SOURCE: Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Particular Myths, Universal Ethics: Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers in the New Nigeria.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 584-95.

In Myth, Literature, and the African World, Wole Soyinka set out to formulate a theory of African literature in relation to myth. He criticized African writers who based their work on European cosmologies, urging instead greater attention to African systems of belief. In his preface, Soyinka went so far as to say that “There is nothing to choose ultimately between the colonial mentality of … West Africa's first black bishop, who grovelled before his white missionary superiors … and the new black ideologues who are embarrassed” by African traditions. “Like his religious counterpart, the new ideologue has never stopped to consider whether or not the universal verities of his new doctrine are already contained in, or can be elicited from the world-view and social structures of his own people”; Soyinka concludes, simply, “they can.”¹

In some ways, the statement is almost commonplace—an assertion of cultural identity of the sort we have come to expect from post-colonization writers, Irish, Indian, African, and so on. And this is, for the most part, how it has been treated. Readers of Soyinka understand him as stressing “the necessity of de-Anglicizing African literature” (to vary Douglas Hyde's famous phrase regarding Irish literature).² But this is not by any means all there is to Soyinka's view of literature, nor is it necessarily the most important part. I would distinguish three other elements of Soyinka's theory that are at least as consequential for our understanding of his work. First, Soyinka's view of literature is very much in keeping with that of his teacher, G. Wilson Knight, who “emphasi[zed] … the deep ceremonial and mythological properties of dramatic symbolism,” as Derek Wright put it.³ Soyinka's is a fundamentally mythic conception of literary effect. This is not to say that he advocates the rewriting of mythological or folkloric material per se (as did Yeats, for example). Rather, he advocates the use of myth to structure otherwise realistic plots and to fill out, give weight to, otherwise realistic characters. Myth is important for Soyinka in so far as it increases understanding of or gives dramatic force to real human concerns and conflicts.

The second point is related to this. Soyinka's drama is insistently ethical. Virtually every one of his plays takes up and works through an ethical dilemma. Moreover, it is an ethical dilemma that is not purely personal, but thoroughly social—most often with clear, if frequently indirect, implications for Nigeria's present and future. And this ethical concern is central to his advocacy of literature founded in myth. Indeed, it is central to his advocacy of Yoruba myth in particular. For, in Soyinka's view, Greek mythology, the founding mythology of the West, is inadequate in the ethical dimension—specifically, in “the morality of reparation”—that is central to Yoruba myth. Moreover, this ethical dimension has direct consequences for contemporary Nigerian politics: “The saying orisa l'oba (the king is a god), embraced at a superficial self-gratifying level, fails to recall today's power-holders to the moral nature of the African deity.”⁴

The final point I should like to stress is that, despite his emphasis on African or even Yoruba particularism, Soyinka's concerns are always universalist, and that in two senses. First of all, the mythological prototypes with which he concerns himself are particular manifestations of universal human concerns. Humanists today are inclined to use the phrase “universal verities” with a tone of derision. But, as we have just seen, Soyinka insists that “universal verities” can be found in African culture—and that this is part of the value of drawing on African culture. This is no doubt the reason that he refers to “archetypal protagonists,” citing European, Asian, and African instances.⁵ Moreover, in his influential essay “The Fourth Stage,” included in Myth as an appendix, Soyinka makes repeated references to “basic universal impulses,” “profound universality,” and so forth. He explains tragedy by reference to broad human concerns, linking King Lear, Oedipus, and the Yoruba Sango, and so on.⁶

Even more important, however, than this mythopoetic universalism is the ethical universalism that animates Soyinka's use of myth in drama, and which undergirds his political activism as well. Indeed, as we have already seen, Soyinka's interest in Yoruba traditions is motivated not only by anticolonialism, not only by a sense that it is important to draw on African ideas and practices in order to counter European cultural hegemony, but equally by his sense that Yoruba traditions are more thoroughly imbued with ethical principle than are the Hellenic myths of so much European literature. And this Yoruba morality is important precisely because it too is universal. Thus, he writes that, in “Yoruba traditional art … [i]t is not the idea (in religious arts) that is transmitted into wood or interpreted in music or movement, but a quintessence of inner being, a symbolic interaction of the many aspects of revelations (within a universal context) with their moral apprehension” (emphasis added).⁷

