The teaching of African literature to undergraduate students in the Western academy presents a number of unique problems.Footnote ¹ Minority literatures always run the risk of being read as testaments to truths about other cultures. In this type of reading the cultural “difference” of African or minority literature is taken as its essential defining feature, thus leading to a perspective that devotes itself to testing the “authenticity” or otherwise of such literature. This may be seen as part of an ethnographic attitude to such writing. Mistakes of two kinds are common: the first has to do with the manufacture of essentialisms that pass for “African” life and culture. The second, and even more deadly one, is to do with the ways in which the West is postulated as a moral entity. Not only is it rendered in a monolithic guise, but it is also analyzed mainly in terms that have forced the postulation of African counter-identities themselves to be couched predominantly in the form of definable (and different) moral values in the first place. In another turn, the West is read as the beneficiary of colonialism, and minority literatures as exposing this debt. But the flipside is also applicable, namely, that minority literatures are essentially derivative of Western genres and literary standards and so offer nothing but lively addenda to what has come before. I state these problems starkly in order to highlight how much more sensitive we have to make our students in their encounter with African literature. And yet at the same time, it is impossible in dealing with students new to this literature to avoid the question of cultural competence. Couched in the mode of “how can a person of privileged background from X be able to understand a cultural product from the underprivileged context Y,” the question frustrates students from dealing with African literature first and foremost as literary writing, as opposed to ethnography, sociology, or something else. My emphasis on “literariness” is not to say that using literature as cultural testimonial is in itself harmful but that this method of reading is often presented as if it is somehow inherently African and that the assumption is typically made as if the issue is self-evident.

The issue of cultural competence is one I address afresh each time I have taught African literature. My approach to this has been two-fold. First is to get my students to understand that what appears to be a specifically cultural or ethnographic detail is only important to the degree to which it reveals something about another level of the text, such as characterization, historical background, ethical choice, notions of causality and transition, and so on. Second has been to persuade them that every cultural particularity must be seen first and foremost as a threshold rather than as a discrete entity in itself. The relationship between particularity and threshold must be seen as that between figure and ground, or between window and vista, or between vector and totality, each of which can be explored in smaller or greater detail depending on what the objectives for interpretation are. But whichever way the relationship of particularity and threshold is interpreted, its meaning must be conceived as a process, that is to say, in terms of a series of processual textual transactions whereby a seemingly innocent and self-evident cultural detail progressively changes its status as it is read alongside other details and dimensions of the text in question. And this procedure is as important to those from “inside” of a culture as it is for outsiders.

As a general rule, I have always taught Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman after introducing students to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God. (Typically both, because if students have ever encountered African literature it will most likely have been only Things Fall Apart). The point about teaching Achebe first is that his Igbo-inspired texts appear to be the most culturally saturated, thus allowing themselves to be read simultaneously in a literary and ethnographic manner. His handling of the theme of colonialism and Christianity in the two novels also allows us to grasp a thematic cluster that is reiterated often in African literature, and from which starting point a number of other themes are radiated. But perhaps most important from the perspective of teaching Death and the King’s Horseman is the problematic understanding of causality that Achebe explores via the concept of chi. The concept of chi in Things Fall Apart points to the belief in a personal god, personal fate if you will, but in such a way as to defy easy explanation even to the people of the fictional Umuofia themselves. The Umuofians believe that when a man says yes strongly enough his chi is bound to agree. But when Okonkwo’s gun goes off at Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s funeral and kills the dead man’s son to trigger his exile from the clan, it looks as if his chi has begun to say no to his self-affirming yes. But because the chi is an abstract concept and not a material entity its main terms cannot be understood except through grasping a range of sociocultural relations as set out within the novel: the relations of gender exchange and reciprocity that are manifest at different material and symbolic levels of the clan, the relation between a proverbial language of cultural interpretation and a rapidly changing world, and the economy of exclusions that peripheralize certain constituencies within the culture despite the essentially meritocratic impulses upon which the culture has been constructed (osus, twins, “effeminate” men, etc.). In other words, Achebe suggests that the chi must not be understood exclusively as pertaining to personal choice or action but must be grasped instead through a form of embedding that takes the whole range of possible and potential sociocultural relations into account. It is a particularity that is also a threshold. The question of how to embed the chi concept within other sociocultural dimensions of Things Fall Apart provides a useful illustration of how this procedure might be used for exploring Death and the King’s Horseman and other texts of African literature.

