches for production, the occasional verse,

you know, the short story, etc., and I think about 1951 I had

the greatest excitement, of having a short story of mine broad-

cast on the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and that was sort of

my first public performance.24
Ever since than, Soyinka has continued to write and publish poems,
novels, plays, and essays. In spite of the high quality and sophisti-
cation of his other works, he is better remembered as a playwright--

a compliment which is justified by his many and brilliant contribu-

tions to the rapidly growing contemporary African theatre.

 

24Wole Soyinka in an interview with Lewis Nkosi, August,
1962. See Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden, eds., African Writers
Talking (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), p. 172.

12

While in Leeds, Soyinka was "particularly active in university
theatre, offering many productions of classical and modern European

25 Late in 1958, Soyinka

plays, often in their original languages."
worked for the Royal Court Theatre, London, as a script-reader; a
position that gave him the Opportunity not only to watch at first
hand the direction and stage-management of a variety of modern and
classical European plays, but also to meet and associate with such
versatile writers as Samuel Beckett, lonesco, Osborne and others.
According to Gerald Moore, it was at the Royal Court theatre,

in the years between 1956 and 1960, that the early plays of

John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Ann Jellicoe, Samuel

Beckett, and a number of other rising dramatists were first

perfbrmed. Players like Joan Plowright, Mary Ure, Frank Finlay,

Kenneth Haigh and Alan Bates all founded their reputations

there during the same period . . . Soyinka, who also joined

their writers' group, was able to take part in presenting an

evening of dramatic improvisation during the summer of 1959,

whose cast included the newly-arrived South African actor

Bloke Modisane and the West African Johnnie Saker, as well

as Soyinka himself.26

Upon his return to Nigeria, Soyinka founded “The 1960 Masks"

and later the Orishun Theatre, both of which were professional
theatre companies. He then wrote A Dance of the Forests for the
October 1, 1960, Nigerian Independence celebrations. The only pro-
duction of the play so far, directed by Soyinka himself and per-
formed by "The 1960 Masks," satirizes the nation's euphoria fer
independence by stripping it of all its romantic legends and showing

that the present is no more glorious and golden than the past or the

 

25Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka, p. 5.
261bid., p. 7.

13

yet unknown future. Among his published works are The Lion and the

 

Jewel (first perfbrmed in Ibadan in 1959 under the direction of
Geoffrey Axworthy, and published in 1963), The Trials of Brother Jero
(1960), Jero's Metamorphasis (1972), Madmen and Specialists (1971),
and The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), an adaptation of Euripides' Ihe_
Bacchae, commissioned by the National Theatre of Great Britain and
first perfbrmed in London in 1973. In his plays,
Western elements are skillfully fused with a subject matter
deeply rooted in Yoruba tradition. His use of symbolism and
flashback sometimes makes his plays, though they are igeni-
ously plotted, hard to understand. His best works exhibit
humour and fine poetic style as well as a gift fer irony and
satire and for accurately matching the language of his complex
characters to their social position and moral qualities.27

Among his poems are Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Poems from

 

 

fzjsgp (1969), republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972). He has

also published two novels, The Interpreters (1965) and Season of

 

'Appmy_(l973), and a documentary, The Man Died (1972), written in
prison about Nigeria's military officers, the Nigeria-Biafra war,

and his imprisonment. At the beginning of the Nigeria-Biafra war

in 1967, Soyinka was imprisoned "without trial" by the Federal author-
ities of Nigeria. He was released two years later in 1969.

Between 1960 and 1964, Soyinka co-edited and published Blagk
Orpheus, an important literary journal. He also edited and published
Transition, another literary journal, in the early 70s. Besides his
book, Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka has published

many leading articles in journals and anthologies. He has lectured

 

27Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. IX, 15th Ed. (1974), p. 391.

14

world-wide: in Britain, the United States, Africa, and France, and
is currently a Professor and Head of Drama at the University of Ife,
Nigeria. His play, The Road, won first prize at the Dakar Festival
of Negro Arts (1966). He also recieved one of the two Arts Council
John Whiting Awards for 1966/67 fbr his work as playwright.
Soyinka sees the artist as the "visionary“ of and for his

society and time. The artist's function is to record and transmit
the values and experiences of his society and time, as well as pro-

vide a historical perspective on his time.28

 

28See Wole Soyinka, "And After the Narcissist?" African Forum
1 (4): 53-64; "The Writer in a Modern African State," in The writer
in Modern Africa, ed. Per Wastberg (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Insti-
tute of African Studies, 1968): 14-21; "The Choice and Use of Lan-
guage," Cultural Events in Africa 75: 3-6.

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

SOYINKA'S MAN-COSMOS THEATRE

This chapter states Soyinka's definition of theatre, pro-
vides the cultural background to the definition, and then explains
the definition in perspective of its cultural determinants. The
chapter then examines in detail Soyinka's application of his defini-

tion of theatre to the writing of A Dance of the Forests. The plot

 

of the play precedes the discussion on the application of the defini-
tion to the play. The chapter concludes with observations and com-
ments on Soyinka's theatre definition, and suggests the implication

and value of the definition to the history both of god and man.

Soyinka's Definition

 

In an important book on the African literary and theatrical
world, in which he makes known some of his key ideas about theatre,
the arts and the tragic concomitance between human and divine actions,
Wole Soyinka states:

Theatre then is one arena, one of the earliest that we know
of, in which man'has attempted to come to terms with the
spatial phenOmenon of his being . . . in speaking of space,
let us recognise first of all that with the advancement of
technology and the evolution . . . of the technical sensi-
bility, the spatial vision of theatre has become steadily
contracted into purely physical actingpareas on a stage

 

 

15

16
as opposed to a symbolic arena fer metaphysical contests
(my emphasiST.Z9
This definition of theatre of Soyinka has much deeper meanings and
implications than the limited understanding the words and phrases

may, at first hand, provide.

The Fundamental DefiningConcept
Soyinka's definition (and concept) of theatre is predicated

on a "man-cosmos organisation"30

in which man is the primary centre.
Thus he states, as his "fundamental defining concept," that "the

stage is brought into being by a communal presence . . . [and]

 

becomes the affective, rational and intuitive milieu of the total

 

communal experience, historic, race-fermative, cosmogonic" (my
31

 

emphasis). Both the definition and Soyinka's "fundamental defining
concept" of theatre can best be understood in terms of the cultural

determinants or precepts that gave them birth.

Cultural Background to Soyinka's Theatre

 

The culture of reference is specifically Yoruba, and gener-
ally African. Soyinka draws extensively from the Yoruba world of
myth and metaphysics. The Yoruba world dates back to the very origin

both of god and man.

 

29Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 40.

301bid., p. 8.
3‘Ibid., p. 43.

17

According to Yoruba mythology, the godhead was one in the
beginning, and was attended by the god's personal slave, Atunda. The
latter's ancestry is, however, obscure and subject only to specula-
tion. But it is generally conceded that Atunda was the first lesser
being (not necessarily a mortal being) to co-exist with the godhead.
He is also believed to be the first iconoclast and revolutionary in
history: the myth relates that out of jealousy, anger, dissatisfac-
tion, or some other unknown cause, Atunda disturbed the balance in
the cosmos and then caused an eruption within the cosmic dome by
fragmenting the godhead into an uncountable number of pieces:

The cause of the gods' spiritual unrest dated from their own
origin. Once, there was only the solitary being, the primogeni-
tor of god and man, attended only by his slave, Atunda . . .
perhaps the original one moulded him from earth to assist him
with domestic chores . . . the slave rebelled . . . rolled a
huge boulder on the god as he tended his garden on a hillside,
sent him hurtling into the abyss in a thousand and one frag-
ments.32

The fragmentation of the godhead by Atunda led naturally
to three significant developments, namely: the multiplicity of
Yoruba gods, the severance of man from god and god from man, and
the creation of a gulf between man and god or between the mortal
and the immortal worlds. The gulf or "abyss" became a thick,
impenetrable growth--a no-man's land. The reunion of man with

god and god with man was, therefore, sealed off and made impos-

sible. Nevertheless, both man and god were intimately aware of

 

32Ibid., p. 27. Also see Wole Soyinka, Idanre in Idanre and
Other Poems (London: Eyre Methuen, 1967; reprinted 1977), pp. 57-85.

 

 

18

the anguish of loneliness caused by the severance of one from the
other. They were also very conscious of their inseparable (and
indestructible) essences; thus they sought reunion through their
conquest of the abyss.

Man sought to gather up or re-unite with his cosmos and
divine essence by bridging the gulf with rituals and sacrifices
offered to the gods. Ogun, Soyinka's patron god, led the gods through
the "chaotic growth" of the abyss to re-unite the gods with their
human essence, and to make it possible for man to more intimately
re-unite with his divine essence. In Soyinka's brilliant account
of this vertical re-assemblage of essences,

This gulf is what must be constantly diminished by the sacri-
fices, the rituals, the ceremonies of appeasement to those
cosmic powers which lie guardian to the gulf. Spiritually,
the primordial disquiet of the Yoruba psyche may be expressed
as the existence in collective memory of a primal severance in
transitional ether, whose first effective defiance is sym-
bolised in the myth of the gods' descent to earth and the
battle with immense chaotic growth which had sealed off
reunion with man. For they were coming down, not simply to

be acknowledge but to be re-united with human essence, to
reassume that portion of re-creative transient awareness

which the first deity Orisa-nla possessed and expressed
through his continuous activation of man images-~brief reflec-
tions of divine facets--just as man is grieved by a conscious-
ness of the loss of the external essence of his being and
must indulge in symbolic transactions to recover his totality
of being.3

The myth invariably accounts for the origins of Yoruba rituals and
drama (a detailed account of those origins is beyond the scope of

this study).

 

33Myth, Literature and the African World, pp. 144-145.

19

The Yoruba world, it is important to note, comprises various
levels or planes, namely: the world of the living, the dead, the
unborn and the gods. It also comprises the mineral, animal, and vege-
table worlds or kingdoms. Each plane of the Yoruba world lies very
close to and overlaps the other; they are mutually co-existent and
are held together by the gulf or abyss. The abyss also serves as or
provides the passage from one world to the other; for example, it
provides the passage from the world of the living to the world of
the dead, and vice versa. Thus, it has come to be identified with
transition and then called the “abyss of transtionf or the "transi-
tional gulf." Soyinka has identified the transitional abyss as "the
fourth stage" which lies between two areas of existence.34 He,
therefore, describes it as

the "chthonic realm," the seething cauldron of the dark world
will and psyche, the transitional yet inchoate matrix of death
and becoming. Into this universal womb once plunged and
emerged Ogun, the first actor, disintegrating within the
abyss.3

In the African world, there is a mutual correspondence between
man and the gods and all of phenomena. Each is a close neighbour
to the other, and it is believed that they are all present during,

and participate in, traditional festivals. The festival is, like

ritual, the commemoration of historic and communal events such

 

34See Wole Soyinka, "The Fourth Stage," in The Mopality of
.Agt, ed.: D. W. Jefferson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969),

pp. 119-134. Re-written and published in Myth, Literature and the
African World, pp. 140-160.

 

35Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 142.

20

as the coming of a new season or harvest. Traditional festivals
involve, among other things, music, dance and masquerade, and the
communal presence both of man and his cosmic neighbours. Thus the
festival is generally regarded as the great artistic institution of
the African world. Ritual is at the heart of every performance.
The performance itself is not merely for entertainment, but
an integral part of life itself. It could be concluded from the
foregoing that theatre (that is, the traditional artistic institution)
constitutes a significant reality upon which the traditional African
bases most of his perceptions of life. Therefore, a symbolic action
or ritual enactment is to the African mind not merely "symbolic"
but [gal. Implicit in this perception of reality is the fact or
understanding that symbolism per se has, perhaps, far more greater
meaning and implication to the African mind than it may have to the
Western mind.

This background of the Yoruba and African world constitutes,
therefore, a germane ground matrix for a better understanding of
Soyinka's definition of theatre, and of his other concepts or ideas

about theatre and the dramatic arts.

Explanation of Soyinka's Definition
Soyinka's definition of theatre deals principally with man
and the space that surrounds him. Within this space man must "come
to terms" with, comprehend, and then master "the spatial phenomenon
“of his being." The spatial definition of being, that is, man's

quest for the comprehension and mastery of his miniscule self within

21

and in terms of the immensity of the macrocosmos, is in itself a
ritual and metaphysical process towards the regeneration of life.

It is in essence a rite de passag§_which derives from the myth of
the primordial godhead and his slave Atunda, and involves the mutual
process of death and birth.

The myth is a study in the fragmentation of the man-cosmos
essence and the process of its re-assemblage—-the gods seeking
reunion with man and man\with god. The spatial definition of being,
therefore, is the metaphysical reunion or re-assemblage of the frag-
mented man-cosmos essence. It is a process which involves the pro—
tagonist in a daring act of will and disintegration within the abyss,
at the perils of his own life. The protagonist combats the abyss
for the sole purpose of re-uniting with his fragmented man-cosmos
essence and being resorbed in phenomena, and of reaching out to new
areas of awareness and becoming wiser.

The "arena" fer this "metaphysical" act of will is the Yoruba
world of man, the gods and phenomena. The world of man comprises
principally the living, the dead, and the unborn. The world of
phenomena comprises the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms.

But the African does not make such clear-cut distinctions between
these worlds, since each is believed to exist in the other, or, at
least, to lie very close to and overlap the other. They are, however,
held together by the transitional abyss--a domain belonging neither

to man nor gods, but carefully and jealously guarded by the gods who

22

were the first to forge a passage through it as well as bridge it

with knowledge of the arts and sciences.

36

Soyinka observes that the

Commonly recognised in most African metaphysics are the three
worlds . . . the world of the ancestor, the living, and the
unborn. Less understood or explored is the fourth space, the
dark continuum of transition where occurs the inter-
transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality. It houses the
ultimate expression of the cosmic will.37

His "arena," therefore, refers more specifically to this "fourth

space," the transitional abyss which he has described, as quoted

inter alia, as

 

"symbolic" portrayal of the gulf of transition.

the "chthonic realm," the seething cauldron of the dark world
will and psyche, the transitional yet inchoate matrix of death
and becoming. Into this universal womb once plunged and
emerged Ogun, the first actor, disintegrating within the
abyss.38

Thus, Soyinka maintains the "stage" is or should be a

trayal inevitably presumes that all the other worlds of the Yoruba

are mutually correspondent and co-existent in the transitional abyss.
The conceptualization of space has, therefore, come to mean for Soy-

inka an inter-transmutational "continuum," having neither dimensions

nor boundaries and constantly suggesting a multiplicity of ideas

and meanings.

 

361bid., p. 158.
37Ibid., p. 26.
381bid., p. 142.

The "symbolic" por-

23

Soyinka maintains that the stage is a "man-cosmos organisa-

"39 "40

tion or "cosmic envelope

"4]

which is "brought into being by a
communal presence. The "communal presence" comprises the living,
the dead, the unborn, the gods and their gnomic agencies, and pres-
ences drawn from the mineral, animal, and vegetable kingdoms. Thus
are to be found in Soyinka's drama human and non-human characters,
the dead, gods and the unborn; trees, rocks, rivers, birds, ants,
frogs, and spirits, all of whom possess a cognitive life-force and
speak the common language of the living. When they are not physically
present on stage, they are presumed to be present but invisible--a
view which derives from the African conception of the great artistic
institution (the festival) as a communal event in which all phenomena
are believed to participate.

Soyinka also sees the arena as a "constant battleground"42
which provides "a multi-level experience of the mystical and the mun-

dane."43

Thus, he adds, the stage becomes "the affective, rational
and intuitive milieu of the total communal experience, historic,
race-formative, cosmogonic.“44 The stage is a "battleground" pri-

marily because of its exploration of “metaphysical contests." The

 

391bid., p. 8.

4OIbid., p. 41.
4‘Ib1d., p. 43.
421bid.

431bid., p. 2.
44Ibid., p. 43.

24

arena is "affective" because of the complete immersion and total
absorption of the protagonist in the ritual and communal experience,
and because of how that experience affects the community or audience.
It is a "rational" milieu because the conception of the arena as a
"man-cosmos organisation" belongs to what the people consider to be
real and cognitive to them. Stanley Macebuh makes the point that
the "rationalist African universe" is believed to be "organically
integrated, its components interrelated by virtue of a cosmogonic
intention that preceded human existence."45 And, according to Rev.
Mbiti,

The spirit world is very close to that of the physical human

life, and people are very much aware of it, articulating it

in their oral literature, in rituals, in ceremonies and as

part of the mystique of the universe without which, perhaps,

human life itself would be dull and boring.45

Soyinka's view of the theatre as an "intuitive milieu"

derives from the traditional African view of festival as a ritual
commemoration of a people's total history and cosmology. Intuition,
therefore, relates more directly to the collective memory which
recalls and re-enacts the historic, race-formative and cosmogonic
experiences of the community. The “total communal experience," how-

ever, derives from the myth of the godhead and Atunda, the fragmenta-

tion of essence from being, the daring combat of the gods with the

 

45Stanley Macebuh, "African Aesthetics in Traditional
African Art,9 Okike 5: 14

46Rev. John Mbiti, "African Cosmology," in FESTAC '77
(London & Nigeria: African Journal Limited & The Internal Festival
Committee, 1977), p. 49.

25

"chaotic growth" of the abyss, and the events and experiences that
were sequel to that combat. The "Mysteries" of Ogun, Obatala and
Sango (which lie beyond the scape of this study) are the traditional
examples and re-creations of the collective memory both of god and
man.

What Soyinka does then with his theatre (as his plays will
illustrate) is to take these ideas from his traditional African world,
re-interpret them in contemporary terms (and at the same time retain
their primary essence), and apply the concepts or ideas to an inter-
pretation of contemporary and modern themes. He finds the stage a
germane symbolic vehicle for the exploration of mytho-history; that
is, the man-cosmos history which begins with the myth of the godhead
and continues to the yet unknown future--the past belongs to the dead,

the present to the living and the future to the unborn.

Application of Definition to A Dance of the Forests

Soyinka's application of his definition of theatre to the
writing of his plays varies from play to play. The fundamental
essence of his definition, however, remains the same in nearly all

his plays.

The Plot

The human community has, as a gesture of acknowledgment and
respect, extended its invitation to the "illustrious ancestors" of the
community to be present at the community's independence celebration.

The celebration is known in the play as the "Gathering of the Tribes."

