Abstract :
ABSTRACT: Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and one of the few African writers to denounce the slogan of Negritude as a tool of autocracy. He was also the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. This paper explores the concept of Foucauldian discourse and applies them to Soyinka’s “The Lion and Jewel” and “Death and the King’s Horseman”. It is one of the most debatable issues in Foucault’s viewpoints. Although it has been analyzed from several different fields of study such as linguistics, philosophy, social psychology, sociology and many other fields, presenting a clear-cut definition for it, has not been an easy task. For some Marxist critics, discourse and ideology are the same and they put the two in the same category; however, Michel Foucault the French philosopher, historian and poststructuralist thinker (1926-1984) tried to differentiate it from ideology.