A strange, symbolic, politically charged play written around the moment of Nigerian independence.

Soyinka stages a dark reckoning: the living summon the dead, the past refuses to stay buried, and a community hoping to imagine its future finds itself confronted by old violence, vanity, corruption, betrayal, and unfinished histories. It is mythic, satirical, ritualistic, and deliberately difficult in the best way — a drama that treats nationhood not as arrival, but as haunted inheritance.

The play moves through spirits, mortals, forest beings, masquerade, argument and accusation, using Yoruba cosmology and modern political theatre to ask what kind of society can be built if nobody wants to properly account for what has already happened. For readers of postcolonial literature, African drama, political theatre, mythic modernism, ritual performance, decolonisation, or Soyinka’s broader work. It also sits nicely beside Achebe, Ngũgĩ, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, and other writers turning myth and theatre into a weapon against official history.

Oxford University Press / Three Crowns paperback. First published 1963; this copy is the eighth impression, 1988. Cover designed by Taj Ahmed. Printed in Hong Kong. Good second-hand condition.