Wole Soyinka – Death and the King’s Horseman (Nigeria)

• Based on historical events in colonial Nigeria, Soyinka’s play dramatizes the failure of a sacred Yoruba ritual due to British colonial interference. The king’s horseman, Elesin, must die to accompany his deceased master into the afterlife. But when the British intervene to “save” him, the rupture causes metaphysical disarray, communal shame, and personal collapse.

It is not merely a tragedy—it is a ritual disruption of ontological consequence.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In The Care of the Self, Michel Foucault speaks of the ethical life as one formed through practice, self-mastery, and alignment with greater cosmic and social orders—not as dictated by juridical command, but as shaped through internalized discipline and stylized existence. Death and the King’s Horseman dramatizes precisely such a form of ethical life—one that is cultivated within Yoruba cosmology, not through laws or punishments, but through ritual obligation, symbolic action, and sacred timing.

Elesin’s role is not performative in the Western sense—it is existential. His body becomes the site where cosmic equilibrium is either preserved or broken. His failure to die, his last-minute seduction by worldly desire, results not merely in a broken social custom, but a disruption of the metaphysical fabric of being.

Foucault’s idea that truth and subjectivity are constituted by technologies of the self finds resonance in the Yoruba tradition: Elesin’s preparation for death is a prolonged ritual of purification, asceticism, and rhythmic alignment with the ancestral order. The interruption by the colonial officer Pilkings enacts a rupture between two epistemes: one rooted in ritual knowledge, the other in rationalist biopolitics.

This play, then, is not about “clash of cultures,” as Soyinka has often corrected critics. It is about ontological trespass: the failure to recognize the ethical subject not as autonomous individual, but as sacred function in a cosmological continuum.