Untitled - Memorial University of Newfoundland

continues. transformed beyond the plain echo (Q an eerie response from vast distances -
(7) . These arc the sounds that build up and swell. culminating in the music of the
black hot gospellers . the African-Americans whose music became a source of comfort
and hope durin g their yean of slavery and oppression. The Slave Leader sees that
same hope for freedom and liberation as revealed in his words to the other slaves who
are frightened because they danced with Dionysos and the vestals:
SLA VB LEAD ER: You hesitant fools! Don' t you unders tand?
Don't you bloW? We are' no longer alone -
Slaves. helots , the near and distant dispossessed!
This master race, this much vaunted dragon spa wn
Have met their match. Nature hasjoined forces with us.
Let them reckon now. not with mere men, not with
The scapegoat bogeyof a slave uprising
But with a new remorseless order. forces
Unpredictable as molten fire in mountain wombs .
To doubt, to hesitate is to prove undeserving (7-8).
The Slave Leader assures all the slaves and helots both near and far that their
redemption is at hand. It is the dawning of a new day when the suppressed will be
freed. By saying that the master race have met their match because nature hasjoined
forces with the servile race, Soyinka would seem by extension to be alluding to all the
Europeancolonialists who considered themselves to be the master race . The Slave
Leader's words are like a call to arms for the ex-colonized to join forces and attack
eurocen tred ideologies and discrimination of every kind. Furthermore. Sc yinka, by
being commissioned to write a play. takes the opportuni ty to expo se the tyranny of
slavery and colonizati on and authenticate Africa' s pre-cclceial history to a
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