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Yakubu Nasidi
A Play of Giants
[By
Wole Soyinka, London: Methuen.
/984. 69
p".
£2.95J
.
, To nobody's surprise, Africa's play writing giant in the English
language has come out with a new play - on giants. But there is really
nothing new about Soyinka's 'newest' published play.
A play of Giants
is
one more dramatic manifestation of Soyinka's well-known obsession
with the 'metaphysics' of power; it belongs, thematically, in a con-
tinuum, stretchng from
A Dance of the Forests
to
Opera Wonyosi,
from
the early revues to
Requiem for A Futurologist.
The theme is power and
what happens when it inevitably 'produces' monstrous 'perversions'like
.Amin, Bokassa, Nguema and Mobutu - familiar giants in 'the jungle of
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African Politics' - who form the centre of the play's action.
.. The play's 'main interest, however, is Amin - 'The I Iero of Heroes' -
who appears in the playas Lamini, a playful murderer with a diabolical
genius for in~nting terror. Against the self-serving rhetoric of pundits
and phrase-mongers who preferred to see Amin as a misrepresented
,revolutionary, Soyinka's view is that Amin was nothing but a 'certified
, psychopath,' a bloodthirsty vampire who unl ashed his insatiable fangs
on 'his people and within months of taking office had eliminated 200,000
of hisown countrymen.
As usual Soyinka refuses a historical or structural approach to the pro-
blem represented by Kamini. The global distribution of dictators (Hitler,
Pinochet, Galtier, Pol, Nguerna, Amin) across a wide spectrum of social
• and racial types bears him out, and testifies to the fact that the worrying
question of power, or, more specifically, of human will-to-power, can-
not be adequately explained in terms of the peculiarlt les of historical
I
irne
and place. The marxist framework of relating all issues to specific socio-
economic arrangements falls aside when confronted with the terrifyingly
irrational example of an Idi Amin. What Amin demonstrates is not
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capitalist perversion, socially and historicall . specific, but man's deep
seated and unvarying capacity for evil.
In spite of this obsession with evil, however, th play's dominant mode
is satire, not tragedy. Karnini is murderou . bthis uffoon - por-
trayed as an incurable bungler, operating o
I
10 th familiar bounds of
(Western) Reason
and Rationality.
His
IAn
u e
i
proof of his
in-
herent unreason -
it
is ungrammatical:
I
dn ygood friend of
African leaders. She
wrltln boo
about
me ... ':
as
R
e his
actions:
brutalising
the
Chairman of the
nll,C(arq entr
I
Rank
hy
baptising him in
'shit", unleashing his dreaded ins/.: -orce on the .ngli~h, and finally lay-
ing a siege around
his
Own
embassy.
At11
i
ni
j~
portra
ed
IlS
all 'viscera'
and no intellect, with an
"TlIl~H
I
emnhnsis on
1'1
bodily functions -
eating, belching,
picking hi,: teeth in
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show
of
nimal
satisfaction, and,
finally,
shitting.
Yet, this I!>~he
man who, with f ~ other dictators, wants
to irnrnortalise himself with a life-size bust at the N. But in the
view
of
the
Russians
(and of
Soyinka.)
it
is not immort
ity
he deserves (an
honour
y~!
to be bestowed on Comrade Ilyich Lenin) but a 'Babooshka
doll' - whose limb!' he should spend his time
tearing
off - 'instead of
those helpless Bugaran peasants and work rs."
We laugh and enjoy these satirical portrayals, b ed mostly on topical
(but slightly dated) issues and events. Then Soyinka drops a
melodramatic device: a telex which tells of a roup in Bugara, This
changes the key of the piny from Slapstick to a ritual demonstration of
the evil of power. Kamini has been overthrown. /\s with most African
leaders
in
a similar situation, however, he would much rather "preside
over a necropolis than not preside at all.' Instantly the Bugaran Embassy
is placed under siege by Arnin's gunners, with everybody - the Russians,
the Americans, the UN Secretary General, even Kamini's comrades-in-
blood as hostage. In the end, the UN building itself, hitherto silhouetted,
comes under rocket fire on Amin's orders and everybody is surrounded
in a ritual of terror .
.A Piny of Giants is a bald and straightfoward representation of what
happens "when men acquire power over the lives of others." A ritual in
the Soyinka sense - but this time shorn of metaphysics and literary con-
fusion - the play is more properly
10
be conceived of as a theatrical
event whose primary conce+r is to make the terrifying evil of power an
immediate and concrete
experience
for the audience. Hence the one-
dimensional, almost cartoonish quality, of Arnin: a leader who speaks to
people, not with them and acts absolutely on his own self-understanding
of things. As the Chairman of the Bugara National Bank and the gar-
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rulous English Sculptor would learn (too late) Arnin Slanguage is the
monologic language of power; it is non-reciprocal.
All said and done, however, A Play of Giants el us nowhere, either
thematically or dramartugically. It is more like a simplification of an
earlier version of the same problem -
Kongl's
Ilarv
t
(1965). But now
instead of a leader locked in combat against romantic and feudal
renegades as in the earlier play, we are given a megalomaniac who turns
against all classes - bourgeois, peasants, workers - with no redeeming
vision of a better society. Is Soyinka, then, at a dead end? Is he finally
paying for his inveterate refusal to root his vision in other than romantic
and metaphysical terms? For the time being, at least, so it seems.
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