Ella Frigyik
Surreptitious Insurrection: Shakespeare and the Aesthetics of Revolt in Post-Civil War Nigeria
2018 Culture and Writing Prize
London, 2012. The first annual Globe to Globe festival saw the exposition of 37 Shakespeare adaptations in 37 different languages, all performed in the same Globe theatre that once housed the Bard.[1]Mass cultural spectacles, like the inclusion of Nigeria’s second largest ethnic group, the Yoruba, and their Igunnuko masked ceremony in the middle of Itan Oginintin, a Nigerian adaptation ofThe Winter’s Tale by a well-known herder,[2]awed the standard crowd of London theatregoers, not least because of the striking juxtaposition of iconic 400-year-old English theatre with the athletic displays put on by the Nigerian actors. This was the work of Shakespeare performed by people from an entirely different continent, planting the likes of Perdita and Florizel into dry red earth miles away from the kingdom of Sicilia. The sheer novelty of such a seemingly incongruous match made for incredible entertainment. But such a connection, between Yoruba theatre and Shakespeare, is less tangential than it may appear.
Shakespeare is remarkably prominent in Nigeria. As a British colony, Nigeria experienced numerous cultural impositions, one of which was the normalization of classic British cultural idols—like Shakespeare. While the sheer cultural recognition of Shakespeare in Nigeria is to be expected, there is powerful irony in the idea of Nigerians performing culturally adapted Shakespeare to a largely British audience: the colonized returning to the colonizer to perform a piece of colonial legacy, now imbued with the culture of the once-colonized. The Nigeria-Shakespeare linkages radiate outwards. From Itan Oginintinat the 2012 Globe festival, to renowned playwright Wole Soyinka’s prison poem entitled “Hamlet,” to the late 1970s Nigerian Macbeth adaptation Aare Akogun, to critical playwright Femi Osofisan’s recent Wesoo, Hamlet!, the confluence of Yoruba theatre and Shakespeare abounds in Nigeria, prompting the question of why these two seemingly disparate cultural fields are so tightly linked.
This essay explores the flourishing of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1970s post-civil war period in Nigeria. I argue that Shakespeare’s politically turbulent plot structures provided a template on which to build a “surreptitious insurrection” that was uniquely Yoruba in nature.[3]The writers of the post-civil war period veiled subtle denunciations of the injustices perpetrated by General Gowon’s military regime through the literary normalization provided by Shakespeare, and the seeming unlikeliness that colonial culture would house the revolutionary politics of the colonized. By using Shakespeare as a foundation for the “aesthetics of revolt,”[4]these political writers cast powerful political critiques while largely evading government scrutiny, the colonially normalized mask of Shakespeare veiling critique just as the Igunnuko masks of Yoruba theatre veil their performers from the audience’s watchful eyes.
I. Nigerian Political and Literary Landscape in the 1970s
Prior to delving into the adaptations themselves, it is key to contextualize, in broad terms, the political climate and literary landscape of post-civil war Nigeria. Shakespeare critics like Martin Banham and Jane Plastow, along with Yoruba scholars like Adesola Adeyemi, have analyzed the nature of Yoruba Shakespeare adaptations. Banham and Plastow, writing in Shakespeare In & Out of Africa, note the tendency for Yoruba playwrights to culturally re-create Shakespearean plays in a manner that better reflected traditional Nigerian ideology and spiritualism.[5]Adeyemi, focusing on Itan Oginintin, argues this cultural re-creation was met with mixed reception from Nigerian audiences, who were divided over whether the inclusion of the traditional Igunnuko masked ceremony in a venue that could not properly encapsulate the full richness of the tradition amounted to a perversion of that tradition, or if the attempt to share a uniquely Yoruba ritual on a global stage was a commendable act.[6]But despite this scholarship on Yoruba Shakespearean adaptations, little has been done to examine the potentially political underpinnings of Yoruba theatre. The one exception is Antony Johae, who, writing in 2007, performed a close contextual reading of Wole Soyinka’s “Hamlet,” pointed out that Soyinka wrote this poem during a twenty-two-month period of solitary confinement in prison, in response to his revolutionary actions against Biafra and General Yakubu Gowon’s military state in Nigeria. Soyinka draws parallels between the unsettled situation in Hamlet’s Denmark and the uncertainty of Gowon’s Nigeria.[7]Johae’s consideration of the veiling of dissent with literature, and his exploration of historical subtext along with thematic intent are both powerful, but he neglects to consider Yoruba cultural re-creation as an integral tool in the creation of this subtle artistic rebellion.