26

By inviting the "illustrious ancestors," the human community h0pes

to add grandeur and excellence, and to give profound meaning, to

their celebration of independence or "Gathering of the Tribes." But
Aroni, the Lame One and lieutenant to Forest Head, in whose power it

is to fulfill the request of the human community, sends them “accusers”
instead to represent the "illustrious ancestors" at the feast of
independence. The "accusers," also labelled "Obscenities," are

Dead Man and his pregnant wife Dead Woman. They are chosen to repre-
sent the dead at the feast of the living because, in their "previous
life they were linked in violence and blood with four of the living

"47 namely: Demoke (the carver), Rola (the whore; known

generation,
also as Madame Tortoise), Adenebi (council Orator), and Agboreko
(soothsayer).

The play opens on an “empty clearing in the forest," amidst
the distant drums and joyous atmosphere of the human celebration.
Dead Man and Dead Woman break open the earth and arrive for the
human celebration. But they are immediately rejected by repre-
sentatives of the human community--Demoke, Rola and Adenebi. Mean-
while, Forest Head (the supreme deity), in mortal disguise as Obaneji,
watches from a safe distance the unabashed rejection of the dead
by the three representatives of the human community. As the dead
wander into another part of the forest, Obaneji (Forest Head) joins
the three representatives of the human community. He searchingly
interrogates them, and then leads them into the innermost part of

the forest for the sole purpose of letting the human community judge

itself by the very path of its history.

27

Each of the human representatives carries a load of guilt:
Demoke the artist has carved the "totem" for the celebration of the
Gathering of the Tribes. In carving the "totem," he had maliciously
caused the death of Oremole, his apprentice and ward to Oro. Rola
has been instrumental to the death of three of her lovers; and
Adenebi has used his position as council Orator to cause the death
of many innocent users of the road. The three human representatives
are fleeing the Gathering of the Tribes. It is during this flight
that they meet Dead Man and Dead Woman, and are confronted and led
away by Forest Head.

Structurally, the play is divided into three principal seg-
ments or movements in a manner that suggests the present, the past
and the future. The living (Demoke, Rola and Adenebi), their world
and the feast of the tribes represent or suggest the present. The
dead (Dead Woman and Dead Man) represent the past; and the unborn
child of Dead Woman (Half-Child) represents the future. The journey
into the forest, led by Forest Head, begins with the present (in
the "empty clearing in the ferest") and moves retrospectively through
the past (in the Court of Mata Kharibu) into the future (in the
innermost part of the forest). The journey itself--a ritual process
of exploration--is divided into the "Welcoming of the Dead“ in which
Dead Man and Dead Woman give account of their action during their
time in the legendry empire of Mata Kharibu; the "Dance of the Half-
Childi during which Dead Woman's suspended pregnancy is relieved of

the unborn child (Half-Child)--a symbolic creation of the future; and

28

the "Dance of the Unwilling Sacrifice" in which Demoke pays dearly
for his daring moral act to save the Half-Child from imminent destruc-

tion.

48

Meanwhile, two gods, Eshuoro and Ogun, are engaged in what

may be described as a bayonet-to-bayonet confrontation with each
other. While Ogun seeks to justify Demoke's act, and to retain his
human essence in Demoke, Eshuoro demands justice through vengeance
for the malicious murder of his ward, Oremole. In carving the totem
for the celebration of the "Gathering of the Tribes," and under pos-
session by Ogun,
Demoke chose, unwisely to carve Oro's sacred tree, araba.
Even this might have passed unnoticed by Oro if Demoke had
left araba's height undiminished. But Demoke is a victim of
giddiness and cannot gain araba's heights. He would shorten
the tree, but apprentice to him is one OREMOLE, a follower of
Oro who fbught against this sacrilege to his god. And Oremole
won support with his mockery of the carver who was tied to
earth. The apprentice began to work above his master's head;
Demoke reached a hand and plucked him down [dead] . . . the
final link was complete.49
The play ends with the triumph of Eshuoro over Ogun, followed by the

ritual sacrifice of Demoke by Eshuoro.

 

48Eshuoro is Soyinka's ingenious creation by grafting two
personalities, Esu (Eshu) and Oro. In Yoruba cosmology. Oro is the
"god of punishment and death" (Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka, pp. 32,
35), and Esu the god of mischief, trickery, confusion and fate. By
syndesizing Esu and Oro--Eshuoro--Soyinka gives a new meaning to both
gods. "Eshuoro," he writes, "is the wayward flesh of OR0--0ro whose
agency serves much of the bestial human, whom they invoke for terror."
A Dance of the Forests, p. 5.

49A Dance of the Forests, p. 6.

29

 

A l in the Definition to
the Play

In A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka is deeply committed to the
portrayal of the "total communal experience"--the historic, race-
fbrmative and cosmogonic. The play opens on the human community
amidst a communal celebration. Dead Man and Dead Woman travel "a
long way" through "the understreams" to represent the dead at the
feast of the living. They carry with them the unborn. Gods and
demons also appear on the human scene. Murete (the tree-demon), for
instance, leaves his dwelling "to drink millet wine at the feast of

50 And Forest Head appears as Obaneji on the human scene

the living."
and leads the human protagonists into the forest. Inside the forest,
the principal gods (Ogun and Eshuoro) and their agencies, the dead,
the living, the unborn, and all of phenomena, are brought together
for the ritual re-creation of history.

The first phase of the history takes us to the ancient Court
of Mata Kharibu. The human representatives (Rola, Demoke, Adenebi
and Agboreko) and the dead (Dead Man and Dead Woman) are in this
scene portrayed as they were in Mata Kharibu's Court more than "eight
centuries" ago:

FOREST HEAD: . . . Well, is everything prepared?
ARONI: We are ready.
FOREST HEAD: Remind me, how far back are we?

ARONI: About eight centuries. Possibly more. One of their
great empires. I forget which.

 

5°Ibid., p. 12.

30

FOREST HEAD: It matters nothing. . . .

(Aroni waves his hand in a circle. The court of Mata
Kharibu lights up gradually. Two thrones. _Qne contains
Mata Kharibu, the other, his queen, Madame Tortoise, both
surrounded by splendour. A page plucks an Africanguitar.
Mata Kharibu is angry; his eyes roll terribly; the court
cowers. His queen, on the other hand,pis very gay and*
cruel in her coquetry. She seems quite oblivious of the
King's condition. The court poet (Demoke) stands a few
feet from her. Behind him stands his scribe, a young
boy,,pen and scroll at the ready. Those not invo'ved in
the action at any time, freeze in onepposition.)

 

 

 

 

We find in this scene that Demoke the Carver was, more than eight
centuries ago, the court poet in Mata Kharibu's palace. Rola is the
Madame Tortoise of this court; Adenebi the Court Historian; Agboreko,
now as then the Soothsayer; Dead Man the Warrior, and Dead Woman his
pregnant wife.

Mata Kharibu is angry because the Warrior (Dead Man) has
refused to fight an unjust war, "the war of the queen's wardrobe."52
Mata Kharibu has stolen a neighbouring King's wife, Madame Tortoise
(Rola). Madame Tortoise's "rightful husband," from whom she was
stolen by Mata Kharibu, does not consider her worth any battle. But
Mata Kharibu,

So bent on bloodshed . . . sends him a new message. Release

the goods of this woman I took from you if there will be
peace between us.53

 

51
52

Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid., p. 48.
531bid., p. 49.

31

Warrior's refusal to "lead" his men "into battle merely to recover

"54 coupled with his unresponsiveness to

the trousseau of any women,
Madame Tortoise's overtures, earn him both castration and trade into
slavery. His wife (Dead Woman), under the strain of pregnancy and
grief, collapses and dies. The ultimate fate of Warrior is in large
measure facilitated by the unabashed corruptness of Historian
(Adenebi). It is he who negotiates the enslavement of Warrior with
Slave-Dealer. Bribed by the latter, the deal is struck; Warrior is
sold into slavery. The Court Physician (of whom Soyinka provides no
counterpart among the human representatives) participates in the slave
deal and is later invited to Historian's house "for some sherbert"

and discussion on "the historical implications" of wars "fought . . .
over nothing."55 Meanwhile, Court Poet (Demoke) lets his Novice
(Oremole) fall from the roof-top and break an arm while trying to get
Madame Tortoise's canary. We also learn that "two days ago," a soldier
had fallen from the same roof and died while trying to get Madame
Tortoise's canary.

What Soyinka has done with the Mata Kharibu scene is to pro-
vide the vital historical link between the past and the present, and
by it forewarn of the future. According to the Warrior,

Unborn generations will becannibals. . . . Unborn generations
will, as we have done, eat up one another. . . . I took up
soldiering to defend my country, but those to whom I gave the
power to command my life abuse my trust in them.55

54
55

 

Ibid., p. 49.
Ibid., pp. 54-55.
561bid., p. 49.

32

In their present lives, Rola is, now as before, a whore and
has already unashamedly sent three of her lovers to their graves.
Adenebi is, now as before, actively engaged in the corrupt and danger-
ous manipulation of the lives of others: he takes a substantial
bribe from the owner of a passenger lorry named "Incinerator," and
changes its certified capacity from "forty" to "seventy." On its
way to the "Gathering of the Tribes" the lorry overturns, and sixty-
five of its seventy passengers die. A further link between the past
and the present is the totem itself. The past dominated Demoke's
thought as he carved the totem:

ADENEBI: Bestial. Yes, just the sort of thing you would
carve, isn't it? Like your totem. Bestial it was.
Utterly bestial.

DEMOKE: Actually, that is what I mean. Madame Tortoise is

the totem--most of it anyway. In fact, you might almost

say she dominated my thoughts--she, and something else.

About equally.57
Obaneji (Forest Head) acknowledges the totem as "the work of ten
generations."58 The totem is the symbol of the "accumulated heri-
tage"59 of the pe0ple. Adenebi tells us that it is the "accumulated
heritage" of their fbregone empires which they celebrate in the
Gathering of the tribes:

The accumulated heritage--that is ggat we celebrate. Mali.
Chaka. Songhai. Glory. Empires.

 

57Ibid., p. 23.
581bid., p. 10.
591bjd., p. 11.
601bid.

33

And they envision the invited ancestors to be

The builders of empires. The descendants of our great nobil-

ity. . . . Let them symbolize all that is noble in our nation.

Let them be our historical link for the reason of rejoicing.

Warriors. Sages. Conquerors. Builders. Philosophers.

213325.).-1133.33:kaiififlblfiei'fiel‘éfliflflcifli 313.3331 ”'9 "am"
But, ironically, these turn out to be accusers (Dead Woman, for
instance, is still burdened with the load of pregnancy, for "it is
a hard thing to carry this child for a hundred generations."62); and
the journey into the forest (under Forest Head's spell), via the
court of Mata Kharibu, is, indeed, the trial of history, both past,
present, and future.

The historic vision persists in A Dance of the Forests, and

Soyinka uses it to interpret modern themes. Amidst the jocund atmos-
phere of celebrations the predominant images are those of bloody
violence, war, and death. The principal characters are in various
ways blood-guilty and everything they have set their hands at doing,
such as the totem carved by Demoke, bears the stigma of violence,
blood, and death. Historian advises that "war is the only consistency
that past ages afford us" and a "legacy which new nations seek to
perpetuate," because "war is the destiny" of mankind. Thus, he jus-
tifies as "honourable" the "war of the queen's wardrobe" proclaimed

by Mata Kharibu, by comparing it to the Trojan war:

I have here the whole history of Troy. If you were not the
swillage of pigs and could read the writings of wiser men, I

 

5'1b1d., p. 31.
621bid., p. 8.

34

would show you the magnificence of the destruction of a beauti—

ful city. I would reveal to you the attainments of men which

lifted mankind to the ranks of gods and demi-gods. And who

was the inspiration of this divine carnage? Helen of Troy, a

woman whose honour became as rare a conception as her beauty.

Would Troy, if it were standing today lay claim to perserva-

tion in the annals of history if a thousand valiant Greeks

had not been slaughtered before its gates and a hundred

thousand Trojans within her walls?53

The two wars in question--"war of the queen's wardrobe" and

the Trojan war--are evidently unmatched in circumstance, importance
and significance. First and foremost, Madame Tortoise is a "whore“
whose legitimate husband does not consider worth a verbal war let
alone a bloody war. But Mata Karibu, having stolen and usurped her,
is bent on waging a bloody war to recover her "wardrobe" from her
legal husband. By using the Trojan War as a reference point to jus-
tify the lesser war of Mata Kharibu, Soyinka is sharply contrasting
and at the same time closely comparing both wars--and all wars in
general. One war is examined against the background of the other
and vice versa. The principal actors--humanity in general--in both
wars are similarly compared and contrasted. By close analysis, the
"war of the queen's wardrobe" is to the Trojan War a bestial diminu-
tive beneath the latter's bestriding legs. The effect of the sharp
contrast is Soyinka's emphasis on the absurdity and crass senseless-
ness of the war of Mata Kharibu. More than merely emphasizing the
absurdity of war, Soyinka uses it as a device to comment on his

characters. Their personalities and moral dispositions assume shapes

and forms before our eyes as we listen to Historian's oratory.

 

63Ibid., p. 51.

35

But beyond that, Soyinka is making a larger statement about
humanity. The comparison between both wars and the juxtapositon of
opposite images in Historian's speech become, therefore, a matrix to
Soyinka's visceral questioning and denunciation of classical values
and the integrity of poets, essayists, historians, philosophers,
etc., who have not only eulogized but have immortalized and deified
the greatest carnage in human history--the Trojan War. By holding
one mirror against another, Soyinka is iconoclastically debunking
the classical values symbolized by Helen of Troy and epitomized in
the Trojan War itself. By comparing Helen of Troy to Madame Tortoise,
all the values the former symbolizes collapse and become one with the
values the latter represents. Besides being a "whore," Madame Tortoise
symbolizes all the "accumulated" filth of history. Demoke's bestial
totem, a symbol of the "accumulated heritage" of history, is dominated
by the personality and qualities of Madame Tortoise and, by indirec-
tion, of Helen of Troy. The very totem is also the symbol for both
wars: it is the "accumulated heritage" of Troy as well as of all
humanity. It stands for violence, blood-shed, corruption, and all
the crimes and filth that history has bequeathed mankind. Therefbre,
by placing side by side opposite images--"pigs" against "wiser men,"
"destruction' against "attainments," divinity against "carnage," and
the slaughtered valiants of history--Soyinka calls to question the
integrity and sanity of poets, historians, philosophers, etc., who
have deified history's most remembered "carnage" and offered it as

a model of values for all ages. In effect, therefore, Soyinka

36

envisons "carnage"--divine or human--as the only "legacy" history
has left for man. It is recurrent and cyclic, a "historic vision"
which, he says,
exists now, this moment, it is co-existent in present aware-
ness. It clarifies the present and explains the future, . . .
it is not a fleshpot for escapist indulgence, and it is
vitally dependent on the sensibility that recalls it. This
is not to deny the dangers which attend the development of
this historic vision-~a convenient term for the total accept-
ance of the human heritage. A historic vision is of neces-
sity universal and any pretence to it must first accept the
demand for a total re-examination of the whole phenomenon of
humanity . . . the total collapse of ideals, the collapse of
humanity itself.54
The counsel of the "historic vision" presumes that "the future [will]
judge [humanity] by reversal of its path or by stubborn continua-
tion."65
The psycho-historic journey in which Forest Head leads repre-
sentatives of the human community into the womb of the forest is a
process towards the spatial definition of being in phenomena through
the "re-assemblage" of essences. In carving the totem for the "gather-
ing of the tribes," Demoke destroys (severs) the human essence of Oro
by reducing "araba's height," and causing the death of Oremole, Oro's
ward. Demoke is himself Ogun's ward. (Both Oremole and Demoke
represent the human essence both of Oro and Ogun.) Representatives
of the human community flee the gathering of the tribes because of

their individual and collective sense of guilt; a sense of guilt which

 

64Wole Soyinka, "The Writer in a Modern African State,"
p. 19.

65A Dance of the Forests, p. 59.

 

37

rises from legend as well as from the present. Their flight from
their guilt, collective or individual, and their refusal even to
talk about it, can best be seen as a statement of their quest, how-
ever unconsiously, for higher values and essences which can only be
found in the divine. Consider, for instance, the ensuing dialogue of
the opening scene between the human representatives and Forest Head
masquerading as Obaneji:

ROLA: No. Demoke stay here.

OBANEJI: You really think they are the people your father
spoke of?

DEMOKE: I do. Anyway, what does it matter? I still don't
know what brought me here.

ADENEBI: Well, don't be over-anxious to find out. At least
not from those . . . _

DEMOKE: I know we're bound to meet somewhere.
ADENEBI: For heaven's sake let's change the sabject.
ROLA: For once I agree with you.

DEMOKE: The man who fell to his death--from the tree--I
wonder if he was the other one . . .

ROLA: Dressed like that? For God's sake . . .
ADENEBI: I'm going back if you don't st0p this.

OBANEJI: But you said you thought they were the ones
Agboreko invoked--at your father's request.

DEMOKE: They say Aroni has taken control. That is when the
guilty become afraid.

ROLA: Can't we talk of something else . . .

38

ADENEBI (hurriedly.): Look, somehow we all seem to be keeping
togetggr. So why don't we fbrget all about unpleasant-
ness?

The gods, on the other hand, struggle to re-assemble and
retain their human essence. While Ogun fights to retain his human
essence in Demoke by defending the acts of the latter against Oremole,
Eshuoro fights to re-claim the human essence of Oro by demanding
justice through vengeance. Forest Head on his part wants to
re-establish order and harmony through the union of flesh and its
divine counterpart. He grieves, however, about its futility and
acknowledges the guilt of fashioning man after the divinity of the
gods:

Trouble me no further. The fooleries of beings whom I have

fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet I must

persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret

is my eternal burden--to pierce the encrustations of soul-

deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness--

knowing full well, it is all futility. Yet I must do this
alone,and no more, since to intervene is to be guilty of con-
tradiction, and yet to remain altogether unfelt is to make

my long-rumoured ineffectuality complete; hoping that when I

have tortured awareness from their souls, that perhaps, only

perhaps, in new beginnings . . .57
Prior to this scene, Forest Head remarks to the feuding

Eshuoro and Ogun: "Soon, I will not tell you from the humans, so
closely have their habits grown on you."68 The divided godhead,
which needs to be gathered up, is embodied principally in the Ogun-
Eshuoro antagonism and in the Ogun-Murete-Eshuoro and Eshuoro-Forest
Head antagonistic relationships. While the gods seek reunion with

66

67

 

Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 71.
681bid., p. 59.

