Postcolonial Shakespearean Reworkings in Nigeria

Keywords: Playwriting, theatre, Nigeria, political struggle, reconciliation, Yorùbá, translation, publishing, gender, women in theatre.

 

Interview audio

Published on 9 August 2024. 

 

 

Interview transcript

Introduction

Amrita Dhar

Hello and welcome. My name is Amrita Dhar, and I am the Director of the project Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies which is hosting a series of interviews with postcolonial Shakespeareans from around the world.

In today’s conversation, my Co-Principal Investigator for the Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies project Professor Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ and I speak with the Nigerian scholar, playwright, poet, novelist, actor, director, songwriter, and activist Femi Osofisan.

 

Conversation

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

 Professor Femi Osofisan, fondly called F.O., is a prolific, and influential playwright, novelist, poet, literary critic, theorist, theatre director, publisher and newspaper columnist all rolled into one life. He signed some of his works, mainly poetry and critical essays, pseudonymously as Okinba Launko. He is the author of scores of plays—about sixty—and four titles of extended prose fiction. And one of which was adapted into film, and that’s Who’s Afraid of Solarin? adapted as Yeepa! Solarin Mbo in Yoruba by Tunde Kelani.  Osofisan was a Professor of French Studies and also Theatre Arts for more than four decades at universities in Nigeria, and held visiting or resident artist appointments in American, European, and Asian institutions.  

 Professor Osofisan has trained at Nigeria’s University of Ibadan, University of Dakar in Senegal, and the Sorbonne in France. He was the director of Nigeria’s National Theatre for four years, 2000 to 2004, after the end of military regime. It’s important for us to know that. He took up that role after the end of the military regime that he fought for so long in his own work.  

 He has served as vice president of the Pan African Writers’ Association [and] President of the Association of Nigerian Authors. Among Osofisan’s many honours are Nigeria’s highest honour for Arts and Humanities, National Order of Merit in the Humanities, which he received in 2004; the Fonlon-Nichols Prize for Literature—in the struggle for human rights—of the African Literature Association in 2006; and the Thalia Prize of the International Association of Theater Critics in 2016.   

 The bibliography and archive of scholarly analyses, Osofisan’s bold articulations of the ideological and political—which is to say, ethical and moral—responsibility of literary, dramatic, and critical arts are vast and formidable.  

 Welcome and thank you for joining us today. Professor Osofisan, tell us a little about your background, how you got to Shakespeare.  

Femi Osofisan  

I went to the colonial school in Nigeria. We had to study English and study literature. Then I would go to secondary school. And Shakespeare was a very big centre of that education. That’s how I got to Shakespeare.  

Amrita Dhar    

At what point of the curriculum did Shakespeare enter into your education?  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, it’s difficult to say now. I mean, Shakespeare as Shakespeare, of course, that was, that had to be later in the process of education. But Shakespeare stories, simplified Shakespeare, were also in the curriculum. We didn’t quite realize it consciously then but the stories were there.  

Amrita Dhar   

Earlier, the stories were there in what language or languages for you?  

Femi Osofisan  

 Shakespeare was already simplified in the local language, that we, we had in primary school. We had an education in Yorùbá. That’s my mother tongue. Some of those stories are already translated. But, in terms of texts and so on, this was when we were in the secondary school where the mode of instruction was in English. So that’s where we started with Shakespeare.   

 Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

My first encounter with Shakespeare formally was a book, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.     

Femi Osofisan  

 Ah yes.  

 Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

 One of those little retellings that you mentioned. I got it as a school prize in my hometown, Ijebu Imushin. I was at the end of primary three, which would be third grade in the United States. I received Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. [laughs] That’s when I first started reading and got an encounter with Shakespeare. Did you have any such moments?   

Femi Osofisan  

Yeah, yeah, I mean, the syllabus was generally the same everywhere.     

Amrita Dhar  

 What play or plays entered your curriculum?   

 Femi Osofisan  

 Maybe it was Macbeth, Julius Caesar, maybe Romeo and Juliet. 

 Amrita Dhar  

 Did instructors lecture about the plays, or was it a group discussion…?   

 Femi Osofisan  

 These were mainly for exam purposes. We studied these texts to pass examinations. Of course, as part of that process, we got to act some parts, but it was mainly for examination purposes. And of course, we loved some of the quotes.  

 Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

 Did you act in any of those in school?  

 Femi Osofisan  

 Well, I was very good English, so obviously I acted in English. Many of them. Particularly for the end of year entertainments that we did for our parents, visitors, and so on.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

You went to Government College Ibadan, I understand. Did you?  

Femi Osofisan    

Yes, yes I did.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

There have been stories about the formidable library, about the library at Government College.   

Femi Osofisan     

Government College, that it was really well care of. We had good teachers. We had good libraries. We had good laboratories. The thing is, of course, that at Government College, Ibadan, the emphasis was mainly on science. Because, not many schools had laboratories then. We had all kinds of laboratories: physics, chemistry, you know, zoology, botany. That’s what the college had. We had privilege that other schools didn’t have, particularly in the sciences. So everybody tended to go towards science.  

But at the time I went there, we had a school principal who was very keen on the arts, D. J. Bullock. And every year he did a major play in school, you know, which attracted many people. Particularly as we got the girls’ schools to come and act with us.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

You also went to the University of Ibadan. And was Shakespeare big in the curriculum? Or you were in French department—or were you in English?   

