THE LION AND THE JEWEL
Or I could choose to see the show as an allegory–a pure play of metaphors, where each character represents a larger principle and relationships unfold according to poetic rather than behavioral laws. Certainly, the title encourages that view: the jewel is Sidi, a beautiful young woman who becomes the toast of her podunk Nigerian village when she’s photographed for a magazine; the lion is Baroka–the strong, sly, frisky village patriarch who decides to make Sidi his youngest bride. The intrigue between these two and Lakunle–the local Oreo, who wants to burn the forest, throw cocktail parties, and turn Sidi into a modern English housewife–pretty much begs to be read as a fable about the power of old age, old ways, and old urges versus all that’s new and modern and bloodless.
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Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel is, without a doubt, 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.
