Nigerian Female Dramatists

Expression, Resistance, Agency

Bosede Funke Afolayan, Bosede Funke Afolayan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000361797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático

This book showcases the important, but often understudied, work of Nigerian women playwrights.

As in many spheres of life in Nigeria, in literature and other creative arts the voices of men dominate, and the work of women has often been sidelined. However, Nigerian women playwrights have made important contributions to the development of drama in Nigeria, not just by presenting female identities and inequalities but by vigorously intervening in wider social and political issues. This book draws on perspectives from culture, language, politics, theory, orality and literature, to shine a light on the engaged creativity of women playwrights. From the trail blazing but more traditional contributions of Zulu Sofola, through to contemporary postcolonial work by Tess Osonye Onwueme, Julie Okoh, and Sefi Atta, to name just a few, the book shows the rich variety of work being produced by female Nigerian dramatists.

This, the first major collection devoted to Nigerian women playwrights, will be an important resource for scholars of African theatre and performance, literature and women's studies.

1The Onye-Nka of African drama

Zulu Sofola and the development of African tragic drama

Nurayn Fola Alimi

Introduction

What this essay sets out to do is to engage in a scholarly discourse on Zulu Sofola. In doing this, the discussion does not assume that the criticism of African theatre has not recognised Onekwuke Nwazuluoha Sofola's immense contributions to African drama. Any such assumption would be a display of an obvious lack of knowledge about the enterprise of drama in Africa. Zulu Sofola's name as a foremost African female dramatist has appeared in many lists of prominent African writers. Critical focus has also been applied to her works in journals and books, in and outside Africa, including Mary E. Modupe Kolawole (ed.), 1997; Adeola James 1990; Clenora Hudson-Weens, 1993; Ebele Eko (ed.), 2014. Apart from focusing on her plays, these books, journals and many more engage in rigorous clarification of Sofola's peculiar dramaturgy and her feminist ideological leaning. Indeed, no one can gloss over the very fact that Sofola's plays have been performed at several university theatres in and outside Nigeria while she was alive. Nor that, the trend of performing her plays has continued even after her transition to the world of African literary ancestors. Moreover, several undergraduate, graduate dissertations and doctoral theses have been written on her works.

To this end, this discussion surveys, highlights and elucidates Sofola's achievements and contributions to African theatre. An important broad aim of this essay is to extend the already established studies on Sofola's dramatic oeuvre by further contextualising her drama within the contemporary realities of the Nigerian cultural, socioeconomic and political experiences, particularly as these were experienced after the Nigerian civil war. As a pioneer female dramatist in Nigeria, Sofola appeared on the African drama scene at a very significant time when African writers needed not just to sustain the landmark achievements of the first generation of writers but to also shift the paradigm upon which African literary tradition had been established, particularly in drama. In addition, she occupies a special position amongst the Nigerian dramatists by being the bridge that links the Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark generation to the seemingly reactionary generation of dramatists arguably led by Femi Osofisan. By the time of her demise in 1995, she had impacted the tradition of play writing and theatre production so significantly in this regard.

Unarguably however, Sofola's contributions, impact and influence on Nigerian drama and African theatre generally have been unfairly overshadowed by the achievements of male theatre icons such as Soyinka, Clark, Rotimi and Osofisan. This shows that the criticism of African drama has been dominated by studies that focus on male-authored works and theatre. It would seem that the discourse on the high point indexes of modern African theatre performances has not only inadequately captured Sofola's impact but has also been unfair to the female dramatists generally, leaving a gap in the critical literature. To fill this gap a little bit, the analysis of Sofola's plays, Wedlock of the Gods, presented in this essay is aimed at further perspectives on her most popular tragic drama. While doing this, the essay reviews the critical literature on the growth of African drama in order to highlight and explicate Sofola's contributions to the subject of African theatre. The point being made here is that, although it may not be correct to say that Sofola's work has been ignored in the criticism of African drama, it may, however, be the whole truth that the depth of her drama has not yet been fully uncovered. Thus, there is a clear need to update the trend in African theatre criticism through an explication of Sofola's Wedlock of the Gods. This discussion hopes to achieve this updating by linking the play to Sofola's concept of the tragic mode and her vision of African theatre practice as she espouses in The Artist and the Tragedy of a Nation.

