WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 11 (2007)

Femi Osofisan

I

The Chairman,

Permit me, first of all, to express my gratitude to the organizers, for the invitation to give the keynote address to this august gathering.

I feel really honoured. And I am particularly happy to be here, as a personal act of fulfillment, since I have been similarly invited by the Association on other occasions in the past, without my being able to honour the invitation.

But Nsukka is a campus I have always been fond of, especially since those days of Chinua Achebe, Emmanuel Obiechina, Meki Nzewi, my senior colleagues who used to give me such a warm hospitality here; not to talk of their younger siblings, people like Ossie Enekwe, Don Assomba, Ngozi Udengwu, and Emman Nwabueze, our chief host today. Nsukka has always remained a place of pleasant encounters and happy memories, and I was only too glad to seize the opportunity to visit again. So once again, I thank you for inviting me.

However I must say that we are meeting today, as theatre artistes, at a time of despair. Unless we do not wish to acknowledge it, our art, from all appearances, is in the throes of extinction.

The production of plays—and I am talking of ‘production’ here in its two connotations, as both the creation of scripts as well as the realization of these scripts on stage—has dwindled dangerously among our people. The few theatres that exist have grown dilapidated out of neglect, or are being converted to other uses, most often wedding ceremonies, in order to meet the costs of maintenance. And those of our comrades who stubbornly persist and, against prevailing odds, finally succeed to get some play on stage have no assurance any more that the audience will be there.

We are, to put it bluntly, in a state of crisis. And it seems to me that, if this conference is to have any significance, it must first and foremost address itself to this very threat to our existence and continuing relevance.

The crisis is particularly acute in the area of the south-west, where I come from. As every one knows, this was until quite recently, perhaps the liveliest and most ebullient in terms of theatrical activity in the whole country, and was one of the most written about by scholars.

On three levels of the socio-economic divide—that is, among the rural peasantry, the suburban proletariat and lower middle class, and the educated elite—the industry of drama was conspicuously busy and crowded.

Village festivals and ritual ceremonies proliferated; professional troupes, and in particular the Yoruba travelling theatre companies, led by Hubert Ogunde, plied their trade in the urban areas, sometimes traversing the whole West African coast; while the higher institutions bubbled with the activities of the Soyinkas and Sofolas, the Clarks and the Rotimis.

These activities naturally spawned a parallel work of academic study, and scholars like Biodun Jeyifo, Karen Barber, Joel Adedeji, and others wrote about them with fervour and eloquence. On the campus where I teach, as in surrounding allied institutions, numerous dissertations blossomed on the subject of theatre and drama.

But the shock is that, today, almost overnight, the bulk of all that scholarly production has turned ludicrously otiose, if not even nonsensical. Implausible as it may sound, the most recent books on the subject of Nigerian theatre, (some of which may be on display here), have become suddenly irrelevant and embarrassingly dated, like archaeological relics.

In a manner that no one could have even dared to speculate some few years back, all these dramatic activities in south western Nigeria seem to have simply vaporized: the traditional theatres have virtually ceased, owing mainly to the relentless exodus of rural manpower to the cities; the once-flourishing Yoruba travelling theatres have changed form and strategy, and dissolved into the world of the “home video” market; on the campuses, economic factors and a corroding surge of “globalization” have led to an implicit erasure of theatrical productions.

If it the situation is so dire in the west, you may well imagine what it is in other parts of the country. That is why the concern nowadays among the troubled practitioners about the actual, or imminent, death of the theatre has grown into a palpable fear; and why it is a subject that haunts me, for reasons which I am certain you understand. It is the reason I have chosen to discuss it with you today.

II

The first thing that will strike those who are familiar with Nigerian history is, surely, the irony of the situation.

It cannot but look strange that the years of creative ebullience in the theatre that we spoke about above, were the years coincident with military rule and the brutal suppression of human rights.

In those years, to dare to speak at all was more or less to put your neck on the line in the face of horrendous decrees. The military were corrupt, and brooked no opposition to their rule. They looted the nation’s wealth in a most extravagant manner, plunged our people into misery and lengthened our night of underdevelopment. Naturally, they did not want anyone to speak about their corruption or profligacy, or to remind them of the people’s anguish and simmering anger. So they were very sensitive to any voice of criticism and punished severely those who dared to oppose them or to attempt to unmask their evil doings.

