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and she is miraculously brought back to life. It is through her powers, and his mother’s love, that Ozidi is able, finally, to defeat the Smallpox King and drive him from the town, thereby purging Orua.

Stating the story as baldly as this hardly makes it seem a riveting experience. To be compelling, as a story told by an itinerant story-teller, it needs a strong narrative line, rich in incident and unexpected developments as the central sequence of events is unfolded, and, in addition, it needs a great deal of visual detail -descriptions which add to the significance of the tale for the whole community. Inevitably, there is some tension between the demands of the narrative and the discursiveness of the detail. The gifted story-teller will even play up this tension and so compel his audience to listen more intently. In the Ozidi saga the strong narrative line is supplied by the revenge theme; and the technique is to tell the story in such a way that the listeners, the audience, themselves will vicariously desire revenge.

This is done by creating an unsettling and amoral world in which the person who gets murdered, Ozidi the father, is the only person with whom the audience can identify. A society is evoked in which the ultimate sanction is not justice but might. Temugedege, the idiot brother of Ozidi the elder, is not so stupid that he cannot recognize the advantages of being king - but he is too stupid to see why the other warriors have chosen him. They are pursuing their own self-interest. Ozidi pleads for sanity, but his objections are over-ridden both by his brother and the other warriors. Then when Temugedege is grossly insulted, Ozidi puts aside his original opposition and rails against the other warriors and elders, arguing for his brother’s rights. The response of the other warriors, and indeed of the whole community, is to plan his murder. Ozidi does not even suspect their malevolence, and he innocently responds to the ruse to get him out of doors. He falls into the trap laid for him and is quite brutally killed. The community which he served so well has destroyed him. Again, Temugedege is not so crazy that he cannot recognize the ultimate outrage committed against him when they serve him up his brother’s head, but he is too feeble-minded to do anything about it and seek revenge. Ozidi’s wife flees when she discovers that she is pregnant. This alone gives the audience some hope, whereas, the rejoicing by the whole community at Ozidi’s death compounds the sense of injustice. Evil seems to work circumstantially, and there is no force within the community to check it.

It would be impossible to leave the story there. The audience need to be reassured that blatant injustice cannot ultimately go unchecked. Ozidi's death must be revenged. However, the audience are aware how difficult it is to fight the strong and the powerful, particularly if they are protected by strong magic and motivated only by self-interest. The preparation for revenge must, therefore, be as thorough as possible. Nothing must be left to chance. So the next part of the story tells how the young Ozidi is prepared for his great task of avenging his murdered father.

He starts as a normal child, and it is only as he grows to manhood that he acquires the strength, cunning and magical protection which he needs. He is recognizably good, and essentially innocent. He is taught to have no fear, and is introduced to the powerful charms and potions of the world of magic which will give him the might and courage which he will need. He goes through all his trials and accepts everything which is done to him because he believes implicitly in his grandmother’s superior knowledge. The only thing which he complains about is his apparent lack of identity. Finally, when he receives his name, which is his father’s name, he accepts without question the burden of avenging his father’s death. The young Ozidi’s reactions and responses are exactly those of the audience. And so the family of son, mother and grandmother, together with their retinue, return to Ozidi’s home town, Orua, to the ruined homestead and the doddering Temugedege.

Revenge is now possible, but it is still not yet finally accomplished. At this point, the teller of the tale draws his audience further into the world of the story by the device known as dramatic irony. This is where the playwright places the audience in a situation in which they are in possession of certain facts which certain characters within the play are ignorant of, and whose behaviour would be remarkably different if they knew what the audience knows. Here, the story-teller reintroduces the warrior-elders and shows them to be complacent, arrogant and secure. His audience knows, however, that the agent of vengeance is already in their midst. Eventually they are told of the arrival of young Ozidi in town, together with his grandmother, the witch. Complacency gives way to a certain amount of anxiety. However, Ozidi still has to find out who exactly murdered his father, and dramatic irony is further used to reveal it to him. He falls asleep on the way to the market and is awakened by the three wives of the three

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warriors who murdered his father. The wives do not know who this young man is - though, of course, the audience does. In their ignorance the wives reveal who they are and brag to him about the brutal manner in which their husbands killed the senior Ozidi. His son now knows everything he needs to know, and can reveal his identity to them. All the while the audience have been anticipating the discomfort of these foolish wives when they find out who the young man is. Ozidi’s slaughter of their wives provokes the warriors into facing the young man in combat.

The battles themselves, the successive fights which Ozidi has with his father’s murderers, are the opportunities for virtuoso performances by the story-teller and his musicians, or the community actors; and they provide the audience, as do all organized fights, with the vicarious enjoyment of violence. Here, the violence is extreme, but it is simulated, and the outcome is known and desired. Vengeance has been carried out and justice has been done. Were the saga merely a tale of magic and revenge it would end here, order having been restored. But the Ijg saga is not simply a tale of revenge. The diversions and elaborations on the main thread of the story over the seven nights and days of its telling, have served to evoke, for the audience, a whole community, a whole world together with its cosmos and special ambience ‘where the land meets the sea and the sky’; and it is this community which is the focus of the story.

At the height of young Ozidi’s triumph a subtle transformation takes place in the saga. The community, with a supreme champion in its midst, now begins to melt away. The champion seeks out monsters and does battle with them but it is in an increasingly sterile milieu, within his own compound and the barrenness of his eventual marriage, and within the town itself which is soon emptied of people. The story-teller is now presenting his audience with two opposing directions in the story, which interact with each other in such a way as to distance the audience from the hero, Ozidi. Even the slaying of the Smallpox King is in a city long since deserted by its populations. Ozidi’s actions, and indeed his character, which in the beginning seemed to embody good, now seem to have progressed into a dual existence of both good and evil. It is a complex view, but it is matched, in fact, by the demands of telling the story; the audience are initially drawn into the saga by the adroit handling of the revenge theme in a strong narrative line, and by the excellent characterization through the extensive detail.

Once their attention has been engaged they are identified with the community that has been created for the narrative, and the narrative line weakens. There is alternating comedy and violence which drifts to an open-ended conclusion in which the members of the audience will find the meaning they want to find.

This is the oral version of the Ozidi saga, and it is thanks to Clark that we have such full and complementary records of it. However, not even the film of the Orua performance can really match the experience of a live performance of the story. Clark’s English-language play, Ozidi, does something different from his various recordings of the oral tradition: it makes the oral version into a literary work of art. How has Clark changed the performance into literature? And why?

We can take as the starting point Clark’s story-teller, who plays Ozidi, father and son, as well as Temugedege. The story-teller starts the play by referring to a hitch. The company need seven young virgins to placate the hosts of the sea before the play can begin. ‘Perhaps you think this is a quaint custom . . . that ... we ought to sweep clean out of the house. . . .’he says, and adds that we can think that if we like, ‘for aren’t we living in a free democratic country?’ He performs the oblations while maintaining this wry tone - ‘Don’t you people kneel to any gods?’ - and extends it into a plea to the gods to help them to share in the materialist offerings of the modern Nigerian state:

... So grant

Us good money, good children, good women. . .

This speech, and the accompanying ‘ritual’ which is performed, is not intended as a parody. It is a secularization of the ritual, a turning of ‘ritual into life’ as Echeruo suggests. As if to underline the point, it is followed by an old woman symbolically sweeping out the ‘evil’ from the theatre or outdoor acting space. She is interrupted and sent off by the story-teller: ‘We men have important affairs of state to consider right now.’ By this single line he transforms the stage into the locale of the first scene which is the meeting of the Council of State in Orua. The chorus and the whole group of people who have been participating in the performance of the ‘ritual’, now assume the first roles which they are going to play, though, of course, as people performing a ‘ritual’ they have been playing a role as well.

Indeed, there is a double paradox in all this. In the first place.

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although Clark has brought the ritual into modern-day reality by using a matter-of-fact tone and contemporary references, it is in fact expressed in English, which would neither be used in a ritual enactment itself, nor in a performance of that ritual enactment within the relevant community. Thus, to achieve something that looks natural on the stage, and just like real life, Clark uses a greater degree of artificiality. Second, we, as readers, are not actually at a performance of the play. We are sitting somewhere relatively private, and reading a book. Perhaps, if our imaginations are powerful enough, we can imagine that we are at some performance of the play - though we shall come back later to the problems of the play in performance. Is the story-teller really Clark himself, addressing us, the readers - ‘Perhaps you think this is a quaint custom. . . - or another group of people altogether?

If so, who? Certainly, he has written lines for the story-teller in a most sophisticated tone, a tone that would appeal to the sort of people likely to read this play. It is deferential yet slightly cynical.

In fact, Clark has maintained this tone throughout the play. The utterances of all the main characters are marked by a quality of understatement that comes only from the urbane and worldly-wise. At the same time the language is richly metaphorical. The wit itself is an interaction of understatement and metaphor, as the following examples show. In the Council of Elders, for instance, Azezabife is speaking about appointing a king, and arguing with another elder:

Azezabife: . . . This state needs a head to put

It on its feet.

Elder: I was not aware we were lying down.

Ofe: You were never one to care in what position

You stood in the eye of the public.^

Later, in a scene saturated with the atmosphere of desolation, the young Ozidi discovers his father’s decayed compound for the first time, inhabited by the human wreck his uncle, Temugedege, who tells him:

Temugedege: ... It was not my fault,

Oh my brother, my brother, it was not

My fault, I tell you, or don’t

You hear me, don’t you? Don’t you?

[He falls down, a bundle of rags, at the feet o/Ozidi]

Oreame: There, you see, Ozidi, it is not

The family house alone requiring Prompt repair.

Ozidi: [Picking up the old idiot and addressing his men]

Start clearing the bush; on this spot

Let us raise again the compound of my fathers.^

The ruined compound is mirrored in the pathetic Temugedege and Ozidi’s tarnished name. All require, as Oreame succinctly puts it, ‘prompt repair. The pithiness of these exchanges, which is almost a shorthand, is present even in violent and passionate scenes - for example, in the scene in which the messengers are sent to Orea, the wife of Ozidi the father, to find out how to cut off the head of her husband, which is protected by charms, without telling her that he has been cruelly murdered by his fellow-citizens:

Orea: . . . Did you say he has

Suffered a small wound?

First Messenger: Of course, that’s only

To be expected; in war it’s give and take.

You know. . . .

Second Messenger: Your man is all right. All he asks

Is that you send some medicine down to staunch A small sore on his foot.

But Orea knows that they are lying, that her husband Ozidi is dead, and when they intimidate her she tells them about the special medicine:

Orea: . . . Stop on your way and pluck seven leaves

Of the coco-yam. When you have covered up Ozidi’s face completely with them, then You may again try cutting his neck.

First Messenger: Nobody’s going to cut your husband’s neck.

Don’t you understand a word we say? But thanks All the same.

They run out, making a cruel pun as they leave:

. . . You’ll be convinced when . . . Ozidi returns At the head of Orua in triumph.^

This scene is paralleled by scene 3 in Act 4, near the end of the play, when Ozidi (the son) and his grandmother, Oreame, visit the sister of the monster Tebesonoma whom they have just killed. They intend to kill the sister and her baby son as well. The woman

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welcomes them as strangers and friends of her brother. The vulnerability of Orea, in the earlier scene, is now echoed in this woman’s sudden awareness of her own vulnerability. She lies down with her son on her breast and prepares to die. The callous comments of those earlier messengers is carried to the extreme in Oreame’s utterances in this scene. Only Ozidi is struck by doubt and some feeling of compassion. ‘Let me be,’ he tells his grandmother, T don’t want to kill anybody again.’ Nevertheless, he does.

Even in the sombre hnal scene of the whole play this tone of understatement is consistently maintained. One neighbour tells Orea:

Orea, it’s a thorough purification ceremony

You of this house require.

When they’ve taken a look at Ozidi they say not a word and tip-toe out, ‘each with hand to mouth’. Orea addresses the supreme God, Tamara:

My mother no longer lives in this house,

So it cannot contain you.

And the Smallpox King announces to his retinue:

She called me Yaws!

The woman mistook us for common Yaws!*

One of the members of his grisly crew replies:

You’ve been too gentle with her; let’s go

Ashore and take the whole town captive.

But everybody has fled. ‘Phew,’ says Okrikpakpa, ‘a wretched race!’^

The metaphors link the characters with the world of nature, suggesting typical traits and universal characteristics. On the other hand, the use of understatement and of the swift verbal exchanges conveys the self-awareness of the characters and their almost cynical expectation of the worst; it makes the characters human and contemporary. And so, while the metaphors take us back to legend and rurality, the understatement is modern and sophisticated. In fact, the matter-of-factness of the dialogue is so effective

* A tropical skin disease which is contagious. It is ironical that something as deadly and feared as smallpox should be ‘mistaken’ for the relatively harmless and common yaws.

that it could almost be taken for granted. If the reader did so he would miss a significant development of the saga which Clark has achieved through it, namely a register in the common language of Nigeria, English, which is appropriate both for the content of the original oral model and for an exploration of contemporary themes. Through this tone, or register, of English the past itself becomes an elaborate metaphor for the present.

Clark, it seems, has attempted to give his fellow Nigerian intellectuals an experience of his own powerful imaginative response to the saga which comes from the heart of his own regional culture. He has endeavoured to write into the English version of the saga the meaning, or layers of meaning, which he has foraged out of its deeply traditional cultural appeal for him. In identifying the following three layers of meaning we are specifically not discussing themes, but resonances-, rather, or intellectual motivations.

The first is an emotional one, an ultimate point of reference for his continuing involvement in the saga. It is a nostalgia for his youth, for a time when his young imagination first encountered the performance of the story of Ozidi, and for the circumstances of its telling in the pre-independence world of the Delta region of Nigeria. Both his childhood and that Ijg world are now lost to him; the former is a metaphor for the latter.

The second layer of meaning is, by contrast, an objective one. The saga can be transformed into an account of an incipient morality. It is not the simple revenge theme of the legend, though this is the means by which he explores a more complex moral order; but it springs from the deep respect which he has for ‘the serious view of life’ deeply imbedded in the saga. The moral development which Clark articulates he sees as being already implicit in the original oral tradition.

The third layer of meaning, the deepest resonance, seems to return to the personal significance of the saga for Clark. It seems to have become a fabulous parable of the talented individual in Africa today, a growing awareness of the ambiguous nature of his destiny, and a search for his identity. The young Ozidi is, at the deepest level in Clark’s version, a very modern African, and, as a characterization by Clark, it involves his own ambiguous relationship with (English) literature and the (Ijg) oral tradition. By developing in himself the highest level of literary proficiency - in order to preserve the traditional performing arts - he nevertheless

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contributes to the development of an elite literary culture which spells the decline of that which he would preserve.