The sociopolitical and cultural influence on Zulu Sofola's Drama

The military era

The military era inadvertently played a crucial part in the shaping of the Nigerian literary tradition, out of which Zulu Sofola emerged with the publication of plays such as The Deer and the Hunters Pearl (1969); Wedlock of the Gods (1972); Old Wines are Tasty (1981); The Operators (1973); King Emene (1974); The Wizard of Law (1975); The Sweet Trap (1977); Memories in the Moonlight (1986); Queen Omu-ako of Oligbo (1989); Eclipso and the Fantasia (1990); Song of a Maiden (1992); Lost Dreams and other plays (1992). These plays essentially constitute Sofola's major platform for espousing her ideas about human social, cultural and spiritual essentialities. Sofola may not have directly used her plays to “criticize the military” as some leftist critics have expected, the sociopolitical environment created by military governance inspired her writing generally.

But it is not surprising that the role and character of the military institution in the trajectory of Nigeria's sociopolitical experience have been generally painted in very distasteful images by critics. By constitutional design, the military is an arm of the Executive arm of government. Its primary responsibility is to defend the country against external aggression. But its emergence in actual and control of executive and legislative space through seising of power from the constitutionally elected government has given observers the opportunity to examine how much damage it has done to contribute to the general problem of underdevelopment in Nigeria. Gbemisola Adeoti, Charles Nnolim, Umelo Ojinmah and Edwin Onwuka are amongst critics who conclude that military leadership is perhaps the worst of all African countries’ challenges. Ojinmah's (86) reading of Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, for instance, led him to the conclusion that Achebe sees

the soldiers as not being any better than the civilians….if anything, they have become worse, having perfected torture, intimidation and cold blooded killings as weapons to cow the opponents of their policies.

In spite of this, the role of the military in the nation's quest for sociopolitical, economic and human capacity development in education and literacy can be described as a double-edged sword. Nigeria's military performance in the political space is actually highlighted by a paradox of “the goodness in evil,” which has offered an opportunity to literary critics to evaluate the extent to which literature has been affected by military governance. On one hand, the presence of the military in governance has provided a window for writers such as Chinua Achebe as Ojinmah noted to depict them as despotic and visionless in Anthills of the Savannah or as the bane of social, economic and political corruption by Femi Osofisan in Once Upon Four Robbers. To the Nigerian creative writer, the Nigerian military institution and its system of governance are quintessentially ready material for the development of the Historical Novel or Drama, a literary genre that is very vibrant in African literature in one way or the other.

On the other hand, the military incursion into civil governance and its usurpation of the social and political landscape is crucial in the development of literary consciousness and criticism in Nigeria (Okunoye, 2011; Osofisan, 1986). This perspective, in particular, has partly answered the question as to how much military governance has been responsible both for promoting literacy in Nigeria and giving the Nigerian literary space a ready window to imaginatively capture Nigerian history, politics and governance, social contract, family life, etc. Okunoye (3) further remarks that critical responses to the restrictive and choking conditioning of the social and political scene by the military are an attempt to recognise certain literary works in Nigeria as belonging to a distinctive genre of Nigerian poetry. He asserts:

Even though writing against dictatorship may immediately suggest writing solely preoccupied with criticising dictators, the tradition has grown, impacting in the process on the form and media of poetic expression.

Therefore, the post Nigerian Civil War military period (the period between 1970 and 1979 when Nigeria returned to civilian rule for the second time since independence) was directly and indirectly instrumental to the crystallising of the imaginative potentials of Nigerian men and women of letters. Nigerian literature at this time blossomed, drawing its inspiration from the diverse issues arising from the historical, social, political, cultural and economic experiences of the country. It is this creative explosion that further resulted in the production of cultural and creative works that unarguably began to further change the narrative about the authenticity of Nigerian literature. By then, the debates about what could be regarded as Nigerian literature or as Nnolim (69) puts it, “the Nigerian tradition in literature” had reached not only its momentum but also its critical landmark.

Specifically, with the pioneer efforts of Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark, in particular, announcing the emergence of modern Nigerian drama in the world stage through their ingenious utilisation of traditional and indigenous oral and cultural materials, sustaining the tradition of African myth and the poetics of mythology on the African drama stage became a crucial task to both these icons and Zulu Sofola who wrote her first play in 1969. It is sad enough that the Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970 imposed a period of interregnum on the pace of writing in the country. But when drama resurfaced after the war, its concerns with projecting the African tradition on stage became even more interesting as it extended its coverage and space beyond the common, ordinary imagination of its patrons. This is because the creative attention of dramatists was drawn to both the immediate experiences of the war and its implications on the larger, more contemporary Nigerian and African social and political climate. Even though Soyinka and Clark continued to lead the way, the group of Zulu Sofola, Femi Osofisan, Ola Rotimi, Bode Sowande, etc., not only sustained the momentum, upheld the established criteria of the Nigerian-ness set by Soyinka and Clark but also expanded the frontiers of dramatic coverage in form and content by writing from ideological standpoints, thus, introducing two key western critical theoretical frameworks, Marxism and Feminism into the criticism of their dramas. Sofola's feminist leaning and gender concern at this period was groundbreaking in the history of Nigerian drama.

