ATTEMPT A JUSTIFICATION OF SOYNKAS PLAY THE LION AND THE JEWEL

The narrative is a funny and magical piece of work: full of folk fantasy, folk wisdom. But it's also got its share of folk cruelty. And more than that--its share of hard political reality as well. Written in 1962--when Soyinka was a young man helping to build the Nigerian republic that would be established in 1963 only to be wrecked three years later (remember Biafra?)--Lion expresses something beyond an anthropologist's affection for tribal traditions. It expresses the simultaneously admirable and ugly ruthlessness of a tribal chief's will to survive.”