Tragedy is Soyinka's primary love, for it offers him a language in which he is able to fuse together imperceptibly his interest in the metaphysical and mythological with his broader political concerns. Yet, even here one notices that his approach ranges from the purity of the Aristotelian paradigm to that of traditional African modes of the tragic. There are also several works which have a sustained solemnity of mood, characterization, and action and which, as his tragedies, dwell on the agony of African post-colonial existence, but which nevertheless only fit in in conventional as well as in Soyinka's own syncretic notions of tragedy with the greatest difficulty. Such texts have the grim pessimism of The Interpreters without its satire and irony, very much representing the diremption of the tension between the satiric and the tragic we saw in Madmen and Specialists and The Road into a singularly unrelieved, anguished reflection on the nature of social and political evil.

This is best exemplified by Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests (1963), which was produced for the celebrations of Nigeria's independence from Britain in 1960. The play dramatizes the tragic quality of African history and mythology in order to make a statement about the future, not only of Nigeria, but of postcolonial Africa in general. Soyinka reports that when he was a student he met some of the leaders-in-waiting of post-colonial Nigeria and, listening to them, he realized that in a curious way the post-colonial was a repetition of certain historical abuses of power; and it is this iterative nature of power that is the subject of A Dance of the Forests.

The play tells a story of how the inhabitants of a certain postcolonial African town decide to invite ancestral spirits from the Forest of the Dead to a celebratory gathering of the tribes, where they also hope to find out from the ancestors what the future holds for them. However, human vanity is such that they only desire the company of important and pristine spirits, but the dead who turn up are not exactly palatable to the eye, as they seem to have just got up from their graves. It is decided that the horrible apparitions must be driven back and, in case Forest Head sends more, they set fire to the forest in order to keep all spirits at bay.