39

man and man with the gods, Forest Head also strives to ensure the
reunion of the gods with each other. According to Gerald Moore,

The harmony for which Forest Father strives is both vertical

and lateral. On the vertical plane, man and god yearn

towards one another: on the lateral plane, the several

aspects of.a once united godhead also yearn to be gathered

up once more.6

Even the dead also seek reunion with man in much the same way

as man seeks reunion with the dead. The invitation of the dead by
the living to the gathering of the tribes is a potent statement of
this yearning by the living to reunite also with the dead. Dead
Man is unequivocal about this yearning of the dead to reunite with
their human essence as he grieves:

I always did want to come here. This is my home. I have

always yearned to come back. Over there, nothing held me.

I owned nothing, had not desire to. But the dark trees and

the thick earth drew me. When I died, I fell into the under-

streams, and the great summons found me ready. I travelled

the understreams beneath the great ocean; I travelled the

understreams beneath the great seas. I flowed through the

hardened crust of this oldest of the original vomits of

Forest Father . . .70

The onerous task of this reunion of essences rests on Forest

Head. Its futility is, however, summed up by Dead Woman: "The World
is big and the dead [and gods] are bigger. We've been dying since
the beginning; the living try but the gap always widens" (my empha-
sis).71 Everyone, including the gods, tries, "but the gap always

widens" between man, the gods and the dead, even though their various

 

69Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka, p. 43.

 

70A Dance of the Forests, p. 25.
711bid., p. 8.

40

planes of existence lie close to each other. Gerald Moore observes
that

The gods to whom appeal is made in sacrifice and ceremonies

of appeasement are not indifferent and aloof, but are them-
selves filled with the anguish of that severance and con-
tinually yearning towards reunification with men. This is

the real meaning of that moment when the celebrant is possessed
by his god, so central to all African religious observance,

and this moment can be realized only in music, the true lan-
guage of tragedy, with its concomitants of dance, mime and
masquerade.7

Preceding the Court of Mata Kharibu scene, the Forest Crier
unrolls his scroll, strikes his gong, and announces:

To all such as dwell in these Forests; Rock devils,
Earth imps, tree demons, ghommids, dewilds, genie
Incubi, sucubi, windhorls, bits and halves and such
Sons and subjects of Forest Father, and all

That dwell in his domain, take note, this night

Is the welcome of the dead. When spells are cast
And the dead invoked by the living, only such

May resume their body corporeal as are summoned
When the understreams that whirl them endlessly
Complete a circle. Only such may regain

Voice auditorial as are summoned when their link
With the living has fully repeated its nature, has
Re-impressed fully on the tapestry of Igbehinadun
In approximate duplicate of actions, be they

Of good, or of evil, of violence or carelessness;
In approximate duplicate of motives, be they
Illusory, tangible, commendable or damnable.

Take note, this selection, is by the living.

We hold these rites, at human insistence.

By procalmation, let the mist of generations

Be now dispersed.73

These personages invoked by Forest Crier, together with the human
community, constitute the cemmunal presence which, as Soyinka states,

brings the stage into being. They are here both as witnesses and as

 

7ZGerald Moore, Wole Soyinka, p. 41.

 

73A Dance of the Forests, p. 45.

 

41

participants. The timing of the invocation, and the fact that his-
tory is about to be re-created, makes us draw the inference that some
of these personages are resurrecting into Mata Kharibu, Physician,
Slave-Dealer, and others who form part of the historic empire: they
"resume" their "corporeal“ forms, "voice," "approximate duplicate of
actions" and "motives." And, like Dead Man and Dead Woman, the
resumption of their "corporeal" ferms takes them through the "under-
streams." In the scenes immediately following the Mata Kharibu scene,
these personages manifest in various other forms: they are the vari-
ous spirits in the play--Spirits of the Palm, Darkness, Precious
Stones, Volcanoes, etc., and also the ants, the triplets and Eshuoro's
jester.

Soyinka uses the forest in A Dance of the Forests as the meta-

 

physical abyss both of god, man and phenomena. The entire forest is
a statement, a message; it is the "chaotic growth" of the transitional
abyss which must be bridged in other to reach new areas of awareness.
Gerald Moore observes that

In modern Nigeria, as in Medieval Europe and Colonial America,
the fbrest is the realm of all those spiritual energies which
surround and watch our lives. In this play Soyinka employs
both the concepts of the ferest as the abode of secret forces
always interacting with mortal life, and that of the music as
the visible expression of an interplay between one plane of
reality and another . . . both the forest and the dance motifs
upon which this play is based are drawn from a deep layer of
African spiritual experience.

The fbrest becomes, therefore, the "symbolic arena" for the explora-

tion of man-cosmos confrontations. The "understreams" through which

 

74Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka, p. 30.

42

the dead and the spirits have journeyed, and the path through which
Forest Head leads the Human Community into the forest, become in the
play Soyinka's symbolic presentation of the transitional abyss, the

"feurth space."

Conclusion

 

From his application of his definition of theatre to the
writing of A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka presents his vision of
theatre as an intersection of planes. Each plane is a reflection of
the other, and represents a moment in the history of man and gods.
The past belongs to the dead; the present to the living; and the
future to the unborn. The past, present, and future are
co-existent. The gods belong to all three planes; and Soyinka uses
the various planes to interpret and portray the unending cycle of
history. Thus, he writes,

the past exists now, this moment, it is co-existent in present
awareness. It clarifies the present and explains the future,
but it is not a fleshpot for escapist indulgence, and it is
vitally dependent on the sensibility that recalls it. This is
not to deny the dangers which attend the development of this
historic vision--a convenient term for the total acceptance of
the human heritage. A historic vision is of necessity universal

and any pretence to it must first accept the demand for a total
re-examination of the whole phenomenon of humanity.75

 

 

75Wole Soyinka, "The Writer in a Modern African State,"
p. 19.

CHAPTER II
TIME AND THE MAGNETISM 0F SPACE AND SCENERY

Introductory Comments

This chapter examines Soyinka's concept of time, space, and
scenery, their interrelationship, and Soyinka's application of the
concept to The Road. The chapter states and explains the concept,
and then provides the background upon which the concept is based as
well as asks to be understood. The rest of the chapter is devoted
to a detailed study of the application of the concepts to The Road.
The chapter concludes on an appraisal of the total theatrical effect

of the concept.

Statement of the Concept
The essence of Soyinka's time-space-scenery concept is con-
tained in the following statement by Wole Soyinka:

The setting of Ritual, of the drama of the gods, is the
cosmic entirety, and our approach to this drama might
usefully be made through the comparable example of the
Epic. . . . We may speculate that it is the reality of this
undented vastness which created the need to challenge, con-
front and at least initiate a rapport with the realm of
infinity. It was--there being no other conceivable place--
the natural home of the unseen deities, a resting-place for
the departed, and a staging-house for the unborn. . . . The
stage, the ritual arena of confrontation, came to represent
the smybolic chthonic space and the presence of the chal-
lenger within it is the earliest physical expression of man's
fearful awareness of the cosmic context of his existence.

43

44

Its magic microcosm is created by the communal presence, and

in this charged space the chthonic inhabitants are chal-

1enged.75

Soyinka's statement suggests that scenery is a symbolic repre-

sentation of the "cosmic totality." Space, it maintains, is an
"undented vastness," a cosmic "infinity" which is the home of deities,
the resting place of the dead, and staging house of the unborn. The
dead and the unborn represent the past and the future; the living
who fearfully challenge the cosmic space represent the present. It
follows, therefore, that space, time and scenery ("setting") are
mutually correspondent: one is a reflection of, and dependent on,
the other. Time itself is "cyclic"; it is, like space and scenery,
an infinite totality, "undented" and vast. The mutual correspondence
and affinity of time, space and scenery

contains within it manifestations of the ancestral, the living

and the unborn. All are vitally within the intimations and 77
affectiveness of life, beyond mere abstract conceptualisation.

Therefore, perhaps, one of the many approaches to understand-
ing Soyinka's concept of time, space and scenery, is to consider
the three ideas as a mutual correspondence. This approach, which
is adopted in this chapter, makes it possible to examine more
closely the inter-correspondence between time, space and scenery in
Soyinka's drama. The preference of this approach to others is also
based in part on the traditional African perception of the mutuality

and inseparability of time, space and scenery.

 

76Myth, Literature and the African World, pp. 2-3.

77Ibid., p. 144.

45

Background to Soyinka's Concept of
Time, Space and Scenery

 

 

In the traditional African imagination, there is a symbiotic
relationship or affinity between time, space and scenery or the
setting for the event. The perception derives from a presence-
environment symbiosis. Presence here refers to the "communal pres-
ence," which we have explained in Chapter I. The environment refers
to the "arena," also explained in Chapter I. The composition of the
communal presence stretches from the past (the dead) through the
present (the living) to the future (the unborn). It also includes
the gods, demons, and the timeless inhabitants of the spirit world,
the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms, as we have seen in A Dance

of the Forests. Each of these presences symbolically carries his

 

world with him as he ventures an appearance in and interaction with
another world. The gods, for example, carry with them to the human
community the mystique of their own world. The collective presence
of the various mystiques defines and charges the environment. It is
within this "charged space," as Soyinka states, that “the chthonic
inhabitants are challenged."

The traditional concept of time, space and scenery, presumes
that all nature and phenomena are in a state of perpetual continuity.
For example, "Continuity for the Yoruba operates both through the
cyclic concept of time and the animist interfusion of all matter

and consciousness."78 Soyinka's application of his concept to

 

781bid., p. 145.

46

The Road portrays a graphic and symbolic interpretation of the tra-

ditional concept of time, space and scenery.

Application of Concept to The Road

 

The Plot
The Road, Soyinka's most successful play by all critical

acclaim,79

opens on a triple setting--a roadside shack where most
of the action takes place and past events are recreated in mime and
music, a church adjoining the shack, and a cemetery which lies between

the church and the shack.80

In the play, Soyinka is very concerned
with the metaphysical essence of death,which takes him into a deeper
exploration of the abyss of transition, the "numinous world."

Having been excommunicated from the church, Professor sets up
a consultancy fbr forgery, and a "road-side shack" to trade in motor

spare parts salvaged from road accidents. The shack serves as a

 

79Margaret Laurence acclaims The Road as a work "of a very
high order" and "Soyinka's most mature work so far": LongDrums and
Cannons, pp. 63, 64. Gerald Moore writes, it is "the finest of
Soyinka's published plays": Wole Soyinka, p. 56. Dan Izevbaye sees
it as "one of Soyinka's most exciting plays": "Lan uage and Meaning
in Soyinka's The Road," African Literature Today (8?: 52. To Eldred
Jones, The Road is not onlyfian extraordinary achievement" but is
"without a doubt a most exciting piece of theatre": The Writin of
Wole Soyinka (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973), p. 7.
Joseph Okpaku observes that "Soyinka himself considers this play to
be more precious to him and once remarked that there were only two
or three people so far whom he could permit to direct it": "From
Swamp Dwellers to Madmen and Specialists: The Drama of Wole Soyinka"
(Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1978), p. 156.

80Oyin Ogunba believes that The Road has a "dual setting"--
the shack and the church. See The Movement of Transiton: The Study
of the Plays of Wole Soyinka (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1975),
p. 148.

 

47

rallying point and provides shelter and resting place for all the
"rejects of the road"--drivers, conductors, and touts--with Professor
as their spiritual and temporal leader: he provides them protection
and guarantees their daily bread through forgery. The shack also
serves both as an altar or shrine fOr the daily "evening communion;"
as a cell or prison for a god; and as Professor's study fbr his
"part psychic, part intellectual grope . . . towards the essence of
death."81 Between the shack and the church overlooking it lies the
cemetery used for the "mass burial" of the daily victims of the road.
After a gruesome motor accident, in which he knocked down a
god masquerading as Murano, Kotonu retires from driving and vows
never to return to the road again. He remains unyielding to his
mate's (Samson's) passionate pleas for his return to the road. Mean-
while, Professor has secretly salvaged Murano from the truck he was
hidden in. He has repaired and revived Murano back to life, and
retained him as his communion server and as evidence to attest to the
veracity of the "Word." The Word is itself the object of Professor's
investigation. The Word is the key to the meaning and essence of
life and death. Murano is "the one person in this world in whom the
Word reposes."82 But Murano is "mute," dumb! Very little can be
gleaned from him regarding the meaning or essence of the Word.

Professor directs the rest of his effbrts towards removing traffic

 

81Soyinka's note, "For the Producer" prefaced to The Road in
Collected Plays 1, p. 149. All page references to The Road are taken
from Collected Plays 1.

821bid., p. 159.

 

48

signs from the road as a step towards hastening more accidents and
deaths. He then ravages accident scenes for clues to the Word. He
searches among rubble, useless pieces of paper, and the cemetery
for clues to unlock the chest of "the elusive Word." His quest is
fraught with dangers; and after an endless search, he reaches an
important and very revealing conclusion about the Word:

There are dangers in the Quest I know, but the Word may
be found companion not to life, but death.83

During the course of the play, Professor invokes the Word
as a curse on the lay-abouts--Kotonu, Samson, Salubi, and the touts.
During the inter-change between him and Salubi, who approaches
Professor to have a forged driving license made for him, Professor
invokes the "pestilence" of the Word on Salubi: "May the elusive
Word crack your bones in a hundred splinters!"84 The power of the
Word is again invoked during the evening communion. And the result?:
The emergence of a god masquerading as Murano and the subsequent
death of Professor by Say Tokyo Kid, thus bringing the plan to an
end.

The scene of action is the "AKSIDENT STORE" and its environs--
the church and cemetery--and the central image, 'the road," which
dominates the play. The central confrontation in the play is psychic
and metaphysical: it is a confrontation between the living and the

dead on the one hand, and between the living and a god on the other.

 

83Ibid., p. 159.
84Ibid., p. 184.

49

It is a confrontation also between the living and their environment,
which, in this case, assumes the propensities of a god, and between
the living and death itself.

In the opening scene of the play, Samson "cannot understand"

why Professor goes daily "to sleep in the churchyard with all that

 

dead-body" (my emphasis).85 Professor, on the other hand, is startled
to learn that Samson buries (saves) his money in a tin in the ceme-
tery, thus appointing the dead as his "bank managers." Kotonu is
gripped by the fear of death, first of his father and, secondly, of
the high probability that if he takes to the road again he could be
the next victim of death. Sergeant Burma is dead. In the re-creation
of one of Sergeant Burma's moments, Samson wears the dead Sergeant's
uniform, and realizes, too late, the implications of his act. As
Soyinka's stage directions show,

(. . . Samson's face begins to show horror and he gasps
as he realizes what he has been doing.)

SAMSON (tearingioff the clothes.): God forgive me! Oh God,
forgive me. Just see, I have been fooling around pre-
tending to be a dead man. Oh God I was only playing I
hope you realize. I was only playing.8
Professor admonishes the lay-abouts to be "careful" because the dead
(and death itself) "weave a strong spell over human eyes."87 Samson's

admonition to Kotonu during the days both of them frequented the road

 

851bid., 154.
861bid., 218.
87Ibid., 207.

50

was that Kotonu should "kill” a dog as sacrifice to the road in order
to avert the anger of the god who lies "guardian" to the road:

Serve Ogun his tit-bit so the road won't look at us one day
and say Ho ho you two boys you look juicy to me. . . . The
one who won't give Ogun willingly will yield heavier meat
by Ogun's designing. 3

The fear of this confrontation is so real that all the lay-abouts

adopt both as a prayer and as a motto the creed "May we never walk

when the road waits, famished."89

The characters in the play, including Professor, are con-

fronted with transcendental forces with which they interact and

I

commune daily. Right inside the "AKSIDENT STORE" is the Egungun90

costume, Ogun's outfit, Murano) the Egungun that Kotonu knocked

/

4_..'r

down, is more than merely human: while masquerading he was knocked
down by Kotonu's lorry and has since then not regained his full
mortal consciousness. As Professor explains, Murano is "Silent but

deep" because he has "slept beyond the portals of the secrets . . .

91

[and] pierced the guard of eternity and unearthed the Word." Conse-

quently, "Murano has one leg longer than the other,"92 withflthq lgfghw

{2229512199. '.'.on_1_:he slumberins--chrysalis.9f___tbs-?!9r9_e."93 In another

_.—..—

 

881bid.. pp. 198-199.

891bid., p. 199.
90A masquerade.
9'The Road, p. 186.
gzlbid.

93Ibid., p. 187.

51

reference to Murano, Professor calls him a "child."94 Thus, Soyinka
presents Murano as an embodiment of the world of living, the dead,
the gods and the unborn (symbolized in the "child" image). He is
part of the community, and the wine served at the evening communion
is the "blessings" of his "daily pilgrimage" to the fOrest. He is
the "god-apparent" trapped or made "captive" by Professor. Murano is
the dramatic embodiment of death or the transitional world, because
it is during his resurrection as ggg_and death that Professor meets
his own death. The road itself, upon which much has happened to focus
our attention on it, is "an endless stretch" which rises whenever it
pleases to strike the unwary traveler.

Murano is an agent of the god, Ogun. He serves the communi-
cants (Professor and lay-abouts) the "blessings" of his "daily pil-
grimage"--wine (Ogun is himself the Captain of Wine, for it was during
his bacchanal inebriation that he slew both his own men and foes).

As Egungun, Murano is both god and the ancestor (Egungun being the
cult of the dead and of Ogun). The eternal presence of the Egungun
mask on stage, the evening communion of wine, and the inevitable
resurrection of the god and ancestor in Murano, transform the stage
into a sacred, religious and metaphysical arena. In other words,
Soyinka transforms the stage into a cosmic totality, or "cosmic
envelope," where the living, the dead and gods interact and conmune.
Professor's death during this communion phase is the final link and
completion of the cosmic totality and of another phase of the man-

cosmos cyclic confrontation.

 

94Ibid., p. 223.

52

Applying the Concept to the Play

In an interview with the South African playwright, Lewis
Nkosi, Hole Soyinka declared that his theatre is "very much conscious
of all the potentialities of existing theatrical idioms in Nigeria."95
These "idioms" could be categorized as visual, auditory and abstract,
and they include the interplay of colours, forms, shapes, design,
music, song, mime and dance. They also include the symbolic and
metaphysical propensities of these idioms, the arena and the surround-
ing nature. Soyinka's statement is a suggestion of his fusion of

these "idioms" to define time, space and scenery, as The Road makes

evident.

