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Any valid inquiry into the meaning of any imaginative writing will lend itself to the salutary credentials of its content and form. This recourse has always created a divide that seeks on the one hand the aesthetic value of the art and on the other its functional or social values. The social themes discernible in the works of many African writers have provided the impetus for an assessment that digs up the social relevance and the ideological slants of such works. For Wole Soyinka, many critics, building on the ideas of Chinweizu, Madubuike and Jemie, have identified a gap between social responsiveness and ideology in his works. This paper, using Soyinka's A Play of Giants and King Baabu, re-examines the centrality of ideology to texts of social engagement in the postcolonial space. Within the context of the humanistic values that the playwright esteems, this essay scrutinizes the social conditions in the plays and the dramatist's "vision." The conclusion asserts the social relevance of the texts but queries the lack of absolute prescription in Soyinka's work under scrutiny. Keywords: Soyinka, drama, ideology, postcolonialism, social vision.
Introduction
The relationship between art and politics has always been one of the major concerns of literary criticism. Michael Etherton (316) emphasizes this nexus when he affirms: "Indeed, if we are thinking of the whole population in a society, it does not seem possible to talk about the development of theatre and drama in that society without analysing the nature of its economic and political development". For Wole Soyinka and many African writers, the engagements with local and national spaces have occasioned responses that reveal a commitment to the resolution of national traumas which sometimes have inseparable links with external influences.
Here I am interested in Soyinka's engagement with national or continental traumas as evidenced in his satiric comedies. His satiric comedies, as exemplified in the plays to be discussed in this paper, are triggered by an impulse of nationalism that offers interpretations to the dilemmas within and outside his indigenous space. Tracing the antecedent of Soyinka's recourse to the themes of nationalism in one of his earliest plays, A Dance of the Forests (1960), Biodun Jeyifo (Wole Soyinka 120-1) notes that the play was:
written and produced as part...