These layers of meaning, these resonances, emerge as a result of a close consideration of the text, rather than from an experience of the play in performance. The point is, that with the text in front of you it is possible to probe the constituent elements such as language, the characterization, the structure of the scenes and acts, and the use of dramatic devices at your leisure, rather than experience the work as a whole at a single continuous performance. The probing of the text, which we are doing now, is part of the literary process. It is an intellectual activity, and it forms part of the methodology of this book - though paradoxically I am critical of the literary process and fearful of its implications for the performing arts in Africa. It is the same dilemma faced by those playwrights who would seek to intellectualize their art while retaining a cultural rapport with both the oral tradition and its mass audiences - with, in fact, the people.

Bearing in mind these paradoxes, let us look again at the text of Clark’s Ozidi, starting this time with the character of the young Ozidi. Although the stage directions indicate that he is to be played by the story-teller (who also plays Ozidi the father), the writing indicates that the young Ozidi is very different in temperament from his father. First of all, the young Ozidi, unlike his father, is very dependent upon women: upon his mother and grandmother, but particularly on his grandmother, Oreame. Orea provides her son with a mother’s love and devotion, but it is Oreame who educates him and initiates him into the world of the warrior with its dual emphasis on bravery and magical powers. She creates in him a dependence on her own superior magical powers and divine support. Continually, he has to call her to his aid, but at the same time there is a growing rejection of her role in his life. For instance, his final act of revenge against his father’s murderers is the slaying of Ofe. When it seems that Ofe is likely to win, Tamara herself intervenes, then Oreame adds her spell, and it is only then that Ozidi is roused to a state of possession and hacks the old warrior up. The crowd fall back horrified, and leave Ozidi and his grandmother alone on the stage. There is an interesting stage direction:

[The old woman falls on her knees, overwhelmed by events and

bewildered by her grandson who is possessed. . . . ]^

It is Ozidi’s horn-blower and other personal attendants who bring him back to normal. ^

The next contest, which is with the seven-headed monster, Tebesonoma, begins with Ozidi being trapped by the monster whilst he is asleep. He calls for his mother (that is, his grandmother) who flies in (with a sound like an aeroplane coming in to land!) and saves her grandson. Tebesonoma and Ozidi fight and after losing six of his seven heads, the monster begs Ozidi not to cut off his last head. Ozidi is about to comply, but Oreame cuts him short:

Not so my son! This cannot happen! I

Was tending at home a client bleeding to death when

Tebesonoma dragged me forth. And do

You want to let him go who brought you here,

Your feet trailing in dirt?^^^

They fight on; but it requires Oreame’s cunning to distract the monster so that Ozidi can enter a state of possession again and hack him to death.

They move on to the home of Tebesonoma’s sister, and Ozidi is now sullenly arguing with his grandmother - ‘Let me be! I don’t want to kill anybody again . . .’ He requires to be put into a manic state of possession physically, by a slap of Oreame’s magic fan, before he will carry out the murder of the woman and her baby. The next contest is with Odogu, whose wife Ozidi has tried to seduce, and it is Ozidi’s last fight. Clark makes it a formal and almost emblematic affair: the mortal combatants are evenly matched in magic, and each are backed up by their half-mortal female progenitors. Behind them all is the voice of the wizard Bouakarakarabiri, the source of their magical potions and strategies. The contest inevitably reaches stalemate. Boua taunts the witches and finally sends them on a race for a magical herb which will decide the victor. Oreame wins the race. The magic herb enables Ozidi to triumph over Odogu, but it so blinds him with manic rage that he kills his grandmother as well. There is a very interesting stage direction:

[Ozidi staggers out shouting his name . .

Out of the random and discursive acts of violence and comic exaggeration which form the latter half of the saga, Clark has discovered a thread of logic which expresses his concept of the

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central character: Ozidi’s realization that he lacks a personal identity. Clark has drawn this thread right through the play. Let us see how.

In the very first scene in which we meet the young Ozidi he is a boy-without-a-name. He remains nameless for the next six scenes, right throughout the time of his preparation as a young warrior. In fact, a name is specifically denied him, despite his boyish protests. It also worries him that he doesn’t seem to have a father and he couples the two deprivations in his mind. As far as Oreame is concerned, and in terms of the magic which saturates the world in which he is growing up, he cannot carry his murdered father’s name until he proves himself to be an adequate agent of vengeance. However, Oreame permits him no alternative course and he, in his innocence which Clark is at pains to emphasize, totally accepts his grandmother’s superior wisdom. He finally acquires his father’s name by a magical process. He is now committed to his immediate destiny as an avenger. He has an identity which he positively assumes.

However, once he has accomplished his revenge he pursues the logic of this identity in a crucial conversation with his mother Orea {not his grandmother):

I cannot farm or fish; nor as others

Exchange fruits from both for profit. I was born

With a sword to hand, fists clenched firm for fight.

This course

I have followed without deviation Doing my duty by my dead father. But now Like a river at a whirlpool I am come to A spinning stop. . . .

Orea replies that she is not going to let him fight again, now that his father is avenged. Ozidi then succinctly points out the problem to her:

Yes, my father sleeps well but what About me? I have only to step out and children Are running to hide their faces in between the feet Of their mothers . . .

Oh yes, my father, all set up now and free from the grove of night Sleeps well indeed, while I walk here awake, for I have only to close my eyes and heads of those I have slaughtered tumble forth, rolling and

Hopping about my feet like huge jiggers

Screaming to suck my bfood.*^

After this, and for the rest of the play, Ozidi remains outwardly a hero, but inwardly a nonentity.

Clark does not shirk the issue. He shows us Ozidi sexually thwarted and curiously exposed in two separate scenes. The first is Ozidi’s own telling of his sexual dream concerning the Scrotum King. He admits that it is his grandmother who in the end has to come and rescue him from the giant testicles and the flood the Scrotum King has released. The second scene shows Ozidi’s impotence more poignantly and more extensively. It is the scene where he tries to seduce the wife of Odogu. When he fails to take the woman he has abducted, he admits to her his dependence on his grandmother:

And of course my grandmother, she is

The sea that fills my stream. . . .

As soon as he admits this the woman begins to treat him coquettishly, almost as though he were a child - ‘Oh, come now, play with me. . . .’ - and Ozidi, who would seduce her and not rape her, finds that her change of attitude signifies nothing more than that she is prepared to trade sex with him for the secrets of his might. Again, an attempt at achieving a normal life fails and he is forced back into his vengeful self. As his mother Orea says at the end of the scene:

Leave the woman alone, Ozidi!

Now is there nothing else you can do but kill?

Oh, no more sleep for us again in this house.

Finally, after his last frenzied act of destruction which destroys his grandmother, he staggers out, shouting his name. It is a grotesque parody of that earlier scene in which he discovered his name and his identity for the first time in his grandmother’s house, and performed a triumphal dance, chanting his name to the applause of his grandmother, mother and retinue. The two scenes have deliberate parallels which are evoked by their respective stage directions. The destruction of Oreame by Ozidi is one of the most significant changes which Clark has made to the saga. In the traditional story, Ozidi is magically warned of the possibility of accidentally killing his grandmother. He takes the advised precau-

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tions, so that when he falls into the trap, she is able to escape from actual death and continue to advise him. Clark perceives that with her influence over him, Ozidi has no individual identity, and he makes his own Ozidi increasingly aware of this constraint upon his life. Clark’s Ozidi knows, if only at a subconscious level, that he must kill her if he is to find his true self. But in killing her he cuts off the source of his power and the magical protection which he has enjoyed. Clark sees the arrival of the Smallpox King and Ozidi’s affliction with the disease as being a result of this act of virtual self-destruction. His mother Orea says that this is the first illness he has ever had in his life, and it is an indication of Ozidi’s losing, at last, his divine protection, and acquiring common humanity. In the saga it is Oreame who cures Ozidi - admittedly on Orea’s own suggestion that he has common yaws - and then helps him slay the Smallpox King. But in Clark’s play it is Orea alone, with her own enduring humanity, who cures him, and the Smallpox King and his retinue depart without the fight.

In Clark’s development of the character, the vengeful Ozidi, the manic scourge, is a personality which has been overlaid on the character of the man himself. For a time, when it seemed that everybody wanted revenge, it was possible for there to be a total identity between Ozidi the scourge and Ozidi the man, and to find no conflict between the man’s destiny and himself. We have already seen how, in the saga, Ozidi’s presence within the community becomes deeply ambiguous for that community. In the play, Clark is less concerned with the community than he is with the man. After Ozidi has achieved his revenge Clark turns the public man upon his private self, in order that the play might reflect the theme of man’s divided self, which Clark sees as a condition of the modern world. The ending of the play, nevertheless, leaves this problem unresolved.

These existential problems are the ones that seem to lie at the core of the play, and they are the ones which have taken Clark farthest away from the spirit and intent of the saga. On a less problematic level, he has been able to pursue the development of moral issues which he finds in the saga. He accepts the metaphysical world of Orua, with its parallel experience of magic and mortality through the divinity - Tamara, the half-mortal, half-magical beings like Oreame, and the mortals whose powers are enhanced by magic, as well as the ordinary mortals of the community who are not. The affairs of the mortal world are

ordered by custom . : . and also by self-interest, mainly on the part of the leaders. ^

At the beginning of the play, the basis on which the community leaders decide to appoint the idiot Temugedege as king appears to be irrational. It’s your family’s turn, they tell Ozidi, but custom forbids the appointment of a younger brother. Ozidi declines on behalf of his idiot elder brother, who, at that moment, staggers in and contradicts him. He agrees to be king, and the elders so appoint him. This apparently unthinking pursuance of custom actually appears to be motivated by self-interest on the part of the most powerful warriors. Another elder has in fact suggested that before they select a new king they should find out why all the others have died so soon after election, but his objections are brushed aside. The deliberate selection of someone wholly unsuitable suggests that the community’s traditions are being used against the community’s best interests. Ozidi himself is pushed into a contradictory position by having to support his feebleminded brother against the community, when they refuse to pay tribute to the man whom they elected. The community seems collectively unable to sort out its problems, and in the impasse allows itself to be led further astray by the immoral warriors. The whole community plays a part in the slaughter of Ozidi, who, bound by honour and custom, walks into the trap and then stoically accepts his fate.

The slaughter of Ozidi and the hacking off of his head is followed by a grotesque scene. Temugedege waits with Ozidi’s wife Orea to receive the customary tribute. He is a parody of a king - ‘He wears a dirty brown tunic over his cloth, and about his brow is a garland which has withered in the course of the day. . . .’ He holds a stick as a staff of ofhce. The procession comes in bearing his awful tribute:

All {With one voice): Here is our tribute to you.

King Temugedege, take it and rejoice!!! [Temugedege, with a fixed

stupid smile on his face, steps down and opens the parcel dumped at his

feet. He shrieks at the sight, tottering back in a fity-^

Orea is left to cradle the head of her husband in her lap, while Temugedege ‘with finger in his mouth cries his way into the house’. He comes out again, his erstwhile staff of office now over his shoulder with a bundle tied to it, wandering off, aware at last of his own pathetic uselessness.

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At this point in the play, the good and evil in the world of the drama are clearly distinguished one from the other, and the whole community at Orua is seen to be corrupted by the evil in its midst. In defeating the murderers of his father, the younger Ozidi overturns the evil in the community. Or does he? It would seem that Clark sees the magic which is at the heart of the play as amoral. It is not a thing in itself but merely a medium, through which superior might and cunning are channelled to whoever seeks these powers and is capable of absorbing them, be they good or evil. The use of magic in all of Ozidi’s subsequent battles is shown to be morally sterile. It is one of the community elders, an ordinary mortal who tricks Ozidi into fighting his battle with Tebesonoma, but it is Oreame who advocates a fight to the death:

But better finish off the fight today

Than clash on another: this forest cannot contain

Two champion lions.

But the slaughter of Tebesonoma leads to further and even more gratuituous killing: Tebesonoma’s sister and her baby. As Tebesonoma himself says:

. . . Take it from me, Ozidi, except you murder them too.

Twenty years from now, as you did

With your father’s assassins, you shall be called to account. . . .^^

Clark establishes the woman’s innocence and essential good nature unequivocally; and when she is threatened he brings in the neighbours to support her. The audience have now been turned through 180°: Ozidi now embodies evil, and the community is seen as good. Oreame manifests her morally blind pragmatism and strikes the woman and her family down by magic. In the same way as Ozidi’s father accepted his immiment death, so too does this poor woman.

The final contest, with Odogu, is utterly sterile because it is the logical outcome of an amoral source of strength: the magic of the witch progenitors. The fight, and the magic, has ceased to have any relevance to the affairs of men. Ozidi’s killing of his grandmother, at the end of this fight, seemingly by accident, restores the human dimension. Orea, too, manifests a recognizable moral goodness in her caring, selfless nature. In the final scene, Ozidi is deserted by his retinue and racked by disease and it is Orua’s simple human care which helps him survive the illness. The mortals, Orua and Ozidi, are now totally unaware of the presence

of the fabulous barge of Engarando, the Smallpox King, filled with his retinue of shadowy^llegorical figures. That world now exists in another dimension altogether. Morality, Clark seems to be saying, rests with human beings, within the world of their common humanity, and not with magic.

Clark has tried to create for the modern stage a dazzling spectacle to delight the imagination of audiences, as much as his own imagination was stirred by the telling of the legend in his childhood. It is ironical, therefore, that for many readers of the play it is this element of extravagant staging, suggested in the stage directions, which is their greatest obstacle to understanding the play. There are two sorts of difficulties. One is the difficulty of actually visualizing the totality of music, dancing, costumes and transformations while reading the play. The other is a disbelief in the possibility of achieving the stage directions in a performance in even the best-equipped theatre. The effect of this second difficulty is to lead the reader into trying to discover the correlative action for which the stage direction must be some sort of metaphor, and then, when this fails, to doubt the validity of the theatrical form which Clark has chosen for his reworking of the saga.