As the last point in particular should make clear, Soyinka's universalism in no way implies that Yoruba particularism is unimportant in his work—quite the contrary, in fact. Indeed, in order to comprehend Soyinka's universalism, a critic must carefully relate Soyinka's work to its mythic prototypes, as well as to contemporary social problems. On the other hand, without a recognition of the underlying ethical and mythopoetic universalism, one would likely misunderstand the use of mythic particulars in Soyinka's work. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has perhaps been the most articulate advocate of combining universalism and particularism—or, rather, of recognizing that they are already necessarily combined. For example, in “The Universality of Local Knowledge,” he writes that “The universal is contained in the particular just as the particular is contained in the universal. We are all human beings but the fact of our being human does not manifest itself in its abstraction but in the particularity of real living human beings of different climes and races.”⁸ I take Soyinka's view to be similar (with the difference that Ngũgĩ's universal principles are largely Marxist, while Soyinka's are, again, mythological and ethical). For both, the universal cannot be understood in isolation from the particular, but equally the particular cannot be understood in isolation from the universal.

The Swamp Dwellers provides an excellent illustration of this entire complex of concerns. Though roughly Soyinka's first professional play, it already shows great socio-ethical and mythic sophistication, and it already manifests his universalistic concerns embedded in a specifically Yoruba mythic context. However, despite the fact that it is a finely crafted and highly characteristic—as well as very teachable—play, The Swamp Dwellers has received very little critical attention. Moreover, what little attention it has received has tended to be somewhat reductive and even dismissive. For example, Anthony Graham-White finds the blind beggar an “artificial” and “theatrical figure” and the Kadiye a “caricatur[e]” and judges “Soyinka's attitude towards tradition” in the play to be “uncompromisingly hostile.”⁹ Wright, too, judges the Kadiye “a crude caricature … too obviously a fraud … to allow for an even contest between tradition and modernity.”¹⁰

The problem here is twofold. First of all, the critics most often fail to understand the Yoruba mythic specificity of the work; second, they usually fail to recognize its ethical universality. Or, when they do recognize the universality, the point tends to remain localized and undeveloped, as when Wright connects the Kadiye with the “universal greed for wealth”¹¹ or Eldred Durosimi Jones notes “[t]he analogy between the city and the swamp.”¹² In this way, too, the play is exemplary. For much criticism of Soyinka seems to me marred by one or the other of these flaws—despite the fact that much of that criticism (including the work of Graham-White, Wright, and Jones) is in other respects insightful, erudite, and sensitive.

In the following pages, then, I should like to reconsider this relatively neglected play, examining it in terms of the ethical and mythic, particularistic and universalistic principles we have been considering—with an emphasis on the particularity of the myth and the universality of the ethics, for I take this to be Soyinka's emphasis. My primary aim is to provide a fuller interpretation of this finely complex play. But, in doing this, I also hope to highlight some fundamental concerns of Soyinka's work that are often passed over or minimized in the criticism.

More exactly, I take it that one of Soyinka's most pervasive themes is the universal tendency of humanity toward corruption, a tendency that often manifests itself in pride or envy or greed (to use the principal markers of corruption in A Dance of the Forests [1960]). In Soyinka's view, the impulse toward corruption affects humans at all times and places. But it manifests itself differently, and with different consequences, depending upon the social and political context in which it appears. Indeed, for Soyinka, pride, envy, and greed are not so much private sins as, so to speak, social configurations with important political consequences. Not only do all individuals suffer an impulse toward corruption; all societies have a tendency to institutionalize corruption in a structure of economic and political domination. Many, perhaps most, of Soyinka's plays address this concern. And in each case, his implicit aim is the same: to encourage a recognition of political corruption (with its insidious tendency to recur, in different forms, in every society) and to foster opposition to that corruption—an opposition that has taken form in Soyinka's own life from his work against the destruction of Biafra to his more recent activism for the National Liberation Council of Nigeria.¹³

