Introduction

The questions of cultural identity, themes, and forms have always been the interest of
both Local and Western writers and theoreticians. The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is
one of the artists whose life and work offers rich material in this field. He is a man
deeply rooted in his native Yoruba land and feels, I think, a citizen of the world at the
same time. It is of course needless to say that even these were often products of
outside influences and that, on the other hand, the present Africans and Europeans
consider as parts of their cultures things that were not necessarily born in their parts of
the world. When looking at two different cultures reflected in a work of literature we
should not forget that the distinction between what is still perceived as local and what is
imported may be much less simple than we would tend to think.
Death and the King's Horseman (1975) is particularly suitable to study, for, within the
whole of its theme, idea, and dramatic line, much of its effect is built on different
shades of contrast between African and European elements. The action of the play,
based on a real event, takes place in a Yoruba town, sometime around 1943^4. Elesin is
a prominent chief and the king's chief horseman. The king died a month ago and is to be
buried this night. According to the local law, his dog, his favorite horse, and his
horseman must accompany him to the world of his ancestors. Elesin is ready but just
before his departure he notices a beautiful girl at the market and decides to marry her
before leaving this world. Though the girl is engaged to her son, Iyaloja, the "Mother" of
the market, does not dare refuse the wish of the dying man. The District Officer Pilkings
learns about the prepared ritual suicide from his black sergeant Amusa. Pickings order
him to arrest Elesin and the couple, after some hesitation, go to the ball. The ball at the
English club advances successfully, honored by the presence of Royalty, the Prince on a
tour of the colonies. While the Pilkingses entertain the company with their native
disguise, Amusa arrives to report the failure of his mission. He seems to hear distant
drums announce his father's death and leaves to see his dead body, Elesin is brought in,
alive and in handcuffs. The shock is deep on both sides. Elesin, humiliated and painfully
ashamed, falls at his son's feet, but Olunde refuses to recognize him.
The last scene takes place in Elesins's improvised prison. Pilkings, uneasy, gives him a
message from Olunde, who regrets his reaction and would like to have his father's
blessing before going back to England. African and European elements in this complex
play are each of its thematic and formal aspects that would deserve a separate analysis.

THEME
He describes the conflict of the play as "largely metaphysical, contained in the human
vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind — the world of the living, the
dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links it all: transition". Elesin, a
man full of energy and love of life, and his friends speak about the joys and sorrows of
life and about the fact that the inner peace, brought by a sense of the order of the world,
is stronger than the desires of earthly life, than the sadness of separation. But he does
falter in the end, at the sight of a young beauty, trying, not very successfully perhaps, to
convince his friends of the purity of his intention.
The Mother of the market is merciless: "He is gone at last but oh, how late it all is. His
son will feed on the meat and throw him bones. The passage is clogged with droppings
from the King's stallion; he will arrive all stained in dung. You sat with folded arms while
evil strangers tilted the world from its course and crashed it beyond the edge of
emptiness. Gerald Moore, in his book Wole Soyinka, not only sees Elesin's "failure of will
" as "allegorical of a wider African failure to stick to indigenous values, even when not
actually forced to abandon them" (159), but for him, there is, moreover, "no doubt that
Soyinka intends a denunciation of all forms of blind colonial meddling. ...what is
lamented", he continues, "Is a heart-wound struck at more than one African culture. Even
though the play is dedicated to Soyinka's father, the extent of the autobiographic
element is difficult to determine precisely and remains, at the level of this paper,
speculation. As for the colonial factor, I do think that however unpolitical the conflict of
the play may be in its author's intention, in the effect there is much political and
anticolonial comment about it.
The information it brings in this respect is not new, but it is the energy of the revolt that
impresses, the power of resistance, the depth of sadness, of the despair, and the
contempt the African characters express, referring to the whites' values, to their weak
points. The social, political, and historical comment does become, as suggested above,
another, and with some readers and viewers the main, theme of the play. Though
describing the colonial ways of the British in Africa, it speaks about colonialism as such,
and about what lack of respect means generally, themes which, again, are not only
African.

