The paper begins by reconfirming two vital perspectives on Soyinka’s play The Road (perspectives that cut against the widespread—and highly questionable—perception of the play as an obscurantist text that is incoherent in its exploration of metaphysical issues): namely, the sociological approach of Christiane Fioupou in her study La Route and the recognition by Biodun Jeyifo (in The Truthful Lie) that the play’s portrayal of Yoruba quasi-proletarian culture is far more central to its substance than is generally recognized. The paper proceeds by recognizing the usefulness to an analysis of the play of Jacques Lacan’s observation: “There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended ‘vertically’, as it were, from that point” (Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, p154).

Taking this observation as an invitation to identify what is, I believe, a previously unacknowledged “relevant context” to the play, the paper attempts to establish a number of significant parallels both between the character Professor and the Vodou Baron Samedi and between the motor-park touts and mechanics (Murano, especially) and the Vodou zombie (a suggestive parallel that needs to be drawn with special care, to avoid the pejorative or ‘victimizing’ associations of the term that exist in popular culture). In drawing these parallels, I do not argue for an infinitely polysemic reading of Soyinka’s text; rather, my reading hopes to consolidate and enrich existing interpretations of the play. Analysis is based on a range of anthropological and theological accounts of Vodou, on a close reading of Soyinka’s text and on a partly skeptical reading of Femi Osofisan’s 1990 Ibadan stage production.