Interview with Femi Osofisan

“A Fertility Rite for the Modern Stage”: Femi Osofisan Reveals the Continuing Relevance of Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels

by Modupe Olaogun 1

Femi Osofisan is the author of fifty-plays, many of which have been performed in different countries around the world. The author also of four novels, four collections of poetry and four volumes of essays and a contributor from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s of popular columns in Nigerian newspapers, Osofisan is one of Africa’s foremost writers. He has extended the entertainment forms of the moonlight tales of the Yoruba, crossing them with contemporary literary forms to forge a theatre that is enchanting, socially relevant and quite popular. His ability to dramatize the local experience and universal images and concerns with astonishing authenticity places him in the ranks of such well-known playwrights as the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, with whom he has been frequently compared, the Egyptian Tawfik al-Hakim, and the South African Athol Fugard and Reza de Wet.

In June 2006 Osofisan turned sixty. His achievements as a playwright, director, poet, novelist, and literary and drama critic were celebrated in Nigeria through many activities: productions of his plays, The Inspector and the Hero (directed by Muyiwa Awodiya, performed in Benin and Ibadan, June 10- 15) and Kolera Kolej (directed by Olu Obafemi, performed at the University of Ilorin, June and July); readings from his plays, fiction and poetry (directed by Biodun Jeyifo, at the University of Ibadan Arts Theatre, June17); several symposia (for instance, at the National Theatre and the Jazzhole Club in Lagos, and at the Arts Theatre and the Lady Bank Anthony Hall at the University of Ibadan); and through the launching of a Festschrift in his honour, Portraits For An Eagle, edited by Sola Adeyemi.

During the celebrations I was fortunate to be in Ibadan, where Osofisan, a professor of theatre at the University of Ibadan, resides. I spoke to Osofisan about his frequently anthologized play, Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, on June 24 and 26. Long before I became of aware of the various celebrations to honour Osofisan, I had chosen to produce the play with AfriCan Theatre Ensemble in Toronto for the company’s 2006 fall season.

The Interview

Olaogun: What inspired your writing of Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels? 2

Osofisan:In the introduction to the play, I stated that the theme of compassion seems to be out of the books nowadays. Violence is the controlling ethos of our time. I think particularly in our society,3 if you came from the old society that we grew up in, you can’t but be shocked at the amount of violence that pervades the present society. A lot of it is also, I think, the influence of American films. Violence and sex, as you know, are the two reigning themes in these films. These are therefore what most of our children have grown up on. When it’s not American films, it’s Kung fu films. So much violence! To be kind, to be different and not violent is almost a crime and something to be laughed at because it is “feminissy” and the mark of a “weakling.”

This ethos became even more entrenched in the military years. We were being ruled by soldiers and the concept of violence became the reigning ideal because you couldn’t get anything except by force. The soldiers ruled through brutality. They continuously brutalized the society and of course this has effects on the psyche of the populace. Because we all had to learn in the end that, to survive at all, you had to become violent yourself, to turn into an agent of brutality, of cruelty.

In the society in which I grew up in, compassion—helping others, helping your neighbours—was the main thing. Every child had a parent and that parent meant every adult in the community, not just your biological parents. Every adult was taught to spontaneously assume the role of a parent whenever the actual parents were absent. That means that, if on the street you see a child by him- or herself, you’re spontaneously responsible for that child. As the saying puts it, ‘Àgbà kì í wà l’ójà k’órí omodé wó.’ [You won’t see a child on its mother’s back with its head dangling if there are adults in the marketplace].Your neighbours are part of yourself. Even the forests, the animals, all living things as a whole, are a part of you. So you don’t just cut a tree down for fun, there’s respect for trees. Animals you only kill to eat. You don’t brutalize. You aren’t deliberately cruel.

But all of a sudden it became a common sight to see dead bodies on our streets, with everybody walking past. You know Tai Solarin made a campaign out of that 4. Even people sometimes would be selling and buying not far from dead bodies on the streets as if they didn’t see those bodies. Soldiers would shoot armed robbers in public places and everybody would go and watch these executions like going to a carnival. Even there people would be picking pockets! Yet these shows went on, and our society was just being brutalized at every turn. I was strongly moved to respond to all that and that’s how I came upon the theme.

