In this essay, Ogundele argues that the actions of Elesin represent the "form and functioning state of his culture."
In the "Author's Note" to his play Death and the King's Horseman (1975), Wole Soyinka, while instructing the play's future producer on its correct stage interpretation, incidentally also describes the kind of tragedy he has written: its "threnodic essence," he says, is largely the metaphysical confrontation "contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind...." This description does more than guide the producer: its terms (metaphysical confrontation, human vehicle, universe of the Yoruba mind) suggest that the experience enacted is fundamentally that of the ritual.
Death and the King's Horseman (DKH) is of course about the acting out of a people's collective religious emotions and desires at a crucial moment in.....
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