Death and the King’s Horseman (Style)

Style

Setting

Death and the King’s Horseman takes place in the Nigerian town of Oyo in approximately 1943 or 1944. Nigeria became a colony of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and into the 1940s British officers kept order and protected a small group of white Europeans who lived in the country. The white expatriates and the black Africans, members of the Yoruba people, inhabited parallel worlds, each group attempting to maintain its own traditional way of life.

The market is the center of the community, where people gather to socialize, to trade, to celebrate and to perform rituals, and it is here that Elesin comes as his last day draws to a close. The Western-style homes of the district officer and the resident are set apart from the village, but close enough that the sounds of the ceremonial drumming can be still be heard. The two communities, each holding a special event on the night of the play’s action, do not mingle. No whites are present at the ceremony marking Elesin’s passage, and the only blacks at the fancy-dress ball are servants.

Tragedy

In its structure, Death and the King’s Horseman appears to be based on the tragedy. The tragedy is an ancient form of drama in which an important person passes through a series of events and choices, resulting in a great catastrophe. Tragedies have been written all around the world over thousands of years, to examine the dignity of humans and their greatest strengths and weaknesses. According to the ancient Greeks, tragedy filled the audience with fear and pity, and so helped a community deal psychologically with these emotions. The structure of a tragedy may be generally divided into several distinct parts: an introduction in which the characters, setting and situation are established; the complication or rising action, during which an opposing force is introduced; the climax or turning point; the falling action, or another focusing on the opposing forces; and the catastrophe, or the unhappy conclusion.

Death and the King’s Horseman has in fact been built on this pattern. Act 1 introduces Elesin and his duty; Act 2 introduces an opposing force in the figure of Simon Pilkings, who plans to prevent Elesin’s suicide; Act 3 ends with the climax of Elesin in transition, apparently only moments away from the central action, his death; Act 4 shifts the focus back to Simon Pilkings, and ends with the revelation that Elesin’s suicide has been prevented; Act 5 contains Elesin’s musings on the disorder brought about by his failure, and presents the deaths of Olunde and Elesin.

Foreshadowing

When a play or story includes early clues to what will happen later, the writing is said to include foreshadowing. In Death and the King’s Horseman there are several hints in Act 1 that Elesin will not carry through with his plan to commit suicide. As Elesin and the Praise- Singer enter the market, for example, Elesin comments on the attractiveness of the women there. The Praise-Singer agrees, but warns, “The hands of women also weaken the unwary.” This warning creates in the audience’s mind the possibility of failure, even danger. When Elesin promises that he will be faithful and join his forbears, the Praise-Singer replies, “In their time the world was never tilted from its groove, it shall not be in yours.” Again, the possibility of failure is presented, as it will be several more times by the Praise-Singer and the women of the market as they assure each other that Elesin will not fail.

Elesin himself speaks eagerly about his determination to complete his duty. He dances and chants a long tale of the “Not-I bird,” a bird who flew away when “Death came calling.” Several critics have pointed out that Elesin seems here to be protesting too much. Why does he repeatedly assure the crowd that he will “not delay”? Why does he keep raising the specter of failure on what should be a glorious day of celebration? The foreshadowing helps prepare the audience for what will happen, prolonging and intensifying the experience of watching Elesin confront and then turn away from his duty.

Ritual

Death and the King’s Horseman is set firmly in Yorubaland, and the metaphysical issues spring from Yoruba belief. However, as Nigeria and the rest of the world move “forward,” the world becomes more homogenous and Western, and ancient beliefs and customs are lost. Soyinka writes in the Author’s Note of the play’s “threnodic essence,” or the play’s mourning the loss of tradition. With Elesin and Olunde both dead, the tradition of the king’s horseman cannot continue, because it depends on the job of chief horseman being passed down from father to son. With Elesin’s failure, an important ritual has been lost.

On stage, the play both celebrates and mourns ritual. Unlike the plays of William Shakespeare, which contain almost no stage directions, Death and the King’s Horseman includes several lengthy passages in which the playwright describes what the actors are doing in addition to speaking their lines. Frequently, these stage directions describe elements of music, dance, and costume that are specific to Yoruba ritual. For example, Elesin parades into the market with an entourage of drummers and praise-singers, and the beginning of the play before a line is spoken — is a reenactment of part of the ritual of the horseman’s last day. The stage directions also mandate that Elesin dance, accompanied by drumming, as he chants the story of the “Not-I bird”; that the alari-cloth the women drape him with be bright red and that they dance around him; that Simon and Jane dance the tango, and that they perform a sacrilegious imitation of the egungun ceremony; that Elesin dances his way into a trance; and so on. These scenes are rich with sound and color, and most of them are not discussed by the characters. They form a separate layer of understanding, unavailable to those who merely read the printed script. In addition to the themes and ideas portrayed by the words the actors speak, the audience of a performance also witnesses a series of rituals enacted on stage as they used to be enacted in village markets.

Compare & Contrast

• 1940s: Nigeria is a colony of Great Britain, governed by a white British minority bureaucracy.

  1963: Nigeria becomes an independent republic, with Nnamdi Azikiwe as first president.

  1975: A military coup brings General Olusegun Obasanjo to power. He is Nigeria’s third military dictator since 1966.

  1999: The latest in a series of military rulers, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, assumes power and invites Soyinka back from a four-year exile. The general pledges to bring Nigeria out of its long period of oppression at the hands of corrupt military rulers.

• 1967: Soyinka begins a prison term of more than two years for criticizing the Nigerian government. He will serve fifteen months in solitary confinement.

  1974: Nobel-prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is stripped of his Soviet citizenship and forced into exile. Writer Es’kia Mphahalele is living in exile from South Africa, after being arrested for protesting apartheid. Soyinka accepts a position as a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University in England.

  2000: Solzhenitsyn, his citizenship restored, again lives in Russia. Mphahlele and Soyinka live in their home countries, where they are honored as intellectuals and political activists.

• 1970s: African writing is not much taught in European or American schools, and is not widely read or understood outside Africa. When Soyinka is invited to be a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University, he is invited to talk about not literature, but about anthropology.

  1986: Soyinka becomes the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is both an acknowledgment of his importance to world literature and an opportunity to attract even more readers around the world.

  2000: High schools and colleges routinely offer courses in World Literature, and these courses increasingly include African and other so-called Third World literatures. Soyinka’s plays, including Death and the King’s Horseman, are frequently included in textbooks.

• 1953: In the nation’s first official census, 43 percent of Nigerians report themselves as Muslims; 22 percent label themselves Christians; 34 percent are recorded as followers of ancestral religions.

  1999: Fewer Nigerians now practice traditional religions. Approximately 50 percent are Muslims, 40 percent are Christian, and only 10 percent adhere to ancestral beliefs.

• 1945: Few opportunities for higher education are available for blacks in Nigeria. Formal education consists mostly of missionary schools, and does not extend beyond the secondary level.

  2000: Nigeria has an extensive system of public schools as well as many religious schools. There are several universities, and a few medical schools affiliated with teaching hospitals. Nigerians pursuing medical careers need not go abroad for their education.