This is almost exactly the realization Aafaa arrives at, at the end of the play. His attack is on the priesthood; and is expressed in the form of a parody of the Gospel according to St John:
In the beginning was the Priesthood, and the Priesthood was one. Then came schism after schism by a parcel of schismatic ticks in the One Body of the Priesthood, the political priesthood went right, the spiritual priesthood went left, or vice versa. . . .
However the split in fact made no difference, Aafaa goes on to say. As he has now come to realize, the schisms were all part and parcel of the same system of domination. Indeed, the very divisions served to bring man into a more complete subjugation. Man retreats further and further into himself. However, at this juncture, he starts tackling his problems without the help of the priesthood. This is the moment for the priesthood, the system, to reassert itself. . . . AS something else. In the re-emergence of belief as something ‘new’, there is paradoxically the unending and unchanging domination of man by man.
The mendicants’ repeated chant - ‘As - Was - Is - Now - As Ever Shall Be’ - parodies part of the Christian church liturgy:
Glory be to the Father,
And to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit:
As it was in the beginning.
Is now.
And ever shall be.
World without end. Amen.
At one point they also include the last line ‘World without . . .’, but they deliberately omit ‘end’, suggesting that in Christian theology at least the world is outside of, or irrelevant to, this religious system..
‘As’ - the word representing God - has further resonances. In Norse mythology, ‘As’ was the name for any of the Norse gods, such as Thor or Odin, who inhabited Asgard, the home of the gods. It comes from the Icelandic word ‘ass’ meaning a god, but it was obviously the interchangeability of specific gods under the title
As that particularly appealed to Soyinka. For the main emphasis in Soyinka’s use of the word As in this play is the insight gained from switching the conjunction ‘as’ (‘like’) into a noun (the process of transformation into a parallel existence). Let us stop worshipping God as Jehovah, as Christ (in his various schismatic transformations!), as Allah, as Siva, and so on; and let us start acknowledging the transformation process itself: As. As is older than any of the religions and their priesthoods, and is each one’s inner dynamic.
Furthermore, As today is all the other parts of the system as well: political and economic orthodoxy, science, the law, the judiciary, the arts. As is, in fact, hegemony: the development of the institutions of the state specifically to keep the elite in power, to perpetuate the power-base of the ruling class. ‘As’ was, ‘As’ is, ‘As’ will always be. . . . The Old Man tells the mendicants that they are the cysts in the system -
. . . and are part of the material for re-formulating the mind of a man
into the necessity of the moment’s political As, the moment’s scientific
As, metaphysic As, sociologic As, economic recreative ethical
As. . . .‘5
They are going to be used by Bero and his colleagues to experiment on, to practise upon, in order to gain absolute control of their minds. The Old Man tells them that there is no point in saying to Bero and his manipulators, look, we are all human beings, all prey to the same human weaknesses and limitations, and you are man like me; because they will reply that they are ‘chosen, restored, re-designated and re-destined’, and they are going to practise on all those who undermine the system.
The paradox lies in the doctrine of As seeming to be the new religion of the Old Man and his patients, when it is in fact the religion of Bero himself and the revelation of his continuing exploitation of them. The mendicants and the Old Man live this contradiction out through the role play and constant recourse to parody. They assume the roles of those in command right from the start of the play. In the name of ‘As’ they ‘torture’ each other, ‘appeal’ against the ‘torture’, are ‘tried’ then ‘executed’, and so on. They parody even their own poverty and servility; they parody confession. They parody politicians, whites and neo-colonialists (as in Blindman’s superb rendering of a ‘refined’ public speaker preying on the racial prejudices of his audience - ‘I hope I didn’t
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do too badly.’ ‘No,’ replies the Old Man, ‘it was quite good really.’ ‘It was just like old times,’ Blindman adds).
The events move towards a crisis, and understanding grows. The Old Man, and then Aafaa, parody the priests; and then, finally, they parody Bero himself, the specialist: ‘Practise, Practise, Practise,’ they all chant, tempting Bero, gun in hand, to kill his father, as the father parodies his son killing the questioning and hopeful Cripple.
Ironically, throughout the play Bero persists in thinking that ‘As’ is a new religion of the poor, and therefore a threat to him and his order in society, rather than the true face of his own credo, the awareness of which by the exploited is ultimately much more of a threat.
What has happened in the end? The Old Man has forced his son to kill him - Bero’s final impious act for which there is no redress. The Old Man has finally put himself beyond the reach of his son’s meanness. However, the Old Man did not do it for that reason, but to distract Bero from shooting the earth mothers. His action ensures that they destroy the herbs that Bero was planning to use himself. The Old Man’s action is in effect a sacrifice on behalf of the mendicants: a following-through of self-awareness, and an assertion of the principle of common humanity. He makes the understanding which he has given them substantial. Bero is defiled; and he is cheated of that earth-bound goodness which he sought to bend to his will. The mendicants mockingly chant at him and his ineffectual sister the Old Man’s credo which is really his own:
Bi o ti wa
As-Was-Is-Now . . .
And the final stage direction: {The song stops in mid-word and the lights snap out simultaneously).^^
A Dance of the Forests
Performed in 1960 for the independence celebrations of Nigeria, and as a direct comment on it, A Dance of the Forests is Soyinka’s first major play. Within the play, the gathering of the tribes for a great feast, symbolic of Nigeria’s independence celebrations, requires the presence of illustrious ancestors from the past. The
Forest Head - who is the Supreme Being - is petitioned; but sends instead two accusers from the past, and so transforms the celebration into a crisis. This leads to ‘tortured self-awareness’, at least for some of the living.
In the same way, Soyinka’s play, as part of the independence celebrations presents, instead of a piece of complacent rhetoric, an apocalyptic vision of a dread future which can only be avoided by self-sacrifice as a result of what he calls ‘self-apprehension’. He can have felt no satisfaction whatsoever when he came to write Madmen and Specialists ten years later that the ‘fanged and bloody future, which he had predicted for the new nation-state of Nigeria, had come to pass in the Nigerian civil war.
In A Dance of the Forests, Demoke, the carver, would seek to make the society something better through the profound selfapprehension he achieves during the course of the play. In Madmen and Specialists, as we have already seen, the Old Man is trying to torture self-awareness out of the souls of the mendicants, which process in the end leads him to sacrifice his life. However, in the earlier play the awareness is essentially metaphysical, while in the later play the awareness tends to be more social. The metaphysical analysis is not as emphasized. In both plays ‘selfapprehension’ goes well beyond political awareness, and is unavoidable if there is to be genuine social reform.
There were two other major plays written between A Dance of the Forests and Madmen and Specialists: Kongi’s Harvest and The Road. In Kongi’s Harvest an attempted revolutionary act, on the basis of a rite and as a result of a metaphysical analysis, has a negative result. In The Road the metaphysical experience of the Professor and Murano is set in deliberate contrast to the political experience of say Tokyo Kid and the other political thugs. Both these plays have proved very popular with audiences and readers. A number of very detailed analyses have been made of them by literary critics and by theatre specialists.
We have already made reference to Myth, Literature and the African World. It is, for readers of Soyinka’s plays, a source-work on his philosophical, poetic and critical precepts: it is a sort of ‘poetic manifesto’. Throughout the four essays which constitute the book runs the theme of the search for ‘oneness’, or ‘wholeness’, which the playwright sees the individual achieving only by daring to bridge the abyss of primal chaos, and triumphing by an exercise of the Will. The theme is embodied in the being of the god
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of iron, Ogun, for Soyinka the central god of the Yoruba pantheon. Ogun alone experienced and explored the primordial chaos ‘which he conquered, then bridged, with the aid of the artefacts of his science’. His science was the mastering of iron-ore and the artefacts were the sword and the plough.
Soyinka develops his analysis of Ogun:
Only Ogun experienced the process of being literally torn asunder in cosmic winds, of rescuing himself from the precarious edge of total dissolution by harnessing the untouched part of himself, the will. This is the unique essentiality of Ogun in Yoruba metaphysics: as embodiment of the social, communal will invested in the protagonist of its choice. It is as a paradigm of this experience of dissolution and re-integration that the actor in the ritual archetype can be understood.*^
In ‘The fourth stage’, which was written before the other essays in Myth, Literature and the African World, there is an earlier analysis of Ogun:
Ogun is the embodiment of Will, and the Will is the paradoxical truth of destructiveness and creativeness in acting man.*^
He goes on to comment, with perhaps a reference to his own experiences:
Only one who has himself undergone the experience of disintegration, whose spirit has been tested and whose psychic resources laid under stress by forces most inimical to individual assertion, only he can understand and be the force of fusion between the two contradictions.
Ogun is frequently referred to in these essays as the artist, the ‘artistic spirit’, ‘the essence of creativity’. He is also referred to specifically as ‘the first actor’. When the actor, the artist, finds himself at the edge of physical and emotional endurance, on the point of disintegration, then
. . . transitional memory takes over and intimations rack him of that intense parallel of his progress through the gulf of transition, of the dissolution of his self and his struggle and triumph over subsumation through the agency of Will.^o
All these elements of analysis - the dissolution of self, the search for oneness, the exercise of will, the retrieval of self, Ogun as ‘the first actor’ and the embodiment of contradiction - all are brought together in the concept of the artist’s sensibility:
The resulting sensibility is also the sensibility of the artist, and he is a profound artist only to the^jegree to which he comprehends and expresses this principle of destruction, and re-creation.
As we have seen in Madmen and Specialists, Soyinka’s own sensibility even goes beyond this basic contradiction, to living through other, specifically social, contradictions, in social conditions where ‘oneness’ can hardly seem a valid objective. This growing sensibility would seem, therefore, to carry Soyinka away from his metaphysical engagement. However, we need to understand his metaphysics in order to grasp the meaning of A Dance of the Forests, and also to comprehend the fountain-head of his poetic inspiration.
There is one other element in the analysis in Myth, Literature and the African World which we need to consider before moving on to a consideration of A Dance of the Forests: music, and its metaphysical significance. Music, dance and masquerade are crucial to nearly all Soyinka’s plays, and especially to A Dance of the Forests. Music, he writes, ‘is the intensive language of transition.’ And as the ‘language of transition’ it lies at the heart of his metaphysics. It is the actual means of communication to the audience both of the disintegration and the retrieval of self; it actually translates the actor and audience to that state of awareness of the journey through the abyss.
Music’s link with Yoruba tragedy, through myth, produces ‘weird disruptive melodies’ which can unearth ‘cosmic uncertainties which pervade human existence’, can reveal ‘the magnitude and power of creation ’,22 and can create the experience of the chasm, the yawning abyss, the chthonic realm.
In this metaphysical sense, music is most apparent and effective in a much later play. Death and the Kings Horseman (1975), both within the play and between the play itself in performance and its audiences. Within the play it is the means by which Elesin Oba, the King’s Horseman, is supposed to commit his ritual suicide in honour of the dead Oba and so restore harmony to the community which the death of the Oba has set at risk. Between the play and its audiences, music shows the far greater disharmony caused by his failure to commit suicide, and carries the audience through a far more profound crisis. The music fulfils a similar crucial function in A Dance of the Forests, to which we must now turn.^^^
The play opens in a clearing in the forest. Two ancestors are
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rising from the earth, breaking its soil surface: a dead man in a rusty warrior’s outfit and a dead woman who still carries the pregnancy that died with her. The three town dwellers. Demoke, Rola and Adenebi, and a fourth ‘town dweller’, Obaneji (who is in fact Forest Head himself in disguise), pass by the ancestors one by one, uncomprehending who they are. The dead pair ask each one in turn to ‘take my case’, by which each means his separate cause. They are at this point, therefore, seen by the living merely as petitioners, though they are the accusers of those three town dwellers whose former lives, eight centuries before, were viciously intertwined with the lives and deaths of the dead pair. No one will take up either cause, and the dead pair wander off into another part of the forest; while the town dwellers, including the disguised Forest Head, come together, explaining to each other, superficially, why they have escaped from the town and the celebrations and come into the forest. However, the disguised Forest Head forces each one of them to reveal not only their true motives for their escape into the forest but to admit to their guilt. Rola is the first. She is forced to admit to being the notorious courtesan, Madame Tortoise, responsible for the deaths of two men. Demoke the carver, the artist, the servant of Ogun, admits to the murder of his apprentice, Oremole. Only Adenebi, the councillor, who took bribes and was responsible for sixty-five deaths as a result of distorting vehicle regulations, refuses until the very end of the play actually to acknowledge his guilt.
Whilst the Forest Head, as Obaneji, is teasing out admissions of guilt from Demoke, Rola and Adenebi, leading them all the while deeper and deeper into the forest, two other groups are trying to sort out the celebrations, the preparations for which appear to have gone drastically wrong. The activities of the various beings in these two groups, who are all in the forest, alternate with the wandering deeper into the forest of the other six (the dead pair, the town dwellers and the Forest Head himself). One of these groups are the elders from the town, including the father of Demoke, who have called this great Feast to celebrate the Gathering of the Tribes, and who now are desperate to drive back into the forest the ancestors they asked for. They use a band of beaters, a masquerader with his acolyte, a divining elder (Agboreko) and finally an amazing lorry which belches out oil fumes and smoke in copious quantities. The other group are non-humans. They comprise (1) the two gods Eshuoro and Ogun,
and (2) all the forest spirits, including Murete and Forest Head’s own activist, Aroni, the Lame One. Aroni is in fact organizing Forest Head’s own metaphysical Welcoming for the Dead, which is intended as the experience of ‘self-apprehension’, and perhaps transition through the abyss, for the three town dwellers.
This welcoming also embraces an immediate crisis involving a bitter conflict between the gods Eshuoro and Ogun, for Ogun’s servant. Demoke, who as an artist and carver worships the god of iron, has carved a gigantic totem out of the tree sacred to Eshuoro. Worse, it is Eshuoro’s worshipper, Oremole, whom Demoke has murdered in the process of carving the totem. Demoke suffers from vertigo. Oremole, his assistant did not, and so climbed higher up the tree than his master, and in the privacy of those heights taunted Demoke, who reached up and caused him to fall to his death.
Eshuoro is therefore in pursuit of Demoke. He is determined to attend Forest Head’s Welcoming for the Dead - in order to subvert it, and to gain his own ends. He is not interested in ‘torturing self-awareness’ out of Demoke, but in immediate and vengeful justice for the murder of Oremole, and the desecration of his sacred tree. Ogun, however, is equally determined to protect his servant Demoke. For Forest Head, the Supreme Being, this conflict too is part of the process of transition through the abyss, and the person being increasingly focused upon is the artist, the actor. Demoke. His impending crisis goes far beyond notions of (1) divine justice, (2) revenge, (3) social and political order. The limitations of each of these as, separately, the key to ‘selfapprehension’ will become clear as the structure of the second part of the play, the dance itself, is revealed.
