The Road by Wole Soyinka

First published: 1965

First produced: 1965, at the Commonwealth Arts Festival, London

Type of plot: Postcolonial; psychological

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Nigeria, West Africa

Principal Characters:

• Professor, the proprietor of a drivers’ haven; formerly a Sunday school teacher and lay reader
• Murano, a personal servant to Professor
• Kotonu, a truck driver
• Samson, a passenger tout and driver’s mate to Kotonu
• Salubi, a driver trainee
• Chief-in-Town, a politician
• Say Tokyo Kid, a driver, the captain of a group of thugs
• Particulars Joe, a policeman

The Play

Professor, the protagonist of The Road, searches for the Word, or Logos, the inward rational principle of language, consciousness, and the natural universe. As the proprietor of the Aksident Store, Professor also dedicates his life to the knowledge and propagation of death, which the Word symbolizes: “The Word may be found companion not to life, but death.” Life is the field of activity, while death, as represented by the Word, is an absolute stasis in which all activity has its unified source. Pursuing the Word can involve the fear of death, which for the Yorubas (the people to which Wole Soyinka belongs) is not considered to be the cessation of life. Professor tries to cheat the illusion of death and embrace the Word, but he ends up only cheating himself.

Death is a constant companion on the road, the synecdoche for the industrial states of Europeanized Africa. The characters in The Road live in ignorance of the true interplay between life and death. Professor’s most intimate medium in his quest for the enigmatic Word is Murano, who is accidentally run over by the truck driver Kotonu during the annual Drivers’ Festival. Murano had been masquerading as the god Ogun, the Yoruba god of carvers, metal, engineering, technology, war, and fire. Ogun symbolizes the creative-destructive principle. Murano dies in a phase known to the Yorubas as agemo and is therefore in a state of suspension: “Agemo, the mere phase, includes the passage of transition from the human to the divine essence.” Murano is a dramatic embodiment of the Word: He is mute, arrested in time, and vanishes during daylight; the Word is silent, eternal, and to most people hidden by the darkness of ignorance.

When Murano is killed, just before the play opens, Kotonu and his tout Samson hide his body in their truck to avoid the frenzied worshipers. Professor discovers Murano and engages him in his former occupation as wine-tapper and companion who might reveal the secrets of freedom from incarnate bondage. As Professor explains, Murano walks with a limp because “when a man has one leg in each world, his legs are never the same.” Murano has one foot on the Word, and the Professor hopes to find rehabilitation in this connection.

Professor’s following consists of a group of drivers and truck-park layabouts who congregate every evening for “communion service,” in which they share palm wine tapped and delivered by Murano. Kotonu asks Professor whether Murano is the “god apparent,” since he was killed in possession by Ogun. Professor thinks that by holding a god captive he can anticipate and cheat the final confrontation with death.

Kotonu, after killing Murano and witnessing an accident at the broken bridge, abandons the road and becomes manager of the Aksident Store. An ambiguous figure, Professor stocks the store from the abundant sacrifice of wrecks and road victims, forging licenses and removing traffic signs to keep his business flourishing. His rationale of reverent purpose—the search for the Word—belies his affinity to the gang of layabouts, whose consciousness of death lacks only his style of spiritual exploitation. Wole Soyinka satirizes Professor by showing how his search leads down the perverse road of madness and megalomania.

The Road consists of two parts, with a series of five major mimes in which one of the characters is in a state of possession. In the opening mime, Samson sits on Professor’s chair, placed on top of a table in the presence of Salubi, a would-be chauffeur, and pretends to be an “African Millionaire” flinging bribes to a line of police. Their hilarious fantasy is suddenly disrupted by Professor, returning from a road vigil, carrying his usual bundle of newspapers and a road sign newly removed to guarantee his success. Salubi dives under the table in panic, but Samson, although petrified with fear, continues his imposing act and manages to confuse Professor, who thinks that he has found a kindred spirit. The irony is that they are really antithetical spirits. By virtue of his willingness to accept fate as it comes, Samson appears to have greater affinity for the Word than does Professor, who searches for the Word on bits of newspaper instead of within the self.