Osofisan (2) writes that amongst other factors, the post-civil war period was remarkable in the annals of Nigerian literature as there was

…a significant growth in the literacy level, consequent upon the expansion in educational institutions (e.g., thirteen universities existed in 1980 as compared with only six in 1970) and added to this was the lure of renown, concretised in the inspiring success of our pioneer writers of the first generation.

Thus, despite its bad image of dictatorship and lack of respect for civil governance, the military institution in Nigeria can earn some credit for being instrumental to the growth of play writing and theatre practice. It has to be stated also that the memorisation of the genocidal conflict of the Nigerian civil war has been done in several forms as researches and studies on Nigerian history through drama. Many plays written at this period have served to document the Nigerian political and military experiences and the postcolonial self-determination struggles by Nigerian and non-Nigerian authors across the board. The role played by Zulu Sofola in this regard is too crucial to be ignored in the development of Nigerian drama to African theatre.

The Enuani cultural and metaphysical influence

The second most important influence on Zulu Sofola's development as an African drama amazon is her Enuani cultural and metaphysical background. Few months to her demise in 1995, Sofola in a seminal monograph, The Artist and Tragedy of a Nation (1994), bared her mind on the problem associated with the perception and the actual content and texture of African Art, particularly performance art. In the exposition, in which she carpets the idea that science is superior to art, she reveals the fundamental guiding artistic principles upon which her plays should be understood. Whether she is writing a tragedy such as Wedlock of the Gods or comedy such as Wizard of the Law, Sofola (4) insists that capturing the African socio-cultural experience in relation to the “dynamic quality of the total universe” is more important to her creative energy than anything else.

It can be argued conveniently that the cultural paradigm that produces the literary ambiance for her tragic work is the metaphysical thought of the “Enuani people of Bendel Igbo.” As a dramatist with a sound knowledge of her immediate culture, she believed that the mythopoeic tradition of tragic drama appropriated and introduced by Soyinka and Clark should raise the consciousness amongst African dramatists about the authenticity of African art and the literary vision a writer should uphold. Sofola, therefore, used this argument to produce plays that expands the frontiers of the tragic mode in African drama. She clearly establishes the premises in African drama criticism that the African tradition and how it exemplifies the core of the humanity of Africans are the basis for African art. The basis for any artistic production, as far as Sofola is concerned, should be encapsulated within the notion of “the African mind” and how this mind works to articulate and relate to the universe in a holistic harmony. For her, the creative force that dictates African artistic creations in whatever form is the very essence of human being in relation to his or her cosmic environment. This, in her judgment, must compel the creative artist to evolve a “new universe in the form of society, …to objectify, engage on cosmic level of cognition and thought, and probe the Supreme Mind of the universe” (4).

The Enuani people's cosmological perception of the artist and his or her role in the service of the society, to which Sofola's creative philosophy and “ideology” subscribe, develop the appropriate concepts that set the platform for her own conceptualisation of the tragic mode as an artistic communication. Onunu in Enuani metaphysics represents the energy and force that is responsible for the creative process. Interestingly, it is a force that is gender sensitive because it does not recognise the sex of the artist. It is an inspirational force that triggers the artist's creative energy to depict a new, alternative condition or state of being. Two types of Onunu are derived from this broad template: Onunu Oma and Onunu Ojo. Both forces exist simultaneously within the Onunu essence, in terms of positive and negative forces, respectively. It is also crucial to understand how these conceptualisations manifests in reality. The artist is called Onye-Nka because Onunu Oma, the positive force has endowed him or her to be creative and ingenious in inventing – whether in terms of scientific invention or in imaginative creative composition – whereas Onunu-Ojo is responsible for the negative tendencies that manifest in human beings in the form of “bad temper, rage, violence, wickedness, immorality and many self-destructive expressions” (7). The physical manifestations of Onunu-Ojo are experienced by human beings through natural occurrences such as storms, volcanic eruptions, flood, etc., which cause destruction to the human environment. It is when the negative force is seemingly overwhelming the positive force that the Onunu-Nka in the creative artist intervenes, enabling him or her to create artistic products that are capable of not just representing the ideal...