Authors Motivation on Death and the Kings Horsemen

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Authors motivation As Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, he wrote this play to emphasize on the theme of duty in Yoruba and its importance. Wole Soyinka was a student at Churchill College in the mid-1970s. Everyday as he would come down the college staircase, he would pass an old building from the British Colonialism. And, every day, he had an overwhelming desire to push it and watch it crash. "He never did, but that feeling of rebellion became what Soyinka calls the "triggering mechanism" for the many plays, novels and poems. His starting point for Death and the King's Horseman was a vivid episode from western Nigeria's colonial period, in which a British district officer intervened to stop the horseman of a dead Yoruba chief from committing ritual suicide, as tradition. Soyinka objects to the description of his play as "a clash of cultures" because such a label implies some sort of equality between the cultures. As he attempts to give balanced arguments for each side. If you have any doubts as to the opinion of the author about which of the two cultures is superior, you won't after the scene between Jane as the wife of the British District Officer and Olunde as the son of the horseman, in which both the characters try to show their cultures as the superior one, which delivers the author's judgment eloquently. What saves the evening from being a didactic bore is the bright language that Soyinka gives to both sides of the arguments and the honesty which he gets the characters to display in each statement of values. Yes, the Yoruban position gets the better of the argument, but the British characters aren't simply straw-men in a classic debate technique. Wole Soyinka's writing is poetic, intense and requires a great deal of concentration from the audience. The playwright dislikes having his work defined as just a simple "clash of cultures" story and

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