from Research in African Literatures Volume 30, Number 1

Theater and the Rites of Post-Negritude Remembering1

Femi Osofisan

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To judge from all the clamor in contemporary literary discourse, it would seem that we are back, we black writers, to the days of Negritude, and that the most acute subject of our writing is once again the rediscovery and reaffirmation of our cultural values, and the reinscription of our racial identity on the pages of history. The white man, to consolidate his military, territorial, and economic conquests over us, has inscribed us within a grand myth of Absence, according to which our lives were more or less a virtual tabula rasa before his arrival. And therefore, as the argument goes, all our work, like that of our Negritude predecessors, is assumed to be dedicated to the deconstruction of this racist myth, through the demonstration of the value and plenitude of our past, and the recovery of our autonomous identity. However--as someone from the so-called Third World, who lives and works in Ibadan, Nigeria--I find it curious, to say the least, that this debate about a so-called "war of Identity" has come to assume a position of such signal importance in discussions about Africa and the Asian world. Perhaps I should not complain; perhaps I should only be grateful that we feature at all in the debate, in a context where the arrogance of late capitalism--with its triumph over world socialism, and the subsequent end of the cold war; its visible material affluence, and the fashioning of such an astute economic arsenal as multinational companies (Shell, the World Bank, the IMF, the Club of Paris, etc.); its dominant control of the technology of communication and warfare; and so on--has proclaimed the "end of history". A new theology, that of "market forces", authorizes astounding philosophies and new epistemological systems that proclaim the irrationality of all causes and all beliefs, sing of the virtues of hybridity and difference, while in fact making the poor and the deprived of history more invisible. Against this threat of invisibility and anonymity, and fueled by Edward Saids seminal Orientalism, the exiles from the Third World in Euro-America mount a fierce and courageous battle, indeed, to be heard, recognized, and respected, a battle in which the so-called "postcolonialist" discourse is the noisy battleground, and the erasure of identity the strident lament.

It is a battle with which, naturally, I am in sympathy. But if I must confess, it is a battle not my own. In Africa we have our own battle of Identity, of course, but it is not the same as that of postcolonialism, and where it concerns individuals and the private psyche, not the most urgent of our preoccupations. And this, no doubt, may be one of the reasons Africa, so far, has featured only marginally in the wonderful "postcolonial" debate.

I have talked above of the Western worlds control and manipulation of the technology of communication. One of its consequences is to worsen the unequal exchange of information that, some years ago, the UNESCO under the Senegalese Moktar Mbow tried to correct. Of course Mbow and his supporters failed, because America, followed by Britain--the two of them being the richest of the financial contributors--simply withheld their funds and orchestrated a process that saw to the rapid rout of the daring Mbow. Now things have grown worse, with the development of satellites and the Internet, the world wide web pages, all in the hand of Bill Gates and the American empire. CNN comes directly from Atlanta into our bedrooms and parlors in Ibadan, or Nairobi, bringing such cargo as the Spice Girls and the funeral of Princess Diana, along with numerous European sports and comedy channels, with the ubiquitous Time Magazine and Readers Digest, and the latest bestseller from Sydney Sheldon. Eagerly and enthusiastically, we consume the movies, CD-ROMs, records, books and magazines, comic cartoons, etc., produced in Hollywood, India, or Japan.

But nobody elsewhere watches our own football matches, or cares about the ongoing debacle in, say, Sierra Leone. Not about the disastrous oil spillage ravaging the delta region of the mighty River Niger and its peoples, conquered by the mighty multinational oil companies, or, on the other hand, about the latest release of Kollington Ayinla (Who the hell is he? I can hear someone asking), or about the importance or otherwise of the latest drama productions of either of the Abibigromma ensembles. Worse still, we ourselves in Africa do not care either: by constant exposure to the allure of the foreign, we have come to lose interest in, and respect for, our own environment, our own products, our own institutions, our own languages and songs, our own peoples. We would rather rape the America we see on the screen.

