[Academic] Death and the King's Horseman: Transitions and Thresholds
TRANSITIONS AND THRESHOLDS The Importance of the Messenger in Death and the King’s Horseman
Death and the King’s Horseman is a play built upon transitions: the various scenes in the play shift from civilization to civilization, from microcosms of one culture to another, and the survival of the Yoruba community itself is built upon transitions between the material world and the spirit world. The role of the messenger in the play is therefore of supreme importance –to ensure smooth transitions by carrying messages of import from one point to the next, and to straddle the thresholds between worlds.
The stability of a community hinges upon understanding-based interaction with other communities around it (in the case of the Yoruba, this entails its interaction with the spirit world as well as the colonial presence in Africa). If a messenger is unsuccessful in his interpretative and translative duties, conveying incorrect messages or simply failing to carry out his ascribed duty, then that yields potentially disastrous results for the community – and that’s exactly what happens in the play.
We’ll focus on a number of key characters who play the role of the messenger in the play. First among these is of course Elesin, whose ascribed social function since birth has been to act as the messenger between the Yoruba and the realm of the ancestors. But no discussion is complete without looking at the other messengers – Amusa is another prime example, and to some degree, Olunde. I’ll also be referencing some brilliant points made by Marty Brooks in ‘The “Failed Messenger”’, which is featured somewhere in the DKH reader.
Elesin’s constant misinterpretations foreshadow his impending failure as the messenger between this world and the next, threatening by extension the very existence of the Yoruba community itself. Brooks writes of how “The Praise-Singer warns Elesin of the threatening presence of the white man, but must end his speech: ‘Elesin Oba, do you hear me?’ [to which Elesin replies] ‘I hear your voice, Olohun-iyo.’ Hearing someone’s voice, however, is not the same as hearing someone’s words and is even farther removed from an acknowledgement of understanding.” That Elesin can hear a voice in general, but not the nuance, meaning and importance of the words which that voice is used for, casts doubt on his interpretative abilities.
But Elesin’s hubris also fundamentally impedes his role as a messenger. He has the strongest obligation, out of all others in his community, to be careful and precise with the language that he uses. After all, language is the medium by which he will speak to both his king and the ancestors, guiding the former through to the afterlife and ensuring continued harmony between the physical world and the immaterial realm. However, Elesin’s language bleeds superfluity where it should be concise; manipulation where it should be truthful. He uses it to forward his own personal desires rather than the good of the community. When Elesin sees a beautiful woman in the marketplace, Brooks shows how the Horseman “[contends] that he yearns not for the pleasure but for an act of meaning”, using “the metaphor of the young shoot rising from the withering stalk of the plaintain to suggest that his desire for the young woman is actually the desire to create life from death”:
Elesin …You have seen the young shoot swelling Even as the parent stalk begins to wither. Women, let my going be likened to The twilight hour of the plantain.
Elesin, appointed spiritual messenger of the Yoruba people, is flippant with the treatment of his craft’s medium, and also proves careless with his interpretation of it. That casts a long, foreboding shadow onto whether or not his role will be fulfilled, and establishes the potential for the descent of the Yoruba community into calamitous instability.
Other characters who fall into the messenger archetype also see a similar failure to carry out their appointed role, engendering chaos as a result. Let’s have a look now at Sergeant Amusa.
Amusa is the only link between the world of the British and the world of Yoruba. He delivers messages from one party to another, but because he speaks in broken, Pidgin English, it leads to misunderstandings and instability between the two worlds. The Pilkingses “misinterpret the contents [of the note that Amusa writes]. They assume that Amusa’s phrase ‘Elesin Oba is to commit death’ refers to ritual murder. Their servant Joseph corrects their misinterpretation, but Joseph is a feeble interpreter for the Pilkingses to rely upon…Pilkings, unable to confirm the truth of Amusa’s note, sends a message to Amusa directing him to arrest Elesin.” And we all know how the story goes from here – eventually the white man’s forces breaks into Elesin’s chamber while his naughty time makes him hesitate, and the Yoruba world is thrown into imbalance.
There are many other scenes where Amusa fails to convey the proper message, causing the colonials to get the wrong idea. For example, despite Pilkings’ later insistence that Amusa is “prone to exaggerations”, the Resident still interprets Amusa’s note as describing riots in the marketplace. As a whole, however, it’s clear that Amusa is another example of a failed messenger.
But why is his language so fragmented? During the scenes with the British, we can assume it’s because he might speak Yoruba whereas the Brits speak English, and therefore Amusa’s Pidgin English reflects his poor grasp of colonial talk. But Amusa is just as incompetent at conversing with the Yoruba as well.
When we were in England for the lit trip, we had a session with a Nigerian playwright who told us that it’s because Amusa isn’t actually Yoruba. Soyinka never specifies, but the playwright speculated that Amusa is most likely Hausa – a completely different nomadic African tribe/culture with its own language, who were often hired by the colonial British.
So Amusa, caricatured through his laughable language, is an incompetent messenger because he simply doesn’t belong. His inability to convey messages properly to either world arises from the fact that this shouldn’t be his job – he’s neither British nor Yoruba. That ill placement creates a fundamental inadequacy, and in turn results in the failure of his assigned job. He is a symbol for the critical, inevitable failure of an out-of-place messenger.
We can draw interesting – and rather foreboding – parallels to Olunde. On the one hand, Olunde should eventually become the next Horseman after the death of his father, because the position of Horseman is dynastic and inherited. So Olunde has that association with the role of messenger, just as how Amusa also has a basic association with being a messenger because he’s been employed by the British.
Most likely not Olunde, but you get the idea
At the same time, however, Olunde attempts to save his community in the wake of his father’s acute failure, committing ritual suicide in place of Elesin – before his father has died, and before the mantle of Horseman has been passed on to him. Olunde is acting way out of his role here because he is not actually the Horseman, much in the same way that Amusa acts out of his role because he is not Yoruba.
Amusa totally fails to interpret and convey messages from one world to another because he is an inadequate messenger. He has no place as a link to two cultures because he simply isn’t part of either, and thus fails precisely because of that. And if Amusa fails on account of that - what more Olunde? What more a black man returning to his community after years abroad in the dressing of the white man, half an outsider…what more a man who has not yet been ordained and ordered to die for his people?
Olunde’s success in keeping harmony between the Yoruba world and the spirit world are drowned in massive doubt. We have no idea if he’ll make it, and most signs point towards the fact that he won’t. Death and the King’s Horseman is a play built upon transitions, and characterized by the failure to transition smoothly because of the inadequacies of its messengers. The abject failure of their important roles suggests a serious de-synchronization of total worlds, be it the material and the immaterial, or the Yoruba and the British.
In fact, the only points of the play wherein communication is whole and unfragmented are at the very peak of its classic Greek tragedy moment: anagnorisis, the point of recognition, when Elesin realises his son has died in place of him, and peripetea, the turning point, when he strangles himself with his chains out of shame.