The Importance of Staging Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests on the Independence Day Sofia Arslan College

Wole Soyinka once said, “History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice”.A Nigerian playwright, Soyinka, was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. A Dance of the Forests is one of the most renowned of Soyinka's plays and the play was presented at the Nigerian Independence celebrations in 1960.

Through the play, Soyinka asserted the political choice of goading the African audiences into not repeating their past mistakes. The Dark Continent, Africa; long-held under the crippling yoke of imperialism; its people were forced to be imprisoned within their mental recesses by the imperialists, who instilled within them not only a sense of inferiority but also derived their subject-mandated positions by subjugating the natives of Africa. The imperialists in Africa defined themselves as what could be put synonymous to being small islands of civilization in an ocean swathed with savagery and hooliganism. They labelled culture, art, and traditions with tags that solely befitted their own definitions of them — to them, the African culture and traditions were nothing but modified versions of savagery. Keeping in consideration the veritable idea that...