Source: Variety.com

The white man’s relationship with its subjects has always been marked by an unfettered paternalism which constituted a need to impose its own perceptions and understandings of the world onto the people it subjugated. This imposition, however, led to confusion and misrecognition and an eventual dilution of the native culture. The violence thus became not only physical and territorial, but also spiritual and epistemological. Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman shows this violence and lack of representation of the natives by an overpowering imposition of the white man’s worldview onto them.

The first instance where this is prominent is when the white couple Jane and Pilkings dress up in the costume of death which holds greater meaning to Sergeant Amusa than they recognise. When he is afraid to talk to them because of their masks, he is mocked and misunderstood and scolded for being superstitious despite being an office in His Majesty’s Government. Amusa has tried to integrate himself into white culture which a lot of people would do to better their circumstances but this has reduced to him becoming a type: he is expected to be rational because of his associations with the white and disregard any cultural traditions as Jane and Pilkings wear his feared egungun as costumes. His reality is thus twisted and forced to suit the white man.

Another event of this lack of representation is central to the play. It is the impending suicide of Elesin Oba due to a native custom. Pilkings’ obsessive paternalism leads to him interfering in the matter despite warnings by others that he won’t be able to stop the custom and that he shouldn’t. He is the saviour, however, and he wants the people to know that he knows better for them than their pagan cultures do and thus he cannot let anyone take their life on his watch. He does not understand the complexities that involve such a custom; doesn’t see how revered Elesin Oba is by his people which was shown in the first scene. Instead, he proudly reminisces about the time he interfered with Olunda, Elesin Oba’s son and how he ‘literally had to help the boy escape from close confinement and load him onto the next boat’. The imagery of entrapment and release renders Olunda and his father passive and projects Pilkings superior conception of freedom onto their relationship. While Olunda is grateful for the opportunity he is given to study medicine in England, by the end we see that when it comes to assuming his assimilation into the white culture, Pilkings was again proven wrong and assumed that he would disregard his native identity altogether for a greater, white one. Although Pilkings arrests Elesin Oba and confines him in order to ‘protect’ him which brings the chief shame that nothing in his life can now undo, both the father and son take their life at the end which proves that Pilkings paternalism was misunderstood and off grounded. However, for the natives, it led to an unnecessary death, a death that they could not respect or celebrate because it wasn’t just Elesin Oba who died but also Olunda.

Death and the King’s Horseman is a poignant example of a scenario in the colonies where the natives were not given a chance to celebrate their own identity and instead, in the name of protections and a better vision of life, they were made to do things alien to them. It also represents that there were natives who did try to integrate themselves into the white culture but how their remained things that were central to their identity which the white man tried hard to eliminate to no avail. In the end, it is an example of their superior yet misguided projections onto their colonies of the global south.