What If the Forest Remembered Differently?
A Proposed Alternative Ending to Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests and Its Thematic Implications
Introduction
Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests (1960) stands as one of the most intellectually challenging and symbolically layered works in African dramatic literature. Written and performed to mark Nigerian independence, the play interrogates the celebratory impulse of postcolonial nationalism by staging a confrontation between the living, the dead, and the spirit world. Rather than affirming a glorious African past as a foundation for national renewal, Soyinka presents history as a cycle of human failure, violence, and self-deception. The play ends on a deeply ambiguous note: Demoke, the carver, saves a Half-Child from being consumed, yet the Forest Father’s surrogate Aroni reminds the gathered community that little has changed. The question remains will humanity learn from its errors?
This blog proposes an alternative ending to A Dance of the Forests one that maintains Soyinka’s philosophical scepticism while introducing a moment of partial, hard-earned reckoning among the human characters. Following this proposed ending, the blog examines how such a revision speaks to the play’s major themes: the burden of history, the corruption of power, the role of the artist, and the question of moral responsibility in the postcolonial moment.
Background: The Original Ending and Its Meaning
To appreciate the proposed alternative, it is necessary to understand what Soyinka’s original ending achieves. In the climactic forest gathering, the Dead Man and Dead Woman ancestors summoned to bless the “Gathering of the Tribes” are revealed not as glorious forebears but as victims of human cruelty. In a past life set in the court of Mata Kharibu, the Dead Man was a soldier who refused to fight an unjust war and was consequently castrated; the Dead Woman, his wife, was sold into slavery while pregnant. These characters, mirroring living individuals in the play, expose the hypocrisy of the community’s celebration.
As scholars have noted, Soyinka’s ending resists catharsis. Aroni’s final speech, delivered with ironic detachment, does not promise redemption. The human characters disperse without meaningful transformation. Demoke’s act of saving the Half-Child is important; it suggests that the artist possesses a unique moral agency but the broader community remains morally stagnant. This is, in Biodun Jeyifo’s reading, precisely Soyinka’s point: the emergent Nigerian nation was being warned not to romanticise its past or expect easy liberation from historical cycles of oppression (Jeyifo 47).
The Proposed Alternative Ending
What follows is a proposed continuation of the play’s final scene, beginning at the moment when Demoke returns the Half-Child to the Forest Father. Rather than dissolving into silence and dispersal, the human characters are made to remain in the forest clearing, unable to leave until each confronts their reflected image from the court of Mata Kharibu.
The Scene: “The Forest Holds Its Breath”
[Stage Direction] The forest does not release the mortals. Roots rise from the ground and form a gentle but impassable circle around Demoke, Rola, Adenebi, and Obaneji. Aroni stands at the edge of the circle. The Dead Man and Dead Woman remain, watching. The Half-Child sits between the world of the living and the dead curious, unafraid.
ARONI: You may not leave. Not yet. The forest has given you the memory of those you wronged and those who wore your sins in another life. You have watched. But watching is not enough. The trees remember longer than men, and they will not let you walk away with clean hands and empty hearts.
ROLA (who in the past life was the court woman who betrayed the Dead Woman): What more would you have us do? We were not there. Those were other lives, other bodies. Why should I carry a guilt that was not mine to begin with?
DEAD WOMAN: And yet you speak her words. And yet you wear her face. And yet the men who die for you today are not so different from the man they unmanned at her bidding.
[A long silence.]
ROLA (quietly, almost to herself): I have buried men. I never asked what became of those who mourned them.
ADENEBI (who in a past life was the court historian who falsified records to protect Mata Kharibu): I wrote what I was told to write. The ledgers of the council, the verdicts of the elders I shaped them. I am still shaping them. A man came to me last month. His land was taken. I wrote that the land was disputed.
DEAD MAN: Then begin with that. Go back. Correct the record. It is a small thing. But it is a beginning.
DEMOKE (who has been silent, still holding the echo of the Half-Child’s weight in his arms): I climbed to the top of the totem and I carved a face that was not asked of me. I thought it was creation. But I had pushed a man from that height. I had watched him fall and I called it an accident because he was a lesser carver. I let the wood carry my guilt and called it art.
[Stage Direction] The roots loosen, but do not fully withdraw. The circle opens slightly. Aroni looks at the Half-Child, who laughs not a child’s laugh, but something ancient and patient.
ARONI: The forest does not ask for perfection. It asks only that you do not lie to yourselves on the way home. You will lie again. We know this. But perhaps, this once, the lie will come a little harder. Perhaps that is enough for one night.