Femi Osofisan  

I wasn’t in English, I wasn’t in drama at all. I was in the Modern Languages Department. I studied French and German. I was going to do science like everybody else. But, the Principal called me one day and said, “Look, all of you are going to all the sciences. What will happen when we leave? Who’s going to replace us? Why don’t you come to the arts? So, as I said, I was good in French, just as good in French as I was in English.   

So, I said, “Okay, fine.” But then I didn’t want to do English. It seemed to me a bit too easy, you know? So, I tried to do French. Don’t forget, the only university in those days. The first and the best in the country.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

As a, as a, as an Ife guy, I will let that go! [laughs]  

Femi Osofisan  

No, no, no. You know that Ife came later!  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

I know. [laughs]  

Femi Osofisan   

Ife came later. We had very good, training. So as I said, I just loved it as my hobby. I didn’t even take it as my subsidiary subject because I had other interests. But the students’ drama department was very active, and I was twice the President of that. So that was where the interest in theatre went on.  Later on I found that, in French, the theatre sector was also very strong, where you have people like Sartre, Camus, Césaire, and so on.   

Amrita Dhar     

Your education is happening, then, in the years leading up to Independence in Nigeria.  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, Independence was in 1960. It was quite early in my education.  

Amrita Dhar  

What was it like going to university in a new country?  

Femi Osofisan    

By the time I went to university, that was already ’65/’66. But Independence was in ’60. It was quite exciting, but I wasn’t particularly conscious of what it meant. They made us carry flags, and we danced… But it wasn’t quite a conscious thing.  

By the time I finished secondary school, ’66, ’65, that was when a lot of violence came up. We were protected, kind of, but we saw a lot of the violence. People were burning houses, burning people, in protest, in our region, against the federal government who were trying to take over that region. We had elections, but they were rigged. And the people rose up in protest. So, it was a lot of violence. All my life so far has been marked by violence of one type or the other.   

Amrita Dhar  

I ask because I keep seeing this motif [in your work] of what succeeds colonialism as not genuinely, post- or after of colonialism, but a kind of morphed colonialism, a neo-colonialism. And I wondered about what in those formative years had marked your creative soul.

Femi Osofisan  

We won’t be able to say the whole story here, but what happened with Independence was just what you’d call deceits. It was a big, big, big deceit by the British. There was really no Independence. The British just said, “Okay, you want Independence? We’ll give you a flag and anthem, but the control will be with us.”

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Hm.

Femi Osofisan

So this is what happened—and Nigeria has never had peace since then. There’s been a loss of life on a colossal scale. We are still in it, we still haven’t found the right, say, formula to run this nation. Once a nation is created to serve colonial interests, it will serve economic interests of masters. It’s very difficult to get out of that. Elites [are] created to participate in this exploitation, who don’t want to give up the power.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah.   

Amrita Dhar   

Yes. When I read your plays, it almost feels to me like I could be reading about India.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah.   

Femi Osofisan   

Yeah, yeah, you know, we are very similar. [laughs]  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Professor Osofisan, especially if you look at Ibadan, the violence, and connecting that to your work, Ibadan was central. [Wole] Soyinka went there, [Chinua] Achebe went there, Chukwuemeka Ike went there, Mabel Segun was there, all those major writers that started what you now call African Literature in English, went to Ibadan. I read in many places that the Department of History at Ibadan created African History as a discipline And also, Ibadan was a location of this anti-colonial and post-colonial violence.   

I read Yemi Ogunbiyi’s biography. He also wrote extensively on his witnessing violence around his high school, again in Ibadan. And if you get to your early play, Farewell to a Cannibal Rage, there’s this violence. So, this discussion is revealing to me connections I didn’t make before between those events, locations, and people, and personalities. I want to connect that to Shakespeare, especially with Farewell to a Cannibal Rage.  

 

Femi Osofisan    

I was trying to write about reconciliation. But that was reconciliation after the war.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

After the Nigerian Civil War?   

Femi Osofisan   

Yes, after the Civil War. We were supposed to write about people coming together and forgetting the past. Because, you know, we lost friends in that war. And then when they came back—some of them came back, we tried our best to help them, to rehabilitate them at least, you know, in the Western part of the country.  We were young people. It was difficult to travel at that time because the streets were burning. But family problems had to be solved, family had to go on. So, some of us were being sent around to meet with family.  We had to actually make physical trips to meet people. And because it was so dangerous the younger ones tended… well, I was the one who was being sent around.  How many scenes of horror I actually… Sometimes the bus would be stopped, someone would be dragged out and killed. Sometimes you arrive at a place where people have just been killing. You see corpses on the floor and all kinds of horrible things. Imagine a young man growing up, going through all that. So, I was particularly concerned that there should be some kind of reconciliation. I wrote that for reconciliation.    

But at the same time, don’t forget, I was also trying to develop my own theatre techniques. I was just a young person, and I wanted an African form of theatre. And I was thinking of the carnival. I wanted a different form, experimental form, particularly. A play that would not use too many props. So, if you see that play now, it’s all just mats. We use mats throughout.  

I was thinking very much also of [Jerzy] Grotowski at this time: poor theatre, you know. The theme to do that is the theme of love, you know, love, young lovers. I wasn’t really thinking of Shakespeare, that’s the funny thing!  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

 Ha!   

Femi Osofisan  

It was much later that somebody said, “Well, yeah, but think of Romeo and Juliet.” But I wasn’t. I was just trying to find a very basic, simple story. While we are also dealing with African forms, the storytelling form, the play within the play, the use of music, dance, and so on. So that was what I was trying out in that play.   

