Ritual, Resistance, and Rupture: A Neo-Marxist Reading of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

This study offers a neo-Marxist reading of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) that goes beyond spiritual readings, or simplistic postcolonial readings of cultural conflict. Drawing on the ideas of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci and Fredric Jameson, I propose that the play depicts the role of ritual as an instrument of social control, the necessarily limited and compromised nature of resistance under colonialism, and the irreparable rupture created by the colonial encounter. In the play, ritual is not only religious practice but a “ideological apparatus” which maintains social order. The two forms of resistance represented by Elesin’s failure to carry out his ritual suicide and Olunde’s sacrificial death both fail in their own right. The play ends without resolution, and we are left to face the fact that the old world is destroyed and the new world has not yet emerged. With this analysis I can show that Soyinka’s play is a deep meditation on the crisis of meaning and social order that comes with colonial domination.