A Dance of the Forests and a Proposed Alternative Ending
African Literature · Drama Studies
Beyond the Forest’s Verdict
A Dance of the Forests and a Proposed Alternative Ending
Assigned by Megha Trivedi ma'am as part of Thinking activity for
§ Introduction
Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests (1963) stands as one of the most intellectually demanding works in the canon of African drama. Commissioned to celebrate Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the play subverts the triumphalist mood of its occasion by staging a deeply unsettling meditation on human nature, historical recurrence, and collective moral failure. Rather than offering a celebratory vision of post-colonial renewal, Soyinka constructs a cyclical world in which the past returns not as a source of heroic precedent but as a damning mirror. The play’s ending — famously ambiguous, morally irresolute, and dramatically pessimistic — has long troubled critics and readers who expect catharsis or transformation from a work of such theatrical ambition.
This essay introduces the play’s author, key facts, central themes, and its contentious ending, offers a critical analysis of that conclusion, and then proposes an extended alternative ending that maintains Soyinka’s philosophical depth while redirecting its dramatic energy toward a moment of conditional, hard-won human accountability.
§ Author Introduction
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, born on 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, is the foremost playwright, poet, and essayist of post-colonial Africa. Educated at University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds, Soyinka synthesises Yoruba cosmology, Western dramatic tradition, and sharp political critique into a uniquely modernist theatrical idiom. In 1986, he became the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A persistent critic of authoritarian rule — he was imprisoned for two years during the Nigerian Civil War — Soyinka writes from a position of both cultural rootedness and civic courage.
His body of work, which includes The Lion and the Jewel (1963), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), and Season of Anomy (1973), consistently interrogates the gap between collective aspiration and persistent human selfishness. Soyinka’s personal identification with Ogun — the Yoruba god of iron, creativity, and destruction — is essential to understanding his dramaturgy: for Soyinka, the artist occupies the same dangerous threshold as the deity, mediating between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
§ Key Facts of the Play
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Title | A Dance of the Forests |
| Author | Wole Soyinka |
| First Performance | 1960, Lagos, during Nigerian Independence celebrations |
| First Publication | Oxford University Press, London, 1963 |
| Genre | Ritual drama / Mythological tragicomedy |
| Setting | A forest outside a Nigerian village; partly in the spirit realm |
| Major Characters | Forest Head, Aroni, Demoke, Rola, Adenebi, Dead Man, Dead Woman, Half-Child, Eshuoro |
| Mythological Framework | Yoruba cosmology; invocations of Ogun, Obatala, and ancestral spirits |
§ Themes
The play operates across several interlocking thematic registers. The cyclical nature of history is perhaps its most insistent concern: the dead return not to validate the present but to reveal how seamlessly ancient crimes replicate themselves in new political forms. Soyinka refuses the comfortable nationalist narrative of independence as rupture; instead, the forest’s ritual reveals that the moral failures of the pre-colonial court are indistinguishable from those of modern Nigerian governance.
Human moral complacency is exposed through the three living protagonists — Demoke the carver, Rola the prostitute, and Adenebi the court orator — each of whom carries unresolved guilt they have buried beneath professional identity. The theme of political hypocrisy is woven through the play’s satirical paralleling of a pre-colonial court with contemporary Nigerian governance, suggesting that power corrupts identically across eras.
Yoruba cosmology provides the structural scaffold: Forest Head embodies divine patience and judicial authority; Eshuoro represents chaotic vengeance and the instinct toward destruction; Aroni is the spirit of unresolved justice who moves between worlds. Finally, the play meditates on artistic responsibility, particularly through Demoke, whose creative act of carving the totem is entangled with violence, exploitation, and the murder of his own apprentice.
§ Summary of the Play
Three living mortals — Demoke, a wood carver; Rola, a prostitute; and Adenebi, a court orator — have petitioned the forest spirits to bless a grand “Gathering of the Tribes.” Forest Head, the supreme spirit, dispatches two unexpected and unwanted guests: the Dead Man and the Dead Woman, unquiet spirits carrying the accumulated weight of unresolved ancestral crimes. Through elaborate ritual flashbacks orchestrated by Forest Head and his servant Aroni — who bears a permanent limp as the mark of his dangerous work between worlds — the living are confronted with their past-life counterparts in an ancient court.
In that court, the same moral failures are performed in different costumes: betrayal, abuse of power, sexual exploitation, and political cowardice repeat with the remorseless logic of inherited human nature. Demoke, the artist, emerges as the most self-aware of the three; he is forced to confront his guilt for the death of his apprentice Oremole, who fell from the totem Demoke was carving. The Half-Child — an aborted spirit seeking embodiment — becomes the focal symbol of squandered potential and incomplete redemption. It is neither alive nor dead, neither claimed nor released.
