Soyinka’s Threnodic Vision Vitality, Transition, and Colonialism in Death and the King’s Horseman

Abstract

In this article, I explore the ways in which the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka offers a unique conception of tragedy, one which reveals key aspects of the Yoruba worldview that informed his upbringing. In contrast to western conceptions of tragedy, in which death works as a grand severance between the individual and the cosmos, Soyinka provides a counter example in the Yoruba understanding of tragedy. This is one in which the vital links between the world of the living and the world of the dead, of gods, or of spirits are severed not by death, but by a disruption in the meaning and work of death. In one of his major works, the play Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), Soyinka composes a tragedy out of a British colonial officer’s interruption of a ritual suicide, in which the newly-deceased king’s horseman is to go and join his former master in the realm of the dead, to guide him in linking the world of the gods and the world of the living. The officer cannot understand the importance of the suicide, and prevents it. I argue that what Soyinka portrays in this work is, first, a vision of tragedy that overturns western assumptions of the genre. Second, through this unique vision of tragedy, informed by the ontology and metaphysics of Yoruba culture, Soyinka outlines a radically different understanding of the relationship between vitality and death. The tragic heart of Death and the King’s Horseman, what Soyinka calls its “threnodic essence,” is a disruption of a world in which life and death are intimately related.