Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman

In a film of grand acting, flamboyant color, vaulting ambition and global conflict, the more slippery gestures contain much meaning.

The film works on multiple levels. It’s an indictment of colonial brute force; a critique of masculine entitlement, an observation of the uneasy coexistence between tradition and modernity. But mostly, it’s a rich, engrossing and distinctive approach to African storytelling.

The drama, with characters trying to avert a tragedy under tragic circumstances, is cleverly-constructed, with its contrivances nicely obscured by the glorious sense of place and time seen, in hindsight, as at best another “grey area” moment in the mixed bag of late era colonialism, at worst as another crippling blow dealt to a culture destined to barely survive the experience.