WOOOOOSH! What a magnificently contrived and thoughtful work was TerraKulture’s new musical MOTHERLAND, which opened last night to a huge crowd in Victoria Island Lagos. It was a memorable experience of ‘truth theatre’ channeling the voices and vices contending for the future of Nigeria. The profiles of contention are sketched in high relief of history, histrionics, humour, and melody. The voices of youth versus the voices of tradition and history. The generational chasm brimming with the blame game of who destroyed Nigeria. And of course, we weave through the vices of Nigeria – corruption, ethnicity, and nepotism as well-sustained across generations of leadership, civilian and military. It is a heady mix.
That MOTHERLAND professes ‘love’ as the answer is almost a melodramatic contention until you break it into its molecular parts. Love a personal responsibility to offer a space to understand and embrace our differences, not exploit them. Love a personal responsibility to our nation-state, to believe in its possibilities enough to serve it, ethically. And love enough to insist that change is possible and that the ‘voices’ of change are voices of revolution, not rebellion.
The biggest triumph of MOTHERLAND for me is that it weaves this narrative through the lens of history only as context. The story is really the very present choice we face as we decide our nation’s future in the coming elections. It’s a narrative that does more than virtue signaling, it questions the urgency and capacity of our generation of social media warriors to own their place in history by active participation and engagement in the development of the country and in the democratic process.
Without fail, Bolanle Austin-Peters once again delivers a magical cocktail of dance and music, gorgeous production design and theatre entertainment of high excellence. And she really triumphs with a narrative tour-de-force that will provoke very deep introspection from everyone lucky enough to see it.
