Theatre and Postcolonial Desires

Awam Amkpa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134381326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.

Part 1
Nigeria

1 Wole Soyinka
Theatre, mythology, and political
activism

IYALOJA (the head market woman): (She turns to the BRIDE who has remained motionless throughout.) Child.
(The girl takes up a little earth, walks calmly into the cell and closesELESIN’S eyes.
She then pours some earth over each eyelid and comes out again.) Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn.
( IYALOJA leaves, accompanied by the BRIDE. The dirge rises in volume and the women continue their sway. Lights fade to a blackout.) THE END¹

The head market woman Iyaloja’s words of advice to a young bride-turned- widow at the conclusion of Wole Soyinka’s complex play Death and the King’s Horseman, captures a hopeful vision of tragedy unique to Africa’s premier playwright. Soyinka’s genius in using the tragic myths of Yoruba culture to forge a compelling language of resistance and change has drawn many admirers and a few detractors. His perspective on crisis and chaos as ingredients for social transformation, rather than an Aristotelian lesson on the wisdom of returning to an established order, has been alternately celebrated and vilified.² Yet, few can deny his influence in shaping what the historian Nicholas Dirks describes as “the politics of thinking about power and resistance.”³

Wole Soyinka, born of Christian parents in the Yoruba town of Abeokuta at the height of English colonialism in 1931, is widely acknowledged as Africa’s greatest, if sometimes inscrutable, dramatist. Educated at University College, Ibadan, and Leeds University, UK, one-time play-reader for the Royal Court Theatre in London, and a director, actor, teacher, and writer in Nigeria, he is a quintessential denizen of the hybrid interstice that I have called “inter-modernism.” His in-between location has arguably shaped his dialectical approach to culture – his resort to “tradition” to argue for change; his use of the English language to subvert Western, rational, epistemologies by breaking down the barriers between past and present, the spiritual and the material; and his recourse to Yoruba particularisms to articulate universalist postcolonial desires. Soyinka’s portrayal of the themes of nationalist and transnational crises embodies penetrating philosophical, political, and metaphoric investigations of culture and epistemology in his home continent. No African mixes political activism, art, and philosophical analyses with as much eloquence, energy, and intellectual rigor as does this 1986 Nobel laureate in literature. Taking aim at the overlapping power structures of European and indigenous African hegemonies, Soyinka’s works and political activism assume a de-colonizing attitude toward emergent and residual tyrannies and forms of domination. They seek to create a space for radical constructions of postcolonial subjectivity – a space that according to the playwright, performs:

the simultaneous act of eliciting from history, mythology and literature, for the benefit of both genuine aliens and alienated Africans, a continuing process of self-apprehension whose temporary dislocation appears to have persuaded many of its non-existence or irrelevance in contemporary world reality.⁴

Soyinka embarked upon his unorthodox cultural mission of resurrecting postcolonial subjectivities in an age in which intellectual orthodoxies such as Marxism and ethnic nationalism loomed large. From the 1960s through the late 1970s, it became obvious that the nineteenth-century colonial agenda that organized Nigeria had shifted significantly. Anticolonial nationalism had succeeded in developing a republic formally divorced from its imperial relationship with England. Independence offered the new nation a sense of national belonging and global engagement. Academic institutions became locations for developing various schools of critical and creative studies largely framed by the same anticolonial energies that made the new nation possible. Soyinka, like other Nigerian dramatists examined in this book, came from such politically activist academic communities. Before long, however, ethnic rivalries and regional conflict underscored the arbitrary colonial construction of the geo-political entity inherited from the English. Military dictators usurped the first civilian government in 1966, perpetuating the colonial tradition of coercive rule as a tool of unification. A new twentieth-century globalism and commodity fetishism redefined the country solely as an oil-exporting machine, and helped plunge the country into a violent civil war. The eastern Igbos seceded from Nigeria in 1967 and proclaimed the Independent Republic of Biafra, unleashing a three-year civil war that culminated in reunification and savage retribution.

In the aftermath of the civil war, an oil boom gave financial reinforcement to a new wave of state nationalism upheld by a succession of authoritarian regimes. As the country’s tiny elite became chauvinistically nationalist, it developed a taste for whatever it did not produce. Buoyed by windfalls from oil revenue, Nigeria imported every consumable commodity, quickly becoming a neo-colonial satellite state clinging to the periphery of the industrialized West. Despite its dependence on economies outside its borders, the nation also developed an arrogant claim to African authenticity. In the 1970s, it hosted the Festival of African Arts and Culture (FESTAC), African Soccer championships, and other events to showcase its coming of age as a nation with the mandate to exuberantly represent Africans inside and outside Africa. Yet, the truth was that it did not speak for all Nigerians, much less the rest of the continent. Excluded from their share in the nation’s oil wealth, the masses of Nigerians enjoyed little formal voice in their government.

