INTRODUCTION
In this unit, we shall examine the emergence of Nigerian theatre/drama. Africa is a rich theatrical environment. All aspects of the people’s culture: birth, death, ritual and all rites of passage have theatrical basis. The history of theatre in Nigeria traces back to then hey days before the advent of colonialism. The traditional artist is a complete theatre in practice. In orature, the folktale narrator is regarded as a complete one man theatre. We will study the development of the theatre and the literary drama in Nigeria. We will also take an incursion into the various factors that led the development of the genre in Nigeria over the years.
3.1 General Overview
It is difficult to imagine any respectable assessment of contemporary Nigerian art, drama in particular (being more indigenous than other art forms, like the novel) without a consideration of its fountain, and in particular those images, tropes and usages which continue to run through every stage and subsequent development of the drama - from the traditional and trado-modern theatre through the literary theatre (especially drama of English expression), to the Community theatre, the Cinema and its now ubiquitous successor, the ‘Home’ Video Film, sometimes contentiously referred to as “Nollywood.” It is these archetypal tropes deriving from traditional modes of theatrical expression that also continue to provide the mark of authenticity in contemporary Nigerian drama. This authenticity includes but also transcends the question of language or verbal deployment, to encompass the gamut of theatricality. What we find in contemporary Nigerian drama is a continual projection of the past into the future at every level of theatrical expression.
The emergence of drama in Nigeria through the agency of the numinous is well established. Anthropomorphic representatives of ancestral spirits – egungun in Yoruba, egwugwu in Igbo, masquerade in English – emerge during funeral rites or other rituals around which festivals and myths have been constructed in the indigenous communities. Theatre emerged from the imitation of the egungun display and the appropriation of the ritual motifs for popular cultural ends. Total theatre in the Nigerian contexts is defined in terms of the relative degree of approximation of these motifs of the egungun festival - mask, dance, drumming and singing, drama, audience participation. In contemporary Nigerian theatre output from stage and literary theatre to video film we find a continued quest to represent the cultural nuances of traditional Nigeria in the drama.
A parallel development from about the middle eighties was the rise of English theatre professionalism which had begun to take the theatre of English expression out of the University. Before then, theatre outside the university and school system had been the main preserve of the indigenous language theatre, with the major Nigerian example being the Yoruba Travelling Theatre. By the early 80s some teachers and students of theatre had begun to seek outlet outside the walls of the university. Notable examples were John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo who set up his PEC Repertory theatre in Lagos in 1982 and Bode Sowande who retired from the University of Ibadan at a fairly early age to concentrate on his Odu Themes Meridian Productions. The heydays of the rise of professionalism of drama of English expression in Nigerian were in the mid-eighties.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Lagos, a theatre tradition developed featuring well-known English and European musicals, concerts and operas. The actors, concert groups and clientele of the foreign tradition were the new, Westernized elite. The artists featured included Handel and Mozart. Similar concert groups were set up in lbadan and Abeokuta. Soon, there was a clamour for works based on indigenous Nigerian subject matter, and one D. O. Oyedele is said to have written a play entitled 'King Elejigbo' (1904) in response to the call. The play cannot now be traced, but there are references to it in the Lagos theatre reviews of the period. This theatre tradition did not last beyond the first decade of the twentieth century. Politics was already in the air in Lagos and in other parts of Nigeria, and many of the leading spirits behind the Lagos Theatre Movement, like Herbert Macaulay, soon found politics more attractive than the theatre. For about forty years after the play 'King Elejigbo', there was no notable development, in the Nigerian Theatre until Hubert Ogunde came to the scene in 1944.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Discuss the transition from the traditional theatre to the elite theatre in Nigeria
3.2 Performance Drama/Theatre
There was a gradual development of the performance drama or theatre in Nigeria. Alarinjo, the traditional Yoruba theatre so well espoused by Adedeji (“Alarinjo”) is direct ancestor of the Yoruba Travelling Theatre which flourished from the late forties well into the late eighties before its practitioners and their descendants dispersed into television, film and video productions. At its zenith, the Yoruba travelling theatre assemblage had some two hundred different theatre groups criss- crossing the length and breadth of the country Nigeria. The major personages of the Yoruba travelling theatre in its formative years were the acknowledged “father of Nigerian theatre”, Hubert Ogunde, and his contemporaries Duro Ladipo and Kola Ogunmola. They constituted the ‘trinity’ of the indigenous mask idiom in the Nigerian theatre, the defining mark of their vocation being the representation of an irreducible Africanness in language and histrionics. Performances were always preceded by the ‘opening glee’ which comprised traditional drumming, dancing and invocation of the metaphysical realm and pertinent deities. Duro Ladipo’s forte was the ritualised stage in which Yoruba deities such as Sango, Oya and Moremi thundered back to life and electrified stages across the globe. Ladipo was singularly responsible, with the collaboration of transnational culture worker Uli Beier, for bringing the myths of Sango and some other Yoruba deities to the international stage. The theatres of the trio were mutually reinforcing Hubert Ogunde, who wrote both in English and in Yoruba, more than anyone else, created the awareness of the modern theatre tradition in Nigeria. His was an operatic travelling theatre, and he took his plays to various parts of the country, and also to other West African countries, particularly Ghana and Sierra Leone, for about forty years. Ogunde's plays have religious, social and political themes and titles such as Garden of Eden, Nebuchandnezar's Feign, Herbert Macaulay, Journey to Heaven, Tiger's Empire, Strike and Hunger and Yoruba Ronu (Yoruba rethink). Occasionally, he came into confrontation with the political authorities and had his plays banned. Hubert Ogunde was professionally remarkable in another sense.