There is no doubt that the highly technical theatres of the wealthy industrialized societies, with the vast range of professional performance and artistic skills which they can employ, can cope with every scenic effect called for in Ozidi, but such theatrical resources are yet in their infancy in Africa. Although Ozidi has been performed in Nigeria, it has not been given the costly and elaborate staging which it calls for. For example, scene 5 in Act 2, when Ozidi acquires his personal charm, needs an actor who has trained professionally in acrobatics to play the role of Bouakar-akarabiri, so that he can act upside-down as he is initially required to do. The huge lizard, eagle-hornbill, and monkey, are played by actors wearing masks; the eagle-hornbill would be played by a trapeze artist (who would be able to fly around the stage on trapezes on a pulley system) while the monkey would be played by another acrobat. The gigantic pestle would be over a trap-door on the stage, and when these weird creatures were put into it they would pass through the false bottom of the pestle, then through the stage trap-door, unseen by the audience. The colossal pestle would be made out of lightweight synthetic material like polystyrene, painted to look like solid wood. The unearthly sounds which signify the onset of Ozidi’s state of possession can be

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recorded on a synthesizer and then amplified around the auditorium. Many theatres have complicated stereophonic sound systems which enable the recorded sounds to swirl around the theatre, and come from different directions.

The other complicated scene, as far as staging is concerned, is the fight with Ofe in Act 3, scene 8. Ofe’s repeated disappearing act can be effected by having a second actor dressed identically to Ofe, and by using special lighting effects. There is, for example, a type of gauze curtain called scrim which seems to disappear when light is thrown on to a person or object behind it, and yet looks very solid when light is thrown on to it and on to whatever is painted on it. So strong lights on Ofe 1 in front of it will make him the target for Ozidi to strike at; and then strong lights on Ofe 2 behind the scrim, with the sudden fade of the first lights, will give the audience the impression of one person suddenly disappearing in one place and reappearing in another.

It is a complicated imaginative process trying to visualize not only these detailed scenic effects taking place but also the mechanics by which they are achieved, while reading the text. However, grasping the visual spectacle of the play on stage is not actually essential to an understanding of it as literature - in my analysis of the layers of meaning I did not have special recourse to the spectacle. On the other hand, it is important to realize that the play can be staged, and that it does not provide any insuperable problems for a competent theatre director, provided he has access to very extensive theatre resources.

The Contest

It is necessary now to place Clark’s Ozidi in the context of the various attempts elsewhere in Africa to develop a modern African theatre from the rural traditional performance modes. We can see a very different approach to the oral tradition to Clark’s in Mukotani Rugyendo’s play in English, The Contest. Rugyendo’s initial concern is not with a particular example of the oral tradition, or its preservation for its own sake. ‘This play,’ he writes in the production note to it,*^ ‘sets out to explore what can possibly be done to maintain the popular nature of theatre.’ It is Rugyendo himself who has emphasized the word ‘popular’. His basic premise is that traditional performances are by their very nature popular, because of their function in society:

Theatre in societies that have not suffered heavy fragmentation and class divisions is a popular activity. It is the expression of the spirit of the collective; the embodiment of their struggle for survival in a hostile environment. In societies with low scientific and technical knowledge, this is confined to the expression of the people’s experiences in the production of the very basics of their existence. And art is necessary to bridge the gap that prevails as man grapples with these hostilities.

Rugyendo’s other premise is that theatre in technologically advanced societies, especially capitalist societies, becomes less and less popular:

But the problem is that as capitalist society becomes more and more complex, and thus more alienating, art forms instead of being richer and more dynamic, become stale and removed from concrete reality.

Thus, in turning back to the African performance traditions, Rugyendo has shifted the emphasis from the peasants’ oral traditions to the peasants themselves, today, as the audiences for modern theatre. What is to be preserved is not a particular saga or dance or masquerade, but the peasant audience itself; and they are to carry over to the contemporary theatre their growing social and political awareness. Rugyendo is not an isolated example of a playwright anxious to retain the popular dimension of traditional performances in the modern forms of theatre. The Zambians, Kasoma and Chifunyise, the Kenyan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Tanzanian, Hussein, as well as the Botswana movement, Laedza Batanani, whose work is dealt with in subsequent chapters, are concerned to address the peasantry and the urban proletariat about their present disadvantaged position.

The Contest is, however, an appropriate play to consider alongside Ozidi, particularly in the terms which this chapter is attempting to set forth, namely, the relationship between literature and performance in the development of an African drama.

Clark’s play can be subjected to literary analysis, to a close and rewarding consideration of the play-text. Rugyendo’s play cannot. To read Rugyendo’s play in the context of a study of African dramatic literature can be a disillusionment, and lead to a dismissal of it as glib and inconsequential. The critic cannot find anything like ‘themes’ and ‘plot’, ‘characterization’ and ‘relationships’, in the text on which to hang his analysis. Even the traditional element seems weak. In fact. The Contest is not intended for reading, except as an indication of the nature of the experiment in

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performance which Rugyendo is suggesting. Although both Ozidi and The Contest use a traditional performance respective to their author’s particular indigenous culture, with the aim of preserving some aspects of it, the results are diametrically opposed to each other. Ozidi is basically literary (though it can be performed); The Contest is basically a performance (though an account of it can be read).

This crucial difference between the two plays is evident on at least three levels of analysis, namely; (1) in the role of the audience in terms of the references to audience participation given in the stage directions; (2) in the structure of each play; (3) in the use of English, that is, in the linguistic texture of each play. I propose to give an analysis of The Contest, and a comparison of it with Ozidi, under these three headings.

1 The role of the audience

Rugyendo tells us in the production note that his play derives from something which he calls the ‘heroic recitation’, ‘a poetic theatrical form which is found among the Bahima, Banyankole, Bakiga and Bayarwanda in Western Uganda, the Bahaya in north-western Tanzania and in Rwanda and Burundi’. He is not concerned with one specific ‘recitation’, or one special saga, but with the genre, which ‘deals with heroic feats of adventure in war, cattle-raiding, hunting. . . .’ The way an adventure is told is more important than the actual content of the recitation, and the performers are supposed to ‘win the spectators’ admiration and honour depending on how they excel in their recitations’. This is Rugyendo’s own response to the recitations, and it reflects his delight in an audience’s response to a performance. Clark’s response to Okabou’s telling of the Ozidi saga, whose version he favours above all others, is significantly different:

Herein lies precisely the strength of the Okabou text - its observance of Aristotle’s old canon for a thundering good story to stir the heart anywhere - and it is outstanding not just in comparison with the Erivini and Afolua versions. As a story, Okabou’s version has a beginning, a middle, and an end in a total structure where no segment is superfluous. . . . Okabou . . . preserves the Ozidi epic as a unified work of art. ..

For Clark, the quality of the saga lies in the textual arrangement of a plot. In fact, Clark complains that in the enacted version in Orua

there was very little ‘text’ - ‘The narrator/protagonist, the late Erivini of Bolou Orua, although a fine performer, had not the gift for words’.

Rugyendo’s concern is with the form of theatre appropriate to a peasant audience today, and so all other traditional elements relate to this overriding concern and can be changed to suit peasant societies elsewhere in Africa. He specifically states this:

The producers and actors should feel free to exploit to the full what they can possibly imagine of the limitless possibilities of this form. It is supposed to establish very easy communication between performers and spectators so that the latter can actively respond to the rhythm of the performance. It aspires to minimise to the lowest degree the hollow distance between actors and the silent audience in the modern theatre.

Clark, however, speaks of his own English version Ozidi in a different mode, which reveals a remarkably different intent:

In my play, Ozidi, I treated the combined accounts of the Ozidi myth given by Okabou, Afolua, and Erivini, just as Shakespeare in his Roman and English plays handled history that Plutarch and Livy on the one hand, and Hall and Holinshed on the other, had written up. The parallel may be stretched to the Greek playwrights in their exploitation of a body of myths that was the public property of their people.

If Clark uses the myth to ‘mirror the continuing state of man’, and to explore the contemporary restraints on man’s individuality, Rugyendo uses the ‘heroic recitations’ to show the choice which is idealistically presented to the contemporary masses in Africa between socialist and capitalist forms of development.

The contest of the title is between two heroes, known as Hero 1 (the son of the Mungwes) and Hero 2 (son of the Nkozis) for the hand in marriage of the beautiful daughter of the village, Maende-leo. The leading drummer is the master of ceremonies; the villagers themselves, who have assembled to enjoy each hero’s defence of his claim to the bride, are the final arbiters, though Maendeleo herself has a choice in the matter. Each Hero is assigned a girl who will sing his praises, stir up the crowd on his behalf, and generally encourage him. Maendeleo is the society of the African masses; Hero 1 is, if you like, African capitalism; Hero 2 is African socialism. The Heroes are each expected to develop their arguments in concrete terms, providing an analysis of what they did before and since independence, and suggesting how future development will go in terms of their guiding philosophies.

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Obviously, because of the nature and composition of the ' peasant ‘audience’ within the play, Hero 2, the socialist, will win the bride, since what he has to say has greater relevance and applicability to the peasant than what the urban capitalist has to say. In fact, Rugyendo allows Hero 1 to present a positive and somewhat idealized view of capitalist development, in order to strengthen the significance of the ‘audience’s’ response. Hero 2 > wins; Hero 1 shakes his hand, and everyone proceeds to a feast. This is clearly an idealized vision of peasant society, and an idealized version of the nature of the choice for future development for the masses. It is quite deliberately so. Rugyendo himself has shown in another play. And the Storm Gathers, that the peasantry really have very little say in their affairs; that when there is a choice for them to make it is always between two equally unsatisfactory alternatives; and that socialism is never as strong as capitalism on the African continent, backed up and manipulated as the latter is by international capitalism and Western economic imperialism. However, in The Contest, he is concerned to present the ideal rather than the actual.

I For this to be valid, the nature and composition of the real 1 audience, of whom the ‘audience’ within the play will become a I part, is crucial. The play is intended for performance before and j with villagers: farmers, herdsmen, traders. It is not intended for performance in a conventional proscenium arch theatre - ‘It is j supposed to establish very easy communication between actors and spectators. . . .’ - and it is not intended for an elitist audience, j If the ‘audience’ within the play, who are taking the roles of i peasants, and the actual audience at a performance of it have the

I same social identity, the response of the former will be very close

I to what is already written into the text for ‘the people’ to say and I do. This is clearly what Rugyendo intends when he says that the play ‘aspires to minimise to the lowest degree the hollow distance between actors and the silent audience in the modern theatre’. Comments, therefore, in the stage directions which refer to the responses of ‘the people’ are to be taken to refer to the whole audience present at a performance of the play. The ‘audience’ within the play will be able to encourage and focus the response of the real audience who are seeing the play performed for the first time. Thus, their role bridges the gap between actor and spectator, and the dramatic form which Rugyendo is reaching towards begins to materialize. The play would be meaningless to a middle class

African audience in a conventional theatre. By choosing to rnake the contest a contemporary political one, of critical importance for the least articulate section of African society, and by presenting it from their point of view and in their terms, the author has bound together traditional form and contemporary content in an uncompromising radical way. If there is to be no sense of distance between actors and spectators, then there should be no distance, likewise, between actors and performers on the one hand, and the subject-matter of the performance on the other. In this sense, therefore, the ‘heroic recitations’ can be modified. Producers and actors, Rugyendo says, ‘should feel free to exploit to the full the limitless possibilities of this form’.

Thus, the many forms of praise-singing, which occur in many different African cultures, could be appropriated to the form of the play.^^

The extent of audience participation in Ozidi is much less than it is in the two versions of the saga, the film of Erivini’s performance and transcription of Okabou’s narration (which Clark himself has given us). Throughout Okabou’s version there are constant interruptions by the spectators, both on the formal level of what Clark calls ‘story reminder’ and on the informal level of individual interjections and comments. In describing the function of the ‘story reminder’, Clark is, perhaps unconsciously, revealing that the audiences of the saga are interested in the manner of telling the story as much as in the unfolding of the narrative:

The ‘story reminder’ is self-explanatory. Antiphonal in form, it carries the story forward all the way to its end. It keeps in constant view the immediate aim of the gathering - to see a good presentation, and to revel in the high spirits of the adventure transmitted. Occasionally the form is extended to include a citation of probable difficulties and the prompt regulation of these. ‘Are you strong? If you see, will you act? Are there men in Ijo?’ often comes the challenge. In each case, the response, of course, is an emphatic ‘Yes’.

But when we turn to Clark’s play, the ‘story reminder’ has disappeared, as have all other interjections by the audience. All that remains is the story-teller’s introduction in the first scene and the accompanying ritual which we have already analysed. He makes two other brief appearances as story-teller, but these have nothing to do with audience participation. They are instead devices to shape the drama as a text. And who is the story-teller

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addressing at the beginning of the play? From both the comments and the tone it appears to be addressed to readers and Clark’s fellow intellectuals.

But the same people will read the text of The Contest (the same people, by and large, who are reading this book). Furthermore, The Contest has a detailed explanatory production note while Ozidi has none. This is odd because the traditional performance from which Ozidi derives is much more specific and esoteric than the generalized ‘heroic recitations’ that The Contest develops. This would seem to argue for more explanations for Ozidi. Again, the theme of The Contest is contemporary and explicit, while the theme of Ozidi is complex and its relevance to the present is not immediately apparent. This too would argue for more explanations for Ozidi. Yet it is the other way around. Why?

The reason is that Ozidi is ultimately contained in its textual form; The Contest is primarily a performance - and, moreover, a performance for an audience other than the readers of the text of it. Ozidi, therefore, needs no introduction. Students and readers, who are familiar with the methodology of literary criticism will discover its meaning, or layers of meaning, and derive their insights from the study of the text. Subjected to the same scrutiny, the text of The Contest will fall apart and yield no further meaning than the obvious one. So an explanation is required: this play in performance - the author is saying - is not actually meant for you, the reader of the text of it, unless you wish to share in its intent and experiment with how the theatre can be made accessible again to the mass of the population, for whom the play is intended.

2 Structure

It is when we come to compare the structures of these two plays that we begin to see the ambiguities inherent in the development of drama in Africa from its traditional modes of performance to the ways in which it now exists.

