Oba Ko So: The King Who Did Not Hang

Yoruba royal tradition places Shango third or fourth in the king list of Oyo, and the fullest narrative accounts describe a reign marked by real power and real excess: a king so consumed by his own experiments with thunder and fire medicine that the practice eventually burned down his own palace and, in some tellings, killed members of his own household, costing him both his throne and the loyalty of his people. Confronted with the ruin he had caused, oral tradition holds that Shango left Oyo alone, traveled to a place called Koso, and hanged himself from a tree, an ordinary and shameful death by the standards of the tradition that tells it. What Yoruba narrative tradition actually centers, however, is not the hanging but what his household did next: rather than accept the plain fact of a king's suicide, they declared instead Oba ko so, the king did not hang, insisting he had ascended bodily on a golden chain into the sky rather than died at all, and that the storms which followed were evidence of his transformation into the orisha of thunder and lightning rather than unrelated weather. Duro Ladipo's 1963 play of the same name, Oba Ko So, brought the story to a national and international stage in the twentieth century and remains one of the best known dramatic treatments of any Yoruba myth. The declaration of denial, repeated by his followers rather than proven by any witness, is what Yoruba tradition treats as Shango's true founding act, the moment a disgraced king's death became a god's transformation.