Nigeria Content Online

I enjoyed reading
‘Waiting for Savon’ by Isaac Attah Ogezi. I love plays but I rarely get
the texts from Nigeria these days. Does anyone of my lovely readers
have any recommended plays from home? I can send my friends and
relatives to get them from the bookstores, along with my Nescafe and
groundnuts. ‘Waiting for Savon’ features a rollicking discussion about
political and ethnic tensions, using three main characters, each
representing Nigeria’s main groups. It is an interesting play on the
tensile anxieties among the three major ethnicities. I enjoyed the play
for it questions the reader’s ideals, the notion of the nation-state,
and one’s sense of the reality on the ground. The reader is forced to
reconcile all that with the rank irresponsibility of our leaders who
see us through linear lenses. And of course today, there is the reality
of blurred boundaries. I am quite fascinated by the burden of the
play’s anxieties. It is a simple play; there are no silly flourishes
with the language. I liked that because it freed me to follow the plot.
The dialogue is insistent, throbbing gently with an urgent message. It
folded itself into my pocket and followed me everywhere; it would reach
out and ask to read to me.

Plays are tricky
because the playwright is bringing together every trick of the writing
trade and you are talking dialogue; you can be easily shamed by an
audience looking for good quality dialogue because dialogue is life and
life is dialogue. Ogezi’s play is mostly dialogue; in my day, before
the Internet became everything, it would have made for a good radio
play. I hope Ogezi continues to work on his craft. I actually loved the
work’s simple trick of disembodying the three ethnic representatives,
as they were, from the people. The reader is focused on them and
fascinated by how seemingly disconnected they are from the reality on
the ground. Or are they? Ogezi provides the lots of food for thought.
This is no mean feat.

‘Waiting for
Savon’ made me nostalgic for my youth, when I used to prance around on
stage. Ogezi’s drama text made me hungry for Wole Soyinka’s ‘Jero’
plays, which I love. Soyinka is a world class playwright, genius flows
from him when he does plays. However, Ola Rotimi’s ‘The Gods Are Not To
Blame’ is my all-time favourite. I enjoyed playing Alaka the drunken
old man when I was young. The work is remarkable in how it takes a
Greek tragedy, ‘Oedipus Rex’, and adapts it into true Yoruba mythology.
Please read ‘The Gods Are Not To Blame’, if you have not done so
already. Like Chinua Achebe, Rotimi was a very confident wordsmith; the
English language did not intimidate him. He deployed English as if he
was using an indigenous language. And it shows in the play’s flow.

If I had to advise
any aspiring playwright, I would say, travel around and listen to any
and everybody. The plays are on the streets. And read, read, read the
masters. Talking about listening, my dad Papalolo taught me to listen
closely to people, to interactions, to the poetry of dialogue, to how
people really communicate. He would take me to our ancestral village
and we would visit folks in the most rugged of places and he would say
to me, “Ikhide, listen, just listen.” My dad was born with a good ear
for the poetry of living. He saw music and poetry in words and he would
say to me, all excited, “Did you hear that? Tell me, what do you think
they were really telling you?” In those days, we both hung around some
rugged places and drank several rounds of palmwine together, listening
to some great oral poets.

We both read
together voraciously. Achebe’s ‘A Man of the People’ is my dad’s
all-time favourite book. If he knew about the Nobel he would probably
say that Achebe should get the laurel every year on the strength of
that novel alone. He loved the character, Chief MP Nanga, and he used
to swagger around our parlour imitating that man. I loved the main
character, the idealistic Odili. My dad loved all the works of T.M.
Aluko and he bought them all, ‘One Man One Matchet’ and so on. He
adored ‘One Man, One Wife’ and he would read long passages aloud, to my
mother’s irritation.

My dad was an armful in his young days. But he was a warrior, who
defied the odds in that place called Nigeria. He taught himself what
the society would not teach him. As a result he got in trouble a lot,
but he taught me how to use charm and street smarts to get out of
trouble. Reading and writing and life-long learning were part of the
tricks of his trade. Growing up, my dad was a one man play, a
triumphant celebration of life. I thank Ogezi for making me remember my
dad.