Our identity, therefore, is under threat. Particularly among the young, among the teenagers, there is a growing, pervasive cult of American pop culture, with all its negative aspects, the imitation of which is regarded as the mark of "civilization," or of youthful exuberance. And the American embassy is besieged every day with visa applicants who, whatever the humiliation of the experience, will endure week-long queues, even under the pouring rain.

One could go on. Everywhere among us there is a visible sign of the spreading plague of alienation. But the resistance to this, which is a form of the War of Identity, is obviously different from the concerns of postcolonialism, and the point I wish to make in this paper is that this difference marks significant departures in the literature we produce. For instance, one of the most sympathetic definitions of postcolonialism I have found so far is that of Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, who argue that

[n]ot a naïve teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism is, rather, an engagement with, and contestation of colonialisms discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies. Colonisation is insidious: it invades far more than political chambers and extends well beyond independence celebrations. Its effects shape language, education, religion, artistic sensibilities, and, increasingly, popular culture. (2)

But the conclusion which the two authors draw from this argument--and this is what I am contesting--is that all our work continues to privilege the "Centre"--by which is meant a former colonial country in Europe, and that we still take this "Centre" as the focal point of all our activities of resistance in Africa. Thus, all we do is prefigured as a continuous act of "writing back" to an "Empire" (see Ashcroft et al.), and hence is perennially a "counter-discourse." This kind of reading therefore presumes, that is, that we continue to acknowledge the overweening presence of an "Empire," in which our roles are not only subaltern but are also an automaton gesture of response to the presence of the "Other." In fact, Gilbert and Tompkins more or less assume this when, among their four categories of "post-colonial performance," they include "acts performed for the continuation and/or regeneration of colonised (and sometimes pre-contact) communities" (11).

It is no wonder, then, that their whole book is devoted to analyzing the plays we write, and all the strategies we employ, as merely strategies to deconstruct the presence of colonization, as opposed to what they really are--attempts to confront, through our plays, our novels and poetry, the various problems of underdevelopment which our countries are facing, and of which the threat of alienation and the potential erosion of ethnic identity constitute only one of the outward signals. It is time to correct this erroneous mis/reading. When NgUgI wa Thiong'o, for instance, talks volubly about the necessity to do away with our colonially inherited languages (see Decolonising the Mind), he is not advocating this as a goal in itself, but as only one of the measures necessary for the process of creating an egalitarian, socialist society on the continent. Similarly, the late Efua Sutherland created the anansegoro, from a skillful fusion of Western and traditional African theatrical elements, but her main purpose was not to erase the gaze of colonialism's Other, as much as to help discover a modern African theatrical form that would be meaningful and accessible to contemporary Africans.2 And Ama Ata Aidoo's goals are not so much the creation of African equivalents of European heroines or goddesses, as rather to empower African women socially and politically against the hegemony of a traditionally patriarchal society. Without attention to these nuances, the incorporation of the work of African writers within the broad front of postcolonialism can only be a gross reductionism.