But it is a tribute to our people that, during all that period of tyranny and terror, many still refused to be silenced, and found various ways to sustain an unrelenting opposition to wrong. In the theatre particularly, plays continued to be written and performed, that made the thieving soldiers the target of attack, either by direct denunciation, or through indirect, surreptitious tactics. The stage was turned into a part of the resistance, into an active space of struggle, with the dramatists contributing their own talents to the demand for freedom, and for the ousting of the uniformed oppressors.

Naturally therefore, the expectation was that, come the change of government at last and the transition to a democratic dispensation, the theatre, like the other arts, would experience a ferment, such that the repertory, hitherto circumscribed by the climate of fear, would explode like a hundred flowers.

But surprisingly, that anticipated harvest has turned into a hollow illusion. Now, when the soldiers have been driven from power, and the concept of democratic governance and of freedom of speech solidly reinstated in the Constitution—it is precisely at this very moment that the creative energy on the stage seems to have drained out.

There is virtually no voice on the stage now celebrating the present triumph; none re-evaluating the hideous past; none evoking the expected future: all is just silence and emptiness. Productions are sparse, the audiences thin; the scripts are, in terms of quality, neither-nor. Nobody, it seems, looks up any more to the playwright for illumination or insight.

What is the reason for this paradox? Is it, as some speculate, because creativity is better stimulated by pain and distress, rather than by pleasure and satiety? There is, of course, sufficient evidence in the history of art to support this line of thought—that the Muse, bruised and scandalized by anomie, grows loquaciously sensitive; whereas paradoxically, she tends to be tongue-tied in the absence of friction, to become complacently mute in the warm cocoon of success and fulfilment.

That line of speculation therefore has its own validity, we must concede. However, before we lose ourselves in this philosophical and psychological whirlpool, I think it may be worth our while to first concentrate on some of the more mundane factors behind the decline of live theatre in Nigeria.

III

The first of these is, as most people have noted, the parlous economic situation, which has continued to worsen since the advent of the soldiers and the imposition of the IMF-inspired Structural Adjustment Programme on our countries. From a period of oil boom, which lasted for probably a decade in the ‘70s, the country went burst, and plunged into what has been described as an ‘oil doom’, a period that is, of high inflation, massive devaluation of the national currency, and of a dubious debt peonage. Unfortunately no regime, since the early ‘80s, has been able to repair the damage, and put the economy back on a healthy course. The Obasanjo government makes so much noise about the reforms it has carried out and the foreign debts it has succeeded in getting paid or cancelled; but sadly, all these have not translated yet into any visible relief for the common man. The redolent statistics announced in every budget seem to have gone only to further enrich the wealthy, while the poor have fallen into greater desperation.

The consequences of this ruined economy on the theatre profession should not be surprising. First of all, it meant that production costs went up, just at the same time that individual incomes were dwindling, and when more people were being retrenched from their jobs. That is to say that, while on the one hand, theatre companies, to survive, found themselves obliged to raise the price of their tickets; on the other hand, the bulk of the audience which came to these plays were themselves, even more than before, burdened with the problem of getting their daily bread, to the extent that the theatre soon became a luxury they could no longer afford.

To make matters worse still, the problem of social insecurity became an untamable demon, as a consequence of the spreading hunger and misery in the land, and of rising unemployment particularly among school leavers. Violent crimes soon became a commonplace; nowadays armies of social miscreants have virtually taken over the streets and the schools; while the forces of law and order have grown even more corrupt and more inept.

This has meant that, in recent years, the majority of the population has abandoned the habit of going out for recreation after nightfall, with the exception of course of such places as night clubs or churches, where they can spend the whole night and stay sheltered until daybreak. Neither the theatre nor the cinema house is of course such a place, at least not yet, and it is a further reason why these places lost their audience.

IV

Along with these reasons, we must also consider the death, in a rather strangely rapid sequence, of the giant, entrepreneurial trail blazers of the stage. After Duro Ladipo, the profession lost the pioneering Hubert Ogunde, then Ade Love, Oyin Adejobi, Ola Rotimi, Wale Ogunyemi, and several others, all within the same decade! This alarming depletion of the practitioners could not but bring a major disruption to the life of the stage, especially to the travelling theatres, given the fact that most of them were organized like family enterprises, in which the lead actors were not only the producers, but also the central industrious paterfamilias. These giant figures organized both the business of the companies as well as the creative products, and their audiences assembled more or less in loyalty to their particular talents, drawn to their fierce but fragile personality cults. As soon they left the scene therefore, the companies they led lost their followers, and eventually vanished from the scene.

