A popular Feminist Drama, "Wazobia Reigns!" dramatizes the politics of gender and power transition with significant impact on the role and place of women in society. Anioma Kingdom has appointed the young woman Wazobia regent for only a season in the transitional period after the death of the male King, as tradition demands. The regent's role is to ?sit and warm the throne? until a new Male King is installed. But Wazobia has tasted power and will not go at the end of her regency'questioning, defying and reforming all traditions that render women 'second-class citizens' in their world. Will the Men and Chiefs of Anioma embrace Wazobia's challenge to tradition
The play is set in the metaphoric state of Hungaria. Nagging questions and concerns fuel the struggles of rising militant and radicalised women and youths in a dramatised revolutionary struggle for change and challenge to tradition. The relegated women take centre-stage to air their grievances and project their cause to the international community in an effort to destabilise the multinational forces and class interests which have oppressed them for so long. They ask, how long can a people whose land produces the richest oil and gas resources, which control local, national and foreign interests, continue to exist in silence, abject poverty and hunger, and sugger acute fuel, water and electricity shortages? The author has won the Association of Nigerian Authors' Drama Prize three times for Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen, Tell It To Women, and The Desert Encroaches.
Onwueme has meticulously and brilliantly restitched many of these traditional and modern elements into plays that are temporally cyclical, thematically modal, ideorhythmically intricate, and histrionically edifying.
A record of the First International Women Playwrights Conference, edited to bring out the highlights of discussions. With index, bibliographies of playwrights, and appendix.
Renowned playwright Osonye Tess Onwueme's powerful new drama illuminates the effect of national and global oil politics on the lives of impoverished rural Nigerians. What Mama Said is set in the metaphorical state of Sufferland, whose people are starving and routinely exploited and terrorized by corrupt government officials and multinational oil companies-that is, until a voice erupts and moves the wounded women and youths to rise up and demand justice. Onwueme's powerful characters and vibrant, emotionally charged scenes bring to life a turbulent movement for change and challenge to tradition. Aggrieved youths and militant women-whose husbands and sons work in the refineries or have been slaughtered in the violent struggle-take center stage to "drum" their pain in this drama about revolution. Determined to finally confront the multinational forces that have long humiliated them, Sufferland villagers burn down pipelines and kidnap an oil company director. Tensions peak, and activist leaders are put on trial before a global jury that can no longer ignore the situation. What Mama Said is a moving portrayal of the battle for human rights, dignity, compensation, and the right of a nation's people to control the resources of their own land.
SHAKARA: DANCE-HALL QUEEN Shakara is 17 years-old and a school drop-out, who can no longer stand her poor mother with her "born-again" sister as squatters in a shanty, where the single mother toils to raise them with her meager income from being nanny and chief laborer for Madam Kofo a drug baroness and socialite in the city that is split between the rich and the poor. Shakara joins a gang and flees home; then the unexpected happens.
This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.
Ona is a college student and the only child of her parents. By the Nigerian folk tradition of Ogwashi-uku, Ona is an Idegbe--a "Male Daughter" and "Female Husband"--who isexpected to remain at home to bear children to continue her family line. However, if she insists on marrying out to a man as her husband, she must "marry a wife" to take her place in the family. These alternatives are unsavory to the western educated Ona, and she rebels. How the traditional society with Ona's doting father grapple with their challenged-destiny sets the drumbeats of the drama.