Amrita Dhar  

When did you start writing plays? As a Shakespearean, to me, Farewell to a Cannibal Rage just leaps off the page as a very profound, playful, political, and beautiful retelling of a story that I know through Shakespeare.

Femi Osofisan

Hm.

Amrita Dhar

At the same time, I agree with you that it doesn’t have to be a Shakespeare story. Where does Farewell to a Cannibal Rage come in your writing career?  

Femi Osofisan   

I started writing plays in secondary school. Plays that we did for entertainment, and up to that point, secondary school, university, theatre was just for fun.  

First of all, I took a year off in Dakar, and I went to the Daniel Sorano Theatre, organized form of theatre for the first time, you know. Not like what we had at home. I was allowed to take part in the rehearsals. I was really, really, really interested in that.   

Then I came back, and I went to France, for my postgraduate, and there, it was a particular period in the development of French society. This was the period they referred to as the period of the student revolts. We already had that in Dakar. Anything that happens in France, percolates down to the colonies, the so-called independent countries. So, we had a lot of student agitation also in Dakar.  In fact, some of us were expelled, you know, from Senegal. So, but by the time I got to France, it was really serious. And Latin Quarter was really the centre of French tradition. It was a conscious attempt to change the society. And I became very much influenced by this. We were not just doing it for fun, it had a purpose. It could affect society.  It was really, I must say, a very chastening moment for me. I became really interested in the use of literature, particularly theatre, you know, for political reasons.  

Amrita Dhar  

Theatre in the service of peace, theatre in the service of a societal well-being—these things are very evident. It reads—I’ve only read it, I’ve not seen a performance or anything…

Femi Osofisan   

Oh, what a pity. You should see the performance [laughs]. It is much better in performance.  

Amrita Dhar  

I believe you. It’s just beautiful because it is so minimalist and so intense. And there are very few characters, you can keep track of everything, but it moves at a fast and engrossing pace. The play works for its minimalism, for its energy, for its compassion. And for how you write your women, for that matter.  

Femi Osofisan  

Thank you very much. Because, yeah, okay, I’m talking about the politics, but also it was the same period that the theatre was undergoing a lot of revision, rejuvenation in the European world, you know. There were so many companies that were in experimental drama at the time. You had figures like Peter Brook, Jean-Marie Serreau, [Ariane] Mnouchkine, and so on, all based in Paris, working there.  

I had an advantage here because of Soyinka, you know. Soyinka himself was in exile at the time, but these were all his contemporaries. People he had worked with in England and so on, you know. And he was passing through Paris frequently at the time, so he was able to introduce [me] to these people. And I was able to watch them in rehearsals, not just in production. I saw them, I worked with them. And so, I gained a lot. Paris at the time was the centre of the world of theatre.  

Amrita Dhar   

Professor, when did you get into theatre writing and when was your first play written? Was that in English? What play was it?  

Femi Osofisan   

Yeah, it was in English. I mean, my aim has always been to get to the national audience, not a narrow audience. Particularly in our case, where ethnicity plays such a large part of creating problems for us. So, I didn’t want to go into that. So, I started writing seriously in the 1970s. I went to Paris to do my postgraduate, but my supervisor was such a difficult person. [laughs] He didn’t want me to do any African literature. He said there was no African theatre. Well, he was a specialist in Corneille and Racine and so on. So, he didn’t even believe in modern French theatre, not to talk of African theatre. So, one day I went to his office and threw his books at him and left the place, you know. [laughs]  

I was there to do [Aimé] Césaire, I was there to do a thesis on Césaire. And he wouldn’t let me. I mean, of course, I suffered for it. When I came back, there was no degree, nothing. [laughs] And I couldn’t get a job. [laughs] Finally, I did get the degree in Ibadan, and I started working in 1974.  

Amrita Dhar  

And what was the discipline of your graduate studies and PhD?  

Femi Osofisan  

It was African theatre, the origins of theatre in Africa. But I wanted to do written and oral forms. But I did start working in Ibadan, and I was not in the Department of Theatre.  And because of that, I also had problems. And I think now that those problems were very good for me. Because it allowed me to create, you see, my own troupe, a different kind of theatre.  I gave myself a task that I would write two new plays every year. So that was a time. It wasn’t just writing, you have to direct it, you have to market it, you have to edit it yourself. So, that’s what I did.  My decision was to do my own work in the country. 

Amrita Dhar   

Hm.  

Femi Osofisan  

Because I felt that earlier writers like Soyinka and Achebe and others had had to compromise a bit because they were writing for the international community.  

Amrita Dhar  

Hm.  

Femi Osofisan  

And, you know, publishers are funny. They edit, even though they may not know, they edit the kind of thing you write. They want you to please the international community. I had a very bad experience once when I tried to get my work published. I was writing about a poor woman. My work called Maami.  And the editor said, “She got angry and started breaking plates.” And I said, “But which plates? She doesn’t have plates to break! Your own culture, maybe that’s what will happen. She goes around and starts breaking plates. But we don’t even have plates to use.”   

Amrita Dhar  

Hm.  

Femi Osofisan  

Not to say that we’re not breaking them in anger! [laughs] I wanted my work to have impact on the society. And so, I didn’t send my work to international publishers.  Now this was another sacrifice, if you like, because the state of publishing in Nigeria, even up to now, is not really very encouraging. So, taking that decision, I knew that it would limit the work. But I, we thought—not only me, probably a lot of my friends and few others—thought that way.  Well, unfortunately, we didn’t really succeed in that area.