We have already noted that Clark finds a unity - which he defines as a beginning, a middle and an end - in the original epic, and that this is reinforced in his own play through Ozidi’s search for an identity. In fact, the one major change which Clark makes is to have Ozidi kill Oreame irrevocably. This becomes inevitable, in the way Clark has structured his play, because he shows Ozidi’s purpose in life, and his identity, change from the identity which his

grandmother gave him and subsequently sustained. It is clear that the focus, for Clark, is the character of Ozidi, who is given an existence both inside the epic and also beyond it: we can, after reading the play, consider Ozidi’s problem of identity entirely on its own, and quite separately from the fact that it happens in a particular society at a particular time. Ozidi is predominant over the social forces which might control him. Those forces outside him which control him are bound to his ego and are manifest in ever more extreme forms of anti-social behaviour. The play offers no comment on the impact of Ozidi on his community (whereas, as we saw, there is a community perspective in the saga). Are the problems of an individual as compelling as the problems of a community, and especially an oppressed social class? They are for those who are aware of their own individuality and find it checked within their society, but they are not for those at the bottom of the social heap. Therefore, and more specifically, if Ozidi is about an individual’s identity and in disregard of any social forces acting upon him, can it be of any compelling interest to Africa’s peasants (even if it were performed in their own language)? The answer, logically, is no. We can go further and ask if it will be as interesting as the original saga, in Orua? And the answer again is probably no. Nor has it been Clark’s aim to return the saga to Orua in a new form. After all, they have their version of it already. He is more concerned to make the saga ‘accessible’ to a wider African audience - he states as much - and, as far as his own play is concerned, to indicate to whoever is interested his own intellectual and aesthetic response to the tradition. However, it is possible that the way he responds to the saga and what he wishes to see happen to African drama might prove something of a paradox: the attempt to preserve the traditional forms may well hasten their demise.

The structure in Ozidi is concerned, then, with the structuring of the story itself: an internal textual organization. The structure in The Contest is concerned with the structuring of performance. There is an extended ‘introduction’ between the drummer and the audience, which is in fact more than a quarter of the length of the whole play. It is much longer than the story-teller’s introduction in Ozidi; and, unlike the need for seven ‘virgins’ from the audience if the performance is to be a ‘success’, the introduction by the drummer is, in reality, and not in pseudo-reality, crucial to the success of the performance. The audience need to be put in the right mood. As the drummer says:

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Before our visitors come forward to show themselves to us, we will first have the flute-player to play a bit and enliven the atmosphere. [Flute-player gets up] It is still dull. It must be warm. Let us shake our bones first. Draw our visitors and ourselves into the throng. Eee! People there to dance to the flute! Where are they?^^

People start dancing. There is an extended and specific stage direction; and all the while the Flute-player and the Drummer encourage the people:

‘This is it. The thing we want. Or isn’t it, wananchi?’

‘It is! We can feel it coming up! The heat!’. . . .

‘Now wananchi ... let us continue with the heat. Here we have our visitors - Hero 1 and Hero 2-1 can see them getting into the heat, too. . . .’

The whole passage may well strike the reader as boringly long-winded and rather odd, especially when compared with the opening speech of the story-teller in Ozidi. The point is that it doesn’t matter, in a performance of Ozidi, who acts the part of the virgins. It is not a ‘real’ sacrifice, but an acted one. The whole story-teller scene is a reference to the traditional culture - a stage convention, if you like - and the performance will continue because the producer will make sure beforehand that there are seven women in the audience, be they virgins or not, who will ‘volunteer’. The audience, too, will know that the sacrifice has been organized, ‘produced’, and they will accept the ‘spontaneity’ of the scene on the level of an imitation of reality, like the rest of the play.

But in The Contest the opening scene requires the audience to get themselves in the mood, to dance if they want to, and to become part of the actual celebration. This is something which cannot be recreated on the page through the written word. It does not matter how detailed or precise the stage directions are, the reader is not going to get out of his or her chair and start dancing. On the other hand, in an actual performance, the drummer and the flute-player will establish a mood and pace which will be different in each performance. Rugyendo acknowledges this in the production note when he admits that the best results ‘will be got if both the actors and the producers go beyond the few directions given in the text and introduce whatever movements may fit their particular context’.

There is a long stage direction which describes the ways in which the Heroes are to comport themselves while delivering their ‘recitations’. These stage directions possess no literary qualities

but they must be followed in essence if the performance is to be successful wherever in rural Africa it is staged. It is in the actual arguments of the Heroes that the substance of the play is to be found, and the structuring of these has nothing at all to do with narrative or plot or beginnings, middles and ends. Instead, the structure is that of a debate, and each of the two parties structures his own argument in the most convincing way possible. It is only the circumstances of any given performance of the play which can allow the outcome of the debate to go in favour of the socialist candidate (which Rugyendo himself, of course, supports). This is a most important point: the debate is only ‘rigged’ in so far as the performance of the play takes place in front of disadvantaged rural audiences. For the argument is open-ended: it is the audience who decides in favour of one contestant over another. On one level, the choice between socialism and capitalism is not actual but metaphorical, and given in the context of a recognized performance mode. On another level, however, it is an indication of choices which do exist in reality, though hitherto obscured, not only by existing economic and political institutions, but by the very development of the type of performing arts which those economic and political institutions encourage.

3 Language

Finally, the way English is used in The Contest, and in comparison with the English of Ozidi, reveals that the language used in African drama is a problem for which there is no easy solution. The choice of language is a problem which faces each African playwright every time he sits down to write a play, just as it is a problem for each director every time he has to choose a play for production. First of all, playwrights and directors are themselves seldom monolingual: their day-by-day experience is multi-lingual. Because they are linguistically versatile, playwrights and directors do indeed have a real choice of language for their drama. Second, the choice of language is not one which can be made on its own, but must be related to other factors over which the playwright or producer may have no control.

For instance, if the playwright is hoping to get his play published it will have to be in a language which the publishers will regard as marketable, that is, with enough potential readers of the text to make the publication of the play economically viable. In practice

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in Africa today, this means the likelihood of the play being a ‘set-work’ on a university or school syllabus; so his choice of language in which to write the play is tied up with the language policies of a particular country’s educational system. Related to this initial sense of restriction is the more generalized linguistic consideration of which language will be read by other intellectuals, not necessarily in the same country: a desire to communicate ideas and experiences through a creative literature, and to manipulate and develop the form of the creative medium in the process. These considerations will tend to push the playwright into writing in English (or French or Portuguese).

Directors and producers respond to quite different considerations. The first problem concerns the cadence of speech. Obviously, this varies in different parts of Africa and it is probably more marked in anglophone than francophone countries. There is a general conception, in anglophone countries, of different sorts of English: Nigerian English, Kenyan English and so on. There are also different sorts of Nigerian English, which depend on a wide variety of factors. This variation in English usage is distinct from the existence of varieties of Pidgin even in Coastal West Africa, and Creole in Sierra Leone. A Pidgin is a contact language. A Creole is a Pidgin which has become a first language for its speakers. Although African linguists are taking Pidgin and Creole seriously now - as languages in their own right and therefore worthy of their close professional scrutiny - students (and indeed many of their academic masters, too) still regard Pidgin and Creole in a derogatory way, as an unexpressive bastardized form of language or as baby-talk. Pidgin and Creole are almost exclusively languages of oral communication. This has positive implications for their use in dramatic performance and negative implications for writing plays.

For a director, the production of a play in English involves a consideration of such elements as alternative stress patterns, variations in the morphology and phonology of Standard English, and structural and lexical differences: all to make it easier for the actors to speak the play’s dialogue.

African playwrights have experimented with a number of solutions to the problem of writing in English, and yet in an English that will be appealing to their African audiences in performance. One solution is to try to forge a poetic diction which will be high-sounding but have the right cadences. Another solution is to

use a variety of English registers within one play, making, say, the main characters speak normal and ‘correct’ English, those who are pompous and elitist, a pedantic form of ‘proper’ English, and the servants Pidgin. A third solution is to lard the dialogue with proverbs and axioms, making it heavily metaphorical with an emphasis on nature and the rural routine. In this last option the authentic tone is achieved lexically rather than structurally, but it is rather inappropriate for plays with a contemporary urban setting. There has been a great deal written on how English can be developed as an appropriate language for African drama. The Nigerian critic, Akanji Nasiru, for instance, has analysed the problem in the context of Nigerian drama and focused on the achievement of the playwright Ola Rotimi,^"^ Kaabwe Kasoma, the Zambian playwright has commented that the mixing of English with other languages has less to do with the social categorization of characters than with the comprehension of the play by a linguistically mixed audience.

This brings us back to the problems facing directors and producers of plays. Often their options are not between appealing to an English-speaking audience on the one hand, and a non-English-speaking audience on the other, but between a linguistically homogeneous audience (usually a very rural one) and a linguistically heterogeneous audience (usually urban). A director’s problem will be acute if he is touring a production in both rural and urban communities, except among communities, like in coastal Ghana where Akan is a lingua franca, which have a prevailing, widely-spoken language.

It is extremely difficult, therefore, to find a language which matches the linguistic complexity of the African milieu. Ironically, it has only become a central issue recently, when playwrights began belatedly to address themselves to the problem of developing a wider audience for contemporary drama. The first efforts have tended to be with the linguistically homogeneous rural audiences such as in Botswana with the Laedza Batanani popular theatre movement. The established popular theatre traditions of coastal West Africa, like the various Yoruba travelling theatres, do have, it is true, an urban orientation, but the companies tend to perform in Yoruba and to draw their audiences exclusively from the particular regional group. Occasionally, people like the Yoruba playwright and performer, Hubert Ogunde, will perform in Pidgin, in the hope of bringing in a wider urban audience.

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Pidgin and Creole are in fact becoming a significant linguistic medium for popular urban performance. Young Nigerian playwrights are writing and performing serious plays and political satire in Pidgin. A significant experiment was by the Sierra Leonean novelist and playwright, Yulisa Maddy, whose Krio play. Big Berrin, got him into political trouble in Freetown.

Those playwrights who have decided to write plays now in the language of their people, like the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, have done so because they have tended to have a political commitment which over-rides a specifically literary objective. Rugyendo appears to have such a political commitment. Yet he writes The Contest in English; and he feels compelled to apologize for it:

Rendition [of the heroic recitations] into English certainly curtails much of the poetic quality, especially the even relationship between the dance and the gestures with the tonal structure of the recited word.

Clark makes no apology for his use of English in Ozidi, for his intention is to render the Ijg saga into a modern Nigerian play in English. We have earlier observed how controlled the language is in the play, and how Clark has found a tone and a register of English which matches his intent. However, some Nigerian critics have found the language of the play ‘Shakespearean’. They are critical of passages like the following:

You

Could say of the storm that a giant wind Had taken the sea as an orange by the mouth And sucking it, had spat in the face of the sun Who winced lightning, and then hurled it all back At earth as rain and bolts of thunder. . .

and

Oreame: . . . Take

The boy into your shrine so, like his late father,

No sword wielded by man may cut through His skin nor any spear or bullet wound pass Beyond a bump. . . .

Old Man: Shall we go in

Then, Oreame? And you come on, boy.

One thing though: it was no pretence Or malice on my side, you must understand. . .

The criticism springs from literary criteria, but it is bound up with the problem of cultural identity: African drama, these critics are saying, ought not to be ‘Shakespearean’ drama.

Rugyendo makes a curious comment about the English of his own play:

But even with what we are left with, there is something more popular, magical and more precipitately involving than the formalism and staleness of modern African theatre.

There is a confusion here, for it seems that Rugyendo accepts that the play in English is a work of literature. This would be a contradiction of all that he has previously said about it, and, more important, a contradiction of the text itself. The fact of the matter is that the play cannot be performed for the audiences, for which it is intended, in English. A peasant or rural audience, anywhere in Africa, will require the play to be performed in their own language.

Thus not only does the director have to transpose the heroic recitations into equivalent performance traditions in his audience’s own culture, but he also must translate the play entirely into their language. We are left, finally, without a single word of the original text. Instead of being a work of literature, a work of art, the text has become a collection of performance ideas - but in support of a very definite purpose, namely to help create a drama for the people in terms of what it has to say and the way in which it is presented.

Notes and references

1 Aristotle, ‘On the art of poetry’, T. S. Dorsch (trans.), Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism (Harmond-sworth: Penguin Books 1965). See also Augusto Boal’s criticism of Aristotle’s Poetics in Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Urizen Books 1979); and, especially, Brecht’s criticism of Aristotle in Brecht, John Willett (ed. and trans.), ‘Short Orga-num’, in Brecht on Theatre: the development of an aesthetic (London: Eyre Methuen 1964).

2 Michael Echeruo, ‘The dramatic limits of Igbo ritual’, paper presented at the First Ibadan Annual African Literature Conference: Drama in Africa, 6-10 July, 1976.

3 J. P. Clark, The Ozidi Saga: collected and translated from the I jo

Drama as literature and performance 101

of Okabou Ojobolo (Ibadan: Oxford University Press and Ibadan University Press 1977). See especially the introductory essay by Clark, pp. xv-xxxvii, from which the information and later quotations in the chapter are taken.

4 J. P. Clark, Ozidi (London and Ibadan: Oxford University Press 1966), p. 4.

5 ibid., p. 6.

6 ibid., p. 62.

7 ibid., pp. 25-6.

8 ibid.,pp. 119-20.

9 ibid.,p. 88.

10 ibid., p. 100.

11 ibid.,p. 114.

12 ibid., pp. 90-1.

13 ibid., pp. 110-11.

14 ibid., p. 29.

15 ibid., pp. 99-101.

16 Mukotani Rugyendo, The Contest in The Barbed Wire and other plays, (London: Heinemann Educational Books 1977). See especially the production note, pp. 36-8, from which the information and quotations in this chapter are taken.

17 There has been an experiment proposed by Salihu Bappa in Zaria, Nigeria, to develop a Hausa version of The Contest, using the praise-singing/begging art of Roko which is still used today in the Hausa farming competitions called Gaya.

18 Rugyendo, The Contest, p. 41.

19 Isaac Oluwalalaaro Akanji Nasiru, ‘Communication and the Nigerian drama in English’ (PhD thesis, Ibadan: University of Ibadan 1978).

20 Kaabwe Kasoma, ‘Theatre and development’, paper presented at the International Workshop on Communication for Social Development, Lusaka, University of Zambia, 1974.

21 Clark, Ozidi, p. 32.

22 ibid., p. 48.

3 Transpositions and adaptations in African drama

We need to return to the complex influence of western culture in modern Africa. This has continued since independence: formally through education systems which, despite the rhetoric of manpower needs, continues to sustain a social hierarchy based on clerical and administrative skills (already an ‘over-developed’ sector, some social critics would argue, of underdeveloped states); informally through urbanization and consumerism. The former is the means of access to the latter. However, what concerns us now is not the undetected influence of what may loosely be called western culture, but the quite deliberate concern of African playwrights to rework plays of other cultures to suit their own societies.