THE CITY AND THE COUNTRY

Twins, as is well known, are revered among the Yoruba. Linked with the god Ibeji, they are elevated above children of single births. They are a special mark of fertility as well, and the mother of twins is particularly respected. If one twin dies, a small wooden doll is carved in his or her likeness and placed in the family shrine. The twin who has died has a special link with the living twin, and the family prays to the soul of the dead twin to protect the sibling who remains. Because of sanctity, and fear that the second twin might join his or her companion in death, it is taboo to say that one twin has died. Instead, the Yoruba customarily say that “he [or she] has gone to the market.”¹⁴

The Swamp Dwellers begins in the ambience of this myth. Alu has two sons, Awuchike and Igwezu. She worries that one of them has died: “I had another son before the mire drew him into the depths.”¹⁵ Her husband, Makuri, protests, “You haven't lost a son yet in the slough.” He goes on to explain, “Awuchike got sick of this place and went into the city.” But Makuri is insistent: “Awuchike was drowned.” Though the brothers are past the age when any taboo would be in effect, nonetheless, in this context, it is a shock to learn of the precise biological relation between them, and in a phrase that reminds us directly of the taboo, the danger of a living twin following his or her sibling into the other world. Alu announces after this exchange, “They are twins. Their close birth would have drawn them together” (83). On hearing this, one wonders if, perhaps, Awuchike is indeed dead, and Makuri is only following the old custom, reasonably substituting “city” for the more standard “market,” the two being closely related in any case. Their other son, Igwezu, has just returned home after an eight-month absence. Perhaps Makuri fears that the same fate will befall Igwezu, and thus will not say that Awuchike is dead, but resorts to a variation on the traditional euphemism.

Soon, however, we learn that Makuri “[wi]ll not perform the death rites for a son [he] know[s] to be living.” Clearly, for Makuri, this is not mere euphemism. When Alu responds, “If you felt for him like a true father, you'd know he was dead” (84), the audience begins to sense that the death is metaphorical. Shortly after, it becomes clear. Makuri begins to discuss the city: “It ruins them. The city ruins them. What do they seek there except money? … There was Gonushi's son for one … left his wife and children … not a word to anyone.” Alu responds, “It was the swamp … He went the same way as my son” (87). The point is clear, even outside of Yoruba belief—the city is a swamp, a place of moral degradation, that “kills” those who go there. But reference to Yoruba belief makes it more striking. If Awuchike were physically dead, she would have said, “he has gone to the market,” or perhaps “he has gone to the town” or “to the city,” where there would be markets every day. In the Yoruba context of beliefs and customs concerning twins, to say that he is dead is to suggest that his fate is worse, that he has undergone a transformation more thorough than that of physical demise. It is, in effect, a spiritual death—and, along with it, a broader, social death, a death of tradition.

The image of the swamp clarifies the point. According to Soyinka, all structured life arises out of chaos—a chaos that continually threatens to overwhelm humanity and perhaps even the gods. For Soyinka, “nothing rescues man (ancestral, living or unborn) from loss of self within this abyss but a titanic resolution of the will”¹⁶—a resolution of the will that is, in almost every case, tragic in its outcome. For Soyinka, there are three great deities of tragedy: Ogun, god of Iron; Sango, god of lightning; and Obatala, the maker of human forms.¹⁷ Ogun is the great god who bridged chaos, who carved out (with an iron blade) a space for humanity and gods to meet. But in the end, he succumbed to chaos himself—murdering his own people in a drunken frenzy. Sango called down the forces of chaos on himself and ended his own life, abandoned by all and sunk into despair. Once, from wine, Obatala too fell into the abyss; in consequence, he shaped disabled men and women. Since their deformities resulted from his drunkenness, he pronounced the lame, the paralytic, the deaf and mute and blind, his sacred offspring. And he mourns throughout eternity for the suffering caused to them in that one error, that one moment when formless chaos impinged on the god of forms.