And also, one of the reasons why I finally changed my mind was when the real military government that we had for thirty years, you know, just messing up our country, became more vicious. And I found that if you want to protect yourself, you do need the international audience. They will intercede for you if you are, if you are being dealt with. That’s what really changed my mind, finally.   

I had two kinds of aims: to create a play that will have a political importance, significance for the people who are watching it, to buoy up their resistance when you have the military oppressing everywhere. You do need some people to say “No.” And I didn’t want to write the kind of play that would be banished in the end, you know, that will be completely suppressed.   

 

 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah, yeah.

Femi Osofisan

This is why I called it a tactic of a surreptitious insurrection. Sometimes, you know, the actors will say, “Oh, sorry. I can’t say, I can’t say those words, please.” And you have to respect their views. You don’t want them to be smashed. There were various ways of finding out how to do our plays without being shut down. But also, it was also important for us trying to create new ways, the mechanics of performance, you know, what we call the meta-theatre, you know. How do we discover new ways of doing plays in Africa that will not be just Western while breaking what we call the rules of playmaking. It was quite exciting.  But that’s it. I thought the international audience would have been a distraction at that time. And that’s probably mostly why you didn’t hear of me in India or anything. [laughs] Unless you came to Nigeria, maybe. [laughs]  

Amrita Dhar  

You’re exactly right about these decisions that many, many post-colonial authors have made on their own terms, in their own geographies. And that is a reason why we don’t know each other’s work.   

Femi Osofisan  

Mm. 

Amrita Dhar  

Sometimes I think that is something to be celebrated. At other times, I feel like I want to know.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah.   

Femi Osofisan  

Mm hm.  

Amrita Dhar  

And I have to say, it is peculiarly Shakespearean as well, what you’re talking about, that the theatre is sometimes a means of indirection, so that you are not shut down. Which is something that Shakespeare was very good at. The Merchant of Venice—you see all this happening? That’s in Venice, has nothing to do with London, in Elizabethan or Jacobean England, oh, that’s elsewhere.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah.   

Femi Osofisan  

Mm hm.  

Amrita Dhar  

Shakespeare has not a single play of his that is set within his contemporary London, which is where he spent almost all his professional life.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

The issue of love comes up repeatedly in these Shakespeare-related works of yours. Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet!, we saw the love, the ups and downs of love.

 

 

In Love’s Unlike Lading again, you see obstacles to love, affection, and even resolution itself is not easy, in any of those, the Shakespeare-related plays.

 

 

Are these allegorical references? Can we make allegorical references to and refer and connect them to the issue we raised earlier of violence, reconciliation after the war, the persistent effort to build a political nation in spite of differences that pervade, that invades Nigeria repeatedly?  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, first of all the point is that my plays have always had a political link. I try to use my plays to contribute to the solution of whatever crisis we have. And we always have a crisis in Nigeria, you know. If we don’t have a crisis, that would be a crisis in itself!  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

[laughs] 

Femi Osofisan  

 These things were written at various different moments. Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet! I was thinking now in terms of interweaving cultures. I was in Germany. I was on the board of the Freie Universität. First of all, I had been in Atlanta, and tried to do a play for Emory University. I was thinking of Antigone at the time, but, I was thinking of Antigone in terms of the political protests going on in Lagos, when our military leader had annulled the elections, and there was so much violence going on. In fact, I could hardly get to the airport because of the burnings and so. I didn’t even know I was going to fly out, you know.  

What struck me was when the actors rushed to me, and said—the Black actors, the Black students—that now we are going to have a play where we will not just be servants. And so, you know, it struck me that, in fact, that is true! We don’t have many plays where whites and Blacks have equal respectability, dignity and so on. Blacks are servants or nurses or whatever it is, you know. And that just struck me when the students came. I had not thought about it at all.

Othello? After that we have no other play. So, I decided that, well, I will now write some plays in which there will be Black and white actors on equal footing.  I decided that the best way to do this, to start this, was to take some Western classics and rewrite them.   

Amrita  

Why, why Shakespeare?  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, you know, Western classics!  

Amrita Dhar  

Fair enough! There is a note about the casting, you have a note in Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet! about the casting, and I want to read it:

“The play has been conceived for a mixed cast of black and white actors. However, given our situation in Africa, it is quite possible there are no white actors readily available for performance. In such circumstances, the practice so far has been to make up the black actors either by painting their faces or noses white and/or giving them wigs, etc. This never quite works as far as I’m concerned,…”   

Femi Osofisan  

Yeah.  

Amrita Dhar  

“…except for comic characters. I will therefore prefer that even the white characters be played by black actors and so have included in the text appropriate dialogue to explain this to the audience.” Which indeed you have, and it works beautifully. Why does whiteface, in your opinion, not work?  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, there are debates and debates over this. I don’t think it works, you know. As a director, anyway, I, I hate it. I think there’s already a history of whiteface. That, you know, racist history, rather, which you cannot ignore. We do have, in our traditional theatres, white characters, you know, what we call the agbégijó, in the traditional theatre. They are masked, the way they are dressed, you know, with long noses, these are for comic roles. For serious roles, it’s very difficult to convince me anyway, as an audience, that these are serious roles. In fact, I must say that this is partly responsible for most of the adaptations I do. Because when I want to do a play from the West, which I like very much, and then I don’t have white characters, I completely transpose the thing into my own culture, you know.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

The way I read that is that reversing blackface does not level the ground of fairness, representation, politics and art. Which I think is, as Amrita mentioned, is notable in your work and also remarkable for people like us who do literary criticism of the early modern and contemporary and see how the two relate.  I was struck, for example, in Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet!  As a Yorùbá reader, Shakespeare a Yorùbá ancestor! I was so fascinated by it in the opening where the messenger, the character representing Ọ̀rúnmìlà says, “Hey, you Shakespeare, that story you wrote as a play…” I said, “Hmm, that is totally, [laughs] that’s completely, it’s a radical way of restructuring! We are not writing back. We are simply writing!” How do you make Shakespeare a Yorùba [laughs] ancestor, a Yorùba writer? [laughs] Why do you do that? What brought that to you?  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, if you believe in reincarnation, you know.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah.  