It is key here to note a common thread between all of the aforementioned Nigerian playwrights: they hail from the 1970s post-civil war literary resistance movement in Nigeria. Though Itan OginintinandWesoo, Hamlet!were written relatively recently, Oguntokun and Femi Osofisan were both active members of the writing community in 1970s Nigeria, and as such we can consider their work as a continuation of that movement, given its formative effect on their early careers. All of the other works here mentioned were written in or around the 1970s, with Soyinka’s “Hamlet” published in 1967, and Aare Akogunfirst hitting the stage in 1972.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were times of great political turbulence in Nigeria. Nineteen sixty-six saw the rise of military leader General Yakubu Gowon to head of state in a bloodless inter-military countercoup. As ethnic tensions rose, Gowon declared a state of emergency and led the military against insurgent factions in a civil war that would last until 1970, after government forces defeated the independently declared state of Biafra in eastern Nigeria. Gowon would continue to rule until 1975, when a different military coup stripped him of power. Nigeria remained under military control for much of the 1970s.[8]
Critics, such as Femi Osofisan himself, have addressed the nature of Yoruba theatre in the post-civil war period and described the “surreptitious insurrection” undertaken by writers like Wole Soyinka.[9]Osofisan argues that political dissenters used the guise of literature to veil their criticism of the military regime, and in so doing built a culture of the “aesthetics of revolt.”[10]He claimed Nigerian plays in the post-Independence period are “intended to be as much investigative rites of sociopolitical rebellion” as “deliberate revisions of the inherited theatrical forms on behalf of that ‘hidden’ agenda” (85). In Osofisan’s argument, theatre is best created within an atmosphere of “Terror” (81), and the civil war and military regime Nigeria experienced in the late twentieth-century provided an ideal opportunity for drama to thrive in the wake of fear and uncertainty.[11]
II. Yoruba Theatre
But before we can grasp the complex relations between the plot structure of Shakespeare’s plays and the realities of politics and literary resistance in post-civil war Nigeria, we must take a closer look at the cultural institution that is Yoruba theatre. From the eighteenth-century spectacle of the Alarinjo traveling theatre, all the way to the ancient Egungun masked tradition, where male leaders of the tribe don masks and masquerade as ancestral spirits, Yoruba theatrical tradition is intrinsically tied to religion, drawing inspiration from the pantheon of gods and deities, chief of which is Ogun, who is said to have cleared a dense forest to allow the other gods to pass from heaven to earth. Alarinjo performance is the model for modern Yoruba theatre, birthed in the mid-twentieth century and led by playwright Hubert Ogunde. The form relies heavily on the incorporation of ritualistic elements like folklore, songs, chanting, drumming, dancing, and a plethora of proverbs. These threads of cultural wisdom are laced through plays in an attempt to treat theatre as an educational and moral experience, much like ancient oral storytelling traditions. Plays are viewed as a means of passing on ideological values, and thus by their very nature require a powerful connection with the audience. At Yoruba plays, the audience commonly chants back responses prompted by the actors, usually completing a well-known proverb the actor has left partially unspoken.[12]In this way, the interplay between audience and actors is key in Yoruba theatrical tradition.
III. Shakespeare and Political Turbulence: Macbeth and Hamlet
Political insurrection and turbulence abound in Shakespearean plots, elements that resonate with the situation of Nigeria in the 1970s and lend themselves to subtle adaptation.
Take the example of Macbeth, where we witness not just one, but two instances of regicide, with varying levels of legitimacy. At this basic level, Macbethis a text cloaked in an atmosphere of political instability, reflecting the very real possibilities of political change in a nation close to war. But so too doesMacbethchart the course of a military man who, both unnerved and tempted by the prophecies of witches, wrangles his way to control of the kingdom of Scotland. Shakespeare makes it clear that Macbeth is a man, above all, of great military prowess—indeed, one of the first images we receive of Macbeth is that of him “unseam[ing]” Macdonwald “from the nave to the chaps.”[13]At the center of Macbeth’s political wrangling is his murder of the king and assumption of power, in a brutal coup. The Weïrd Sisters warn Macbeth that he can only be killed by a man not of woman-born; falsely assuming no such man lives, Macbeth is slain in battle in a climactic confrontation with Macduff, who was prematurely removed from his mother’s body. In this sense, Macbeth is often read as a tragic and cautionary tale of the perils of a military man assuming power by force.
