Postcolonial Governance and Social Strife: A Social Semiotic Reading of Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants and Butake’s Dance of the Vampires

Post-colonial governance has continued to be a subject of critical discourse among scholars and researchers in Africa and beyond. This is because the question of leadership in the continent has accidentally adopted, as leitmotif, the consistent violation of the basis of the social contract. This phenomenal practice has generated growing tension, wretchedness, frustration and ultimate resistance among the people who try to offset their depreciating condition in hope of a new beginning. It is against this appalling situation that the continent remains the laughing stock of the world in spite of enormous recognizable human and natural resources. The aim of this paper is to show the link between postcolonial African dramaturgy and the politics of governance. In specific terms, the paper expounds on how contemporary African playwrights represent political leadership in their various contexts and go on to show how the mismanagement of political power results in resistance and social upheavals. In the context of social realism, Wole Soyinka's A Play of Giants and Bole Butake's Dance of the Vampires are textual prototypes that portray the leadership situation in Africa in the aftermath of political independence. Using social semiotics as theoretical paradigm, this paper is foregrounded on the premise that Soyinka and Butake in their dramatic discourses convey the pitfalls of postcolonial despotic political leadership which has, as a matter of fact, ushered in a reign of self-aggrandisement, corruption, hero-worship, sycophancy and social strife.