Translation, transposition and adaptation have been endemic in European drama: they are the means by which play-texts have survived the process of history, and have become part of a ‘great tradition’ (which itself is part and parcel of a particular static view of history). In taking over the European concern to ‘rework’ the great dramatic works of the past, African playwrights have also taken over this particular historical perspective.

In reworking play-texts any or all of the following changes are made in order to point to its relevance in the playwright’s own society:

1 the names of people, places and titles may be changed, as, for example, in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame, based on Sophocles’s King Oedipus, where Oedipus becomes Odewale, the Greek city of Thebes becomes Kutuje, and all other names are given Yoruba equivalents;

2 the period or the setting may be changed, as, for example, in the Oshogbo Everyman where the late medieval European town of the mid fifteenth century becomes a Yoruba town in the 1960s;

Transpositions and adaptations in African drama 103

3 the framework, or context, may be changed, as, for example, when Sophocles’s third play in his Theban trilogy, Antigone, becomes a play done by two political prisoners on Robben Island, South Africa, in The Island by Fugard, Kani and Ntshona;

4 the story may be changed: Soyinka introduces the slave leader

as an important new character in his reworking of Euripides’s The Bacchae, which he calls The Bacchae of Euripides

5 the themes may be changed: for example, th^i nexorab

fate becomes instead the issue of personal culpability in Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame.

Adapting or transposing a play, therefore, may be limited to superficial changes or may involve anything from superficial changes of detail to a radical recasting or rewriting. At one extreme this is nothing more than translation; at the other extreme it is^'Orew-play. aTT^riginal play mtlu^cedd^ or alluding to an

piaywrignt wno transposes a play, me translator win attempt to rend ci t l ic o rt giiial play a s ~ acc mately~as~~possTbre in his own language losing as little as possible of its dramatic nnalitv while

qualities in terms of theatre audiences in his own s

A playwright who transposes a play from another culture is not, by virtue of this fact, less of a playwright than someone w ho prod uces an entirely original pie ce. ‘Originality’, which has connotations of excellence, is actually a di fficult concept and needs to be^^arefully deftn^dTToF^ample, Rom an comedy, which was based on the earlier Greek comedy , developed the art of comedy inThe^tHeafrFl'ar EeyondTfiF Gfee^ , some out-

stairdiffg^ontemporary Eurapean plays are reworEings of plays fmrrrifTr^ignT)r eafRe example, EdwafTBond’s Lear'

(rir^ngtish - from Shake speare’s King Learf^ _Bertolt BrechFs Corfo/flh (iff German - from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus), Jean-ParrlrSaTtfe’s The Flies (in French - from Aeschylus’s Oresteia), and, from the same Greek trilogy, the American playwright,

* Ettgette~OT^enTs Mourning becomes E/ecrr^T, and tlie English playwrfghT7T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion.

There have T^lsoTi^h successful transpositions by African playwrights, such as President Julius'ttyerere's SwahiTTv^sion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi (trans-

the transposer will seek to redefine the original

position of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, which in turn was a transposition of Gay’s^r/ie Beggar s Opera - Soyinka’s play--is discussed in a later chapter).

The transpositions which we are going to consider in this chapter are, first, two Yoruba versions (probably the same play) of the play Everyman by von Hofmannsthal, who transposed his play from the medieval European play of the same titlesecond, the Nigerian Ola Rotimi’s extremely popular version of Sophocles’s King Oedipus, The Gods are not to Blame-, the Fugard, Kani and Ntshona play. The Island which is built around a performance of Sophocles’s Antigone’, and third, Soyinka’s reworking of Euripides’s The Bacchae.

This by no means completes the list of published transpositions, or of those successfully presented in performance - like ’Segun Oyekunle’s Nigerian Pidgin version of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan (and a Kenyan Swahili version of the same play).

We will consider the Everyman transpositions first, even though the English medieval Everyman, translated from a Dutch play Elkerlijk, was written in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The play was derived, apparently, from an eighth century work, Barlaam and Josaphat, which itself originally came from a Buddhist legend. The English medieval Everyman was, therefore, written and performed at least 18(X) years after the plays of the Greeks: Sophocles (495?-406?bc) and Euripides (c. 480-406?bc).^ The African transpositions are our own societies’ contemporary works. Although the medieval Everyman is chronologically a much later play than King Oedipus, Antigone and The Bacchae, it is much ‘earlier’ than the Greek plays in terms of a concept of a development in drama and theatre. The Greeks express a view of man in society which is more humanist and expansive than that of feudal Europe dominated by Christianity.*^ This is precisely why the rediscovery of Greek intellectualism was so exciting to Renaissance readers and authors, and why ancient Greek and Roman plays w'ere so ‘new’ and so stimulating to the European dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Greek humanism, for which her playwrights found an effective form, is also probably what appeals to African intellectuals today.

Everyman

Everyman is within the tradition of the European morality plays.

Transpositions and adaptations in African drama 105

This tradition developed both before and during the Reformation: that period in European history when the spiritual and secular authority of the Church of Rome was being challenged by devout clerics on the one hand, and pragmatic monarchs of rising nations on the other. The morality plays developed as a tradition of theatre in the wake of the other more important dramatic tradition of the great cycles of the miracle plays, which were sponsored by urban trade and craft guilds and supported by the Catholic Church. These cycles told the story of the creation, the advent, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and final judgement.^ The morality plays were shorter than the miracle cycles, simpler to stage, and presented contemporary characters in an allegorical form. Eventually morality plays in countries which became Protestant through their rulers came to support a Protestant instead of Catholic ethic. The English Everyman appeared before Protestantism took hold in England, and it is very much a Catholic morality play. The Protestant moral ethic differed from Catholic morality in that the Protestants believed that man could communicate directly with God, and no longer had to rely on the priesthood through which to approach their creator. A man could therefore follow the dictates of his own conscience. The English Everyman has important passages in praise of the priesthood; and the play emphasizes the crucial importance of good deeds in obtaining salvation.

The morality plays used allegory as the means of dramatizing those moral issues which were the concern of the times. Allegory was a means of making abstract notions concrete and giving them a material form; for example, the doing of good deeds in one’s lifetime is allegorically represented as an old woman called, obviously, ‘Good Deeds’. If the central character in the play has not done many good deeds during his life then Good Deeds will be portrayed as decrepit and feeble. The central character of the morality play almost always stands for all men, for mankind, for common humanity.

Not only were the characters allegorical, but so too were the ways in which the plots of the plays were constructed. What the plots themselves embodied were the moral concerns that sprang from the teachings of Christ. This was seen in abstract as follows: man was conceived in a state of sin - original sin - and therefore needed to be saved (from his own wicked, human, nature), or, put another way, man’s nature was such that he was prey to tempta-

tion, and his capacity for sin was matched only by God’s boundless mercy. The basic dramatic allegory for this abstract theology was to show a central character -‘Mankind’, ‘Everyman’- preyed upon by Vice, who was always adroit at devising plans and arranging schemes to deflect Mankind from the path of goodness. He was helped by a variety of cronies, such as Greed, Lust, Avarice: all characters in the play. Fighting to save Mankind’s soul were the figures representing goodness: Conscience, Soul, Good Deeds, and so on. These were weakened as Mankind veered from the straight and narrow path - with inevitable implications for his salvation. However, because God’s mercy was infinite there was always an opportunity for repentance, sometimes represented as a character and sometimes as a process. The steps to salvation were always allegorically precise.

In Everyman the moral dilemma was how to reconcile the acquisition of wealth with salvation: how could a man who had worked hard and prospered be sure of his place in heaven, when Christianity teaches that poverty is a virtue and wealth an obstacle to salvation. The play allegorically charts a way.

God sends Death to summon Everyman to give an account of himself. Everyman, caught up in his wealth and luxury, has forgotten God. This is shown in the absence of any good deeds on his part, characterized as a weak and hopeless old woman. She is weak and hopeless because Everyman has neglected her. When Death summons Everyman and tells him to go on a journey from which there is no return, all his friends and relatives desert him. So do his worldly goods. Only Good Deeds is prepared to accompany him to God’s throne to help him give an account of his life; but she is so weak she cannot even stand. However, she leads Everyman to Knowledge (another character) and together they lead him to Confession who teaches him to make an act of contrition. Beauty, Strength, Discretion and Five Wits - all characters -gather round him, but he now begins to weaken on his journey. All desert him in the end, even Knowledge; but it is Good Deeds who has helped him to repentance and helped him find favour with God.

$da Duro LadipQ and Everyman Obotunde Ijimere

The two versions of Everyman are apparently the same play and are derived from a German version of Everyman by the Romantic

Transpositions and adaptations in African drama 107

poet, librettist and playwright, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929). In the late 1950s and early 1960s Ladipo was encouraged to write by Ulli Beier, who provided Yoruba writers, playwrights, artists and musicians with the opportunity to explore and develop their creativity in the Mbari Clubs which he helped establish in Oshogbo and Ibadan, two towns in the Yoruba heartlands of Nigeria.

‘Ijimere’ may be the nom-de-plume for Ulli Beier himself. The literal translation of the name is Obotunde = the monkey is here; Ijimere = baboon. Thus the name is roughly ‘Monkey Monkey’, and clearly no one would allow himself to be called that. ‘Iji-mere’s’ brief ‘biography’ and photograph appear on the back of the first edition (1966) of The Imprisonment of Obatala and other plays, and his ‘work’ is discussed by Beier in an introduction to this collection of plays. Whoever this is a nom-de-plume for is a shadowy figure who has subsequently proved very elusive, though the three plays in the collection are widely studied and frequently performed.Tn the end the actual identity of the author is not all that important - the original Everyman is itself anonymously authored - and the only reason why we need to discuss the issue is because authorship of what is substantially the same play is claimed by two playwrights.

In the introduction to Ijimere’s plays, Beier refers to Eda, Ladipo’s title for his version of Everyman, as being Ijimere’s play:

He [Ijimere] began to write plays for Ladipo’s company. One of these plays, Eda, has already been performed by Ladipo with great success.

In this two-page introduction to Ijimere’s plays, Ladipo’s name is mentioned twelve times while Ijimere’s is only mentioned seven. Eda, subtitled Opera by Duro Ladipo, is transcribed in Yoruba from performances and translated into English by Val Olayemi, and was published by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan in 1970. It is printed as a parallel text in English and in Yoruba. Ladipo claims the copyright of the Yoruba text, and the Institute of African Studies the copyright of the transcription and translation.

The variations in the two English versions are mainly linguistic, not structural, and as such clearly show the difference between a translation, which aims to render in English the Yoruba text, and an adaptation which aims to create a Nigerian play in English. In discussing the plays we will use the abbreviations DL - Duro

Ladipo - for the Institute of African Studies publication, and OI - Obotunde Ijimere^ for the Heinemann Educational Books edition.

The first scene is in ‘God’s Palace’ (DL), ‘Prologue in Heaven’ (OI). Olodumare is God, Owner-of-the-world. Men and women have their origin in heaven before his throne, and each is permitted to choose his fate, as a gift from Olodumare to take into the world. The choice entails a promise to make proper use of the gifts given. Everyman (OI), Eda (DL), had chosen money, and Olodumare had granted him his fate. But Everyman has abused his gift and forgotten God: ‘Eda has grossly misbehaved’ (DL), ‘Now 1 am tired of Everyman, / ‘For he broke his promise’ (OI), and Death, Iku, is summoned by God and ordered to fetch Everyman to appear before his throne and give an account of himself.

The next scene, ‘In Eda’s House’ (DL), ‘The Play of Everyman. In front of Everyman’s house’ (OI), begins with Everyman ordering his servants and his Companion (OI), lyanda (DL), to prepare for a party. The Companion is asked to fetch Bisi (OI), Risi (DL), the expensive ‘lady-lover’ of Everyman, and to give her money to provide her with all she needs. A long list is given in the Ijimere version:

. . . This money

Will get her velvet cloth, rekyi rekyi,

Sarasobia scent, fine pomade, gold and silver,

Headtie, handkerchiefs, umbrella, shoes,

Shirt and blouse, iron bed, blanket and Bed sheets, pillows and pillow-cases.

Sleeping-gowns, easy chairs, door blinds,

Window blinds, mosquito-net, table and Table-cloth, carpets, bed curtains,

Handwatch, looking-glass, powder.

Sewing-machine, portmanteaux, trunk box.

Bicycle, gramophone and so many other Things a woman could use. [OI, p. 51]

The list, by virtue of its fullness and its length is obviously meant to be comic: that she should need all these things to come to a party!

There is a similar list in Ladipo’s play, but the manner of going through it is different:

Eda: I am a man for certain.

Tell her to . . . er . . . buy a velvet cloth:

Transpositions and adaptations in African drama 109

The cloth which her social club is buying . . . tell her to buy it.

She is to buy hand-woven cloth and a sewing machine.

She is to buy a bicycle.

lyanda: Yes.

Eda: She is to buy a gramophone,

iyanda: Yes.

Eda: She is to buy gold [ornaments],

lyanda: Yes.

Eda: She is to buy silver [ornaments] ... for the ears, for the face. . . .

The shoes she has in mind are as long as this ....

Tell her I said she should buy them.

Tell her to buy Sosorobia.

lyanda: Eda, son of Oodua!

Eda: I am a man for certain! [DL, pp. 38-9, 40-41]

The list is much shorter, but the extravagance of it is built up dramatically and more effectively by the involvement of lyanda and Eda’s boasts that begin and end the list. However, in both cases, the list very much reflects the consumer aspirations of the late 1950s in Nigeria: and today it would make Everyman and Bisi seem rather ‘bush’. Bisi’s wants today would be less modest and much more sophisticated: a car, stereo, video-cassette recorder, air conditioners, trips to London.

The list of Bisi’s ‘needs’, even before lyanda has time to set off, is immediately followed by the appearance of the Poor Neighbour (OI); the Beggar (DL), who begs Everyman for some money, pointing out that he was once Everyman’s neighbour and knew better days but ran into debt. Eda insults him, in front of lyanda, and throws him threepence. He tells him:

That’s . . . that’s how it is.

Don’t you ever come to me When I am enjoying myself.

I don’t like it.

Whenever you come again I will disgrace you.

