Volume III Issue II April-June 2023

Name of Author : Dr. Anju Bala

Title of the paper : Wole Soyinkas The Lion and the Jewel The Conflict between Tradition and Modernity

Abstract: The Lion and the Jewel is one of the brightest postcolonial canonical comedies by Wole Soyinka, a satirical battlefield between the ideological combat between African traditionalism and the invasion of modern Western civilization. The play, whose setting is the Yoruba village of Ilujinle, poses an active challenge to the issues of the cultural transition during the late-colonial Nigeria. This paper looks at how Soyinka develops the main conflict using a dynamic three-man character Barika, the ageing Bale, the symbol of the much rooted and opportunistic forces of traditional patriarchal authority Lakunle, the village schoolmaster, a symbol of superficiality and mimicry driven Western modernity and Sidi, the village jewel whose commodified beauty turns out to be the ultimate prize of this social cultural conflict. Raising an objection to the naive Eurocentric binarial paradigms that equate modernity and progress with the traditional and stagnation, this paper uses the concepts provided by Homi Bhabha to show how Soyinka reveals the deadly shortcomings of both paradigms. Modernity itself is shown to be a toothless, alienated performance of the colonial assimilation by Lakunle, with the Baroka tradition turning out not to be the stale historic object, but a dynamic and highly strategic system that can make use of the contemporary devices to maintain its own power structures. In this article I claim that the play is a vehement critique of neo colonial transition, a warning that a real African identity can never be constructed on the bare act of imitating Western practices and blindly adhering to feudalism of the patriarch.

Keywords : Post Colonial Mimicry, Hybridity, Tradition versus Modernity, Cultural Imperialism, Yoruba Metaphysics.

DOI :

Page No. : 107-114