Soyinka’s play raises another set of difficulties that pertain specifically to its status as a play rather than a novel. For one thing, the play has a highly elaborate sonic and poetic dimension that is easy to miss when reading it merely as a play text. To highlight this mistake, I will have asked my students in that week to read Tejumola Olaniyan’s “Festivals, Rituals, and Drama in Africa.”Footnote ² Olaniyan provides an in-depth discussion of the continuum of festival theater and art theater, showing for example the degree to which art theater typically severs the stage action from the music, dancing, mime, and call-and-response that are endemic to festival theater. In Death and the King’s Horseman, the question of drumming and its function in this sonically rich text is placed firmly in the foreground from the very first stage directions:

To get my students to keep the sonic dimension of the play firmly in view at all times, I bring to class a large djembe drum, along sometimes also with a small xylophone. After getting some of them to tap a rhythm on the drum or the xylophone (it must be from the heart, I tell them), I then play a series of beats on the instruments, alternating between the two to establish a sense of variety. From time to time during the course of the discussion, I also stop to play quickly on the instruments, in each instance reminding them that had they been watching the play rather than reading it they will have been hearing different types of drumming and other traditional instruments throughout the course of the action. The other thing that I do to animate the opening stage directions is to bring to class a number of African-print cloths that I drape along the desk at the front of the class. This is to highlight the rich visuality of the market in the opening scene and also to focus attention on the role of Iyaloja, the chief of the market women, who comes to perform a very important function in articulating cultural values and also acting as a sharp critic of Elesin Oba when he fails in his obligation to successfully perform the ritual suicide. I also embed the entire market scene within Yorùbá cultural processes, pointing out how the proverb Ayé lọjà; ọ̀run nilé (the earth is a marketplace; heaven is home) points to the conjunctural nature of the market in Yorùbá culture as a place of the meeting of the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be-born.Footnote ³ This also provides an opportunity to give them examples of other markets in African literature (say in Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Amma Darko, and others) and to show how the market is often the place where important things happen.

Throughout the course of exploring the play, I get students to try and identify the different points at which drums are played and whether there is any significance to the contrast between that and other sounds within the action. Thus, for example, they come to see that there is a slight dissonance at the start of Scene 2 when we see Mr. and Mrs. Pilkings dancing to the tango in the costume of the egungun. Because the affective dissonance has already been established in the musical transition between Scene 1 and Scene 2 and in the relationship between the tango from the gramophone and the traditional costume they are wearing, it is easy then for us to appreciate Amusa’s shock when he enters the parlor to deliver his message and first sets eyes on his boss. His refusal to deliver his “message of death to man wearing cloths of death” seems entirely appropriate, but the point is for the students to have recognized the dissonance before Amusa’s own somewhat comic protestations. And in the same scene, when Mr. Pilkings is baffled by the sound of the faraway drum, we note the modulation that the sonicscape introduces into the play, both at the level of the enigmatic character of the drumbeat in the distance (is it for a funeral or for a wedding?), the pace of the action, and also in establishing the ethical choices that each of the characters is perforce making with regard to the presentation of different worldviews couched in the shape of culture.

