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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Though his work is as yet less familiar in Europe and the USA than that of Wole Soyinka. Femi Osofisan, while acknowledging a discipleship to his predecessor, is more concerned with specific social issues than with universalized themes, and is pre-eminent among contemporary Nigerian playwrights in combining a radical perspective with a recognition of the importance of cultural traditions. In this article. Sandra L. Richards explores his work in terms of the way that its social analysis elicits an active response from its audiences, through the reshaping of recognizable forms – ‘whodunits without solutions’ – while accepting the often-limited resources of theatre machinery and personnel on which most of his directors will be able to call. Sandra L. Richards spent two years in Nigeria as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Benin, and is presently Assistant Professor of Drama and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University, California. An earlier version of the present article was presented at the annual African Literature Association conference held at Michigan State University in 1986.
1. Osofisan, Femi, ‘Do the Humanities Humanize? A Dramatist's Encounter with Anarchy and the Nigerian Intellectual Culture’, University of Ibadan Faculty Lecture, 9 01 1981Google Scholar.
2. Osofisan, Femi, ‘Politics and Theatre in Nigeria’, Public Lecture, University of Port Harcourt, 26 04 1984Google Scholar.
3. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘The Popular and the Realistic’, in Willet, John, ed., Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 108Google Scholar.
4. Personal interview with Femi Osofisan, 9 August 1985.
5. Consider Sowande's trilogy The Night Before, Farewell to Babylon, and Flamingo, which traces responses to socio-political conditions over a ten to fifteen-year period. Would-be revolutionaries end up responsible for death, corruption, and repression; the final tableau is yet another corrective coup which may usher in simply another era of terror: yet for Sowande what is important is the attempt at securing change. Even his latest play. Circus of Freedom Square, while stylistically freer, still contains some questionable politics. See the plot summary in Osofisan, Femi, ‘A November Mist’, The Guardian (Lagos), 8 12 1985Google Scholar.
6. The expression is, of course from Soyinka, Wole. Myth Literature and the African World (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Note that in more recent plays like Opera Wonyosi andA Play of Giants, Soyinka deals entirely with a man-made environment; his anger particularizes events and charges men to assume responsibility for the tyranny they have created.
7. Ricard, Alain, ‘Theatre Research: Questions about Methodology’, Research in African Literatures, Spring 1985, 45–51Google Scholar.
8. Femi Osofisan, Birthdays Are Not for Dying, p. 37.
9. Personal interview with Femi Osofisan, 21 January 1984.
10. Such a situation occurred when the fourth year students of the University of Benin presented both plays as part of their first semester exams during the 1983–84 session. One would have hoped that by this stage in their careers, they would have developed better critical skills, but the incident is also indicative of how strong an influence the tradition of broad comedy exerts on all other genres.
11. Gates, Henry Louis Jr, posits repetition and inversion as a crucial element of literary construction: see his ‘The Blackness of Blackness: a Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey’, in his anthology Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984)Google Scholar.
12. Personal interview with Femi Osofisan, 9 August 1985.
13. Olu Obafemi, ‘Revolutionary Aesthetics in Nigerian Theatre’ African Literature Today, XII, p. 122–3.
14. Olu Obafemi, ‘Revolutionary Aesthetics’, p. 136, and Muyiwa P. Awodiya, ‘The Chattering and the Song: an Analysis’, p. 21.
15. Yai, Olabiyi, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Yoruba Alo Apamo (Riddles)’, Department of African Languages and Literatures, Seminar Series, I (1967–1977), 419–62Google Scholar.
16. See Osofisan, Femi, The Chattering and the Song (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1977), 4Google Scholar. All subsequent references to the play are from this edition.
17. See such histories as Ajayi, J. F. Ade and Smith, Robert, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press; Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1971)Google Scholar; Atanda, J. A., An Introduction to Yoruba History (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Crowder, Michael, The Story of Nigeria (London: Faber, 1962)Google Scholar; and Smith, Robert, Kingdoms of the Yoruba (London: Methuen, 1969)Google Scholar.
18. Osofisan, Babafemi Adeyemi, ‘The Origins of Drama in West Africa’, Diss., Ibadan, 1973Google Scholar.
19. Osofisan, Femi, Morouniodun and Other Plays (Ikeja: Longman Nigeria, 1982), 79Google Scholar.