In a subsequent scene, Samson imitates Professor in his former churchgoing days, when during service he would bow at every mention of the name Jesus Christ. This distracting mannerism, together with his habit of shaking his head in disapproval and taking notes on the bishop’s grammatical errors, held priority in the interest of the congregation over the actual sermon. Finally, the bishop thought that he would teach Professor a lesson by using Jesus Christ in every other sentence, prompting him to rise, bow, and sit like a marionette. The congregation was hushed, for they knew that this was the final duel. Professor clinched victory by taking and holding one last bow. His move was applauded, as Samson recalls, by a thunderous noise from outside that sent everyone running: The church wall adjacent to the window had collapsed under the weight of the exuberant spectators.

Each of the three remaining imitation/possession scenes involves death, and Professor is the prophet of death. Soyinka uses the chorus to re-create the original atmosphere of the scenes imitated, as with organ music in the bowing scene and the layabouts’ dirging in the subsequent scenes. At the end of the first part of the play, Murano mistakes the requiem for the departed souls of the bridge accident for the evensong that usually summons him to serve the palm wine “communion.” This simple confusion of time illustrates Murano’s nontemporal condition.

Part 2 opens with Samson and Kotonu reenacting the bridge accident for Professor. Just as they approach the bridge, an overcrowded truck passes them and plunges through the rotten planks of the bridge. The violent screech of Kotonu’s brakes is heard in the theater as they pull up to peer down the chasm. Although Professor sees the accident as a sacrifice to a thirsty river goddess, he considers it largely wasted. Professor criticizes the accident, as he does the layabouts for fighting at political rallies for money, because in both cases death lacks the dedication to the understanding he considers necessary for redemption. He thus claims to have the sole key to salvation. Death itself is not sufficient, for clearly death is not literally equivalent to the Word. Ironically, while the Professor initiates his followers into the cult of the Word, the process of redemption seems to occur without him during the scenes of possession.

The cathartic reenactments of The Road are dramatizations of cultural transcendence. The Driver’s Festival is the most intense enactment of the play. It occurs when the tailgate of the truck serving as the store falls, ejecting Kotonu and the grotesque mask worn by Murano at the time of his death. Instantly the stage is flooded by celebrators searching for their lost god, the masquerader who has just been run down by Kotonu. Samson and Kotonu frantically hide the body of Murano in the back of the truck. Kotonu then deceives the other drivers by donning the mask, which is still soaked with the dead man’s blood.

Samson also undergoes possession by the dead, precipitated by policeman Particular Joe’s hunt for Murano’s killers. Particular Joe gropes around the back of the store truck with his hands and is about to discover the mask when Samson distracts him by donning the uniform of Sergeant Burma, the former Aksident Store manager, who was recently killed in a road accident himself. Samson then imitates Sergeant Burma, while the layabouts sing a dirge. Reenactment thus takes Kotonu and Samson toward the Word’s boundlessness, melting their identities with the fate of the dead men and terrifying them into hysterically ripping off the mask and uniform.

Finally, Murano’s reenactment occurs at the evening “communion,” when he is forced by Professor to wear the mask. Murano dances to the rhythm of agemo in the ritual of Egungun, as he did as the masquerader before his death. In the previous reenactments, only the possessed were frightened; now, everyone is frightened, except Professor, of an impending death. Even though the Word is manifested through possession, Professor is never really possessed. His vicarious attempt to penetrate the mystery of death culminates, with apparently no spiritual rebirth, in his own accidental death at the hand of Say Tokyo Kid, the skeptical ringleader of the layabouts.

Dramatic Devices

Wole Soyinka’s condensation of time and space began with the play-within-the-play of A Dance of the Forests (pr. 1960, pb. 1963) and the periodic flashbacks of The Strong Breed (pb. 1963, pr. 1964) and reaches its greatest originality in The Road. The characters of this play revive the past through an intensity of recall that dissolves the boundaries of time and personality and allows them to dramatize their mental images instantaneously. Soyinka’s paradigm is the communication between the Word and the masquerader at the moment of his possession by the spirit for whom he is dancing. The difference between Murano’s possession by Ogun and the possession of the other characters by the past incidents that they relive is one of intensity and depth. Murano transcends into the pure energy of the Word at the source of thought, while the others dive to deeper levels of thought that are purged in the process of being dramatized.

