War, Cannibalistic Atrocity, and the Illusion of Patriarchal Absolutism in Wole Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists

ABSTRACT Existing studies on Soyinka’s dramatic works have shown how his play Madmen and Specialists (henceforth called Madmen in this study) constitutes a caustic critique of war, the Nigerian military class, and its civilian allies who orchestrated the tragedy that characterized the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). However, Madmen deserves more critical attention to unravel its significance to Nigeria’s current state of anomie generated by various patriarchal supremacist ideologies. This article, thus, explores how Soyinka, in Madmen, uses dramatic resources to capture how obsession with absolutism by the patriarchal forces continues to provoke war and cannibalistic atrocities in Nigeria. Using a postcolonial approach of African feminism as the theoretical lens, the article contends that although Madmen’s thematic preoccupations—war, cannibalism, and absolutism—are significant to the imaginative historicization of the Nigerian Civil War experience, they serve as the binoculars through which various forms of male-orchestrated violence in contemporary Nigeria can be interrogated. Soyinka engages in gendered self-reflexivity to reveal the destructiveness and the illusion of patriarchal absolutism in the postcolony. He indicts the state as anti-wo(hu)man. The article concludes that Soyinka’s imaginative engagement with war, cannibalism, and patriarchy in Madmen is an important critique that destabilizes men’s maleficent neocolonial domination.