SOURCE: Williams, Adebayo. “Ritual and the Political Unconscious: The Case of Death and the King's Horseman.” Research in African Literatures 24, no. 1 (spring 1993): 67-79.

In the following essay, Williams explores the function of ritual in Death and the King's Horseman, commenting that Soyinka “counterpose[s the dominant culture of the ancient Oyo kingdom against the equally hegemonic culture of the white invaders.”]

In feudal societies, ritual was part of the cultural dominant. In other words, ritual was part of a complex and insidious apparatus of cultural and political reproduction employed by the dominant groups. It is to be expected, given the superannuation of the feudal mode of production in Western societies, that the phenomenon of ritual itself would have lost much of its power and social efficacy. There is a sense in which this development cannot be divorced from the gains of the Enlightenment and the triumph of rationality...