Femi Osofisan  

This is why we justify the various interpretations of Antigone. We believe that the egúngún, the ancestral, can return. Return again and again and again.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́  

Yeah. That’s a radical rereading of Shakespeare, in my understanding of it, a rereading of postcolonial traditions, even of Hamlet himself. Was Hamlet deceived in seeing the ghost of his father? Well, let me quote this line: “Shakespeare, are you there?” Yes.” “Ọ̀rúnmìlà has decided that some of you who are prominent in that earlier drama should return now to participate again.” I was quoting. Those are your words at the beginning of that play. I would love to teach that to an undergraduate class here. Theatre transforming life and life transforming art. Did you get that from Shakespeare? What’s the inspiration for that?    

Femi Osofisan  

Well, I haven’t really thought about it, but it’s always been there. Otherwise, you won’t believe in stories. Stories travel. They have no frontiers. Stories are reborn again and again, recast in various places.

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Shakespeare probably wishes his Hamlet knew that. [laughs] 

Femi Osofisan  

[laughs] Don’t forget, Shakespeare himself took, took that story from somewhere. He didn’t invent… 

Amrita Dhar   

Exactly. You said that when you were writing Farewell to a Cannibal Rage, Shakespeare wasn’t anywhere explicitly on your mind. I, of course, now see it as a Shakespearean play. And it is worth mentioning for our listeners that although we are here speaking to you about Shakespeare (because we are having this conversation in a series of conversations on postcolonial Shakespeares) these Shakespeare-related plays are actually quite a small number of your total dramatic output.  

Now, Farewell to A Cannibal Rage, you mentioned Shakespeare was never explicitly in your mind. However, by the time of Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet!  of course, there are explicit references to Shakespeare, to the point, as we were just talking about, Shakespeare is summoned, in sort of afterlife person, to be in the play. And we have to talk about also Love’s Unlike Lading where explicit references to Shakespeare do come up.

 

 

That story is more recognizable for what happens in, for instance, The Merchant of Venice. And there is a very sharp moment of Much Ado About Nothing that comes into focus. But also, there are small explicit references, such as, “Oh, your father didn’t want to leave things to Shylocks.” Can you, can you talk about that, please?  

 Femi Osofisan   

I would rather just leave you to enjoy it. But, you know, I wanted to write a comedy, you know, that’s all. And I must say that I’m not really good at inventing comic plots. I have to borrow a plot. Also you have to think of the political climate. 

Amrita Dhar   

When was Love’s Unlike Lading written, could you remind us? What was the political climate?   

Femi Osofisan  

We were having a lot of political debates. Trying to reorganize our political parties. And people were talking about the old politicians versus the new ones. There’s not just Shakespeare, there’s [Bertolt] Brecht also there. I was thinking very much about Jacques, the character of Jacques, when I, you know, when I was writing this. You know, but again, there was a lot of debate about Lagos and who are the people who are indigenes there, who are not indigenes. I’m not sure that play is particularly successful. It’s a pity that it was published before it was performed. Usually I don’t like my plays being published before performance because performance allows me to edit, to cut and add and so on. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Did you rescue Shakespeare or did you domesticate Shakespeare? What relationship does your work show to Shakespeare? 

Femi Osofisan  

[laughs] I’m not sure Shakespeare needs to be rescued. [laughs]  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Okay. [laughs] Okay. All right. I agree.   

Femi Osofisan  

[Laughs] But you know, there’s much less Shakespeare in the curriculum now. In fact, there are so many students who are not even aware of Shakespeare at all. Because since the Independence, Shakespeare has been removed from the syllabus.  

Amrita Dhar  

And where do you stand on that debate as an educator?  

Femi Osofisan

It’s mixed. I personally love Shakespeare. I think he’s a genius but, you know, one of the pillars of colonialism: with the Queen, the Bible, Shakespeare. Those three were the pillars of colonialism. We need to break the circles of colonialism. But at the same time, that was a man of genius. I think it’s possible to teach Shakespeare without necessarily becoming, you know, subservient to the colonial. So, it depends on how you teach it.  Shakespeare is a very necessary part of universal culture that we need to, you know, revive. But that’s my own view. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

I find that refreshing and I wish well-known writers like you, come up boldly and not leave the centre-stage to those who say Shakespeare should be left out completely. And in relation to that, still talking about meta-theatre and politics: why not Tempest? In the West, everybody talks about The Tempest.  At least in Africa, it doesn’t seem as if The Tempest is as well embraced as in the Caribbean or in North America. The question comes up for two reasons. One, it is a play that is about playing almost from, from the beginning to the end. I’d think that would be the first thing you would want to do as someone who does meta-theatre. And it’s also about colonial possession and domination and rebellion. Why not Tempest for you?  

Femi Osofisan   

I think the reason is obvious. Okay, so The Tempest  seems almost obvious that you should do when you’re thinking of Shakespeare. But okay, what of Othello?   Years ago I was commissioned to translate it.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Oh.  