The swamp, then, is an image of this chaos, used here to characterize the city. The swamp is natural disorder—the ground always sinking beneath one's feet, leaving one literally and figuratively without a foothold, without a basis for action. The city is artificial disorder—ethical principle or structure replaced by the shifting contingencies, not of physical space, but of economy, and social morality undermined by impulse, by “the bestial human” (as Soyinka terms it in A Dance of the Forests),¹⁸ by pride or envy or greed. The point is extended by the further story of Awuchike and Igwezu: the former, far from observing his special obligations, has destroyed his twin—taken his money and his wife, driven him back to a ruined farm and to despair. Igwezu explains, “Awuchike is dead to you and to this house. Let us not raise his ghost” (104). Far from the benevolent twin spirit who may aid his brother in life, Awuchike is a malevolent specter who, like the unholy wanderers in the bush of ghosts, preys upon the living.

THE ETERNITY OF EVIL

Thus far, it might seem that The Swamp Dwellers repeats the common motif of the good countryside and the evil city. The idea is re-enforced by the contrast between Igwezu's unfaithful wife, Desala, and his mother, Alu, of whom Makuri says, “There wasn't a woman anywhere more faithful than you, Alu; I never had a moment of worry in the whole of my life” (84). It is also furthered by the implicit identification of Alu with the Yoruba earth goddess Edan—for she conceived the twins when sunk into the earth, and the twins share its colour (86-87).

But the contrast is not that simple (a point noted, in general terms, by most critics of the play). Indeed, it could not be that simple. For the city to be seen as a swamp, and damned, the swamp itself must have the character of malign chaos. The first suggestion of this comes on the same page where Alu compares the city to the swamp, for Makuri points out that Igwezu's crops were “ruined by the floods” (87). Of course, this is not mere natural chance, mere natural chaos. It is itself part of the same development as the city—the result of colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, the shift from tradition to “modernity.” For it wasn't only the floods that killed the crops. A few pages later, Makuri explains, “Not a grain was saved, not one tuber in the soil … And what the flood left behind was poisoned by the oil in the swamp water” (92). Forty years later, after the cruel alliance of Shell Oil and the Nigerian military in repressing Nigerian democracy, the point is particularly clear: capitalism, industrialization, the city, has already invaded the countryside, here in the form of spillage from the drilling of oil, drilling that would eventually grow to enormous ecological and human waste. (This, rather prescient, point was entirely deliberate on Soyinka's part. As James Gibbs notes, “Soyinka started writing The Swamp Dwellers after reading that oil had been found in marketable quantities in the Niger Delta”).¹⁹

But this is not the first suggestion that modernity has already entered into the village. In the opening scene, we see “a hut on stilts”; in the hut “is a barber's swivel chair” (81). This strange, part comic, part pathetic icon of modernity was a gift to Makuri from Igwezu, when he was in the city. Its significance is made clear in the story of its transportation: “when they were bringing it over the water, it knocked a hole in the bottom of the canoe and nearly sank it”—a virtual liberalization of the idea that traditional practices cannot bear the weight of modernity, but sink under the load. More strikingly, “The carrier got stuck in the swamps and they had to dig him out” (95). This is significant for two reasons. The first should be obvious at this point—modernity, commodities, things acquired for money in the city, are precisely the things that foster pride, envy, and greed, and thus sink one into the swamp of destructive chaos.

More importantly, “carrier” is the term Soyinka uses for the scapegoat figure who takes on all the evil of the village and transports it into the bush. As in The Strong Breed, each year one man takes on the task of “carrying” the bestial human out from the town and returning it to the destructive chaos from which it came.²⁰ But here Soyinka inverts the image, as he did with the twins. Instead of the carrier transporting evil out of the village and into chaos, we find the carrier transporting evil—the evil of modernity—out of chaos into the village.

