EbonyLife presents A Biyi Bandele Film,Odunlade Adekola (Elesin Oba), Odunlade Adekola, (Praise Singer), Omowunmi Dada (Bride), Shaffy Bello (Iyaloja), Michael Okorie (Adenkule), Jide Kosoko (Sergeant Amusa), Mark Elderkin (Simon), Jenny Stead (Jane), Kevin Ushi (Joseph), Deyemi Okanlawon (Olunda), Ajoke Siva (Madam Bola). Screenplay, Biyi Bandele; Executive Producer, Mo Abudu; Producers, Judith Audu, James Amuta, Adeola Osunkojo, Quinty Pillay; Director, Biyi Bandele; Director of Photography, Lance Newer. © 2022
“Death and the King’s Horseman can be fully realized only through an evocation of music from the abyss of transition.” Wole Soyinka.
Wole Soyinka tells us a medieval-style narrative (drama) of a Nigerian story that took place at the height of not so distant second world war. A thirty days old dead King is in transit to reach the void of the ancestors. He’s awaiting the burial of Elesin Oba, his (Horseman), before his spirit can rest in peace. The latter will accompany him to the underworld. A powerfully built Okonkwo-of Things Fall Apart-like character is the King’s Horseman, Elesin Oba (Olawale Olofforo). Elesin Oba welcomes his fate with joy and pleasure, for he has overcome the gruesome thought of suicide as a traditional route to join his ancestors. Therefore, he has to get the best from life before killing himself. Yet, it has been thirty days since the King died, and the kingdom is wary of Elesin Oba’s delay.
One would not wonder what the swarm of teenage women around him is for as he buffets in the good life. It is supposedly his last day on earth. Isn’t it? He has the right to enjoy all the worldly pleasures endowed to him, especially women. Hence he picked out the young virgin he sees on his tour of the village. He meets with slight opposition to this demand. But Iyaloja (Shaffey Bello), knowing what time this Elesin’s life has on earth, agrees for him to marry and deflower her son would’ve been wife.
Meanwhile, Elesin Oba’s son Olunde (Deyemi Okanlawon) arrives in town from England, where he studies medicine. Simon (Mark Elderson) and his wife, Jane (Jenny Stead), had smuggled him from Nigeria to England. No, he’s in town for the ceremony to see his father, the King’s Horseman, to be buried next to his King. The tradition, however, crashes with the White man’s look at the Yoruba tradition of burying the Horseman with the King as brutish and barbaric.
Olunde took four years in England, but he has not forgotten his culture and stands with it, as he makes evident in the scene with Jane:
Olunde, “how fortunate I came here to see your husband.”
Jane, “What a fine young man you’ve become. Grand, but solemn.”
Jane is still in the egungun costume
“Don’t you find it rather hot in there?”
“Of course not. It is for a good course.”
“What good cause?”
“Oh, the ball.”
“And that is the good cause for which you desecrate an ancestral mask?”
“If you are shocked.….”
“No, I’m not shocked. I spent four years among your people. You have no respect for what you don’t understand.”
“Why are you here?”
“To bury my father. And I do not want your husband….”
Olunde’s rush to meet the Colonial District Commissioner, Simon, is to warn him not to pick beef with the community over the ritualistic killing of his father in the name of custom.
“Olunde, this is a barbaric culture.”
“And how do you call this (looks around the ballroom) at such a time when war rages?”
“Preservation of sanity in a time of chaos.”
“I call it decadence.”
When the film opens, Elesin Oba is buried under a harem of younger girls, feeding him, drinking from their cups, singing his praise—and wishing him to live long as if that was not the last night supposedly on this earth. Elesin, with all the bravery he demonstrates in his native kingdom, has a little fear in going forward with his avowed obligation as a King’s Horseman. He is not quite ready to leave worldly pleasures for the abyss. “What thing this is? That even those we call immortal should fear to die.”
Since he received the telegram of the King’s death, Olunde had written off his father, Elesin Oba, the King’s Horseman, as dead. Knowing that his father disappoints the community by not killing himself and letting the dead King’s spirit wander restlessly abroad, Olunde takes the place of his father. Upon his arrival, he finds his father has not committed suicide yet but is about having his worldly cup full of pleasures. Olunde commits suicide in place of his father. The colonial officers stop Elesin Oba from going on with the ritual of committing suicide and, in fact, handcuff him and lock him up.
Of course, the idea of one killing himself as a ritual to be the lead in the afterworld to navigate the void for his King could be scary and even seem brutal to the western culture, as Jenny and Simon, and other Whites could perceive. In passing, I will mention similar cultures in the Northern province of Sierra Leone among the Temne tribe. In a certain chiefdom there, a deceased chief is never buried with his head, but the chief who preceded him in death, and his head is–sterilized, dried?–is saved for the next dead chief in line. I cringed the first time I heard of such rituals. But they do exist in our cultures.
Iyaloja pointedly confronts Elesin Oba on more than one occasion. She comments to Elesin Oba, “(about his love of women), they love to spoil you but beware. The hands of women also weaken the unwary.” At this point, Elesin Oba shows a dint of cowardness, hence his delay in taking his own life: “What thing this is, that even those we call immortal should fear to die.” To which Iyaloja retorts, “But you, husband of multitudes?” Yet when Elesin Oba sees the face of his dead son, his heart sinks. He strangles himself with the chain on his wrist, and by the time Simon can open the cell to save him, he is cold dead. Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman, and Olunde are laid to rest.
What makes the situation worse for him is that the Praise-Singer, the women in the chorus, and Iyaloja use gentle pressure on Elesin Oba to hasten up. They all fear the dead King’s spirit must be in transit between the two worlds. His Horseman has not been buried to take him through the void in the great beyond. Women chorus pestered him with pressing questions when Elesin says, “My rein is loosened. I am master of my fate.” And the choir sings in response, “You will not delay? Nothing will hold you back?”
Elesin, who had rampantly used the word “Not I” like a Shakespearean character in most of his utterances expressing his bravery, courage, and disrespect, now stands behind the bar. And in chains. Elesin confesses so to Iyaloja, “My shame is enough.”
Iyaloja, “You have not seen anything yet. I will tell the other chief how you showed bravery in waging war against the Whiteman who took your side against your death. Didn’t I warn you? If you want to leave a seed behind, do not leave the cursed one. …To want a self-replacement when you are not ready to die?”
Elesin Oba, “My powers deserted me.”
Iyaloja, “You betrayed us! ”Whosoever breaks custom shall ever face the consequences…When banana dies, it replaces itself.”
Besides giving us a roadmap of the drama unfolding in front of us on the screen in a melodic tone, the proverbs, wisdom, and traditional rhetoric parables all put this story in an admirable class. A commentator of the piece could say, “Soyinka blends European literary theater with total-theater traditions of the Yoruba tribe.” I agree with him. He couldn’t have put it more succinctly. Still, I can go further to describe this literary piece as a crown jewel in African literature. Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman reminds me of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in rhetorical usage and structure, embedded in proverbs and parables.
A significant aspect of this medieval-style Soyinka narrative is its initial quotation at the top of the film. “Death and The King’s Horseman can be fully realized only through an evocation of music from the abyss of transition,” as the Poet laureate could quote. The chorus, and the Praise Singer, take us through the poetic treatise. I, for one, rollicks more in the solemn voices of the women singing and, at times, deep into the forest, reaching us in waves as the wind turns, like a sound of a pall-bearing funereal procession. Ominous. Tear-provoking. At times dancing. Indeed the chorus takes a life of its own and becomes an important character.