Let us pursue the point a little further. I insist: it is not so much that the wound of the old colonial Empire is not uppermost in our mind; it is, rather, that the notion of that kind of "Empire" at all is no longer a current concern. When Soyinka talks of the "open wound of a continent," he is not referring to "Orientalism," to these problems of (mis)representation in Western discourse. He is talking, instead, of such problems as our inept and kleptocratic governments, our brutal, self-perpetuating dictatorships (military or otherwise), and the unrelieved poverty and misery among a majority of our people, compared to the ostentatious opulence of a corrupt few. He is also concerned with the collusion of foreign commercial interests in the undermining of Africa's progress, as well as with the religious and ethnic animosities among our people, which members of our cynical and rapacious elite periodically ignite into violent pogroms to serve their own selfish ends. He is talking, in one word, of the immense difficulties inherent in the creation of a Nation and of a National Identity.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not saying that the widespread cultural disorientation, which is a consequence of the above agonies, does not preoccupy us, as writers and intellectuals. No nation can grow, after all, which abandons its roots. Thus the threat of alienation is obviously an important issue to be confronted and resolved like others. All I am saying is that in dealing with this one particular issue, we must place it within its proper perspective. The African grievance against foreigners does not lie so much on our resentment of the lingering scars of colonization as, rather, on the economic policies they continue to pursue to our detriment and continued impoverishment. And even then, we hold these foreign interests guilty for this exploitation only in a secondary way, because we believe that the first culprits in this deleterious drama are our own leadership, and our own complacent or misinformed populace, and those two are hence the primary target of our works. What we cannot tolerate, what we will not allow the West to get away with, is what I may describe here as the wound of invisibility--the open and insidious ways by which the moguls of the Western media contrive to keep us out of the platforms of world discourse, as if we were completely absent from history. And again, even in this regard, our main problem is not about the distortion of our identity--you can't distort what you don't represent--as much as about the consequence of this invisibility on our people, that is, the loss of faith in ourselves, which culminates in an impulse to imitate, and be absorbed in, the pop culture of the West. It is this danger, of the gradual transformation of our people into mimic men, that is our concern, and it is obviously different, therefore, from the goals of postcolonialism, even if they share some similar features.

This wound of absence is particularly damning because it repeats itself even in surprising places, among even the radical circles of the West. For to be "Oriental" is at least to be aware of the Orient, to take its presence into account, even if that taking into account turns out to be a distortion of its reality. In our case, in Africa, we are not even noticed: the map of discourse has been drawn, apparently, to stop on a latitude parallel to the Mediterranean Sea! Thus, for instance, in theater circles where there has been a vigorous experimentation, in recent years by various radical theater practitioners in cultural and transcultural productions and research, this "international" work has meant only the blending of Western theater mechanics with those of Asia. When Africa is mentioned at all, it is only cursorily, or, as with Peter Brook's single excursion to Africa, in a brief and humiliatingly tangential interlude.3

By comparison, however, all the celebrated troupes on the contemporary Western stage--Arian Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil and Brook's International Centre for Theatre, both in Paris; Eugenio Barba's Odin Theatret in Holsebro; the Irondale group in New York; etc.--work extensively with Oriental theater techniques and traditions, such as the kabuki and bunraku (e.g., in Mnouchkine's three Shakespeare productions), the noh (Robert Wilson's Knee Plays), kathakali (Mnouchkine's L'Indiade)--and possibly the most famous of all, Brook's Mahabharata.4 These postmodernist experiments may not offer authentic pictures of the Orient, as many have argued, but at least they do make the Orient visible; they make it a subject of living attention on the international scene. In contrast, no such attention is paid to any African form or tradition--as far as theater traditions are concerned, we may as well not exist! This is painful, no doubt. But, and this is my point, where the pain bites even deeper is in the realization that many of us in Africa ourselves share this nonchalance or ignorance of our own indigenous traditions! Instead, we swoon--are made to swoon--in ecstatic delight over the cultural products of the West. Obviously, then, if we have a great battle to fight for survival at all, the first place to start must be on the home front. Thus, while the target of Orientalism--and of postcolonialism, its offspring--is the West (a front which we must leave to our diasporic kinsmen and women to fight), the target of our own battle must be, and has been, ourselves.

There are two crucial points to note therefore in this regard. The first is that when postcolonialism talks of the "Centre," and locates it in the West, our own "Centre" is on the contrary Africa itself, while the West is the Other, with its concerns being totally marginal to us African writers based in Africa. The second point is that, from our own perspective, there are in fact not just one, but two categories of the Other--one constituted by the white world, and the second by our own brothers and sisters in exile in the diaspora. For the assumption has always been erroneous, that simply because we share the same color of skin, and the same ancestral backcloth, those of us who live on the continent, and those who live outside, must necessarily share the same pains and the same priorities. Ben Okri and Festus Iyayi are both Nigerians and are both novelists. Okri has been enormously successful in England, where Iyayi is unknown. But in Nigeria the situation is just the reverse, with Iyayi being the recipient of many ANA prizes,5 while Okri is known only by name and reputation, but hardly read. And of course there is a palpable difference in their styles and themes, because the experiences they wish to discuss, and the audiences they are addressing, are different. Similarly, it is wrong to presume that a play by Gabriel Gbadamosi, who has lived most of his life in England, will, simply because he himself is of Nigerian parents, be dealing with the same issues as a play by Wale Ogunyemi,6 who has lived and worked in Ibadan most of his life.