Amrita Dhar    

Into what language?  

Femi Osofisan  

English. You know, it’s in French.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Oh, okay. Césaire’s play. 

Femi Osofisan  

Yes, to do an adaptation of Césaire’s A Tempest, yeah. And Abiola Irele, who you know very well—  

 Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Who was with us! Abiola Irele, for our listeners, Professor Irele was at Ohio State for a long time.

Femi Osofisan  

Now in translating it, I found that it had to be completely rewritten into the Yorùbá culture. Because Césaire has such rich words: plants, vegetation, the animals, and that is such a rich vocabulary. And he had this poetic way of using language. The way he used language was the way Yorùbá poets would use language. I’ve been wondering whether I should just write my own play or just leave it. [laughs] It’s a really tempting text. 

Amrita Dhar   

I hope you do it.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

I, I really hope so.  I would like to see that. Yeah.  

Femi Osofisan  

Well, I was just going to point out that, as for Othello, I actually have a contract to do this play. For Bayreuth University. But I must say it doesn’t really move me. I’m not really interested in Othello. I would have to rewrite it completely. I don’t like the character of Othello, the way it’s portrayed. I think he’s not really a Black person, you know. [laughs]

Amrita Dhar  

A number of senior male African or African-diasporic theatre-persons and poets have discussed that Othello, the character, is a white person’s fantasy of a Moor.   

Femi Osofisan  

Yeah.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Mm hm, mm hm.   

Amrita Dhar   

And I think you are in good company when you, as you say, don’t like the character as he is portrayed.  

Femi Osofian   

Yeah. [laughs]  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah, yeah. And one thing about the first play of yours that I saw—talking about personal connection, was at Ife. The second time, I think you did Once Upon Four Robbers in Ibadan. It was premiered at Ibadan. Then you brought it to Ife.  

Amrita Dhar  

Leke, when were these?  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

This was, this was in 1981…? I graduated in 1982 at Ife. What I remember most vividly about it: we were all sitting in Oduduwa Hall and your actors started coming in from the aisles, chanting “ìbọn lo wá rà, máa jó,” asking the whole audience to start dancing. I never experienced theatre in that form. And they all got on stage, and somebody was handing out costumes to them, giving them, “You wear these, you wear that, you wear that on stage.” And when they were leaving, they went through the aisles in the theatre. It debunked the idea of theatre as people different from us. I saw that even in your relations to Shakespeare, in the way you brought up not just the ancestors, but even asking characters, “you are going to play these, you are going to play that.” They keep commenting on their own act as actors. Is there any connection to Shakespeare in that?  

Femi Osofisan

It’s possible. I mean, I’ve not seen Shakespeare, in real. I mean, how did he direct his plays? You don’t know.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

 Mm hm.  

Femi Osofisan  

But if you look at the shape of the play and the theatre, the Globe Theatre, this proscenium stage that we now inherit is a recent invention. And separating the characters from the audience, I think it’s a 19th-century thing. At least for the kind of theatre we do, the link has always been there in traditional theatre. Where you have a circle, the actors come in, the people are all around, and they’re playing with them, you know. The audience participates and so on. I think that’s our only form of theatre. which is difficult to do when we have a proscenium thing. [laughs] I like to subvert the proscenium wherever I go, anyway. 

  Amrita Dhar  

I wanted to wind back to the plays themselves and ask you about the women that you write. I am trained as a Shakespeare scholar. And I notice that in Shakespeare’s plays, which come from a moment of profound misogyny in that culture, Shakespeare nevertheless creates very memorable and sometimes very powerful, sometimes (I wouldn’t go so far as to say perfectly feminist, but sometimes) women who know their minds, and who act upon them clearly and articulately. And I find your women also fascinating and really good characters. Which is not to say that your plays don’t also reflect the misogyny of the culture in which they stand. But that you write real women: good characters in female roles. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about how you use gender in your playwriting?  

Femi Osofisan  

A good question. I don’t know whether I’m a feminist or not. The point is that in my experience, my personal experience, I know that women are very active and sometimes even more active than the men.  And yet, when I began to write, they were not featured so much in the plays. Always at the background, or as goddesses, and…. You didn’t see them as human beings. And I wanted to do something about that. The kind of women I knew would feature in the plays.   

There are some women whose lives are quite exemplary. Who needed to be shown. And teaching, also looking at my students. Many of them are females. What books do they read to give them their role models, you know, if you are portraying women as bad or wrong all the time? We grew up where women then regarded themselves as superfluous. Where they are not supposed to participate in politics. “Just go and sit down.” “Go and cook.” “When things are going wrong, don’t talk.” “You’re only a woman.” This was really, really, really annoying to me, you know.  And it’s not true! Because they do involve themselves in politics. They do take strong roles. This was probably something that came out of our colonial experience. Because we go back and see that women always had very important roles in traditional society. And it’s important to keep repeating that, so that my students, my daughters and so on can also look up to the role models for them and play their own part in shaping a society. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

But in Farewell, you saw the central role that the female characters play, the roles they played in, to use Amrita’s phrase, understanding their own mind, and applying it differently from the dominant view that men, that the warring men followed. I think that was very, very critical as early as the 1970s. Putting that on play, especially given what already existed. 

Can I ask you why Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet!? Professor Osofisan is Ìjẹ̀bú by sub-ethnicity. I also happen to be Ìjẹ̀bú by sub-ethnicity. One day, my younger brother and I—he was then at the University of Lagos, I was home—Professor Osofisan gave an interview about a play, where he said Ìlọ́tọ̀! Which is my mom’s natal place.  She said, “Who are you talking about? You said Femi Osofisan? Ọmọ Babá Headmaster!” That’s what my mom said! My mom, God bless her soul now. I related this story to Professor Osofisan a long while back when we first met at University of Wisconsin in Madison.  