Scenery

In The Road, a "ragged fence" separates the church and the
cemetery from the shack. The "stained-glass window" of the church,
above which "a cross-surmounted steeple tapers out of sight," remains
"closed“ for most part of the play. And rising above the church's
roof in Baroquean reminiscence is the spire and "tower clock." The
back of a wheelless, lop-sided "bolekaja" (mammy-waggon) thrusts
downstage from a corner of the shack and bears the inscription
"AKSIDENT STORE--ALL PART AVAILEBUL." Inside the store are to be
found the debris of fatal motor accidents which occur daily on the

road. Perhaps the most important and most significant single object

 

95Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden, eds., African Writers
Talking (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1972), p. 173.

53

in the store is the Egungun mask, salvaged from the road after a
"god" masquerading as Murano was knocked down by Kotonu's "bolekaja."
Another object of corresponding importance to the mask, also salvaged
from the road and brought into the store, is dead Sergeant Burma's
army uniform.

Outside, the immediate surroundings of the store is strewn
with wrecked and assorted motor parts varying from hubs, worn tires
to bumpers, etc. Benches, empty beer-cases, a table and chair, cups,
etc., are thrown about the place in sharply "contrasting tidiness."
0n and beneath these props and on the bare grounds the "motor-park
lay-abouts" sprawl, sleep, relax, and "wait." In an apparently incon-
spicuous corner, there is a seemingly insignificant item of scenery--
a "spider's web"--which engages our attention throughout the play.

These scenic details, together with "the road" as the central
dominating image in the play and I'the Word" as the principal “Quest,"
are imbued with more than physical properties and qualities. They
are impregnated with more than surface, literal meanings. They are
an evocation of fundamental cosmogonic acceptances, especially for
the African reality, by a fusion of the metaphysical and spiritual
properties of the very instrument of craft and the manifested rela-
tionship between flesh, word and the cosmogonic world.

Soyinka uses his scenery to suggest the inner world of
the characters and of the play, the "chaotic growth" of the abyss,
and the limitless magnitude of time and space.

The Road is a collection of phobic characters; characters

whose individual and collective psyche has been irredeemably cracked

54

by their daily experiences and contact with the road and by their
confrontation with life. Everywhere they have turned to confront
life, whether in the past or present, to find a meaningful existence
for themselves, they have come face to face with the necrophilic
horrors of life. The result is their resort to a lackadaisical
existence, scavenging whatever they can from the necrophilia which
life has held out to them fOr so long. They grope towards, and at
the same time drift away from, one another. With the possible excep-
tions of Professor, Murano, Particulars Joe and Chief-in-Town, they
are all veterans of the Second World War as some of their pseudonyms
(Sergeant Burma, Indian Charlie) allude. Back from the war, they
have all taken to the road as drivers, conductors, or simply thugs
who could be hired by politicians. But their post-war occupation is
by close comparison similar to their occupation as soldiers: as
soldiers and as drivers they have traded in death and caused the
death of many innocent people. To a large extent, therefore, their
souls are burdened with blood-guilt which remains a constant haunting
reminder in their every thought and daily confrontation with life.

In the opening scene, Samson quickly spots "blood-stain" on Salubi's

uniform.96

Later in the play, Samson is struck with horror as he
discovers himself wearing dead Sergeant Burma's uniform.97 And
Kotonu who, after knocking down Murano, had gone "inside the mask"

becomes possessed and "demented":

 

96The Road, p. 152.
87Ibid., p. 218.

55

(There is a sudden violent movement against the canvas and
Samson, scared, rushes there. Almost at the same time, the
masguerade [Kotonu] comes through in violent throes, a

figure in torment. There is a loud yell from the dancers and
the whipping and chanting becomes more Vio1ent, aidinggthe
(god's seeming possession.)

KOTONU (Tearingat the clothes,demented.): It's all wet
inside, I've got his blood all over me. . . . It's
getting dark. Samson I can't see. His blood has got
in my eyes. I can't see Samson. . . . (His struggles
become truely frantic, full of violent contortions.
Gradually hegrows weaker and weaker, collapsing 98
slowly on the ground until he is completely inert.)

 

In the very opening of the play, the first event is an early
morning accident from which Professor has come to take Kotonu to
witness and then salvage parts:

Come then, I have a new wonder to show you . . . a madness
where a motor-car throws itself against a tree--Gbram! And
showers of crystal flying on broken souls.99
And throughout the play, accident scenes are recounted again and
again as they had happened: Kotonu's father, for instance, died
from a motor accident, and Kotonu recounts that
a lorry . . . beat his spine against a load of stockfish.
. . . that day the truck was piled high with it. . . . Buried
in stockfish. It was all I remembered for a long time, the
smell of stockfish. Torn bodies on the road all smell of
stockfish.100
The memory of their dead colleagues, especially of Sergeant Burma--
barely a week-old victim of the road--is an intimately persistent
experience which constantly reminds the characters of the horrors

and meaninglessness of life:

 

981bid., p. 209.
99

100

Ibid., pp. 158-159.
Ibid., p. 190.

56

KOTONU: Where is Zorro who never returned from the North
without a basket of guinea-fowl eggs? Where is Akanni
the Lizard? I have not seen any other tout who would
stand on the lorry's roof and play the Samba at sixty
miles an hour. Where is Sigidi Ope? Where is Sapele
Joe who took on six policemen at the crossing and
knocked them all into the river?

SAMSON: Overshot the pontoon, went down with his lorry.

KOTONU: And Saidu--Say? Indian Charlie who taught us
driving? . . . Where is Humphrey Bogart? Cimarron
Kid? Have you known any other driver take an oil-
tanker from Port Harcourt to Kaduna non-stop since
Muftau died? Where is Sergeant Burma who treated
his tanker like a child's toy?

SAMSON: Just the same . . .

KOTONU: Sergeant Burma was never moved by these accidents.
He told me himself how once he was stripping down a
crash and found that the driver was an old comrade from
the front. He took him to the mortuary but first he
stopped to remove all the tyres.

SAMSON: He wasn't human.

KOTONU: But he was. He was. A man must protect himself
against the indifference of comrades who desert him.
Not to mention the hundred travellers whom you never
really sea until their faces are wiped clean by
silence:I 1

In view of these, therefore, the disconcerted appearance of

the scenery, first and foremost, recreates in powerfully suggestive

images the common sight of the average Nigerian road-user. The

scenery also goes beyond that to suggest a "battlefield": to the

driver-veterans, life on the road was an ever endless war of survival

--the survival of the fittest--and so they approached the road:

"Like a battlefield they always say. Like a battlefield."102 The

 

1(”Ibid., p. 167.
1021bid., p. 219.

57

scenery also goes a long way to suggest the phobia that is gnawing
the characters. First, they are "lay-abouts" and the play opens with
all of them sprawling and fast asleep in different parts of the
stage, with Murano "coiled under Professor's table." None of them is
whole again: they are the "broken souls" and "rejects of the road."
Murano has one leg together with an abnormal toe longer than the
other. Professor is on the precipice between insanity and sanity
and makes his "bed among the dead" so that

when the road raises a victory cry to break my sleep I hurry

to a disgruntled swarm of souls full of spite for their

rejected bodies. It is a market of stale meat, noisy with

flies and quarrelsome with old women. The place I speak of

is not far from here, if you wish to come. . . . you shall

be shown this truth of my endeavours.103
Neither Samson nor any other character in the play understands why
Professor goes "to sleep in the churchyard with all that dead-

"104 and moves like Sergeant Burma "round those corpses as if

105

body,
they didn't exist." Kotonu, since knocking down a god, is a com-
pletely broken man and will never return to the road again. Samson
whose existence depends entirely on Kotonu is paralyzed by Kotonu's
refusal to take to the road again. Salubi is jobless and merely

drifts and day-dreams of becoming a millionaire with Samson. Soyinka's
scenery therefore does more than merely suggest locale by illum-

inating the inner world of the characters. Enthusiasm and aspirations

are dead and gone in the characters. Like Estragon and Vladimir in

 

1031616., p. 159.

1041616., p. 154.

1051bid., p. 167.

58

Beckett's Waitingfbr Godot, the characters in The Road merely wait,

 

sleep, and wait. What Soyinka has done in this play is very much

106

similar to T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative": he has used

physical objects to reach the inner world and psyche of the characters.

Scenery and Space

Soyinka uses his scenery to describe and define the "collec-
tive inner world" of The Road. This is the world of the collective
memory of the community--the community of the driver-veterans, of
Professor and of Murano. It is the world of the living, the dead,
the unborn and the gods; it is the ”undented vastness“ of the transi-
tional abyss. Expressed differently, Soyinka uses scenery to describe
and define space.

The spider's web, which Samson continually pokes and throws
flies in, is a symbol closely associated with the road: "The road
and the spider lie gloating, then the fly buzzes along like a happy
fool."107 The limitless stretCh of the road is a symbolic represen-
tation of the "undented vastness" of the transitional abyss. The
road itself belongs to the god, Ogun, who demands periodic sacrifices

from users of the road. By the close comparison between the spider's

 

106See T. S. Eliot's essay, "Hamlet and His Problems" in
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essa s (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
Inc., 1960 ed.), pp. IZI-lg6: "The only way of expressing emotion
in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in
other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the

external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked," pp. 124-125.

1071616., p. 178.

59

web and the road, Wole Soyinka uses the spider's web to comment on
and suggest that the road, or the “undented vastness" of the transi-
abyss, is a trap--an intertwining design of the god, Ogun, to catch
the unwary traveller who will not sacrifice willingly to the god.
According to Soyinka, Ogun's road is a "mobius' orbit" or "Mobius

108--which

Strip," an infinite interlocking set of rings or circles
are semblative of the spider's web-~and Samson, fully aware of the
nature of Ogun's road, advises Kotonu to

Serve Ogun his tit-bit so the road won't look at us one day

and say Ho ho you two boys you look juicy to me. . . . the

3360333'2036§13;¥:9?133 willingly will yield heavier meat
Thus, the spider itself symbolizes the god, and the flies which
Samson throws into its web symbolize the multitude of human beings
who have yielded "heavier meat" to the road.

The cemetery and the church, like the road, are centres of
great focus. Their interplay with the shack and their overall sig-
nificance to the play cannot be under-estimated. Both the cemetery
and the church represent the deep unknown: the cemetery represents
the world of the ancestors. Since the church is the Christian
fundamental world of hope, salvation and judgment of, and for, a yet
unknown future, it is a reasonable assumption to say that the church
represents in this play the world of the unborn. Soyinka, however,

makes no mistakes about the future: just as the past and the present

are blasted phenomena, so too will the future be (or has been) blasted.

 

108Idanre in Idanre and Other Poems, p. 83, 85, 87.

1091m Road, pp. 198-199.

60

We learn from the play (during the confrontation between Professor

and the bishop which led to Professor's excommunication from the
church) that "just when the bishop was shaking the pulpit and blasting
humanity to hell," the walls of the church, like the walls of Jericho,

110 Thus

were collapsing, and have since then not been re-built.
what we see as part of the scenery is a church with broken and
collapsed walls. And Soyinka means to suggest by this detail that
the future or the world of the unborn is as blasted a phenomenon as
the past and the present--a suggestion which derives from Soyinka's
"historic vision" as explained in Chapter I. Also, the broken walls
of the church (which suggests incompleteness or an unfilled space),
together with the towering spire and tower clock of the church, are
a symbolic representation or suggestion of the vastness of the space
within which the drama is set.

The incongruous and the disconcerted juxtaposition of the
scenery and its sharply contrasting details--the church, the shack
and the cemetery, each overlooking the other, and the "contrasting
tidiness" of the space immediately surrounding the shack--are in
structural and thematic harmony with the levels of experiences in
The Road. Oyin Ogunba observes that Soyinka's scenery in The Road

can be made into a convincing representation of the polar-
ities of a transitional era, for adjoining each other are
a physically magnificient church and a slum shack, the two
juxtaposed with more than just physical intent. The incon-
gruity of the juxtaposed sets may at first provoke laughter

but the playwright is in earnest. As the meaning of the
play unfolds itself, we come to see more clearly how setting

 

1101616., p. 164.

61

harmonizes with idea, for between the church and the shack
are comprehended many of the levels of living which Ihg
Road endeavours to present.111

This visceral graphic probing of the "collective inner world" is not
a passion towards fantasy, but a genuine effort towards the
re-creation of the reality of the African world. And, according to

Izevbaye in his penetrating study of The Road,

The opening "scene" dispenses with words altogether, but it
displays some of the terms on which the play asks to be under-
stood. It communicates the mood wholly through setting and
mime. The road, the corner of a church, and an old mammy
waggon now used as the "Aksident Store" are not merely the
physical setting but communicate, through their everyday
associations, the religious and social dimensions of the
play. Their constant presence on stage sustains this func-
tion: the road links the spiritual and the satirical aspects
of the play by being the agent of death as well as the path
along which the dead passengers are carried to their church
funeral. However much we are consciously unwilling or unable
to link the opening scene with death, the sprawling, motion-
less figures lying close by the Aksident store must appeal to
our subconscious by their likeness to death before the comedy
takes over. After this a mime rapidly suggests some motifs
of the play: Murano the tapster disappearing into the dawn,
Samson the idler prying uncertainly after him, then poking a
spider's web in frustration after failjgg in a lonely, des-
perate attempt to wake his companions.

The visceral and graphic probing, therefore, of the "collec-
tive inner world"--the "undented vastness" of space--is a genuine
effort towards the re-creation of the reality of the African world.
It is neither a passion for, nor a movement towards, the creation
and portaryal of fantasy, for, according to Wole Soyinka,

To describe a collective inner world as fantasy is not intel-
ligible, for the nature of an inner world in a cohesive

 

 

1110yin Ogunba, The Movement of Transition, p. 148-

1120. S. Izevbaye, "Langua e and Meaning in Soyinka's Ihg
Road," African Literature Today (81: 53.

62

society is the externalisation of a rational world-view, one
which is elicited from the reality of social and natural expe-
rience and from the integrated reality of racial myths into

a living morality. . . . What up call the mythic inner world
is both the psychic sub-structure and temporal subsidence,
the cumulative history and empirical observations of the com-
munity. It is nonetheless primal in that time, in its cyclic
reality, is fundamental to it. The inner world is not static,
being constantly enriched by the moral and historic expe-
rience of man.1 3

Soyinka's sense of time is very intimately linked with the
comprehensive world-view that gave it birth: the rationalist African
universe which conceives of time as a "prgamatic man-centered con-

t9.114

cep and assumes that

The spirit world is very close to that of the physical human

life, and people are very much aware of it, articulating it

in their oral literature, in rituals, in ceremonies and as

part of the mystique of the universe without which, perhaps,

human life itself would be dull and boring.115
Or as Macebuh describes it, "the universe is assumed to be organically
integrated, its components interrelated by virtue of a cosmogonic
intention that preceded human existence."n6 According to Gerald
Moore, time is conceived by the African as “a projection from living

experience, rather than as an abstract sequence of fixed units

 

113Myth, Literature and the African World, pp. 34 and 35.

H4Gerald Moore, "Time and Experience in African Poetry,"
Transition 6 (26): 18.

115Rev. John Mbiti, "African Cosmology," in FESTAC '77
(London & Nigeria: African Journal Limited & The International
Festival Committee, 1977), p. 49.

116Stanley Macebuh, "African Aesthetics in Traditional
African Art," OKIKE (5): l4.

 

63

existing in its own right and imposing its pattern upon human activi-

ties."1'l7

Commenting on the same subject of time, and including
space, Rev. Mbiti adds:

In terms of geography or distance, the universe has no rim,

no boundary, no ending. In terms of time, Africans do not

conceive of an end of time and hence an end of the world.

African concepts of time lays great emphasis on the past and

the present, with little linear future dimensions of time.

The future which they conceive, is a future within the context

of the rhythm of individual life (birth, growth, marriage,

procreation, death and joining the departed . . .), and the

rhythm of nature (like day and night . . . and other rhythmic

changes).1

Soyinka brings the metaphysical and human planes to inter-

sect on his stage. Events are brought to the same point of inter-
section and, as he says, "life, present life, contains within it
manifestations of the ancestral, the living and the unborn. All are
vitally within the intimations and affectiveness of life, beyond mere

abstract conceptualisation.".n9

The juxtaposition, therefore, of
the various planes of existence is Soyinka's technique to show that
time is endless--has neither a beginning nor an end. Thus it is not
a surprise that Professor's watch still tells the time, even though
it has stopped. Because of the interrelationship between time, space
and scenery, the spider's web becomes also a visual and symbolic

representation of time as a cyclic, recurrent phenomenon.

 

117Gerald Moore, "Time and Experience in African Poetry,"
p. 18.

118Rev. John Mbiti, "African Cosmology," pp. 41 and 44.

119Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 144.

64

Soyinka also conceives of time as a summons, an agency both

of life and death. The dead are sunmoned to their "mass burial"
by the chiming of the tower clock; Salubi wakes from his sleep as the
clock chimes at six in the morning; and the tower clock summons all
the characters, including Murano, to their daily "communion" of wine
with Professor and the cosmic fOrces of the environment. In the
Opening scene, Murano, who is part man, part god, and belonging to
more than one world, wakes upon the chimes of the tower clock,
crosses the fence and disappears into the unknown. Samson goes to
the fence and tries to follow Murano, but gives it up to poke at the
spider's web and later to confide in his mate Kotonu:

I have often thought of following that Murano you know. He

sets out about five o'clock in the morning, goes in that direc-

tion. And he doesn't come back until five in the afternoon.

That's a long time to tag a little wine. Have you ever con-

s1dered where he goes?12
The Magnetism of Space and Scenery

The "affective" nature of Syoinka's theatre, that is the total

effect of the theatre on both audience and perfbrmer, depends largely
on the magnetism of space and scenery. Beside the total architectonic
of scenery, Soyinka uses the idioms of traditional Nigerian theatre
to effect a magnetism of space. These idioms include the interplay

of colours, forms, design, music, song and dance (a more detailed

examination of the musical idiom is the focus of Chapter III.

 

‘Zoihe Road, p. 187.

65

According to Wole Soyinka,

[Music is the] means to our inner world of transition . . .

[it is] the intensive language of transition and its communi-

cant means, the catalyst and solvent of its regenerative

hoard.121
He attributes its "source" to the "archetypal essences” of the transi-
tional abyss. Thus, Soyinka uses music to reach the "undented vast-
ness" of the abyss, and to define the miniscule self of the protagon-
ist within that cosmic "vastness" of the abyss, defined here as
space. Two moments in The Road will sufficiently illustrate the
points we have raised.