State nationalism coexisted with cultural practices attempting to understand and critique the state of the nation. Cultural critiques of the official national narrative premised upon Nigerian prosperity and the nation’s appropriation of political and cultural leadership in Africa, abounded. Sometimes subtle, at other times brazen, they responded to Nigeria’s neocolonial despair and the sense of social and political alienation experienced by a majority of Nigerians. Artists in a range of arenas crafted alternative visions of nationalism – Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and Sonny Okosun in music; Hubert Ogunde, Ola Rotimi, and Theatre for Development in theatre; “Wonyosi lace” and “agbada” in fashion; oral expressive forms and varieties of the “Nigerian novel” in literature; “Village Headmaster,” “Cock Crow at Dawn,” and “Icheoku” as well as news in the local languages on television; “Ajani Ogun,” “Aropin N’tenia,” and “Ikebe” in films.

Within the universities, Marxism and residual forms of anticolonial nationalism offered analytical frameworks for mounting critical challenges to Nigeria’s corrupt dominant class and the unitary nationalist ideology it deployed to buttress its regime. Sometimes contesting, at other times complementing each other as they confronted the national government, counter-cultural activists ranged from passionate ethnocentrists to mimics of European political radicalism. Marxist scholarship highlighted issues of class and the neo-colonial economic structure, and presented strategies for defining and empowering working-class identities. Biodun Jeyifo (perhaps the most erudite and politically impassioned of all), Ola Oni, Omofune Onoge, Segun Osoba, Bala Usman, Bade Onimode, G.G. Darah, Chidi Amuta, Ropo Sekoni, and Jibril Ibrahim, all offered interpretations not only of Nigeria’s neo-colonial identity in global politics, but also Marxist strategies for democratic change. Trade unionism became a prominent platform for radical activism, as well as a forum for political collaborations between middle-class and working-class Nigerians committed to contradicting and limiting the excesses of the neo-colonial state. The Left not only dominated organized labor but also organized student unionism across the country thus making universities locations for developing counter-hegemonic attitudes. Their writings on history, culture, and ideology depicted a nation in dire need of revolutionary change and international alliances against global capitalism. To the extent that they talked about collectivities, they did so in the context of forming counter-hegemonic blocs, rather than in order to engage issues of the multiplicity and hybridity of individual and group identities.

It was in this milieu that I, as a drama undergraduate at the University of Ife in 1979, first encountered Wole Soyinka. By then, the playwright had already achieved a formidable reputation, not only for creative and philosophical brilliance, but also for his repeated gestures of defiance against Nigeria’s neo-colonial masters which landed him in jail in the 1960s. He became an inspiring mentor through my college days and beyond. It was under his tutelage that I learned to develop a healthy skepticism toward essentialisms of all sorts. Within the relative stability of the Marxist tradition of dissent of our day, there emerged a community of social commentators and activists whose ideological “purism” worried Soyinka as much as did the ethnocentrists’ uncritical embrace of “tradition” as the path to resistance. His acrimonious exchange with his detractors is well documented in his Art, Dialogue and Outrage. Uncomfortable with rigid ideological or cultural orthodoxies of any kind, and of fixed constructs of identities such as “working class” and “middle class” designated by Marxists as agents of change, Soyinka had long offered an alternative approach to thinking about individual and collective identities, about the hydra-headed nature of power, and about resistance and change. He created characters with shifting, multi-positional identities and found, within the paradigm of Yoruba tragedy, conditions and spaces for fostering communal consciousness for transformation without prescribing the precise nature or direction of such change.

Soyinka’s revisionist notions of identity, power, and agency unfolded in the course of a versatile body of works spanning well over three decades from the late 1950s through the 1990s which, for the purposes of cataloging, may be placed under three broad but fluid categories. Plays such as Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, The Lion and the Jewel, Trials of Brother Jero/Jero’s Metamorphosis, Opera Wonyosi, Play of Giants, Requiem for a Futurologist, From Zia with love, The Beatification of Area Boy, and King Ubaku may be classified as “political satire.” Others including The Strong Breed, Madmen and Specialists, The Road, The Bacchae of Euripides, and Death and the King’s Horseman may qualify as “metaphysical drama.” The third category consists of “political street theatre” skits, which are numerous and include prominent examples like Before the Blackout/After the Blowout, Priority Projects, Trials and Tribulations, and Rice. Soyinka fashioned the satire of his political sketches into a low-budget film titled Blues for a Prodigal and a long-playing record labeled Unlimited Liability Company.

