A Hunger for Justice

This explains why he was in England when -- fueled by a confrontation with the late Sir Winston Churchill -- he wrote his best-known play.

'An Accidental Push'

Skip Gates was present at the creation of "Death and the King's Horseman" -- and he was in awe of the man who wrote it.

The time was the mid-'70s. Gates was doing graduate work at Cambridge under Soyinka, and he couldn't believe how "culturally secure" his mentor was. Soyinka is someone, he explains, to whom "it never once occurred" that African writers or his own Yoruba culture were in any way inferior to the culture of Greece and Rome.

"As an African American, I'd never met anyone like that," Gates says.

One week, Soyinka didn't show up for a scheduled tutorial. Shortly thereafter, Gates recalls, he was invited to Soyinka's room for a reading of "this incredible play."

Soyinka tells the story this way: He missed the tutorial because he'd somehow gotten stuck in Ghana, another former British colony. When he finally got back, he was coming down the stairs at Cambridge's Churchill College and encountered "this bust of Winston Churchill, the great colonialist."

He makes an abrupt shoving gesture with the palm of one hand. Always before when he'd passed the bust, he says, he'd found himself wanting to topple it with "an accidental push." On this day, feeling especially irritated with its presence, his mind suddenly went "from Churchill to colonialism to the colonial experience" and on to a historical event "which I'd known about for a very long time."

He went to his room "and in a few days I had written that play."

The event Soyinka had recalled was the death of a Yoruba king in 1946. According to tradition, the king's passing should have triggered the ritual suicide of the king's horseman, whose journey to join his master in the world of the ancestors was required to keep the cosmos in order. A British colonial official, believing the tradition to be barbaric, intervened to prevent the suicide -- with tragic results.

Soyinka views "Death and the King's Horseman" as a metaphysical drama of fate, and it is certainly more complex than the simple clash of cultures the plot implies. He has taken pains to make clear that the horseman's failure of will is his own, with the official's intervention serving only as a "catalytic incident."

Still, the story of how the play came to be written confirms that colonialism was much on his mind.

Soyinka has written poetry, novels and a wide range of nonfiction over the course of his five-decade career. But he sees himself primarily as a playwright, and it seemed only fitting when -- a decade after its initial 1976 production -- "Death and the King's Horseman" was singled out for special mention as its author became the first African to win the Nobel literature prize.