ABSTRACT
Soyinka’s The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness, where he acknowledges Negritude’s fi ght to reclaim African cultural glory, it was not common to suggest that Wole Soyinka’s literary work projected a drive towards African cultural revival such as seen in Langston Hughes’s Harlem Renaissance poetry. Yet, a cultural understanding of both Death and the King’s Horseman and The Lion and the Jewel (1963) would reveal that primary voices coming from these plays are unmistakably those of African revival and cultural pride in the face of western colonial pomposity.