The movement deeper and deeper into the forest metaphorically reflects the subsequent movement of the dance: there is a penetration to deeper levels of meaning. Present at the beginning of the second part of the play are the spaces of the three parallel worlds of the living, the ancestors and the unborn. These worlds are conceived as spaces, conterminous with each other, a translation of time into spatial terms. It is somewhat confusing, therefore, to speak of the ‘past’, the ‘present’ and the ‘future’ as a linear time scale. One has to imagine them as spatial worlds, and the movement between them is this crucial realm of transition, which Soyinka calls the fourth stage, which is also conceived of as a space.
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Eshuoro, whom we meet now for the first time, occupies all three spaces simultaneously. So does Ogun. However, their immediate concern is in the world of the living; and in a long harangue, which actually serves as a prologue to the dance, Eshuoro proclaims himself to be the embodiment of ‘the fear in men’s lives’. As an extension of this, he is to be seen as the agent of revenge, blind justice, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: inflexible. He rushes off after his long speech crying for revenge on Demoke.
The forest spirits are assembled to Welcome the Dead. The Forest Crier indicates that lives in the present were also lives in the past; and as they wait for the proceedings to begin Forest Head tells Aroni about leading the three town dwellers to this moment: ‘It was their latent violence which frightened me. I did not know what I would do if it involved me.’ But now these violent living appear so tame, after having been confronted with their true natures and confessed to their crimes, that even at this early point in the rite they could be sent home. ‘But they forget too easily,’ comments Forest Head.
Crime - guilt - confession - pardon - expiation: this may be a process for morality, but for Soyinka it stops short of full selfapprehension, the full awareness of being. Those who have the capacity for action, and a sensibility which perceives the inner contradictions in all existence, especially the creative artist, must go further. They must dare the fourth space, that ‘luminous area of transition’.
The performance space becomes the arena for this time-warp: Aroni calls forth the past, and the twelfth-century court of Mata Kharibu appears. Demoke and Rola are in their former lives: the Court Poet and Madame Tortoise. They are not forced to act out their former lives: this is that time. We, the audience, perceive an inter-meshing of relationships and a series of actions and decisions which now seem to have peculiar significance. Madame Tortoise, Mata Kharibu’s queen, whom he has abducted from a neighbouring king, has forced a war to be fought by Kharibu’s armies against the kingdom of her former husband to recover her trousseau. Madame Tortoise is vain, capricious and vindictive. The Court Poet is forced to climb on to the roof of the palace to fetch her canary. Mata Kharibu himself, together with his sycophantic court, is bent on imperialist aggression.
However, one warrior, a captain of his army, reasons out the
war’s futility and teaches his men to reason too. After a futile effort to get him to recant, the warrior is given to a slave-dealer to be sold into slavery, together with his men. Madame Tortoise offers him the opportunity of overthrowing Kharibu himself, but his antagonism towards her precludes such opportunism. His wife breaks into the throne room to beg the court for mercy. She is pregnant. Madame Tortoise orders the warrior’s castration before he is sold into slavery. The wife commits suicide.
The captain and his pregnant wife are, of course, the dead pair. They now have separate petitions for the world of the living, for their special horror has been their separate, but equally deprived, states in the world of the ancestors. The woman who died with the unborn child in her womb has been further disquieted in the world of the unborn to which her foetus belongs.
At the end of this re-creation of the past, Eshuoro and then Ogun arrive in the arena of performance. Eshuoro comments disparagingly on the Dead Man’s decision and actions as a living warrior. Ogun taunts and finally clashes with Eshuoro. They are separated by Forest Head who comments that soon he won’t know them apart from humans - ‘so closely have their habits grown on you’. The attempt by the two gods to transpose Demoke’s murder of Oremole onto a mythic plane that will reflect their rival archetypal powers is resisted by Forest Head, who nevertheless acknowledges that this mythic dimension is an integral part of the process. ‘Do not deny that all goes as you planned it,’ Forest Head tells Eshuoro, and adds to himself, ‘but only because it is my wish.’ We now enter the moment of transition. The space is carefully described in the stage directions:
{Back-scene lights up gradually to reveal a dark, wet, atmosphere, dripping moisture, and soft, moist soil. A palm-tree sways at a low angle, broken but still alive. Seemingly lightning-reduced stumps. Rotting wood all over the ground. . . . First there is a total stillness, emphasized by the sound of moisture dripping to the ground)-'^
Forest Head first of all questions the Dead Woman through his masked Questioner, who condemns her for committing suicide. She knows only hate. Then the Dead Man is brought for questioning. He, too, seeks redress for his endless restlessness. This time it is Forest Head who turns the Dead Man’s accusation upon him:
. . . Mulieru, I knew you
In the days of pillaging, in the days
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Of sudden slaughter, and the parting Of child and brother. I knew you In the days of grand destroying And you a part of the waste. . . .2^’
The Dead Man, Mulieru, is certainly not blameless. When he was a soldier he was part of the destruction; when he was castrated and sold into slavery as a eunuch he was well-fed and fat. The Questioner takes up the accusation, and, referring to Madame Tortoise’s offer to the condemned warrior to overthrow Kharibu, asks:
What did he prove, from the first when.
Power at his grasp, he easily Surrendered his manhood?^^
We discover that the masked Questioner is none other than Eshuoro, who has subverted the role. Forest Head contends that things will proceed as planned.
Then he does something significant: he dismisses ‘for the time being’ the Dead Man and his petition: ‘Let the one whose incompletion denies him rest be patient till the Forest has chorused the Future through the lips of the earth-beings.’ And the stage direction adds: {At this, the Dead Man makes a dumb distressed protest, but Aroni leads him off)P We never see him again. Who exactly is he, and how does he fit into the overall structure of the play? In the court of Mata Kharibu he is the one who thinks. His protest against the futile war, and against Mata Kharibu’s rule, is a highly intellectualized stance. He is engaged in verbal altercation by two other intellectuals in the court: the Physician and the Court Historian. The Physician is well-intentioned but limited by his lack of perception and lack of imagination. The warrior easily gets the better of him in the argument. The Court Historian - Adenebi - is different. His in-tellectualism is perverse: it is exercised without responsibility and justifies what cannot be justified. His rhetoric and his verbal dexterity are corrupting. However, there is also a certain stubborn arrogance on the part of the warrior himself in his own intellectual position. He is prepared to sacrifice his wife and unborn child, and even the men under his command, for it. Ultimately his intellec-tualism robs him of the power to act.
The Dead Man may be said to represent Soyinka’s view of the
limitations of political awareness. It is a position which Soyinka’s real protagonist in the play, Demoke, must completely transcend if he is to change anything in the future. The Dead Man has served his purpose. He has embodied a position which had to be stated so that it could be transcended. Now he can be dispensed with in the play.
Not so the Dead Woman and her unborn child. She is relieved of her burden of the unborn child so that ‘the tongue of the unborn, stilled for generations, be loosened’. At the same time the three town dwellers are masked and are now incorporated into the dance as forest spirits. This is the transition into the world of the unborn, the space of the future, where all the resources of the earth are wantonly plundered by man, as the words and the masquerade convey; while the Figure in Red, a bloody destiny, plays with the Dead Woman’s Half Child - the future - and wins. Because of man’s greed and avarice the future will be bloody.
Then comes chaos: the rivers run red, the winds cease, the sun is darkened at noon, the volcanoes - energy within the earth -cease. ‘Whose hand is this,’ asks Forest Head, ‘that reaches from the grave?’ The ants have joined the masquerade: they are suffering humanity:
Down the axis of the world, from
The whirlwind to the frozen drifts,
We are the ever legion of the world.
Smitten, for - ‘the good to come’.^s
But there is no ‘good to come’. The Ant Leader curses the future: after the scourge of silent suffering, there will be blind retaliation, like the sting in the tail of the scorpion. A bloody destiny. Again the Figure in Red appeals for the Half Child: a bloody destiny is claiming the future.
Forest Head orders the unmasking of the three town dwellers so that they may see the final enactment of the future with their natural eyes, and not with the eyes of the forest spirits.
The rite now embraces the collective mask of the Three Triplets, who join the dance one after the other. They embody the hideous future that the Ant Leader pronounced. The First Triplet is a manifestation of that ‘good to come’, for which numberless, nameless human beings have died. But it is hideous, grotesque, headless and no ‘good’ end at all. It is followed in by the Second Triplet: the Greater Cause that lies like a mirage, beyond all
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immediate ends. It, too, is grotesque: a huge, drooling head only, the complement of the headless First Triplet. The First and Second Triplets are linked to the world of the living by a comment of Forest Flead. The triplets, ‘perversions’ as he calls them, are born when ‘weak, pitiable criminals . . . acquire power over one another, and their instincts are fulfilled a thousandfold, an hundred thousandfold.’
There is a Third Triplet, ‘fanged and bloody’. ‘I am posterity. Can no one see on what milk I have been nourished?’ For the third time the Figure in Red, the embodiment of a bloody destiny, appeals for possession of the future, for the Half Child. We now discover that the Figure in Red is Eshuoro in another disguise, another god-concealing mask. The Half Child struggles to move towards its mother, the future seeking to escape from a blindly vengeful god, uncaring of humanity.
At this point it is perhaps necessary to explain the ‘round of “ampe”’ which is danced over and over again by the Triplets and the Interpreter (who proves to be one of Eshuoro’s minions in disguise). Oyin Ogunba describes ‘ampe’ thus:
The ‘ampe’ dance is a Yoruba children’s dance (‘ampe’ means ‘Do as I do, we are the same’) in which two children face each other, jump and make the same hand and foot movement uttering in unison the sound ‘pe pe pe pe pe pe shampe!’ and stretching corresponding feet to indicate perfect
agreement.29
The reader has to try and carry in his imagination the sound of the music, the movement of the dances and the visual spectacle of the masks. The scene has built up to this passionate pitch from the absolute stillness of the dripping scene which marked its beginning.
As the dance moves to its climax, Ogun has intervened, standing behind the mother and drawing the Half Child towards her. The frenzied ‘ampe’ distracts the Half Child, disarms him, then the first two Triplets catch him up and toss him to the Third Triplet. The Half Child is tossed back and forth as in a furious and lethal game. Demoke tries to save the Half Child - he intervenes to rescue the future from this chaotic and bloody disintegration - and finally, through the help of Ogun, gains possession of it. Demoke would give it back to the mother, but Eshuoro blocks the way. Both Eshuoro and Ogun appeal to the Forest Head for a judgement. He refuses, and in a short speech he expresses the fundamental
contradiction between the Creator’s omnipotence and man’s freewill: . to intervene is^to be guilty of contradiction and yet to
remain altogether unfelt is to make my long-rumoured ineffectuality complete. . . .’ He seeks to ‘torture self-awareness’ from their souls’ in the hope that new beginnings may indeed reflect some change. If Demoke really means to take the world of the unborn, the future, out of Eshuoro’s hands, and return it to the human world of the living, he will have to pay a heavy sacrifice. He gives the Half Child to its mother; and the last phase of the dance begins.
A sacrificial basket is strapped to his head by Eshuoro’s jester, and he is forced to climb to the top of his totem. This fear of heights - in European Romanticism often expressed in the symbol of a tower or mountain - is the fear of the abyss. Demoke’s fall, when Eshuoro sets fire to the tree, is the final moment of transition for him. He is caught by Ogun as he falls. It was Ogun who first dared the abyss; and it is his worshipper’s knowledge of his bridging of it by an exercise of the will that has led him to act and to exert his own will. Ogun, who is the embodiment of contradiction, gently lays him down, and the implements of iron that signify Ogun’s dual contradictory nature, the gun and the cutlass, he carefully lays by Demoke’s side.
Through Demoke’s act of will - his sacrifice - humankind edges forward, perhaps, from the blind vindictiveness and revenge of Mata Kharibu’s kingdom, embodied in the god-head Eshuoro -the ‘fear in men’s lives’. It is not to be by way of what Soyinka sees as barren intellectualism (the role and nature of the Dead Man) which is presented with its inevitable opposite in the person of Adenebi and his corrupting cleverness. Instead, it is by way of confronting and embracing the contradiction embodied m the man of action, the creative artist: creativity and destruction. Demoke creates the totem; he kills Oremole his assistant. To exercise the will is to act. Demoke acts: first, by carving the totem (acting under divine inspiration); second, by killing young Oremole (acting in passion); third, by intervening to save the Half Child (an act of compassion); fourth, by giving the Half Child to the mother and fifth, as a willing sacrifice, as in a rite of passage which will carry the burden of his people across the void. ‘Willing’ is used in two senses: Demoke has agreed (is willing) to be the sacrifice; and he is also compelling (willing) his spirit through the darkness.
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Opera Wonyosi
Opera Wonyosi was first performed at the University of Ife’s convocation ceremony on 16 December 1977. The title plays on the meanings of the word ‘opera’ in Yoruba and English. Accented thus: opera, it means in Yoruba ‘The fool buys. . . .’ In English it refers to a very elaborate and expensive form of theatre in which every word is sung to the accompaniment of a large orchestra. Wonyosi was a very expensive type of lace (it cost about $1000 a metre!) for which there was a craze at this time in Nigerian high society. In a prefatory note to the manuscript of the play which circulated after its production, Soyinka writes: 'Opera Wonyosi has been written at a high period of Nigeria’s social decadence, the like of which will probably never again be experienced. . . .’
His play is modelled on two European plays: Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper {The Threepenny Opera) (1928), which itself was a twentieth century version of a play composed exactly two hundred years before - John Gay’s The Beggar s Opera (1728).^^ Both titles, like Soyinka’s, are ironical; and reflect the fact that both the plays were critical of their societies. Gay satirized the Whig ascendancy in London, which was dominated by Sir Robert Walpole, the First Minister of the Cabinet who advised the German-born King of England, George I; Brecht satirized the excesses of the Weimar Republic in Germany, which was set up after the defeat of Germany in the First World War and before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
Neither satire was revolutionary. Gay certainly did not seek the dissolution of the aristocracy - or of the emergent bourgeoisie. His satire was directed against individuals and his play aimed at personal reform. Brecht, however, did intend a more fundamental political impact when presenting his play. Using Gay’s story of double-dealing and betrayal amongst the criminals and urban destitute, Brecht’s play attempts a class analysis and is an indictment of capitalism and the late bourgeois world. Ironically, his play has proved very popular with audiences of the very class he is seeking to undermine through his satire. Like Gay’s play, which had phenomenal success on London stages for over a century, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera made his reputation as a playwright in Europe and the play has been translated into a number of European languages and frequently revived in the west since 1928.
