Soyinka’s Nietzschean Bacchae: can we find nineteenth-century continental philosophy in a twentieth-century postcolonial tragedy?

Adam Lecznar (UCL)

The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973), written by the Nobel Prize winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka and commissioned by the National Theatre in London enacts a convergence of European, African and ancient contexts and influences. Though this convergence has been studied extensively for its ramifications for the postcolonial significance of Soyinka’s drama, I want to extend the analysis to cover another contributing influence that is often invoked but never fully scrutinised: that of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

My point of departure will be Wole Soyinka’s essay The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy (1969) where he displays his most extensive engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. The paper will seek to explore the dynamics of this engagement, addressing how Soyinka became interested in Nietzsche, and how this interest found its way into his adaptation of Euripides. The fact that Soyinka refers solely to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) also points towards another intersection between the two intellectuals: their interest in the ancient Greek god Dionysus. By locating this Dionysiac nexus in its historical context, during the broader resurgence of Nietzsche’s popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, I hope to give a fuller account of Nietzsche’s influence on Soyinka’s Bacchae than has previously been available, or attempted, while simultaneously bringing out the remarkable synergy between these two appropriations of the drama. I will also offer some thoughts on how important it is to acknowledge the full range of contexts that a reception of ancient Greek tragedy can contain and draw upon. In this case, we should not be content to label Soyinka’s text as ‘postcolonial’ without probing the complex of determinative intellectual influences that exercised Soyinka at the point of its creation.