The Question of Justice in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests: An Assessment of Literary Criticism Anwesha Ghosh College

Critics who have worked on Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests invariably make the point that the play was written for the occasion of the celebration of the independence of Nigeria in 1960 and is thus a metaphorical commentary on the political and social scenario of Nigeria at the dawn of independence. Probably James Gibbs is the only critic to point out that “a significant portion of the text was taken over from an earlier work A Dance of the African Forest, an anti-Apartheid play” (63). Gibbs even quotes Soyinka to prove his point who said, “A Dance of the Forests was not a play about the Nigerian situation; it was a general thing. The independence celebration in 1960 was just an appropriate occasion to present it.” (qtd. in Gibbs 63). Solomon Omatsola Azumurana in the abstract to his paper “Wole Soyinka’s dystopian/utopian vision in A Dance of the Forests” argues that, “the problems with such reading [reading A Dance of the Forests as a “metaphorical commentary of the socio-political situation in Nigeria”] is that it does not take into account the structure of the play in which Soyinka traces the past to the present to forecast a dystopian future” (71). Bernith Lindfors argues that A Dance of the Forests has an arty...