A Morte e o Cavaleiro Real

The work is part of a series of texts that Soyinka wrote during his time in exile in Cambridge (USA), years after being accused and imprisoned in his country for conspiring with the rebels during the civil war in Nigeria (1967-1970).

"Death and the King's Horseman" is a 1975 play by Wole Soynka, which has been translated by Sandra Tamele and published by Ethale. Soynka, the first African writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, based it on an incident that took place in Nigeria during the colonial period, at the time of the Second World War, in which the colonial authorities prevented the ritual suicide that the Youruba tradition required of the King's Horseman on the occasion of the king's death.