The human voices in the play are constantly reaching out to
the vast space of the abyss of transition. Music then becomes the
natural complement to the human voices which constantly strain into
the world of the dead. Death itself stalks every move of the char-
acters and, as a result, an atmosphere of fear looms large in the
play. Consider, fbr example, the scene between Samson and Salubi
in which both are discussing Professor's past life in the Church,
and the confrontation between Professor and the Bishop which led to
the collapse of the church walls. Having talked about it for a long
time Salubi, apparently bored by Samson's "cinema show" and appre-
hensive that he has wasted the whole morning ("De whole morning
done vanish fbr your cinema show"), decides to leave Samson alone
and go to "find work" for himself. Samson, who has found Salubi a
vulnerable accomplice and victim of idling antics, is disappointed that

Salubi has left him, preferring a job to good company. He "ambles

 

12IMyth, Literature and the African World, p. 36.

66

restlessly round the room" cursing, complaining and dejected, blam-
ing his fate on his mate Kotonu:

If he [Salubi] gets a job before Kotonu puts us back on the
road the man will become simply intolerable. All the fault

of that Kotonu, What use am I, a tout without his driver.

I should have known it would come sooner or later. He's never
acted like a normal person. When other drivers go out of the
way to kill a dog, Kotonu nearly somersaults the lorry trying
to avoid a flea-racked mongrel. Why, I ask him, why? Don't
you know a dog is Ogun's meat? Take warning Kotonu. Before
it's too late take warning and kill us a dog.122

As Samson's grumbling gets in stride, Kotonu returns from the "har-
vest" of dawn's "showers of crystal" (to which Professor had taken
him) with handfuls of salvage, and slips into the mammy-waggon through
a hidden entrance. Almost simultaneously one of the lay-abouts plucks
a tune from his guitar and begins to sing. Other lay-abouts hanging
by the fence join in idly:

Ona orun jim o eeeee

Ona orun jin dereba rora

E e dereba rora

E e dereba rora

Ona orun jin o eeeee

Eleda mi ma ma buru

Esin baba Bandele je l'odan
Won 0 gbefun o

Eleda mi ma ma buru

Esin baba Bandels je l'odan
Won 0 gbefun o. 3

(It's a long long road to heaven
It's a long long road to heaven, Driver
Go easy a-ah go easy driver
It's a long long road to heaven
My Creator, be not harsh on me
Bandele's horse galloped home a winner
But the race eluded him.)
Soyinka's translation, p. 230.

 

122The Road, p. 165.

1231616.

67

The timing of the song is important and significant. Follow-
ing Samson's speech and Kotonu's return from an accident scene very
closely, the song emphasizes the immensity of space and cautions

about death. It is also a dirge fOr the dead in absentia; the dead

 

whose belongings Kotonu has just brought into the mammy-wagon which,
apart from being a store, is also a grave for the dead (belongings
salvaged from the dead are rested in the mammy-waggon). The song is
a contrast as well as a complement to Samson's speech, and is a revela-
tion of the fear of death. For example, Samson turns angrily on the
lay-abouts, especially on the lead singer, and yells at them to stop
the song or get out with it:

Get out get out. Is that the kind of song to be singing at

this time of the morning? Why don't you go and look for

work?124
An atmosphere of fear looms large in the play: all of them are
"rejects" both of war and the road. They are afraid of death and
the dead. This fear becomes real and is made manifest later in the
play when Samson, wearing dead Sergeant Burma's unifbrm and pretending
to be the dead Sergeant, comes face to face with the "horror" both
of death and the dead:

(Samson's face begins to show horror and he ggsps as he
realizes what he asTbeen doing.)

SAMSON (tearingfioff the clothes.): God forgive me! Oh God,
forgive me. Just see, I have been fboling around pretend-
ing to be a dead man. Oh God I was only playing I hope
you realize. I was only playing. 25

 

124Ibid., p. 166.
1251616., p. 218.

68

The fear and reality of death reach a climacteric crescendo in the
final scene when Murano becomes god and death in one freezing moment
of time and space--a moment achieved almost exclusively by the
rhythmic cadencial cues of drums, song and movement.

Our second example relates to the use of the same musical
idiom for the spatial definition of man's miniscule self within the
macrocosmic immensity of the abyss. Names are an important theatri-
cal device for defining character in terms of space. This is because
names in Africa, especially in Nigeria, have profound meanings and
significance, and they are used to measure man in terms of space.
Names have ontological significance in the thinking of traditional
Africa. And when chanted to the accompaniment of drums and other
musical accompaniments, they become an effective means to understand-
ing the relationship between character and space. Praise names in
particular are means of achieving that effect. Robert Armstrong
emphasizes the importance of praise names and their use for such
portrayals both in real life and drama in Africa:

Praise names with their litany of attributes, are clearly
syndetic (additive) means to achieving the constitution

of character. They represent an effective way, as does the
careful delineation of psychological and historical "causes,"
to bring a dramatic or a fictive character into existence.
The number of attributions accorded a man tends to be an
index of his power and importance.126

Therefbre, Soyinka's use of praise names in his drama comes within the

tradition described by Armstrong. Professor's praise song, for

 

126Robert Plant Armstrong, "Tragedy--Greek and Yoruba: A
Cross-Cultural Perspective," Research in African Literature 17 (1):
34-35. .

69

instance, crystallizes the point and sets the standards or criteria
for understanding the relationship between character and space:

Professor, our being like demon

Professor, our being like demon

The elder above us

The elder below

The hand that thinks to smash me, let it pause awhile

I have one behind me, coiled snake on Mysteries

He mounts in season, coiled snake on Mysteries

The foe cannot pound the head of a Father's son like yam
Who holds discourse with spirits, who dines with the Ruler of Forests

He is the elder above us 127
He 1s our elder below. . . .
(Soyinka's translation, pp. 231-232.
The musical idiom creates visual forms and shpaes which
incorporate colours and design. For example, the Egungun display
of the drivers, and that of Murano in the final scene. It involves
patterned ritualistic movements as well. It is the metaphysical and
religious associations of the visual fbrms and shapes (such as the
outfit of the Egungun masquerade and the mask itself), and of the
music itself, which change both space and scenery and make them
magnetic. Femi Osofisan's account of one of Soyinka's productions
is a further illustration of Soyinka's magentism of space and the
spatial conception in ritual drama.
Osofisan recounts that Soyinka's Paris production in 1972 of
excerpts from his already translated play, La danse de la f6rét, was
an exercise in and illustration of the magnetism of space and the

spatial conception in ritual drama. The production was designed to

articulate Soyinka's conception that the theatre is

 

1271he Road, p. 220.

70

a medium in the communicative sense and, like any other
medium, it is one that is best defined through the process

of interruption. In theatrical terms, this interruption is
effected principally by the human apparatus. Sound, light,
motion, even smell, can all be used just as vividly to define
space, and ritual theatre uses all these instruments of
definition to control and render concrete, to parallel . . .
the experiences or institutions of man in that far more dis-
turbing environment which he defines variously as void,
emptiness or infinity.123

In Osofisan's postmortem of the Paris production of excerpts from

A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka opened the show in darkness as a

 

demonstration of the dark void from which the dead resurrect to join
the living:

Soon, the stage is plunged in darkness. Then the Crier
somes fOrward beating on an agogo, and chants the invoca-
tion. In response, from three directions within the
audience, emerge the protagonists, led by the Chorus in
procession, all bearing lighted atu a (mud lamps). When
they are installed, in separate c1rc es delineated by
coloured lights, the Crier steps into each circle and, as
Master of Ceremony, makes up the faces of the protagonists
--who are immediately "entombed" by new chorus formations.

Now the play properly begins . . . dead ancestors rein-
carnating break through their "graves" to meet the living
at the Gathering of the Tribes . . .

Brief as it was, the extract was . . . an uninterrupted
link of good moments: the ancestors' spectacular reincarna-
tion and the dance of rejection; the "duel" between the
Half-Child and Death, backed by the incantative chants of
the Chorus; the Dead Woman's lamentation; plus the play of
coloured lights [and] physical stylizations . . .

As a demonstration of space exploitation, the play had
been well done, in both physical and temporal terms. The
creative use of scenic effects has always been Soyinka's major
talent as a director--and is the other little-acknowledged
area of his contribution at the development of African
theatre. . . . It is the means by which his theatre, so woven
with complex meanings and mythology normally vaults thg
huddle of comprehension [and] traps the audience . . . 29

 

128Myth, Literature and the African World, pp. 39-40.

129Femi Osofisan, "Soyinka in Paris," West Africa (21 July
1972), p. 935. Also "Theatre des Nations," in Cultural Events in
Africa (88): 2-3.

71

The climatic moment of the production was the physical reunion
of ancestors with the living and the unborn; a "ritual fusion of
three temporal planes of entity: historical, actual, and nascent,"130
which is, in Dathorne's words, “the intersection of time and event
and the simultaneity of the legendry, the inmediate past and the
present [and the future]."131 And "to a traditional Yoruba conscious-
ness, such reification was a palpable religious fact, celebrated in

quotidian rites."132

Conclusion

 

From the foregoing analysis in this chapter, it is a germane
conclusion to state that the metaphysical and religious associations
of the stage, scenery and space, are of far greater importance to
Soyinka's theatre than the physical details of construction of the
stage and scenery, and of the precise dimensions of the acting space.
It is the metaphysical and religious associations, and the reality
of these associations which the stage, scenery and space, call up
in the mind both of the perfbrmer and audience, which are of utmost
importance to Soyinka's theatre.

Soyinka leaves us in doubt about his passion towards trans-
lating the theatre into a cognitive symbolic language; a language
that gives fOrm and shape to his circumcentric world. He declared
in an interview with Lewis Nkosi:

130

131O. R. Dathorne, The Black Mind (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1974), p. 411.

 

Ibid.

 

132Femi Osofisan, ASoyinka in Paris," p. 935.

72

"my prime duty as a playwright is to provide excellent theatre . . .
I have only one commitment to the public, and that is to my
audience . . . to make sure they do not leave the theatre bored."133
Thus, he uses his scenery and the stage as a microscopic duplicate
of the macrocosmos. He charges the stage with visual, sensory and
auditory charms and, as he says, the

Encapsulation of these exclusivist spheres of existence

within which all action is unravelled appears to be the

first prerequisite of all profound drama, and tragedy most

especially. Its internal cogency makes it impervious to

the acc1dent of place and time.) 4
The depth therefore of his vision, the profundity of his meanings,
and the esoteric charm of his drama, are marked by a striking imagina-
tive power which aims at impressing an acceptance by effecting greg-
.tivg entertainment and communication at various levels. According to
Stanley Macebuh, "where you have a metaphysical framework in which
past, present and future are intrinsically interrelated and penetrate
one another, the cultural, and therefore, artistic consequences are

going to be far-reaching indeed."135

 

133Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden, eds., pp. 172-173.

134Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 50.

135Stanley Macebuh, p. 19.

CHAPTER III

THE MUSICAL HERITAGE AND ITS
THEATRICAL RESTORATION

Introduction
This chapter examines the musical heritage of Soyinka's
theatre. The chapter begins by stating, and then explaining,
Soyinka's idea or definition of the musical idiom as it relates to
theatre. This is followed by the cultural background to the idiom.

The chapter then examines Soyinka's application of the musical idiom

 

to Kongj's Harvest. The plot of the play precedes our examination
of Soyinka's application of the concept to the play. The chapter
concludes with an appraisal of Soyinka's theatrical application and

restoration of the idiom.

Statement of the Concept
During an interview in August 1962, which took place between
him and the South African playwright, Lewis Nkosi, Wole Soyinka
declared: "my prime duty as a playwright is to provide excellent
theatre . . . [that is] very much conscious of all the potentialities
of existing theatrical idioms in Nigeria."136 These "idioms" which
belong to festival, the great artistic institution and highest art

form in traditional Nigeria, include music, dance, song, ritual,

 

136Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden, eds., pp. 172-173.

73

74

mime, masquerade and mask. Soyinka also added that he was to use these
"idioms" to interpret "modern themes," even though the themes may be
"quite completely remote from the source of [their] particular idiom."137
Fourteen years later (1976), Soyinka was to more precisely

state his ideas about the "idioms" as they relate or apply to theatre.
Thus he defines music as the "means to our inner world of transi-
tion," and emphasizes that "Music is the intensive language of
transition and its communicant means, the catalyst and solvent of
its regenerative hoard."138 Soyinka attributes the "source" of music
to the source of mask, especially of the tragic mask. Music, he
says, belongs to the "archetypal essences" of the transitional abyss.
The "tragic mask," he writes,

functions from the same source as its music--from the arche-

typal essences whose language derives not from the plane of

physical reality or ancestral memory (the ancestor is no more

than agent or medium), but from the numinous territory of

transition into which the artist obtains fleeting glimpses

by ritual, sacrifice and a patient submission of rational

awareness to the moment when fin ers and voice relate the

symbolic language of the cosmos. 39

Explanation of the Concept
Soyinka's concept of music underscores four major points,

namely: that music is (l) a vehicle or "communicant medium" to the
"undented vastness" of transition; (2) the "intensive language" of

the cosmic abyss; (3) a "catalyst" and capable of reversing the

 

'37Ibid., p. 170.
138Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 36.
1391bid., p. 155.

75

process or progress of the Spatial definition of being in phenomena;
and (4) a "solvent" and has the capacity to absorb and dissolve or
merge and harmonize the antithetical "essences" of the "man-cosmos
organization." Besides these, however, music is also the medium of
entertainment in Soyinka's theatre.

Generally, music is a common human experience, and a com-
pulsive fbrce in human life. Musicologists such as J. H. Nketia,
Meki Nzewi and Chinyere Nwachukwu, as well as anthropologists such
as Merriam, maintain that music "has got a special language of its

140 "141

own," which "differs from that of ordinary discourse. Meki

Nzewi contends that music is “the expression of ultra speech sensa-

tions in sound and theatre."142

And, according to Nketia, music

is "an outlet for emotion," and "a vehicle of verbal expressions

and a special means of action or means of communication."143 These
views about music explain the characteristic use of music in Soyinka's

theatre. And we hasten to add that Soyinka's music combines

 

140Chinyere T. Nwachukwu, "Folk Music in Culture: A Calabar
Study" (B.A. Thesis, University of Nigeria, 1972), p. 44.

141A. M. Merriam, The Anthropolggy of Music (Illinois: North
Western University Press, 1964), p. 187.

142Meki Nzewi, "Folk Music in Southeastern Nigeria: An
Appraisal" (Unpublished workshop paper on the "Peoples of Southeastern
Nigegia,“ held at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, December 5-8,
1972 , p. 1.

‘43J. H. K. Nketia, "Unity and Diversity in African Music: A
Problem of Synthesis," First International Congress of Africanist
(1962), p. l.

76

instrumentation, verbalization and symbolic signification in a way

that only the well-infbrmed can best understand it.

Background to the Concept

 

Music in Soyinka's theatre is not merely "music" pg§_§g, but
a combination or integration of various related idioms. That is,
music to Soyinka is not merely the combination and interplay of words
(songs) and instrumentation, but a combination and integration of
ferms and idioms which include ritual, song, dance, mime, the mask
and masquerade. This heritage and its application to the modern
theatre derives from the great artistic institution (festival) of
traditional Africa.

To the African, the festival is an important and great occa-
sion for ritual displays in masks and archetypal movements to the
accompaniment of musical instrumentations and songs. Although the
various idioms--ritual, music, dance, song, mime, masquerade and
mask--may appear to be individual art forms, they are, neverthe-
less, not autonomous. That is, the African does not regard music
to be separate and distinct from mime or masquerade. The idioms,
therefbre, constitute a complex artistic totality which could
variously be designated (based on the knowledge of its intercon-
nectedness) as music, masquerade or ritual. This is because there
can be, for instance, neither music nor dance nor song without one
of the other idioms or both, nor can there be masquerade without
the proper union of ill the other idioms. Thus they have the
potentialities fer far-reaching theatrical effects and conse-

quences. According to J. H. Nketia, music is "a dominant

77

fbrm of artistic expression in African social [and religious]

life . . . [it is] an outlet fer emotion . . . a vehicle of verbal

[and non-verbal] expressions and a special means of action or means

of communications."144
Music, including song, drumming and dance, is in traditional

Africa a vital link between the living, the dead and the unborn, and

the gods. It is a language of its own; a vehicle of much symbolic

‘45 Lee Warren defines the African musical

146

content and meaning.
heritage as a "text in motion." The "drum literature," says
Ruth Finnegan, "is a relatively esoteric and specialized form of

expression, understood by many . . . but probably only fully mastered

"147 By the "evocation of music from the

and appreciated by the few.
abyss of transition," 6 link between the various planes of existence
is established. The music brings to the arena the "communal pres-
ence" that is so vital to the establishment of the locale. The
dance which accompanies the music is a “movement of transition" into

the deeper metaphysical world of conflicts.

 

”41616.

145See Inih A. Ebong, "Traditional Dance-Drama in Ibibioland"
(B.A. Thesis, University of Nigeria, 1976).

146Lee warren, The African Dance (New York: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1972), p. 1.

147Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Nairobi: Oxford
University Press, 1976), p. 498. See also pp. 481-499.

78

According to the Nigerian playwright, 01a Rotimi, "mime is

148 and dance

149

the essential index" of traditional Nigerian theatre,
"the medium through which mimetic impulses are carried." John
Pepper Clark, a Nigerian poet and playwright, adds that

music, dance, and poetry have been the constants of true

Nigerian drama from the earliest birth-marriage-and-death

cycle ceremonies and rituals to our own current exercises

and experiments . . . [In] this "closely unified combination

of the arts" . . . the ascendant elements are those of music,

dance, ritual and mime, that of speech being subdued to a

minimum. 5
Rotimi further states that

The dance is an advance on mime. Varied in form and tempo,

it is not only a visible expression of rapport between

rhythm (music) and movement, but a manifeiggtion of a state

of mind whose farthest stretch is trance.
The mimetic movements of dance, however varied in fbrm and tempo,
are conceived in traditional imagination as iconic symbols assigned
meanings through social and cultural conventions, and through
psychological and metaphysical mechanisms. The theatrical idioms
codify in iconic symbols sets of values, ideas and thought; they are
a body of concepts and feelings, and a vehicle of much symbolic

content and meaning.

 

148Ola Rotimi, "Traditional Nigerian Drama," in Introduction
to Nigerian Literature, ed.: Bruce King (Lagos: Africana Publish-
ing Corporation, 1971), p. 36.

1491616., p. 41.

 

 

150J. P. Clark, "Aspects of Nigerian Drama," in The Example
of Shakespeare, by J. P. Clark (London: Longman, 1970), p. 85.

 

15101a Rotimi, p. 40.

79

It is against this background of "festival" (as it is known
and practised in traditional Africa,especially among the Yoruba) that
Soyinka's concept and application of the musical idiom to Kongi's

Harvest asks to be understood.

