The Process of Othering in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman: A Postcolonial Study

Abstract

This paper explores the process of Othering in Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman based on a Postcolonial study. It focuses on how the colonizers create their Self-image through different colonial practices in the colonized homeland. The analysis of the play is based on Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ and Gayatri Spivak concept of ‘Othering’. This study explores how colonial powers control and shape societies in a way that serves their ambitions. Othering can be used as a tool to impose colonial control by diminishing the role of the cultural identity of the native people, dehumanizing them and treating them as less than human being ‘Other’ while the colonizers control the country’s wealth to serve their political, expansionist, and imperialist ambitions. This paper aims to analysis Soyinka’s play Death and the kings Horseman (1975) according to the process of Othering. The paper shows the Yoruba people’s struggles to defend their culture and identity against the colonizers strategies to subject them. This paper shows the colonizers attempt to create their advanced, pure Self-image over the colonized people who they consider as savage, less morally inferior and not fully human ‘Other’. Through Said ‘Orientalism’ and Spivak ‘Othering’, this study concludes that Othering is l a process that includes all the subaltern communities without any regard to geography race, or gender. Through the analysis, the study shows how the Pilkings could transform or subjugate the Yoruba people and make them the’ Other’ by preventing them from their traditions. By using the process of Othering, the Pilkings caused disastrous results at the end.