We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
New Year purification ceremonies are perhaps spread more widely over African fiction than African drama, ranging from the disposal of the old year's yams at the Feast of the New Yam in Achebe's Things Fall Apart to the Somalian Rendezvous of the Brooms which, in Nurridin Farah's novel Sweet and Sour Milk, the military dictatorship perverts into a political circus. More specifically, the annual rite of the carrier, who bears away the sins and misfortunes of the past year in the form of a miniature wooden boat, a bundle of twigs or a wicker effigy, is handled figuratively in the first novels of the Ghanaians Kofi Awoonor and Ayi Kwei Armah. This particular ritual practice does make some vestigial dramatic appearances, however – for example, in the symbolic dismemberment of Tufa in the cleansing floods at the end of J. P. Clark's play The Masquerade – and it receives what is probably its most complex and experimental treatment in two plays by Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed and his adaptation of Euripides' The Bacchae.
1. Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 26Google Scholar; Farah, Nuruddin, Sweet and Sour Milk (London: Heinemann, 1980), pp. 185–94.Google Scholar
2. Awoonor, Kofi, This Earth, My Brother … (London: Heinemann, 1972)Google Scholar; Armah, Ayi Kwei, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969).Google Scholar
3. Clark, J. P., Three Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 87–8Google Scholar; Soyinka, Wole, Collected Plays, Vol. I (Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar All references to The Strong Breed and The Bacchae are taken from this edition and are given in parentheses in the text of the article.
4. van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage, 1906. Trans. Kimball, S. T. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 11, 21.Google Scholar
5. Gates, Louis L., ‘An Interview with Wole Soyinka’, Black World, Vol. 24, No. 10 (08 1975), pp. 40–1.Google Scholar
6. Awolalu, J. O., Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites (Harlow: Longman, 1979), p. 176Google Scholar; James, E. O., Origins of Sacrifice (London & New York: Kennikat Press, 1933), pp. 198, 204.Google Scholar
7. Gates, , p. 36.Google Scholar
8. Mphahlele, Ezekiel, ‘Interview with Wole Soyinka’ in African Writers Talking eds Duerden, D. & Pieterse, C. (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 171.Google Scholar
9. Awolalu, , pp. 153–5Google Scholar; Horton, Robin, ‘New Year in the Delta’, Nigeria Magazine, No. 67 (1960), pp. 260, 273.Google Scholar
10. Rattray, R. S., Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 167Google Scholar; Horton, , p. 274.Google Scholar
11. Henderson, R. N., The King in Everyman: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 391–2, 407Google Scholar; Horton, , p. 259.Google Scholar
12. Awoonor, , This Earth, My Brother …, p. 29.Google Scholar
13. Lindfors, Bernth, Priebe, Richard & Others, ‘Interview with Kofi Awoonor’ in Palaver: Interviews with Five African Writers (Austin: African Research Institute, University of Texas, 1972), p. 62Google Scholar; Goldblatt, John, ‘Kofi Awoonor: an Interview’, Transition, No. 41 (1972), p. 44Google Scholar; Rattray, , Ashanti, p. 211Google Scholar; Meyerowitz, Eva, The Sacred State of the Akan (London: Faber, 1951), p. 155.Google Scholar
14. Gates, , p. 41.Google Scholar
15. Horton, , p. 273.Google Scholar
16. Frye, Northrop, An Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 41.Google Scholar
17. Ogunba, Oyin, The Movement of Transition (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1975), pp. 115–16Google Scholar; Ogunba, , ‘The Traditional Content of the Plays of Wole Soyinka’, African Literature Today, No. 4 (1970), pp. 17–18Google Scholar; see also Okafor, Dubem, ‘The Cultural Validity of Soyinka's Plays’, Nsukka Studies in African Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1979), pp. 19–22.Google Scholar
18. Gates, , p. 41.Google Scholar
19. Rattray, R. S., Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 136–7.Google Scholar
20. Soyinka, Wole, The Bacchae of Euripides (London: Methuen, 1973), p. vii.Google Scholar
21. Soyinka, Wole, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 33.Google Scholar
22. Soyinka, , The Bacchae of Euripides, p. xi.Google Scholar
23. Ibid., p. xi.
24. Anon., ‘Interview with Wole Soyinka’, The Militant, Vol. 2, No. 1 (12 1972), pp. 3–7Google Scholar; Jeyifous, Biodun, ‘Wole Soyinka: A Transition Interview’, Transition, No. 42 (1973), pp. 62–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agetua, John, ‘Interview with Wole Soyinka in Accra, Ghana, 1974’ in When The Man Died ed. Agetua, J. (Benin City: Bendel Newspaper Corporation, 1975), pp. 37–41Google Scholar; Gates, (1975), pp. 32–42Google Scholar; Anon., ‘No Sense of Direction’, Afriscope, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1977), pp. 36–8.Google Scholar
25. Gates, , p. 37.Google Scholar
26. Ibid., p. 37.
27. Soyinka, , The Bacchae of Euripides, p. xii.Google Scholar
28. Soyinka, Wole, Season of Anomy (London: Rex Collings, 1973), pp. 173–5Google Scholar; Soyinka, Wole, The Man Died (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 87–96.Google Scholar
