This article attempts to trace the cultural discord in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman as the white colonial culture impose itself into the rituals, traditions, myth, beliefs, etc. of the black native land of Yoruba clan and thereby evoking a play of cultural politics which establishes the white as superior to these native black tribe. Further, the play also reiterates the ideas and notions regarding the ‘blackness’ of the black as Frantz Fannon details in his work Black Skin White Mask. In the introductory part of the book, Fannon asks the pivotal question-
“What does a man want?
What does a black man want?”
Frantz Fannon details on his psychological understanding of the identity crises, struggle for finding and establishing roots in matters of black lives. While Fannon details on the issues of racism, and marginalization of African community within their native space, Wole Soyinka delineates the same idea in a parallel plane, through his work Death and the King’s Horseman, which is abound in themes of superstitions, religious convictions, cultural politics, suicide, white supremacy etc.
As much as Death and the King’s Horseman was inspired by an actual event, its characters, Elesin, Olunde, Iyaloja, Simon Pilkings, Jane Pilkings and Amusa, Joseph et al. behave like archetypes that juxtaposes the contradicting perceptions of African and Western outlook on native rituals and exposes the incongruities and the changing tendencies of the native beliefs and ideologies through struggles within their system. As much as it is a play that details and defines the African traditional whiffs, by its theme technique and style, it somehow extolls itself as a modern folklore that relates on the conflicts in individual’s conviction and its grave repercussions on self and society.
The whole idea of western infiltration into African niche, accounts for the manipulations in superstitious slant in the dimension of African cultural politics. The deep rooted belief- that the reluctance of the horseman in following the dead Chief to the spirit world for ascending the Chief’s spirit to the afterlife causing an imminent plague upon the living world, inflicted by the unquenched soul of the deceased- functions as the axial element around which the question of challenging African belief and white man’s burden evolves. Thus the entire plot stems from this base and evolves with the clashing aspects of native and the western viewpoints, where, Iyaloja embodies the superstitious significations of the native land while the Pilkings epitomizes the rational and modern fervor of the first world.
Elesin, the dead king’s horseman, waiting for his cue to ritual suicide is the leading protagonist of this play, perhaps with an undercurrent of antagonism, remorse, thorough materialism etc. It makes him more reliable as a true representation of an individual than an exalted image of a hero. Elesin, once, an ardent horse man to the king, now has his principles on slippery grounds; owing to the fact that he is guilty of material desires and that he must now face his death to prove his loyalties to the ruling class as well as a society, which is neck deep in matters of superstitions.
Elesin’s resolve to commit ritual suicide fails as he progresses towards the ominous hour of death. His material desires overpower his spiritual obligations. His yearnings escalates in the forms of a hasty marriage to the bride, looking eager for excuses to tarry and cling on to the material world and resorting to his son, Olunde to take his place who had originally returned from abroad to bury his father. The hue and cry in the marketplace and the previous flaunting of ‘courage’ in ‘the face of death’, all crumbles as fear sets in. This is where Pilkings turns up as a blessing in disguise as he thwarts Elesin’s attempt to ritual suicide. Here, one could find his initial resolution and courage to commit the ritual suicide fail like a house of cards as Elesin is revealed to be an ordinary man with ordinary scope of thoughts. This alone pulls him down to earth as a common man unlike the former larger than life image of a valiant horseman.
Here, Pilkings, a symbol of imperial power, with his intolerance to the Nigerians and their perceived savagery, paints the stereotypical image of an unrelenting colonial white man, even when, his wife, Jane Pilkings, though naïve, tries to understand the Nigerian beliefs. Simon Pilking’s violent behavior to Jane delineates a west that could be beastly within its domesticity and proving to be hypocritical in its claim for all natural sophistications that the Dark Continent lacks.
The flaunting of the egungun costume by the white couple shows their outright disdain of African myth and superstition, something that Amusa strongly showed his objection to. Joseph, with his African roots and his debatable slant on Christianity also renders his identity on unsteady grounds. Here, Amusa and Joseph are entrapped in a situation that destabilizes their roots. This idea is not isolated as Fannon subtly acknowledged it in Black Skin White Mask- “His metaphysics or less pretentiously his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.”