All the same, the most important of these factors for the decline of live theatre must undoubtedly be the twin phenomena of the local video industry and the growth of Pentecostal churches, both of which have witnessed a spectacular blossoming in the last decade, and both of which are evidently products of the same severe economic slump.

The first, that is the video industry, has proved to be a marvelous expedient both for the erstwhile theatre practitioners and the suffering public. Given all the problems that the travelling theatres and their audiences had to face in the age of SAP, as I briefly summarized above, recent advances in digital technology came at a most fitting time, as a fortuitous life-line. Unlike celluloid films, the production of videos is relatively cheap and affordable: and as far as the popular theatres are concerned, it is a process that also helps to eliminate travelling costs, road hazards, extensive wage-bills, hall charges, and so on, while at the same time bringing in the much-needed income for their labour.

Most crucially however was the audience’s wild enthusiasm. To everyone’s surprise, the public’s hunger for home entertainment, given the hazard of the streets and of night life, proved to be so rabid and so insatiable, that a vast and lucrative market was soon created for these video films. Naturally therefore, the travelling theatres rapidly diverted to videography, to the detriment of live theatre productions.

No one could have imagined the astonishing success and immediate acceptance of these home videos in the entertainment market. The most recent calculation (already two years old in fact) is of a 6 billion naira industry, all the more striking in that it is completely home-grown and privately developed. Known now as ‘Nollywood’, or ‘Naijawood’, it has won a large followership spread beyond the borders of Nigeria, and has even become the model for other, similar endeavours across the continent. The glamour and the financial reward that it provides for the actors and the producers can of course not be matched by any production on the live stage; so it is just natural that the bulk of our creative energy and our artistes should migrate to Nollywood.

V

In a parallel manner, the Pentecostal Christian phenomenon has become an answer to the desperation of the deprived population. In the search for solace or escapism, for miracles and healing, for an answer to their wretched lives, the masses of our people, both poor and rich, troop in ever increasing numbers to these churches, which have multiplied on an exponential scale in the last decade.

Whether fake or genuine, the fact is that these churches attract huge populations and so, have been a major force in draining away both the creative agents, as well as the audience of the theatre. Most of what we do on stage—the drama, the singing and dancing, the lighting and the costuming, etc—have already been appropriated by these churches, and incorporated into their liturgical processes. This is because these churches have realized the power of drama and music as tools in the process of evangelization, and of strengthening the illusion of wonder and supernatural presence. Hence they are prepared to supply the needed patronage for the despairing dramatists—to provide financial remuneration, purchase the equipment, arrange for the publicity, and so on for them. So it should not be surprising that some of the best actors and musicians and singers nowadays will be found in the church orchestras; or that some of the most impressive musical compositions are to be found in the church repertory. Indeed, just like in their early days at the beginning of the last century, the Africanist churches may be said to be the most fertile contemporary nursery for the discovery and mellowing of artistic work, while the theatre seats remain empty. [I am informed, although I have not personally investigated this, that a parallel movement has begun in the mosques, as a strategic programme of countering the growing wave of Christian evangelism. If true, this will only further compound our problems in the theatre!]

And then, beside all this, there are so many church activities now on almost every day of the week, from so-called “fellowship meetings”, to revival services, to night vigils, and so on, such that their congregation are kept almost permanently engaged, without the space for any extra activities, such as theatre. (In any case, we must not forget that the theatre is in most instances portrayed by the pastors as a haven of evil, to be scrupulously avoided by believers who wish to make it to paradise!)

These then, are some of the major reasons why the theatre has become a dying activity in Nigeria today.

VI

Nevertheless I have for some time, held to the view that this ‘death’ of the theatre is only in fact a temporary eclipse, that we would sooner than later experience a resurgence in the dramatic field.