And yet, that is not all there is to the matter. For the swamp suggested destructive chaos even without the oil, even without the barber's chair. Again, the imagery indicates this from the beginning. And when the Beggar enters, the point is brought home even more strongly. Employing religious and ethical imagery, the Beggar asks if he can “take a piece of the ground and redeem it from the swamp […] drain the filth away and make the land yield” (92). The suggestion is clear—it is, most importantly, moral “filth” that needs draining, spiritual degradation that requires redemption. Makuri objects that it would be a violation of religious custom. The Beggar explains that he has no desire “to question your faith” (93) and prepares to leave. But just then the representative of that traditional faith can be heard coming toward the hut. We will now understand the nature of the tradition—and, indeed, the nature of the “filth” that might be drained away from the swamp to reclaim the land.

In a place where all able-bodied men and women must engage in productive labour, the Kadiye enters preceded by an obsequious drummer and followed by a fawning servant. In a poor land, “At least half of the Kadiye's fingers are ringed”; in a land with little food, he is “voluminous” in fat (94). His corruption is obvious immediately—not only from his physical appearance, but from his great interest in Igwezu's material success in the city. In addition, the Beggar, whose religious good faith has already been demonstrated by his acceptance of Makuri's devotion to the swamp, refuses to accept alms from the Kadiye (94). The point is made explicit when Igwezu returns and discusses the Kadiye, explaining that “His thighs are like skinfuls of palm oil” (102), and when he interrogates the Kadiye concerning the animals offered for sacrifice to the divine Serpent (109). The clear implication (recognized by most interpreters of the play) is that he did not sacrifice at all, but ate the offerings himself, deceiving the people out of his own gluttony and greed.

In short, the tendency to corruption is universal. Corruption assumes different forms in the city and in the country. But it arises inevitably in both contexts—and in all others. When asked if he will return to the city, Igwezu asks, “Is it of any earthly use to change one slough for another?” (111). The destructive chaos encroaches everywhere. Always, “the swamp will […] laugh at our endeavours” so that, whatever we may do, “the vapours” of the swamp “will still rise and corrupt the tassels of the corn” (110)—the use of the word “corrupt” is, of course, not accidental.

TRAGEDY, TESTIMONY, AND THE NEW NATION

But where does all this lead? Soyinka is not merely saying that humankind is fallible. His interests are more specific, his worries more pressing and historical. The Swamp Dwellers was written at the end of colonialism. It was produced in 1958, the year after Ghana's independence, and two years before Nigerian independence, which could already be anticipated. In this context, it is a play that implicitly introduces the issue of where a new society might proceed, what path the people might choose in new nation. It is, in that sense, a sort of prologue to A Dance of the Forests, which takes up the national issue more explicitly and systematically. Dance, first performed in connection with the Nigerian Independence Celebrations, ends in uncertainty, wavering between hope and despair for the future. The Swamp Dwellers, in contrast, seems far more uncompromisingly grim in its expectations for the future. And this is where the mythological resonances of the play enter. For two of Soyinka's three prime tragic deities are present in the play and suggest its unstated outcome.

The Beggar is blind, one of “the afflicted of the gods” towards whom all are “under the strict injunction of hospitality” (89)—that is because, with his disability, he is beloved of Obatala, linked with him in a special bond. But the tie with the maker of forms goes further. “Obatala” means “lord of the white cloth,” for that is Obatala's distinguishing mark.²¹ Other gods are preceded by a drummer, announcing them, singing their praise names, glorifying them—like the Kadiye. But the humble and always penitent Obatala refuses such pomp.²² He is known only by his perfectly white clothing. So too the Beggar: “He wears a long, tubular gown, white, which comes below his calf” (88). And the Beggar too is scrupulously penitent, worrying over the purity of his blessings and over the alms he has accepted (91)—like the sins of Obatala, minor crimes in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, Obatala forever eschews palm wine because of his errors in making, which resulted from inebriation—a point stressed by Soyinka.²³ The Beggar too, alone among those in the play, refuses liquor (96).