Hamlet too is grounded in atmospheric political instability. Here it is useful to take the inspiration of Margreta de Grazia and consider Hamlet without the prince himself.[14] The play is set in a turbulent Denmark that is still reeling from the loss of its king, the late Hamlet senior. Hamlet is forced to grapple with the concurrent assumption of power by his uncle, who may potentially have murdered his father, and the “o’erhasty” incestuous marriage of his mother and uncle.[15] In this way, Hamlet depicts a country that is internally fragmented. But even beyond this internal turmoil, Denmark is being assailed by the belligerent Fortinbras and his Norwegian army. As such, Hamlet’s Denmark is an example of a nation tormented by both intrinsic and extrinsic conflict,[16] in a manner almost parallel to the situation of Nigeria in the 1970s.
IV. Surreptitious Insurrection
Nigerian writers in the post-civil war period culturally re-created Shakespearean texts in order to both celebrate the African heritage they felt the military regime undervalued, and veil their denunciations of the injustices wrought by the war. In 1972, playwright Wale Ogunyemi first staged Aare Akogun, a Macbethadaptation that fairly closely parallels Shakespeare’s text: Akogun the warrior is praised by the king Oba for his military prowess, and raised to increasingly grand positions of power, till eventually he and his wife Olawumi murder the king and Akogun assumes command of the kingdom. Akogun is defeated in the seemingly implausible event of an eclipse, parallel to Macbeth’s foe being a man not woman-born.[17] But there is one key difference between the texts: Akogun and Olawumi do not kill the king out of ambition as do Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but rather under the influence of Yoruba spirits.
Ogunyemi strips Macbeth of foreign Western ideology, retaining simply the plot structure as the key commonality. There is no element of the freewill struggle in this retelling, and the focus is instead on the havoc wrought once the spirits have dictated events in this manner. By reframing the story in a supernatural context well defined in the Yoruba canon, Ogunyemi crafted a story that was well accepted and distributed within Nigeria, in a way that Shakespeare’s original text would not have been, due not only to significant language barriers but also to cultural barriers—Western elements of fate and freewill are nonexistent in traditional Yoruba folklore. This cultural reframing is key, because it allowed Ogunyemi to carry the plot of Macbeth over to Nigerian audiences, while veiling subtle indictments beneath the literary normalization of a pro-Yoruba theatre movement. Macbeth is, at its core, a story about the tragedy that ensues once a military man rises to power. Aare Akogunwas performed during the rise of General Gowon, a military general who had also gained power after demonstrated valor in battle. In this sense, Ogunyemi’s tale reads as a warning against militaristic assumption of power, made all the more relevant to Nigeria through the inclusion of Yoruba spiritual ideology, and numerous instances of song, chant, and idiom.
This technique, of veiling political commentary in culturally reframed Shakespeare adaptations, is one Osofisan takes in Wesoo, Hamlet! Osofisan writes that the play is situated in Yorubaland in the “last half of the 20thcentury,”[18] a time period that encapsulates the build-up to the Nigerian civil war, the war itself, and the aftermath. The play’s secondary title is the The Resurrection of Hamlet, and Osofisan takes this quite literally, incorporating Hamlet, Ophelia, and Claudius as characters separate from their Nigerian twentieth-century counterparts in the play. Shakespeare’s dead characters are sent down by the deity Orunmila from the afterlife to attempt to forestall “the tragedy that is about to break,”[19] namely, the re-creation of the tragedy of Hamlet in contemporary Nigeria. These characters don “ancestral masks” and function much like traditional Yoruba spirits,[20] grounding the unfamiliar Western characters in Yoruba tradition by encapsulating their foreignness in the general inscrutability of ancestral forms. In this sense, Osofisan transformed Shakespeare’s tropes into more familiar elements of Yoruba theatre, framing the story in a way that was accessible to Nigerian audiences. The motivation for Claudius’ counterpart Ayíbí’s murder of the king Oba Sáyédèrò is, like in Shakespeare’s text, political, but Osofisan adds an economic factor too, as the Oba refuses to allow Ayíbí’s proposal to build a tobacco factory in the village.
