It has always been pronounced in the annals of dramatic criticism—from Aristostle’s Poetics to Harold Bloom’s Invention of the Human—that the mark of a capable playwright is the ability to create believable characters. That the mark of an impressive one is to create, with the least suspicion of cognitive coercion in their tics, personalities that convince in their singularities—not only in the particular play in which they find themselves but also across other plays in the tradition of their creator. Also, that the mark of a great playwright is the consistent ability to present these characters of convincing personalities so sufficiently marked and eloquent in their differences. In African drama, no writer has been so steadfast as well as showing great virtuosity to dazzle us with characters of this strong human-like breed and calibre as Soyinka; since the dawn of his professional career in the theatre in the mid-twentieth century till presently, in the third decade of the twenty-first. 

As early as A Dance of the Forest, first performed at the Nigerian Independence Celebrations in 1960, Soyinka established that he’s not just a capable playwright—if only he could get the grace of life to write and to perform one more play of the imagination, and another after that, to prove as much. Indeed, he got this grace and well evinced it enough that the characters—major in their roles, intimidating sometimes in their gestures yet imaginatively prepossessing—that established his greatness are as marvellous on the page and stage as the ones supporting their roles toward memorability.  

This is why I am pledging my ink neither to Demoke, for instance, who has been heavily but somewhat rightly described as standing in for humanity in A Dance of the Forest. ‘The carver is central to Yoruba life and worship,’ the critical cognoscente on Soyinka, Eldred Durosimi Jones, notes in The Writing of Wole Soyinka. ‘[T]his central position is reflected in the symbolic role of Demoke the carver . . . who becomes a representative of humanity.’ Nor to Kongi, the vainglorious dictatorial president of the developing African nation of ‘Ismaland’ from Kongi’s Harvest. Ditto Dr. Bero, the cynical specialist from the absurd ambiance of Madmen and Specialists. Each and every one of these characters has been well-represented and well-interpreted in our literary and critical traditions. 

However, in Jones’s comprehensive commentary, Rola—one of the four protagonists of Part 1 of A Dance of the Forest, referred to as ‘The most notorious’ of ‘the four living generations’ by Aroni, a Forest Dweller, in the prologue—becomes relegated to her appreciation of Demoke’s artistic performance, that too after calling her ‘an odd mixture,’ a keen observation that hints towards her complexity but is described with minimal context that results in a rather shallow perception of the character. ‘About all that can be said for Rola in either existence,’ the critic concludes, ‘is that she shows some appreciation of art.’ This is evidently not the case. 

While I concede she does have a rather cynical view of her society as the critic also perceives, I take her loud performance of this outlook to be a result of the mocking denigration of ‘her position’ as a prostitute by the fellows in whose company she finds herself. Why stand reduced in silence by hypocrisy—that is, the amalgam of Adenebi, Demoke, and, to some minor extents, Obaneji (cynicism divined), the representatives of men and their socio-cultural privilege—when you are gifted with words and reason? The issue later escalates to the ancient question about who propagates prostitution in society: women who sell sex or the men who sustain the enterprise as hedonistic ‘investors?’ Rola understands the prejudice all too well and she defends her position as expected of a fastidious intellect, even more so when she’s accused of something as horrid as killing her transactional ‘lovers’: 

ADENEBI: Men! Some of them were hardly grown up. We heard you liked them young, really young. 

ROLA: I regret nothing. You men are conceited fools. Nothing was ever done on my account. Nothing. What you do is boost yourselves all the time. By every action. When that one killed the other, was it on my account? When he killed himself, could he claim that he did it for me? He was only big with himself, so leave me out of it. 

ADENEBI: I suppose you didn’t really run merely because you were beset by your relations. They simply didn’t leave you room to entertain your lovers. And this could have been a profitable season. A generous season. 

ROLA: Draw your filthy conclusions. I only know I am master of my fate. I have turned my training to good account. I am wealthy, and I know where my wealth came from. 

ADENEBI: Oh yes, you ruined countless. Young and old. Old, peaceful ones who had never even set eyes on you; who simply did not know what their son was up to; didn’t know he was draining the home away—for you. 

ROLA: Don’t go on or you’ll make me cry. Fool! What is it to me? When your business men ruin the lesser ones, do you go crying to them? I also have no pity for the one who invested foolishly. Investors, that is all they ever were—to me. 

This conversation reminds one of ‘You Men’, a poem by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in which she essentially anticipates Rola. However, the tone of this conversation is not the same tone with which Rola engages the men at the start of the play. But alert to the fellows’ disregard, among other things, of Dead Man and Dead Woman’s requests to take their ‘case’, Rola does not only seem to lose patience but also respect for each of them after she takes the case, absent excuse, absent ironical intonation. From then on, the civility, if sometimes demanded or compromised for, that permeates the air of the Forest at the beginning recedes as she claps back at them any chance she gets for their tasteless quibbles. 

While Rola’s vocation is neither as socially respected nor even accepted as carving, removing the easy possibility of elevating her persona to the revered figuration of being human, with her paradoxical mix of playfulness and seriousness, she proves nonetheless these traits as redeeming of man as ‘art’—to give a nod to Obaneji’s rhetorical comment on Demoke’s impressive artistry in carving the totem. Perhaps the most thrilling discovery about the characters of Rola and Demoke is that the loud and caustic personality of the former is at a fascinating tension, but not necessarily at odds with the mild, introverted mien of the latter in which case Rola becomes just as representative of humanity as Demoke. 

What’s interesting and even enviable in the person of Soyinka the man—his polemic sharpness, to be precise—remains present and particular in Rola more than in anyone else in the play. It is evident, however, in the drastic if the natural transition of the wild temperament of Rola to the outright devilish temperament of her ancestor, Madam Tortoise, that these characters are not a result of unconscious self-representation or a conscious attempt at self-definition. Rather, they are sure demonstrations of an anthropological curiosity that seeks to analyse the present through the less informed, but equally considered lens of the past. 

‘The theatre is, or should be,’ according to poet and essayist, T. S. Eliot in ‘Poetry and Drama’, ‘a means of extending our knowledge of life, and a means of enlarging our understanding of human beings.’ In the character of Rola and others like her, Soyinka has executed this job with precision, without any shortcoming reductive of their being human and peculiar.