African Culture and Globalization: Assessing Regal Excesses and Reverse Rhetoric in Stephen Solanke’s Alaafin Aole Arogangan

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the toxic Yoruba regal culture in the context of globalization as the playwright records in the play Alaafin Aole Arogangan. This is with a view to aligning the Yoruba regal culture with global cultural best practices. Global best practices on culture have spread across the world and societies across the world bear the duty of domesticating such cultural recommendations. The study is qualitative in nature through which ideas or findings in the paper are arrived at through rationalism anchored on available textual data and evidence. The paper is also guided by Oswald Spengler’s Cyclical Theory, whose essence is to modernize the social system for development. In the play, Solanke portrays the regal vices of Alaafin Aole Arogangan of Oyo Kingdom. These include suppression of women’s rights through commodification of women, tendency for killing, regal superiority, as well as institutionalization of dominions. These are vices that are inconsistent with global framework for social system such as gender equality specifically as enshrined in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals 5 – Gender Equality. Solanke revisits the Yoruba regal history in the play through the reigns of Alaafin Aole so as to repudiates regal excesses. Aole commandeers GIRL, requests the head of the Baale of Apomu, is in contention with Ooni, and wages a violent war against Apomu outside his regal jurisdiction, among other atrocities. These are perpetrated under the cloak of reverence and awe of the Yoruba regal figures. Solanke, by these circumstances, suggests that these vices can only be eliminated if Yoruba cultural system is re-instituted in alignment with global best practices.