Application of Concept to Kongi's Harvest
The Plot
Set in the fictitious Republic of Isma, Kongi's Harvest

directs attention to the forces of change in a transitional era.
President Kongi has set up a personality cult around himself, and then
deified himself. To commemorate the occasion of his deification,
as well as consumate his stranglehold on traditional politics and
values, Kongi orders the traditional ruler, Oba Danlola, to appear
before him at the Festival of the New Yam and, in full view of the
public, present the new yam to him (Kongi). According to the Organis-
ing Secretary, through whom Kongi's orders are communicated to
Danlola,

Kongi desires that the king perfbrm all his customary spirit-

ual functions, only this time, that he perform them to him,

our Leader. Kongi must preside as the Spirit of Harvest,

in pursuance of the Five-Year Development Plan.152
But Kongi's dictatorial demand for "a total, absolute submission [of

"153 is both an insult and a

Danlola]--in full view of the people,
sacrilege to traditional ethos. It amounts to the total extinction
of Danlola's spiritual cum political powers. Danlola and his

152Kon i's Harvest in Collected Plays 2 (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1974), p. 77. ‘All page references to Kongi's Harvest
are taken from Collected Plays 2.

1531616., p. 94.

 

 

80

council of traditional chieftains refuse to give in to Kongi, for
which they are imprisoned at Kongi's orders.

The play which employs the simultaneous staging device, opens
on the prison with Oba Danlola and his royal retinue. It then
shifts to Kongi's retreat on the mountain, with members of his
Refbrmed Aweri Fraternity fasting at the fbot of the mountain. Next,
the scene shifts to Segi's Night Club, and then to Danlola's royal
palace. And, finally, to an open arena where the feast to commenor-
ate the Harvest of the New Yam takes place.

The play opens on Danlola's desecration both of the national
flag and anthem. Having been deprived of his agbada trousers,
Danlola has used the national flag as trousers under his agbada
(a large, flowing traditional dress). In addition to desecrating
the national flag, Danlola and his retinue distort and burlesque
the national anthem as they sing:

Ism to ism fbr ism is ism

Of isms and isms an absolute-ism

To demonstrate the tree of life

Is sprung from broken peat

And we the rooted bark, spurned

When the tree swells its pot

The mucus that is snorted out

When Kongi's new race blows

And more, oh there's a harvest of words

In a penny newspaper.154
They are, however, interrupted by the Superintendent. And following
this interruption, the royal retinue break into a traditional song
and dance, with Oba Danlola and Oba Sarumi engaged in a dance of

farewell and mourning.

 

‘54Ibid., p. 61.

81

Following this scene is Kongi's retreat on the mountain,
where his Reformed Aweri Fraternity (as well as Kongi himself) is
observing a period of fasting. In preparation for their first public
appearance beside the "Leader" (Kongi) at the festival, members of
the Reformed Aweri Fraternity (Kongi's spiritual disciples) engage
in a dialectic process of finding an "image" fer themselves--a
semantic process in which they seek to find the right word that
will conjure up the image they need:

SECOND AWERI: Isn't it enough just to go in as Kongi's
disciples?

FOURTH: Magi is more dignified. We hold after all the
position of the wise ones. From the recognition of
us as the Magi, it is one step to his inevitable
apotheosis.

FIRST: The emphasis of our generation is--youth. Our image
therefore should be a kind of youthful elders of the
state. A conclave of modern patriarchs.

THIRD: Yes, yes. Nice word patriarch, I'm glad you used it.
Has a nice reverent tone about it. Very nice indeed,
very nice.

SECOND: I agree. Conjures up quite an idyllic scene.

FOURTH: We might consider a scientific image. This would
be a positive stamp and one very much in tune with our
contemporary situation. Our pronouncements should be
dominated by a positive scientificism.

THIRD: A brilliant conception. I move we adopt it at once.

SIXTH: What image exactly is positive scientificism?

THIRD: Whatever it is, it is not long-winded proverbs and
senile pronouncements. In fact we could say a step has

already been taken in that direction. If you've read our
Leader's last publication. . . .

82

FIFTH: Ah yes. Nor proverbs nor verse, only ideograms in
algebraic quantums. If the square of XQY(2bc) equals QA
into the square root of X, then the progressive forces
mu2tngrgvgllegzgrozhesgeactionary in the span of .32 of
Meanwhile, Organising Secretary consults with Kongi in his

mountain retreat. Plans are reviewed, amended, and new ones made
f0r the success of the festival. Strategies are also being worked
out to compel Oba Danlola (if he will not be convinced) to humble
himself before Kongi at the festival. One of such strategies is to
grant the release of the Oba and his retinue from prison, as well as
persuade him with the promise, not the assurance, of the release of
other political prisoners, including Segi's father, who are awaiting
execution.

Danlola and his royal retinue are released; but their release
does not change Danlola's mind, nor does it alter the strategy Daodu
and Segi have been hatching up at the Night Club-ethe overthrow of
President Kongi and the release of all political prisoners. Under
Daodu's persuasive pressure and assurance, and to aid the Daodu-Segi
strategy (which Kongi's secret intelligence service, the Big Ears
of State, could not detect), Danlola agrees to attend the festival
but not to present the new yam to Kongi. Amidst the festive atmos-
pehre of the celebration, Segi's father (Kongi's prisoner) is shot
and killed on Kongi's order. Kongi becomes possessed; and Segi

serves him with her father's head, instead of the new yam, in a bowl;

thus bringing the festival to an abrupt and confused end with

 

1551616., pp. 70-72.

83

everybody fleeing the arena, except President Kongi who has now
become one with the dead. In the filmed version of the play, Kongi

is shot and killed by a snipper at this point of the play.

Applyingthe Concept to the Play

Koggi's Harvest profoundly justifies Soyinka's four-point
definition or concept of music, as the musical idiom relates to
theatre. As already stated, Soyinka conceives of music as a "com-
municant" vehicle, a language, catalyst, and solvent--all of which
play significant roles in the regenerative process of life, the

process towards the spatial definition of being in phenomena.

Music as a Communicant Medium
andLanguage

There is a profound sense in which music as a "communicant

 

medium" and music as an "intensive language" are closely related.

As a "communicant medium," music becomes the means both of communi-
cation and communion on the social or physical and metaphysical
.planes. Communication pgr_§g_may not necessarily involve an ”inten-
sive" (as opposed to “ordinary") language, but communion involves
intense experience of the mystical which fundamentally uses an
"intense" language--a language which profoundly affects the emotions,
and whose images are primarily drawn from the metaphysical world

of myth.

Kongi's Harvest deals with the forces of change in a transi-

 

tional era: the spiritual and the temporal, the one trying to change

the other. The f0rmer (spiritual power), represented by the

84

traditional politics of Oba Danlola which places the spiritual power
of government in the hands of traditionally elected chieftains, is
forcefully being ousted by the latter (temporal power), represented
by Kongi's passion for the "absolutism" of modern dictatorship. The
power struggle is also a symbolic representation of the regenerative
process of life, the process of death and birth--the death of one era,
and the birth of another--which is celebrated in the festival. Festi-
val in Africa, as already noted, is a celebration of the end of one
season and the beginning of another. It is an occasion during which,
it is believed, all the forces of nature, including the living, the
dead, the gods and the unborn, come together f0r a common “communion"

to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.

In the early scene of the play, Danlola and Sarumi are engaged
in a dance of mourning and farewell. The song they sing to the
accompaniment of drum music is more or less an invocation to the
cosmic forces of misfbrtune and disaster embodied in Ogun, Esu and
Sango--the three gods which they invoked:

SARUMI: Soon the head swelled
Too big for pillow
And it swelled too big
For the mother's head
Was nowhere to be seen
And the child's slight belly
Was strangely distended.

DANLOLA (comes forward, dancing softly.):
This is the last
Our feet shall touch together
We thought the tune
Obeyed us to the soul
But the drums are newly shaped
And stiff arms strain
On stubborn crooks, to
Delve with the left foot

85

For ill-luck; with the left

Again f0r ill-luck; once more
With the left alone, fer disaster
Is the only certainty we know.

(The bugJesjoin in royal cadences, the two
kings dance slow, mournful steps, accompanied
by their retinue. Coming_down on the scene,

a cage oprrisonlbars separatinggDanlola from
Sarumi and the other visitors who go out 156
backwardE herded off by theSuperintendent.)

 

 

 

Earlier in the play, it is Sarumi and the royal drummers who sing
and dance, and are joined later by the dejected Danlola:

SARUMI: Ah, Danlola, my father,
Even so did I
Wish your frown of thunder away
When the Aweri were driven from
Their ancient conclave. Then you said . .

DRUMMER: This is the last
That we shall dance together
They say we took too much silk
For the royal canopy
But the dead will witness
We never ate the silkworm.

SARUMI: They complained because
The first of the new yams
Melted first in an Oba's mouth
But the dead will witness
We drew the poison from the root.

(As the King's men begin a dirge of "egg,“ Danlola sits
down slowly onto a chair, withdrawing more and more into
himself.)

DRUMMER: I saw a strange sight
In the market this day
The day of the feast of Agemo
The sun was high
And the King's umbrella
Beneath it . . .

 

1551616., pp. 68-69.

86

SARUMI: We lift the King's umbrella
Higher than men
But it never pushes
The sun in the face.

DRUMMER: I saw a strange sight
In the market this day
The sun was high
But I saw no shade
From the King's umbrella.

OGBO AWERI: This is the last
That we shall dance together
This is the last the hairs
Will lift on our skin
And draw together
When the gbedu rouses 157
The dead in Oshugbo. . . .

SARUMI: This is the last our feet
Shall speak to feet of the dead
And the unborn cling 158
T0 the‘Hem of our robes. . . . (my emphasis)

 

 

 

Both traditional rulers and their retinue use their dance
as a means of communicating with the gods, the dead and the unborn,
as well as sounding a note of warning to the living. Their invoca-
tion to the cosmic forces of disaster, and the communion of their
feet with the feet of the dead and the unborn, involve a process of
intense communication. The metaphysical nature of the communion
naturally calls for the use of some "intensive language," for the
sole purpose of reaching a meaningful rapport with all the forces
involved in the process. The intensity of the language derives in

part from the proverbial nature of the language of the song, and the

 

157Soyinka's f00tnote: Oshugbo is the "Shrine of Oro (Cult
of the dead)."

158Kongi's Harvest, pp. 66-67.

 

87

allusionS'UJthe Yoruba metaphysical world. The allusions to Oro
(”oshugbo") and "Agemo“ are thematic evocations of death. Both
allusions belong to the Yoruba metaphysical world.

Historically, the Agemo is a politico-religious and judiciary

159

cult and had the absolute power to give and take life. In his

prefatory notes to The Road and Madmen and Specialists, respectively,

 

Soyinka states that the "Agemo is simply a religious cult of flesh

‘60 and (referring to it as "AS") "the universal triumph

dissolution"
of expediency and power lust, which makes dehumanisation possible,
even in wars . . . [and] wear[s] a hundred masks and a thousand

16‘ Oro and Agemo are invariably synonymous and,

outward forms . "
together, they constitute "the first step to power. . . . Power in
its purest [absolute] sense. The end of inhibitions. The conquest
of the weakness of your too human flesh with all its sentiment."162
It is evident, based on the foregoing argument, that
Soyinka uses music as a symbolic vehicle to reach the “inner world"
both of the characters and the play; to communicate with and then
interpret that "inner world," and therefore, establish a corre-
spondence between that inner world of the play with the world of
the living. Consider, for instance, the epithets which Daodu uses

to describe Segi in Segi's praise song:

 

159Oyin Ogunba, "The Agemo Cult in Ijebuland," Nigeria Maga-
zine 86: 176-186.

‘50"For the Producer." The Road, P- 149-

16lWole Soyinka, Publisher's preface to Madmen and Specialists
(Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1971).

162Madmen and Specialists, p. 36.

88

Fame, is a flippant lover

But Segi you made him a slave
And no poet now can rival

His devotedness

But Segi

You are the stubborn strand
Of meat, lodged 163
Between my teeth.

A coiled snake

Is beautiful asleep
A velvet bolster
Laid on flowers

If the snake would
Welcome me, I do not wish
A softer pillow than

This lady's breasts

But do not fool with one

Whose bosom ripples

As a python coiled 164

In wait for rabbits.

Segi, Kongi's f0rmer consort, is the brain behind the plot

to overthrow President Kongi. She, like President Kongi, has become
the "Spirit of Harvest.“ She is the "Queen of the Harvest night."165
And Daodu's epithets drawn from the Yoruba world of archetypes,
establish the correspondence between Segi and the metaphysical inner

world of the play in which death looms large.

 

163Kongi's Harvest, p. 75.

1“Ibid., p. 88.

1551816., p. 97.

89

Music as Catalyst

 

What we are witnessing in Kongi's Harvest is the struggle f0r
absolute power. Inevitably, the balance of power must tilt to one
side. Kongi has already declared himself "the SPIRIT of Harvest."
The harvest itself is "the feast of Agemo," and Agemo means death.
Kongi himself is the Agemo--for the festival of the new yam is itself
"Kongi's Harvest" or the "feast of Agemo." The atmosphere of death
looms large in the play; and it is imminent that the "spirit of
harvest"--death--will make its appearance at the harvest, either to
win over the living and take control of power or to claim one of its
own kind. Soyinka uses music to bring about this catalytic finale
of the play.

The festival song proper, whose images are also drawn from
the archetypal world, sets the stage for the catalytic finale of the
play. While the yam is being pounded for the celebration proper,
the women break into a song sung in Yoruba (Soyinka provides the
translation of the song at the end of the text). The song, repro-
duced here in part, echoes the arrival of the dead:

I have borne the thorned crown
Shed tears as the sea

I was spat upon

A leper's spittle

A burden of logs

Climbed the hunchback hill
There was no dearth of yam

But the head of the first born
Was pounded for yam

There was no dearth of wood

Yet the thigh of the firgg born
Lost its bone for fuel.

 

1551616., pp. 140-141 (English translation); pp. 130-131.
(Yoruba text.)

90

During the pounding of the yam, Segi's father is shot and
killed on Kongi's orders. For Kongi's share of the yam, Segi serves
him her father's freshly killed head in a bowl. Soyinka's stage-
directions to the scene crystalize the point:

The rhythm of pounding emerges triumphant, the dance grows

frenzied. Above it all on the dais, Kongi, getting progres-

sively inspired harangues his audience in words drowned in

the bacchanal. He exhorts, declaims, reviles, cajoles,

damns, curses, vilifies, excommunicates, execrates until

he is a demonic mass of sweat and f0am at the lips. Segi

returns, disappears into the area of pestles. A capper salver

is raised suddenly high; it passes from hands to hands above

the women's heads; they dance with it on their heads; it is

thrown from one to the other until at last it reaches Kongi's

table and Segi throws open the lid. In it, the head of an

old man. In the ensuing scramble, no one is left but Kongi

and the head, Kongi's mouth wide open in speechless horror.

A sudden blackout on both.157
The women's song and dance, their yam-pounding and the ritual act of
passing the bowl to Kongi's table, and the total effect of their
rhythmic action on Kongi, become therefore a catalytic process and
moment in the play. At this point in the play, Kongi has bridged
the gap between the living and the dead, as he confronts and communes
with the "terror" of the "numinous world of transition," symbolized
by the blood-clogged head in the bowl bef0re him. Thus with the
carefully plotted destruction of Kongi by Segi and Daodu, which is
aided and speeded up by the sudden and unexpected death of Segi's
father, comes the end of an era of tyrannical dictatorship.

This scene also illustrates the points we have already
examined in this chapter: Soyinka's use of music as a "communicant

medium" and as the "intensive language of transition!‘ Amidst the

 

1571616., pp. 131-132.

91

rhythm of pounding the yam, the song and the dance which "grows
frenzied," President Kongi reaches the state of possession which
makes it possible f0r him to reach a rapport with the "dangerous"
”demonic" forces of the transitional abyss. As the stage-directions
show, his language becomes as intense as, and in harmony with, the
intensity of the language of the music. The language of the music
underscores a secret masonic correspondence with the symbolism of
the play. According to Wole Soyinka, the intensive language of
theatrical music, especially of tragic music,

undergoes transformation through myth into a secret (masonic)
correspondence with the symbolism of tragedy, a symbolic medium
of spiritual emotions within the heart of the choric union. It
transcends particularisation (of meaning) to tap the tragic
source whence spring the familiar weird disruptive melodies.
This masonic union of sign and melody, the true tragic music,
unearths cosmic uncertainties which pervade human existence,
reveals the magnitude and power of creation, but above all
creates a harrowingsense of omnidirectional vastness where the
creative intelligence resides and prompts the soul to futile
exploration. The senses do not at such moments interpret myth
in their particular concretions; we are left only with the emo-
tional and Spiritual values, the essential experience of cosmic
reality. The forms of music are not correspondences at such
moments to the physical world, not at this nor at any other
moment. The singer is a mouthpiece of the chthgnic forces of
the matrix and his somnambulist "improvisations"--a simultaneity
Of musical and poetic f0rms--are not representations of the
ancestor, recognitions of the living or unborn, but of the

no man's land of transitionpetween and around these temporal
definitions of experience. The past is the ancestors', the
present belongs to the living, and the future to the unborn.
The deities stand in the same situation to the living as do

the ancestors and the unborn, obeying the same laws, suffering
the same agonies and uncertainties, employing the same masonic
intelligence of rituals for the perilous plunge into the

fourth area of experience, the immeasurable gulf of transition.
Its dialogue is liturgy, its music takes form from man's uncom-
prehending immersion in the area of existence, buried

wholly from rational recognition. The source of the possessed
lyricist, chanting hitherto unknown mythopoeic strains Whose
antiphonal refrain is, however, instantly caught and thrust

 

 

 

92

with all its terror and awesomeness into the night by swaying
votaries, thgs source is residual in the numinous area of
transition (my emphasis).

Music as Solvent

The solvency of music in Soyinka's theatre derives from the
capacity of the music to bring together, unify and harmonize several
factors of theatre production. It also derives from the fact that
music, as a "communicant medium," is a ritual act of affirmation and
solidarity among the living, and between the living and the dead,
the unborn and the gods.

