Heaney’s Vergil was not only a Dante-esque guide to cultural memory, but also an interlocutor for the present and future. The use of classical texts as interrogators, explicit and implicit, rather than models is a characteristic of postcolonial classics. This suggestive questioning has been developed in late twentieth - and early twenty-first-century rewritings of Greek drama by African writers and directors. In South Africa the translation, performance, and adaptation of Greek drama, often in workshop contexts, was culturally and politically important in the resistance to apartheid. In the new South Africa, workshop theater has moved on from being an art form of protest and consciousness-raising and is reconstructing and revising cultural relationships. It has brought together different performance traditions and languages and built an intracultural theater, notably in the productions of Euripides’ Medea (1994-6) and In the City of Paradise (1998, based on the Electra myth), directed by Mark Fleishman (Mezzabotta 2000; Steinmeyer forthcoming).
In West Africa, adaptations of Greek drama have also been important, but the context is different. Between 1960 and 2004 there were eight modern adaptations of Greek plays into English or French (Budelmann 2005). Most of these dated from the 1960s and early 1970s, and there was a preponderance of Nigerian writers using the English language. Classical education in schools and universities had given West Africa its own classical traditions, and unthinking mimicry of the imperial version of classical education
Figure 21.3 Medea, performed in three South African centers in the period 1994-6. Directed by Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek. Photo: Ruphin Coudyzer. Medea is played by Bo Petersen
And values was a source of satire (Gibbs forthcoming). The links between the University of Ibadan and the Universities of London and Leeds (which involved the West African writers Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo and the British poet and dramatist Tony Harrison) fostered the exchange of ideas, cultural politics, and writing techniques, as did the French links of Femi (Osiofisan and the time spent in Boston by Ola Rotimi.
There are two important aspects in the ‘‘new traditions’’ developed by these writers. The first is the international movement ofwriters, directors, and productions, some of which were commissioned and first performed in Europe or the United States. Some aspects of this tendency are found in other areas of postcolonial culture, for example in the ‘‘diaspora’’ of Indian novelists to the west and the impact of British-born writers of Indian descent. The trajectory is in the direction of cosmopolitanism and hybridity between different cultural forms. The second important aspect of West African adaptations of Greek drama is that they involve a complex set of counter-discourses that not only, or even primarily, involve protest against former colonizers but allude critically to the sociopolitics of West Africa, both historically and in the more recent times after independence (Budelmann 2005). These critiques of postcolonial regimes in Africa have exposed dramatists such as Soyinka and (Oscifisan to accusations of cultural and political disloyalty.
The appropriation of Greek tragedy for African counter-discourse provides an important perspective on the dissociation of Greek tragedy from the literature of colonialism. Among the possible reasons suggested for this are some similarities between Greek and African (especially Yoruba) theater traditions, the importance of myth in Greek and African culture, the nature ofthe themes and debates in tragedy, and the difference between the Athenian arche (empire) and modern imperialism. A crucial point is that the Athenian dramatists were themselves refiguring and reinventing myth at a time of social and political change. To these one might add the desire of African dramatists to get African theater on the international stage and the European and North American interest in the exotic (a means both of assuaging postcolonial angst and of reappropriating Greek drama for metropolitan audiences).
A prime example of a play that relates to several of these contexts and offers several strands of meaning in different phases of its performance history is Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, which takes Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos as its antetext. Rotimi, who died in 2000, believed in the importance of drama as an indigenous African artistic medium for expression and exploration (McDonald 2000: 95-108). He was educated in Nigeria and at the universities of Boston and Yale. He was twice a Fulbright Fellow and was for 20 years a university academic in Nigeria. The Gods Are Not to Blame was first performed by the Ori Olokun Acting Company in 1968 and published in 1971. It is set in a three-day period in Nigeria in the fifteenth century. Although it does not deal overtly with colonization or decolonization, it is concerned with the experiences ofhaving land invaded and occupied and with intertribal conflict. Odewale/Oedipus says at the end:
I do not blame the gods they knew my weakness: the weakness of a man easily moved to the defence of his tribe against others. I once slew a man on my farm in Ede. I could have spared him. But he spat on my tribe. He spat on the tribe I thought was my own tribe. . . . I lost my reason.
This represents an implicit comment on, and slight shift from, the perspective in Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannos 1329: ‘‘Apollo brought these sufferings upon me, but I myself accomplished them.’’ Rotimi’s play was sometimes interpreted as a metaphor for issues raised by the Nigerian Civil War of 1966, often called the Biafran Civil War (Macintosh 2001). It has also been read as using the Oedipus story as a metaphor for the impact of colonialism and of the psychology of its denial. The printed text of 1971 gives the Choruses in both the Yoruba and English languages, a practice further developed in the multilingual techniques in Femi (Osctfisan’s Women of Owu, a rewriting of Euripides’ The Women of Troy in an 1820s Nigerian setting that was premiered in Britain in 2004 (Budelmann forthcoming). Rotimi’s play was revived in London in 2005 at the Arcola Theatre, a community theater in Hackney, by Tiata Fahodzi (Theater of the Emancipation). The director was Femi Elufowoju Jr., a British director of African descent who had already directed a highly regarded production of Medea in a West African setting with an all-black cast at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 2003. In preproduction interviews, Elufowoju spoke of the intense effect that Rotimi’s play had had on him at his first theatrical experience in 1975, when as a boy of 11 he saw a revival performed in a reconstructed Greek amphitheater at a university campus in Ife, western Nigeria. He spoke of that production as ‘‘my baptism into African theatre tradition.’’
African theater tradition was the governing factor in Elufowoju’s approach; indeed, in preparing the 2005 production, he revisited Nigeria to consult the original cast about crucial aspects of the play, such as the rhythms of the movements that go with the songs but are not in the text (Cripps 2005: 49). By 2005 the impact of the Biafran War was fading and audiences responded to the play more in terms of allusion to the role of African communities in facing contemporary problems, perhaps especially in the context of the ‘‘Make Poverty History’’ campaign that was high-profile at the time. The early scene in which Odewale advises the villagers on their responsibility for taking action to combat sickness among children drew an audible response from the multiracial audience (documented from the performance of June 11, 2005). Most important of all in this intersection of Greek, African, and British classical and theatrical traditions was the use of lament, especially as sung in Yoruba by the Antigone figure after the blinding of Oedipus. This marked a change in register in a way impossible in the emotionally and ritually constrained English language and tradition. The production as a whole is also significant as an indicator of the way in which the international migrations of ancient texts, modern writers, and theater performers, together with the cultural diversity of postcolonial audiences, create performances in which different strands of meaning are interwoven and activated according to the changing contexts within which they are received.
The postcolonial conversations in this play were, in this production, brought back to a site in the country that had imposed colonial regimes on Africa. Yet the production also demonstrated that Britain itself is now a postcolonial community, changing in terms of cultural identity and artistic diversity and collaborating in the invention of new classical traditions that engage with all these aspects. The lines of communication, however, are not merely two-directional. African/Atlantic/Carib-bean intersections are never far from the core of developments in classical traditions.
Figure 21.4 The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi, Arcola Theatre, 06/05. Director: Femi Elufowoju, Jr. Mo Sesay, Golda John, Nick Oshikanlu. Photo: Marilyn Kingwill/ArenaPAL. Odewale/Oedipus (Mo Sesay) is on the left of the photograph
World History
