The Lion and the Jewel is a play by Wole Soyinka first performed in 1959. It chronicles how Baroka, the lion, fights with the modern Lakunle over the right to marry Sidi, the titular Jewel. Lakunle is portrayed as the civilized antithesis of Baroka and unilaterally attempts to modernize his community and change its social conventions for no reason other than the fact that he can. The transcript of the play was first published in 1962 by Oxford University Press. Soyinka emphasises the theme of the corrupted African culture through the play as well as how the youth should embrace the original African culture.
Read more about The Lion And The Jewel: Characters, Plot, Themes, Performance, Critical Reception, References
Famous quotes containing the words lion and/or jewel:
“Enough if the work has seemed,
So did she your strength renew,
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)