Life & Background
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, western Nigeria in 1934 into a Yoruba family, his father a school headmaster and his mother a shopkeeper and activist in the Abeokuta women's movement. He studied at Ibadan and then Leeds, and worked at the Royal Court Theatre in London before returning to Nigeria at independence. During the civil war he attempted to broker a ceasefire and was imprisoned without trial for twenty-two months, most of it in solitary confinement, writing on cigarette packets and toilet paper; The Man Died came out of it. Under the Abacha dictatorship in the 1990s he fled the country and was sentenced to death in absentia. He has taught at universities in Nigeria, Britain, and the United States and remains a public critic of Nigerian and international politics.
Death and the King's Horseman
Set in Oyo in 1946, based on real events. The Yoruba king has died, and custom requires Elesin Oba, the king's horseman, to take his own life so as to accompany him and keep the community's passage between worlds intact. Elesin, at the market on the night of the ritual, demands a young bride, and the market women, led by Iyaloja, grant her with misgiving. The British district officer, Pilkings, learning of the intended ritual, arrests Elesin to prevent what he sees as barbarism — while he and his wife wear confiscated ancestral masks to a fancy-dress ball for a visiting prince. Elesin's son Olunde, studying medicine in England, returns for his father's funeral, finds him alive and shamed, and takes his place. Elesin, seeing his son's body, strangles himself; Iyaloja tells him he has left the world unmade.
Soyinka's own preface warns against reducing the play to a clash of cultures, and the warning is worth taking: the colonial officer is an interference, but the tragedy belongs to Elesin's own hesitation, his appetite for life, and his failure of will. The dramaturgy fuses Yoruba ritual — the praise-singer, the drums, Ogun's transitional abyss between the worlds of the living, dead, and unborn as theorised in Myth, Literature and the African World — with the structure of European tragedy, and the language moves between dense Yoruba-inflected poetry for the market scenes and clipped naturalism for the British. Olunde, educated in England and yet the one who honours the rite, is the play's answer to any assumption that modernity and tradition sort by generation.
Why Soyinka Matters
Soyinka was the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize, and his drama demonstrated that Yoruba cosmology and ritual could carry tragedy on the world stage without translation into European terms. His criticism, particularly Myth, Literature and the African World, provides one of the few fully worked African theories of tragedy, and his attack on Negritude — the tiger does not proclaim its tigritude — is a standard reference in debates about African identity. His prison writing and his political exile make him the type of the writer as dissident.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Dance of the Forests1960
- The Lion and the Jewel1963
- The Road1965
- Kongi's Harvest1965
- The Man Died1972
- Death and the King's Horseman1975
- Myth, Literature and the African World1976
- Aké: The Years of Childhood1981