Music harmonizes several factors in theatre production. The
festival atmosphere which dominates Kongi's Harvest provides the
basis for such harmonization. According to Ogungbesan,

Soyinka's usual theatrical effects, both visual (dance and
mime) and auditory (bells, drums, song, etc.) are those most
commonly used during festivals among his people, the Yoruba
who are very conscious of their cultural past which they
celebrate publicly and lavishly. As an expression of cul-
tural continuity, the dead and the gods are understood to be
present and to rejoice with the 1iving.159
The festival atmosphere,therefore, permits as well as enhances the
general fluidity of action in Kongi's Harvest. Consider, for
instance, the simultaneity of action at the festival in which the
music becomes the vital link between the event off-stage and the

activity on stage: The women's festival song, quoted inter alia,

 

168Myth, Literature and the African World, pp. 148-149.

 

169Kolawole Ogungbesan, "Wole Soyinka: The Past and the
Visionary Writer," in A Celebration of Black and African Writin ,
ed.: Bruce King and Kolawole Ogungbesan (Zaria: Ahmadu Beilo Uni-
versity Press, 1975), p. 176.

93

and their yam-pounding constitute a vital link between the simul-
taneous events on- and off-stage. Soyinka's stage-directions, also

quoted inter alia, show that the shooting and killing of Segi's

 

father has a simultaneous correspondence with the "progressively"
demonic transfbrmation of President Kongi. The music becomes the
symbolic vehicle of this transformation, and also the means whereby
the dead journey to the living. For example, it is during this
moment that the copper salver is "raised suddenly high; it passes
from hands to hands above the women's heads; they dance with it on
their heads; it is thrown from one to the other until at last it
reaches Kongi's table and Segi throws open the lid. In it, the head

‘70 The act or process of passing the copper salver

of an old man."
"from hands to hands" until "it reaches Kongi's table," could be
regarded as a mined representation or portrayal of the passage
through the "undented" cosmic "vastness" which the dead frequently
make to reach the living and vice versa.

The solvency of the idiom also provides for the attainment
of a rapport by the perfbrmer with the cosmos. This is a moment in
the life of a perfbrmance when all the planes of existence--histori-
cal, temporal and nascent--and when the living, the dead, the gods
and the unborn, come together in a frozen moment of time and space.
President Kongi attains this moment of "possession" or rapport during
which he gets "progressively inspired" towards becoming a "demonic
mass," and finally confronts the dead (represented by the old man's
head).

l7O

 

Kongi's Harvest, pp. 131-132.

94

The perfbrmer or character, Soyinka maintains is a mouth-
piece of the gods. And since characters are double-cast to reflect
their man-cosmos essence (as mentioned in Chapter I), the incidence
of rapport or possession becomes, therefbre, a metaphysical state of
absolute freedom, a profound state of harmony with the cosmos, and
a state in which the performer completely identifies himself with
his role. During this moment of possession, says the Nigerian play-
wright, Ola Rotimi, "self-identification" by the perfbrmer with
cosmic forces

becomes total, and the caution of self-regard is submer ed.
Sometimes, further stimulated by sounds of rhythm (music)),
this feeling of mystical eminence is heightened and stretched
beyond the level of the purely physical to affect the psyche,
precipitating a state of trance.1 1

According to J. P. Clark, a Nigerian poet and playwright,

the incidence of "possession" . . . is the attainment by
actors in the heat of performance of "actual freedom of
spirit from this material world," a state of transfbrmation
which has been given the rather sniggering name of "posses-
sion" or "auto-intoxication" by those outside its sphere of
influence and sympathy . . . when [in] this state of complete
identification with his role . . . at that point when . . .
"things unseen enter the man," the actor may become a

medium, a votary of some ancestor spirits or divine powers
filling him with the gift of prophecy.17

And, adds Eldred Jones, "in this state of possession the humans
present a double image."173
Finally, the solvency of the musical idiom provides for the

natural and uncued transition from dialogue to song and dance. In

 

17101a Rotimi, "Traditional Nigerian Drama," p. 44.
1720. P. Clark, p. 87.
173Eldred Jones, "Wole Soyinka: Critical Approaches," p. 59.

95

the examples cited inter alia, there are no cues for the beginning

 

and end of the songs. The characters sing and dance when they
must, and stop when they please or when interrupted by extenuating
circumstances. The occasions and situations create their own music,
fer example, the women's festival song. The occasions also provide
the essential facilities f0r celebrating every situation or event
within the framework of music, dance and mime, for example, Segi's
praise song which marks the satisfactory completion of the plans to
overthrow President Kongi. This device--the fluidity of action
through the uncued interplay of music--demonstrates Soyinka's ability
to change the character of a scene by suddenly charging it with the
secret, masonic energy and power of the musical idiom. Herbert

Kretzner, theatre critic of the Daily Express (London), made a

 

similar observation of Soyinka's comedy, The Lion and the Jewel,

 

during its 1966 production in London. Thus he wrote about the play:

With its almost causal shifts into song, dance, and mime, this
novel and entertaining Nigerian comedy achieves a cohesion
that has so often eluded the makers of musical comedies on the
stages of Broadway and the West End. There are no obvious
prepared cues for song, no sudden or inopportune dance num-
bers to show off the chorus. People in this show sing when
they have to, dance when they must, deriving their motivation
for these activities from the real life, rich with ritual

of the African village in which the Nigerian playwright Wole
Soyinka has set his little fable.174

 

174Herbert Kretzner's review in Daily Express (13 December

1966) of a London production of The Lion and the Jewel by Wole

Soyinka; quoted in Eldred Jones,-“Wole Soyinka: Critical Approaches,"

p. 54.

96

Conclusion

From the foregoing analysis, it is evident that, apart from
its entertainment function and its capacity for spectacle, the musi-
cal heritage is in Soyinka's theatre a vehicle of much symbolic
meaning and content, a set of ideas, concepts and feelings, a multi-
faceted phenomenon which represents and symbolizes a multiplicity
of ideas because, perhaps, of its psycho-biological as well as cul-
tural levels. It involves the symbolic transfbrmation of thought
and experiences in a manner similar to that usually postulated f0r
myth: translating experiences into visual and recognizable action.
The music is evidently part of the people's life-style, nothing added
to it.

The musical heritage has provided Soyinka's “excellent
theatre" a tremendous amount of flexibility and the integration both
of form, character and content. Soyinka has applied the musical
idiom as a mode of instinctive response, and as a device for externali-
zing the internal inner world, both of character and transition.

The occasions and situations have created their own music, and pro-
vided the essential facilities for celebrating every situation or
event within the framework of music, mime and dance. The framework
is carefully structured and worked out within the context of the
play, so as to achieve smooth and natural transitions from the
present into the past and future, from dialogue to song, dance and
mime, and from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

In view of the foregoing analysis, it is germane to suggest

and believe that Wole Soyinka has re-interpreted, and given new

97

meaning and significance to the traditional idiom of music. He

has restored it to its original status, garbed it with new signifi-
cance, and used it to interpret modern themes. Thus he has not only
saved the musical idiom from an ineluctable collapse and fossiliza-
tion, but has transformed it into a more viable art f0rm whose
infinite capacity and value fer the theatre have not yet been fully

explored and exhausted.

CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

An Appraisal

 

This is not an exhaustive appraisal of Wole Soyinka as artist,

 

and his importance and significance to the rapidly growing comtempo-
rary African theatre. This chapter is divided into three parts:

the first re-states the playwright's basic positions as contined in
this study; the second part is an appraisal of Wole Soyinka as artist,
based on his application of his fundamental concepts to the plays
discussed in this study. The third part of the chapter examines
Soyinka's importance and significance to contemporary African theatre,

based principally on the observations made in this study.

Re-statingthe Concepts

 

The world of Soyinka's theatre is the coterminous world of
transition in which are coeval and consanguineous the living, the
dead, the unborn and the gods. In Chapter I of this study, there-
fore, Soyinka defines theatre as the microscopic duplicate of the
macrocosmic world of transition. Theatre, he says, is a "meta-
physical" and ”symbolic arena" for the living, the dead, the unborn
and the gods. In Chapter II of the study, Soyinka conceives of

time, space and scenery to be mutually correspondent--one being the

98

99

reflection of, as well as defining the other. Scenery is the
symbolic re-creation of the totality of the macrocosmic world--the
"cosmic entirety;" space is the symbolic encapsulation of the magni-
tude and vastness of the macrocosmic world; and time is fundamentally
“cyclic" and, like space and scenery, limitless and vast. The mutual
correspondence between time, space and scenery, Soyinka maintains,
"contains within it manifestations of the ancestral, the living and
the unborn."175 Soyinka maintains in Chapter III that music is a
symbolic medium of communication between the living and their cosmic
neighbours. Music is the "intensive language of transition," a
"catalyst" and a "solvent," he says.

In these three fundamental positions, Soyinka's vision of
theatre insists upon the transitional abyss as a constant theatrical

factor for the better understanding of his work.

Wole Soyinka, the Artist

"The writer," says Wole Soyinka, "must impress an accept-

176

ance." That is, he must not only entertain and please his

audience, but must creatively communicate with them at various
levels, through his mastery and application of the very instruments
and mechanics of craft. Therefore, says Soyinka, "my prime duty as

"177

a playwright is to provide excellent theatre, by reinterpreting

 

175

176Wole Soyinka, "From A Common Back Cloth: A Reassessment
of the African Literary Image," The American Scholar 32(3): 392.

Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 144.

‘77Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden, eds., PP- 172'173-

100

or transfbrming and then applying all the "existing theatrical
idioms in Nigeria“ to redefine the human phenomenon.

Because of his metaphysical and symbolic approach to the
theatre, Soyinka's work is infOrmed largely by two modes of symbol-
ism, namely: visual and auditory symbolism. Soyinka's visual
symbolism is a profbund attempt to imagistically recapture on stage
the more abstract and metaphysical ideas about his "man-cosmos"
world. The image of the spider's web, and of the road itself in
The Road, for instance, portray the "man-cosmos" orbit as an endless
orbit of interlocking rings and circles, within which man is essen-
tially trapped. The density of the forest in A Dance of the Forests
is a visual portrayal of the mystique of the transitional abyss.
Soyinka's stage-directions describe the forest as follows:

(Back-Scene lights up_gradually to reveal a dark, wet, atmos-
phere, dripping_moisture, and soft, moist soil. A palm-tree
sways at a low angle, broken but still alive. Seemingly
lightning-reduced stumps. Rottinngood all over thegground.
Almound or two here and there. Footfalls are muffled. First,
there is total stillness, emphasized by the sound of moisture
dripping to the ground. Forest Head is sitting on a large
st6he,rstatuesque,;the Questioner stands beside him. Aroni

is no longer to be seen. The Dead Woman enters, dead as on

first appearance. She behaves exactly as’before,’hesitant,
seemingly lost.)l73

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The details of the scenery have more than literal meanings. Some of
the details are to a large extent reminiscent of the scenery of The
‘Rgag (see Chapter II, pp. 52-53): the low-angled and broken, but
still living palm-tree, the “lightning-reduced stumps," and the

"rotting wood all over the ground," are reminiscent of the wrecked

 

178A Dance of the Forests, p. 60.

 

101

motor parts which f0rm a significant background to The Road. In

both plays, therefore, the visual or pictorial details of scenery
become powerful symbolic statements about the "man-cosmos" world,
its metaphysics, and about the inner world of the characters.

Dance and mime are used also to visually create and sustain
the movement towards transition, to bring together the various
planes of the "man-cosmos" correspondence, and to release into one
frozen moment of time and space all the physical and psychic forces
within the play. Consider, for instance, Samson's mimed re-creation
of dead Sergeant Burma, and the mimed re-creation of the drivers'
festival of Ogun during which Murano was knocked down by Kotonu,
both of which are in The Road (see Chapter II, pp. 67 and 55,
respectively). Both the physical and psychic forces of the
re-created moments are released into the present, and their effects
are visually registered by the character's confrontation with, and
reaction to the f0rces.

Auditory symbolism in Soyinka's theatre derives principally
from the musical accompaniments to the songs, and from the poetry
and tonal quality of the songs. Consider, for instance, Professor's
praise song and the song of the lay-abouts in The Road (see Chapter

II), and Danlola-Sarumi song and the women's song in Kongi's Harvest.

 

All the songs, together with the dance and the instrumentation which
accompany them, have profbund auditory effects, and they are also
profound symbolic statements about the play. Drumming is an art,

and its music a language in traditional Africa. The drummer usually

102

directs his energies towards the perfection of his art because,
says Echezona, ”it is in the drumming that all elements--melodic,
harmonic, and rhythmic--are exhibited."179 Writing about the Gelede
dance of the Yoruba, Margaret and Henry Drewal come to the conclusion
that "a drum phrase . . . imitates the tonal patterns of the Yoruba
language to communicate movement direction and social commentary."180
Wole Soyinka has, therefbre, distinguished himself as a

master craftsman by his creative application of the idioms of the
traditional theatre to create his "excellent theatre." Registering
his reaction to a sterile production given sometime ago in Cuba,
Wole Soyinka states that "Every event in the theatre, every genuine
effort at creative communication, entertainment, escapism, is fer me,
entirely valid. . . . What one must regret is the atmosphere of
sterility and truely pathetic preciosity that it seems to breed."181
As an artist he seizes upon every idea and idiom that have profound
theatrical values and effects. John Ferguson, fer instance, wrote
about Wole Soyinka's drama: '

His restless intellectualism seizes on ideas and themes, and

his characters tend to become symbols for conveying these ideas.
It is a sober judgment that he has the creative capacity and

 

179W. E. Echezona, "Ibo Musical Instruments" (Ann Arbor:

University Microfilms Inc., 1970). Quoted in Meki Nzewi, "Folk
Music in Southeastern Nigeria: An Appraisal," p. 6.

180Margaret Thompson Drewal and Henry John Drewal, "Gelede
Dance of the Western Yoruba," African Arts VIII (2): 3B.

18‘Wole Soyinka, "Towards a True Theatre,“ Transition 3(8):
21.

103

technical equipment to take hisgplace amon st the very few
dramatists who overstride the boundaries 0 continents and
centuries (my emphasis).182

Therefore, says David Cook, Soyinka's drama continues to echo

through our minds long after we have watched or read it,
returning to us unawares at unexpected moments, when we

find ourselves wrestling with its implications. As we per-
ceive that the familiar psychological and religious dilemmas
are being re-examined, we may be tempted into symbolic inter-
pretations with fixed relationships between the items, but
this is certainly to limit our dramatic experience, which
should cut across f0rmulas and categories. The patterns

are compelling, endlessly suggestive and re gvant, BUt
neither fixed nor prescribed my emphasis).

As a highly sophisticated writer, Wole Soyinka takes his

 

 

place amongst leading world dramatists. The freedom and flexibility

184

of his theatre is reminiscent of Brecht's epic theatre. It is

this freedom of his medium which gives him the facilities to play
and juggle with ideas. According to Osofisan, Soyinka "plays with

"185

ideas with the facility of a master juggler. And, says Margaret

Laurence, his

 

182John Ferguson, "Nigerian Drama in English," p. 26.

183David Cook, African Literature: A Critical View, p. 126.

184In an interview with Lewis Nkosi (a South African play-
wright) in 1962, Soyinka acknowledged his admiration for the ”live-
liness and freedom" of Brecht's theatre: "What I like in Brecht is
his sort of theatre, its liveliness and freedom, not so much his
purpose or intentions." Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden, eds.,
African Writers Talking (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation,
1972), p. 173.

185Femi Osofisan, "Tiger on Stage: Wole Soyinka and Nigerian
Theatre," p. 151.

104

Writing often seems like a juggling act. He can keep any
number of plates--and valuable plates, at that--spinning

in the air at the same time. . . . He is a volatile writer,
and he achieygg in his work an almost unbelievable amount
of vitality.

Hence, what is not said in Soyinka's drama, as David Cook observes,

becomes as important as the spoken word. . . . Frequently

the gap between what is uttered in conventionally grouped

words and what is meant in the complexity of the human

heart provides an upper layer of [meanings and] gentle

humour. This tier of meaning is not just a matter of the

structures of separate sentences and speeches; it has more

to do with the eddying movement of the human mind, circling

round its private pre-occupations while it is carried forward

publicly by the stream of a situation. 3

It is for these reasons that the distinguished critic of the

”theatre of the absurd," Martin Esslin, acknowledged: "Wole Soyinka
is a highly accomplished playwright . . . a master craftsman of the

t."188 As a "master-craftsman,"

theatre and a major dramatic poe
Wole Soyinka is in perfect command and control of his artistic medium.
His medium responds with instantaneous ease to his restless, but

active imagination.

Soyinka and Contemporary African Theatre
In the wake, perhaps, of a profoundly disturbing feeling that
the artistic institution of traditional Africa was faced with the

threat of total collapse and extinction or fpssilization from today's

 

186LongDrums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists
l952-l966 (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 11.

187David Cook, "Of the Strong Breed." P- 33-

188See Martin Esslin, "Two African Playwrights," Black Orpheus
(19): 33-39.

105

civilization, the Ghanaian playwright, J. C. de Graft, raised a cry
of anguish and alarm, saying:
What we are witnessing is not merely a change but a collapse,
the cumulative result of over five hundred years (in some
places) of the subjugation of African cultural systems to
the most ruthless forms of domination and exploitation.
And it is a collapse not only of systems of belief and wor-
ship, but also of systems of political, social, and economic
organization and practice, systems of technology (no matter
how elementary) and systems of linguistic and non-linguistic
communication. 3
J. C. de Graft's outcry came at a time when many African writers
were still more Western than African in their approach to literature
and theatre.

Soyinka's primary importance to the African theatre derives
principally from his demystification of the African metaphysical
world. He has explored the metaphysical world of transition, the
dead, the unborn, and the gods; and he has used his findings about
these dark areas of existence to interpret and understand today's world
of the living. Other African writers such as J.Fh Clark, Tsegaye
Gabre Medhin, and Sarif Easmond, have become more aware of the
artistic potentialities of the traditional idioms, and their capacity
to be used for the theatrical exploration of the man-cosmic world.

Soyinka also brings to the African theatre a high degree of
professionalism and extensive theatre experience, both of which
were nurtured by the Royal Court Theatre, London. He is the most

successful and the most imaginatively liberated of African writers.

According to Oyin Ogunba,

 

189J. C. de Graft, "Roots in African Drama and Theatre,"
African Literature Today (8): 13.

 

106

the dominant figure in West African drama is Wole Soyinka.
There are obvious reasons for his ore-eminence. First, there
is hardly any feeling of provincialism in his work--the fear,
in fact, is that he is already s0phisticated to a fault,
unlike many others who tend to be mere local men. He is an
accomplished actor and producer, unlike some others who are
simply armchair playwrights. This seems to have given him

a more pointed sense of theatrical effect than the others,
for he is able to see the clash of ' eas with the eye of a
[professional. . . . (my emphasis).'§8

It is, however, doubtful whether any single volume of work
(unless such a work is encyclopaedic) devoted entirely to the study
and analysis of Soyinka's work can justifiably encompass the breadth
and depth of his vision and craftsmanship. It is no hyperbolic con-
clusion to emphatically assert that Wole Soyinka is to contemporary
Africa what Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, W. B. Yeats to
Ireland, Henrik Ibsen to Norway and the Renaissance man to Europe.