The confrontations culminate in a chaotic ritual dance during which Eshuoro, the spirit of vengeance, attempts to seize and destroy the Half-Child. Demoke, in an instinctive act of physical courage, rescues the child. Yet the mortals are ultimately returned to their world largely unchanged, and Forest Head pronounces his judgment with resigned weariness over what he has witnessed.
§ The Original Ending and Its Critical Analysis
The play’s conclusion is one of deliberate dramatic irony. Forest Head, surveying the results of his elaborate moral experiment, delivers a speech suffused with exhausted resignation. He acknowledges that humans persist in their self-deception and that the forest’s intervention has yielded no transformative awakening. The Half-Child is returned to limbo. The mortals disperse back toward their village, carrying unresolved guilt. Demoke’s act of saving the Half-Child is the lone flicker of moral agency, yet even this gesture is not rewarded with clarity or resolution — it is absorbed back into ambiguity.
Critics such as Biodun Jeyifo have read this ending as Soyinka’s most honest political statement: that independence, without moral self-reckoning, is only a change of costume (Jeyifo 112). Eldred Durosimi Jones notes the deliberate refusal of catharsis as itself a formal choice — the audience is denied the comfort of resolution so that they must carry the play’s unresolved question out of the theatre (Jones 48). However, some scholars, including Ketu Katrak, argue that the relentless pessimism forecloses dramatic agency and risks leaving the audience morally paralysed rather than morally provoked (Katrak 87).
Derek Wright identifies in this ending what he calls Soyinka’s “tragic rhythm”: the pattern by which the playwright stages moral possibility only to demonstrate its non-achievement, producing an aesthetic experience closer to lamentation than to tragedy in the classical sense (Wright 54). The ending is not accidental, weak, or unfinished. It is philosophically precise — and precisely, provocatively, unsatisfying.
§ Comparison Infographic: Original vs Proposed Alternative Ending
This infographic maps the five narrative beats of both endings side by side before you read the proposed alternative text.
Two Endings, One Play
A Dance of the Forests · Wole Soyinka (1963)
| ORIGINAL ENDING Cyclical Pessimism | ⇆ | ✎ ALTERNATIVE ENDING Conditional Accountability |
| 1 — The Rescue Demoke saves the Half-Child from Eshuoro instinctively. Motivation is unclear — impulse, not deliberate conscience. No moral reflection follows. | → | 1 — The Rescue (Retained) Demoke saves the Half-Child — but this time the act triggers deliberate moral reflection. He pauses. He turns inward. Instinct becomes the beginning of conscience. |
| 2 — No Confession Demoke, Rola, and Adenebi evade, deflect, and remain morally opaque. Guilt is never spoken aloud. Silence is the language of perpetual self-deception. | → | 2 — Three Confessions Demoke names Oremole & admits murder. Rola acknowledges deliberate ruin of three men. Adenebi strips rhetoric to one bare, honest sentence of guilt. |
| 3 — Half-Child’s Fate Returned to limbo with the Dead Woman. Neither destroyed nor born — suspended in the same unresolved state as before. Potential remains unclaimed. | → | 3 — Half-Child’s Fate Forest Head lifts the child — it breathes steadily. Not born, but preserved. Its survival is contingent on the mortals’ sustained, changed behaviour. |
| 4 — Forest Head’s Verdict Exhausted resignation. He does not condemn — simply acknowledges humans will persist in self-deception. A god too weary to hope. Withdrawal, not judgment. | → | 4 — Forest Head’s Response No absolution. No forgiveness. Speaking truthfully is only “the precondition for redemption” — not redemption itself. A god who holds the door open. |
| 5 — Tone & Departure Mortals disperse. No reckoning. No change. The forest reclaims silence. Eshuoro’s laughter lingers. The play ends where it began. | → | 5 — Tone & Departure Mortals walk back separately, each carrying their confession. Changed in self-knowledge, not in nature. History could learn — if individuals choose honesty. |
The difference is not in the outcome — it is in whether the mortals speak their truth aloud before they go.
| The CycleUnresolved in both |
Half-ChildNigeria’s potential |
Forest HeadPatient, not just |
EshuoroRetreats, not gone |
ConfessionTHE key difference |
§ The Central Question: What If the Mortals Choose Differently?
The pivotal dramatic question the play raises — but refuses to answer — is: what would it look like if the mortals, confronted with the mirror of history, actually chose accountability over evasion? Soyinka’s ending suggests they do not and cannot. The proposed alternative ending below does not betray this philosophical seriousness but redirects its final dramatic energy: it imagines that Demoke’s rescue of the Half-Child is not an isolated instinct but the first act of a deliberate moral reckoning, one that compels Rola and Adenebi to follow before the forest releases them.