You with puny little eyes! [DL, pp. 46-7]

lyanda, taking his cue from Eda, adds, ‘You with narrow-slit eyes!’ and they go on abusing him in this vein. Everyman in the Ijimere version is more at pains to explain that money can’t be given out for nothing and that once one starts giving out money there is no end:

110 The Development of African Drama . . . But suppose

All my property was divided equally Among all those who are in need -Do you think your share would be bigger.

Than these three pence here? [OI, p. 53]

‘You answered him well,’ comments the Companion; ‘ - let me hurry and invite Bisi to the feast.’ ‘Don’t forget the errand I sent you on,’ Eda tells lyanda. ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ replies iyanda and goes off to Bisi’s house. There is a spectacular waste of money on the harlot, but only threepence for the Beggar; and this part of the scene has been deliberately structured to emphasize this irony. It represents, dramatically, Everyman’s failure to do a good deed. ‘He ill-treated poor people’, Olodumare said in the first scene (DL, p. 3), and this is a manifestation of it.

Whilst lyanda is away fetching Bisi, the Debtor and his Wife enter, followed by a policeman. In Ladipo’s play, Eda is shown to be totally without remorse, inhuman:

Eda: ... He is still talking.

When he comes out of prison this time He will then go again.

He will go again and again and again . . .

Wife: Please, have pity on his children!

The children he has. . . .

Eda: Nonsense!

Wife: Father, for God’s sake.

Eda: Do you hear . . .?

Wife: He will pay back your money.

Eda: All this does not impress me.

Wife: Ah! Please let it impress you.

Eda: I’ll forget about it all.

Prison it is that . . .

Look man . . .jail, jail!

Wife: Father, in spite of my plea . . . [The Debtor and his Wife start to

cry. . . . Eda laughs. The Policeman marches the Debtor and his Wife out] [DL, pp. 58-9]

Ladipo’s play increasingly emphasizes the arrogance of Eda, and his boastfulness. His praises have been sung endlessly by his servants and sycophants, and he replies over and over, ‘I am a man for certain!’. He even cautions himself against his own temper, as

Transpositions and adaptations in African drama 111

though he were so powerful that nothing can stop him behaving as he wants except he himself: ‘Don’t be violent. / A violent man can’t hold a group together.’ He has a heart of stone. Ijimere tends to emphasize more the power of money. His Everyman tells the Debtor and his family:

Blessed is the day when money was invented!

Money has power over any other thing:

There is no house, no land, no wife it cannot buy.

Money is more powerful than armies.

It is more powerful than judges and kings.

Money is the most faithful servant

To the man who owns it.

There is nothing it refuses to do.

There is nothing it cannot do.

It is money I hold in my hand

That raises me high above you.

Had you known how to deal with money

You would not be on your way to prison now! [OI, p. 55]

The Debtor gets carted off to prison.

But, strangely enough, Eda, Everyman, has a premonition of death which he finds entirely inexplicable: ‘No one knows when we shall leave this wretched world. / Father, endow us with good gifts.’ (DL, p. 61); ‘Something spoils my pleasure today: / Something worries my head - / Something like fear.’ (OI, p. 56). The Ifa Priest, or Babalawo, enters. Eda recovers his arrogance and roundly abuses him - but asks him to divine for him, mainly as a joke, but partly, too, in earnest. The Priest throws the palm-nuts and then recites the story of Ogbe who refused to sacrifice when he went hunting. He sheltered, unwittingly, from the rain in the anus of an elephant. The relatives had to offer many sacrifices before Ogbe was finally passed out with the elephant’s faeces. The Babalawo is driven off as Bisi and the guests arrive full of praise:

Eda, a man of the world.

How lovely!

If but one star remains in the sky alone. . . .

How lovely!

You are the one we’ll vote for. [DL, pp. 68-9]

and

Everyman treats money like his slave!

He sends him to bring food.

He sends him to bring drink.

He sends him to bring woman,

And the slave obeys! [OI, p. 59]

(In this eulogy to Everyman the guests are being unexpectedly frank about their own motives for coming!) But from the start of the party Everyman is distracted. His thoughts, despite himself, are on death, and he finds himself insulting his guests - whom he realizes he has bought anyway. Despite the insults (and because of his money) they try to cheer him up.

Death’s drum is heard by Everyman - though not by the others - and it cannot be drowned by the noise of the highlife band. It gets closer and closer. Iku comes in and calls Everyman from a distance:

Can you rightly say that you are enjoying worldly pleasures.

Enjoying the company of your woman.

When you have forgotten your creator? [DL, p. 89]

Who is this impudent person? Iku takes his time before he tells Eda and the assembled guests that he is

. . . Death! ! ! [Noise and confusion. The friends run away]

I kill people at any time

And I cut hearts unexpectedly. [DL, p. 91]

Everyman begs for time - ‘ten, twelve years’ - and is finally given one hour by Iku. Eda first asks lyanda, the Companion, to come with him, but lyanda wishes him luck and hurries away. He turns to his relatives - blood is thicker than water, after all - but after wishing him luck, too, they also leave.

Everyman’s money is next. The staging devices in this part of the allegory are somewhat different in the two plays. In the Ijimere version, Everyman’s money-box is dragged in by a servant. Money, Owo, leaps out, beautifully attired and with a grinning mask. Everyman orders him to follow him to Olodumare:

Owo: Follow you? That cannot be.

Everyman: You are my property - do as you are told!

You dwarf! [OI, p. 71]

Everyman who thought he controlled money finds he is ruled by money, who tells him, tearing away his grinning mask and revealing a fearful face beneath:

Well now: you’ll make your trip.

Transpositions and adaptations in African drama 113

Alone, a small and naked fool.

ril stay right here - to play with other men. [OI, p. 72]

Ladipo’s Eda doesn’t recognize Owo when he comes in. When he knows who he is he, too, orders Owo to follow him and is roughly rejected:

I turned you into a senseless person in your lifetime

And I made you a wealthy man in your lifetime.

Today I will show you what I am. [He climbs on Eda. Eda screams]

I will leave you now.

I will start enjoying life with someone else.

And you will go your way. [DL, pp. 108-9]

Money was a demon on his back.

Good Deeds staggers in. She is a decrepit old woman who collapses on the stage. Even at this critical point Everyman, who does not recognize who she is, has no time for the weak and the needy. She had come to follow him on his journey, but now decides not to: she falls down and dies. (The Ijimere version does not state that she dies.) Eda realizes the implications of it, all too late:

Money, treacherous friend!

He has made me lead a reckless life

And he has made me use people badly for my enjoyment.

Ah! Now Good Deeds lies dead by my side. [DL, p. Ill]

The full significance of being found guilty is made explicit in Ijimere’s version:

Woe unto me:

My promises were broken - my life was wasted

And to the potsherd heaven shall I be condemned. [OI, p. 72]

Traditional Yoruba belief is in the living world of the ancestors and in reincarnation within the family. The ultimate punishment by Olodumare is to be denied rebirth and to be sent to what is metaphorically represented as the heaven of broken pots. This is made explicit with the entrance of Sfdfkatu, Eda’s daughter, who is seen to be very pregnant: ‘You want to leave me./It is a pity’ (DL, p. 113). Death’s drum heralds his final entrance. Eda breaks out in a sweat:

My daughter, let us pray, let us pray!

O God, I implore You on Your throne in heaven.

You, Who own earth and heaven.

Let my daughter be safely delivered of her child.

Through the child let my sins be erased.

Let the child be full of wisdom and intelligence. [DL, pp. 112-13]

Sidikatu is accusing in the Ijimere version; and it is she who suggests that they pray for his return through her child:

The owner of heaven may forgive you.

You have betrayed his trust,

You have broken your promises -But let us pray for another chance.

Let us pray that you may return,

Come back to earth and start your life once more.

Let us pray for another beginning. [OI, p. 74]

He prays ‘Forgive my breach of promise - / And through her, / grant me a new beginning.’ Death, Ikii, strikes Everyman dead.

The third and final scene - ‘In the House of the Ifa Priest’ (DL, pp. 114-15), ‘Epilogue / Sidfkatu is seen with a baby in her arms. She is consulting a Babalawo’ (OI, p. 75) - it is the revelation of the outcome of Eda’s dying prayer. What is the augury for the new-born child? ‘This child will be poorer than a rat’ (DL, p. 119). But he will have wisdom. Money doesn’t prevent anyone from being lame, dumb or stupid. ‘Wisdom is the pride of man’ (OI, p. 76), that is, wisdom differentiates us from the other orders of creation. And how shall the child be called? Babatiinde, which means Father-is-come-again. Their prayers have been answered. Everyman has not been sent to the heaven of potsherds, but has returned to earth as the child of his daughter:

Priest: ... if a man has a child.

In due course, the child can in turn Beget his father, certainly!

From heaven to enjoy life on earth.

From earth back to heaven;

From heaven to enjoy life on earth.

Thus from earth, back to the heavenly realm!

Therefore, Babatunde will be the child’s name. [DL, pp. 120-21]

The Ijimere version concludes: ‘Let the child remember . . . Wisdom is the pride of man’. Ladipo’s play celebrates the continuity of life - ‘Surely! I understand it! / Babatunde! Babatunde!’.

The Oshogbo Edd / Everyman has changed the medieval Everyman in its essential meaning. In the European play, Everyman does finally get into heaven, despite his wealth and his pride.

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through repentance and contrition. It is good deeds which enable him to gain his place in heaven; good deeds are the means to grace. The allegory charts out the procedure, with every correlation fixed. The contemporary Yoruba Everyman operates in a cosmogony in which there is no fall of man and original sin, no concept of a final judgement, no end of the world, and no division of souls into ‘damned’ and ‘saved’, with a corresponding notion of heaven and hell. The Yoruba believe in the continuity of life, in reincarnation and in the conterminus existence of the worlds of the living, the unborn and the dead, which implies a contradiction of the Christian dogma in some of its most essential aspects. This will inevitably alter the specific morality of the Yoruba play which has become humanist. Ladipo’s play especially is concerned to indict Everyman because he abuses his fellow man, through his arrogance and slavish devotion to money. The medieval Everyman accuses Everyman of having forgotten God. Olodumare accuses^ him instead of having forgotten his promise at the moment of his creation. The Christian Everyman is saved, in the end, from his all too human nature (he was conceived in original sin, anyway); Eda is returned to his human nature, to earth, as his ‘salvation’ - he is ‘saved’ from his inhumanity.

In both plays wealth is abused. In the European play wealth is to be tempered by good deeds. The church taught that wealth would make man love the world and forget God, and so fall from a state of grace. In fact, the European morality play slyly teaches almost the opposite: wealth can enable man to perform good deeds which can help him to a state of grace. The Yoruba play ends up ironically being much sterner about wealth: it is set in opposition to wisdom. Eda is born again, destitute but wise. The Christian play teaches Everyman to be humble and contrite (and he can enjoy his wealth); the Yoruba play teaches Everyman to be proud - but of man’s capacity for wisdom, not through wealth.

This Yoruba humanism weakens the allegorical structure of its model. In the end, Eda is personalized through his daughter Sidikatu; and is born again as her child. The crisis of Eda’s death becomes the crisis of a particular man, who may or may not represent us, and not the crisis of mankind. The Beggar, the Debtor, iyanda are fully rounded characters, and not two-dimensional allegorical figures. Eda’s salvation results from the chance intervention of his daughter - he has not given her a thought as he looks for someone to accompany him. But the

European Everyman'follows a formula and a process, step by step, to his salvation.

What is the appeal of the original play to Ladipo? Obviously, its theatrical possibilities, which are tied up with the theme of death in the midst of life. This powerful theme is able to cross cultural barriers very easily and compel audiences to seek an answer to the (existential) question of the meaning of life in the moment of death. It was an opportunity, probably, for Ladipo to set two moral outlooks side by side, by taking the Christian play and interpreting it through the Yoruba world view. In the end, Edd is no longer a Christian play at all.

There is, however, a very popular Christian African version of Everyman: the Ghanaian play Odasani which was originally devised by Efua Sutherland with the Studio Players in Accra.^ It was subsequently directed by the Ghanaian theatre producer Sandy Arkhurst with the Kusum Agoromba, a professional touring company based in the University of Ghana drama studio in the Institute of African Studies, who travel around the country and perform in the lingua franca, Akan. Arkhurst devised his production of Odasani for Church audiences: the play was performed in all sorts of churches in various towns around Ghana, as a sermon-in-performance with a reverend minister or priest invited to each performance. Thus a late medieval Catholic play has become a predominantly Protestant African play today. Ghana television subsequently screened it several times, in Akan. It was widely reported that people repented of their sins after watching this play.

King Oedipus Sophocles

King Oedipus, in its original Greek form and in its many translations and adaptations over 2400 years, is one of the great plays of world drama. The Greek playwright, Sophocles, was chronologically in the middle of the three great fifth century bc Athenian tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, some of whose original plays survived to provide the basis for so much world drama. King Oedipus is the first play in what is referred to as a ‘trilogy’, known as The Theban Plays. However, although all three plays deal with consecutive events in the crisis in Oedipus’s family, they are not written consecutively or as a trilogy. Antigone, the last play in the ‘trilogy’s chronology, was the first to be

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presented in performance when the playwright was a young man. King Oedipus was performed later in his life; Oedipus at Colonus, the middle play, was written at the end of his long life and only performed after his death, in 401 BC.^

The playwright’s life covers an epoch that was scarred by two major conflicts and saw the eventual decline in the Athenian city-state as the pre-eminent political entity in the eastern Mediterranean. The intellectual and creative energy that had been manifest during the rise of Athenian democracy was still sustained, however, for another hundred years or so, even though Athens’s political power was eclipsed by the Macedonian commanders, Philip and then his son Alexander, who were actually northern Greeks. Euripides appears to have been exiled to Macedonia towards the end of his life, and Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor.

It is perhaps necessary to add at the outset that although political life was manifest in a very sophisticated form of democracy, and although Greek intellectual life was very high-minded, humanist and rational, the whole society was socially and economically under-pinned by slavery. It is estimated that by the middle of Sophocles’s life three-quarters of all the people living in the Athenian state were slaves. Slaves were classed as in- jstrumentum vocale, ‘speaking tools’. They had no rights whatsoever. They in no way enjoyed the benefits of the Greek citizens’ humanist oudootTpafat!h5xit^^ 4fd not seem to affect the

development of their rational~modes of thought, or, in their drama, of their concepts of personal and individual freedom. All three Athenian tragedians belonged in all likelihood to the upper ■ or patrician class, with a higher social standing than the ordinary citizens, and were the owners of slaves.