In his essay “The Fourth Stage” (1976), Soyinka explains that in addition to the three worlds commonly recognized in African metaphysics—those of the unborn, the living, and the ancestors—there is a less understood fourth space, “the dark continuum of transition, where occurs the inter-transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality.” The characters of The Road enter this transitional space while being possessed or reenacting events from the past. In this experience of transcending the boundaries of space, time, and causality, the characters momentarily cross over the gulf between the human and the divine, the finite and the infinite, in their transition toward an experience of primal reality. Making this highly subjective experience accessible to the audience is Soyinka’s dramaturgical feat.

Soyinka symbolizes this experience with the enigmatic Word. Ultimately, the Word represents the unity of name and form, sound and meaning, that is found in the fourth space. The approach toward the Word that occurs in the play’s reenactments is accompanied by the chorus, which re-creates not only the original atmosphere of the scene imitated but also the atmosphere of ritual transition across the abyss. Sound, therefore, functions as an important transitional device, although the sound of the Word is never actually manifested and its meaning cannot be discovered on the printed page. Another transitional device is the road itself. Soyinka uses it as a middle ground, a no-man’s-land, full of corruption and impending death. Similarly, Professor’s Victorian outfit, his threadbare top hat and tails, represents a middle state, belonging neither to European nor to African culture. Thus, The Road teaches that the Word’s ultimate meaning exists beyond the range of ordinary waking consciousness and requires a transition toward higher states, of which Soyinka provides a glimpse.

Critical Context

Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1986, is considered a “difficult” or literary as opposed to a popular dramatist. The Road, even though it falls within the traditional framework of his other plays, defies narrow classification. It ranges in mood from the near tragic to the absurdly comic, and it contains grim realism, abstract symbolism, caustic satire, and religious and mystical speculation. As an example of ritual theater, The Road presents a microcosm of the “cosmic” human condition. As Soyinka says of ritual theater in Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), “powerful natural or cosmic influences are internalized within the protagonists.” Since the stage for Soyinka is “brought into being by a communal presence,” the ritual aspect of the play draws the audience into participating in the cathartic process.

Soyinka distinguishes European from African literature on the basis of their different relations to the audience and to reality. Whereas the European literary experience consists of a series of literary ideologies, such as realism, naturalism, and absurdism, the African literary experience concerns mainly the discovery and understanding of timeless truth and the preservation of the moral fiber of society. For Soyinka, African literature does not have an independent existence as an ideological entity. The Road, like Soyinka’s other plays, employs ritual devices within a folkloric framework in order to engage the audience in the cathartic process. Ideally, this process has the effect of raising collective consciousness and thereby bringing the community into harmony with the laws of nature. In his visionary projection of society, Soyinka’s satire extends well beyond the road. His absolute standard includes the Christian God and Yoruba deities, such as Ogun and the spirits of timber and the graveyard. The characters (and through them the audience) apprehend these deities not merely as abstract concepts but as real forces open to direct experience on the basis of expanded awareness. For Soyinka, crossing the transitional gulf cannot be separated from the African cultural context.

Sources for Further Study

Adelugba, Dapo, ed. Before Our Very Eyes: Tribute to Wole Soyinka, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books, 1987.

Bossler, Gregory. “Writers and Their Work: Wole Soyinka.” Dramatist 2 (January/February, 2000): 9.

Gates, Louis, Jr., and Kwame Appiah, eds. Critical Perspectives, Past and Present. New York: Harper Trade, 1994.

Gibbs, James, Ketu H. Katrak, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Wole Soyinka: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Jones, Eldred Durosimi. The Writing of Wole Soyinka. 3d ed. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1988.

Maja-Pearce, Adewale. Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal. Oxford, England: Heinemann, 1991.

Moore, Gerald. Wole Soyinka. 2d ed. London: Evans Brothers, 1978.

Ogunba, Oyin. The Movement of Transition: A Study of the Plays of Wole Soyinka. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1975.

Okagbue, Osita. “Wole Soyinka.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Sekoni, Ropo. “Metaphor as Basis of Form in Soyinka’s Drama.” Research in African Literatures 14 (Spring, 1983): 45-57.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Wright, Derek. Wole Soyinka: A Life, Work, and Criticism. Indianapolis: Macmillan, 1992.