Lion and the Jewel

The central theme of the play is progress versus tradition which is explored through the dueling perspectives of schoolteacher Lakunle and village chief Baroka, as they vie for Sidi’s hand in marriage. Lakunle is the representative for the side of progress. He believes that the traditional beliefs and behaviors of the people in the village of Ilujinle are old-fashioned and harmful. In the opening scene, he refers to the other residents of the village as a “race of savages” (3) and proclaims: “For now, it is this village I shall turn / Inside out” (5). It is Lakunle’s expressed desire to drag Ilujinle into the 20th Century despite Sidi’s complaint that he should “Go to these places where / Women would understand you / If you told them of your plans with which you oppress me daily” (5) rather than staying in Ilujinle. It is never made explicitly clear in the play why Lakunle does not follow this advice: why it is that he wishes to stay in a village which he considers to be so offensive, rather than moving to somewhere where the other residents share his progressive outlook.

One potential explanation for Lakunle’s desire to stay in Ilujinle, is because his supposed sophistication and intelligence is largely superficial and would not stand up to scrutiny in a more informed environment: he lists words by rote which he has clearly memorized from a dictionary (“A savage custom, barbaric, out-dated, / Rejected, denounced, accursed, / Excommunicated, archaic, degrading, / Humiliating, unspeakable, redundant, / Retrogressive, remarkable, unpalatable” (7)), before confessing that he stopped with this list of terms because “I own only the Shorter Companion / Dictionary, but I have ordered / The Longer One – you wait!” (7) Lakunle’s supposed superior intelligence, and greater understanding of the values of progress, is exposed as a sham. He learns the ideas of progress the same way he learns words from the dictionary: by rote, without engaging wit their wider meaning.

In contrast to Lakunle, Baroka stands as a symbol of tradition and an enemy of progress, as shown through his successful attempt to thwart the building of a railway through Ilujinle which would have connected the village to the rest of the country. Baroka complains to Sidi about the downsides of progress: “the skin of progress / Masks unknown, the spotted wolf of sameness… / Does sameness not revolt your being” (52). In his complaint that progress causes all places to become the same as each other, Baroka unknowingly echoes a monologue given by Lakunle earlier in the play, in which this very sameness and homogeneity which so offends Baroka, is openly longed for by Lakunle who wishes that everywhere in the country would become the same as the capital where “The ruler shall ride cars, not horses / Or a bicycle at the very least. / We’ll burn the forest, cut the trees / Then plant a modern park” (37). Ultimately, by critiquing both Baroka’s corruption in his interference with the railways and Lakunle’s unquestioning embrace of everything modern culture would bring, the play makes the argument that progress is a force for good when it is pursued for the welfare of the people, but a force for harm when it is used to unthinkingly do away with traditional culture and ways of being.