Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, Nobel laureate in 1986. The plot basis for this play was a real incident that happened in 1946 in the southwest of Nigeria, in the ancient Yoruba town of Oyo, when the life paths of Olori Elesin, his son and a regional inspector from colonial administration led to a tragic outcome. The author changed some details, the sequence of events and, of course, the characters, and moved the action of the play two or three years into the past - to the early forties, when ancient customs and rituals were still very strong. In particular, the voluntary departure from the world of a servant after the death of his master, in order to accompany him in the afterlife. A documentary account of this incident is still kept in the archives of the British colonial administration, and the events themselves have already spawned an excellent play in the Yoruba language, created by a Nigerian writer Duro Ladipo, and a very bad film made by one of the West German television companies.