Wole Soyinka’s postcolonial pride offers no answers to Nigeria’s Christian deaths
The name Wole Soyinka is probably best known in Britain to those who keep half an eye on the Nobel announcements or who have studied drama at university. His most famous play, Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), is a convenient set text for lecturers keen to decolonise their curriculum; I’ve dutifully taught it myself. Soyinka is now ninety-one and has recently been in the news again.
He has announced that the United States has revoked his visa and effectively banned him from entry. Why would Washington do such a thing to so esteemed a writer? Perhaps because Soyinka has long been a fierce critic of Western policy towards Africa, and a particular scourge of the current president. Trump, he’s said, is “Idi Amin in white face.” Soyinka claims the 45th and 47th president behaves “like a dictator.” The eminent writer was so disgusted by Trump’s first election that he took drastic action on his Green Card, which, as he put it, “fell between the fingers of a pair of scissors and got cut into a couple of pieces.” You’d think, after all that, a US visa wouldn’t rank high on his wish list.
But beyond his personal quarrel with the State Department, Soyinka has been vocal in condemning current US policy towards Nigeria — particularly the president’s interest in the massacres of Nigerian Christians. Speaking to Democracy Now!, Soyinka said he was affronted by America’s paternalistic intrusion into African affairs. Trump, by contrast, said on Truth Social that he is appalled by tens of thousands of deaths and wants the Nigerian government to do something about the situation. It’s when we see such priorities that we can tell ethical wheat from ideological chaff.
Nigeria is now regarded as one of the most dangerous nations on earth for Christians. Jihadist groups, including Boko Haram and ISWAP, alongside Fulani-herder militias, carry out relentless attacks in the north and Middle Belt. According to Open Doors, around 3,100 Christians were killed in Nigeria last year for faith-related reasons — roughly 90 per cent of all such deaths worldwide, according to a UK parliamentary briefing.
Attacks have intensified this year, with more than 7,000 deaths reported in the first 220 days, and hundreds more Christians abducted. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has urged that Nigeria be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” for its systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom, a recommendation the State Department finally actioned in late October. In early November, President Trump said he had instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action if Nigeria’s government continues to fail to protect its Christian citizens.
As for practical help for the persecuted Christians of Nigeria, Soyinka is less forthcoming
In response, Soyinka, in the Democracy Now! interview, condemns Trump’s threat and makes the comparison to Idi Amin. According to Soyinka, Nigeria’s problems stem not from Western neglect but from the exploitation of religion for political power within the country. He insists that external force would only worsen the crisis. For Soyinka, Trump’s posturing is proof that the West still treats Africa as a stage for its moral vanity.
As for practical help for the persecuted Christians of Nigeria, Soyinka is less forthcoming. He seems more concerned with the perceived insult to African pride, with hurling a few intemperate barbs at the American president, and with continuing what he regards as his lifelong struggle against Western imperialism than with outlining any concrete steps to improve the situation. His criticism of the Nigerian government, and of its Muslim president Bola Tinubu, is limited to calling their failure to protect Christian lives “lackadaisical.”
This stance brings us back to Death and the King’s Horseman. It invites a fresh look at the play’s central argument — one that has long been taught and staged in Britain as an unambiguous parable of anti-imperialism and cultural self-assertion.
The play is set among the Yoruba people of Nigeria. It opens with the death of a Yoruba king, whose passing, by tradition, must be accompanied by the ritual suicide of his chief horseman, along with the ceremonial slaughter of the king’s horse and dog. The local British colonial officials intervene to prevent the suicide, regarding it as a barbaric relic better honoured in the breach than the observance.
Their interference plunges the Yoruba community into turmoil, provoking fears of supernatural retribution and accusations of cowardice against the horseman. Matters worsen when the British District Officer and his wife don sacred tribal costumes at a fancy-dress party. The horseman’s Western-educated son, Olunde, returns home in time to witness the chaos; appalled by both the colonial mockery and his father’s failure to fulfil duty, he takes his own life to restore both family honour and cosmic order.
I saw the play in an enormous, carnivalesque staging in the National Theatre’s Olivier auditorium in 2009. It was entirely right that the National should mount so significant a work of the twentieth century canon, though the production’s figures — 79 per cent attendance but only 64 per cent financial capacity, owing to school bookings and discounts — suggest that its appeal lay chiefly among those qualifying for reduced-price tickets (data from Daniel Rosenthal’s The National Theatre Story).
The text, as befits a play of its reputation, admits a variety of interpretations. At the National, the condescension of the British governing set was, to my eye, cranked up to caricatured proportions. The sacrifice of Olunde was presented as an active, dignified, and informed decision. It was impossible to leave the production with any impression other than that the British were baddies, while Olunde occupied the moral high ground.
In classroom discussions, I’ve found students are often mystified by, or sceptical of, the ethics of Olunde’s suicide. They occasionally question the fuss over the tribal costumes, principally the idea that sacrilege towards objects might be used to justify a death. This suggests that the play itself is shrewder than its National production took it to be — and that Soyinka, in interviews, is less open to ambiguity than he is when writing for the stage. Ambiguity is a dangerous trait for ideology.
The contrast between Soyinka’s art and his public posture is telling. He tends to cast himself as a kind of heroic Olunde, proudly defending African traditions and self-determination while depicting Western governments as irredeemably self-interested imperialists. Yet he is an Olunde who, rather than embracing ritual death, has accepted professorships, a string of prestigious international prizes — including the Nobel — and who enjoys his every pronouncement being treated as global news.
Evidently it is hard for Soyinka to risk disappointing those who expect rigid ideological adherence from him
This pose does little to help Nigeria’s Christian community, who continue to die in their thousands. Perhaps the black-and-white anti-imperialism Soyinka the polemicist trades in is less useful in the real world than in the seminar room, where his texts are often taught (badly) as simple postcolonial parables. Perhaps it does the slaughtered Christians little good that Soyinka amuses himself by likening Trump to Idi Amin, given there is no evidence that the American president has, as Amin did, murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, expelled whole ethnic groups, or been rumoured a cannibal. Perhaps the Christians might prefer to see some of the gunboat diplomacy that secured ceasefires between Israel and Iran, and Israel and Hamas, put to work for their cause.
Evidently it is hard for Soyinka to risk disappointing those who expect rigid ideological adherence from him. He is, after all, no Nicki Minaj. She managed to outrage her liberal fanbase by congratulating Trump for taking notice of the plight of Nigerian Christians. Soyinka lacks the pop star’s facility to surprise us with an opinion that isn’t crushingly predictable.
