The Man Died: Wole Soyinka’s imprisonment and the Yoruba trickster tale in Femi Euba’s Tortoise!

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nigerian playwright Femi Euba utilizes the Yoruba trickster tale in his one-act play Tortoise! to satirize the imprisonment of Wole Soyinka during the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s. This essay draws parallels between Euba’s play and Soyinka’s play, The Detainee, which critiques the imprisonment of Chief Obafemi Awolowo by the Nigerian federal government a few years before Soyinka himself fell victim to the same alleged crime of treason. This essay argues that Euba’s use of the trickster tale as a logical genre in theater is grounded in the communal space of Yoruba belief systems that encourage a collective response to social and political crises. The essay also traces modernity’s fraught challenges in the guise of neo-colonial structures, such as the prison system, and the ways in which traditional modes of story-telling become avenues for apprehending, addressing, and contesting global forces at work through the legacies of colonialism.