Blog 1: Death and the King's Horsemen

Cultural death is a process of erasure that not only seeks to remove certain ‘uncouth’ practices from the culture of the colonized, but also seeks to completely change the identity and nature of the colonized into the image of the white man.

In the play, ‘Death and the King’s Horsemen’, through the interactions of the Pilkings with Amusa and Olunde we see the expectations the colonizers have of those people who have stepped into their world. It is not enough that these natives are now part of the colonial machinery that seeks to reimagine their world, but along with that to fully fit into the white man’s world these people also need to let go of their cultural identity, their way of rationalizing things and adopt that of the colonizers.

We see this in the second act of the play when Amusa expresses distress at seeing the Pilkings attired in the Egungun costumes and Simon’s response is to tell him, “…I swear by you at the club…., he doesn’t believe in any mumbo jumbo…”. This alludes to how since Amusa is a member of the police force under His Majesty, he is not only supposed to carry out the orders of his colonial masters, but also adopt the same belief and rationalizing systems as them. In the same way, from the conversation between Jane and Olunde, it becomes evident that Jane’s expectation of Olunde since he has gone to study in England has been that he would have forgotten his cultural ‘mumbo jumbo’ and learnt to see his own world through the white man’s lens of barbarity. When she realizes this has not happened, she expresses disappointment.

For the colonizers, every act of theirs is based on logic and rationality, while that of the native is based on barbarism and so to save the natives from this barbarism it is important for the colonizer to subsume the culture of the natives and replace it with their understanding of what civilization should be, even if the harbinger of that civilization is violence.

In this way the colonial project of settlement of certain territories or the extraction of resources is not only carried out through the physical domination of the peoples of these territories, but also through the cultural, psychic and epistemic domination of these people. For Captain Cook and Cortez and even for the fictional Pilkings in the play, it is not enough that they had overpowered the natives and established their control; they had to insert themselves into the traditions and myths of the colonized and disrupt them to show the perceived absurdity of native customs.

By stopping the king's horseman from sacrificing himself, Simon Pilkings sets into motion a series of events that lead to an even worse outcome; rioting followed by the death of the horseman and his son who Simon had gone to great lengths to protect. The play itself acts as a metaphor for the colonial project where in the act of bringing civilization to these 'savages' leads to an even worse fate for them than their own supposed barbarism. It signifies the end of their world in many different ways, people like Amusa face rejection and isolation from their own community, those that resist the colonizers face death and those that are ‘saved’ like the horseman find themselves in even worse circumstances.