Conclusion

Summary

Though the dramatists discussed here write from and of a common condition of cultural subordination and oppression, and share the desire to use the theatre to explore and affirm their cultural substance, it must by now be evident that they have done so in remarkably diverse ways. This has to do, inevitably, both with differing personal imaginative orientations and with the particular cultural realities that have nourished them. For example, the nature of colonialism in western Nigeria was such that traditional ritual belief and practice have remained as an everyday reality and as a rich and immediate source for Soyinka's dramatic imagination. But for dramatists of the black diaspora, such as Derek Walcott and August Wilson, the link with their cultural heritage is more problematic and requires a greater effort of reclamation. The need to restore that heritage – and to restore it as a vital part of the contemporary self – are crucial themes of their writing, as they are not in Soyinka, even while they both make powerful metaphorical and formal use of features of their popular cultural traditions, through folklore and blues music respectively. For Jack Davis, on the other hand, since the focus is very much on the struggle to resist immediate injustice and to assert the fundamental human and political rights of Aborigines, the evocation of the heritage is much more subdued, and much more elegiac in mood.

These and other differences are sufficiently evident from the preceding chapters not to need elaborately spelling out here.