SECTION A (AFRICAN DRAMA) WOLE SOYINKA: The Lion and The Jewel 1. Examine the theme of love and marriage in the play.

Answer Details

Love and marriage form the central theme of Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel. The play examines competing attitudes to courtship, marriage customs and the union of the sexes, set against the wider clash between tradition and modernity in the village of Ilujinle.

Rival views of marriage

• Lakunle's romantic, Western view. The schoolteacher preaches a modern, companionate marriage: no bride-price, a wife as an equal partner, courtship with kisses, and city-style romance drawn from magazines. Yet his ideas are shallow and unworkable in the village.
• Sidi's traditional pride. Sidi values the bride-price as proof of her worth and virginity. She will not surrender her honour for Lakunle's fine words and demands that custom be respected.
• Baroka's polygamous tradition. The Bale sees marriage as the privilege of the strong man. He already has many wives and a favourite, Sadiku, and he pursues Sidi as another jewel for his household.

The contest for Sidi

• The plot is a courtship contest in which love is bound up with pride, custom and cunning rather than pure affection.
• Baroka wins Sidi by guile, and their union celebrates virility and native tradition; Lakunle's bookish romance is defeated.

The bride-price and custom

• The dispute over the bride-price shows how marriage in the play is a social and communal matter, governed by custom, not merely a private feeling between two people.

Comment on the theme

• Soyinka treats love and marriage with comedy and satire. He mocks Lakunle's undigested modernity while affirming the vitality of tradition through Baroka.
• The closing marriage dance and Sadiku's celebration of fertility present marriage as a communal, life-affirming institution rooted in African custom.

Conclusion

Through the rivalry of Lakunle and Baroka for Sidi, the play stages three attitudes to love and marriage, romantic-modern, proud-traditional and shrewdly polygamous, and finally endorses rooted native custom over borrowed Western romance.