A Dance of the Forests by Wole Soyinka. Oxford. 1967. Oxford University Press. A Three Crowns Book. 89 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘Leave the dead some room to dance,' sings the Dirge-Man in Wole Soyinka's beautiful play, A Dance of the Forests. But the living are not willing to do so, and the play's dynamic is the conflict between the desire of the dead for judgment and the desire of the living to avoid it. This conflict is manipulated by the will of Forest Father, who leads both to a judgment they do not relish, while despairing that his labours will effect any real improvement in human conduct ... 'The play opens with the arrival of two dead ancestors, thrusting their heads up from the understreams. They had been summoned by the living to attend ‘the gathering of the tribes' (an analogue of Nigerian Independence?), but instead of being the idealized figures of the tribal imagination they turn out to be full of ancient bitterness and resentment and are shunned by everyone as ‘obsceneties.' However, Forest Father selects four of the living and leads them away deep into the forest where, in company with the dead couple, he forces them to confront their true selves and the repetitive pattern of their weaknesses and crimes.' - Times Literary Supplement. 'The contemporary theater seems to have forgotten that it has its roots in ritual and song, and it is only the rare emergence of a Lorca or a Brecht - or a Wole Soyinka - that recreates an awareness of our deprivation.' - African Forum. 'His play, The Road, presented in London during the Commonwealth Festival last summer, was described by Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer as ‘having done for our napping language what brigand dramatists from Ireland have done for two centuries, booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot into the middle of next week.' His novel, The Interpreters, has been greeted by an American critic as the work of a new James Joyce. Thanks to the Dakar Festival the two companies that he has founded, the 1960 Masks and Orisun Theatre were seen for the first time in full strength outside Nigeria in his play, Kongi's Harvest, and The Road got the Dakar prize for drama.' - New Society.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.

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