Part of the reason for the success of both these plays is the music. Gay’s play was a. new art form when it first appeared: a ‘ballad opera’. That is to say, the play was not a full opera in which every word was sung - indeed, another aspect of its satire was its attack on the fashionable Italian opera of the time - but a play interspersed with songs. The words of the songs were related to the play - they were usually ironical and focused the criticism of people or society - but the tunes were the familiar and popular ballad tunes of the time. Some of these ballads were genuine folk ballads; but most were songs recently composed and currently popular in London in the 1720s. The tunes, therefore, were very melodious, variously haunting or lively, while the songs themselves were witty and satirical. The art form of the ballad opera has remained popular since Gay introduced it - it is now known in North America and Britain as the ‘musical’, though musicals tend to be sentimental rather than satirical.
The music for Brecht’s play was composed by Kurt Weill, then a young composer and friend of Brecht, who, like Brecht, later had to flee his homeland Germany when Hitler came to power.Weill composed his music jointly with Brecht who wrote the sharp acerbic words of the songs. He used jazz and some popular music, whilst striving for a more profound - and social - meaning through the music. The songs of The Threepenny Opera have had a profound appeal for audiences. The opening song, ‘Mack the Knife’, later popularized by Louis Armstrong’s rendering of it, is well known in its own right, and Soyinka uses it as the opening song for Opera Wonyosi, with words adapted to the Nigerian situation.
All three operas are set in the underworld of criminals, pimps,^ prostitutes and beggars, and the conflict is between two underworld characters for more power and a wider sphere of operations. One of the men is known as the King of the Beggars. He has turned the begging of the deformed and distressed into a profitable and well-run business. His power comes from the cynical manipulation of the processes of the law; he both protects criminals and betrays them, and he ‘protects’ the beggars - or has them beaten up. In Soyinka’s play this man is Chief Anikura; in Brecht’s and Gay’s plays he is called Peachum. The other man is a big-time robber: in Gay’s play a highway robber; in all three plays the leader of a gang of robbers, known as Captain MacHeath, Mack the Knife, Mackie.
In Brecht’s play, and after him in Soyinka’s play, both these
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men struggle for supremacy within the unbroken continuum of the criminal, professional and business worlds fox a monopoly of the pickings. Brecht laboriously tried to show that, under capitalism, there is no difference between the morality of legal business practice and of crime. Capitalism itself is state crime. ‘What,’ asks one of the characters in The Threepenny Opera, ‘is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?’ Soyinka is less concerned to prove this link than simply to demonstrate it in a more general indictment of greed, materialism and exploitation, in a system in which ‘socialists’ are as culpable as ‘capitalists’.
In the story, MacHeath marries the daughter of Chief Anikura, Polly. This brings Anikura into direct conflict with MacHeath, not simply because of the abduction of his daughter, or for her sake, but because it puts the secrets of his business into MacHeath’s hands and so allows him to gain control of it. Anikura gets MacHeath accused and arrested - twice. The first time he is released by the machinations of Polly, who has taken over MacHeath’s criminal operations, turned them into legal big business and now runs the gang as a limited liability company. She corrupts the judiciary. In response, Anikura corrupts the very law-makers themselves, who overthrow the ruling of the judiciary and have MacHeath rearrested and condemned to death by firing squad. Mackie is saved at the very last moment by an imperial pardon - imperial, because all the action of the play takes place in the Nigerian Quarter in Bangui during the run-up to Bokasa’s coronation in the short-lived Central African Empire. It turns out that his pardon was partly engineered by Anikura himself. Polly has become the brains behind MacHeath’s enterprises, whose scale of operations is now vastly increased by being amalgamated with the multinationals. She and her father are now members of that comprador class which leeches society and of which, in real life. Emperor Bokasa was the apotheosis.
Opera Wonyosi is - not necessarily by intent - a satirical inversion of Madmen and Specialists. It shows how peace, and oil wealth (which succeeded the Nigerian civil war) can mutilate the population, emotionally and physically, just as much as the war did. War and trade are part of the same process, and are inseparable from each other. The Old Man, who sought to enlighten the maimed of the war about the nature of exploitation, has become the totally cynical Chief Anikura, ‘King’ of beggars within a society in which everyone begs. The mendicants who
struggled forward to self-awareness, have become the people they parodied: the professionals. Now, the politicians, the lawyers, the professors, play the role of beggars; and by begging, in the gutter, learn how to beg and grovel for high office. There is a deeper irony here, for those parodying the beggars are the ones who made the real beggars. Bero, the specialist, and his sister, have in this play become husband and wife, with their roles reversed. Polly, Anikura’s daughter, is the aggressor, bent on acquiring economic wealth and power by any means. She is also an example of what Si Bero, pliant and uselessly good, in Madmen and Specialists, could so easily become. As Polly’s parents comment: ‘She’s such a sensitive child you don’t want to mention blood to her.’ MacHeath’s execution (which doesn’t happen, in fact) is a pseudosacrifice; and a demonstration of how sacrifice can be degraded into a cheap public spectacle appealing to not the noblest but the basest instincts in man.
The only people in Madmen and Specialists who are not represented are the earth mothers and, indeed, what is absent altogether from the satire is the metaphysical dimension. This has some significance when we come to consider how Soyinka’s criticism of his society has developed. But before we can do this we need to see how the very specific satire is used to develop a criticism of Soyinka’s society. For this play is not about man or society, the African or African society. It is a critique that is specific to time and place: Nigeria at the end of the 1970s.
The structure of Opera Wonyosi is sequential and quite simple. The play is given a theatrical ‘frame’ by Dee-Jay, the disc-jockey or master of ceremonies. He introduces the play, and indicates (1) its musical form; (2) its begging theme - ‘. . . that’s what the whole nation is doing - begging for a slice of the action’; (3) its topicality and (4) its satirical targets - ‘I’m yet to decide whether such a way-out opera should be named after the beggars, the army, the bandits, the police, the cash-madams, the students, the trade-unionists, the alhajis and hajias, the aladura, the academics, the holy patriarchs and unholy heresiarchs. . . .’
Dee-Jay also functions as a narrator, providing a link between the scenes; and at the climax of the play it is he who reads out Bokasa’s proclamation announcing the amnesty for criminals, which enables MacHeath to escape the firing squad. Each scene contains one or two songs which serve to widen the relevance of the events in that scene and to extend the satire.
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The first scene is set in Anikura’s place which is known as ‘Home from home for the homeless’, in the Nigerian Quarter in Bangui. His business is a sort of beggars’ union, or rather, a beggars’ protection society: if they don’t let him ‘protect’ them they get beaten up or handed over to the police. He is helped in running the business by his wife, known as De Madam. There are various types of begging outfit. Anikura exhibits these to a new recruit to the business: ‘the Cheerful Cripple: Victim of Modern Road Traffic’; ‘War casualty’; Tapha-Psychotic; Victim of Modern Industry. It is not the beggars who are being satirized, but the system which creates these types of mental and physical deformity and a song about the ‘Cement Bonanza’ in Nigeria in 1977 makes the satire specific by referring to the scandal when hundreds of cargo ships waited outside Lagos harbour for months to off-load a ludicrously large order by the army for cement. The song’s title is: ‘Big man chop cement; cement chop small man’.
The structure of the song emphasizes the irony. There are three verses, in which the labourers unloading the cement round-the-clock sing of their luck at getting what seems like good pay and overtime. The refrain, however, expresses the labourers’ later realization that the cement fumes have given them Fibrositis and drastically shortened their lives:
And the overtime pay comes to mere chicken feed When the cement tycoon has filled out his greed.
The song is sung by Anikura’s beggars. Like the songs in Brecht’s play, the songs in Opera Wonyosi are not meant to be sung naturalistically. Instead, the play stops, the people come on to the stage, and the song is sung as a ‘number’ at a pop concert. The message of the song is therefore addressed directly to the audience. It is a comment on the situations within the play, and a focusing of the satire. In the cement song the satire is attacking two levels of greed: the knowing and culpable greed of the cement tycoon, and the ignorant greed, on a much more limited scale, of the labourer.
Ahmed, destitute and therefore a new recruit to the business, is given his outfit, then we are given the first development in the story. Polly, the only child of Chief Anikura and De Madam, is not to be found at home and her parents very much fear that she has run off and married Captain MacHeath. A second number is sung, this time by the Chief and De Madam: ‘The song of ngh-ngh-ngh’.
This is the sound one makes which, together with a shake of the head, means ‘never!’, ‘not at all!’. Again like Brecht’s and Weill’s songs, this links the words of the song to a physical gesture, so that the song is ‘acted’ through as well as sung through. ‘The song of ngh-ngh-ngh’ comments that anyone’s daughter will marry as wealthy a man as she can. This is contradictory - deliberately - to the familiar theme of many African plays in which the beautiful daughter is being forced to marry a wealthy old man, when the only man she wants to marry is the young guy she loves but who is terribly poor. No, says the song, ngh-ngh-ngh. For the daughters of today true love is finished and anyway, everybody is a thief and only the big men get away with it:
We know it’s the big fish the net’s sure to miss While your small-time bandit earns lead perforations!
Having taken their time to sing this song, De Madam and Anikura then rush off to search for Polly.
Polly has indeed run off with Mackie, the Captain, and the second scene shows her wedding, in the stables of the Polo Club. This place is transformed into a reception room by a vast array of consumer durables, stolen for the occasion of the wedding by Mack’s gang. Mack and Polly seek the glamour of the good life. Mack is determined to whip his gang of crooks into shape and to give them more class. However, the whole scene is a debasement of this expensive life-style, and both Mack and Polly reveal during the course of the scene that they can be just as coarse and unscrupulous as any other crook when the occasion demands. Style is merely a thin covering over the avarice. Mack comments disparagingly of one of his gang: ‘He eats caviar with a knife. With a blood-stained knife!’ We have an image of the society and it refers to everyone: refinement is only bought with the blood of others.
The prophet Jerubabel comes in, and by means of spurious analogies he is able to justify his being there to bless the marriage. The whole company then sing a ‘hymn’ to the happy couple which expresses the hope that Mack will never end up as the main attraction at the Bar Beach show - a reference to the public executions which regularly took place at this time at Bar Beach in Lagos. (On the whole only small-time crooks were shot.)
The Commissioner of Police joins the wedding party. In the play he is variously called Tiger Brown (his name in Brecht’s play) or Smith. Soyinka reserves a special loathing for this character. He is
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totally venal and completely corrupt; and in his train the whole police force is committed to corruption. In fact it has become so hot for him back home in Nigeria that he has been loaned indefinitely to Bokasa and the Central African Empire. He is also very stupid. Mack and Smith/Brown have a bond which supposedly goes back to when they were both soldiers in the civil war. They sing a song, which is heavily ironical, about their spirit of camaraderie: ‘Khaki is a man’s best friend’. Again, the structure of the song reflects its irony. The four verses sing of patriotism, glory, power, while the refrain or chorus sings of the reality of the civil war and comments that while the nation is one, the soldier’s bodies are definitely not:
We know who won and who got undone No thought of keeping his body one It’s scattered from Bendel to Bonny Town.
The song satirizes the rhetoric of the Nigerian civil war: neither side was really fighting for an ideal but for possession of the oil. What has it got to do with the wedding which is taking place? On one level it reflects the materialism which lies beneath occasions such as weddings: marriage and war are business propositions and the reality is often different from the high-flown rhetoric. The scene has shown us, therefore, the exact nature of the relationship between Polly and MacHeath, and of the relationship between MacHeath and the Commissioner of Police. The ‘innocent and sensitive’ young girl has married the master crook for what she can get out of it; and the most wanted criminal consorts with the Chief of Police!
In the next scene, which is by way of an interlude, Dee-Jay introduces us to Emperor Bokasa himself. It must be remembered that the play was written while this grotesque head of state was still in power, and this scene was no doubt intended as a vicious attack on a ruling African leader, whom Soyinka totally despises. Bokasa is created as a parody, but with the sense that the real Bokasa is already a parody of himself. He marches onto the stage with his squad and initially behaves like a sergeant-major. Then he addresses the audience, not as in a public address, but as though he was standing outside his society and commenting on himself with brutal frankness, boasting of his viciousness. Then he transforms his speech into a dance in which his squad mimes trampling people to death. Bokasa finally joins in, with immense energy and
enjoyment, yelling at the band: ‘Give me that Lagosian lynch-mob rallying rhythm!’
Brown - or Smith - Bokasa’s (Nigerian) Chief of Police has been summoned by Bokasa to watch this display; and his amused presence throughout the ‘imperial stomp’ reflects the collusion with Bokasa of at least some members of Nigerian society and the Nigerian body politic. At the end of the stomp the story is moved on a little, for Brown is given specific instructions to avoid any riots or disturbances by the poor during his coronation.
The next scene, set once again in Anikura’s establishment, reveals Brown carrying out his instructions from Bokasa. He hopes to sort out Anikura and lock up his beggars for the duration. A hint has been dropped in Brown’s ear by MacHeath that Anikura was planning something. Anikura turns the tables on this dumb Chief of Police: unless MacHeath is arrested immediately, thousands and thousands of the poor will march in front of the royal chariot and be filmed on television. The threat of the poor disrupting Boky’s coronation is Anikura’s ploy to force Brown to arrest MacHeath. Such a demonstration is not intended by Anikura to benefit the poor whom he controls.