§ Proposed Alternative Ending
✎ PROPOSED ALTERNATIVE ENDING — APPROX. 1,300 WORDS
After Demoke draws the Half-Child back from Eshuoro’s outstretched grasp, the forest falls into an unnatural and total stillness. It is not the stillness of peace — it is the stillness of held breath, of a world pausing to see what a man will do next with the thing he has just saved. The torches burn low without flickering. The drums cease mid-beat, as though the hands of the drummers have been frozen by a command no one voiced aloud. Eshuoro recoils — not in defeat, but in the manner of a force that has been temporarily, inexplicably, outmanoeuvred by something it did not expect. It vanishes into the upper branches of the forest canopy, its laughter dying not into silence but into the sound of wind through dry leaves: hollow, patient, waiting.
Demoke stands at the centre of the forest clearing. He holds the Half-Child — that small, incomplete, unclaimed spirit — against his chest with both arms, the way a man holds something he does not yet know the name for but recognises, instinctively, as his responsibility. He does not look triumphant. He does not look like a man who has performed an act of heroism. He looks, for the first time in the entirety of the play’s action, afraid — not of the spirits pressing in around him, not of Eshuoro’s retreating malice, not of Forest Head’s inscrutable authority, but of himself. Of the particular shape of his own hands. Of what those hands have done and left undone.
Aroni moves toward him slowly, his limp marking each step with its familiar, uneven rhythm — that perpetual reminder that even the servants of divine justice carry their own wound. He stops a few feet from Demoke and simply waits. The clearing is lit from an uncertain source: not torchlight, not moonlight, but something between the two, as if the forest itself is leaning in to witness.
Demoke speaks. He does not declaim. He does not reach for the elevated register of ritual speech, which has, up to this moment, been the lingua franca of this entire assembly. He speaks in the plain, stripped, slightly hoarse voice of a man who has rehearsed a lie for so long that the truth, when it finally comes, arrives without ceremony: “I killed him. My apprentice. Oremole. He did not fall. I cut the branch he stood on. I let him go because I could not bear — I could not permit — any other hands to touch the summit of what I had made. His hands were as skilled as mine. That was the crime. Not that he was beneath me — but that he was equal to me, and I could not live with that.” He pauses. The Half-Child stirs slightly in his arms, as though responding to the vibration of a truth being spoken near it. “I have carved that totem into the sky for all the village to see. I have let them call it my masterwork. And every morning since, I have known what is buried inside it.”
The words do not echo. They are absorbed immediately into the forest, the way water is absorbed into earth that has been thirsty for a long time.
Rola, who has stood apart throughout — positioned always at the edge of each scene with the practised detachment of a woman who has survived this far precisely by never allowing herself to feel anything completely — begins, almost imperceptibly, to tremble. It begins in her hands, which she presses flat against her thighs as though to still it. It does not still. She does not weep; Soyinka’s dramatic world does not permit her that softness, and she would not trust it anyway. But she turns to face the Dead Woman whose ghostly presence she has been orbiting all evening like a moon that refuses to acknowledge its own planet.
“She is me,” Rola says. Not as a revelation, but as a confirmation of something she has known since the Dead Woman first appeared and she felt the shock of recognition that she immediately, reflexively, suppressed. “Centuries back, dressed differently, with a different name given to her by different men — she is exactly me.” She exhales slowly. “I told myself the men who came to me chose to come. That they chose their own ruin. That my door was open and they walked through it of their own will and whatever became of them afterwards was the consequence of their own appetite, not mine.” Her voice does not waver; it flattens. “But I lit the path. I laid it out with great care. I was never a passive door — I was a very deliberate architect. Three men are dead. Three families carry an absence they cannot explain and I gave them that absence and then I walked away and remade myself as someone with no history.” She looks at the Dead Woman directly for the first time. “I will not look away from you again.”
The Dead Woman does not respond. She does not need to. Her presence is the response. She has been waiting, across centuries and incarnations, for exactly this: not revenge, not justice, but simply to be seen. A faint light, barely perceptible, settles into her features — not peace exactly, but the diminishment of a particular kind of anguish.
Adenebi has been standing slightly behind the other two throughout this sequence. He is a man built for crowds: for rhetoric, for the management of public meaning, for the art of saying important-sounding things that ultimately commit to nothing. He opens his mouth twice in the seconds following Rola’s confession. Both times, the shape of an eloquent deflection forms and dies before it can be spoken. Aroni has not moved from his position, but his gaze has settled on Adenebi with the quality of a weight. On the third attempt, Adenebi speaks — and what emerges is not an oration. It is a sentence. One sentence, preceded by a long silence that costs him visibly:
“I signed the warrant for the overloaded lorry. I knew its cargo was human beings. I knew the road. I knew the weight. I signed because the alternative was inconvenience and the inconvenience belonged to me and the dying belonged to strangers.” He stops. There is nothing further to add. Rhetoric elaborates; truth, apparently, does not. His voice did not break. It did something quieter and more permanent — it simply became honest, perhaps for the first time, and in doing so it shed something that had been giving it its shape for years.