Early in his theatre career, he confronted the problem of the frequent resignation and departure of his actresses, especially as soon as they got married and their husbands objected to their wives continuing as actresses because of the stigma attached. Ogunde then solved this problem in a practical way by marrying virtually all his actresses. This stabilized his performing company such that he often had too many actresses and sometimes made some of the women to perform male roles. Ogunde was the first professional theatre man in Nigeria who lived entirely by the art and, indeed, for it.
Ogunde had many followers and imitators, and there is now a flourishing art of the popular theatre. Biodun Jeyifo (1984) listed over a hundred such theatres in Yoruba land alone. They are popular with the masses because they use the local language, and their operatic mode (a balance of speech and music) endears them to the people. Indeed, the ordinary Nigerian is hardly aware of any other modern theatre form.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Critically assess Hubert Ogunde as “father of Nigerian theatre”
3.3 The Literary Drama
Apart from the popular travelling theatre of Ogunde and his followers, there is also literary drama, largely university-based and elitists. One of the first practitioners of this mode was James Ene Henshaw. He wrote several plays including This is Our Chance, Children of the Goddess, Medicine for Love, and Dinner for Promotion. These plays are commentaries on social and political life in Nigeria in the years just before and after independence. They treat issues of culture contact and conflict, of the problems of building a coherent nation out of diverse ethnic groups, and of morality in social dealings. The plays were popular in schools and other literate circles in the 1960s and early 1970s, and were the first diet of many budding Nigerian playwrights.
By far, the dominant personality in Nigerian literary drama has been the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, who has been in active theatre, both inside and outside Nigeria, since the late 1950s. He produced and published many plays. Early in his artistic career, he established the Orisun Theatre Company and the 1960 Masks from which literally flowed a stream of truly remarkable plays. He has a background which includes the University of Leeds and the Royal Court Theatre in London, university jobs in Lagos, lbadan and lfe and reasonably well- equipped theatres in lbadan and lfe. Thus, Soyinka was well prepared for an outstanding career as a playwright and theatre-practitioner.
Soyinka has tended to write two types of plays; first, the relatively easily comprehensible play in which he is dealing with a single issue or a limited number of issues in plain language; and second, the more ambitious, full-length play in which he is dealing with a wide array of issues in complex language, often loaded with abstruse imagery and symbolism, and for which he has acquired the reputation of being a difficult writer. The easier plays include The Lion and the Jewel, The Jero Plays, Kongi's Harvest and A Play of Giants, while the more abstruse ones include The Road, The Strong Breed, Madmen and Specialists and Death and the King's Horseman. In content also, Soyinka has tended to write two types of plays, viz; the political play and the social/metaphysical play. In the political plays, Soyinka exposes the bizarre, insensitive and bestial nature of governance in contemporary Africa. In the social/metaphysical plays, he explores, often in a satirical vein, issues like prejudices, religious hypocrisy, and futurology, or he probes the nature of sacrifices, conflict, the transition from life to death, and the inscrutable supernatural forces which control the universe.
John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo is another important playwright. He has published seven plays, namely, Songs of a Goat, The Masquerade, The Raft, Ozidi, The Boat, The Return Home, Full Circle and The Wives’ Revolt. The first four belong to the 1960s, and the last four to the 1980s. As in his poetry, Clark-Bekederemo's setting is the ljaw Delta environment and his universe is one of storm and tide, of sandbars, boat capsizes and drowning, and the human tragedy enacted therein. The plays, with the exception of Ozidi which is Shakespearean in style, have Greek models and seem organized into two sets of trilogies.
