Tradition: Medical student disowns father, commits suicide

Lagos – “You are not my father”, that was the
last statement from Olounde, a medical
student in England, who returned home to bury
his father, Elesin Oba but found out that he
was still alive.
Olounde, full of disappointment, committed
suicide to fill the void left by his father as a
result of his reluctance to fulfil age-long
tradition.
The tradition demands that Elesin Oba must
commit suicide before the burial of the late
Alaafin of Oyo in order for his (Elesin) spirit to
clear the way for the transition of the
monarch and forestall imminent danger on the
community.
Upon direct confrontation with his imminent
death, Elesin displayed human frailty,
demanding for vain desires, resulting to his
arrest by Mr Pilking, the British Colonial
Administrator.
The Elesin later took his own life in captivity
after being presented with the corpse of his
first son (Olounde) by the reactive natives.
All these played out on Sunday night in Lagos
at the command performance of one of Nobel
Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka’s iconic plays
“Death and the King’s Horseman”.
The play, written 40 years ago, which won
Africa its first Nobel Prize in 1986, was
performed by the National Troupe of Nigeria
and directed by Mr Mike Anyanwu.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji
Lai Mohammed and other prominent
personalities in the creative industry attended
the event.
Speaking about the play, Anyanwu said that
the theme was relevant to the present day
Nigeria where the youths were adrift with
vanity and selfish tendencies.
The Play director urged youths to “emulate
Olounde’s choice of honour, self-sacrifice and
patriotism rather than his father and Pilking’s
dialectics of selfishness, arrogance and
sacrilege”.
According to him, the play also demonstrates
the tragic human frailty when in direct
confrontation with the imminence of death.
Anyanwu likened the vain desire and
indulgence of Elesin to the wide spread
embezzlement of national wealth by a minority
at the expense of the majority of Nigerians.