Introduction
Some plays announce their politics quietly. This one does not. Once Upon an Elephant by Bosede Ademilua-Afolayan takes the shape of a folktale, complete with a talking animal at its centre, and uses that shape to deliver one of the sharpest indictments of dictatorship you will find in contemporary Nigerian drama. The elephant of the title is not a literal animal but a man, Olaniyonu, who claims the throne under the name Ajanaku, Yoruba for elephant, and who behaves exactly as the folk image suggests: large, heedless of the smaller creatures around him, and utterly uninterested in whether his claim to power is legitimate.
For literature students, this play offers a compact, richly symbolic case study in how African drama has continued to interrogate leadership long after the colonial period ended, turning its critical eye inward toward the failures of self-rule rather than outward toward a departed coloniser. For teachers, it offers a text dense enough to sustain serious classroom discussion on plot construction, characterisation, symbolism, and the uses of oral tradition within written drama, while remaining accessible enough for students encountering Yoruba-inflected literary English for the first time. Whichever seat you are reading from, approach the play expecting more than a simple story of a bad king; expect a carefully built argument about how tyranny takes root, who enables it, and what it costs the people closest to it.
What the Play Is About
At its core, the play is an examination of dictatorship and the corrosive effects of unchecked ambition on both a ruler and the community forced to live under him. Using the familiar folkloric image of the elephant, an animal that in Yoruba oral tradition famously never bothers to ask the tortoise how it might become king of the animals, Ademilua-Afolayan builds a story about a man who seizes a throne he has no legitimate claim to and who is willing to commit almost any act, including violence against his own family, to hold onto it. The play is ultimately about what happens when personal ambition is allowed to override communal tradition, and about the collective courage required to undo the damage once it has been done.
What Happens in the Story
The action begins in the middle of a crisis, with King Akinjiobi already on his deathbed and a succession struggle already underway behind the scenes. Serubawon, an elder, seer, and medicine man, conspires with a man named Olaniyonu to install him as king under the throne name Ajanaku, performing the rites necessary to legitimise a claim that is, in truth, illegitimate. Once crowned, Ajanaku wastes no time revealing his true character, seizing fertile land in a dispute and marrying Omoyeni against her will by threatening both her family and her lover Delani. Iya Agba, the late king's widow, is the first to openly challenge him, accusing him of theft and injustice, and is dismissed by the elders as unstable for her trouble. As the play develops, darker secrets surface: Serubawon is revealed to be Ajanaku's actual biological father, the product of an affair with the previous king's younger wife Adebisi, an affair Iya Agba had witnessed and been falsely discredited over. Ajanaku's pursuit of ritual immortality leads him to commit an unforgivable act, raping Serubawon's daughter Desola, his own half-sister, as part of a ritual called IJEDODO. This act sets his downfall in motion. Iya Agba leads Desola and other victims to the palace, where Desola embraces Ajanaku in a ritual reversal that breaks his hold over her and restores her life. Serubawon, faced with the horror of what his ambition has produced, confesses his crimes and later takes his own life. In the play's climactic moment, Odekunle places a charm on Ajanaku's neck during the JOBELE ceremony, and the tyrant falls dead before he can complete his bid for immortal power. The play closes with Omoyeni going into labour, a birth that signals renewal for the community even as it buries its recent trauma.
Who the Important Characters Are
Ajanaku, also known as Olaniyonu, is the play's central tyrant, a man who conspires his way onto a throne that was never rightfully his and who is willing to commit theft, coerced marriage, and eventually rape against his own half-sister in pursuit of absolute and permanent power.
Serubawon is the elder, seer, and kingmaker whose manipulation makes Ajanaku's rise possible. His eventual confession that he is Ajanaku's true father, the product of a long-hidden affair, exposes the corruption underlying the entire succession.
Iya Agba is the late king's widow, falsely disgraced by Serubawon and Adebisi to protect their secret. She becomes the play's moral centre, refusing to accept Ajanaku's legitimacy and eventually leading the ritual action that breaks his power.
Omoyeni is coerced into marrying Ajanaku through threats against her family and her true lover, Delani. Her eventual reunion with Delani, and the birth of their child at the play's close, offers one of the story's few notes of hope.
Desola, Serubawon's daughter, is the victim of Ajanaku's most horrifying act, the assault committed as part of his ritual quest for immortality. Her eventual restoration, achieved through Iya Agba's intervention, is central to the play's resolution.