Most importantly, Obatala is known for two great acts. In the beginning, the earth was covered with water and swamp. All the gods ignored the marshy earth, but Obatala went to the supreme god, Olorun (also called Olodumare),²⁴ and volunteered to drain the marsh and make solid land that could support life. Olorun agreed, and Obatala descended from heaven and made land. But there were as yet no people to live there. So Obatala took up his second great task. He reached into the wet clay and shaped the human form, into which Olorun breathed life.²⁵ So, too, the Beggar focuses on the “miles” of swamp before the sea, where, as Makuri warns him, “you'll not find a human soul” (89), and he wishes, like Obatala, to “redeem […] the swamp […] to drain the filth away and make the land yield” (92). He is prevented only because Makuri and the Kadiye, deviating from the principles of Olorun himself, and thus from the highest source of tradition and of universal ethics, forbid it. Moreover, like Obatala, the maker of forms from clay, the Beggar wishes “to knead [the soil] between my fingers” (89), to take “this soil […] to scoop it up in [his] hands […] cleaving ridges under the flood and making little balls of mud” for sheltering seeds (111). At one point, the Beggar even goes so far as to identify the soil formed by his hands with new human life, saying, “I shall […] work the land. […] I feel I can make it yield in my hands like an obedient child” (101).

Igwezu at first appears ambiguous. There are hints of a connection with Ogun. He is the only one in the play to hold a blade, and that immediately links him with the god of war, of weapons, and of iron. But other links are stronger. In some stories, including those discussed by Soyinka, Obatala is presented as a friend of the impetuous god/king Sango. And thus the devotion of the Beggar to Igwezu might suggest a connection between Igwezu and the god of lightning. Sango was a great and powerful king. But—perhaps through his own pride and cruelty, perhaps through the fickleness of his people, and of all people; in any case, because of some intrusion of chaos into ethical and social order—he was abandoned by the people, denounced by the chiefs. He was dethroned and replaced in the kingship by his brother.²⁶ He fled from the city to the countryside. But even his wife abandoned him. In the end, he was left alone with one loyal slave. He told the slave to wait, that he would return, and wandered off into the forest. After a time, the slave sought him out and found that Sango had hanged himself. The slave returned to the city and bore testimony to what had happened.²⁷

This is Igwezu. Replaced in the city by his brother, abandoned by his wife, repudiated by the priest, he flees into the wilderness. The Beggar volunteers to be his loyal bondsman, calls him “master” (111), says that he will remain with him to the end, share his suffering. When Igwezu walks off, the Beggar explains that he will fulfill the function of Sango's one loyal companion: “I shall be here to give account” (112). That line ends the play. We can only conclude that, like Sango, Igwezu has gone off to hang himself, for “Only the innocent and the dotards” can live in this world of human corruption (112).

The ending of the play expresses a virtually complete hopelessness. Yes, the Beggar is a saint—but what possibility is there for ordinary humanity in following Obatala? There is no indication that he will ever be able to do anything other than bear witness, that he will ever be allowed to drain the swamp—if the Kadiye does not prevent it, the oil company will. He is like Forest Head in A Dance of the Forests: “Yet I must persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret is my eternal burden—to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness—knowing full well, it is all futility.”²⁸

Moreover, this is not a purely personal suffering, hopelessness of the individual soul trapped between corruption and corruption, suffocating in the vapours of the swamp. It is also social, even national. In A Dance of the Forests, the future of the nation is uncertain. Perhaps it will improve. But here, Soyinka holds out no hope of better times, no possibility of improvement. Indeed, the Beggar has already borne witness to this impossibility, has already provided the testimony about the “rebirth” of the land—an allegory for the “rebirth” of the nation, only two years distant for Nigeria.

The Beggar explains that he grew up in a land with no hope of new life springing from the soil, a land in which “Our season is one long continuous drought.” But suddenly it began to rain; the rain continued, and leaves grew, shoots of grains sprouted and “hope began to spring in the heart of everyone” (98). They set to work on the land, hoeing and planting. But when the harvest appeared, it was consumed by locusts. This land is Africa, or Nigeria. The drought, which kept all the people poor—so that “the land had lain barren for generations […] the fields had yielded no grain for the lifetime of the eldest in the village”—was the period of colonial domination, which had begun a century before. The momentary hope is independence, with its expectation of universal freedom and prosperity: “This was the closest that we had ever felt to one another. This was the moment that the village became a clan, and the clan a household,” the moment of national pride, the brief sense that anything is possible now that we control our own destiny. But the expectations of freedom are always quickly disappointed. The indigenous elite, moneyed collaborators (like Awuchike), the fake village heads, with their positions secured for the last 100 years by British guns, all the exploiters of the people descend on the spoils, leaving nothing for the mass of men and women: “The feast was not meant for us.” The image of locusts is apt: “They […] squatted on the land. It only took an hour or two, and the village returned to normal” (98-99).

