Death and the King's Horseman
by Wole Soyinka
A ritual suicide interrupted by colonialism.
For you if
you want to understand how colonialism destroyed the things it didn't even know it was touching
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In 1940s Yoruba Nigeria, the king's horseman is required to follow his master in death — a ritual that maintains cosmic order. The British colonial officer stops the ceremony because he finds it barbaric. What follows is not the story of a superstition defeated by civilization. It is the story of a civilization's equilibrium destroyed by an outside force that didn't understand what it was interrupting. Soyinka's most performed play. The most precise dramatic dispatch from inside the violence of cultural misunderstanding.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Nigeria • West Africa
- Voice
- Written by a Nigerian author
- Topics
- british colonial nigeria
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