As to the play’s form, you know I’m always very much concerned with form. Some critics even say I’m over-concerned but form, to me, is of paramount importance. I’ve always thought about forms of entertainment in traditional life—the story telling sessions, the moonlight stories we used to have, and so on—and I’ve always thought about adapting these to the modern stage, bringing them back and recreating the sense of communion that they gave. Theatre, as you know, is a very good platform for spectacle and for parables.

Then, in addition, I was thinking about the way Christians misrepresent Esu all the time. The Bible [in the Yoruba translation] renders Esu as Satan, which is quite erroneous, and always I felt that it should be corrected. So it was all these issues that combined into the play you know as Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels…

Olaogun: On the play’s publication, you described it as “a fertility rite for the modern stage.” What do you mean by that?

There’s a certain speciousness, a certain hypocrisy, about morality in contemporary society and I’m not talking about Africa alone but contemporary society everywhere. There’s a certain hypocritical moralizing that’s really sickening as it doesn’t correspond in any manner to people’s real behaviour. We like to preach to the young—our politicians and our preachers in particular, coming on television every day, every hour, to talk and talk—exhorting them to do what we ourselves don’t do.

Well for me as a dramatist, I thought the best way to counter this hypocritical moralizing is through one of our traditional rites. You know the example of Oke’badan 5 and these rites in which women come out and they’re singing vulgar songs, wearing a phallus, etc, to celebrate fertility, to celebrate sex itself. That’s what I wanted: a kind of play that will end in an orgy of gross sensual jouissance, of an uncontrolled and liberating delirium. I am talking metaphorically of course, not in literal terms. But I mean a pure and primitive ecstasy, just as we had in some ceremonies of fertility in the traditional society.

Olaogun: Something performed, symbolic?

Osofisan: Yes, symbolic—remember the women wearing phallic symbols and chasing men around—just purely symbolic. But it’s very necessary for every nation to have these symbolic rites from time to time to celebrate vitality, virility, sexuality, that essential but often suppressed side of humanity. It is because we dread this vitality as sin and put a taboo round it that it provokes people all the more into criminality and strange perversions. And that’s why, as you can see, most of the symbols in the play’s narrative have to do with fertility, child-bearing, virility, and reproductive organs. However, I must confess that the play doesn’t quite end the way I wanted it. The orgy is aborted, and besides, the argument at the end should have incorporated itself through an integral action, and not a debate. But I suppose a play will end the way it wants.

Olaogun: Have you pursued this idea further in your subsequent plays?

Osofisan: Oh, I haven’t really got back to it. Other things have come up since. But maybe one of these days I’ll get back to it.

Olaogun: Could you elaborate on the connection you’ve implied between human compassion and the celebration of fertility/ritual of orgiastic release?

Osofisan: It’s not the compassion itself that is celebrated at a masque or a fertility rite. No, such rites, as I said, allow the celebration of that earthy side of us, the part that is flesh and human and without disguise. The part that laws and morality suppress, and even deny. But that celebration leads to a release that gives humanity itself a renewed focus that helps resurrect and re-strengthen the ethos of humanism that the daily pains of survival tend to deaden in us. Against cynicism, self-centeredness, cruelty and apathy, our ventricles refill themselves with the sap of kindness and faith, hope and compassion.

Olaogun: What excites you most about Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels?

Osofisan: Well… a play is a play. I think it’s the theme of compassion. And then the form: I tried to modernise an ancient traditional form for the stage, creating a certain kind of play as a challenge. The challenge was how to make a play in English popular. The prevailing gospel was that our plays in English were not as popular as the Yoruba plays simply because of language. I’ve always argued against that. It’s not the language—I am talking here specifically of the language employed for the dialogues—that makes a play popular or otherwise; it is, rather, the kind of play that you write. If you’re judging from Soyinka’s plays, especially the very complex ones, obviously you’ll have problems. But a playwright like [Ola] Rotimi for instance, who also wrote in English, always had large audiences, even when he took his plays on road tours. 6

But the argument on language kept ringing and wouldn’t die—that plays in English would not be popular just because they’re written in English. So, as usual, I thought the only way to resolve the argument, and prove that the popularity of a play did not depend on the language, was to carry out an experiment, which I did with Esu. Esu has so far been the longest running play in Nigeria—of all plays in English. Usually, we ran a production here for three days, or at most a week at a go. Even the Yoruba plays didn’t run for that length of time without break. So as I was then visiting at the University Ife campus, I decided to carry on this experiment there, and run this play for three weeks non-stop! To my surprise, and that of my collaborators, the production beat all records! Every night the theatre was filled to the brim. In fact, on the last night of performance, I had to intervene and stop further sale of tickets when the standing audience was already five rows thick! I was frightened because of fire regulations. Imagine, the standing audience alone had become five rows thick on the last night and people were still on a long queue outside!