In fact, when we talk of African literature and its treatment of the subject of Identity, we must begin by breaking it down into three separate categories. The first would comprise the works written by Africans living in exile in the diaspora, and therefore published there. The second would be the literature produced by Africans, regardless of where they live, but which are written in response to some experience of racism in Europe and America, or have been commissioned by a Euro-American agency for performance in the West. And the third category would comprise the works written by those living and working in Africa, and mostly published in Africa, and which are written either in response to our ongoing sociopolitical disjunction or simply about the human relationships in it.

Now it is obvious that it is the first two categories that would be the most known in Europe, because published there, by publishers based there. They are also the ones in which the problematic contact with white culture is at the core of thematic exploration, the very topic that is pertinent to postcolonialist discourse.7 Based on this fact, it is then assumed that the third category--which is not published abroad and is therefore mostly unknown--would also carry the same preoccupations.

It is the arrogant, unapologetic fallacy of this kind of assumption that I am trying to refute. As one of the writers on the continent, and one who has served at various times on the executive board of significant literary associations, I believe I talk with authority when I say that our concerns are different. Postcolonialism is a return to the past, to the trenches of Negritude, whereas our Identity crisis in Africa is of a different order entirely, relating to two urgent problems--first, the dilemma of creating a national identity out of our disparate ethnic communities; and secondly, that of creating committed, responsible, patriotic, and compassionate individuals out of our civil populations. Of course, because we live in an increasingly shrinking world, we know we cannot accomplish any of these objectives without taking into consideration our contact with the Western world--as with the Middle and Far Eastern countries--but it is not this contact primarily that determines the locus or strategy of our struggle.

All this may sound too theatrical or abstract. So a journey to Africa, and a direct participation in the activities there, even for a so brief period, would be of course the best prescription. But since this is perhaps not immediately feasible, you will have to rely on my evidence, which as you must know by now, is not unbiased. It is simply impossible for me, as one of those deeply involved in this struggle, to construct a viable future for our people, to remain neutral or pretend to be. So I am going to illustrate with some examples from the repertory of theater over there, limiting myself to two plays that deal respectively with these two aspects of the identity problem I have just talked about.

The first of the plays is Ola Rotimi's Hopes of Living Dead. Like the plays of Negritude, Rotimi's theme is based on a scene from past history. Unlike these plays, however, history here is not ancient history, lost in myth, but a very recent one whose protagonists some people still remember. Also, it is not history with a capital "H," the official History which celebrates kings and queens and the fabricated grandeurs of court life; rather it is the slice of history which official historiographers normally omit, because they consider it shameful or degrading to the image of the rulers. Rotimi's heroes are therefore not the ones we are used to hearing about, not those usually celebrated with festive activities on national holidays; they are, on the contrary, social outcasts, diseased fellows, lepers, just the kind of characters, in fact, which Forest Father decided to send to the world of the living, to grace the Independence festivities of Nigeria in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests. This astonishing similarity here between the two plays--Soyinka's written in 1960 and Rotimi's some two and a half decades later--and the dissimilar purposes they serve is a revealing trope on the issue of Identity, and encodes graphically one of those signal moments I have been trying to describe, of the move away from Negritude by our authors. For in Rotimi's play, the lepers are not mere ciphers being manipulated by some controlling supernatural agency; they are, rather, the active agents themselves, involved, as the play shows us, in the very process of challenging a powerful Establishment, and rebuilding their world.