A song at this point reflects the cheapness of life for ordinary Nigerians. It is called ‘Who killed Nio-Niga?’. Soyinka has based it on a famous syncopated marching song: ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’. In the play, the song is highly schematic. A beggar sings the first verse, ‘Who killed Nio-Niga / I, said Sir Bigger. . . .’; the second verse, ‘Who caught Nio-Niga /1, said Chief Freelance. . . .’ is sung by Tiger Brown; the third verse, ‘Who heard Nio-Niga/I, said Professor . . .’ by Anikura; the fourth verse, ‘Who sold Nio-Niga/I, said Ma Trader. . . .’ is sung by De Madam; the fifth verse, ‘Who carved Nio-Niga / I, said Doc Morgans. . . .’ by another Beggar, and so on. When it comes to the last verse, ‘Who’ll solve Case Niga?’ the song abruptly stops, and there is silence, while everyone who has characterized a verse goes earnestly about his business. The stage direction describes it thus:
[‘Bigger’ puffs his cigar smugly, ‘Army’ salutes, ‘Police’ drills, ‘Doc’ sheathes his stethoscope. ]
The chorus, which throughout the song has sung of the callous lack of interest of people, now finally turns its criticism on the audience in the theatre:
Poor Nio-Niga is a-rotting on the Route A2 And a stream of cars passing - including you And a long stream of cars of the New Republic.
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The next scene, 5, takes place back in the Polo Club stables, now Mack’s headquarters, and converted into a Board Room by clearing the wedding table, around which are seated Polly, Mack and members of the gang: ‘The solemnity of the scene suggests a parody of a Board meeting’. Polly has just tipped off her husband that her father is about to have him arrested. During the course of the scene, Polly takes over as Boss of the gang, now called the Firm, and asserts her authority physically over the gang with the help of a heavy ledger. She proposes that the criminal operations become respectable by affiliating with a new multinational corporation with special holdings in developing countries. Shares have already been bought by Polly for various people in high position in Bangui as an investment against any future charges of corruption.
At the same time, Polly dresses Mack in Wonyosi - the amazingly expensive lace - and the rest of the gang in slightly less expensive blue lace. On the stage, therefore, before the audience’s eyes, the gang of crooks is transformed into a group of Nigerian businessmen. Brown comes in to arrest Mack, who is nevertheless able to make his escape in his Wonyosi outfit. Polly and Brown spar with each other, verbally, over the size of the bribe to get Mack off once he is arrested, and then Polly sings a song about her transformation into a tough business lady.
The song is accompanied by a dance, performed by a chorus of women, who first sing of the ‘attack trade’ which was carried on by Nigerian women across enemy lines during the war. In the second chorus they mime, with the help of Brown’s officers who feign being shot and dying, the process of trading in the midst of death. The stage direction describes the dance: ‘(. . . The women march over them, stop to empty their pockets, take off their watches and carry on business throughout the chorus ...)’. This song and mime-dance ends the first half of the play; and Soyinka extends the irony by having the women immediately emerge in the interval among the audience selling to its members those wares which they have just ‘robbed’ from the ‘corpses’.
In the first scene of the second half of the play Mack, who is still on the run and not yet arrested, visits the brothel of his favourite harlot, Sukie. De Madam anticipates his visit there and so lays her trap to get him arrested. This involves bribing Sukie. The action is deliberately contrived and artificially arranged. In counterpoint to the deals and arrangements is the shadowy figure of Jenny Leveller who scrubs the steps of the brothel and refuses to take bribes. She
sings a powerful song about how, one day, she will take revenge on society. (Compare this, jn passing, with the Leader of the Ants in A Dance of the Forests.) The essence of her role and the theme of her song both come from Brecht’s play, though the character there is integral to the plot. In Soyinka’s play, Jenny Leveller is only an incidental part of the scene, but stands as an angry comment on it and on the whole of society.
Scene 7 is in the prison. Mack has been arrested. He tries to bribe, with his Wonyosi outfit, his gaoler, a fellow-countryman named Dogo, who in the end insists on hard cash together with the suit. Brown, then Polly, visit Mack; then Mack’s other wife, Lucy, the daughter of the Prison Governor, forces her way in, and Mack has to do some fast talking as the rival wives press their claims for his person. In the end it is Polly who organizes his escape, though not through bribes at the lower end of the social scale but by a stay of execution signed by the Deputy Chief Justice himself. Polly extracts from Mack a promise that he will become ‘respectable’: ‘No treacherous women, no dangerous adventures. Let’s go legitimate like the bigger crooks.’ ‘It’s the easy life for me’, which is a song about self-interest at all levels, closes the scene.
So Mack gets let off, on a technical point relating to secret societies. The next scene is back in Anikura’s establishment, where the Chief is determining on new ways of getting MacHeath arrested. He has managed to lure to his place someone who holds real power in the state. Colonel Moses, who advises Bokasa on all his decrees and who is also on loan from the Nigerian army-government. The satire changes at this point from lampoon and parody to something much more serious, direct and personally specific. Colonel Moses is not caricatured. He is soft-spoken and exudes authority rather than violent aggression. Everybody instinctively defers to him and the beggars positively grovel.
Anikura’s proposition that he slightly bend the laws he has made so that the ruling of the judiciary can be overturned in MacHeath’s case, meets with a frigid reception. Moses rises to go. However, at this point and quite by accident, his true nature is revealed: he is an actual sadist who gains sexual pleasure from beating people. He prowls the streets at night to find victims among the poor whom he can beat for his pleasure. Anikura now has him in his grasp.
It has been revealed during the course of the scene that many of Anikura’s ‘beggars’ are in fact, professors, lawyers, doctors.
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agriculturalists and so on, who are learning in Anikura’s establishment how to beg for high office. A powerful image has been established on the stage of these elites, dressed like beggars, licking the shoes of the army in the person of this sadistic Moses. Now it seems possible to frame Colonel Moses, at least in Bangui with its paranoid and violent Emperor; and the beggar-professionals plan how to get him hooked. The Nigerian army itself is to be accused of being a secret society on the basis of the army’s repeated verdict that those involved in civil riots and civilian murders were 'unknown soldiers’.
The play has now become a direct attack upon the army, mounted, paradoxically, through an extremely reticent figure, whose characterization lacks any extravagance on stage, and who is therefore in marked contrast to the frenzy and excesses of the other characters. Soyinka has withheld parody from the portrayal of Moses. Why? Perhaps he feels that we can scorn and ridicule the corruption, the begging for high position, and the idiocies of Bokasa, but when we come to the army in Nigeria, its malignant nature, while it ruled, existed beyond satire and parody.
As far as the story is concerned, Anikura’s case against Moses is not especially convincing - even though Moses himself is convinced by it, and he goes off to have MacHeath rearrested.
The final scene is Mack’s execution by firing squad. The frenzy and parody return to the stage with a speeded-up version of the music for the song ‘Who killed Nio-Niga?’ and everybody cheering the crowning of Bokasa, while his goon squad hunt out troublemakers. The coronation is made synonymous with the public executions, staged as part of the festivities. The passion of the crowd for grotesque public slaughter knows no bounds, and the public fall over each other in order to get good seats. Dee-Jay acts as a roving news-reporter, and allows everyone he interviews to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Those connected with the condemned MacHeath all adopt suitable public poses: Polly is in tears, and De Madam is threatening to take her home; the whores of Mack’s favourite brothel have been converted to the CSU (Christian Scripture Union) and do a chorus-line dance to the hymn ‘Just a closer walk with thee’. The various religions claim Mackie till they hear he has no money, then they give up. Mack’s last request is to be allowed to sing a song: ‘Mackie’s farewell’. In it he attacks both Bokasa and the mindless, sycophantic public.
Then Bokasa’s courier arrives, granting an amnesty not to political detainees but to^criminals - the final parody of the play.
Anikura steps forward - steps out of the play, in fact - and gives a concluding speech in which, perhaps with the voice of the playwright, he warns against the easy solutions, like the Emperor’s courier arriving with a pardon, to society’s problems. He warns the audience against radicals and socialists:
Beware certain well-tuned voices
That clamour loudest: ‘Justice-for-alF
A ragged coat does not virtue make
- Here I stand as your prime example -
He warns them against Highway robbers and their more respectable counterparts, the business tycoons:
Nor is the predator a champion of rights,
A brave Robin Hood equalizing the loot. . . .
In proof my son-in-law is more than ample.
Instead, we have to look and see who is really benefiting in the society - ‘Who really accumulates and exercises / Power over others?’. In the end it is power, not money, that counts, Anikura’s final statement is unequivocal:
I tell you -
Power is delicious. {Turns sharply) Heel!
This last word is the command of the master to his trained dog to follow close by his heels. The beggars, like dogs, shuffle towards him and cringe by his feet. Then there is a massive procession, headed by Bokasa in his chariot drawn by slaves, behind whom everybody falls in rank order, to the tune that opened the play. Mack the Knife.
Anikura’s final statement - ‘Power is delicious’ - takes us to the heart of Opera Wonyosi, and also sets the play apart from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Anyone who seeks to control the lives of other people is, for Soyinka, suspect, no matter where he is on the political spectrum. The attack in Opera Wonyosi is not on a particular economic system, though there is a fairly obvious attack on the link between the business world and the criminal world in capitalist Nigeria, which Soyinka does not attempt to gainsay. It is there because of the oil wealth which engendered the headlong pursuit of material possessions on an unprecedented scale.
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However, Soyinka wishes to go beyond this, to try to determine what actually drives a man, or a woman, to go on acquiring wealth when they already have more than they could ever consume. He concludes that, in the end, money means power, rather than possessions. And power, unlike wealth which is limited and limiting in its possibilities, knows no constraints.
For Soyinka, the exercise of power over others corresponds with man’s base instincts. In his plays he returns to this theme over and over again. We have seen in A Dance of the Forests, Forest Head, referring to humankind as weak, pitiable criminals, saying to the three Triplets:
You perversions are born when they acquire power over one another, and their instincts are fulfilled a thousandfold, a hundred thousandfold.
In Madmen and Specialists Bero tells his sister it was the first step to power you understand. Power in its purest sense.' He later tells his father: i do not need illusions. I control lives.’ And Anikura, finally, states it bluntly: ‘Power is delicious.’
Soyinka’s obsession with the seemingly inevitable abuse of power suggests that perhaps instinctively he has some affinities with anarchism. Anarchists seek to abolish the state and to replace it with free association and voluntary co-operation of individuals and groups. However, in Africa, and in other parts of the third world, the integrity of the nation-state is the most basic principle of political life. It is the corner-stone of the OAU’s charter. State boundaries are defended against aggression by neighbouring states, to the extent of bringing in non-African powers; and within the state, forces that would divide it are passionately resisted. The nation-state is perceived as a positive entity, for it transcends narrow tribalism and ethnocentricity, and it guarantees some sort of survival in the modern world.
It is, therefore, to be expected that although Soyinka attacks power structures, he does not specifically attack the nation-state, either in the abstract or in, for him, its concretization as Nigeria. Right from Nigeria’s inception, when he himself was a young playwright at the beginning of his career, he has espoused liberation yet been intensely critical of post-independence rhetoric. He has held in creative tension the liberation ethos of Nigeria as a nation and its restricting reality. At the beginning of the chapter we suggested that his search for ‘oneness’ (generated by his Yoruba metaphysics) and his passionate response to suffering and
injustice (shaping his profound sensibility) are held in opposition within him and that it is this very opposition which generates his art. The other, political opposition, between the awareness of liberation and the experience of abuse, both embodied in the new nation-state, only reinforces that dichotomy. His plays are protest plays. They are also works of art.
Notes and references
1 A great deal has been written about Soyinka’s work, by Nigerians and non-Nigerians. An early study by Eldred Duro-sinmi Jones, The Writing of Wole Soyinka (London: Heine-mann Educational Books 1973), remains valid for the work discussed, as does Gerald Moore, Wole Soyinka (London: Evans 1971). James Gibbs is compiling a cumulative bibliography on Soyinka, and the scope of this is discussed in James Gibbs, ‘Wole Soyinka: bio-bibliography’, Africana Library Journal, vol. 3 no. 1. Some of the most interesting critical commentary appears as articles and papers and Gibbs has recently collected some of these into an anthology: James Gibbs (ed.). Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka (Washington: Three Continents Press 1980).
However, students should always refer back to Soyinka’s own work of criticism and philosophy: Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976).
2 See, for example, Soyinka’s campaign against Idi Amin, the former ruler of Uganda, which he organized through the columns of Transition (Accra). Soyinka was editor through nos. 45-50, and then changed its name to ChTndaba. For the attack on Amin see, for example. Transition no. 49 (July-September 1975).
3 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976), p. 46.
4 Wole Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists (London: Methuen 1971), p. 37.
5 ibid., p. 36.
6 ibid., p. 49.
7 ibid.
8 ibid., p. 76.
9 ibid., p. 77.
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10 ibid.
11 ibid., p. 61.
12 ibid., p. 60.
13 ibid., p. 75.
14 Soyinka, The ritual archetype’, in Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 12.
15 Soyinka, Madmen and Specialists, pp. 71-2.
16 ibid., p. 77.
17 Soyinka, The ritual archetype’, p. 30.
18 Soyinka, The fourth stage’, in Myth, Literature and the African World, p. 30.
19 ibid., p. 150.
20 ibid., p. 149.
21 ibid., p. 150.
22 ibid., p. 148.
23 I am using the first edition of the play, Wole Soyinka, A Dance of the Forests (London and Ibadan: Oxford University Press 1963). All page numbers refer to this edition. There are some minor changes in later editions, particularly with regard to the ending.
24 ibid., p. 68.
25 ibid., p. 70.
26 ibid., p. 71.
27 ibid., p. 72.
28 ibid., p. 78.
29 Oyin Ogunba, The Movement of Transition (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press 1975), p. 92.
30 The best text of Gay’s The Beggar s Opera is in the edition in the Regents Restoration Drama Series, edited by Edgar V. Roberts (London: Edward Arnold 1969).
An English translation of Brecht’s play is Ralph Manheim and John Willett (eds.) 1979, Bertolt Brecht: collected plays Vol. 2, Part 2, New York: Vintage Books, and London, Eyre Methuen. Another translation, by Desmond I. Vesey and Eric Bentley, is in Bertolt Brecht, Plays Vol. I (London: Methuen 1960). While I was writing this book Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi was not yet published, and I worked from a production copy privately circulated from Ife by Soyinka at the time that the play was produced. It is now published by Rex Collings (London, 1981).
31 Thereisalengthy biography of Kurt Weill: Ronald Sanders, The
Days Grow'Short: the Life and Music of Kurt Weill (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1980). Perhaps a more interesting publication, in terms of a composer-dramatist collaboration to produce socialist songs, is Eric Bentley, Songs of Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler (New York: Oak Publications 1967). It is a collection of songs in German and in English together with Eisler’s musical score.