That was certainly an experience that delighted me. Particularly as we had another factor working against us, with regard to the theme of the play, apart from the language problem. You know we have these charismatic, evangelical movements everywhere in Nigeria, and they have become particularly active on university campuses. In Ife, as soon as people saw the word “Esu” in the play’s title, the evangelical Christians became scandalized, and started going around the campus, dissuading people from going and see the play because it was about Satan—that is, Esu!

Olaogun: That wrong equation of the Yoruba god of chance and the crossroads with the devil!

Osofisan: Yes, Satan was translated as Esu in the Yoruba Bible, and that has been part of the popular culture, and is still there. But that translation is not a true reflection of the traditional figure of Esu, which was one of the points I set out to show. But so worrisome was the Christian campaign that the head of the drama department at the time called me aside at a point and said, “Let’s change the title of this play. We are trying to prove a point about audience attendance, but here we are, already alienating that audience; so let’s change the title, please.” I thought about this, but in the end said “no.” The title, I reaffirmed, was part of the experiment, so we could not change it. .

In the end, there were people who saw the play every single night; yes, they were there every night! They learnt all the play’s lines, and songs, and began singing them with us in performance! Just as I wanted! And so it was fun discovering a form of theatre in English that could at the same time be popular. I remember that during the production, the veteran Ogunde brought his troupe to the campus for a show. 7 And in the end, he was the one who came to me and said, “When you people have this kind of show on the university campus, you don’t ask us to come and perform.” It was because he wasn’t getting the kind of audience he was used to— everyone had gone to see Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels.

Olaogun: The participatory form of the play, your incorporation of the kinds of songs which draw in an audience, and the play’s playfulness which is blended with a dead serious theme without in any way suggesting a misfit help achieve the form that you sought?

Osofisan: I believe so. Otherwise the play would not have remained as popular as it has. Our people love entertainment and spectacle. They love rich melodic tunes. They are particularly susceptible to laughter. And the storyline, as you know, is deliberately simple and uncomplicated. Through such tactics I believe you can achieve a great impact with any kind of theme and any kind of audience.

Olaogun: What are you working on at the moment?

Osofisan: Oh one is always working on several things. At the moment I have three biographies, another collection of poetry, a piece of popular fiction in what I call my “intermediate literature” series, and some three or four plays in various stages of completion on my table. But I won’t tell you their titles yet…

Olaogun: Thank you.

1 The interview was recorded in Ibadan, Nigeria, on June 24 and 26, 2006.

2 Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels premiered in Benin City, Nigeria, in 1984. It was directed by Peter Ukpokodu, assisted by Femi Osofisan.

3 Femi Osofisan was born in 1946 in Eruwon, Western Nigeria—Yoruba land. 

4 Tai Solarin (1922 -1994) was an educator and social crusader, who devoted his life and career to promoting human rights. Regarded as the conscience of the Nigerian nation, Solarin died suddenly from a heart attack he suffered while participating in a mass demonstration against the murderous rule of the military dictator, Sani Abacha, in June 1994. About him, Osofisan had written a famous play, Who’s Afraid of Solarin? in 1977.

5 Oke’badan is the central hill deity of Ibadan and is celebrated every year in the city and surrounding villages in a carnival format directed mostly by women who are often the most vocal in processions going from house to house singing playful songs with explicit references to sexual organs and having a feast day teasing chiefs, the educated elite and people known to be squeamish.

6 Ola Rotimi, a contemporary of Soyinka’s, wrote in English.

7 Hubert Ogunde (1916 -1990) was a versatile playwright, actor and director and a pioneer of Nigerian folk opera.