A restless, active intelligence and prototype of the Renaissance
man--poet, novelist, playwright, actor, director-producer, critic,
publisher, teacher, politician, and more--Soyinka pre-eminently
bestrides the African literary and theatrical stage like a mortal
incarnate of a god.

He will be remembered as the African promethean who, with a
bold and decisive stride, liberated contemporary African creativity
from provincialism, self-deification and cultural nostalgia. He has
brought to it a new sense of direction and sophisticated sensitivity.
He has given it a new form, texture and colour, in subject matter and
in the handling of it, in language and in all the functional and aes-

thetic logistics of the artistic media, especially in drama and theatre.

 

190Oyin Ogunba, The Movement of Transition, p. 105.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

107

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Wole Soyinka--A Chronological
Arrangement

Soyinka, Wole. "Cor, Teach." Ibadan 7 (1959): 25-27.

 

 

Soyinka, Wole. "The Invention and Ohter Tales." London: Royal
Court Theatre Production, 1959.

Soyinka, Wole. "My Father's Burden." Ibadan: Western Nigeria
Television Service (WNTV), 1961.

Soyinka, Wole. "Salutations to the Gut." In Africa in Prose.
Eidted by O. R. Dathorne and Willifried Feuser. London:
Penguin African Library, 1969: 355-363. Reflections:
Nigerian Prose and Verse. Edited by Frances Ademola.
Lago: African Universities Press, 1962, 117-123.

 

 

Soyinka, Wole. ”The House of Banigeji" (Act 2). In Reflections:
Nigerian Prose and Verse. Edited by Frances Ademola.
Lagos: African Universities Press, 1962.

 

Soyinka, Wole. Three Plays. Ibadan: Mbari, 1963. Contents:
The SwamplDwellers,The Trials of Brother Jero, and Ihe
Strong Breed.

 

 

Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests. London: Oxford University
Press, 1963.

Soyinka, Wole. The Lion and the Jewel. London: Oxford University
Press, 1963.

Soyinka, Wole. "From A Common Back Cloth: A Reassessment of the
African Literary Image." The American Scholar 32:3 (1963):
387-396.

Soyinka, Wole. "Amos Tutuola on Stage." Ibadan 16 (1963): 23-24.

Soyinka, Wole. "Towards a True Theatre." Transition 3:8 (1963):
21-22.

Soyinka, Wole. Five Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Content: A Dance of the Forests, The Lion and the Jewel,
The Swamp Dwellers, The TriEls of Brother Jero, and The Strong
Breed.

 

108

109

Soyinka,]Wole. “The Republican." A 1960 Mask Production, February,
964.

Soyinka, Wole. "The New Republican." A 1960 Mask Production, March,
1964.

Soyinka, Wole. The Road. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. London: Andre Deutsch, 1965.

Soyinka, Wole. "Theatre in Nigeria: A Brief Review." Cultural
Events in Africa 5 (1965):

Soyinka, Wole. "The Detainee." A BBC Africa Service Broadcast,
1965.

Soyinka, Wole. Before the Blackout. Ibadan: Orisun Acting Edition
1969. First performance by Orisun Theatre Company at Ibadan,
11 March 1965.

Soyinka, Wole. "And After the Narcissist?" African Forum 1:4 (1966):
53-64.

Soyinka, Wole. "Le Theatre Moderne Negro-Africaine." ("Modern Black
African Theatre") Colloquium paper at the First World
Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, April 1-24, 1966. Societe
Africaine Culture, Vol. 1 (1967): 539-548.

Soyinka, Wole. “The Writer in an African State." Iransition 6:3
(1967): ll-13. Reprints: "The Writer in a Modern rican
StateJ'In The Writer in Modern Africa. Edited by Per
Wastberg. Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African
Studies, 1968: 14-21; L'Afrique Actuelle 19 (1967): 5-7;

When the Man Died by John Agetua. Benin City: Midwest
Newspapers Cerporation, 1975: 25-30; "Terrible Understanding,"
Atlas 15:1 (1968): 36-39.

Soyinka, Wole. Kongi's Harvest. London: Oxford University Press,
1967.

 

Soyinka, Wole. Idanre and Other Poems. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977
(Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1967).

Soyinka, Wole, and Fagunwa, D. O. The Forest of a Thousand Demons.
London: Nelson, 1968.

Soyinka, Wole. "The Fourth Stage" in The Morality of Arts. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 119-134.

Soyinka, Wole. Poems from Prison. London: Rex Collings, 1969.

llO
Soyinka, Wole. Madmen and Specialists. Ibadan: Oxford University
Press, 1971.

Soyinka, Wole. "The Choice and Use of Language." Cultural Events in
Africa 75 (1971): 3-6.

Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, Ltd.,
1975 (first published by Rex Collings, 1972).

 

Soyinka, Wole. A Shuttle in the Crypt. London: Rex Collings/Eye
Methuen, 1972.

Soyinka, Wole. Camwood on the Leaves. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973.
Soyinka, Wole. The Bacchae of Euripides. London: Eyre Methuen, 1973.

Soyinka, Wole. Collected Plays 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973.

Soyinka, Wole. Collected Plays 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1974.

Soyinka, Wole. "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition."
Transition 9:48 (1974): 38-44.

 

Soyinka, Wole. Season of Anomy. New York: Third Press, 1974.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman. London: Eyre Methuen,
1975.

Soyinka, Wole, ed. and intro. Poems of Black Africa. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1975.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976.
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Armstrong, Robert Plant. Wellspring; On the Myth and Source of
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Jahn, Janheinz, and Dressler, Claus Peter. Bibliography of Creative
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Kennedy, Scott. In Search of African Theatre. New York: Charles
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Kernan, Alvin. The Plot of Satire. New Haven: Yale University
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Killam, G. D. .African Writers on African Writing. London: Heine-
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King, Bruce, ed. Introduction to Nigerian Literature. New York:
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King, Noel Q. Religions of Africa. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

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Laurence, Margaret. Long Drums and Cannons. London: Macmillan,
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Lindfors, Bernth. ed. Dem-Say: Interviews with Ei ht Nigerian
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Morell, Karen L., ed. In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka.
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Ogunba, Oyin , and Irele, Abiola, eds. Theatre in Africa. Ibadan:
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Wastberg, Per, ed. The Writer in Modern Africa. Uppsala: The
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Articles and Reviews in Periodicals, Journals,
and Anthologies

Achebe, Chinua. "English and the African Writer." Transition 4:18
(1965): 27-30.

Achebe, Chinua. "The Role of the Writer in a New Nation." Nigeria
Magazine 81 (1964): 157-160.

Acquaye, Saka. "The Language Problem of the Developing African
Theatre." African Arts 2:1 (1968): 58-59.

Adedeji, Joel A. "The Origin of the Yoruba Masque Theatre: The
Use of Ifa Divinition Corpus as Historical Evidence."
African Notes 6:1 (1970): 70-86.

 

Adedeji, Joel A. "Form and Function of Satire in Yoruba Drama."
99p 4:1 (1967): 61-72.

Adedeji, Joel A. "Oral Tradition and the Contemporary Theatre in
Nigeria." Research in African Literatures 2:2 (1971): 134-

149.

Adedeji, Joel A. "Trends in the Content and Form of the Openin Glee
in Yoruba Drama.“ Research in African Literatures 4:1 ? ):
32-47.

120

Adedeji, Joel A. “Traditional Yoruba Theatre." African Arts 3:1
(1969): 60-63.

 

Adedeji, Joel A. "The Place of Drama in Yoruba Religious Observance."
‘Qgp 3:1 (1966): 88-94.

Adedeji, Joel A. "A Profile of Nigerian Theatre 1960-1970." Nigeria
Magazine 107-109 (1971): 3-14.

Adelugba. Dapo. "Nigerian Theatre Survey." New Theatre Magazine
12:2 (1972): 15-16.

Adesanya, Adebayo. "Yoruba Metaphysical Thinking." 9gp_5 (1958):
36-41.

Aidoo, Ama Ata. "Review of Idanre." West Africa London (January
1968): 40-41.

 

Akade, Imafidon. "Comments on Mr. A. Bodunrin's 'Arts and Culture.'"
African Statesman 1:3 (1966): 39-42.

Akanji, Sangodare. "Criticism of The Lion and the Jewel and [he
Swamp Dwellers.“ Black Orpheus 6 (1959): 50-51.

 

 

Akanji, Sangodare. "Three Plays by Wole Soyinka." Black Orpheus 13
(1963): 58-59.

Akaraogun, Alan. "Wole Soyinka.“ Spear Magazine (May 1966): 13-19.

Akinrinsola, Fola. "Ogun Festival." Nigeria Magazine 85 (1965):
85-95.

 

Albert, Gerard. "Preservation of Tradition in African Creative
Writing.“ Research in African Literatures 1:1 ( ): 35-41.

 

Allen, Samuel. "Two Writers: Senghor and Soyinka.“ Negro Digest
(June 1967): 54-67.

Amoda, Moyibi. “The Artist and the Issue of Relevance." Transition
9:45 (1974): 38-45.

Aniebo, I. N. C. "Review of The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka."
Nigeria Magazine 86 (1965): 218-220.

 

Armstrong, Robert Plant. "Tragedy--Greek and Yoruba: A Cross-
Cultural Perspective." Research in African Literatures 7:1
(1976): 23-43.

Asalache, Khadambi. "The Making of a Poet: Wole Soyinka." Presence
Africaine 67 (1968): 172-174.

121

Atilade, David. "Kin i's Harvest and the Men Who Make the Film."
Interlink 6:4 (1970): 4-15.

Axworthy, Geoffrey. "The Performing Arts in Nigeria--A Footnote."
New Theatre Magazine 12:2 (1972): 17-18.

Babalola, Adeboye. "Yoruba Folk-Tales." West African Review 33: 415
(1962): 48-49.

Bamgbose, Ayo. "Yoruba Folk-Tales." Ibadan 27 (1969): 6-12.

 

Bamikunle, Aderemi. "What is 'AS'? Why 'AS'? A Thematic Exegesis
of Wole Soyinka's Madmen and Specialists." Work in Progress
2 (1973): 126-149.

 

 

Banham, Martin. "African Literature II: Nigerian Dramatists in
English and Traditional Ni erian Theatre." The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 3 (1967): 97-102.

 

 

Banham, Martin. "The Beginnings of Nigerian Literature in English."
Review of English Literature 3:2 (1962): 88-99.

 

Banham, Martin. "Drama in the Commonwealth: Nigeria." New Theatre
Magazine 1:4 (1960): 13-21.

 

Banham, Martin. "Notes on Nigerian Theatre: 1966." Bulletin for
the Association for African Literature in English 4 (1966):
31-36.

Banham, Martin. "Nigerian Dramatists." The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 7 (1969): 132-136.

Banham, Martin. "Criticism (If Soyinka's Three Plays." Books Abroad
38:1 (1964): 92.

Banham, Martin. "A Piece that We May Fairly Call Our Own." Ibadan
12 (1966): 15-18.

 

Banham, Martin. "Playwright/Producer/Actor/Academic." New Theatre
Magazine 12:2 (1972): 10-11.

Banham, Martin. “West African Writing." Books Abroad 36 (1962):
371-374.

 

Banham, Martin. "Nigerian Dramatists in England and the Traditional
Ni erian Theatre." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
3 11967): 97-102.

Banahm, Martin, and Ramsaran, John. "West African Writing." Books
Abroad 36 (1962): 371-374.

122

Barrett, L. "The Origins and Creative Usage of the Dramatic Urge
in Writing." Pan-African Journal 2:2 (1970): 162-173.

 

Bascom, William R. "The Relationship of Folklore to Divining."
Journal of American Folklore (April-June 1963): 127-131.

Bascom, William R. "Verbal Art." Journal of American Folklore 68
(1955): 245-252.

 

Beier, Ulli. Review of A Dance of the Forests. Black Orpheus 8
(1960): 57-58.

Beier, Ulli. "The Position of the Artist in Traditional Society."
Presence Africaine 105-106 (1978): 170-180.

Beier, Ulli. "Saving a Language." Africa Quarterly 5:4 (1966):
324-338.

Beier, Ulli. "The Egungun Cult." Nigeria Magazine 51 (1956): 380-392.

Beier, Ulli. "Festival of the Images." Nigeria Magazine 45 (1954):
32-34.

Beier, Ulli. "Nigerian Literature.“ Nigeria Magazine Special
Independence Issue (1960): 212-219.

Beier, Ulli. "Obatala Festival." Nigeria Magazine 52 (1956): 10-28.

Beier, Ulli. "The Agbegigjo Masqueraders." Nigeria Magazine 82
(1964): 188-199.

Berger, Renato. "Ogun: God of War and Iron." Nigeria Magazine
99 (1968): 309-315.

Berry, Boyd M. "0n Looking at Madmen and Specialists." Pan-African
Journal 5:4 (1972): 461-471.

Billington, Michael. "First Night." (Review of Soyinka's The Road,
J. P. Clark's The Son of a Goat and The Masquerade) Plays
and Players (Lonaon) I3z2 (1965): 31-35.

Biobaku, Subur 0., and Beier Ulli. "The Use and Interpretation of
Myths." ‘de 1:1 (1955): 12-25.

 

Birihanze, James N. "African Theatre: A Call for Change." Umma
1:2 (1972): 7-11.

Bishop, Rand. "On The Critical Evalgation of African Literature."
World Literature Written in English 14:2 (1975): 497-505.

123

Blacking, John. “The Value of Music in Human Experience." Year Book
of the International Folk Music Journal 1 (1969): 9- .

Blair, D. S. Review of A Dance of the Forests and The Lion and the
Jewel. English Studies in Africa 7:1 (1964): 128-131.

 

 

Bodunrin, A. "Postscripts on the Dakar Festival." African Statesman
1:3 (1966): 33-36.

Bodunrin, A. "The First Festival of Negro Arts: A Preview." African
Statesman 1:2 (1966): 27-29.

Bodunrin, A. "What is African Literature?" African Statesman 1:1
(1965): 33-42.

 

Bodunrin, A. "Hole Soyinka: Poet, Satirist and Political Neophyte."
African Statesman 2:3 (1967): 19-27.

Brien, Alan. "Where Spades Are Trumps." (Review of the Royal Court
Theatre Production of The Invention.) The Spectator 203
(6 November 1959): 629-630.

 

Brown, Lloyd W. "The Historical Sense: T. 5. Eliot and Two African
Writers." The Conch 3:1 (1971): 59-70.

Bryden, Ronald. "The Asphalt God." (Review of The Road.) New States-
.map LXX (1965): 460-461.

Bryden, Ronald. Review of The Lion and the Jewel. Observer
(18 December 1966): 20.

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Theses, Dissertations, and Unpublished Materials

Asanga, Siga. "Theory and Practice in the Plays of John Pepper
Clark and Wole Soyinka. As Related to the Irish Dramatic
Movement, 1899-1939." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
Ottawa, Canada, 1978.

Adedeji, Joel Adeyinka. "The Alavinjo Theatre: The Study of a
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to the Present Times." Ph.D. Dissertation: University
of Ibadan, Nigeria (1969).

Adelugba, Dapo. "Nationalism and the Awakening National Theatre
of Nigeria." M.S. Thesis, University of California at
Los Angeles, 1964.

Balistreri, June Clara. "The Traditional Elements of the Yoruba
Alarinjo Theatre in Wole Soyinka's Plays." Ph.D. Disserta-
tion, University of Colorado, 1978.

Bishop, David Rand, Jr. "African Critics and African Literature:
A Study of Critical Standards, 1947-1966." Ph.D. Disserta-
tion, Michigan State University, 1970.

Elso, Ebele Ofoma. "The Critical Reception of Amos Tutuola, Chinua
Achebe and Wole Soyinka in England and America, 1952-1974."
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greens-
boro, 1974.

140

Fearn, Marianne. "Modern Drama of Africa: Form and Content, A
Study of Four Playwrights." Ph.D. Dissertation: North-
western University, Illinois, 1974.

Gibbs, James Morel. "Aspects of the Nigerian Dramatic Tradition."
M. A. Thesis, American University, Washington, D.C., 1967.

Graham-White, Anthony. "West African Drama: Folk, Popular and
Literary." Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, Stanfbrd
University, Stanford, 1969.

Haddad, Marjoire Arlene. "Pollution and Purification in the Novels
and Plays of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and John Pepper
Clark." Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, New York,
1976.

McCartney, Barney Charles. "The Traditional Satiric Method and
Matter of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe." Ph.D. Disserta-
tion, University of Texas, Austin, 1976.

McNeive, Kay. "Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Dramatist." M.A. Thesis,
University of Kansas, 1967.

Ogude, S. E. "Technique and Function of Soyinka's Satire." A
paper presented at the Second 1977/78 Departmental Seminar
of the Department of English and Literary Studies, University
of Calabar, Nigeria, December 12, 1977.

Okpaku, Joseph 0. 0., Sr. "From Swamp Dwellers to Madmen and
Specialists: The Drama of Wole Soyinka." Ph.D. Disserta-
tion, Stanford University, 1978.

 

Owomoyela, Oyekan. "Folklore and the Rise of Theatre Among the
Yoruba." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California,
Los Angeles (1970).

Peters, Jonathan A. "A Dance of Masks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka
and African Cultural History." Ph.D. Dissertation, Univers-
ity of Alberta, Canada, 1975.

Priebe, Richard. "The Development of a Mythic Consciousness in
West African Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation: The University
of Texas at Austin, 1973.

Richard, Alain. "Wole Soyinka and LeRoi Jones: An Attempt at a
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141

Ricard, Alain. "Wole Soyinka and LeRoi Jones: An Attempt at a
Comparative Study in Their Concept of Nationalism in
Drama." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California,
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Sekoni, Oluropo Johnson. "The World in Search of Viable Leadership:
A Study of Structure and Communication in Soyinka's Scripts."
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977.

Stone, Robert Henry. "Yoruba Concepts of the Natural World in
Relation to Learning Science." Ph.D. Dissertation, Univers-
ity of London, 1967.

Uyovbukerhi, Atiboroko S. A. "The Idea of Tragic Form in Nigerian
Drama Written in English." Ph.D. Dissertation, University
of Wisconsin, Madison, 1976.