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Death and the Horseman

Wole Soyinka's play Death and the Horseman is both essentially African and classically Western. The story itself is one about African characters and events that took place (and could only have taken place) within the context of colonial Africa. But the form of the play is Western in at least two different ways. It both adheres to specific Western theories about how a play should be constructed and adopts a Western genre. Traditional Africans two hundred years ago would not have sat down and written a play like this about such events because formally scripted plays designed to be performed on a proscenium stage with the same lines spoken each night to an audience awaiting a neat climax is not a traditional African way of understanding or presenting history. Soyinka has created a hybrid form for a hybrid land, arguing (implicitly, by the very act of writing this play) that neither traditional African means of expression nor fully Western ones would be adequate to tell a story in which two sets of history collided.

The play recalls events that happened in Oyo, Nigeria, in 1946, when this ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria saw the death of a king. This death was to be followed by the suicide of Elesin Oba, who in life had served as the king's chief horseman and who in death must accompany him to the afterworld so that he does not lose his way. The story up to this point is sad, but not a tragedy. People die, and throughout the broad course of human history men and women have followed their leaders into death, and many have done so willingly and with the belief that such a sacrifice must be made willingly.

But into this time of sorrow steps Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer who decides that he must prevent Elesin's killing himself. This decision is based, perhaps, in part because he finds the ritual barbaric and the Africans that he is charged with governing barbaric themselves for approving of it. But mostly he wants to shelt...

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Death and the Horseman. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:07, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688089.html