Here the imposition of white man’s liberal thoughts on native conservative structure sure had its sway. That, Olunde, Elesin’s son, being almost smuggled out of his homeland to pursue the white man’s sciences instead of the sacred spiritual philosophies of his own soil, is in itself a proof of the imperial imposition of the new discourses and cultural aspects of western episteme into a world of myth, taboos, superstitions etc. This is where one gets to delineate the cultural politics amidst the two clashing worlds. The disdain for African culture and mythologies by the white supremacists and engendering their own modern whiffs and liberal thoughts on Africans by the colonial masters shows the play of power and the consequent shift of power from the now marginalized Africans to the Colonial center in a land seized from the former. Thus culture mythology and its political aspects becomes vehicle for control and subjugating the African landscape.
Iyaloja is perhaps one of those only women in the play who is vocal on any matter native, traditional and close to their hearts; while all other women folks delineate the tame submissive stereotypical manifestations within restrains of family and society. Iyaloja’s open remarks and accusations make her the mouth piece of traditional African society that is immersed in definitions of beliefs, taboos and superstitions. Her loud words and coarse tongue is an exposition of the native and crude African airs. Pilkings on the other hand embodies the imperial mindset of Whiteman’s burden in his disdain for African culture and mythology. Here, juxtaposing the characters of Iyaloja and Pilkings, one could delineate what Fannon meant by, “The white man is sealed in his whiteness, the black man in his blackness.”
Ultimately, Elesin’s suicide turns out to be not one of the ritualistic deeds that elevate the repute of African tradition; on the contrary, the suicide is one of shame, humiliation, regret and desperation. Elesin’s dithering in the matters of ritual suicide brings dishonor to the clan that prompts Olunde to take his father’s place in performing the ritual suicide. Having witnessed his son’s lifeless remains, it dawns upon Elesin that he had failed to keep his end of promise to his clan, his chief, his beliefs, his roots, and finally, his son and himself. The failure to perform the ritual is coupled with the shame of not having enough conviction to the clan even as much as his estranged son. The humiliation is added with the critical remarks directed towards him by Iyaloja. The regret stems from loosing his son to the necessities of religion when it should have been his job to prove the veneration for his native land. As much as it is impossible to retrace the bygone, there’s the desperation to set things right that is now beyond his grasp. It is the same desperation that prompts him towards a suicide which is not revered like the honorable death of a horseman, but is despicable, as the beliefs are broken by the same man who was bound to protect it. Thus the death is one of disgrace than dignified.
Unlike occidental tradition, African mythology sticks to the oral form of transformation from one generation to the next through forms of stories and rituals. Here, the individual become a microcosm amidst the universal scope of the spirit world. With its pagan roots and supernatural predilections, the ritual and cultural politics of Africa is consistent with its favor for an elite class within the community and consequently, often, at the expense of their social subordinates.
With multiplicity of tradition and cultural overtones, the Yoruba culture, among many others, stands prominent due to many reasons; that it embodies a formidable population of African continent, its recurrence in African literature, and above all, Wole Soyinka who belongs to the tribe and has so lucidly immortalized its various aspects and predilections through his many works including, Death and the King’s Horseman and The Strong Breed. In majority of his works, one could delineate the lingering conflict between the African culture and the Western culture, where the latter somehow stands superior to the former.
Thus, Death and the King’s Horseman in many way signifies the political culmination of Soyinka’s firm belief on the volatility of ritual, culture and aesthetics of myths; its assertion towards a validity in relation to its resilience and of its ability to contextualize the truth. Soyinka’s aesthetic view on African cultural politics is juxtaposed to the understanding of the tribulations and injustices to which the archetypal things of ritual, myth and culture offer its own mode of resistance within the hoi-polloi. And in these many ways, Death and the King’s Horseman reverberates like an author’s complain towards the ideological constructions that make up his native land.