As I have already mentioned, Soyinka is not always so determinedly pessimistic. Sometimes he is, at least, uncertain. A Dance of the Forests ends with similar images. Referring to the night's events, Demoke alludes to Sango in an obscure phrase, saying, “It was the same lightning that seared us through the head.” Agboreko asks, “Does that mean something wise, child?” but there is no answer. On the other hand, perhaps Sango will be the despair that leads to suicide. But perhaps he will be the lightning that destroys enemies. Agboreko asks another question: “Of the future, did you learn anything?” This time, the Old Man answers, “When the crops have been gathered …” He is alluding to an earlier statement made by Agboreko himself, “When the crops have been gathered it will be time enough for the winnowing of the grains.”²⁹ Thus, in A Dance, the harvest time has not yet arrived. Perhaps it will be plentiful. Perhaps there will be a feast for all. Perhaps this time the locusts will not descend. It is a brief moment of hope, however slight and equivocal.

But in The Swamp Dwellers, it seems unambiguous that Sango enters at the end as a figure of despair. And it is entirely clear not only that one harvest was destroyed by parasites, but that there will be no other harvests in the years ahead, that there will never be a feast. The implications for Nigeria's future are grim, but perhaps no more so than the implications for humanity as a whole. For, again, the corruption is general, the swamp ubiquitous (though sometimes it appears to be a city, and sometimes a drought, and sometimes a plague of locusts). And the mythic prototypes, however narrowly Yoruba, are universal as well, and universally tragic.

Notes

1. Wole Soyinka, preface to Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge, 1976), xii.

2. See Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland,” in Charles Gavan Duffy, George Sigerson, and Douglas Hyde, The Revival of Irish Literature (London, 1894), 117-61.

3. Derek Wright, Wole Soyinka Revisited (New York, 1993), 6.

4. Soyinka, Myth, 14-15. See note 1.

5. Ibid., 3.

6. Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” appendix to Myth, 142, 147, 154.

7. Ibid., 141.

8. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, “The Universality of Local Knowledge,” in Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London, 1993), 26.

9. Anthony Graham-White, The Drama of Black Africa (New York, 1974), 126-27.

10. Wright, 47. See note 3.

11. Ibid., 45.

12. Eldred Durosimi Jones, The Writing of Wole Soyinka, rev. ed. (London, 1983), 33.

13. See, for example, Wole Soyinka, “Nigeria Waits,” The Nation (4 December 1995), 692-93.

14. George E. Simpson, Yoruba Religion and Medicine in Ibadan (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1980), 44.

15. Wole Soyinka, The Swamp Dwellers, in Collected Plays 1 (Oxford, 1973), 83. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

16. Soyinka, “Fourth Stage,” 149. See note 6.

17. Soyinka, Myth, 1.

18. Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests, in Collected Plays 1, 5.

19. James Gibbs, Wole Soyinka (New York, 1986), 39.

20. See Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed, in Collected Plays 1, 113-46.

21. Harold Courlander, Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes (New York, 1973), 16.

22. Ibid., 83.

23. Soyinka. “Fourth Stage,” 15, 159.

24. For the full story, see Courlander, 15-23. See note 21.

25. See Soyinka, Myth, 15.

26. Rev. Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, ed. Dr. O. Johnson (London, 1921), 148.

27. A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (1894; reprint, Oosterhout, Netherlands, 1970), 50-51.

28. Soyinka, A Dance, 71. See note 18.

29. Ibid., 74, 72.