Part of review forum on “Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman.”

Music in film typically serves to enhance narrative, contributing to the creation and sustenance of specific atmosphere, and evoking emotions in the audience. In Nollywood, music has been employed in multiple ways not limited to setting the atmosphere and establishing segments within a film. In Bandele’s Elesin Oba (a cinematic adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman), music takes center stage, introduced to the audience before any other character through a memorable theme song—a harmonious blend of flute, drums, and oriki (oral praise poem) in honor of the Elesin, man of the moment. It fills space, serenading the audience, embodying Alexander Agordoh’s (African Music: Traditional and Contemporary [Nova Science Publishers, 2005]) perception of sub-Saharan African music as earthy and physical. It is present and personated in ways that make it “visible” like an unseen film character. Direct and uninhibited, it sets the audience on a musical journey, sustaining its appeal despite its lyrics being rendered in Yoruba language.

Music will be examined here in two ways: first, as reflective of the Elesin’s state of mind; and secondly, as embodying the uncertainties posed to the community by colonization. Introduced with the background of the story, music in Elesin Oba asserts its place, role, and significance in the Yoruba community, which expects a restoration through a ritual performed by the king’s horseman. With the king’s death, attention has turned to Elesin who is eulogized by the praise singer, his praises constituting the melody. Through drums and chants, it beckons Elesin on his duty and destiny “to accompany the king to the afterlife.” Elesin has known the good life, pampered by the community for this all-important duty his lineage is chosen to perform. But he dawdles, distracted not by the euphoria, but his Achilles heel—woman. Music hails him as the lover of women, of all things beautiful. With death as the least beautiful, Elesin hesitates and music falters, shifting from oriki to festive songs and drumbeats, solemn and pensive tunes to silences. Reflecting Elesin’s state of mind, music redirects the audience from a planned rite of passage into marriage celebration and consummation before continuing its diegetic duty of guiding Elesin to his ancestors.

This back-and-forth movement in music reflects not only the individual hesitancy of Elesin as he prepares for ritual suicide, but communal uncertainty as their rootedness in tradition is threatened by colonial rule and external interferences. Despite their subtleties, the import of their presence is reinforced by momentary silences and weaker sound once scene transitions away from the villagers. Music takes on different traits while highlighting intermittent shifts from the market square to colonial residencies, appearing lively and energetic among the locals and indistinct amid foreigners. This vitality in local music, communal uncertainties notwithstanding, sustains optimism in the audience. With Elesin’s “the time is almost near,” music begins its climax, taking a chant-invoked solemnity that capture Soyinka’s position: “Death and the King’s Horseman can be fully realized only through an evocation of music from the abyss of transition” (Death & the King’s Horseman [Hill & Wang, 1975]2). As Elesin readies himself for his onward journey, music begins a slow but persistently disrupted descent into denouement defying both plot and subplot which are nearly attaining climax. The silences that interrupt music from this point on, especially the quietness of the night echoed by the chirping of crickets and katydids, invigorate the dirge which mournfully announces catastrophe to the land.

Elesin Oba underscores the integral nature of music in the daily life of Yoruba people. The trumping of Yoruba musical instruments, chants, oriki, orin (songs), dirges, incantations, and so on, over Western music shows supremacy of the Yoruba culture, a testament to the preservation of culture and tradition, a deference to Soyinka’s desires for his work, a perfect example of romancing folk tale. Romancing tales is Webber’s (1991) way of describing the celebration of past moments/events in the unfolding lives of the members of a community—the author’s definition of romancing tales as “a social means towards maintaining communal value and vitality through the rough times and despite relentless pressures from … colonization,” comes alive in this film, resulting in a clash of cultures (Sabra J. Webber, Romancing the Real [Philadelphia Press, 1991], xxiv). Soyinka, however, perceives the “clash of cultures” as facile, prejudicial, and reductionist, proposing that the interpreter of his work directs their “vision instead to the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence” (Death and the King’s Horseman [Hill & Wang, 1975]). Bandele creatively achieves this mournful essence through a seamless interaction of evocative music, color, camera movement, role interpretation, and Yoruba worldview. Elesin Oba is a romance of the unfamiliar, a creative commentary on the interconnectedness of past and present, living and dead, the understandable and unfathomable, and the transition which connects the cycle of life.