The forest responds. Not dramatically — not with thunder or transformation or the sudden blooming of supernatural light. It responds the way a patient, very old thing responds when it has finally received what it has been waiting for: it exhales. The pressure in the clearing changes almost physically, as though a held breath of centuries has been slowly, quietly released.
Forest Head rises. He surveys the three mortals without expression — that divine face which has watched ten thousand generations of human beings perform these same failures in slightly different costumes and has long since passed beyond either disappointment or surprise. He does not praise them. He does not absolve them — absolution is not within his authority, and even if it were, Soyinka’s dramatic universe would not permit it to be granted so cheaply. Guilt, in this world, is not a stain to be washed away by a single act of confession; it is a substance that must be carried, must be lived with, must be made meaningful through action sustained far beyond this one night in the forest.
But he takes the Half-Child from Demoke’s arms — gently, with a deliberateness that contains something that is not quite tenderness but is the closest a deity of this particular disposition can come to it — and holds the child up toward the canopy of trees. The child does not cry. It breathes. Steadily, evenly, with the unhurried rhythm of something that has decided, provisionally, to persist.
“The child will not enter your world tonight,” Forest Head pronounces. “It is not yet time. It may not be time for another generation. It may require that each of you return to your village and live differently — not perfectly, not without failure, but differently — before this child finds the world hospitable enough to risk being born into it.” He lowers the child. “You have not redeemed yourselves. Do not mistake what has happened here for redemption. You have spoken truthfully in the dark, before witnesses, about things you have never spoken of before. That is not redemption. It is merely the precondition for it. What you do with this night — whether you carry it home and bury it again or whether you allow it to alter your choices — that remains entirely your own. The forest does not govern what you do in daylight.”
He steps back. The drums return — not at their former pitch of ritual frenzy but at a slower, deeper register, more like a pulse than a performance. The forest begins to thin at its edges, the trees drawing back, the path to the village becoming visible again in the grey pre-dawn light.
The three mortals walk. They do not speak to one another. There is nothing to say that would not reduce what has just occurred to the manageable scale of ordinary conversation. They walk separately, each carrying the particular shape of their own confession, still warm, still without resolution. But they are walking back toward a world they know — and for the first time, they know exactly what they are bringing back into it.
Aroni remains at the edge of the clearing, watching them go. After a long moment, he looks toward Forest Head. Forest Head does not return the look. His eyes are lifted upward, toward the canopy, where the Half-Child has been returned — not to limbo exactly, but to the conditional space between worlds, held in suspension, neither lost nor born.
The lights do not fade to black. They hold — imperfectly, unevenly, as though the forest’s own attention is wavering — on the empty clearing below: on the ground that has received three confessions before dawn, on the indifferent trees, on the space where something happened that may or may not matter, that may or may not be remembered, that may or may not change anything at all. The Half-Child’s breathing, from above, continues. Steady. Unresolved. Alive.
§ Conclusion
Soyinka’s original ending to A Dance of the Forests is a masterwork of deliberate dramatic frustration — its pessimism is earned, structured, and politically honest. Its refusal of catharsis is not a weakness but a calculated formal argument: that post-colonial optimism, without radical moral honesty, is self-deception dressed in celebration clothes. Yet drama, as Aristotle and Soyinka himself have argued in different registers, carries a social obligation not merely to reflect but to provoke action.
The proposed alternative ending above does not dissolve the play’s darkness; it gives that darkness a more precise target. By having the three mortals speak their guilt plainly — not in the heightened language of ritual but in the stripped register of personal honesty — the alternative asks whether post-colonial accountability is possible not at the level of grand narrative but at the level of individual moral speech. The Half-Child remains unborn, history remains unresolved, and Forest Head grants no absolution. But the forest does not consume these people either. It releases them with their guilt intact and newly articulate — which, in Soyinka’s world, may be the most one can honestly ask of any ending at all.
Where Soyinka’s ending asks us to accept the cycle’s continuation, the alternative asks us to consider whether the cycle is inevitable or merely habitual. The distinction matters — for Soyinka’s Nigeria in 1960 no less than for any society standing at a new beginning and weighing whether it will repeat its own history.
§ References
Jeyifo, Biodun. Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Jones, Eldred Durosimi. The Writing of Wole Soyinka. Heinemann Educational Books, 1973.
Katrak, Ketu H. Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice. Greenwood Press, 1986.
Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests. Oxford University Press, 1963.
Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Wright, Derek. Wole Soyinka Revisited. Twayne Publishers, 1993.
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