Hamlet is based in the turbulent state of Denmark, with the outside forces of Norway marshalling against the nation; Wesoo, Hamlet! is centered in postcolonial, (mostly) post-civil war, economically troubled Nigeria, with outside Westernizing forces of industry marshalled against the traditional order of the village. In this sense, the general atmospheric elements of Hamletparallel the situation Osofisan wished to encapsulate and comment on. Post-civil war Nigeria prefaced the oil boom and, drained by wartime efforts, the country faced a massive economic downturn in the late 1970s, despite Gowon’s efforts to revitalize the economy through the creation of the Economic Community of West African States.[21] By transforming Hamlet in this manner, Osofisan was able to craft a subtle indictment of the failed attempts of the Westernizing, economically minded military to provide for the Nigerian people—a message that was made all the more powerful by the fact that he used traditional Yoruba tropes such as song and idiom to tell it.
V. Conclusion: Aesthetic Revolt
It is important to note that surreptitious insurrection in Nigeria has not been limited to the realm of Shakespearean adaptations. Indeed, Femi Osofisan’s individual artistic rebellion encompasses a vast array of theatrical material, including pieces uniquely Yoruba in plot and thematic content, such as The Chattering and the Song, Morountodun, and Once Upon Four Robbers. In The Chattering,Osofisan disguises his “indictment…of the corrupt Gowon regime” by crafting it as a retelling of the overthrowing of nineteenth-century Nigerian king, Gaha.[22] Morountodun unites the Yoruba legend of Moremi, former queen of Ife, with the story of a Nigerian policewoman who led a stealthy attack on insurgents in 1968, Osofisan here masking a plea for greater gender equality in a nation bound by traditional practices.Once Upon Four Robbers proved to be a “modern folk tale,”[23] incorporating an amorphous narrator, audience participation, song, and dance into a tale about highway conmen. Osofisan’s plays thus interweave themes from Yoruba history and theatre with political commentary on the social realities of a Nigeria still reeling from political instability, a thematic concern conserved in the Shakespearean adaptations that form the main focus of this paper.
By keeping Shakespeare applicable to Nigeria, the political playwrights of the post-civil war literary resistance movement, Osofisan’s so-called “surreptitious insurrection,” were able to ground their political commentary in a context that was well suited for Nigerians to understand. This context was well suited on two fronts. Firstly, Shakespeare’s plays contain elements, like the turmoil in Hamlet’sDenmark, which paralleled Nigeria’s political situation, and thus served as a medium through which political messages could be conveyed. To make the message powerful these writers had to strip Shakespeare’s plots of foreign ideological elements and embody them instead with Yoruba tradition. Secondly, the differences between Shakespeare’s texts and Nigerian politics are, on a cultural level, considerable. And it was these very differences that made Shakespeare such a valuable tool for the revolt. Through the façade of colonial literature, Nigerian writers could disguise their commentary as literary, as nonpolitical. In this sense, the case of surreptitious insurrection and the Shakespearean adaptations of writers in post-civil war Nigeria demonstrates that the apparently non-political may actually be deeply imbued with political commentary. As a foreign playwright with no apparent connection to Nigerian politics, Shakespeare provided an ideal cover for a covert artistic revolt, because authorities simply did not foresee political resistance coming from artistic quarters—least of all from a four-hundred-year-old English playwright.
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Notes
[1] Plastow et al., Shakespeare In & Out of Africa.
[2] Adesola, “Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn [The Winter’s Tale].”
[3] Òsófìsan, “Reflections on Theatre Practice in Contemporary Nigeria.”
[4] Osofisan, “Literary Theatre after the Generals.”
[5] Plastow et al., Shakespeare In & Out of Africa.
[6] Adesola, “Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn [The Winter’s Tale].”
[7] Johae, “Wole Soyinka’s ‘Hamlet.’”
[8] Phillips, “Nigeria’s New Political Institutions, 1975-9.”
[9] Òsófìsan, “Reflections on Theatre Practice in Contemporary Nigeria."
[10] Osofisan, “Literary Theatre after the Generals.”
[11] Osofisan.
[12] Adesola, “Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn [The Winter’s Tale].”
[13] Shakespeare, Macbeth.
[14] Grazia, “Hamlet”without Hamlet.See for deeper analysis of the external/internal forces assailing the world in which Hamlet lives.
[15] Shakespeare, Hamlet.
[16] Grazia, “Hamlet”without Hamlet.
[17] Plastow et al., Shakespeare In & Out of Africa.
[18] Osofisan, Wèsóo, Hamlet!
[19] Osofisan.
[20] Osofisan.
[21] Phillips, “Nigeria’s New Political Institutions, 1975-9.”
[22] Osofisan, “Literary Theatre after the Generals.”
[23] Osofisan.