Language Politics and Identity in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

This study examines the politics of language and cultural identity as dramatised in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, with particular attention to how Soyinka deploys language as a medium through which colonial and Yoruba philosophical worldviews are set in tragic collision. Soyinka's play, first performed in 1975 and continuously taught in Nigerian university drama courses, is frequently analysed for its metaphysical and tragic dimensions, but the specific linguistic strategies through which cultural authority and colonial power are enacted in the dialogue merit more focused undergraduate examination. The study applies postcolonial literary theory and Yoruba cultural theory to a close reading of the play's dialogue, focusing on the contrasting speech registers of Elesin and the colonial District Officer, the function of praise singing and incantatory language in the Yoruba scenes, and the role of Pilkings and Jane's masquerade conversation as a metaphor for colonial misreading. Findings reveal that Soyinka's language politics operate on multiple levels: the play's English deliberately performs the inadequacy of translation as a figure for the impossibility of colonial comprehension, while Yoruba oral genres embedded within the English text assert the self-sufficiency of the Yoruba ceremonial world. The study argues that Soyinka's linguistic architecture is inseparable from the play's tragic logic. These findings support reading the play not only as a critique of colonialism but as a meditation on the irreducibility of cultural language. Keywords: Wole Soyinka, language politics, Yoruba drama, postcolonial theatre, cultural identity.