GENRE
Elesin, of course, is a classical hero, and Olunde is a more modern one. Though there is
not a perfect unity of place and action, both are very much centered on the principal
dramatic conflict, and the time observes fully the classical requirement of one day, for
all the action takes place within one evening and night. At the same time, like
Shakespeare, and O'Casey, and like the African theatre, Soyinka sees life as a constant
mixture of joys and sadness and knows the importance of a comic element within the
grave atmosphere of a play. The scene in which African schoolgirls, helping their
mothers drive away the black policeman Amusa from Elesin's improvised wedding
chamber, perform a lively sketch of a dialogue at the English club, is a memorable
example. The beginning of the fourth act is thus a variation of the 17th-century court
theatre genre: through music, dance, movement, and perhaps some improvised word it
tells the events of the ball at the English club until Amusa arrives from the market. A
very handy tool for condensing the action, it contains many comments within a small
space as well. The name and the form of the genre itself, Royalty in a 17th-century
costume dancing the waltz and the Pilkingses' first prize for their death mask, all form a
powerful image of anachronism and absurdity and transform the old genre into a
moment of the theatre of the absurd.

CONSTRUCTION AND RHYTHM

The last scene is set in the prison cell improvised in the Residency, where the white and
the African characters meet — it is the former's place, but the latter leads the action and
carries the meaning of the play. Besides the symbolic value of this arrangement, the
scene closes logically with the strategy of contrast developed throughout the play's
construction. The African and the European elements are alternated by sharp switches
from one to another or simply juxtaposed but always the effect is powerful, like in the
passage from Elesin's ritual and spiritual dance and song to the Pilkingses' tango
danced to the sound of a gramophone, between the first and the second scenes.
The suspense is developed and the shock is great. Similarly, the rite of the ritual suicide
is very early exposed as the event of the play and the source of action. But it is not until
the end of the play that its basic principles and its timing are explained through pieces
of information brought at different moments by different characters. Attention is kept
throughout. Though suggestion, paraphrasing, the repetitive, slow increasing of rhythm,
and retrospective narration are natural elements of all oral traditions, Soyinka's use of
some of them, and first of all of turn flashback technique, reminds us of modern prose
as well.
All the principles mentioned above would not suffice to create the dramatic power of
the play if he did not apply to his tragedy the classical principles of composition. The
first scene, in its poetic way, exposes very well the hero and the problem: Elesin's
sudden desire for an earthly union is already here shown as a possible threat when
lyaloja asks him: "You wish to travel light. Well, the earth is yours. But be sure the seed
you leave in it attracts no curse" (DKHJ.162). The second scene brings the first collision
when Amusa refuses to talk to the mask of death worn by his boss about the death
prepared in town and that he will be asked to stop. The collision is then taken over to
the market, the truly African territory, in the third scene, where Amusa's attempt to
arrest Elesin fails. When in the fourth scene Pilkings tells Olunde that they "have a crisis"
on their hands, he names the dramatic role of this scene.
Moreover, one of the deaths was useless, for the "gods demanded only tHe old expired
plantain", while the English, by their intervention, have "cut down the sap-laden shoot" to
"feed" their "pride" (DKH,v.219). At the very end of the last scene, however, the thoughts
go to the unborn fruit of the union of Elesin and his young bride. This, I think, could be a
call to try and keep the circle of life, and the order of the world alive, a sign of hope. The
construction of the play shows then clearly that Soyinka combines the tools of African
theatre with those learned from European tragic literature for the effect of his work.

