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This Proverb… 4-decades-old play about youth uprising for unveiling

  • ‘I wrote the first draft as a 19-year-old HSC student – Tomoloju
  • Play, published by OmniBooks, NY, for virtual launch Sun. Dec 6
  • Launch to mark author’s 40 years of professional arts practice

BEN Tomoloju’s new drama publication, This Proverb (OmniBooks, 2020) comes at a time the Nigerian socio-political space is witnessing immense disruptions, as governance ethos seems to have hit rock bottom. This is more so in the wake of youth protests aptly tagged #EndSARS that was violently brought to an end on October 20 with men in Nigerian Army uniform shooting at unarmed protesters.

At the heart of Tomoloju’s dramaturgy is the grim realisation that the nation’s youth have been on a long trial without even knowing the crime they are being tried for. This makes the outcome of This Proverb, even more chilling as a hotbed of insane conspiracies by the powers that-be. It would snowball into yet another liquidation of youth ascendancy that would have set society on the right course for progress.

The first draft of the play was written as ‘The Walnut’ in 1973 when the author was a 19-year old Higher School Certificate student at Christ’s School Ado Ekiti. The current version, was however, concluded in the early 80s while the dramatist, theatre director and culture communicator was teaching English Literature at Saka Tinubu Secondary School, Orile Agege. It was then experimented with a group of his students whom he had constituted into his famous semi-professional art producing outfit, Kakaaki Arts Kompany. This makes the play about 40 years old, a long time before the #EndSARS protests, adjudged as, perhaps, the most impactful youth-led uprising in Nigeria’s socio-political history.

Tomoloju’s tragic portrayal and rendering of corruptible elders, who hold the levers of power and how they use it to harm or disrupt all efforts at setting society aright is what makes This Proverb a play for today’s Nigeria.

How do those who benefit from the present rot see the coming of positive change that should be beneficial to all segments of society? Why do they upset the promised positive change? What conspiratorial theories do they spin to subvert the will of the gods and man for the status quo to remain that benefits them only? And what sleight of hand eventually subverts youth ascendancy that ought to right past wrongs?

These are the questions that agitate the playwright. They should also agitate all segments of society as well, because the forces arrayed against society’s overall good are powerful and firmly embedded in the corridors of power. What is worse, these forces strike hard at the society’s moment of epiphany.

In This Proverb, Tomoloju casts a hard gaze at the interplay of power and innocence, conspiracies and guilelessness, envy and good-naturedness, jealousy and hatred, the old and the new, and the aged and the young, all colliding in bitter intercourse to society’s hurt.

AS Jokoje and its monarch Oba Alaye prepare for a smooth transition of power, a hermit is needed to preside in the sacred grove pending when Oba Alaye would bow out for the hermit to ascend to power. The Ifa priest Ifagbaye is consulted, who pronounces that Adeboye, who dwells in the city, is the choice of the gods and the people.

However, and quite uncharacteristically, Oba Alaye decides to send his three chiefs instead of a messenger or a trusted emissary. This rather unusual decision sets the course for the tragedy that would follow. The three chiefs – Ojomo, Dakeja and Sapatira – set out for the city to fetch the hermit. But unknown to everyone, the three chiefs have also set their eyes on the crown even when they have no royal claim to it, with Adeboye now favoured. The journey to the city turns out an ordeal for the aged chiefs and their anger at being so treated like commoners. It sets them on a course of uncommon jealousy and hatred for the hermit, Adeboye.

The tragic consequence of that trip to the city by the three chiefs results in the subversion of the gods’ choice as hermit for Jokoje community. Ojomo, Dakeja and Sapatira would hatch a plot that would alter the fortunes of Jokoje and the succession plan.

 It is Ojomo, who accuses Oba Alaye for amplifying the three plight of chiefs, when he said, “But Alaye should know/That it’s unbecoming/For a whole chief to be treated/Like a court-messenger, shouldn’t he?” That is when the seed of evil is sown among the trio.

Adeboye’s reception of the chiefs when they arrived his house in the city isn’t the best for the status of the chiefs either. This further infuriates them. They accuse him of treating them with cavalier attitude, insisting his education has gone to his head. They begin to question why Adeboye of all people in Jokoje should be chosen as hermit for the sacred grove. The seed of hatred is sown on this ill-advised trip.