Ola Rotimi, who started his writing career in 1966, has been a well- rounded theatre man and a first rate play director. He has published about six plays, namely, The Gods Are not to Blame, Kurunmi, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, Our Husband has Gone Again, If …Tragedy of the Ruled, and Holding Talks. Rotimi's major pre-occupation in his plays is with history conceived as tragedy either in metaphoric or in plain expository terms. The Gods are not to Blame, for example, is a Nigerian adaptation of the 'Oedipus theme' in which Rotimi uses the metaphor of communal dispute, self-love and ethnic pride to symbolize the problems that culminated in the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70. Thus, it is not the gods who are to blame for Nigeria's national tragedy, but the people themselves who led their nation to disaster through their incautious actions and aggressive self-interest. In Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, the message is even less ambiguous: it is the case of a people who plunge themselves into tragedy either because of the excesses of their leader or the limited vision of the people themselves.
There are several other playwrights in Nigeria who belong to this liberal-conservative ethos, notably Wale Ogunyemi and two women playwrights, Zulu Sofola and Tess Onwueme. Ogunyemi's landscape is similar to that of Ola Rotimi. His ljaiye War, for example, is earlier and uses basically the same material as Rotimi draws on for his Kurunmi. Ogunyemi has published many other plays, including Eshu Elegbara, and Obaluaye.
Zulu Sofola, the first Nigerian woman playwright, has been writing plays for over twenty years. Her titles include Wedlock of the Gods (1972), King Emene (1974) and The Disturbed Peace of Christmas. Her forte is tragedy put in domestic or two ritual setting with human error, insensitivity or crime as the tragic flaw. In Wedlock of the Gods, her first play, a girl was bundled off to marriage because her parents needed money from her dowry to pay medical bills for her sick brother. She considers herself as being in bondage for three years the marriage lasted, and then the husband dies. Rather than wait for three months as
stipulated by custom or agree to the obnoxious custom of leviration, she becomes pregnant for her former lover. Custom is broken, the consequences are severe - the plot thickens as the tragedy unfolds.
By contrast, Tess Onwueme started writing in the early 1980s. Her plays include A Hen Too Soon (1983), The Broken Calabash (1984), The Desert Encroaches (1985), The Reign of Wazobia (1988) and Legacies (1989). Unlike Sofola, her vision is not predominantly about the past; rather she moves across temporal and cultural frontiers with relative ease.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Critically assess the thematic focus of most Nigerian playwrights.
3.4 The Emergent New Playwrights
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, a group of young people started expressing unease about the prevailing liberal-conservative ethos in the Nigerian theatre. They were mostly former disciples or admirers of Soyinka, but who were no longer fully satisfied with his vision of society. While still paying respect to his great artistic skill, they suggested that he was not giving the adequate leadership in his plays about what the people ought to do to alleviate their social and political problems. With varying degrees of sophistication, they expressed their desire to see the theatre in the vanguard of the search for solutions to society's problems and as a propaganda machine designed to achieve this purpose. Some of the prominent names in this socialist alternative are Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Tunde Fatunde, Olu Obafemi, Sam Ukala and Kole Omotoso.
Osofisan has published more than eleven plays, the most important of which are The Chattering and the Song (1977), Who is Afraid of Solarin? (1978), Once Upon Four Robbers (1980) and Morountodun (1982). Bode Sowande's plays include The Night Before, Farewell to Babylon and A Sanctus for Women (1979). Fatunde has No More Oil Boom (1985), Blood and Sweat (1985), No Food, No Country, (1985) and Oga Na Tief Man (1986). Obafemi's publications include three short plays: Night of the Mystical Beast (1986), The New Dawn (1986), and Suicide Syndrome (1988). Omotoso wrote the play The Curse (1976).
All these plays in various ways protect the socialist vision of the Nigerian society. At its most competent, for example in Osofisan's plays, the vision is realized through carefully woven plots mediated by limit-credible characters and situations. Some of the playwrights, however, give the impression that their works have been hurriedly put together to catch the moment. Such plays are little more than topical social and political tracts with only a thin veneer of fiction.
