Death and the King's Horsemen

Death and the King's Horsemen Summary | Author's Note Summary

Wole Soyinka opens his play with an author's note, in which he explains that Death and the King's Horseman is based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruban city of Nigeria, in 1946. Soyinka sets the play a few years before, while World War II still waged, and changed other details. The individual characters are also his invention.

The author strenuously argues that the theme of his play is not the clash of old and new cultures. The conflict at the center of the play, he says, is not between the Yoruba religion of Africa and the British colonial presence. In his mind, cultures have to have a degree of equality before they can be said to clash. Soyinka does not consider the acquisitive foreign culture of England, which gained power in Nigeria largely through the destruction of its complex religion, to be equal to Yoruban culture.

Soyinka also takes pains to point out to readers, producers, and directors of his play that the District Officer, Simon Pilkings, is not caught in a cruel dilemma. Pilkings decisions are based on a desire not to lose face in front of his superiors at a European costume party. For its author, this play is not a clash between traditional and modern practices. Its confrontation, he states, is in the person of Elesin Oba and the universe as seen by the Yoruba people. This universe contains the living, the dead, the unborn, and the transition that links them all.