My optimism was based on what I believed was the logic of the market, the forces of supply and demand, and on the ineffable communal and spiritual impact of the theatre experience, which is difficult to recapture in any other art. I was strengthened in this belief by the fact that practically all the actors that I knew, and interacted with—and including particularly those who were successful in Nollywood—all still yearned for the experience of acting before live audiences, and were obsessed with getting back on stage. At the same time, in an interesting corollary, the public itself regularly came out to lament the disappearance of stage performances, and the loss of that tactile relationship with the actors that they enjoyed at drama productions.

It seemed logical then, given these twin centripetal forces, to believe that all that was wanting was the right occasion, the right atmosphere, and the right incentive, and both the actors and their audience would inevitably come together again, and the theatrical tradition resume from where it had fallen into comatose. In particular, I believed that the emergence of some leader combining the artistic genius and business acumen of the Ogundes would provide the requisite magic wand.

But nowadays I am no longer certain.

Sadly, the hunger for live performance seems to me to have dwindled considerably in recent times. The public that knew and loved the experience of the live stage—both as actors and spectators—has decreased with the gradual ageing of my generation; turned to religion, or business, or politics, and they no longer have the time or the taste for such leisure activities as theatre. Again, among the actors, those who have not lost the taste do not seem capable any more of finding the energy required for a successful production—for instance, spoilt in the indulgence of Nollywood’s predilection for improvisational processes, very few of the actors are still capable of the mental agility required for the learning of lines, and fewer still can sustain the discipline that live theatre demands, especially when measured against the poor remuneration that it offers. Hence most of these practitioners have resigned themselves to the status quo, and in spite of their lingering regret, may never actually mount the stage again.

This situation is further compounded by the fact that virtually all the existing theatre houses are in dilapidation, and nobody seems interested in repairing them, not to talk of building additional theatre houses. All the new mega plazas going up in Lagos now for instance are for shopping malls, conference halls, and film houses, and the young men and women of the new generation do not seem to have any interest in watching plays.

VII

It is this new generation in fact that worries me especially. I used to argue that the fortunes, or misfortunes, of the traveling theatres could not affect us much, we practitioners of the literary theatre genre, since our plays have not depended so much on the audience of the streets as rather, of the schools and campuses. But since my return to the Ibadan campus after my 4-year stint at the National Theatre in Lagos, the situation I came to meet has shown that I may be wrong. In those four years, it seems, the campus environment has completely changed from the one I used to know and write for.

I found that first, the present corps of students are just as consumed by the Pentecostal phenomenon as the rest of the population, and receive as much thrill and fellowship there. The young ones are just as susceptible as their parents to the seduction of miracle and ecstatic worship, and especially to the glowing promises of boundless affluence that the priests brandish. Naturally one of the consequences, like with their parents, is that their enthusiasm for such activities as theatre has been seriously eroded.

Furthermore, our students in the department, as well as other theatre enthusiasts from other disciplines, have developed a keener interest in Nollywood than in stage productions, both because of its glamour and the possibility of gainful employment in the industry after school. This last point is of particular pertinence: the students can see that there are no opportunities for them in theatre when they graduate, whereas Nollywood offers glittering possibilities. So why, they ask themselves, should they waste their time on stage plays?

Finally, there are crucial generational problems. The present youth, having been shaped by factors different from those by which we were raised and nurtured, are naturally different from us in their values, their tastes and their habits. No society after all is ever static; and we too are not our parents. But what is worrisome however is that the influences which have determined the character of our students seem not to have always been the kind that one would describe as positive. We were grown and seasoned in an environment where our culture mattered, and our traditional customs held deep meaning; but for them, the pivotal cultural items have been from abroad, dominated by such things as the CNN, Channel O, The Face of Africa pageant, designer clothes and jewellery from abroad, lurid celebrity magazines like Ovation and Encomium, and so on.

Whereas we grew up in the age of liberation movements, of the communist struggle with capitalist power, of the fight against Apartheid, and so on; and whereas our heroes were such iconic figures as Mandela, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Brecht, Fanon, Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi and such names, the generations which have succeeded us are those of the morning after, of the age of capitalist triumphalism and the dominance of the American superpower, with its awesome control of the global media, of the Internet with its uncontrolled freedom. Our children have grown up in the age of SAP and IMF-dictated economic policies, and of an irresponsible, fissiparous party like the PDP in power. In their time, the celebrated heroes are not the commanders of dreams but of what the Americans call megabucks, the stars of the sports field or the musical charts, the barons of commerce and industry, the amoral, thieving politicians of this age of cynicism.