[Stage Direction] The forest gradually releases them. The Dead Man and Dead Woman do not leave they remain as witnesses, seated at the roots of the great tree. The Half-Child vanishes. Drums resume, but softly, like a question rather than a declaration. The mortals walk out separately, each into a different path of the forest.
[Blackout.]
Thematic Analysis of the Proposed Ending
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1. History as Burden, Not Heritage
Soyinka’s original play refuses to offer history as a source of pride or consolation. The ancestors summoned to celebrate independence are not heroes but casualties. The proposed ending extends this logic by forcing the living characters to acknowledge their personal, not merely inherited, participation in historical patterns of harm. Rola’s admission that she never considered those who mourned her victims, and Adenebi’s confession about the falsified land record, are not dramatic conversions but modest recognitions precisely the kind of hesitant, incomplete reckoning that Soyinka’s worldview might allow. As Simon Gikandi argues in his study of African literary nationalism, Soyinka consistently resists the teleological optimism of Negritude, favouring instead a tragic consciousness that acknowledges human complexity without resolving it (Gikandi 112).
2. The Artist’s Moral Responsibility
Demoke is the most morally complex character in the original play. His creativity is shadowed by violence: he killed Oremole, a fellow carver, in order to complete the totem. Soyinka’s original ending allows Demoke to save the Half-Child a redemptive act but does not fully reckon with the crime he committed. The proposed ending gives Demoke a moment of direct confession: he names the act, distinguishes it from artistic necessity, and acknowledges that he used art as a shield for guilt. This is significant because, as Ketu Katrak observes, Soyinka’s plays frequently interrogate the role of the artist-figure in society, questioning whether creative power confers moral authority or merely moral temptation (Katrak 78). By having Demoke speak his guilt aloud, the alternative ending reinforces the play’s warning that artistic achievement cannot substitute for ethical accountability.
3. Power, Corruption, and the Postcolonial State
Adenebi, the council orator, represents the class of educated elites who serve power by lending it legitimacy. His counterpart in the Mata Kharibu court was the historian who erased the truth of the Dead Man’s fate. The proposed ending connects these two figures explicitly: Adenebi’s confession about the falsified land record draws a direct line between colonial-era court corruption and postcolonial bureaucratic dishonesty. This resonates with what Neil Lazarus describes as the “postcolonial predicament” the persistence of exploitative structures even after formal independence (Lazarus 90). The alternative ending does not resolve this predicament; rather, it names it as such, which is the first step toward any genuine accountability.
4. Aroni’s Role as Moral Custodian
In the original play, Aroni the lame servant of Ogun and custodian of the forest functions as an ambivalent judge. He summons the dead not to punish the living but to make them see. The proposed ending preserves this function: Aroni does not condemn the mortals or promise their redemption. His final speech is characteristically ironic, acknowledging that they will lie again while suggesting that even a momentary difficulty in lying constitutes a form of progress. This is consistent with what Derek Wright identifies as Soyinka’s “guarded pessimism” a belief in change as possible but never guaranteed, and always slow (Wright 134).
5. The Significance of Separate Exits
The stage direction at the close of the proposed ending each character exiting by a different path is a deliberate contrast to the image of collective celebration that the “Gathering of the Tribes” was supposed to produce. Community, the ending suggests, cannot be built on ceremonies that obscure individual guilt. Each character must reckon with their own history before a genuine communal life becomes possible. This echoes Frantz Fanon’s argument in The Wretched of the Earth that postcolonial national consciousness must pass through a stage of honest self-examination before it can be truly liberatory (Fanon 148).
Conclusion
The proposed alternative ending to A Dance of the Forests does not seek to improve on Soyinka’s original. Rather, it is an act of reading an attempt to press the play’s questions a little further and to imagine what a partial, imperfect reckoning might look like within Soyinka’s own dramatic and philosophical framework. Soyinka’s genius lies precisely in his refusal of easy answers, and the alternative ending attempts to honour that refusal while giving the human characters one more moment of honest confrontation before the forest lets them go.
For students and scholars of African literature, A Dance of the Forests continues to reward close reading because its central question whether human beings can be taught by the dead what they refuse to learn from the living remains urgently contemporary. In Nigeria as elsewhere, the politics of historical memory, the complicity of intellectuals with power, and the corruption of public record are not problems resolved by independence celebrations. Soyinka knew this in 1960. The forest is still waiting.
Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963.
Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. Columbia University Press, 1996.
Jeyifo, Biodun. Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Katrak, Ketu H. Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy: A Study of Dramatic Theory and Practice. Greenwood Press, 1986.
Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. Yale University Press, 1990.
Soyinka, Wole. A Dance of the Forests. Oxford University Press, 1963.
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