7 The art theatre political plays
Mokai Ajibade; The Chattering and the Song Osohsan
Two Nigerians who are influenced by Wole Soyinka and, in their separate ways, critical of Nigeria are Yemi Ajibade and Femi Osohsan. Ajibade is, perhaps, better known for his play Parcel Post, which was professionally staged in London - it is set in London among Nigerian expatriates - than for his plays written in and about Nigeria. Osohsan is a well-established literary hgure on the left and his plays are very popular among students. The influence of Soyinka is seen right away in each playwright’s seriousness of dramatic purpose. This is manifest in the content of their plays and in their approach to the craft of playwriting. Both explore a number of dramatic forms and effectively combine wit and comedy with their seriously intended social criticism.
Ajibade’s play MokaP (which is the one we are going to consider) reveals a close observation of people, but in symbolic rather than naturalistic roles and relationships, and it reflects a deeply rooted pessimism about their increasing ability to co-exist. Osohsan has structured The Chattering and the Song^ (the play of his we are going to consider) to demonstrate a critique of the Nigerian social formation, but through a group of highly individualized intellectuals. Both plays depict a movement in society towards revolution, as well as the attempts by the established order in society to contain and neutralize this revolutionary tendency. At critical moments both plays are concerned with the claims of the traditional beliefs upon the minds of the people. These beliefs are seen as potentially positive, but in the present time distorted. Both plays, therefore, look back, while at the same time looking forward to the future, as Soyinka’s do.
Ajibade focuses his play on the Cult from Akilagun. This is not specific. It is neither one of a number of cults or secret societies nor a particular one, but rather ‘cultism’ in essence. It could also
be seen as a metaphysical embodiment of ultimate reality, a potential moral force, 'a linking of earth with man, and an expression in its masquerades and sacrifices of wholeness. But the Cult itself has been corrupted in the modern world and is now no better than Christianity, portrayed in the play as a revivalist sect. Nor is it any better than the state, which is depicted as opposing military forces or factions. The Cult conflicts with Christianity, and then both are subjugated to the will of the military state, which itself is being destroyed by internal conflict.
The action of the play takes place on a symbolic level; and the central character, the eponymous hero, Mokai, is also symbolically conceived. He has been born into the Cult. His mother, lyaja, was a special Cult member - an earth mother, in fact - with unique powers and gifts. As a young woman with her new baby she lived with the Old Wizard, referred to by both during the course of the play, in the iittle cottage on the edge of the Savannah’. A tornado then swept it away, and Mokai became separated from his mother. When we first meet him in the play, as an adult, he is ignorant of anything other than the memory of the iittle cottage on the edge of the Savannah’, but is searching for his mother. In his quest he is caught, ironically, by the Cult as a ‘stranger’ whom they intend to sacrifice in their masquerade. However, he displays a superior physical and moral strength, and so Cult members seek to possess him within the Cult. He escapes, and continues with his search. The Pastor of the Christian sect at Olifie, together with his flock, recognize a spiritual quality in him - he is given the title ‘The Meek One of the Lord’ - and they seek to exploit him, the Pastor spiritually, and the young women of the flock sexually. Mokai accepts whatever role is given him by others. lyaja, a Christian now in the Pastor’s flock, fails to recognize him as her son, but is able to recognize him as a strong character who reminds her of her Cult past. The Cult members, who are pursuing Mokai, then clash with the Christians over ‘owning’ him.
This is interrupted by gunshots and the manifestation of a military presence. There is a brief scene in which an officer, obviously on the run, tries to rob Mokai of his bundle of clothes; it is later reported that they have in fact changed clothes. Mokai is captured by RATS (Revolutionary Association of Tough Soldiers) who have staged a coup, then captured again, in a counter ambush by the reactionary military forces who assert that he is General Baado, the head of state. Throughout all this Mokai is beaten and
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assaulted. He must, to serve the military’s purpose, be put back into shape. This task is entrusted to Professor Tpmwuruwuru who quite unequivocally symbolizes the comprador Nigerian petty bourgeoisie.
The military, in reasserting their authority over the coup faction, make the Cult members and the Christians swear an oath of allegiance and form spurious organizations like the Lord’s Brigade and the Farmers’ Brigade, and so on. Towards the end of the play, Mokai’s own personality emerges through his ‘reconstituted’ character as General Baado; but as a moral force it is now powerless. lyaja realizes, too late, that he is her son but Mokai never knows her to be his mother. Before the end of the play he has divested himself of his uniform and probably makes his escape, though lyaja and the Cult members mourn his apparent death.
If Mokai, as man in the new African nation-state, is searching for his identity, then it is also true to say that within the state sects, factions and affiliations are searching for Mokai - but so that each can reconstitute him in their own image.
If Soyinka embodies in his protagonists the duality of creation and destruction, Ajibade’s Mokai embodies at one and the same time a moral stance and an amoral compliance. This duality is manifest whenever he acts: seeking his mother; escaping from sacrifice; exchanging clothing. His actions tend to reveal in others hypocrisy and self-deceit.
Osofisan’s play occupies a space less redolent with symbolic meaning than either Soyinka’s ‘fourth stage’ or Ajibade’s ‘clearing in the bush’. It is set in a middle-class house belonging to the play’s main character, a playwright and song-writer called Sontri. He is involved in protest against the bourgeoisie, to which class he and the other characters in the play nonetheless belong. Sontri is a member of the subversive and outlawed ‘Farmers’ Movement’, which aims at the government’s overthrow. The play takes place on the eve of Sontri’s wedding to Yajin.
The critical action of the play is presented as a rehearsal of a play devised by Yajin for the eve of her wedding which concerns the confrontation in 1885 between the rebel Latoye and ‘the famous Alafin Abiodun’. Another character, Mokan, who was at university with them and formerly Yajin’s fiance, turns out at the end of this rehearsal to be a member of the secret police. He has used the rehearsal as an excuse to arrest Sontri and Yajin for subversive activities. Metaphorically, the play-within-a-play is the
rehearsal for the revolution. During the rehearsal, in which the characters are improvising their parts, there is a long speech by Leje, the character playing the rebel Latoye, about how the wealthy have used religion to secure themselves in power:
For centuries you have shielded yourselves with the gods. Slowly you painted them in your colour, dressed them in your own cloak of terror, injustice and bloodlust. . .
This is very close to the Old Man’s doctrine of As in Madmen and Specialists. Leje, who makes this speech as Latoye, is an interesting character. In the epilogue to the play he turns out to be none other than the secret head of the Farmers’ Movement. His role as a drunken friend of Mokan in the play itself is a deliberate mask; his role as Latoye in the play-within-a-play is a fine irony, particularly as Mokan, the member of the secret police, has no idea who he really is. Leje continues Latoye’s speech by saying that the gods of the Yoruba pantheon are governed by crucial checks and balances:
To each of the gods, Edumare gave power and fragility, so that none of them shall be a tyrant over the others, and none a slave.
But rulers like Abiodun have distorted their essential being. What is being criticized, therefore, by the rebel is not belief in the gods, but the hegemonic use of them by power-hungry rulers - a criticism, of course, very similar to Soyinka’s Old Man’s and also to Mokai’s. Osofisan’s play is, however, less rooted in Yoruba metaphysics than either Soyinka’s or Ajibade’s.
There is role-reversal in the play-within-a-play, with the exception of Leje, whose true identity is not known anyway by the wedding party. Sontri and Yajin play Abiodun and Olori, the reactionary rulers. Mokan plays the role of Aresa, a palace guard in revolt against Abiodun’s authority. When he arrests Sontri and Yajin, Mokan is quite specific that it is not the play, or the rehearsal of it, which has indicted them; it only formed the occasion for the arrest which has been planned for some time. The play is only metaphorically a rehearsal for the revolution.
In the same way, the weaverbirds, with their chatterings and songs which give the play its title, are another metaphor for the coming revolution. As Sontri says after he has been arrested: ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop the birds from singing. Mokan,
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the revolution is already on the wing, you cannot halt it.’ In an earlier encounter with Funlola, Yajin’s artist friend, Sontri accuses her of chasing the weaverbirds away from the trees. He builds his attack on Funlola into a criticism of the professional middle class, whom he sees her as representing, while the weaverbirds represent the masses whom the former would drive out of their sight and hearing.
In the epilogue to the play Leje confides to Funlola that he is the leader of the Farmers’ Movement and has her join the Movement. She, like Sontri, is an artist (like Demoke in A Dance of the Forests). Together they return to the child’s game of the riddles which Sontri and Yajin played at the beginning of the play. This game - Twori Otura: the bigger riddle begins . . .’ - posfis the contradictory relationships in the physical, or natural world, and shows these contradictions being resolved into new oppositions. In fact, the Marxist dialectic. Metaphor succeeds metaphor in the game, and the two players take the parts of, for example, hare, tortoise, frog, fish. Through this metaphorical behaviour, Osofisan perhaps hopes to show the dialectical relationship between characters, and how, through their oppositions one to each other, they resolve their beings into new phases of the struggle. The play begins and ends with the same game; the players are different; the struggle goes on.
Mokai and The Chattering and the Song have one particular political perspective in common, which should be briefly considered. It concerns the relationship of man to his labour. Mokai, in an attempt to transcend the role of the corrupt head of state. General Baado, keeps on insisting that ‘the Nation must labour’, but he is unable to translate his words into actions or to inspire others to do what he cannot do. Similarly, The Chattering and the Song ends (even though Osofisan tells us in the stage direction: ‘The play does NOT end’) with the Farmers’ Anthem, and the audience are encouraged to join in the chanting. The words of this Anthem reflect Mokai’s repeated injunction exactly:
When everyone’s a farmer We’ll grow enough food In the land No insurrection When all are fed Less exploitation You eat all you need
When everyone’s a farmer We’ll wipe out the pests In the land ^
No more injustice Labour’s for all No more oppression All hands to hoe
When everyone’s a farmer We’ll burn out the weeds In our lives No alienation Working on the farm But brothers and sisters Sharing everything^
The refrain, sung between these verses, begins ‘So clear the forest / Turn up the soil. . . However, there is no evidence in the text that any of the characters actually do any farming, either on a large or small scale. Nor is it likely that the audiences for this English-language play will themselves farm, even though they may agree with the sentiments.
The position is a rhetorical one. It is like Mokai’s ‘The Nation must labour!’, except that in Ajibade’s play the awareness of this ideal as mere rhetoric is cause for further despair in Mokai. It is interesting to note, in relationship to this, that hardly any of Soyinka’s characters, to date, ever labour. They are variously artists or politicians or in business. Sometimes they are market people, traders; or if they are working class they are either laid-off or layabouts. If they are peasants, it is not their farming labours which are the concern of the playwright - with the exception of Makuri, his son Igwezu and the Blind Beggar in his very early play The Swamp Dwellers.
Soyinka seems much more concerned with what people do in their time out of work than in the way they earn their livelihood. There is nothing especially significant in this, except in one respect. For although it can be argued that work, labour, is generally unrewarding for peasants and the proletariat and that few want to be entertained in their leisure by a representation of the monotony of their working lives, nevertheless the implication that man is profoundly alienated by his working life is of crucial importance. Soyinka chooses to concentrate on those moments in people’s lives when meaning can be discovered, but these mo-
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ments are invariably time out of the ordinary routine of mundane labour. Yet, paradoxically, it is in man’s relationship to labour that meaning must be found - as both Ajibade and Osofisan partly realize in their exhortations to labour. Man’s alienation from his work, and the exploitation of his labour, is actually a significant cause of many of his social traumas. Ajibade's character says The Nation must labour!’; Osofisan gets his audience and actors to sing ‘When everyone’s a farmer . . . / No more injustice / Labour's for all. . . but if these playwrights are trying to show their audiences how Nigerians are alienated from their working lives, then these rhetorical positions in themselves do not succeed.
One other play which we will consider in the context of protest theatre in Nigeria is ’Segun Oyekunle’s Katakata for Sufferhead. There is a crucial element - apart from the social criticism - which links it with the plays we have been discussing. This is the use of role-play. In all of the plays, in one way or another, the characters engage in role-play, that is to say, they assume other roles beyond their basic characterization. This can be by ‘acting* in a play-within-the-play (as in The Chattering and the Song)\ or, like Eshuoro in A Dance of the Forests, by disguising themselves as someone else. They can be forced to become someone other than themselves (for example Mokai as General Baado); or deliberately parody the behaviour of people of a higher social status (the mendicants in Madmen and Specialists). They may play games, like Sontri and Yajin, and then Leje and Funlola, in the child’s riddle game; or become their alter egos (some of the beggars in Opera Wonyosi, who turn out to be highly-placed members of the professionals). What happens when characters engage in role-play within the drama? Let us consider an example from The Chattering and the Song.
Sontri plays the role of Abiodun; and any actor who plays the part of Sontri will have to convince us that Sontri is ‘real’, so that when Sontri plays the part of Abiodun we still think of him as Sontri. This is straightforward. But it can also be the other way around: the initially-established character, which the actor makes us accept as ‘reality’, turns out in the end actually to be someone else. Think of Leje. Throughout the play we think of Leje in the same way as the rest of the characters do: as Mokan’s friend, then as Mokan’s collaborator. But in the epilogue he is unmasked - or he unmasks himself - and actually turns out to be the revolution-
ary leader. Furthermore, when he played the role of the rebel in the rehearsal of Yajin’s play, he was in fact playing an assumed role close to the reality of his own role.
The playwright and the actors are in a position to manipulate physical images to reflect the protagonist’s search for his ‘true self, or his ‘identity’. They can peel off the layers of illusion, discovering new deceptions and new ‘masks’, until the audience see before them images of the characters’ inner and non-apparent selves. This is sometimes described as a deeper psychological reality of the characters’ personalities. We will return briefly to this a little later in this chapter, in a reference to Athol Fugard’s plays.
We need, however, to look at this critically. It is possible to argue that characterization which creates the illusion of reality is a ‘fixed’ or static sort of characterization and that this in turn can reflect a fixed or static view of society. The depth of meaning a play may achieve may be limited if the playwright is pre-eminently concerned with ‘fixed’ characters as the ‘reality’ within his play, characters who may indulge in the ‘illusion’ or fantasy of role-play, but who nevertheless remain the same. Let us try and explain why.
Some thinkers see the history of man as reflecting a continuous process of becoming, rather than a cyclic one. This historical process can also be personalized: we are always about to become something other than what we are, which was different from what we were, and we are prepared to struggle towards our chosen goals. The classic example of this is the slave who dreams of being free, and who wasn’t a slave when he was born. In the same way, we collectively remember our past and struggle towards our future: there will no longer be slavery. All history is seen, therefore, as a progression and people are constantly transcending the limitations of their societies by means of oppositions, which are resolved into new oppositions. This is a dialectical view of history.
