Leave the Dead Some Room to Dance: Postcolonial Founding and the Problem of Inheritance in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

• Date: 01 June 2020
• Author: David Thomas Suell
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719878403
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719878403

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(3) 330 –356

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719878403

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Article

Leave the Dead Some

Room to Dance:

Postcolonial Founding

and the Problem of

Inheritance in Wole

Soyinka’s A Dance of

the Forests

David Thomas Suell1

Abstract

In this essay, I examine Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the

Forests in order to think through political founding. Viewing founding from

the postcolonial context, I explore how members of a political community

negotiate among the multiple pasts that continue to affect them, and what

kind of institutions and actors are best equipped to pursue this critical

part of the founding project. Situating Soyinka’s account against competing

narratives of the postcolonial condition, I demonstrate how he uses Yoruba

philosophy and cosmology to reframe the challenges and potentials of

founding, and I illustrate how political actors should respond to these by

adopting the role of “citizen-artists” who can learn from past struggles and

overcome their overwhelming legacies. Read as a dramatic intervention

into Nigerian democratic politics and as a work of political theory, A Dance

offers a lens through which to interrogate founding within and beyond the

postcolony.

1University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Thomas Suell, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 5700 Haven Hall,

505 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.

Email: dtsuell@umich.edu

878403PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719878403Political TheorySuell

research-article2019

Suell 331

Keywords

founding, decolonization, memory, democracy, Wole Soyinka

Postcolonial Founding and the Problem of

Inheritance

On October 1, 1960, Nigeria became an independent state. This defining

moment followed generations of natural resource and slave extraction, a cen-

tury of British political influence, half a century of direct colonial administra-

tion, decades of budding nationalist movements, and two years of formal

transition to self-government. At its opening ceremonies, Nigeria’s leaders

lauded this new beginning while also recognizing the preceding history. Prime

Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa touted the moment as an “achievement

. . . unparalleled in the annals of history” and “a new chapter in the history of

Nigeria.”1 Nevertheless, he also portrayed the day as the culmination of fifteen

years of “purposefully and peacefully planned . . . harmonious cooperation”

between Nigerian and British officials toward self-government. In short,

Balewa’s laudatory speech expressed succinctly the reality that Nigeria—like

other postcolonial regimes—began its political life molded explicitly, inescap-

ably, by that which came before.

Amid the fanfare of Independence Day festivities, playwright Wole

Soyinka presented the first run of A Dance of the Forests—hereafter, A

Dance—which employed indigenous Yoruba cosmology to dramatize for

Nigeria’s citizenry the paradoxes and risks of the new, inherited regime.2 The

Independence Day Committee originally commissioned A Dance, Soyinka’s

first major play, only to reject it for criticizing the incoming leadership and

the state’s triumphalist narratives. A prescient thinker, playwright, and activ-

ist, Soyinka represents a rare “convergence of aesthetic and political radical-

ism” that brought him a Nobel Prize in Literature and landed him in prison

and self-imposed exile.3 In this essay, I examine A Dance to reflect on politi-

cal founding.

Critical reflection on founding is essential, because it directly addresses

how individuals create communities of meaning and relationships of obliga-

tion across time. In a founding moment, political actors encounter multiple

contradictory memories and legacies that sweep across generations to pro-

duce their present trials and goals. If they silence these memories or ignore

legacies of the past, then they risk enshrining old modes of domination or

community conflicts in the new polity. For Nigeria, the most obvious legacy

was that of the colonial period itself, from which it received its borders,