But why am I bringing this up? The idea of “Wẹ̀sóo” is a greeting in Ìjẹ̀bú. That’s a “Hello, how are you doing?” It’s like saying, when you meet someone, the first “Wẹ̀sóo” is “I want to know you are alive, you are kicking somehow.” Why “Wẹ̀sóo” Hamlet? Why, who are you greeting? Is it the ghost speaking to him? Or is it the ghost of his father telling him “Wẹ̀sóo”?  

Femi Osofisan   

Well, you’ve already answered the question.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Oh! [laughs]  

Femi Osofisan  

[laughs] I mean why not “Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet”? He could have said “Pẹ̀lẹ́, Hamlet.”  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Mm.    

Femi Osofisan 

But where the play is located, I located it in… 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Ìlàjẹ.   

Femi Osofisan  

Yeah.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Ìlàjẹ. Yeah, that’s true. Now I get it. It’s the locality of the play. That’s the version of Yorùbá they will be speaking and that’s how they will be greeting one another. 

Femi Osofisan  

Yeah.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

That’s remarkable as a meta-theatrical comment because in Yorùbá theatre, the original dialects, non-standard, non-written Yorùbá, non-biblical Yorùbá, tend to be just for comic relief. Which is not what you did here in Wẹ̀sóo, Hamlet!  In most plays, in most stage acts, when you speak Ìjẹ̣̀bú, you are a joker, or you are just a comic relief somehow, or you speak Ìjẹ̀ṣà or any of those non-, non-standard, even Ọ̀yọ, sometimes.́ sometimes. So, I found that striking.   

Femi Osofidan  

The idea that when we use our own plays, our own languages, you are only joking, you are not serious, that idea has to be really debunked.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah.

Femi Osofisan  

I wish I had, I don’t know how many lives, you know. But there are so many things I would like to do in Yorùbá. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Hm.  

Femi Osofisan  

Translate all those plays to Yorùbá. Because, as I told you, I wasn’t interested in this language problem. I thought, “There are people who write the language very well, so why should I get involved? I use the language I need, and I use it the way I can use it.” But, you know, I was ill once, and I had to spend maybe a week in bed. And I was watching television. Many plays, Yorùbá plays, were all so sexist!

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah.  

Femi Osofisan  

Always portraying women in a bad light, confused, and all kinds of things. And the only thing that will resolve it will be a Christian. Somebody bring a Bible to you.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah.   

Femi Osofisan  

And that is really a terrible thing.    

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah.  

Femi Osofisan   

Something we need to deal with. We really need to deal with that, you know, seriously. And I think if I had a life, I should probably devote myself to this, you know. It’s the language used for witches, for abusers of women…

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Yeah.   

Femi Osofisan   

It’s really terrible. We need to do something about it. We need a conscious, cultural program. Rewrite the plays. Bring the positive aspects. Translate the positive books. Not just the Bible into Yorùbá. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Especially in relation to Professor Osofisan’s stand, what we call “liberal stand” on the use of literary language. And in terms of the language used even within the texts created in Indigenous languages and also in relation to verisimilitude. That’s one of the points that J. P. Clark, Professor Clark—about whom actually the best-known biography of Professor Clark was written by Osofisan about ten, eight years ago. J. P. Clark—he was one of the very earliest commentators on The Example of Shakespeare (that’s the title of the book in relation to African Anglophone writing). And he says—he too was a playwright and a poet—he said the use of language as an instrument of verisimilitude in literary texts is the is one of the great things that African writers picked from Shakespeare. 

There was one young woman here, in Georgia. She did a study of, asked a public question on Facebook: “Do you recollect any Yorùbá writer who is female before 2000?” She got very, very few responses. Actually, I told her, “Please, when you are done, share your findings with me.” She’s still collecting. I scratched my brain too. I scratched over and over and over. And those writers, the previous writers have been creating men and women in a certain way that reflects Professor Osofisan’s observation on how women are depicted.  So that’s why his work is, on women, is so striking in the way he spends a lot of time. He gives a lot of space to them to talk in those works.

Amrita Dhar  

And they have really beautiful poetry.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Yeah. They do.  

Amrita Dhar  

Always.  

Femi Osofisan   

Hamlet’s mother, I think I, I give her chance to explain herself this time. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Yeah. 

Amrita Dhar  

Let me mention a couple of other examples of why these women, to me, as a Shakespeare professor, who is a woman, who is from India: your women stand out. I was telling Leke a few days ago that in Farewell to a Cannibal Rage, it is the woman, the young woman lover who takes the first step towards genuine reconciliation. And the way in which that instance reminded me of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, incidentally, and Milton’s Eve. Where, after the Fall, as Milton depicts in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are sitting there talking, bitterly bickering, blaming one another, it is Eve who makes the first human, mortal, necessary, genuine move towards redemption. Both of the human relationship, and of the relationship of the human to the divine. And I was very struck with that moment in Farewell to a Cannibal Rage.  

Femi Osofisan  

Thank you.  

Amrita Dhar  

Similarly, I thought the character of Tosan in Love’s Unlike Lading was somewhat more progressive, actually, than Portia, who is simply… In Shakespeare’s play, Portia, who comes across as a strong character, nevertheless is implicated within a project of patriarchy.  And Tosan is not, in quite the same way. She has greater agency, and she is a postcolonial female twentieth-century character who is making genuine decisions about how power and capital operate.  

