Wole Soyinka

The Cotton Club; famous Black club during
the Harlem Renaissance

Today in class, we learned a little bit about negritude. Negritude was a literary movement among black writers in Paris that began in the 1930's and 40's. Inspired the Harlem Renaissance, the movement became an assertion of the writers' cultural identity. They sought to give black people around the world an identity of their own. Politically, the movement was a response to, and a refusal of, French colonialism, and affected how those who were colonized viewed themselves. We learned in class that Achebe was a supporter of the negritude movement, but Soyinka was not.

Wole Soyinka was born in Nigeria and educated in England. There's no doubt that he experienced racism and complete disregard of his culture by the English. "Death and the King's Horseman" is one of Soyinka's more famous works. It is about a minor chief, Elesin, is destined to follow his dead king to the afterlife. To do this, he must commit ritual suicide. But the Englishmen, who are attempting to colonize and westernize the tribe, ruin the ritual in order to save the Elesin's life (they don't understand how important the ritual is to the tribe). In the end, they only succeed in causing more trouble because he committed suicide in his cell after seeing that Olunde, his son, had commit suicide to take his place in the afterlife. I guess the intentions of the English were good, but they were ignorant to the beliefs and customs of the tribe and deliberately disrespected their culture.

Wole Soyinka

Soyinka himself said that this play was not about culture clash, but this perplexes me because that's all it seems to be about. If we take his word for it, though, it leaves us wondering what it is really about. Discord among the many cultures present runs rampant throughout the play and it's hard to imagine that Soyinka's overall meaning is not something to do with that discord. My first impression after reading the play was that it is about oppression of the black people by the white, and the consequences it has. The play could also be about moving on and letting past occurrences go; at the end, a woman says "Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn." Here Soyinka seems to say just focus on the future because you can't change what's happened.