Odekunle, Desola's lover and Odejimi's son, is the one who ultimately delivers the fatal blow to Ajanaku's ambitions, placing the charm that kills him at the moment of his intended triumph.
Other figures, including the elders Odejimi and Ogundele, Odejimi's wife Iyale, Serubawon's wife Demoke, Omoyeni's lover Delani, and various friends of the younger characters, round out a community whose collective response to tyranny is as important to the play's meaning as any single hero's actions.
Why the Characters Behave the Way They Do
Ajanaku behaves with such ruthlessness because his claim to the throne was never secure to begin with; having seized power through conspiracy rather than legitimate succession, he has every incentive to consolidate that power by any means available, including ritual, coercion, and violence. Serubawon's initial scheming is driven by a desire to see his own illegitimate son placed above the rightful order, but his later confession and suicide reveal a man ultimately undone by guilt once his ambition produces consequences even he cannot stomach. Iya Agba acts with such persistence because she alone, among the play's major characters, has both the moral standing and the personal history to recognise the rot at the centre of Ajanaku's rule from the very beginning, having already been silenced once for speaking an inconvenient truth. Omoyeni's initial compliance with Ajanaku stems from the very real threats made against the people she loves, while her later honesty with Iya Agba reflects a growing willingness to risk everything to reclaim her actual life. Odekunle's decisive action at the play's climax is motivated by love for Desola and by the accumulated weight of a community's grievances finally reaching their breaking point.
The Major Conflicts
The central conflict is between legitimate, tradition-sanctioned succession and Ajanaku's illegitimate seizure of the throne through conspiracy and ritual manipulation. A related conflict runs between Ajanaku's tyranny and the community's growing resistance to it, led first by the isolated and disbelieved Iya Agba and eventually by a wider coalition of victims and allies. There is also a deeply personal conflict within Serubawon, torn between loyalty to the son his own betrayal produced and the horror of what that son ultimately becomes. Finally, the play stages a conflict between secrecy and revelation, as buried truths about paternity, adultery, and coerced marriage surface one by one and progressively strip Ajanaku of his legitimacy.
The Important Themes
Dictatorship and sit tightism. The play is a direct dramatisation of the pattern seen repeatedly across African political history, in which leaders cling to power well beyond any legitimate mandate, manipulating tradition and suppressing dissent to preserve their rule.
Tyranny and self perpetuating ambition. Ajanaku's willingness to harm his own family in pursuit of permanent power illustrates how thoroughly personal ambition can override any remaining sense of communal obligation once a leader believes himself untouchable.
The elephant and tortoise metaphor. Drawing on Yoruba folklore, the play uses the image of an elephant who never bothers to ask how legitimate kingship is properly achieved to comment on leaders who seize authority without regard for process or consent, and who, like the folkloric elephant, ultimately meet a swift downfall.
Betrayal. Serubawon's affair with Adebisi, the previous king's wife, sets the entire tragedy in motion, and betrayal continues to ripple outward through the play in the form of coerced marriage, false accusation, and broken trust between generations.
The triumph of collective justice over tyranny. Ajanaku's downfall is achieved not by a single heroic act but through the combined efforts of Iya Agba, Desola, Odekunle, and others, suggesting that resistance to dictatorship in the play's moral universe requires community rather than individual heroism alone.
The Setting
The play is set in an unnamed traditional Yoruba village, deliberately kept free of explicit foreign or colonial influence so that its critique lands squarely on indigenous structures of power and their internal failures rather than on any external coloniser. This choice of setting matters enormously to the play's argument: by locating tyranny within a fully African, pre-colonial-feeling world, Ademilua-Afolayan insists that the dangers of dictatorship are not imported problems but recurring human ones, capable of arising wherever ambition goes unchecked by accountability.
The Major Events
The death of King Akinjiobi and the immediate conspiracy between Serubawon and Ajanaku to seize the throne set the entire plot in motion. Ajanaku's early abuses of power, seizing land and coercing Omoyeni into marriage, establish the pattern of tyranny the rest of the play will chart. The revelation that Serubawon is Ajanaku's biological father recontextualises everything that has come before, exposing the succession itself as fraudulent from its origin. Ajanaku's rape of Desola during the IJEDODO ritual is the play's darkest and most consequential event, the act that finally galvanises open resistance against him. Iya Agba's leadership of the ritual that restores Desola, Serubawon's confession and subsequent suicide, and Odekunle's fatal charm at the JOBELE ceremony together form the play's resolution, while Omoyeni's labour in the closing moments signals the community's turn toward renewal.
