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Egwaoje Amarachi Linda
Almost all African and Nigerian ethnic groups had thriving traditions that's embellished with myths and folklores before their contact with the western world. The advent of colonialism in Africa created a shift from the tradition of oral literature to sophisticated Western documentation which halted pursuits of sustaining cultural myths in contemporary African societies. The play examines the influence of myth in oral narratives as it's applied and how myth acts as a formula for living with reference to Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman.
In the past, myths were regarded as stories of the gods and about religious values. They were usually sacred and associated with theology and ritual. Their main characters where deities or cultural heroes whose actions are set in the earlier world. Here the myths describe nature and the functions of divinities or the adventures of cultural hero’s all of which often include elements from legend and folktales set in the earlier world. In explaining natural phenomenon, myth focuses on gods, goddesses and creations as their explanation of nature and the stories had an underlying moral meaning or explanatory purpose. Halpe (2010) supports this fact when he notes that myths are stories sometimes immemorially old, which tells not only man’s relationship with his kind but also with his god or the supernatural in whatever form it may be represented.
The social concepts and attitudes determined by the history and institution of the society are communicated to its members through its myth because it is a form of communication from a society to its members. They contain information about the people’s beliefs regarding the nature and purpose of human existence and the principles underlying relationships among humans, divinities and other creatures. The myths are transposed as formula for living which reflects the life and ethics of the community. It makes man conscious of his place in order to help him accept his social obligations. They present to the living the lesson to be learnt from the great deeds of their ancestors. They also function as means of reconstructing the history of family, clan or tribe (Armstrong, 2005).
Writers like Achebe and Soyinka have seen the recovery of the past and celebration of the nation’s traditional culture as a necessary phase owing to the importance they draw upon traditional myths, legends and folklores (Innes, 1978: p. 19). Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African world is a pioneer of its kind. It provides a mythical and an archetypal theoretical framework for examining Yoruba drama which to Soyinka reflects positive apprehension of African worldview in drama that elicits the African self-apprehended world in myth and literature. Soyinka's Death and King’s Horsemen” also sets out to study the use of traditional materials in modern African drama. It lies within the ambit of cultural and historical affirmation and is a myth-ritual based on a historical fact that a dead King must be buried with the Head of his stables. Thus by marrying the myths and old folkways to the new colonialist infiltrated ways of modern African life, the artists in their different ways re-channeled life’s emphasis in order to create new myths out of new experiences (Awosanmi, 2007).
The myths, folktales and legends which are part of the oral tradition now feature as dynamic material for the re-interpretation of history and projection into the future. In a world that lacked scientific knowledge, myths were man’s first attempts to indulge in logical or scientific reasoning but using western myths and their European languages to communicate our African myths constituted a complete displacement and the consequent imposition of foreign myths, norms and values on traditional African societies.
Myth in Death and the Kings Horseman
The sacred myth occurred in Oyo in 1914 during the British colonial rule when the Horseman of an important Chief was prevented from committing ritual suicide by the then colonial authorities. According to Yoruba tradition, the death of a Chief must be followed by the ritual suicide of the chief’s horseman, because the horseman’s spirit is essential to helping the chief’s spirit ascend to the afterlife which will lead to the stability of the whole community. Otherwise, the chief’s spirit will wander the earth and bring harm to the people. Thus the result is catastrophic, as the breaking of the ritual means the disruption of the cosmic order of the universe and terrible things will befall the community because their spiritual life has been tampered with. This investigates the mythology of being, death and the world of the unborn to create a secular social vision which draws on the metaphysical experience of the Yoruba worldview.
Here Soyinka embraces the Ogun myth, through which he believes that life continues within its manifestations, embracing the ancestral spirits, the living and the unborn. To him, the past is the ancestor, the present is the living and the future the unborn, The deities stand in the same situation to the living as do the ancestors and the unborn, obeying the same laws, suffering the same agonies and uncertainties, employing the same Masonic intelligence of rituals, for the perilous plunge into the fourth area of experiences which is the immeasurable gulf of transition (Soyinka, 1976, p.77). The existence of a gulf to be bridged is crucial to the Yoruba comic ordering. The gulf is what must be diminished by sacrifices, rituals, ceremonies of appeasement to the comic power which lie guardian to the gulf”.
Soyinka's creativity lays emphasis on the view that the world of the gods and ancestral dead sustains a spiritual strangle-hold over the living world with a view to safely mid-wife an envisioned unborn future that corrects the mistakes of the past (Ejiofor and Ukwu, 2012, p.132). So an Ogun hero is therefore the political leader that Soyinka envisions for Nigerian society because such a leader derives from the heroic qualities of Ogun which the incarnate possesses and demonstrates.
In relation to the role of myth in structuring social history, Soyinka also interrogates leadership styles on two fronts. The meaning and weight of leadership according to the Yoruba (represented by Elesin Oba) and leadership in the eyes of the European’s (represented by Samuel Pilkings). While Elesin thinks that leadership is about responsibility which should be discharged even at the expense of one’s life, Pilkings on the other hand takes his responsibility less seriously to the detriment of cosmic order and the peaceful co-existence of the people for his own personal fun and enjoyment. Also, Soyinka succeeds in exploring how difference in world view can generate conflict between people. In the play, Amusa is a character used to portray Africans as highly traditional, religious and conservative unlike the Europeans who appear to be culturally insensitive and inconsiderate of religion as exemplified by Pilkings and his wife Jane.
The conflict in the play performs a significant function in portraying the use of traditional material. It is necessitated by the lack of understanding between people of different traditional background. This conflict particularly points out the fact that the tradition represented in the play is in every aspect different from the Western culture. Soyinka in his own words describes the conflict of the play as “largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind - the world of the living, dead and the unborn, and the passage which links it all- transition" (Soyinka, 1988, p.67)
Death and the King’s Horseman whose material is derived from history, examines transition and change, self- sacrifice and loyalty to a long established ideal in the face of inevitable cultural transformation. The play also uses the events of the story as an extended metaphor, a deliberate attempt at cleansing history by way of acting out history and at the same time, reaching to popular imperial historical account about Africa and their barbarism. To achieve this, Soyinka uses both African and European characters in the text to explore his ideas on leadership, tradition and the difference between people (Soyinka 2001).
Conclusively, The importance of myth for the re-construction of the African past still rests on the strong consciousness for historical presentation and transmission. The oral tradition expressed in myths beyond entertainment and recreation functions constitute the bedrock of traditional African conception of history.
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