Femi Osofisan

Thank you. 

Amrita Dhar  

You were talking earlier about the Yorùbá language, about the politics of your theatre-writing. What is it that makes you compose in English? You mentioned if you had other lifetimes, there is so much else that you would like to do. Why do you write in English? And at the same time, your publications seem to be mainly in local, that is to say, Nigerian smaller houses. Would you be willing to reflect on these decisions, please?   

Femi Osofisan  

These works we are caught with, you know, in our historical experience. This English, I’m not sure whether I write in English or in Nigrish. [laughs]  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

[laughs]    

Femi Osofisan   

You know, Nigrish is Nigerian English. We live in a country of so many nationalities. In Nigeria you have over 500 different ethnic groups in one country, 500 different languages. How do we reconcile the way languages impose themselves either by conquest, or by trade, you know, something like that. We haven’t been given that chance, you know. The British just, well, the British and the others went to Germany and just put the map down and said, “This is my own part.” You know, squeezing together people of disparate languages, different traditions, different customs, and separating people who are even the same. Now, that is the reality that we have to face. How do we bring these people together? Maybe we impose one language and then lead to rioting because you have people are so bent on not speaking other languages than theirs. There are Yorùbá people who will not speak Hausa, who will not speak Igbo, and vice versa. So, English is the only language that keeps us together as a nation.  

Amrita Dhar  

This is also true of my country, in India.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah. 

Amrita Dhar  

 Where I am a Bengali person. I don’t know the 20 plus major languages that are in the rest of the country. And I’m not even going into the actual number of languages, which is in the hundreds, but even the division of states, which is by linguistic inheritance, by cultural inheritance, by food, and so on.  Sometimes English is the only language in which I get to speak to another Indian. And that is what you’re talking about, as well.  

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Yeah.  

Femi Osofisan  

Yeah. It’s a tragic thing, but, I mean, we cannot, because of that anyway, refuse to write. We will not allow them to keep us mute because of this problem of communication. So, if English is the thing that we can be using for now, that’s what we will use. And we try our best to invent all kinds of ways to get around the various obstacles of English.  

In Nigeria, when Soyinka and Achebe and so on began to write, there was only one university. And I don’t know how many people even used English then. But they managed to, you know, invent their own ways of communicating that even went around the world. Nowadays, English is so widespread. It’s become even stronger, you know, as a national language. In fact, we argue now that English is no longer a foreign language. It’s a Nigerian language. And we also have varieties of English, like Pidgin, which many people use also. But so far, it’s the only language we have to communicate among ourselves. And we’ve just got to use it or fall into silence. Ngũgĩ [wa Thiong’o] has tried his best to fight this thing. But he himself, he has to write it in Kikuyu and then translate it into English, otherwise nobody will understand it.  So, that’s the dilemma. Even people who can write in Yorùbá, in my own language, for example, the audience is so small. So, they would rather use English than Yorùbá. And we don’t have presses to publish them.    

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ   

Yeah.  

 Femi Osofisan    

Just so many complications in using just Yorùbá. So, what we try to do is use as many languages as you can. I try to translate my works into Yorùbá as soon as I can. I’ve run experiments where I have the English version of the plays running simultaneously with the Yorùbá version. And what I’ve discovered is that with the Yorùbá version, the audience is thinner, whereas the English version, you will get a full house. We continue to do what we can do. But it’s a problem we have, and we have to deal with it.   

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ  

Being a translator of Femi Osofisan: I translated his Kolera Kolej into Yorùbá, which was published last year by Bookcraft in Ibadan.

 

 

He took not a penny, not one penny for the permission to translate that book and publish it in Yorùbá. The difficulty actually was with the publisher who decided to take it only after Professor Osofisan and I agreed that he could do Yorùbá on one side and English on one side. So, it’s one book. But the cover on one side is English. The cover on the other is Yorùbá. So that’s the only way to publish the book and get it sold. So, Professor Osofisan is right. 

As a final comment regarding that: even his English works—talking about verisimilitude and creating the atmosphere—one of the things that marks his texts out is that ability to, I do not know how to put it, make Yorùbá life in English language still Yorùbá! I remember writing about Kolera Kolej, “This is the most Yorùbá text I’ve ever read in my life.” And it was in English! That’s why I chose that book, to translate it to Yoruba. That is the most Yoruba book I’ve read, although it’s in English. And we find that in other texts. I don’t think it’s Shakespearean, but it’s a gift of being able to reflect one life world in another language such that those who are in the other life world can see, recognize themselves in that language.  

We’ve taken so much of your time Professor Osofisan. This reflects what I’ve always known about your generosity to scholars who are… 

Femi Osofisan  

Sorry, I have to interrupt you there. It’s not generosity. I gain a lot from this kind of dialogue. 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ 

Oh!  

Femi Osofisan 

It’s very, very good to have a response to what you’ve written and to hear people give you feedback. Every work is always something in progress. Nobody has the final say or knowledge, and we’re experimenting all the time. So, I’m very, very grateful to you two for this opportunity to exchange views and ideas about the work we are doing. Thank you very much.  

Amrita Dhar  

Huge thanks.   

Conclusion

Amrita Dhar  

If you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe to this podcast, spread the word, and leave a review. Do take a look also at our project website at shakespearepostcolonies.osu.edu for materials supplementing this conversation and for further project details. Thank you for listening, and until next time, for the Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies Project, I am Amrita Dhar.