It is the consequent struggle that this challenge leads to, that forms the drama of the play. As the story unfolds, we see these lepers, who have been brought together at the beginning for some program of medical rehabilitation, reject being haphazardly dispersed when the program comes to an abrupt end. Instead, against the intimidating orders of the state, they mobilize themselves into a force of resistance, feeding and supporting one another, till the state finally yields and agrees to establish a leper's colony with proper medical facilities for them.

Rotimi dramatizes in full the astonishing process of the leper's resistance--their divisions and quarrels, the exemplary leadership which succeeds in ending these divisions and molding the people into one unified front, the sacrifices and betrayals and sometimes tragic costs of the struggle, and finally, their triumphant success. We see how a small condemned community, crippled at the outset by several disadvantages, manages to conquer itself first, and then conquer all its enemies, and attain the justice it is fighting for. There is no intervention of magic or of supernatural forces; the temptations of corruption are firmly rejected; collaboration, discipline, and compassion are the constant watchword; victory comes in the end through the lepers' visible, heroic struggle. We go away from the performance not dazzled or mesmerized, but inspired, liberated. Rotimi has not preached any sermons; he has merely shown a sample of human struggle, and its possibilities.

This last point is important, for the bane of most committed theaters is the tendency to sermonize. But Rotimi's methods show a masterful use here of the kind of theater mechanics which, since Grotowski, is now described as Poor Theater. All we have here is an almost barren stage, with a few beds for the patients. The stage props are also sparse, of the most minimally functional; and costumes, as is appropriate for a badly maintained hospital, are truly wretched, cheap. The result is to free the play of contrivance, give acuity to the play of the actors, and fluidity to stage movement. Such effects help in no small way to intensify the conflict, and amplify the affective, and yet profoundly ideological, power of the play. And then there is the use of music, never absent from any of Rotimi's productions. This time, however, the playwright chooses to reach for a clear, and deeply penetrating, classical intensity, rather than for the complexity and spectacle of an orchestral ensemble. Expertly drawing upon the actual history of the hero, Harcourt White, who in his real life led a choral ensemble, Rotimi discards drums and other instruments and relies solely on the raw, authentic power of the human voice. Thus, either consciously or unconsciously, the play becomes powerfully evocative of other tragic moments in human history, when songs alone are all that is left for a helpless people about to be slaughtered.

Two other features reinforce the play's tremendous effect. These relate to characterization and language. With regard to the first, the playwright carefully draws the complex relationship between leadership and followership. While emphasizing the democratic imperatives of any kind of communal struggle--the need for everyone involved to be treated with respect, along with the need to understand that everyone's contributions cannot be exactly equal--Rotimi also shows the corollary--that is, the need for a leadership that can be trusted, that does not shy away from taking decisions on behalf of others, always knowing those decisions will be just, that will also be able to share out responsibilities judiciously, according to each one's talents, or energies, or experience, a leadership that, in one word, has the guts to take control. Rotimi's Harcourt White certainly displays a lot of guts, especially the courage to refuse to betray his comrades for monetary inducements. All the same, with all these exemplary qualities, White is never shown to be a lone ranger in the camp. All the others, too, and especially the women, share in the labor as well as in the decision-making process: patriarchy simply becomes a nonissue in the embrace of struggle.

Still, the second feature is the more astonishing. This is Rotimi's decision to use, in his dialogue, as many languages as are naturally spoken by the members of his cast.8 As far as I know, this is the first time any playwright in Nigeria would take such a daring approach to dramaturgy. And only a Rotimi perhaps could make such a successful use of plural tongues and simultaneous translations, with the formula "each one tell one" becoming the unifying statement that welds the action and carries it forward. And the lesson for our country, as well as others in black Africa, where the complex multiplicity of languages has been the most formidable barrier to the forging of a national Identity and the achievement of collective national objectives, is obvious. Rotimi's lepers show us how this problem can be so simply transcended and turned in fact into an asset in the pursuit of national goals, by a positive and determined leadership, and by a general spirit of collective striving.

