ABSTRACT
Following Soyinka’s warning in his author’s note that Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) should not be read as portraying “the clash between old values and the new ways, between western methods and African traditions”, critics like Henry Louis Gates, Eldred Jones, and a host of others have confined themselves to the metaphysical dimension of the play within the Yoruba cultural context. This chapter argues that in Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka has turned death into a space of power contestation not only between the colonizer and the colonized but also between the essentialist and the syncretist elements within the Yoruba cultural order. At the time of the play’s action, that is, by the mid-1940s, Oyo territory and its people had already undergone deep transformation under British colonial rule.