This succeeding generations of dramatists of English, for which Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande remain frontline representatives were not
as tired of the gods as they had proclaimed, even if they do seem occasionally wary of their ‘inviolability’. Also literary in orientation, their work is however marked by ideological departures, and a toning down of sacred idioms of the numinous in favour of a more secular verbal engagement. The gods continue to appear in the plays of Osofisan, allegedly only as ‘metaphor’ rather than in their full mystical significance as potent, real or functional personages of the metaphysical world. The distinction between the deployment of the numinous as myth or as metaphor had been subject of scholarly exchange. What is crucial to the current engagement however is the continued appropriation of
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4
Most Nigerian playwrights acknowledge Soyinka’s influence. Explain why some dramatists towed a new direction
4.0 CONCLUSION
Apart from the traditional folktale narrator and Yoruba Travelling theatre groups at the early state of theatre, theatre in Nigeria was largely university-based and elitist even though the question of authentic representation of indigenous theatre aesthetics was more prominent. The drama of frontline playwrights like Soyinka, John Bekederemo-Clark- Bekederemo and Sofola acquitted themselves well in their deep- structure representation of the Nigerian worldview and aesthetics. Soyinka proved also to be consistently master translator of the indigenous ritual stage, with metaphysical confrontation deployed as metaphor for the understanding of life’s critical moments in his major works from Dance of the Forest (1960) to Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). His plays are drawn into the arc of post-coloniality not on account of being post-independence per se but also because of the debates and issues they deliberate set up in opposition to colonial experience and European postulation of epistemological and cultural superiority. Confrontation is usually achieved at two structural levels of drama and dialogue, first by pitching the Yoruba metaphysical world- view in direct confrontation with western/colonial epistemic or ontological systems, and second through telling, reality invoking dialogue.
The late matriarch of the literary stage of English expression in Nigeria, Zulu Sofola, herself a theorist of the African stage, explores the realm of the tragic and ritual as representational idiom in both her Wedlock of the Gods and King Emene (The tragedy of a Rebellion). She is also known for her gender- centred plays. In her work, tragic conflict consists on the one hand in a confrontation with temporal and super-temporal powers beyond one’s full understanding and grasp, and on the other hand in her immersion in her dual Igbo (Isele Ukwu) and Yoruba traditional heritage.
The other playwrights and theatre practitioners have been in the vanguard of addressing socio-political issues in Nigeria through the theatre. They have been realizing the odds of the Nigerian state in various forms on stage. Unlike, the histrionic concerns of Hubert Ogunde’s art, the later dramatists aim more on the correction of political odds, social vices and culture destruction.
5.0 SUMMARY
The Nigerian state has been affecting the Nigerian theatre and drama. What was more difficult to survive was the grip of the Nigerian political economy and its aftermath, which has proved an even greater test for the resilience of the tenets of traditional drama aesthetics. The downturn in the Nigerian economy from about the early eighties had a direct impact on the literary theatre as on various other intellectual sectors. The departments of English and theatre in Nigeria, which had been the nursery of the important dramas, began to suffer severe brain drain and creativity fatigue. Promising playwrights had their attention divided by the sheer need to survive economically and began to turn their creativity into other, occasionally and not so noble, spheres. The commitment of students who were the mainstay of the literary theatre productions (as cast and crew members and as consumers) could no longer be guaranteed. Many outstanding students could not secure graduate assistantship in university departments where they could have honed their talents. The relative economic security and political stability that produced the great literary works of the first and second generation playwrights had suddenly vanished. Related to this was the problem of dictatorship, the clamp-down on the Nigerian intelligentsia from where came the most vociferous opposition to untoward government policies left the university in droves for either the private sector or the intellectual pastures in Europe, America and even some more favourable climes in Africa such as South Africa where the radical dramatist Kola Omotoso, and more recently the poet and literary critic Harry Garuba reside. Even Soyinka left Nigeria at the height of the draconian experiences. Theatre/dramatic literature in Nigeria is long history of upheavals.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
Answer these questions:
1. Trace the emergence of Nigerian theatre from the time of orature
2. Discuss the role of Yoruba Travelling Theatre in the development of Nigerian Theatre.
3. Carefully assess the influence of Wole Soyinka in Nigerian Theatre practice.
4. What factors led to the emergence of anti-Soyinka playwrights?
5. Highlight the major thematic focus of Nigerian theatre artists/dramatists since the late 80s.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
Adedeji, Joel (1978). “Alarinjo: Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre,” Theatre in Africa. Ed. Oyin Ogunba & Abiola Irele. Ibadan: Ibadan UP, 27 – 51.
Adelugba, Dapo (1978). Wale Ogunyemi, Zulu Sofola, Ola Rotimi: “Three Dramatists in Search of a Language”. Theatre in Africa. Ed. Oyin Ogunba & Abiola Irele. Ibadan: Ibadan UP, 201 – 220.
Clark-Bekederemo, John Pepper (1985). “Aspects of Nigerian Drama” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book. (Ed.) Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine.
Jeyifo, Biodun (1984). “The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria”. in Dramaand Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book. (Ed.) Yemi Ogunbiyi. Lagos: Nigeria Magazine.
Osofisan, Femi (1982). “Ritual and the Revolutionary Ethos: The Humanistic Dilemma” in Nigerian Theatre.” Okike 22 (1982): 72 – 81.
Soyinka, Wole (1982). in African Traditional Cultures:
Survival Patterns. Art, Dialogue and Outrage. 190 – 203.
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