The Meaning Behind Important Events
Serubawon's affair with Adebisi matters because it establishes that the corruption at the heart of the play did not begin with Ajanaku's coronation but decades earlier, suggesting that tyranny often has deep, quietly tolerated roots long before it fully flowers. Ajanaku's assault on Desola carries enormous symbolic weight beyond its horror as an individual act; it represents the point at which a ruler's pursuit of personal power becomes willing to consume even his own family, a warning about how far unchecked ambition can travel. Iya Agba's ritual intervention to save Desola matters because it reclaims traditional practice as a tool of justice rather than oppression, refusing to let Ajanaku's misuse of ritual stand as the final word on what tradition means. Ajanaku's death at the exact moment he sought to secure immortality is the play's sharpest irony, insisting that the very ambition meant to make him untouchable is what finally destroys him.
The Author's Major Ideas
Ademilua-Afolayan is making a direct argument about the mechanics of dictatorship: that it typically depends on collaborators, such as Serubawon, who enable a leader's illegitimate rise for their own reasons, and that it typically survives only as long as a community remains fragmented, disbelieving, or too frightened to act collectively against it. The play also insists that traditional structures are not inherently oppressive; rather, they can be manipulated toward oppression by individuals like Ajanaku and Serubawon, or reclaimed toward justice by individuals like Iya Agba, depending on who wields them and to what end. By setting her critique explicitly against a backdrop of real African political history, referencing figures whose rule echoes Ajanaku's methods, the author is arguing that this is not a distant or fictional danger but a recurring and present one.
Important Symbols and Literary Devices
The elephant itself is the play's central symbol, drawn directly from Yoruba folklore to represent a ruler who is large, forceful, and entirely indifferent to the legitimacy of his own claim to power. The use of Yoruba language and expressions throughout the play, alongside otherwise simple and accessible English, roots the drama firmly in its cultural context while keeping it approachable for a broad student readership. Foreshadowing appears early, when a character's guarded remark about Serubawon's motives hints at revelations that only surface much later in the play. Innuendo is used skilfully by Iya Agba, whose indirect remarks repeatedly hint at truths she is not yet permitted to state outright. Dramatic irony runs through the entire Omoyeni subplot, since the audience knows long before Ajanaku does that the child she carries is not his. Situational irony defines the play's ending, as both Serubawon and Ajanaku are ultimately destroyed by the very schemes they set in motion to secure themselves against exactly that outcome.
The Lessons Readers Can Learn
The play warns that illegitimate power rarely stays contained; once a leader seizes authority through deception, the corruption required to maintain that authority tends to spread outward, harming even those closest to the one responsible. It teaches that silence and fragmented resistance allow tyranny to entrench itself, while collective, coordinated action, as modelled by Iya Agba and her allies, is what ultimately makes accountability possible. It also asks readers to consider how easily tradition and ritual can be twisted to serve personal ambition, and how important it is that those practices remain answerable to the community rather than to any single powerful individual. Finally, the play offers a sober reminder that ambition unchecked by conscience tends, sooner or later, to consume the very people who indulge it.
Questions You May Encounter in a Test or Examination
- Discuss the significance of the elephant and tortoise metaphor in Once Upon an Elephant.
- Examine the theme of dictatorship and sit tightism as portrayed through the character of Ajanaku.
- Discuss the role of betrayal in setting the play's central tragedy in motion.
- To what extent is Serubawon responsible for the tragedy that unfolds in the play?
- Analyse the significance of Iya Agba's role in exposing and ultimately undoing Ajanaku's tyranny.
- Discuss the use of dramatic irony and situational irony in the play, with specific reference to the plot.
- Examine how the play's setting contributes to its critique of leadership and power.
- Discuss the significance of ritual, both as a tool of oppression and as a tool of justice, in the play.
- Compare the character of Ajanaku to real African political figures the play appears to reference. What is the effect of this parallel?
- Discuss the play's ending. In what ways does it suggest both justice and renewal for the community?
This guide is written as an original academic companion to Once Upon an Elephant by Bosede Ademilua-Afolayan, intended to support close reading and examination preparation. It is not a substitute for engaging directly with the primary text.