Sophocles in his plays often expressed a patrician point of view, which in Athenian society was support for the democratic institutions, a piety and a sense of duty towards the Gods, who were in fact acknowledged formally rather than spiritually by the citizenry. Euripides, who was a younger man than Sophocles at the time of Athenian political decline, was more cynical, and, as we shall see when we discuss his play The Bacchae, ironical about the role of the Gods in the affairs of people.

King Oedipus has been constantly re-interpreted by scholars and critics from the time of Sophocles’s fellow-Athenian, the philosopher Aristotle. Behind all the interpretations is a play about a man’s attempt to escape his awful destiny, prophesied at his birth.

The play’s special impac^ derives, however, from its structure as much as from its theme: as a play it demonstrates the potential of irony in drama to convey a deeper meaning, and of the separate but related theatrical device of dramatic irony to engage an audience in the unfolding action of the play. King Oedipus is, structurally, an extended experiment in the use of irony and of dramatic irony.

Irony, which was mentioned in the schema in Chapter 1 is, quite simply, the appropriateness of something which you don’t expect. Irony in dramatic action can be defined as events not working out as one would expect but which are, on reflection, much more appropriate. Events can be said to have worked out ironically for the better or for the worse. Irony in characterization is when characters behave in an unexpected but much more significant way, or in a way which produces in the particular relationship the opposit e response inte nded. Irony in a character’s tone is when he or she is saying the opposite of what their sentences are apparently sayingT His oTlYert onc is said to be iiimical.

DFamatic irony (also mentioned in Chapter 1, an^Jh£n_a^ain in the discussion on Ozidi) is when theatre audiences know something crucially releyajitjiitb^ction o^Tstage, oTT^t^e character which soriie'of the characters on'stage^ dcntOt know. Its effect in serious drama is to heighten tensions in the audience. They know people are being deceived but they cannot intervene in the action of the drama in order to set matters right.

Dramatic irony can also be used to heighten the comedy in a humorous situation. A standard example of this is the situation in a bedroom when the husband returns unexpectedly from a trip, and the wife’s lover, who has sneaked in while he was away, only has enough time to hide under the bed or in the wardrobe. The wife and the audience know that the lover is under the bed; but the husband doesn’t. Such situations can be greatly complicated to create farce. In this type of drama there is little or no meaning and the enjoyment of it is derived solely from the outlandish situations which the playwright manages to create. Therefore the same dramatic device may be used both to deepen meaning and also to eliminate it. Sophocles’s King Oedipus is probably the first play to explore the use of dramatic irony to enhance meaning.

The action of the play is set in the Greek city of Thebes in times mythical even to Sophocles. The house of Cadmus which ruled Thebes was cursed: one crime generated another by way of

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revenge and divine punishment; and the latest in the line was King Laius whose first-born, it was prophesied at his birth, would kill his father and marry his mother. This cursed baby could not be destroyed by its parents for they would then be guilty of infanticide; he was cast out with his feet pierced and bound, abandoned on the side of a mountain, but rescued by a shepherd and eventually given to the King of Corinth, whose marriage was childless. He adopted the baby as his son and named him Oedipus, ‘Pierced foot’. As a young man Oedipus heard of the curse that he would kill his father and marry his mother and to avoid it he fled from the court of the King of Corinth whose son he imagined himself to be. In his wanderings he killed a stranger who had abused him; and when he came to Thebes he was able by his native wit and intelligence to destroy a fabulous beast, the Sphinx, that had brought a plague upon the city and held the town in thrall. For this he was rewarded with the throne and the hand of the recently widowed queen in marriage. Unknowingly, he had killed his father - the stranger - and now had married his mother. He lived for many years very successfully as King of Thebes, was much loved by his people, and had four children by his mother. The curse from which he had run and which he continued to dread had long since come to pass. All that remained was that he should come to know his guilt. Another plague descended upon Thebes.

Th#-e\re nts for the pla^jtseinake place during one day; the play is not about Oedipus comm itting TH^cnmes but about him dis-cavefihig~who he really is and what__he has really done. The drairiatieTfony sterns from the fact that the audience are aware of Oedipus’s re aTT^ htfig. TlmsTwhehTToFex^ he'^cttrses the murdereFof Laius and pronounces the sentence of excommunication, the audience are acutely aware that he is cursing himself.

Oedipus’s determination to find his true identity makes us respond to him positively and to be fearful for him. What he has already done are terrible crimes, sins: killing his father and marrying his mother. But he did it in total ignorance, ironically in an attempt to prevent himself from doing it. Our knowledge of his guilt and his ignorance makes us as an audience aware of conflicting moral interpretations.

The irony in the play - as opposed to the dramatic irony -increases the complexity of the issues. Everything Oedipus does during this day of self-discovery he does in good faith, including

the banishment of his ‘wife’s’ brother Creon and the abuse of the old and blind soothsayer,^Tiresias, whom he suspects of plotting against him. Tiresias knows who he is, but refuses to answer Oedipus’s question concerning the identity of the murderer of Laius until Oedipus loses his temper with him and insults him. He is then stung into saying who Oedipus is, but not in any way which can be understood by Oedipus who regards himself as a stranger in Thebes. Tiresias’s wild and improbable accusations can only mean that he is deliberately lying and trying to stir up trouble on the instigation of Creon, who must now be aspiring to the throne. The audience know that Tiresias is not lying, that Creon is not plotting - and that Oedipus is only wrong because he is behaving rationally. It is his rationalism which has deceived him into thinking that he had any free choice. This is one of the bitter ironies of the play.

Queen Jocasta is also completely ignorant of who Oedipus really is. She loves him as a wife; but the more she seeks to reassure her husband and give him confidence in his search for Laius’s killer and for his own identity the closer she brings both Oedipus and herself to an awareness of their true relationship; son and mother. She realizes before Oedipus does that her husband is her son. She goes silently into her bedroom and hangs herself. Even her sudden exit is ironically misconstrued by Oedipus:

The woman, with more than woman’s pride, is shamed By my low origin. I am the child of fortune,

The giver of good, and I shall not be shamed.^

A little later he too realizes who he is: ironically, Jocasta had indeed been shamed by her discovery of who he is, but not at all in the way he thought. Earlier, in trying to reassure him she told him not to pay any attention to soothsayers:

. . . For I can tell you No man possesses the secret of divination.

And I have proof. An oracle was given to Laius . . .

That he should die by the hands of his own child,

His child and mine. What came of it? Laius,

It is common knowledge, was killed by outland robbers At a place where three roads meet. . .

She goes on talking about her child that was abandoned on the mountainside to die and about the inaccuracy of prophecy, but Oedipus is no longer listening because something she has said by

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the way has made him very uneasy - ‘My wife, what you have said has troubled me. My mind goes back. . . .’ - and he questions Jocasta closely. He once killed a man ‘at a place where three roads meet’; could it be that he is Laius’s murderer? ‘Ah, wretch! Am I unwittingly self-cursed?’only as the murderer of Laius, a stranger. A shepherd is sent for who witnessed the murder: if he still maintains Laius was killed by robbers as he did originally then Oedipus is absolved from blame for the murder of Laius - ‘one is not more than one’. Well, he can’t change his story now, Jocasta reassures her husband, ‘the whole town heard it’. This shepherd of course knows that Oedipus is the murderer of Laius, and lied originally. Ironically, what he doesn’t realize is that Oedipus is also the baby he rescued from death when told to abandon it on the mountainside.

However, Jocasta is convinced that augury is worthless: Laius wasn’t killed by his own child; instead, that child died. Jocasta’s disregard for the oracles worries the Chorus of Elders who also do not know who their king really is. The Chorus is a key formal element in Greek tragedy of this period. Collectively they express in chants and songs, accompanied by formal dances, the limited understanding and conventional wisdom of what today we would call ‘the man in the street’. The Chorus of Theban Elders wish only to live within the framework of the law; but now they are suffering from the plague and they realize that matters must be resolved concerning the murder of Laius all those years ago. Ignoring the Gods seems to them to be the wrong way to go about it:

Zeus! If thou livest, all-ruling, all-pervading,

Awake; old oracles are out of mind;

Apollo’s name denied, his glory fading,

/^T^ere is no godliness in all mankind.

The audience’s attitude towards the oracles is more ambiguous. The Greek audiences of the time were not especially religious, according to comments, for example, made by Thucydides, the Athenian historian who was Sophocles’s contemporary. On the other hand there was an accepted divine order which underpinned the political stability of the state. However, there was no doubt that the intelligence, nobility and moral integrity of Oedipus contradicted his fate, and that the fulfilment of his destiny was wholly undeserved in terms of his character. This was particularly so with regard to Oedipus’s ability to reason: I cannot be guilty

circumstantially of something that 1 was ignorant of doing; that would be superstition. I hiust be proved guilty.

If Oedipus is proceeding by logical deduction, he cannot logically arrive at the truth on the basis of incorrect evidence. This is crucial to an understanding of Sophocles’s play. For example, someone in Corinth tells him he is not his father’s son - something instantly denied by his adoptive parents. When he goes to the oracle to double check he does not get an answer to the question:

Am I son of the King of Corinth? He gets told instead that he will kill his father and marry his mother. His ‘parents’ lied to him; and the oracle deliberately confuses him by remaining silent. If he behaves logically on the basis of these two pieces of information it must inevitably take him away from the truth rather than nearer to it. If he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother, and if the oracle doesn’t deny that the King and Queen of Corinth are his parents, then he had better put as much distance between them and him as possible.

He is thus driven by two wholly praiseworthy characteristics: a determination to discover the truth, no matter what it means personally; and a logical mind. Both qualities, it seems, are contradicted by the Gods in his ordained fate and its awful fulfilment. However, even in the moment of crisis, when everything is made plain, Oedipus does not relinquish these qualities.

The Chorus wonder why he didn’t commit suicide, rather than inflict upon himself the pain of blindness and its continuing agony. He replies:

I will not believe that this was not the best

That could have been done. Teach me no other lesson.

How could I meet my father beyond the grave With seeing eyes; or my unhappy mother,

Against whom I have committed such heinous sin As no mere death could pay for?

No! Hearing neither! Had I any way To dam that channel too, I would not rest Till I had prisoned up this body of shame In total blankness. For the mind to dwell Beyond the reach of pain, were peace indeed.

T

His reasoning determines a harder way forward than suicide ' | (which in his society would have been more honourable), but by 4

following this course he is able to work out his redemption on {

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earth (a similar resolution in essence, though not in form, to Eda’s sins). In this Oedipus shows the true nobility of his soul. This process is handled in the next play in the ‘trilogy’, Oedipus at Colonus, in which Sophocles allows Oedipus’s expiation to bring benefits to Athens, rather than to his native Thebes which still sinks down in blood and civil strife. His noble nature is finally ‘sanctified’, that is, his qualities are reconciled with the intentions of the Gods.

Taking the two plays separately, as they were in fact written and first presented, or together, the meaning of Sophocles’s dramatization of the Oedipus story is, ultimately, conservative. He attempts to balance the rational and humanist potential of Oedipus’s character against the inexorability of fate, and of the divine order; and in the second play he synthesizes them into support for the contemporary social order in the Athenian state, which itself was disintegrating at the end of an extended and vicious war with her neighbours. Oedipus at Colonus does not have the same dramatic impact or significance as King Oedipus, which has held a fascination for other playwrights throughout the ages and throughout the world.

The Gods are not to Blame Rotimi

Partly because of the powerful structuring of the ironies of the original, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame^^ has proved to be one of the most successful modern plays in performance ever since its first production in 1968 by the playwright at the Ori Olokun Cultural Centre in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Most of the members of the audiences in West Africa would be ignorant of its Greek model and the Greek myth on which it is based. So Rotimi’s transposition differs in intention from some European transpositions of this play, which deliberately counter-balance the new version with their audiences’ expectations and knowledge of the original. The twentieth-century version by the French playwright Jean Cocteau is an example of this. Rotimi, on the other hand, is required to introduce his audiences to what is for them a new legend, or new story, as an African play; and, as such, his African audiences always receive it most enthusiastically.

A prologue, therefore, begins the play. A narrator set s the scene with an ac count of the events of the original Greek legend •franspiosed into a rural Yoruba setting. The time in which the

action of the Yor uba play takes pla cej^not made specific; but it is clearly neither contemporary nor colonial, and predates white intrusion into Yorubaland.

As the Narrator speaks, what he describes is enacted in mime; and modern stage devices are used to reinforce the meaning, such as spotlights to isolate the shrine of the God Ogun in the surrounding darkness on the stage, and the rhythmic clinking of metal to emphasize his essence as the God of Iron*j^ancers and musicians reflect the changes in mood as the Narrator tells the story, from joy at the birth of a child for King Adetusa and Queen Ojuola of Kutuje (Laius and Jocasta of Thebes), to despair on hearing Ogun’s (Apollo’s) prophecy; back to joy at the birth of a second son (transposing Creon as uncle of Oedipus to his brother). The dancers also represent in chants and dances the wars which the young stranger Odewale helps the people of Kutuje to turn to their advantage.

The Narrator’s role is now taken over by Odewale himself, and he tells how he was rewarded by being made King of Kutuje, ‘and have taken for wife, / as custom wishes, / Ojuola, the motherly Queen / of the former King / Adetusa.’He introduces the four children which he has had by her, and his second wife Abero, and brings the story up to the time of the action of the play with a description of the present plague, with which the play itself now ^ens.

The formal chorus of the Greek play has been replaced by individualized townspeople, royal retainers, bodyguards and chiefs, who all act naturalistically (and not, as in the prologue, in formal dances, chants and mime). Odewale is quickly established as a good and caring king, at one with his people despite being an Ijekun man from Ijekun-Yemoja. He is vigorous and purposeful, inspires confidence, and yet is able to command and be obeyed. These are qualities which Rotimi adds to the qualities of reason and the desire to know the truth of the original Oedipus. They increase rather than lessen the injustice of his fate. |

This creates the first major problem of Rotimi’s play. The j trad itional Yoruba concept of fate i s only su perficially the sam e as -the Greek concept as expressenTiTXmg Oedipus. In fact, as we h ave seeiT^in ou rdiscussion of ^^^^ '^and" Ev er y mar u T oxnhas tr adition^ly believe Oi^ ~youT"fate is your own doing: you kneel down and receive it as a gift fronTOTodumare before being born. Furthermore, it is intrinsic to Yoruba cosmology that a person’s

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fate is never irreversible, and it can be changed from evil to good by appropriate sacrifices \vhich the Ifa Oracle at Ile-Ife will, in the last resort, always determine. Finally, unlike the G reek Olympian pantheon (Zeus, Apo llo and the restj whose^ divinities p vendettas^agamst each otEeFand against mortals, the Yoruba gods ar^n^'capricious, least of all 0»gun - a point deliberately made in almost every Yoruba drama in which Ogun is represented, and made in this play too:

Priest: My master, Ogun is a god with fierce anger, son; one does not

call him to witness so freely.

