In Arrow of God, the main crisis is triggered by the imminent repudiation of the sacred ritual of yam-eating. The young bride, pregnant from her one night with Elesin, appears. After his prison experiences, his work became more political and more strident. I’ve always found you somewhat more understanding than your husband.” Jane does not understand Olunde’s reaction to his father’s death, and she calls him “callous” and a “savage.” But while Simon assumes he understands the Africans under his supervision and has no wish to learn more, Jane feels deeply the limits of her understanding.
The contrived marriage therefore has its source in the ethics and metaphysics of the culture. Much of the published criticism of the play offers little more than close reading, supported by helpful background information about the traditional role of the Praise-Singer, or the market, or the egungun ritual. This analysis has so far concentrated on the internal workings of the culture—and therefore on the internal logic of the tragic action of the play. Iyaloja, the mother of the marketplace, reluctantly agrees.

Soyinka himself has directed important American productions, in Chicago in 1976 and at Lincoln Center in New York in 1987, but these productions were more admired than loved. As the play opens, Elesin comes strutting into the market bragging about his many sexual conquests.

He also assumes that his power to control things—including his power of self-control—is limitless.

He traveled throughout Europe and the United States, teaching, writing, and directing, and he spent two years as an editor in Ghana.

Iyaloja warns him not to be deterred from his duty, and not to bring trouble on the people who will remain.

Thus was established the political custom in which a man had all the social rights, privileges, and power of a king without the necessary political and moral restraints of that state. The most important communal rites are carried out there. He tries unsuccessfully to make Pilking understand Yoruban belief. Black and white male students have not shown any liking for Simon Pilkings, who is portrayed as symbolic of the colonial administrator rather than just a male character. He remains a powerful political figure in Nigeria, albeit one who has endured imprisonment and exclusion down the decades.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Soyinka says he has no romantic notions about the innate value of Africa. Frequently, these stage directions describe elements of music, dance, and costume that are specific to Yoruba ritual. After four years in England, Olunde returns expecting only to see—and bury—his father’s body.

The praise-singer again captures this moment of historic stress: Yet despite the enormous integrity of Olunde’s self-sacrifice, it is difficult to identify the point at which his role as a cultural hero ends and where his role as the rearguard defender of a backward-looking political order prevails.

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. I have analyzed the political implications of Soyinka’s penchant for the mythic resolution of actual contradictions as well as the shortcomings of the historicist opposition to this position (Williams “Mythic Imagination”). It in turn explains Elesin’s act of hamartia. Thus, insofar as Elesin’s suicide is conceived to usher the departed king into his new kingdom, it is a crucial ritual of continuity, well-being, and hope; hence, the collective anxiety about the dire consequences of its abortion. His request for the Bride, although unexpected, must be granted, because “the claims of one whose foot is on the threshold of their abode surpasses even the claims of blood.” Iyaloja realizes that the child born of Elesin and the Bride will be extraordinary, “neither of this world nor of the next.

Soyinka will be 75 this summer, though it's hard to tell from his face; his trademark shock of curly hair - now almost completely white - is as springy and unruly as it ever was. The living and the dead in traditional Africa are closely related, and the social set-up in Africa is such that the community takes precedence over the individual: the sacrifice of an individual for the harmony of the group is traditional in many areas.

As Elesin enters the market, the Praise-Singer pleads with him to tarry a while, to enjoy the last fruits of life in this world. Suddenly he is distracted by the sight of a beautiful woman whom he has never seen before. He recalls how one actor backed out of the Chicago production after two weeks, saying she could not master the text.

He talks of the Not-I bird that sounds at the approach of death, echoed by people from all levels of society who seek to flee death—all but he, the king’s horseman, who was born and lived for this moment. The myths and rites, plus the values and beliefs they express, are present in the plays, possibly as defenses against reality, but more certainly as ideals by which the reality that is their primary concern is measured (and of which it is seen to fall short).

We have no way of knowing whether she loved Iyaloja’s son, the man she was to have married, or what personal benefit she might look forward to in marrying a man whom she had never met, and who would be dead a few minutes after the marriage was consummated. Aboyade, Bimpe, Wole Soyinka and Yoruba Oral Tradition, in Death and the King’s Horseman, Fountain Publications, 1994. 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.

In both Whitman College and The University of North Carolina at Charlotte the students unanimously found Act 1 difficult. Although Simon does not care personally what happens to Elesin, he cannot afford to have any trouble while the prince is visiting his district.

The move is important because it keeps the universe spinning. Mphahlele and Soyinka live in their home countries, where they are honored as intellectuals and political activists. CRITICAL OVERVIEW He can calmly accept his father’s death, because he knows it is necessary. He had to leave again in a hurry in 1994, not long after Nigeria came under the brutal regime of General Sani Abacha. They range from the need for a reactualization of direct relations between a people and their god to a drive towards the seasonal regeneration of sacred forces. The Oyo empire collapsed and, with it, the heroic society and culture. I made the students aware of Greek, Shakespearean, and modern concepts of tragedy and had to approach Death and the King’s Horseman from the angle they understood, while showing how the play is different in being African. From now on, disasters follow in ever greater magnitude; an action started as a ritual performance to secure the world in its metaphysical moorings completes itself in tipping that world over into the void. Raymond Williams has described these forces as the residual and the emergent. By virtue of the fact that it is often a reaction to urgent existential dilemmas, the political unconscious is clearly involved with these synchronic forces.

He acknowledges, though, that western society is less ignorant when it comes to Africa. Within Soyinka’ s corpus, Death and the King’s Horseman has achieved the status of a classic.

It would be better to speak of sacred situations in Durkheim’s spirit”.... For people in pre-industrial societies, rituals served as a vehicle for reestablishing contact with the ontological essence of the tribe. There are those who think poets and playwrights should steer clear of politics, and Soyinka says he has some sympathy with this view. Soyinka might have deliberately made it vague for suspense or unconsciously to leave gray areas in this play of the “numinous passage,” but it constitutes a problem for readers.

Put simply, Elesin overdramatizes his eagerness to go in order to hide his reluctance—even from himself. Meanwhile elsewhere, Simon Pilkings and his wife, Jane, are preparing for a masquerade party later that evening. For him, “daydreaming and wish-fulfilling fantasy are by no means a simple operation, available at any time or place for the taking of a thought.

Elesin's son, Olunde, returns to the village and, shamed by his father's actions, kills himself in hopes of fulfilling his father's duty. That ethos (I am using Clifford Geertz’s definition: “the tone, character, and quality of.. . Soyinka’s plays, including Death and the King’s Horseman, are frequently included in textbooks. A central question answered differently by various critics and reviewers is the question of theme.

He is well-meaning but unable to understand or respect the Yoruban people. ."