A Fanonian Reading of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests and Death and the King's Horseman

A Dance of the Forests (1960) and Death and the King's Horseman (1975) are two plays by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka who has gained a large amount of reputation for his idiosyncratic expression of abhorrence towards Western colonialism through depicting native people's life situations and their conflicts with the Western colonizers. He also repudiates nostalgic view of the past and in A Dance of the Forests revealed his premonition of the forthcoming internal colonialism which was a consequence of exalting the past in a prejudicial manner. Frantz Fanon, the influential French psychiatrist and political philosopher, put colonialism under scrutiny in his writing and analysed its various political forms and psychological consequences. This article gives the two aforementioned plays of Soyinka a close reading through the eye borrowed from Fanon to detect in the relation of these two texts and the existing post-colonial conflicts and ambivalences in them.