The status of Death and the King’s Horseman as a tragedy raises another set of pedagogical opportunities. A central principle of my teaching of African literature over the past two or so decades has been to get my students to see it as part of their general training in literary studies. I insist on not allowing them to see African literature in terms of an enclave but rather as providing insights into other areas of literary studies and vice versa. Sometimes this has entailed exploring African literature in a comparative and world literature framework, but my most preferred mode has been to teach it in relation to the tradition of tragedy. By the time my students and I get to Soyinka, we will have raised Oedipus Rex in relation to Things Fall Apart. True, the two texts are remarkably different in their essential emphases, and yet the universe of assumed mythological verities that forms the backdrop to Oedipus’s choices compares well with Okonkwo’s while the absolute certainty with which both undertake every enterprise shows they share strong literary kinship. The dialectical relationship between determinism and contingency that we find in plays such as The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Hamlet, Othello, and others will also have been raised sporadically in the course of discussing the Achebe novels, but it is with Soyinka that I establish an explicit dialogue with the tragic tradition. This is done both at the level of concepts (such as tragic responsibility, pity, and fear) and of dramaturgy.

Starting with Soyinka’s dramaturgy first. After the sequence with the drum and xylophone and before we move on to the rest of the play, I turn to Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound to illustrate the relationship among stasis, mobility, and spectatoriality in the unfolding of that Greek tragedy. As people familiar with the play will know, throughout the action Prometheus is bound to the rock in one place and remains completely fixed, while other characters enter and exit the action. The most important of these characters is Io. But the example of Aeschylus is mainly to focus attention on the changing nature of spectatoriality that the play provides us with. Sometimes I have found it useful to bring to class for the students to look at the lengthy extract from Prometheus Bound (lines 436–505) where Prometheus details his services to man. We conclude from this extract, among other things, that far from just bringing man fire, what Prometheus brought were different skills of interpretation that allowed mankind to master numbering, agriculture, astronomy, medicine, and augury, among others. And yet these skills of interpretation, at least according to Aeschylus’s play, fall short of giving man the capacity for knowing themselves, in other words, of seeing into their bewildered souls the face of a universe that they have been given the tools to transform. And at issue in Prometheus Bound is who is a spectator within the diegesis of the action. After the discussion of the dramaturgy and concepts from the Greek play, I then pose the question to my students as to who is a spectator in Death and the King’s Horseman and how we come to know this. The question pertains predominantly to the first scene but has implications for how we interpret the rest of the play. This takes us back to how to visualize the action. In an ideal situation, I would have liked a classroom in which I might get students to enact the first scene by distributing them across a stage and showing how the varying functions of speaker and spectator alter as the scene progresses. Having not as yet had this opportunity, I have relied mainly on painting the scene with language and getting my students to imagine it in as much detail as they can.

A number of elements of Scene 1 become especially pertinent in this exercise. As we saw from the first stage directions, the scene opens onto the closing stages of a market, with bolts of cloth being taken down by the market women at dusk. Into this liminal temporal setting enters the energized Elesin Oba pursued by drummers and his Praise-Singer. The entire market is immediately converted into an interactive theater space, where the market women are the primary observers and Elesin and Praise-Singer are the main actors. Praise-Singer begins to sing Elesin’s oríkí (praise names and epithets) as a means of eliciting his ritual self and ascertaining his preparedness for the ritual crossing that is to take place later that night. The elicitation takes place through a careful process of call-and-response, where Praise-Singer says something about communal history in a dense proverbial language and Elesin responds accordingly, again in matching proverbial discourse:

This steady ritual process of elicitation is, however, interrupted three different times in the course of Scene 1, and in each instance the interruption is by Elesin himself. The three times are, first, when he arrests the procedures to declaim the lengthy story of the Not-I Bird. The introduction of the song of the Not-I Bird is initially baffling to the Praise-Singer and to the market women who have been partly singing and dancing along and partly watching the proceedings. This is what we see:

