Let me first say acknowledge that a work of art is effectively a fertile space of multiple interpretations. It is neither a cultural manifesto nor a religious doctrine. The late Biyi Bandele has offered a cinematic representation of Wole Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horseman”. You can enjoy the art, like a Shakespearean play, warts and all. Or you can project into it some sort of cultural manifesto.

I commend BIyi’s Bandele’s art. His offering scores highly on the picture. Significant efforts went into the costumes, no doubt. The quality of language is another excellent score. A lot of research and practice went into that, surely. Some of the dialogue is rather protracted and laboured, though. And I did find parts of the settings somewhat unnatural, compared to say Anikulapo, but perhaps I am a bit too demanding on this count.

So much for the art.

Olunde was decidedly misguided in his belief that he needed to kill himself in order to forestall some mysterious calamity that would befall his people. Or in order to regain his family honour, what have you. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions that a fine young man, who has acquired an excellent education, would be wasted in that way. Society is of course complicit in the enactment of that horrific tragedy.

Elesin is a fraud, period. The insatiable hedonist wanted all of the women and wine and money, and then some. He never wanted anything to do with death or ritual suicide, all along. Forget about all the elaborate gimmicks on his “final” day. The epicurean pursuit of sensual pleasure and the stoic embrace of death is not quite a good mix. He was never really intent on fulfilling his vow of ritual suicide. He never gave it much thought during his life of “pleasure”. It was the shame of being exposed as a fraud, not a revised sense of duty, that drove him to his tragic death in the end.

But make no mistake, the precipitous enactment of ritual suicide by an able bodied human is an irrational idea that is neither justifiable by culture of common sense. And to suggest a repudiation of this nonsensical idea is somehow a Western imposition is adding insult to injury. The West is not the custodian of reason and common sense. That is not what we learned from history. No human should offer, or should be made to offer, their life for some dead king. And no evil will befall any community because some king died, and some able bodied human refused to kill himself. There is no calamity other than the one precipitated by fear and ignorance.