Hence, for the majority of the students, the greatest ambition the nurse is to emulate these figures they see daily in the media headlines and like them, accumulate wealth by any means and in the shortest time possible. That is why, for them, the grand, humanistic themes which fill our plays have become like a grandiose hoax, bearing no relevance whatsoever to the reality they observe all around them.

We are dramatists with no visible heirs.

VIII

Because of the way most of them are now brought up, with hardly any exposure to our traditional ways and customs—some of them are not even allowed to speak our indigenous languages in their homes—the bulk of the students we now have on campus are virtual aliens, with the alien’s mentality and ignorance, far different from the kind of Africans that we assumed ourselves to be!

You in this assembly will understand what I mean when I say that the present corps of students seems to have lost—or perhaps, never developed—the kind of skills and habits that we thought were necessary to become African actors. I mean that what we seem to have in our students nowadays are simply bodies, but not the bodies of performers.

The basic talents which we used to take for granted among our people are, sadly, no longer in their physical make-up. Senghor for instance was the one who told us that anybody who was black, and who was born in Africa, would automatically know how to sing, and dance, and play a basic percussive rhythm. But no more; not with the present generation. Now we know that it was not the factor of our skin that made us so sensuous as Senghor erroneously claimed, but rather, the nature of our old societies. And unfortunately—or fortunately—those old societies are gone.

Nobody wakes the young people up with oriki any more; nobody sings them to sleep with a folktale; they no longer participate in the old festivals and ceremonies. The only songs they know are taken from Channel O and the Euro-American Top Ten list, or from the church choirs. The costumes they wear are jeans trousers, no longer those wrappers and headties that we older ones proudly associate with our culture; for fashion and body adornment, they take their models from CNN.

All these factors have naturally altered not only the mentality, but also—a point crucial to the art of drama—the very body language of our youth. This is why it has become difficult to produce our plays, we older playwrights, since we wrote in the main precisely to flaunt and defend our culture against the incursing manners of the West. But now, all the semiotic signs that we used to assume to be intrinsic to our culture are no longer natural to the new actors. The spontaneous gestures are no longer there, nor the fluidity of movement one expects of African actors.

Take for instance, for illustration, the accompanying pouts and hisses and paralinguistic signs and signatures that make up the rich scenes of Yoruba theatre, and which a playwright like Rotimi exploits so marvelously for his cursing scenes in Man Talk, Woman Talk,—all that just can no longer be guaranteed in a production nowadays Similarly, the flow of referents, when you mention Ogun or Sango, or Orunmila, which should provoke from the actor certain spontaneous, somatic responses, does not do so with the new actors, largely because they are deaf to its ontological import. Hence the attempt nowadays to produce a work of Soyinka, or Rotimi, or Ogunyemi can be a most tedious and exhausting experience, nearly like working with foreign actors.

IX

So what is way out of this crisis? Should we just give up then and abandon the theatre? Is it true that it has no future? Or is there something we can do to preserve the profession?

The answers can only be in the area of speculation for now. But if I were to give an opinion, I would only say that there is no cause for despair. All we require will be courage. For what we will need to do, in order to keep our profession alive, is to renew ourselves, and radicalize our art. We must find the language to speak to the new generation and get them back into the auditorium. This will mean finding new approaches to the production of the old plays, as well as creating new scripts to fit the temper of the times, without however compromising or forsaking our belief in the capacity of art to enrich our community.

It is to this task that I believe we all must urgently dedicate ourselves, if we are not to plunge ourselves into a future of irrelevance. Certainly at no other time than now has the voice of the playwright been more pertinent, or more need. The society hungers for dreamers, for the intrepid moulders of vision such as the dramatist has always claimed to be. If we let the theatre die, it is we ourselves who will supply the corpses.

[Keynote Address to the 20th Annual Convention of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists (SONTA) at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, on July 12 2006.]

Citation Format:

Femi Osofisan. “Theatrical Life After the Generals: Or, Nigerian Theatre in Search of a Lifeline” West Africa Review: Issue 11, 2007.

Copyright © 2007 Africa Resource Center, Inc.