Drama can help us explore this dialectical historical process; for its visual and aural images, so concrete and at once apparent, can reflect the process metaphorically. But instead of the ‘illusionistic’ theatre, instead of individual characters indulging in a search for their ‘true’ selves in the illusions and fantasies of role-play, all aspects of the characterization are depicted in a state of flux. Our characters and our consciousness are formed by our social dr-
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cumstances. Viewed dialectically, the search for identity cannot be divorced from the social context in which it is being formulated. For, on the one hand, the central character is being modified continuously by political and economic pressures, and on the other hand, the truth about him lies only in the extent to which he is able to change the future.
How does this affect our view of Soyinka’s drama? First, Soyinka’s protagonists ‘discover meaning’ in their lives, which concerns the search for self and has metaphysical implications for their societies. The ‘oneness’ of the protagonist, which he finally achieves, usually in the moment of sacrifice, parallels the restoration of equilibrium in the society. However, in order to achieve this ‘oneness’ the protagonist has to be a very specific sort of person: he is the one who acts\ who is able to exercise his will; the creative artist; someone who embodies and comprehends the contradiction of creativity and destruction. Thus, the characterization of Soyinka’s protagonist is always determined right from the start and when the protagonist has achieved understanding, identified himself, it has not and does not change his character in essence. Achieving understanding is dependent on character, rather than character being determined by (social) understanding. Second, none of the protagonists actively engages with the society to change it. Their understanding, and each one’s sacrifice, is always by way of an example to society: a ritual demonstration of its readjustment; a restoration of its equilibrium by example.
His theory reinforces this restorative function of the drama. He talks of the ‘origin of the race’, and the ‘chthonic realm’. The latter is, for him, the contemplation of the extinction of the race: it is chaos and the return of primordial darkness. The purpose of his drama, therefore, is the purpose of each of his protagonists: to ensure the survival of the race. For small-scale societies this is the essence of morality:
Where society lives in a close inter-relation with Nature, regulates its existence by natural phenomena within the observable processes of continuity - ebb and tide, waxing and waning of the moon, rain and drought, planting and harvest - the highest moral order is seen as that which guarantees the parallel continuity of the species.^
This is essentially a cyclic view of human society.
Bertolt Brecht, whose influence on some African theatre we
have already seen, constructed his plays in such a way that audiences were able to think how the social order, and therefore people, may be changed for the better. This was not a rhetorical position (‘Workers arise! Throw off your chains!’); nor was it even a moralistic one (‘It is evil for the rich to exploit the poor.’); but an analysis, in a dramatic form, of the social formation informed by a dialectical view of history. At the core of Brecht’s dramatic method was his approach to characterization. Not only did he reject the idea that the playwright and the actors must convince audiences that the characters were ‘real’ and fixed - which we have termed ‘illusionistic’ theatre - but that characters could discover a ‘true’ self inside themselves and apart from society. For him, what characters and audiences both needed to discover during the course of a performance was how and why they were unable to achieve what they wanted to, and how and why happiness escaped them. Brecht is often wrongly represented as pursuing social conformity and opposing ‘individuality’. In fact, he recognized and admired each individual’s claim to happiness through ever-widening horizons of knowledge and experience; and each person’s desire to be productive and to contribute to the betterment of human existence. What he doesn’t accept are any illusory ‘short-cuts’ to happiness and achievement, either through religious belief, magic, mysticism or even metaphysics; people have to come to understand the dialectical processes in order to change history.
He saw the ‘illusionistic’ theatre as a theatre which deliberately or unconsciously keeps the social connections obscure, pursuing as it does individualistic solutions for the benefit of individuals. He developed in its place a theatre which he called ‘epic theatre’, in which the actors do everything in their power to prevent the audience from imagining they are playing ‘fixed’ or predetermined characters which they must believe are ‘real’. He suggests a number of technical ways in which actors and directors might do this; but the way he creates his characters initially, in the writing, is the significant development: the plays are structured so as to show them capable of highly ambivalent behaviour which leads us to question their actions, and so see that these are often socially determined and contradictory. The contradictions in their behaviour enable us to see the contradictions in the society. For example, in his play The Good Woman of Szechuan, the central character is a young exploited prostitute who is forced, in order to
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survive, to assume the role of an aggressive male cousin. This role-play is not fantasy but two aspects of the central characterization: although she is poor and a prostitute, she is naturally generous to her fellow poor; but she is also capable of survival, and can be ruthless and exploit the very people she wants to help. The question we find ourselves asking is why it is that the poor are forced to exploit each other in order to survive.
Linked with this process of characterization is Brecht’s concern to show his audience things which we have come to accept as commonplace and unremarkable - people, actions, relationships - in a new and strange light. By suddenly being able to notice that which previously had escaped our attention, and by seeing standard practice as anything but normal, we have taken the first step towards realizing that the social order is not immutable. The world can be changed, and people can change as they change it.
This preamble to a consideration of Katakata for Sufferhead^ is not meant to suggest that it is specihcally influenced by Brecht’s work. Nor is it specifically influenced by Soyinka’s work, and it is interesting to note that it was written before Opera Wonyosi - but after Oyekunle had worked with others on a group improvisation of another Nigerian version of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which preceded Soyinka’s own transposition.
Katakata for Sufferhead Segun Oyekunle
Oyekunle’s play concerns a young school-leaver, Lateef, who is a ‘JJC’ - a Johnny-Just-Come, which is a common Nigerian term for someone who has just arrived from the village into town (or at the university or polytechnic). Lateef has just arrived in town. He is also an ‘applicant’ - another Nigerian term this time for someone who is searching for a job. However, jobs are impossible to come by. Lateef sponges off his friend Femi for a while until Femi has had enough of him and manages, by a trick, to get him out of his room. Lateef has no money, no food and nowhere to go. He refuses to go back to his village and admit defeat. After all, he has a school-leaver’s certificate. Grade 1:
Is this what I have spent five years for in a secondary school? Would it not have been better if I had not gone to school at all? My age-mates who did not go to school at least own farms of their own now. The
powers-that-be say we should go back to farm. Is farming all that easy? Where is the training? The experience? The capital to start with?. . . . Loans in this country are for the highly placed to buy cars and build houses to hire out at high rates to us poor. They are getting richer and we are getting poorer. . . .
Lateef s despairing comments show how his determination not to go back to his village is bound up with his awareness that the likes of him cannot get loans to do what the government tells school-leavers to do, i.e. to farm. Lateef is the voice of both reason and disillusionment.
After he has been pushed out of his friend’s house he roams the streets and finally is befriended by two young men, Jac Moro and Toronto, who sleep in front of the Quoxa Cinema and ‘guard’ it for a tiny weekly ‘wage’ from the manager. Jac and Toronto get to see all the films. Lateef is allowed to share their mat and sleep on the pavement between them and he is greatly affected by their friendly attitude towards him:
What is all this? With a certificate and yet no hope whatsoever in this world. See me here housed by layabouts. They are even more secure than I am.
Starving hungry, he goes into a local restaurant, into the ‘VIP section’, and eats a meal which he cannot pay for. He is arrested, of course; taken by the police to the magistrate; and because he cannot pay a bribe, or a ‘fine’, is sentenced to a term in prison.
Oyekunle actually sets his play in the prison; and he begins the play with Lateef’s arrival in the cell: a JJC to the prison, just as he was a JJC in the town. The action of the play involves him telling his tale to the other inmates in the cell: Jangidi (nine years in jail, out of a sentence of thirteen years for taking 1^20 out of public funds) who is the ‘boss’ of the cell; Ndem (eight years of an indefinite term for using his position as a 1^120 per month store-keeper to try and establish a little business on the side); Darudapo (six years for an unstated crime); Okolo (five years, detention without trial, for having a quarrel with the daughter of a very influential man); and Buhari (also five years without trial for being seduced, as a servant, by the young wife of his master, an ageing and impotent Alhaji). The point is that they are like Lateef: thrown into jail to rot over the years for trivial offences and for their economic inability to bribe their way out of the clutches of the police and the law. In jail they have established their own
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hierarchy, and they call the prison their ‘white college’ - ‘Dis college na di proper school wey you go learn plenty-plenty: de ting wey no dey hinside book, di ting wey no professor fit lecture you . .
. [. . . which no professor is able to tell you]’.
Lateef, as JJC, is ‘tried’ again, this time by the ‘white college’. He tells his story, and it is acted out with comments and intersper-sions by the inmates of the cell. At the end he is again found ‘guilty’, not of forging his certificate, which is what he imagines the other prisoners are accusing him of, but of being too poor and vulnerable to stay out of trouble. His ‘sentence’ is to be in charge of the shit bucket and to keep the mosquitoes from disturbing Jangidi at night: he has been assigned his place at the bottom of the pecking order in the cell.
Why has Oyekunle structured his play in this way? The play seems to function on two levels; a naturalistic level and a symbolic level. Prisons in towns all over Nigeria are probably like the prison in which the play is set; and the prisoners, certainly, typical examples. This is the level of naturalism. The plight of Lateef, as ‘JJC’ in town, as ‘applicant’, and then as ‘bird’ (a convict) was increasingly common at the time the play was written, particularly in the south of the country, and also for southerners in the north, and was likely to get worse. The play goes further than most other Nigerian plays in integrating the sense of social injustice and despair into the actual structure of the play, without losing the elements of wit and satire. The play is not just about one character, Lateef, and his desperate situation; it is about a whole world: the urban proletariat, forced to deviate, in small ways, from the ‘straight and narrow’ because of an initially exploited position, and then inevitably caught out. Their crimes are petty when compared with the corruption and criminal behaviour of the great and famous; and they rot in some obscure Nigerian jail.
This carries the play on to the symbolic level. The jail is, for these prisoners, and in the play itself, the symbol of Nigeria. Lateef, referring to the two layabouts outside the cinema, Jac Moro and Toronto says:
Their life is not better than ours here. . . . Em, well, except for their freedom.
To which Ndem replies:
Freedom shit! When without it you dey eat tree time dem for day [three times a day].
There is a greater lack of ‘freedom’ outside the jail, if one is talking about getting enough food to eat to keep alive. It is not that ‘freedom’ and a ‘just society’ do not exist; they do. But not for these people. They can’t see how it could possibly exist for them, or how the existing order might be changed for the better. This is the central concern of the play. Two incidents indicate the writer’s view of people at this level being unable to develop adequate political awareness.
The first is when Ndem is made to play the part of Lateefs friend Femi, with whom Lateef stays until he is pushed out of his house. Ndem is happy to play this role in the beginning; but when it comes to the trick to get rid of Lateef, he declines to play the role any longer:
Ndem: Wait. {To Lateef) You say Femi commot you by tulass?*
Lateef: Yes.
Ndem: And you no sabi anybody where you fit go?
Lateef: Nobody.
Ndem: Femi no be better person. I no like am so I no go do am again.
Jangidi: You must to continue as you done start am.
Ndem: I say I no fit.
Jangidi: You say you no fit? Oright. De time before when you dey feed
nine mout dem with your sixty naira: so, if stranger just come land for your house so, wetin you go do?
Ndem: Ah! Na to chase am commot one time!
Jangidi: OK. Show us you go commot your stranger.
And Ndem does. He acts the role of Femi with great commitment and feeling: he remains hard-hearted and unflinching even when Lateef breaks down and cries. The point that Oyekunle is trying to make in this well constructed little scene is that Ndem is by nature good and would always like to behave generously, but that economic circumstances do not permit him to do so. Put another way, the play at this point is saying, don’t judge your neighbour harshly, but the system.
The other example comes a little later in Lateefs story when he is staying with the layabouts outside the cinema. The characters of Jac Moro and Toronto are played by the ‘birds’, Okolo and Buhari, respectively. There is now an apparently lengthy digres-
* ‘You say Femi got rid of you by a trick?’ ‘sabi’ = ‘know’; ‘fit’ = ‘can’; ‘wetin’ = ‘what’.
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sion as Buhari and Okolo get into their role-playing and start enjoying acting the parts of layabouts. But it is not a digression at all. It is an analysis of the people’s inability to transcend the limitations of their understanding of the social forces at work in their lives. Jac Moro, played by Okolo, lives almost entirely in the fantasy world of the Kung Fu cinema and Nigerian affluence. Toronto, played by Buhari, is much more of a realist and acts as a foil to show up the limitations of Jac’s thinking. Jac doesn’t want anything to disturb his little world, and he warns Lateef, whom he describes as ‘bookman’, against upsetting the situation:
Make you no start revolution for here. Or else I go retire and dismiss you with immediate effect.
Toronto scorns him and tells Lateef:
He don’t know his right. I tell him make we told Manager to increase our salary wit one-one naira. But he na so so fear fear! Na Progress-Enemy-Numba-One he be, dis one. . . .
Jac Moro’s voice is that of the passivity of the exploited. He is sustained by his fantasies, one of which is Kung Fu, and another is winning the lottery. And if he suddenly came into money, what would he do? He is quite specific: he would do exactly what the wealthy do at present: stay in a hotel suite, have private doctors, engage in the import-export business, fix price controls in his favour, bribe the police, and drive around in the owner’s corner of his pleasure car acknowledging the approval of the crowd.
The scene is brilliantly constructed, for it must be remembered that it is two convicts who are playing the roles of two layabouts in front of the cinema who themselves are parodying the elite. Yet it is all out of Okolo’s and Buhari’s own imaginations. Buhari as Toronto as the Asian medical doctor is conducting an examination on Okolo playing Jac ’de Tousanaire’ (a ‘thousand-aire’ is not quite a millionaire); and on two occasions he returns us to the reality of the prison cell. The first is when he is ‘examining’ ‘de Tousanaire’s’ mouth and he tells him ‘your mout dey smell, like dog wey chop shit’ which brings Okolo back to himself to respond to his prison-mate Buhari with like insult. The second is a bit later when Buhari (as the doctor), while giving him the physical examination, tries to pull down Okolo’s trousers. Partly in role and partly out of it Buhari tells him that, as Okolo, he needs to cure the yaws and jiggers in his crotch if he wants, as Jac ‘de
Tousanaire’ to pick up smart girls. Okolo replies derisively: ‘Once money dey, Nigerian chics no go care. Abi I lie? [Do I lie?]’ To which the others all reply: ‘No - O!’ And he adds, as Jac ‘de Tousanaire’: ‘I go carry dem plenty for one time. Na one of dem go commot my shirt, na anoder go hold my emperor make I piss.’ [I will have plenty of girl-friends all together. One of them will hold up my shirt and another will hold my cock when I want to piss.]
