Folklore and Contemporary Realities in Death and the King’s Horseman and Death, Not A Redeemer

Abstract

The benefits of folklore to African playwrights have been very immense. From what began like mere statements of aesthetics, contemporary African playwrights have gone to seek the relevance of primordial forms to the challenges of their societies. This essay contemporizes Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) and Hope Eghagha’s Death, not A Redeemer (1998) within these tensions that raise questions on the validity of cultural modes and the needs for mediation. The writer identifies the inevitable negative impacts of contact on cultural stasis and, chronicling the lodes of contemporary challenges of African states as typified in Eghagha’s play, asserts the expediency of re-invention.