Cosmology and Politics in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

Conference Paper

2013

, Hala Maziad Altuwaijri . 2013

The collectivism and immediacy of dramatic experience challenge playwrights to

employ this genre in order to convey political, cultural, and sometimes

philosophical or ideological messages. Hence, if a country is in a state of war,

under colonialism, or undergoes a revolution, the stage functions as a platform

where resistance or acceptance is presented, and where identity marking can take

place. In this chapter, my intention is to focus on drama as play that is a medium

through which issues of history, cosmology, and a nation’s politics are addressed.

Particularly, I would like to examine A Dance of the Forests by the Nigerian Nobel

laureate, Wole Soyinka. The play exemplifies how the stage can be used to present

the cosmology and worldview of a culture in general, and of the Yoruba in

particular, in a context that challenges the romanticised history of pre-colonial

Africa and the political future of post-independent Nigeria. In 1960, the year of

Nigeria’s independence from British colonization, Soyinka was awarded a

Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. He returned

with a clear sense of scepticism about the political future of his country. Therefore,

when he was asked to write a play that would celebrate independence, he seized

this opportunity to challenge the Nigerian audience to re-evaluate their political

future when the heroism and chivalry of independence fades away. Hence, the

gathering of the tribes is the pre-colonial context that Soyinka used to parody the

political future of Nigeria. My chapter is divided into two parts. The first part

focuses on the deployment of the play in terms of presenting the peculiar

cosmology and worldview of the Yoruba. A Dance of the Forests is a play that

demonstrates a complex interplay between gods, mortals, and the dead while it

addresses the experience of self-discovery within the context of West African

spiritualism. The second part is devoted to the use of the play as a warning against

a disturbed political future under the tyranny of local leaders. Soyinka used precolonial

history to assert that tyranny and dictatorship were not restricted to

colonisers, but have also been practiced during the times of African leadership.

Key Words: Drama, colonisation, revolution, pre-colonial history, cosmology,

Yoruba, Africa, Nigeria, politics, African Spiritualism, West-African mythology.

• Publication Work Type: Paper
• Conference Location: Oxford University
• Conference Name: interdisciplinary-net. Making sense of Play.
• Sponsoring Organization: King Saud University