It turns out that the Not-I bird is an entirely made-up mythical character that Elesin has created on the spot in order to tell his own story of fearlessness and courage in the face of death. The ritual call-and-response between him and Praise-Singer is to resume after the lengthy story of the Not-I bird, but Elesin stops almost immediately after the resumption of his routine with Praise-Singer to declare that he is bitterly offended by something. This throws everyone into a state of shock and horror, but especially the market women, who think they must have done something terribly wrong. It turns out that Elesin is pretending to be offended because the women did not drape him in resplendent cloths when he entered the market. They oblige him in great relief, and the imminent crisis of his disapproval on the day he is a potent ritual sacrificial carrier is averted. The ritual call-and-response continues but now explicitly incorporates the dancing and praise-singing of the market women themselves as Elesin swirls round and round in the colorful cloths they have draped him with. Things seem to be going reasonably well, Praise-Singer has resumed his call-and-response routine with Elesin, and then, all of a sudden, the third and final interruption. And this time it is to call attention to the beautiful young woman who has just come through the passageway into the market. What appears to be a momentary distraction turns out to have major consequences for the rest of the action. For Elesin now insists that he must have the young girl on this night of monumental crossing. He thus suddenly presents his culture with a large and hitherto unanticipated problem. For it turns out that the young woman has already been betrothed to Iyaloja’s own son. Iyaloja’s initial hesitation is, however, overcome by the assertion that because he is standing astride the space between the living and the dead his every wish must be obeyed to smoothen the way for the crossing:

What this rationalization really means is that Iyaloja and the cultural disposition she represents is prepared to countenance the suspension of the foundational ethics of familial relationships in favor of the apparently higher ethics of communal security and cultural survival. This turns out to be a terrible mistake, as we later come to find out.

The key element that each of the three interruptions share is not the fact of their being interruptions, but that they are moments in which the other people on stage are converted into spectators of Elesin Oba. This is different from what we see in Prometheus Bound because the spectatoriality is inherently tied to Prometheus himself, and his status does not change from start to finish of the action. In Death and the King’s Horseman, what spectatoriality entails is the conscription of the other characters into a dramatic spectacle/scene of which Elesin alone knows the script and can control its preferred outcome. This comes out particularly strongly in the interregnum of the Not-I bird story but is replicated in each of the other instances. In each of them, Elesin proffers himself decisively as the object of total attention and enacts a script that appears to follow the discursive rules of communal comprehensibility and yet is totally private, at least in its preferred outcomes. The market women and Praise-Singer are transformed into momentary spectators, and Elesin becomes the only actor in the one-man scene that unfolds before them. The fact that these one-man scenes arise without explicit demarcation except for the sudden turns of language of Elesin himself also suggest that this is ultimately a tool of suspension, as if to defer the process of the elicitation of his ritual self that everyone assumes is prepared to die for the community. Read another way, the dramaturgical structure of interruptions and the fact that they are instigated by Elesin himself goes to reveal his subliminal reluctance to becoming the sacrificial carrier for his community. This reluctance, or at least lack of preparedness, is in the play given ample illustration through his desire to be betrothed to the young girl on the very day that he is going to commit the ritual suicide. Iyaloja warns him of the consequences of failure, but he insists nonetheless. The focus on the precise dramaturgy of Scene 1 then prepares us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the moment when Elesin actually fails to achieve the crossing. One of the themes that I introduce when teaching Arrow of God is that of giving an account of oneself. The echo of the title of the book by Judith Butler is not entirely accidental given that what I have in mind is precisely the mechanisms by which the characters attempt an account of themselves to interlocutors, only some of whom are necessarily embodied in the form of other characters. In the case of Ezeulu, the primary interlocutor in his case is the skeptical interlocutor inside of his own mind that afflicts him with second thoughts about his status as the potential leader of his clan. At all times Ezeulu wants to see himself as either the supreme expression of tradition or as possibly the representative of his clan’s will. Unlike the generally unanimist ethos of Things Fall Apart, which my students and I will also have noted in discussing the earlier novel, however, the clan community in Arrow of God is governed by an inherently agonistic debating structure, such that nothing is immediately subject to consensus. The debatelike structure within the novel is seen everywhere: among the Christian community, between Captain Wintabota (Winterbottom) and both his superiors and inferiors in the colonial administration, among Ezeulu’s children, and between Ezeulu and the secular leaders of the clan. The structure of skeptical interlocution we find in his mind must thus be understood as a correlative of a larger structure of disagreement and debate within the entire representational nexus at large, whichever way we might choose to dissect it. The failed moment of Elesin’s ritual crossing provides us with an opportunity to look at another installment of the problematic of giving an account of oneself. In this instance, the shifting spectatoriality that we will have noted to be central to Scene 1 will come into play again, but this time to postulate an unanticipated difficulty for Elesin because of the grander sacred scale upon which his community not just views his ritually sanctioned action but derives comfort from it.