There is a direct line drawn by the playwright between the squalid physical conditions of the prisoners in the cell, the squalid behaviour of the rich, and the overriding obsession with money. The connection is made more specific by the compliance of Jac Moro in his poverty. And it must be remembered that Okolo has created the character out of his own imagination on the mere suggestion of Lateef in the telling of his story. Okolo is inside the prison; Jac is outside the prison: they both lack ‘freedom’, just as Lateef’s condition outside the prison is no more ‘free’ than his condition inside it. The transition from the former to the latter is almost inevitable given their social and economic condition. The prison is variously the ‘white college’ where the prisoner is ‘educated’, the ‘court’, where the prisoner is ‘tried’ again, the ‘theatre’ where the prisoner’s story is re-enacted, and, in fact, the microcosm of society, with its hierarchies, ‘arrangements’ and connections. Ndem is the only one who has tried to escape, and only because his wife had been having an affair with the Warder and produced a couple of children by him. His attempt is considered by the others as lunatic - because what can you possibly escape to?
The play ends with all the ‘birds’ filing out to do hard labour. And what, in the end, is the difference between this and peasant farming?
Up to this point the discussion has been on protest plays by Nigerians who are critical of their society’s direction and progress since independence. In terms of the African continent, however, this is an advanced political position, for in South Africa (and in Namibia) the black populations still remain unliberated from the yoke of white supremacy. Racism is at one and the same time both easier to protest about through drama and theatre (because its injustices are obvious) and harder (because naked aggression and brutality, and the sense of outrage, are difficult to recreate on the stage). For this reason, therefore, it is perhaps useful in the
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context of this chapter to comment on one of the most important protest plays to have come out of South Africa. Survival, which was staged in South Africa just prior to the Black Consciousness Movement’s violent eruptions in 1976, is seen by its creators not only as a protest play for the people of South Africa, but also as a created work of art. It has subsequently toured North America.
The play is relevant here in another respect too. Those Nigerians who are concerned with the development of criticism of their society through the art of drama, through the art theatre, are also deeply committed to the liberation of South Africa; they see the need for Nigeria, as a nation, to play an economic, political and, if need be, military part in that struggle.
Survival Workshop ’71 Theatre Company
Survival^ is a black South African urban play devised by the fully professional Workshop ’71 Theatre Company. It was first performed around the black and coloured urban areas of Cape Town and then in Soweto in 1976. The production was forcibly closed down by a gang of soldiers who beat up the cast and the staff of the YMCA where it was being staged in Soweto. Robert ‘Mshengu’ Kavanagh writes in an introduction to the text of the play:
In the Cape the play was seen in the black townships of Langa and Gugulethu and in the various so-called Coloured townships (under the auspices of the Black Community Programmes) after June 1976 and before violence spread to the Cape. It was thus seen by thousands of school students and adults at a very sensitive time. It is possible to argue that at that stage the play performed an effective political function. . .
However, Kavanagh feels that the political function of the play was later obviated by events spearheaded by the Black Consciousness Movement in 1976.
The play’s genesis was by group improvisation; its subject-matter and its subsequent demise within South Africa reflect the conditions under which blacks normally live in South Africa. Both group improvisation and apartheid need to be briefly summarized before we can fully understand the play, for this company of actors find a need to combine their own harsh experience in South Africa with their art as actors.
In group improvisation the actor ceases to be the means by which a playwright realizes his vision on the stage - in a sense, a
technician with little or no autonomy - and becomes the joint creator of the work. The play which is realized by a group of actors is either something which reflects the actors’ personal experiences or something which they wish to say collectively or a combination of both. Instead of representing somebody else’s ideas they are representing their own collectively. This is an approach to theatre which is being tried increasingly in many parts of the world, as well as in Africa; and it is usually regarded as part of the technique of the theatre of social commitment. In fact this is misleading, for a group improvisation may result in a play which can be devoid of political commitment in all but the most generalized sense, and can simply use the techniques of creative group work in order to realize a more intense and compelling form of acting (such as the ‘Poor Theatre’ of Jerzy Grotowski, or the experiments of the British theatre director, Peter Brook). On the other hand, there is no reason, obviously, why the work of individual playwrights cannot reflect very strong and coherent social commitment (Brecht, of course; and now, especially, Edward Bond). Nevertheless, it is true to say that group improvisation can sometimes uniquely produce new and compelling theatrical forms for the new experiences of the late twentieth century - like the irresponsibility of scientists, the hidden dangers of super-technology, urban guerrilla warfare, racism.
The problem of turning these contemporary issues into drama and theatre is often seen as the problem of ‘finding solutions’. It is probably more appropriate to aim at raising consciousness among the people than to ‘find solutions’ - as though they existed already, waiting to be discovered. In fact, a solution to one problem will in all probability create a new problem of its own. In fact, ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ are a less satisfactory way of looking at the dynamics of society than oppositions which become resolved into new situations which in turn create fresh oppositions. For example, in Katakata for Sufferhead, getting out of jail is hardly a ‘solution’ to Lateef’s predicament - or for any of the other ‘birds’, as Ndem himself found out when he tried to escape. The situations which severally put them inside the prison still remain in the world beyond the walls of the jail. What the play shows, instead, is that they come to a greater understanding of their society inside the ‘white college’ than they did when they were outside.
Racism in Southern Africa is an especially intractable issue to
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present through drama, both within South Africa and elsewhere in Africa. Within South Africa apartheid makes racism ‘respectable’ among the white populations, to the extent that if you are white and consider ‘separate developm*ent’ with its belief in the genetic inferiority of the black race wrong and an evil, you are labelled peculiar and dangerous. If you are black you experience the stark brutality of the police state which apartheid legitimizes. If you live outside South Africa you find it very difficult to come to terms with the fact that such an immoral system can exist in the present time. The objectives for any serious play on apartheid are different, therefore, depending on the audience for whom it is intended, whether white or black within South Africa, or an audience outside the country. A black audience within South Africa knows much better the true nature of apartheid than white South Africans for the most part could possibly understand, and the message one might wish to communicate to blacks would be different to the message black South African actors would have for whites.
Yet this is only part of the problem. How can the reality, the meaning of wasted lives, be represented on the stage? It is a sense of desolation more than mere words can seemingly sustain. On the other hand, because the actors have to act it night after night through the weeks of performances, they need to be distanced from the actual suffering they or their fellow-actors have actually experienced. This is apparently a contradiction: intense engagement and emotional distancing at one and the same time. How do the actors achieve it? In the introduction Kavanagh describes the process by which Survival was made:
The play was made in two and a half months of intensive workshops, . . . The group began with nothing except the idea of doing something on prison . . . with explorations to evoke as many experiences of and insights into prison life as possible. Three of the five [four actors and a director] had had first hand experience of jail. . . . These explorations were in dance, mime, drawing, colouring, rhythm, singing, chanting - and tried out with slow motion, reversed motion, zoom lens and tableau effects. . . . Writing, improvisation, tape-recording and group discussion were the basic means of evolving dialogue, editing and recording it. . . .
The process was exhausting but essential because not only did it provide the group with the play, but also the means to act it. . . . [emphasis added]
The ‘means to act it’ implies not only the acting skills and physical fitness necessary to sustain vigorous movement, concentration and a cumulative intensity over two hours, but also a particular
sensibility. This is reflected in unexpected things almost working against the actual words of the play, like understatement, contradictory gestures, silences. In Katakata for Sufferhead, neither the playwright nor the actors who first staged the play had to my knowledge been in jail. Nor are the intended audiences for that play prison audiences in Nigeria. There is, inevitably, a sense among audiences and actors of being removed to some extent from direct experience, which, in the end, doesn’t seem to matter. Katakata now exists as a play-text. Another Nigerian - or African - director and actors can tackle the play-text and perhaps come up with a more compelling performance than the first. But in the case of Survival one has the feeling that any other production, even by other black South Africans, would lack the deep sincerity and unique dramatic experience of the first production by the four actors, Dan Maredi, Seth Sibanda, Themba Ntinga, Fana Kekana, and their director, Mshengu. This is actually implied by Kavanagh - who is in fact Mshengu - in the introduction when he writes about a subsequent production:
In 1978 it was revived in South Africa when ‘pirate’ performances were given by a new cast, directed by Peter Sephuma. This version, though considered by the original cast to be a 'diluted' travesty of the original, was ultimately banned in South Africa, [emphasis added]
This raises another question: what is the actor’s responsibility to the work which he is presenting? Does he enact it word for word? Or does he communicate his own sense of the work, through his own sensibility and understanding? The question is particularly pressing in the South African context. For playwright-directors like Gibson Kente, whose work we noted in Chapter 1, the question is answered in the way the group is organized: it is a commercial company playing to audiences in the black townships. The actors are there to entertain their audiences. It is interesting to note, however, that performances of Rente’s company apparently became more politicized following the success in the townships of the more overtly political groups of the art theatre, especially Workshop ’71 Theatre Company.
For Athold Fugard (either with or without his two actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona) the situation is somewhat different again. Fugard himself clearly sees an actor’s first responsibility neither to a company nor to violent protest and change, but to a psychological integrity. Commitment to a particular group of
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actors and to radical change are there, of course, but they are not the actor’s responsibility. This results in the intense focus on personal relationships and a sustained analysis of character which we see in most of his plays. True, these relationships and characters are formed by the society; but for Fugard they actually exist beyond it, in and of themselves. In The Island, for example, which we considered in Chapter 3, it is ‘Winston’s’ character {not , it must be stressed, the character of the actor playing the part, who is also called Winston) which enables him to endure the bitterness of seeing ‘John’ get out of the prison; it is their relationship to each other during this testing time which is the focus of the play, rather than the nature of the society which put them on Robben Island. Although this is explored as well, it is not the focus of the play. ‘Winston’s’ final speech of endurance at the end of the play is uniquely his and throughout the play ‘John’ acts as a foil to him in the painful acceptance of his fate. The psychology of someone facing incarceration for the rest of his life is the link with Sophocles’s Antigone, rather than a specifically political parallel. There is, of course, a reality which is discovered through this approach; but the Workshop ’71 Theatre Company appear to see their responsibility as actors primarily in a political rather than a psychological context - even though their method of working and the resulting theatrical forms are sometimes remarkably similar to Fugard’s Port Elizabeth group.
The difference is perhaps best summed up by the way Survival ends. After the scene which shows the four prisoners staging their hunger-strike, there is the following stage direction: [Very quietly the actors discuss the hunger-strike. Quietly and gently. The acting is over] [emphasis added]. There follows a conversation which expresses the hopes of their own lives in juxtaposition to their (possible) premature deaths in terms of the situations which they have just presented as actors:
Themba: If I were really to be in a hunger-strike, I would want them to
bury me on a faraway island, no people, bleak, where everything is wild.
Dan: Four clever children ... I would like to see them grow up. I’ve
always promised them they can be what they like. To die before I can keep that promise. . . .
Seth: So much to leave behind. I want a house and a family.
Fana: I can see her - you know, Lindi - I can see her coming towards
me to tell me it’ll soon be time. She usually plaits her hair. Now it’s fluffed out. Time to have our baby. The two of us wanted to travel - especially where ihe sea is.
Seth: I want to be buried near Blood River.
These are personal details from the actors’ own lives. Dan then comments:
In a real hunger-strike they would have force-fed us. One or two of us would have died. Then they would have brought us better food and we would have won our battle. . . . only a small battle.
The four actors drift into song; and then into some final group -or, as they call it, ensemble - work. This is not acting in a formal sense. Instead it is very much akin to music-making, to singing or playing drums together, in a bus, on the back of a lorry, around a camp-fire: there is a certain structuring of the collective emotional experience of the group, but it is still an improvisation and, especially, a response to the moment.
People who have never been involved in dramatic improvisations often wonder if the dialogue or even the situations can be the same for each performance. Even in the most undirected improvisation (that is, where there is no director and no leader emerges within the group) a ‘text’ can eventually be realized, a ‘stabilized’ performance which is substantially the same each time the play is performed. The published text of Survival is the final ‘stabilized’ form of the play (arrived at in the manner described in the introduction). But the ending is rather different from other improvisations, and from the improvisation in most of the rest of this play. What is being expressed are the sentiments and experiences of the actors Dan Maredi, Seth Sibanda, Themba Ntinga, Fana Kekana. They are not the sentiments and experiences of other actors who might choose to present the play. If such actors follow this ending then surely they are misrepresenting the spirit of the original actors’ conclusion to their play. Instead, the play would now need the personal response of the new actors; and in the process of doing this these actors would have to make their play their own. What might the play become if the actors were not black South Africans?
It should perhaps be noted that Kavanagh seems to provide an illogical note on the staging of the play in terms of what he has previously said about the play’s political function historically within South Africa:
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A-
How the play is staged depends on the audience. If it is ideologically in sympathy with the play's meanings, it can be considerably cut. The beginning of both halves can go and the various other sections which are obviously aimed at another sort of audience. . . . [emphasis added]
He implies that the core of the play to be retained are the four ‘reports’. What, therefore, seems to be dispensable are those very parts of the improvisation which break through the more formal acting in order to communicate more directly and powerfully with the audience. Any director or actors who omitted this element would surely make the production another ‘“diluted” travesty’ of the work of the original cast.
If the dramatic method by which Survival was created is in any way different from the way Fugard created The Island, for example, or Sizwe Bansi is Dead, then it is precisely in the way an actor finally ceases to act, and presents his or her most personal emotions, but still in the context of the play. To do this there must be an atmosphere of trust which the rest of the play manages to establish at each performance, between actors and audience. With Survival, which attempts to communicate the black South African experience of apartheid to blacks and whites more urgently and passionately than hitherto, we seem to have moved away from acting in a formal sense but paradoxically heightened the actor’s performance.
It is with an understanding of this particularized use of group improvisation in the South African situation that we can try to reach the full meaning of the play - which unfortunately exists for us readers only as a written text.