METHOD
The "European" and partly mixed scenes use a realistic method, with the above-
mentioned exception of a masque, used at the beginning of the fourth scene. The
"African" and partly again the mixed scenes might rather be a poetic development of the
real ways. This distinction applies in particular to the characterization but is strongly
reflected in the use of prose and verse, in the language, and the (partly) non-verbal
means of expressions as well, as will be shown later. The characterization tends to be
fuller and more subtly drawn with the English characters, while the African ones are
much more types than complex human beings, with some exceptions in the case of
Elesin, whose force as well as weak points do appear. Nevertheless, the wisdom and
wrath of lyaloja, the affection, and grief of the praise singer, the vitality and shrewdness
of the girls and their mothers' experience are all felt as real.
The Africans, on the other hand, seem to move most of the time with an inner rhythm
that is soft and slow, though it might at times look outwardly different. There is
something much more natural about it, for it is guided by a sense of the rhythm of life,
of what must be. They do not develop much and even the unexpected destinies of
Elesin and Olunde belong to the logic of their tempers and visions of the world and are
well prepared by the play. When Olunde hears about the pilot who blew himself up with
his ship bringing to the port a dangerous cargo, to save the local population, he does not
find the news morbid, like Jane, but rather "inspiring. It is an affirmative commentary on
life. If we compare the techniques of characterization, we find fluent English
conversation and more or less abrupt dramatic action with the English, who are rarely
characterized directly by other characters (Jane's remarks on her husband are among
the exceptions), but rather by their verbal reactions and by their acts.
The language itself abounds in figures and the story might be seen as symbolic as well.
The death cult mask is yet another type of symbol. Besides, the construction of the play,
the development of the plot, and the dialogues all contain symbolic elements —
contrasts, parallels, and ironies of unequal subtlety. Among them, there is the
Pilkingses' death mask dancing at the fancy ball at the very moment of Elesin's dance of
death, his desire to whisper his message to the courier as he did to the ears of his son,
expressed just before Olunde's face is disclosed, and Pilkings placing Elesin in a former
room for slaves whose bars are still intact.

PROSE AND VERSE

The English speak in prose and Olunde's only local image is calling his father "eater of
left-overs", a slip into the local idiom that only comes as a result of the outrage
developed during the preceding dialogue with Jane, led in fluent and rather intellectual
English, but helping him to realize fully his African roots again. The African characters
can talk in a matter-of-fact style, there are in the play, and especially so in the last part,
many moments in which the rhythm and imagery of their prose have much of the
intensity of the verse parts, as some of the above-quoted passages prove. The rhythm
and the meaning of what the Africans say are frequently strengthened by the repetition
of the same sentence, or phrase or by the development of the same theme. Some of his
poetry in the play is dense, some more relaxing. But rarely is what is said inaccessible to
the reader, while the spectator will perhaps sometimes have to follow the rhythm and
the mood rather than the complex metaphorically expressed meanings. The subtle
message of this distinction is understood by those who know the conventions of
Elizabethan drama. Others will feel it spontaneously, subconsciously perhaps, as a part
of Soyinka's comment on the two groups of his characters.

LANGUAGE
Linguistically speaking and except for a few Yoruba words, sometimes translated or
explained, the language of the play is English, but even this one language, at least in
some of its aspects, suggests differences between as well as contacts of cultures. It
goes from the colloquial English of the Pilkingses, colored by some professional jargon,
via Amusa's pidgin, forgotten sometimes (maybe by Soyinka himself?) for a more
correct grammar and vocabulary, to Olunde's cultivated English and the snobbishly
relaxed idiom of the colonials at the English club. I think that it is symptomatic that the
African people around Elesin speak English whose grammar is correct and leaves thus
no place for ridicule.

CONCLUSION
Our knowledge of African theatre and its cultural and historical background may limit
our capacity to distinguish what exactly is African in the play, but we can see the
presence of European elements and say that Soyinka's seemingly free, but, well-thought
-out mixing of both is one of the key principles of the conception of the play and a
powerful tool of its effect. The use of quasi-European settings and the presence of
important European characters are not usual in Soyinka's earlier plays. The historical
event the play draws from demanded them, but they might, moreover, reflect the
specific situation in which the play was finally written in the 1970s, during Soyinka's
long stay in Europe, after he had thought of it for several years. The two plays
immediately preceding and following Death and the King's Horseman are stations of
European drama, one of which is set outside Africa, and the following original play is set
in New York, though at an African embassy. All this might then suggest a further
enlargement of the choice of settings and forms used for both his African and universal
themes and show in practice that the borderline between the "African" and the
"Western" in a work of literature is not easy to draw.