If Rotimi's play deals so brilliantly with this aspect of Identity at the national level, using a cast of characters drawn mainly from the lower class, the second play I wish to discuss, my own Morountodun, tackles the subject from the angle of the single, private individual, deliberately drawing from, and hence representing the average theater-going public in Nigeria. The intention is to make the spectator confront himself or herself in the character of the leading protagonist, Titubi, the daughter of a middle-class market woman and strong defender, at the outset, of the hierarchic ideals of that class. The time is that of the Biafran war in Nigeria, during which a major peasant uprising (the so-called "Agbekoya War") occurs in the western part of the country. In the play, Titubi, after an interesting confrontation with a police superintendent, volunteers to go as a spy among the rebellious farmers, to help arrest their leader, and the police duly arrange for her to be captured. However, her direct experience of life among the farmers changes her completely, till her political allegiances shift spectacularly to their side, and we find her serving as their agent. (The comparison is always made, by American readers, with Patty Hearst, again, almost as if every experience has to have American equivalents to be valid!) The play thus demonstrates a process of class suicide, in which a member of the middle-class elite is mobilized into an alliance with the peasantry, in order to perform the catalytic role necessary, in our underdeveloped economies, for the drama of social transformation. It seeks to provide, that is, one plausible option to the question of identity with which the members of the ruling elite and the educated class in our countries are daily confronted in our developmental crisis.

While Rotimi's mechanics recall the tactics of Grotowski and of the Absurd theater, however, Morountodun's affiliation--since we must seek one, to be understood at all--is with the Epic Theater of Brecht. Thus there is a self-conscious theatricality at play here, the play continually breaking out of its conventional narrative mold to declare its artificiality, its self-referentiality; the preference for an episodic rather than a linear sequence of narration; the conspicuous use of flashbacks, of the play-with-the-play, riddling games, music, song, and spectacle. Then the play deliberately foregrounds the question of illusion and reality, by continuously juxtaposing scenes from myth and history; from the present and the past; and from the play's present, and the real present, such that the audience is made aware all the time of the options available, and those chosen. Also, the play highlights the role of women, showing them in differing roles, as heroines (Titubi) or villains (Alhaja Kabirat), as combatants (Mosun, Wura), as well as supporting wives (the peasant women). The intention is to turn the stage into a problematic space of ideological conflict, through which the audience can see itself mirrored and, possibly, energized in its struggle with history.

These two plays, then, Rotimi's Hopes of the Living Dead and my own Morountodun, illustrate, I believe, the crucial point that I am trying to make, that in tackling the question of Identity, we writers on the continent have gone beyond Negritude, and hence beyond the rhetoric which authorizes and maps postcolonial discourse and its banners. The strategies we employ, particularly in the theater, will quite often recall similarities with the discourse of postcolonialism and with Negritude, of course, but it is important to note the differences. This is in fact why I have chosen the term "post-Negritude" advisedly, to underline the fact that just as there is a relationship of similarity/repetition and dissimilarity/contestation between modernism and its post-version, so there is, between Negritude and post-Negritude, the same relationship of continuation and disruption. Nor is the passage from one to the other always sharp or distinct, or even chronologically linear in the career of all our artists (Soyinka's Negritudist Death and the King's Horseman, for instance, postdates his The Road or Opera Wonyosi). While Negritude seeks to be a philosophy, racially holistic, post-Negritude identifies itself only as praxis; while Negritude flamboyantly displays its racism--"anti-racist racism," said Sartre (see "Orphée Noire"), post-Negritude is merely racial, in that it seeks to identify, emphasize, and promote certain cultural aspects of the black African world which it believes have been under threat of erasure by first, colonialism, and secondly, by the present "global" (translate: "American") cultural incursions. But unlike Negritude, post-Negritude does not, however, believe in, or promote, a wilful mystification of the African past, the blanket exoticization of which people like Senghor were often guilty (and which still bedevils Molefi Asante's "Afrocentricism"). However--and it is important to stress this--post-Negritude does not reject the past either; it only demands a critical attitude to the exhumation of our heritage, such that such remembrance will not just present our culture as a static, nostalgic monument, but rather as a dynamic process, hybrid, and sometimes even self-contradicting. Thus it is a rejection of the past which is at the same time a more authentic reappropriation of it; so that while Negritude remembers, post-Negritude re/members. Both believe, especially, in the conception of art practiced by the ancient storytellers, in which the narrative is never gratuitous, but equally serves an ethical and edifying purpose; the difference, however, is that the audience post-Negritude wants to reach is not the white men and women of Europe or America, either so as to teach them about our positive values or convince them of our humanity. Rather, its primary audience is the local public, which it wants to empower for moral and political action, against the negative forces of our societies. Again, like Negritude, it does not reject wholesale the use of the inherited colonial language as a language of national communication and of artistic creation; but it also recognizes the validity of our local languages, and advocates the promotion of all of these in equal measure with the adopted national lingua franca. Perhaps the time has come, urgently, to turn away from the glamor of postcolonialism, into the grit and dust of post-Negritude, in order to have a proper apprehension of the present reality of the African continent.