Survival is set in prison which, like the prison in Katakata for Sufferhead, is an image of the outside world. It presents the experiences of four people in what are called the ‘four reports’ of the play: first, Vusi Mabandla’s (called ‘Fana’s Report’ after the actor who plays Vusi, Fana Kekana); then Slaksa Mphahlele’s (called ‘Dan’s Report’ after Dan Maredi who plays Slaksa); then Leroi Williams’s (called ‘Themba’s Report’ after Themba Ntinga who plays Leroi); and finally Edward Nkosi’s (known, oddly, as ‘Edward’s Report’, but played by the actor Seth Sibanda, who also plays the part of Habbakuk Ngwenya, a character appearing in ‘Fana’s Report’). Although the action of the play is continuous, except for a break in the middle, these four reports could be said to correspond to four scenes or acts. In fact, the terminology of the play’s structure is more than a little confusing, partly because the
reports are named after the actors rather than the characters they play, and partly because the person/character giving the report is not always the focus of that scene. Thus, for example, Tana’s Report’ is not about the character Vusi who gives it, but about Habbakuk. In the circumstances the table outlining the play’s structure is probably helpful.
Survival: the play’s structure
[Actual names of the actors are in italics.]
From this the play would seem to be episodic, a collection of experiences. Nevertheless, it contains a well-structured story, which is as follows.
Three men in a jail cell, Vusi, Leroi and Slaksa, are joined by a ‘new recruit’, Habbakuk, an innocent like the ‘JJC’, Lateef, in Katakata for Sufferhead. Habbakuk is quickly schooled by the others in the ways of the prison and, in the process, in the corrupt ways of the legal world outside. Like Lateef, he is ‘re-tried’ by his cell-mates. However, Habbakuk continues to protest at the system and is finally removed from the cell. His place is taken in the ceil by a much more sinister and brutal figure, Edward Nkosi. One of the inmates, Slaksa, has had his sentence reduced and is released from prison, after serving five years. Has the situation changed
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whilst he was inside? Slaksa finds that it has not changed at all; and he offers himself up for re-arrest. He returns to the cell. Edward Nkosi, Vusi and Leroi all describe how they have become criminals. Edward and Vusi have both killed people. They detail the circumstances and explain their actions. Each is prepared to admit to a desire to kill the oppressor and to accept in themselves a violent initiative. They refuse to accept blame for their actions.* The four in the cell then resolve to go on a hunger-strike. Vusi breaks the strike. Edward and Leroi threaten to kill him but Slaksa dissuades them. There is a final climactic moment indicated in the following stage direction:
. . . The ritual of rejection. Each prisoner takes a plate and tips the contents on the ground. He clutches his stomach in pain - hunger and beatings - and falls to the ground. Vusi too rejects the food. For a short while there is silence. . . . Then there is the quiet sound of tears. One by one they cry.^^
That is the end of the story; the play continues, as has already been described, with the actors discussing out of role the story they have just acted and how it affects their own lives.
There is, therefore, in Survival a very detailed structuring of experience. Improvisation is not as open-ended as one would imagine. What appears effortless and spontaneous in performance is almost always the result of (1) intellectual understanding and trust among members of the group, achieved through exercises and discussion; (2) physical experimentation in role of which there has been intense group criticism; (3) an ordering of actions and events, using a whole range of stage conventions and acting techniques. In this play the ordering of actions is complex, for the form of a story (a sequential narrative) intersects with the alternative and sometimes contradictory form of various ‘reports’ by individual characters (telling the same events from different points of view).
Characterization is central to this structure: and the more formal characterization (characters like Vusi, Slaksa, etc.) intersects with the characterization of the actors’ own personae (Fana Kekana, Dan Maredi, etc.). Within the formal characterization there is a deliberate organization of contrasts. For example, there is a clear
*Actually they use the word ‘responsibility’ instead of ‘blame’ - ‘Ail [Together]: We refuse to accept responsibility for our crimes.’ - but it seems they
are accepting responsibility; they are refusing to be blamed for them.
and deliberate contrast between Habbakuk, the innocent, and Edward Nkosi, the brutaPthug’. With deliberate irony, they are both played by the same actor. Habbakuk’s naive and honest resistance to the prison regime finally gets him removed from the cell for punishment. The others expect him back. When the actor playing Habbakuk does return the others assume that he is ‘Habbakuk’; but he is now ‘Edward Nkosi’, a silent, sinister figure who ‘chops Slaksa down with a swift brutal blow’. The play focuses on Edward from this point, and Habbakuk is no longer seen. Whereas Habbakuk’s innocent spirit can be easily silenced by the white regime, Edward’s violence ultimately cannot be contained. He leads the hunger-strike.
There is, however, a m.uch more significant dimension to the characterization, namely their eventual achievement of political understanding. Slaksa’s growing awareness is presented first. It is on the immediately obvious level, namely that nothing in South Africa changes over the years as a result of international pressure against apartheid, and the tinkering with the system is merely ‘cosmetic’. In the second half of the play the tone changes when the lives of the other three inmates of the cell are scrutinized. The political awareness of Leroi, Vusi and Edward is the result of a much more complex analysis relating to the crime in all their lives. These men are not terrorists or political detainees, it must be remembered, but common criminals. Each is differentiated; and in the final climax, the hunger-strike, Vusi, who is black middle-class, though a murderer like Edward, is contrasted with Edward and Leroi. When the others threaten to kill Vusi for breaking the strike Slaksa says:
Leroi you began our strike. You’re young but you’re heroic. You’ve got
the guts we need. Now listen to the head. Don’t beat him up. He’s not a
traitor. He tried. This time the pressure was too much for him. He was
weak. Give him your strength and he too will be heroic.
Vusi rejoins the strike. There is a special political awareness being developed here, for the audience directly: those who desire to join the struggle but who are weak (the vast majority of us in fact) need to be encouraged and sustained by the more heroic. Slaksa’s intervention on Vusi’s behalf is tangential to the rest of the scene. Both Edward and Vusi, different as they are in temperament, describe in similar terms how they come to recognize their actions for what they are. Edward, for example, is involved in a car crash.
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He rescues the black driver from the burning car but allows the white occupants to burn to death. The accident is acted out and there is the following stylized exchange between an ‘onlooker’ at the scene of the crash and Edward, who is actually addressing the audience in a different time-dimension:
Onlooker: There are people in the car. They’ll burn to death.
Edward Nkosi: {To audience) I stood and watched the flames rise into
the air.
Onlooker: {To Edward Nkosi) Why didn’t you see them?
Edward Nkosi: {To audience) I can’t say I didn’t see them.
Onlooker: {To Edward Nkosi) Why didn’t you pull them out while there
was still time?
Edward Nkosi: {To audience) I can’t say why I didn’t pull them out in
time. Why did I save the black driver and leave the white passengers?'^
Edward subsequently beats one of his mother’s elderly boy-friends to death.
Vusi describes how he tried to get his dying father to the hospital. He drove his father’s car without a licence and was stopped by a black policeman and his white superior. In the ensuing argument Vusi strikes the black cop:
Vusi: {To audience) In the heat of the fight I had forgotten even that he
[\usVs father] was there. He was dead. The traffic cop, too. He was dead. On the way to the police station I kept shouting: ‘I didn’t mean to kill him! I didn’t mean to kill him!’ Then I thought of father and stopped shouting.
It is Leroi who sums up the nature of their awareness:
Suddenly at obstinate moments, these circumstances come together and trap a human being so tightly that for one moment the parts become a whole. . . . 1 ^
In the circumstances violence becomes acceptable. There is no blame attached to it. The logic of racialism in South Africa is succinctly expressed at the end of the play when the actors have moved out of role:
Themba: You know, that’s what survival means. ... I wonder how
many of those who hate us now, won’t one day wish they too could be black 20
and he continues a little later:
A people survive by grimly holding on. But at the same time they achieve what their oppressors cannot help envying them for. The strength lies with the people, who carry with them in their lives the justification for the struggle - the victory that is survival.
The will to survive as a people, rather than as racially inferior individuals, is the first stage of political awareness. This is as much a moral survival as a physical one: a determination not to blame oneself for the actions one feels compelled to do. No guilt. The play ends with a passionate song about a future beyond survival as the actors march through the audience and out of the theatre with clenched fists raised.
Music - in Survival, songs without backing or a band, sung in the style of a ‘barbershop quartet’ - is also part of the structuring of the play. The songs make a comment on the actions of the characters and they sum up the mood at a particular moment. They have the effect of distancing the audience from the action while drawing them into the mood or emotions of the play. The use of music in Survival differs in some ways from the use of music in Opera Wonyosi where it is primarily the means whereby the satire of the play is turned upon the audience. It differs more markedly from the use of music in The Marriage of Anansewa where it is the means by which the audience actually become involved in the staging of the performance.
A comparison might be made, finally, between Survival, Opera Wonyosi and Katakata for Sufferhead, in the direct relationship which each play depicts between criminality and the existing social system. In Opera Wonyosi Soyinka shows that the behaviour of the powerful and the rich is as criminal as the underworld with whom they are inextricably bound up. In Katakata for Sufferhead, Oyekunle shows the criminality of the prison inmates to be so petty by comparison with the practices of the up-holders of the Rule of Law as to amount to their complete innocence. In Survival, however, the system - racism and apartheid - is shown to generate and justify violent crime for which the criminals will not accept the blame. All are unpalatable analyses for the majority of the present art theatre audiences in Africa.
Notes and references
1 Yemi Ajibade, Mokai is not published yet.
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2 Femi Osofisan, The Chattering and the Song (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press 1977).
3 ibid., p. 45.
4 ibid., p. 45.
5 ibid., p. 56.
6 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976), p. 52.
7 Segun Oyekunle, Katakata for Sufferhead, is not published yet. It was first produced in Zaria in 1978, directed by Tony Humphries.
8 Survival is published in Robert Kavanagh (ed.). South African People s Plays (London: Heinemann Educational Books 1981).
8 Theatre and development
Consider this: One of the tribes in Zambia, the Chewa, has a spectacular dance which celebrates rites of passage. The dance is called Nyau and the masquerade is performed on the occasion of a funeral. In one of the villages in this area there was a man who was able to dance Nyau so well that all the people from the surrounding communities acknowledged his pre-eminence in the art of the dance; and because the dance celebrated death as a transition from this world to the next, the man was much in demand to perform the dance at funerals. His local fame reached the ears of the ministry of culture in the capital, Lusaka, and talent scouts were sent out to assess whether he could be brought into the National Dance Troupe. Without question he was a natural ‘star’, and he was soon in Lusaka dancing with the Troupe. Within a year he was performing not only at the International Airport for visiting heads of state, but also in the distant capitals of the world when the National Dance Troupe went on foreign tours, in order to promote the culture of Zambia. His international acclaim was noted by his family and his fellow villagers.
A much-loved fellow back in the village died in tragic circumstances, and a small delegation of fellow peasants came to the capital to ask the internationally famous dancer of Nyau if he would come and dance the masquerade at the deceased’s funeral. Of course he would come. He remembered the fellow with affection; they had been age-mates. He obtained permission through the ministry’s bureaucracy for a short leave of absence, and set off for the village.
Back in the village the dancer marvelled to himself how he could have danced in such heat and dirt without really noticing it. How long ago it all seemed. How could the dance have ever been considered as an art in the midst of the emotional and physical chaos of a funeral? Prepared in his costume, behind a hut, and
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waiting to dart out in the sacred mask, he pondered on his good fortune that had taken him so far away from this ‘bush’ life, and which had singled him out to be the one to preserve for all time the only truly great thing about his people’s culture, Nyau.
The dance began and for a while he was totally absorbed in demonstrating to his fellow-villagers his heightened technique and unassailable virtuosity. He was the star of the occasion. Gradually, however, he became aware of the fact that the villagers were no longer watching him. They seemed to be gazing intently behind him. He turned his head, and was amazed to see a second Nyau dancer, dancing behind him, almost as his shadow. He missed the beat and lost his step; but nobody seemed to notice. The second dancer smiled encouragingly at him. Then he realized that the drummers, the musicians, were playing for this other dancer and not for him. He had become irrelevant to the masquerade.
In anger he left the arena and sought out one of the village elders. ‘It’s all right, my son,’ he was told. ‘You were dancing Nyau incorrectly; and we could not afford to let our illustrious son who has died miss the way to the other side.’
The dancer pondered this new reality in his life for some time. Then he went in search of a length of rope, and hanged himself from a nearby thorn tree.
This is a story, obviously. The form of it indicates that it is. But is it real? Or is it fiction? In fact, it is a summary,* in narrative form, of a play by the very popular Zambian playwright, Stephen Chifunyise, whose work we will be considering in this chapter. This play is fictional. However, it is considered by many of the Zambian intellectual middle-class not to be so, for there was a famous dancer of Vimbuza, Wilikilifi Ludaka (Mkandawire)^ who had been the star of the National Dance Troupe, and who recently died. Chifunyise maintains that the play is not about Mkandawire at all. Rather, he insists, it is about a deeper reality which he sees in his society, namely, the contradiction that those who would preserve the traditional culture are actually destroying it. The National Dance Troupe, in Chifunyise’s play, co-opts the village dancer. In doing so it encourages his own individualism through elitist performances and international tours, and ignores the community which alone is capable of giving the dance and the masquerade any meaning. The dance, and not the people, are given contemporary value.
It is not clear if Chifunyise sees this contradiction specifically as
part of an analysis of how the dominant elitist art, in most contemporary third worM societies, usurps the popular culture, but such an analysis is implied in the way he has developed the scenario of his play. The play is intended to show, I think, the complex problem of cultural development in the modern African nation-state, and how certain cultural policies ironically achieve the exact opposite of what was intended. Such a view assumes that intellectuals, cultural planners, playwrights and theatre directors actually want to do the ‘right thing’ - where the ‘right thing’ is usually seen as retrieving the culture of the people after it has been ravaged by the long years of colonialism and settlerism. The problem is that these people lack a sufficient understanding of what might be called cultural dynamics.
Another view is the opposite of this. It sees the outcome of national cultural policy as being exactly what is intended by the society’s rulers. The people’s culture, and in particular those arts of the rural masses which have actually managed to survive colonialism, are used to reinforce the dominance of the new elites. This is done, for example, by making the people’s dances and masquerades, which hitherto had had a social function inseparable from its aesthetic, into an art form which now mirrors and encourages individualism. In general, this is achieved both through the content of artistic work - as, for example, in those plays which show individuals achieving success - as well as through a commercialization of the means of artistic production, as, for example, when we ‘buy’ and ‘book’ a seat in advance to see a performance of a ‘successful’ show. Individualism is indicated by such attributes as personal success, high status, and the individual ability to appreciate ‘great art’. The hope of acquiring these attributes is inculcated in those masses who, by the very nature of the system, can never attain either success, or high status, or access to ‘great art’.