Accounting for Postmodernist Tendencies in Contemporary African Plays: A Study of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Ngugi WA Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi.

Abstract

The concept of postmodernism is acknowledged as a Western creation. Postmodernism in Western context often engages with aesthetic playfulness, scepticism, and metanarratives. However, African playwrights have adopted some postmodernist features into their plays for political resistance, social critique and retelling of Africa's history. This paper attempts to examine how postmodernist tendencies are incorporated into contemporary African plays. Using an analytical and comparative approach, this paper examines Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King's Horseman and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi to account for how African playwrights incorporate postmodernist techniques in their plays. These two selected plays represent two distinct regions of Africa – West Africa and East Africa as sample regional study. One of the leading voices in Postmodernism, Hutcheon (1989) observes that postmodernism as a concept of study has been ignored by critics because of its ‘’complex paradigmatic quality’’. There are little or few research works on this concept. This paper as a result offers a good exposition and contribution to the study of the concept of postmodernism. It explores such elements of postmodernism as historiographic metafiction, fragmentation, deconstruction and intertextuality to contribute to the wide view of postmodernism.