Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants and King Baabu: The Crises Between Ideology and (Social) Vision

Abstract

Any valid inquiry into the meaning of any imaginative writing will lend itself to the salutary credentials of its content and form. This recourse has always created a divide that seeks on the one hand the aesthetic value of the art and on the other its functional or social values. The social themes discernible in the works of many African writers have provided the impetus for an assessment that digs up the social relevance and the ideological slants of such works. For Wole Soyinka, many critics, building on the ideas of Chinweizu, Madubuike and Jemie (1980) have identified a lacuna between social responsiveness and ideology in his works. This Paper, using Soyinka’s A Play of Giants (1984) The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope (1995) and King Baabu (2002), re examines the centrality of ideology to texts of social engagement. The writer, within the context of humanistic values, scrutinizes the social conditions presented and the dramatist’s alternative ideologies. The conclusion of the paper is that ideological dispositions are temporal and must not necessarily negate the social relevance of any work of art.