NOTES

1. This paper was first presented at the Conference on Identity and Conflict in Africa, organized by the African Studies Unit of the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, 15-17 September 1997.

2. The late Efua Sutherland was the founder of the Drama Studio in Ghana. Her plays include Edufa, Foriwa, and the most famous among them, The Marriage of Anansewa. Sutherland died last year.

3. Biodun Jeyifo has discussed this problematic issue in his essay in The Intercultural Reader, edited by Patrice Pavis.

4. Parvis's The Intercultural Reader is an excellent collection of essays and interviews on these various experiments. See also Carlson.

5. Association of Nigerian Authors' literature prizes, awarded annually in October/November. Iyayi has won the Fiction Prize, first with Violence and then Heroes, which also won the Commonwealth Literature Prize.

6. A founding member of Wole Soyinka's 1960 Masks and Orisun Theatre, Ogunyemi wrote prolifically for many years, but seems nowadays to have retired solely into acting, for stage and television. Among his plays are Ijaye War: A Historical Drama; Obaluaye, A Music-Drama; and Kiriji.

7. Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, for instance, was written in Cambridge, after the playwright had been the victim of racial discrimination. Although the subject had been in his mind for several years, the resulting script can be justifiably said to have come out as a strong response to that racist experience, in that, contrary to the playwright's former position and practice, we have here a confrontation in which the "culture clash" theme is foregrounded.

8. Recently, at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, Rotimi also carried out the same experiment with a multicultural cast speaking a variety of American and European languages. Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain any kind of feedback on how successful or not the approach was. But I should imagine that if it could work in Ife, it should work also in Minnesota.

WORKS CITED

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

Carlson, Marvin. Places of Performance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge, 1996.

Jeyifo, Biodun. The Intercultural Performance Reader. Ed. Patrice Pavis. London: Routledge, 1996. 149-61.

NgUgI wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986.

Ogunyemi, Wale. Ijaye War: A Historical Drama. Ibada: Orisun Acting Editions, 1970.

_____. Obaluaye, A Music-Drama. Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, U of Ibadan, 1972.

_____. Kiriji. Lagos: African Universities P, 1976.

Osofisan, Femi. Mororountodun. [The Oriki of a Grasshopper and Other Plays.] Washington: Howard UP, 1995.

Rotimi, Ola. Hopes of the Living Dead. Ibadan: Oxford UP, 1986.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Orphée Noire". Preface. Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. Ed. L. S. Senghor. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Trans. in English by Samuel Allen as Black Orpheus. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman. London: Methuen, 1975.

_____. The Road. London: Oxford UP, 1965.

_____. Opera Wonyosi. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.

Sutherland, Efua. Edufa. London: Longman, 1967.

_____. Foriwa. Accra: Ghana Publishing Corporation, 1971.

_____. The Marriage of Anansewa. Harlow, Essex: Longman Drumbeat, 1975.

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