How It All Goes Down
When the play opens, the Yoruba king has just died, and Elesin Oba (the king's horseman), according to tradition, must follow his king to the great beyond. The move is important because it keeps the universe spinning. Which sounds really important if you ask us.
As Elesin enters the market to prepare for the big plunge, he seems pretty ready—but the Praise-Singer who accompanies him is a wee bit dubious that he'll be able to take things all the way. Elesin reassures him, and the women of the market start getting him outfitted properly for the big event.
However, Elesin is still interested enough in life on this side of the eternal divide to demand that Iyaloja (a.k.a. the "mother of the market") hook him up with a pretty girl he saw walking by. Even though the girl is betrothed to Iyaloja's own son, and she's worried that getting married will be a distraction from the task at hand, Iyaloja agrees—after all, he's about to make a big sacrifice for their people, so how can she turn him down?
Meanwhile elsewhere, Simon Pilkings and his wife, Jane, are preparing for a masquerade party later that evening. While they're dancing around in their costumes and getting ready, a local policeman by the name of Amusa arrives to alert them about Elesin's plans. After some deliberation (during which he manages to offend his servant, Joseph, pretty deeply), Pilkings sends word to Amusa to have Elesin arrested—he is not going to miss the masquerade ball, since the British Prince is going to be there.
Amusa goes to the market to try to prevent Elesin's ritual from going off, but the women drive him away. And so the ritual starts, and Elesin gets drawn into what seems like a deep trance.
Pilkings receives word at the ball that the ritual is still a go, so he heads out to intervene. After he bounces, Olunde, Elesin's eldest son, shows up and starts talking to Jane (who has been left behind). With the Pilkingses' help/urging, Olunde went to medical school in England, which caused a pretty big breach with his dad. Despite their estrangement and the fact that he had left home to live in the West, when he heard that the Yoruba king died, Olunde came back to fulfill the duties to his father and community that are expected in these circumstances.
By listening to the drums in the distance, Olunde concludes that the ritual has ended, and his father is now dead. However, he soon learns that Simon and his accomplices intervened before the ritual could be completed, and Elesin ends up stumbling in, handcuffed and furious. For his part, Olunde is furious at his father for not having completed the ritual before the Englishmen could intervene.
Later, Iyaloja visits Elesin in prison and taunts him for his weakness in not getting to the other side quickly enough, implying that his will wasn't strong enough. Elesin agrees that his will failed him, but he also believes he would have gotten there had it not been for the English intervention.
Iyaloja then mentions that someone else has had to intervene to help pull the ritual off and prevent total cosmic chaos after Elesin's failure. Hmm, we wonder who that could be? A large bolt of cloth is brought in, and we soon find it contains Olunde's body. Apparently Olunde sacrificed himself to try to redeem his father's failure. At this revelation, Elesin strangles himself with the chains binding him before anyone can stop him.