 Dakeja does not waste time in telling Adeboye when he demands the message the chiefs have brought thus, “Through what course will the message flow,/But the river of bitterness which brought us here?”

When they return to Jokoje, Sapatira plants the evil seed of foisting the stealing of Oba Ajaye’s royal staff on Adeboye soon after being installed the hermit. Adeboye is made to suffer the indignity of stealing. The plot thickens and spirals out of hand. Adeboye lands in the dungeon from where another plot of adultery with Oba Alaye’s young wife is foisted on him. He is banished to the evil forest for seven years. But Ojomo, Sapatira and Dakeja are not content with Adeboye’s unjust but dire punishment. They plot to finish him off in the evil forest where they meet their own downfall.

 Adeboye finally departs the evil forest, bile and revenge frothing in his heart. His obsession with revenge turns out to be his undoing. Oba Alaye, for unjustly laying a hand on Adeboye, the gods’ chosen, suffers just retribution. Adeboye’s son Adewale has since ascended throne as regent till his father returns from exile. In the meantime, Adewale has been most productive in other ways, in the words of Mogaji, “Since Adewale took over the throne /As the regent of Jokoje, /Every woman in the palace is pregnant /Except his mother.”

Sadly, youthful Adewale, a promising regent and future heir, is cut down at his prime. A parallel here with the Lekki Tollgate shooting becomes apt in the abortion of youthful dreams of making their society better for all. From father to son, the elemental forces of evil become so overwhelming that the possibility of good triumphing is further thwarted. What then? Society’s propensity towards evil, the playwright seems to be saying, is so compelling good will have a hard time getting a firm foothold. But society is imperiled without good. What then? Indeed, the proverbial good over evil, or vice versa, will remain a question for all ages, now and in the future.

  Tomoloju’s dramaturgy is a fascinating blend of rich folkloric and modernist sensibilities that make for wholesome enjoyment. Yoruba songs punctuate the entire play, as is common in royal circles in which it is set. This helps to lend special flavour and piquancy to the dramaturgy. Also, the style is a cross between prose and poetry. Lines rather than sentences are deployed that lend the play poetic quality, more so since it is set in a palace where poetry usually resonates, whether in the form of enchanting songs or the alluring proverbs.

********

Journey of This Proverb, by playwright

THE first draft of This Proverb was done in 1973/74 at Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti in my Upper Sixth Form when I was only 19 years old. The title, at that time, was The Walnut. It was meant to be performed by the school’s Drama Society where the then Mr. Niyi Osundare (now the globally renowned poet and Distinguished Professor) was the master in charge of drama. But the school’s terminal fixture could not accommodate the performance.

The script, written in long-hand remained in scrappy form with me until it was lost. The story, however, remained in my head intact and haunting. I really mean that THIS PROVERB is a play that haunts, albeit pleasantly.  Between 1974 and 78 I wrote quite a number of plays, especially those written in my university days such as Flowers’ Introspect, Sacrilege on The Broad Way and Cataclysm.

Some more plays were written before and after the establishment of KAKAAKI (Arts Kompany). Plays like Let The Vanguards Come To Town, We Only Went In Search Of Happiness, Katigori Gbekeyan belong to this phase. But, like I pointed out, the story of The Walnut remained intact and haunting inside my head. It is exactly the same story, same plot that you now have in This Proverb, the very play you beautiful folks are unveiling on Sunday 06/12/2020, sponsored by Kakaaki USA and published by Omnibooks, New York.

The journey of the story which started in 1973/74 revved higher in 1981, just about a year after Kakaaki was founded. I was running a Master’s (Research) programme in Drama at the University of Lagos when the urge to recreate The Walnut became near-psychically irresistible. The political situation in Nigeria at that time had proven so desirous of radical creative intervention that the walnut transmogrified from a mere metaphor of a simple imagination to a proverb from a complex imagination.

Critics will have their say, of course. But you will encounter so much of Alli Must Go just as you will harvest thoughts on EndSARS in This Proverb. The play was written in 1981 and Kakaaki was strategically placed as the first to bring it on stage, not as a première, but as a piece of theatrical experimentation, literarily and dramaturgically.

  • The Sunday December 6 virtual unveiling is part of activities to mark the playwright’s 40 years of professional art practice
  • Tomoloju, multi-talented, multi-skilled artiste, culture communicator, and former Deputy Editor of The Guardian newspaper, is a columnist with Naija Times
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