Thus, there is no familial or other reason why Odewale should have been given such a specifically criminal and heinous fate, especially as something separate from his essential nobility and moral integrity.

Sophocles, on the oth er hand, is a_b l e to set the radical aspects of Oedipurs^naracter aga^ his fate specifically because the Greek gods thems elves genera ted con flicting moral cl aims This meant that a pefs'anTiad t o determ ine, finall y, his ow n rnoral responsibil-ityrTHus, the Greek view of fate could be expressed in another way, namely, as the burden of an established moral position (such as being forced to exact revenge) that needed to be redefined. Sophocles’s Oedipus was only able to redefine his moral responsibility by embracing his fate and living through its implications. This is somewhat removed from the Yoruba world view wh ich sees all morality vested in the continukyjoflife^d the survival of the race"^^ destiny which j sjnibjQdied, especially, in the god Ogun.

Rotimi is clearly unhappy with this lack of correlation between the Greek and Yoruba cosmogonies. To get round it he resorts to an interpretation of the Greek play which has been derived (inaccurately) from Aristotle since the fifteenth century. This interpretation finds a single ‘fault’ in the character of Oedipus which overrides all his other virtues and causes his ‘downfall’: his ‘pride’. It is a peculiarly Christian interpretation of the Greek play to see Oedipus as deserving his punishment from the gods because of his pride. It is a deeply flawed interpretation. Oedipus’s fate was sealed before he even became king, and certainly before we the audience witness what might be termed his ‘proud’ or ‘arrogant’ behaviour (presumably his treatment of Creon and Tire-sias). In fact, Oedipus’s ‘guilt’ was established the day he was born. The curse on the House of Labdacus must not be confused

with the Christian concept of original sin which is the condition of all mankind. In the play, Oedipus discovers his culpability; his sinful acts had unwittingly been committed long before.

Rotimi retains the notion of the tragic flaw, but specifically substitutes hot-temperedness for pride. Odewale’s flaring temper is constantly commented upon:

Baba Fakunle [The blind seer]: Your hot temper, like a disease from

birth, is the curse that has brought you trouble.

Odewale: [Praying to Ogun before his household shrine] Cool me, Ogun,

cool me. The touch of palm-oil is cool to the body. Cool me. The blood is hot. . . .'^

Alaka [Odewale’s sparring partner of his youth in Ijekun]: I did not teach

you your hot temper, though!

Odewale: No, no, Shango, the thunder lion, taught me that onel^^

Rotimi then introduces as a ‘flash-back’ the occasion when Odewale killed an old man at Ede who had arrogantly laid claim to the farm which Odewale had bought. They fight by charms. Finally, however, Odewale reaches for a hoe and brandishes it above his head and chants:

This is . . . Ogun and Ogun says: Flow! flow ... let your blood flow flow . . . flow . . . f-l-o-w. . .

And he kills the old man, who, of course, is his father. He kills his father in the god’s name. Thus, he not only commits patricide, he blasphemes; and the moment he comes to his senses he feels guilt. Oedipus feels no guilt for killing a man; it is only when he comes to realize who that man might be that he is horrified.

This flash-back is meant to be a crucial demonstration of his hot temper: at the end of the play when he has discovered his identity and his crimes he tells his townspeople:

No, no! Do not blame the Gods. Let no one blame the powers. My people, learn from my fall. The powers would have failed if I did not let them use me. They knew my weakness: the weakness of a man easily moved to the defense of his tribe against others. I once slew a man on my farm in Ede. I could have spared him. But he spat on my tribe. He spat on the tribe I thought was my tribe. The man laughed, and laughing, he called me a ‘man from the bush tribe of Ijekun’. And I lost my reason.

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The validity of this final statement within the context of the whole play is dubious and seems to be somewhat contrived. The whole thrust of the play is in the opposite direction. The gods are indeed the cause of Odewale’s downfall, for his particular crimes would not have been committed if there had been no prophecy. He would have grown up in his family, hot-tempered perhaps, but there is nothing in his character to suggest that he could ever commit patricide and incest. Indeed, despite his hot temper his personality is moral, honourable and caring. The prophecy, which had no reason whatsoever to be uttered, proved to be self-fulfilling: as his parents, and then Odewale himself, sought by all means to avoid the curse, they were unknowingly driven into fulfilling it.

Rotimi finds himself trapped both within the story and within the Greek moral order: if the gods, or Tate’, are to blame and not Odewale, then the Yoruba milieu of the play disintegrates. If, on the other hand, Odewale’s hot temper and, as he says, tribalism, is to blame and not the Gods, then the story of the prophecy has no rationale.

Rotimi subsequently suggested in a published interview that the play was an allegory of the civil war in Nigeria which was raging when the play was first performed: the gods were the European powers who were, accordingly, not to blame for the conflict; Odewale represented tribalism in Nigeria; and the civil war was caused not by the intervention of the super-powers but by Nigeria’s tribalism: ‘The powers would have failed if I did not let them use me’.^i But what is seen at the end of the play is the tragedy of one man, not of Kutuje or of the Yoruba kingdom; and the civil war was fought on a regional basis in which the Yoruba role itself was not clearly defined. There were many tangled issues caught up in the war, and to reduce it to a single cause is trite. Finally, there are no other correlations in the play for the civil war; and there is the problem of the actual thrust of meaning of the original Greek story.

The Island Fugardy Kani and Ntshona

This play, which was realized through improvisation techniques developed by Fugard, Kani and Ntshona, is not really a transposition. The original Greek play Antigone, the third of Sophocles’s Theban ‘trilogy’, is more a thematic equivalent than an actual

model for the new play, which is about two black prisoners on Robben Island, the notorious detention centre off the coast"at Cape Town, for opponents of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The only two actors in the play retain their own first names as the prisoners: John (Kani) and Winston (Ntshona).

Only two things happen in The Island by way of a story: John is informed that his sentence has been reduced from ten years to three years and that he only has three months to go; and the two of them perform John’s recollection of the trial scene from Sophocles’s Antigone at a prisoners’ ‘concert’ organized by the warders.

The characterization of the two prisoners is very detailed and maintained throughout the play even in their roles as Antigone (one of Oedipus’s daughters) and her tyrant uncle, Creon, in the little play which they perform. However, The Island does make considerable use of stylization: Robben Island is suggested by a raised area representing a cell, with two mats, two blankets, two mugs and a bucket only, and an area around it representing the beach in which, at the beginning, John and Winston each keep endlessly loading a wheelbarrow from a hole which each is digging - merely to fill the other! On occasion they mime being beaten up by warders and guards. We don’t ever see a warder or a guard, but John’s and Winston’s acting is so good we can actually believe that a warder is present. The guard, any guard, is referred to metaphorically throughout the play as Hodoshe, the green carrion fly:

A whistle is blown. They stop digging and come together, standing side by side as they are handcuffed together and shackled at the ankles. Another whistle. They start to run . . . John mumbling a prayer, Winston muttering a rhythm for their three-legged run.

They do not run fast enough. They get beaten . . . Winston receiving a bad blow to the eye and John spraining an ankle. . . .^^

Apart from the whistle which is heard, everything else is mimed: handcuffs, the shackles, the beating.

However, for their performance of Antigone in the fourth and final scene of the play, some scraps collected off the beach and from the quarry are fashioned into a necklace (from old nails) and a wig (old rope) for Antigone, and into a badge of office and crown for Creon. A prison blanket makes Creon’s robe, Antigone’s dress. Before their play begins John addresses the audience as the prison governor, warders and ‘Hodoshe’.

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Just before this play takes place, while they are in their cell, Winston’s torment over John’s promised relief in three months time encapsulates the horror of political detention on Robben Island. Winston, talking of another prisoner, tells John relentlessly:

. . . Twenty perfect blocks of stone every day. Nobody else can do it like him. He loves stone. That’s why they’re nice to him. He’s forgotten himself. He’s forgotten everything . . . why he’s here, where he comes from.

That’s happening to me, John. I’ve forgotten why I’m here. . . . Fuck slogans, fuck politics . . . fuck everything, John. Why am I here? I’m jealous of your freedom, John. I also want to count. God also gave me ten fingers, but what do I count? My life? How do I count it, John? One . . . one . . . another day comes . . . one. . . . Help me, John! Another day . . . one . . . one. . . . Help me, brother! one. . . .

[John has sunk to the floor, helpless in the face of the other man’s torment and pain. Winston almost seems to bend under the weight of life stretching ahead of him on the Island. For a few seconds he lives in silence with his reality, then slowly straightens up. He turns and looks at John. When he speaks again, it is the voice of a man who has come to terms with his fate, massively compassionate]^^

They perform their little play. The Trial and Punishment of Antigone. It is comprised of speeches which John has written out from memory around the basic structure of the scene which he has recalled. He has made Winston learn the speeches of Antigone off-by-heart. In the Greek play, Creon (technically the same person as in King Oedipus, though now characterized as a younger man) has refused burial for Antigone’s brother (another of Oedipus’s children) who has led an attack against Thebes. Antigone attempts to bury him twice and is caught. Creon stands by the law; Antigone tells him that it was he who made the law, and it is an inhuman law which contradicts a greater, divine authority. In John’s play, Antigone, played by Winston, tells Creon: ‘Guilty against God I will not be for any man on this earth.The little play ends:

John [As Creon]: There was a law. The law was broken, the law

stipulated its penalty. My hands are tied. Take her from where she stands, straight to the Island! There wall her up in a cell for life, with enough food to acquit ourselves of the taint of her blood.

Winston [As Antigone to the audience]: Brothers and sisters of the land! I

go now on my last journey. I must leave the light of day forever, for the

Island, strange and cold,Jo be lost between life and death. So, to my grave, my everlasting prison, condemned alive to solitary death. [Tearing off his wig and confronting the audience as Winston, not Antigone] Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home! Time waits no longer. I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs. [The two men take off their costumes and then strike their ‘set’]^^

The play ends as it began, with the men shackled together doing their three-legged run around the stage, the beach. The ancient Greek play has been made applicable to the situation in South Africa today, and used as a point of reference for an exploration of the character of Winston, especially, who comes to accept his fate.

The Bacchae Euripides

Euripides’s play,^^ and Soyinka’s play based upon it, are both about a Greek god, Dionysus. His later Greek name, bakXai, in Latin Bacchus, gives us the English words ‘bacchanal’, meaning either a drunken reveller or a debauched party, and ‘bacchanalian’, the adjective. The Romans who assimilated many of the Greek gods into their own society tended to emphasize certain characteristics to the exclusion of others. Thus Bacchus was for them the god of wine; and he became known as such to Christianized Europe during the Renaissance which found him difficult to accommodate. In fact, Dionysus, or Bacchus, had been assimilated into Barbarian Europe many many centuries earlier, in various Pagan rites - which Christianity then supplanted.

Dionysus (sometimes spelt Dionysos, as it is in fact in Soyinka’s play) was a much more complex figure in his original Greek manifestation because he constituted both a religious and a political influence. He was a god of the people, the common folk, as opposed to the Olympian gods of the established order (Zeus, Apollo and many others, dwelling on Mount Olympus, who reinforced the authority of the state and to whom access was denied save through an elaborately constituted priesthood). His cult swept through Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean prior to the period when the Greek city-states were establishing themselves economically and politically in the area, and probably as early as the thirteenth century BC.

He was presented as an earth god, and his votaries proclaimed wine, the fruit of the vine, as sacred to him. His special rites

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evoked for his followers an earlier mode of existence, closer to nature and its seasons. In this way it became a means of transcending the daily oppressions of those bound either to the land in one form or another, or to other men, living in the cities, as their labourers or slaves, as wars and economic expansion forced peasants off their land and into the armies and the cities. Dionysus’s rites reasserted for them earth’s productiveness and the unfettered spirit of men and women.

His cult had special appeal for women; and the title of Euripides’s play. The Bacchae, refers to the female followers of the god. They literally are his followers in the play, for they have followed the god, who appears in the play both as man and as god, from Phrygia (in Asia Minor), spreading his influence, back to the place where the Greek myth asserts he was born: the city of Thebes.

It is indeed the same Thebes of the Oedipus legend; and some of the dramatis personae are also the same: Cadmus, the founder of Thebes (who actually appears in this play) and Tiresias, the blind seer, who was a character in King Oedipus. The various legends drastically distort the chronology: and it is obvious that Thebes, for the Athenian dramatists, was a mythical city which was the disastrous alternative to their own (idealized) city of Athens.

Dionysus was the ‘illegitimate’ child of Zeus, foremost of the Olympians and Semele, mortal daughter of Cadmus. Semele’s family did not believe she had been visited by Zeus and they accused her of fornication; her issue, Dionysus, was denied as god. Soyinka’s Dionysos states his patrimony thus:

A seed of Zeus was sown in Semele my mother earth, here on this spot. It has burgeoned through the cragged rocks of far Afghanistan, burst the banks of fertile Tmolus, sprung oases through the red-eyed sands of Arabia; flowered in hill and gorge of dark Ethiopia. It pounds in the blood and breasts of my wild-haired women, long companions on this journey home through Phrygia and the isles of Crete. It beats on the walls of Thebes, bringing vengeance on all who deny my holy origin and call my mother - slut.^^

In both Euripides’s play and in Soyinka’s version of it, Thebes is now ruled by Pentheus, Cadmus’s grandson and Semele’s nephew, who is determined to resist the new religious madness that seems to have gripped Thebes and the women especially. The play becomes a conflict between Pentheus and Dionysus. Pentheus

represents the nobility sustained by the established order: the law, the army, and of course'the ‘mysteries’: Apollo and his Oracle at Delphi, and other Olympian gods - all mediated by a burgeoning and powerful priesthood in the control of Tiresias, who himself nevertheless recognizes the strength of his new cult and sides with it against Pentheus. Dionysus comes to the people. He represents the force of nature and contradicts man’s socialization. Admittedly he is Zeus’s progeny; but it is in the same way that Christ is the son of the Judaic god though he is resisted and denied by Judaism.