One of the peculiar features of the character of Elesin Oba is that despite the many praise names that are showered upon him at the start of the play, not a single one pertains to military prowess. This is decidedly odd for someone whose position as guardian of the king’s stable automatically implies the powerful position of commander of the king’s army. If not one oríkí is delivered regarding his skills as a military commander, might this not be interpreted as Soyinka’s subtle critique of the culture’s fixation on the flawed vessel that is their chosen conduit for salvation? For all the culture has is the hedonistic, womanizing, and overall haughty Elesin Oba. Thus, Iyaloja’s mistaken ethical choice in delivering him her son’s betrothed marks the larger failure of a cultural praxis whose terms may have been thoroughly compromised but masks itself as the design of a necessity (he is at this moment the most sacred figure astride living, dead, and yet unborn, and therefore every wish of his must be acceded to). The compromise we see in her decision is not in the simple terms of colonialism’s well-documented attempts at undermining indigenous structures of thought and feeling, but that of making the idiom of hierarchical power infinitely replaceable in the mind of traditional cultural agents. Elesin Oba’s own lament to the vociferous Ijaloja when she comes to visit him in detention after the failed crossing is of a piece with this idiom:

Note the nature of the admission of failure here: the real blasphemy and thus the cause of the failure was in the concession, for one elusive moment, that there might be the hand of his own gods in the white man’s intervention. In other words, in the liminal status of the crossing, the categories that had organized his world are warped such that he is able to mistake the white man as one of his own gods and vice versa. That he also admits to succumbing to the renewed embers lodged deep in the heart of man and thus of his essentially pleasure-seeking orientation must not becloud the nature of what he describes as his blasphemy. Iyaloja spits out disdainfully that she wishes she could pity him; his reply is that he wishes to be understood and not pitied. But his action in failing the ritual crossing is of such dramatic consequence that it represents no mere failure but the sign of an epistemological impasse. He cannot receive understanding within the terms provided in his own culture. At this point, Elesin’s condition illustrates the difficulty of giving an account of oneself when the cultural instruments by which such an account might be given prove either inadequate or otherwise contaminated. At such points the tragic protagonist is entirely alone in a world that is itself at a loss in the face of transition. By this point in the class, I will already be inviting my students to look forward to us revisiting the theme of giving an account of oneself later on in the course with respect to characters such as Mustafa Sa’eed in Tayib Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, Hamida in Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, Nyasha in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Mazvita in Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name, and the Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, all texts that have paired well with Achebe and Soyinka in my courses on African literature.

What I have explicated of Death and the King’s Horseman in a pedagogical context by no means exhausts what might be done with the text. For my part, however, my teaching of this terrific play has been guided by a number of core principles that I would enumerate as:

1. 1. To provide my students with a way to grasp the nature of African cultural details as opportunities for investigation of literary process

2. 2. To encourage my students to think of the play first and foremost as a drama rather than as narrative and to try and visualize and imagine in as much detail as possible the experience it would be to see it performed as opposed to just reading it

3. 3. To persuade the students to see Soyinka’s play as part of wider literary studies and thus to read it in the primary instance in comparative terms both in relation the rest of the African literary tradition and in the context of world literature

4. 4. To enliven their capacity for close reading and by this their capacity for taking pleasure in discovering things that might not readily appear on first reading, or, more importantly, that alter in their appearance once read in relation to other elements of the text

Thus the entire process of teaching the play is structured around the ebb and flow of various dimensions, demonstrating how much vitality can be derived from the encounter with it.