Throughout his plays and philosophical pronouncements, Soyinka has consistently sought an adequate language of resistance and the description of an esthetic comprising mythology, politics, and activism. Kongi’s Harvest, The Road, and Madmen and Specialists all suggest elements of this configuration, but it is Death and the King’s Horseman, in combination with his seminal essay “The Fourth Stage,” that offers its most complete and eloquent expression. In the present chapter, I explore Soyinka’s creative use of mythic tragedy as an inter-modernist site of contests over “the sign,” as well as to devise an empowering discourse of political agency. I read “The Fourth Stage,” together with his celebrated play Death and the King’s Horseman to suggest that Soyinka’s dramatic practice represents an inspiring and agitative archeology of postcolonial cultures. Grounded in the conceptualization of mythic tragedy as a site for fueling communal consciousness of marginality and desire for change rather than as a bastion for consolidating tradition for its own sake, his works challenge authoritarianism whether derived from colonial or indigenous sources and enunciate symbolisms of resistance and agency, the birthing, if not the destination of postcolonial desire.

“The Fourth Stage” was first published in an anthology of essays dedicated to the Renaissance scholar G. Wilson Knight in 1969, and later presented as one of a series of lectures at Churchill College, Cambridge. As a philosophical statement offering a decolonizing epistemology, the essay broke controversial new ground in terms of the enunciative space its theory presented for the study of drama in Africa. It evoked a volley of criticism from disparate quarters, most of them located in Africa. Anti-colonial nationalists castigated the essay’s dramaturgy as too European. Marxists lamented its alleged lack of class-based antagonism to European colonialism and capitalism.

The frustration of Soyinka’s critics lay partly in the difficulty in compartmentalizing “The Fourth Stage” within rigid genres and established esthetic traditions. One was apt to wonder: is the essayist a tragedian or political satirist? Is he a socialist or anticolonial nationalist writer? What are the instrumental values of his mythopoeic writing? Is he sufficiently African? Yet, “The Fourth Stage” suggests that Soyinka’s dramaturgy, although inherently political, does not conform to prescriptive models for knowing or describing individual and collective political identities. In the dramatist’s own words:

I have been preoccupied with the process of apprehending my own world in its full complexity, also through its contemporary progression and distortions . . . For after (or simultaneously with) an externally directed and conclusive confrontation on the continent must come a reinstatement of the values authentic to that society modified only by the demands of a contemporary world.⁵

In pursuit of his project to apprehend his own world, Soyinka in “The Fourth Stage” takes us into Yoruba cosmology by describing a tripartite structure of the world: the spaces of the unborn, the living, and their ancestors. In such a structure, the acts of being born, of living, and of dying are seen as natural processes of transition. The birth of a child is an occasion for celebration as is the death of an old person. The world of the living is an arena for conscious reparations through sacrifices, rituals, and mythology codifying the moralities of being and becoming. In cases of premature birth or death, oracular wisdom is sought and appropriate sacrifices are performed to stabilize the world, as the Yoruba know it. Soyinka, however, complicates and subverts the ontological certainty of this Yoruba triplicity by suggesting “The Fourth Stage” which in his opinion is fundamentally the most fulfilling of all transitions. Defying temporal linearity, “The Fourth Stage” is more a desire that catalyzes perpetual action and focuses on processes of “social acting,” than a description of a life stage or a well-defined historical destination. In other words, it is a process that summons a consciousness for change without necessarily naming the manner of such change beyond its immediate anticolonial directions. Such consciousness can happen in the worlds of the living, and in the modes of remembering the dead and the ancestors. Its goal is disalienation as a constant process of deconstructing domination and seeking a language of equity and justice.

In a conscious act of invoking an epistemology that is indigenous to Africa and not overdetermined by European colonizing knowledge, Soyinka delves into a Yoruba legend describing the origin of the world to support his concept of “The Fourth Stage.” According to this legend, a supreme d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From Colonial Modernity to Postcolonial Desires: Oppositional Theatre In Nigeria and England
• Part 1: Nigeria
• Part 2: England
• Conclusion
• Notes