Femi Osofisan

From A Restless Run of Locusts, he has written from a materialist perspective, having discovered that mere reformist programmes will not salvage society from the trap of an obtuse and crude capitalist economy, and he advocates social revolution as the remedy to the country’s social incoherence which led to the Civil War. A Restless Run was particularistic with respect to the socio-political decadence and crisis, manifest in dysfunctional leadership, thuggery and election irregularities, all of which precipitated the political upheaval that inevitably produced the war. The Chattering, on the other hand, is a re-creation of an aspect of the history of Oyo to depict a vision of an on-going process of change and confrontation with the historical forces of oppression and predation. A Restless Runs reveals a clear evidence of the social compulsion that characterises his later plays. It treats the issue of party politics and the dehumanising effect of the rat-race for power and material wealth, rather than a genuine commitment and compassion for the citizens, on the part of politicians. Chief Kuti symbolises the old politicians who are amoral enough to murder their political opponents in order to win or rig elections.

Three decades after this play was written, and on our political landscape, it is de ja vu! Think of the murderous nature of our politics today % the murder of Chief Bola Ige, Harry Marshall, Chief Rewane, Williams, Daramola, Olorinnipa, Kudirat Abiola, and the more recent ones and it would appear as if this play was written yesterday. And the violence-torn politics still dominates our partisan democracy.

Yet, the play represents a broad outline of what Osofisan will come to do in his later and more subtle plays. It is still preoccupied with the moral ideal of heroism. Sanya, the protagonist of the play, violates his oath with his party in order to maintain a clear conscience, and he goes on to pay the mortal penalty, so that the future generation will inherit a purer and cleaner society. This new generation of the future is symbolised by the pregnancy of Iyabo, his girlfriend. Witness the assertive dialogue between two.

Sanya: Together, Iyabo, we can heal the wounds. With a little tenderness, we can start anew.
Iyabo: From ashes, from anguish of love forsaken?
Sanya: From life, from the fresh bud, springing in your womb. From the flower that blossoms there from.

In this play, we come into contact with the seed of rebellion and its literature in which the dramatist proposes that change and social transformation are possible only through revolt against the culture of reaction and gerontocracy. Sanya ejects the message from the Oba, which canvases the peace of the graveyard. He defines the notion of the continuity of out-mode institutions. He stresses the need for the dislodgement of the old order by the new generation, which he represents. This is the tenor and bent which also inform the revolutionary prediction made emphatically in The Chattering by Latoye who rebels against the tyranny of Alaafin Abiodun, whose reign ensures that “the elephant and nothing remains for the elephant”. Even in his lighter and satirical plays, where politics seems a far cry, a commitment to equity, social justice and a humanised polity is writ large.

Osofisan employs, in a dialectical and progressive fashion, the medium of total theatre , a concept which was aptly described by Professor Adedeji as an ‘ensemble where the conscious and the unconscious, the real and the unreal, poetry, song and dance, intermingle with elements of traditional theatre both sacred and secular’. Osofisan maintains an objective distance from the elements of myth, folk-tale, magic, music, dance and poetry so as to achieve a dialectal treatment of them, using them to convey his appropriation of classical material and of Shakespearean plays described by Professor Yuill as ‘cultural vandalism’. We have further advanced on this format in our more rigorous theatre theorizing

Fabulous Aesthetics
We are talking here, neither mainly of fables (stories about mythical and legendary beings told with moralistic end)) nor fabu (as in humour-packed anecdotes). Seeds of both preponderate Osofisan’s theatre, as we all know. Just as much as his stories are full of uncomfortable conviviality, technique of laughter, which makes his audiences laugh and wince at the same time.

Ritual and fabulous metaphors of liberation
In other words, a materialist reading is possible of a theatre which employs ritual as metaphor and as dramaturgy, if not done covertly (in a ‘hidden’ form) as Soyinka is alleged to have done. Most contemporary African theatre practitioners of whatever bent—from the Agemo-cult inspired ritual theatre of Soyinka, the Ozidi Saga of J.P. Bekederemo-Clark, Sutherland and the Anansegoro, to the fabulous boon folktales of Osofisan, our own Agurumo myth – are fascinated with the deployment of ancestral forms of myth and ritual for visional mediation in the social predicaments of Africa. As I have argued in the case of Soyinka, not in any isolated, exclusivist manner, there is an inextricable link between a socio-spiritual and a revolutionary quest for liberation through the medium of ritual.

We cannot therefore totally mint an aesthetic format for the theatre of Africa, no matter the level of our commitment to social change without exploring the ethos of ritual. As already established by the masters, (Soyinka, Clark, Rotime, and so on) ritual is a very compelling medium through which a dramatist can elicit a strong response from his audience. This is because, both ritual and theatre share the dynamic attribute of being essentially communal performances. As a social intercourse, ritual is inseparable from theatre. It has a revolutionary potential which can be integrated to the revolutionary ethos of the theatre.. Ritual is thus not just a vehicle of communication, but what is communicated. Soyinka (1975:79) asserts that drama emerges from the recombining essence of ritualism. He argues in his essay titled ‘Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal’, Soyinka argues that revolution (or liberation) is ritualistic in nature, and since theatre is the most ‘revolutionary art form known to man’ (being performance and audience), ritual and myth should be integrated to the revolutionary potential of play. He asserts that ‘Ritual contains its own stringent dialectic: it is not merely a visual decorative framework… And in seeking the revolutionary dynamic of theatre today, trying to move away from what you might consider has become the bourgeois form we may say that perhaps the goal at which we are all aiming is that point where the cementing communal roots of theatre are made one with the liberating direction of the present…the motivation away from the bourgeois death of theatre form is towards the communal cementing factor which recovers a revolutionary dynamic theatre’.

Fabulous Theatre
The second phase of the positive ritual affirmative consciousness is in the radical theatre of the generation of practitioners of African theatre after the first main generation of theatre practitioners and dramatists, which include a long list among whom are the Sutherland, Soyinka, Clark, Aidoo, Ngugi, de Graft, Mengitsu Lemma, Tesfaye Gessesse, Ebrahim Hussein, Serumaga, Um Kalthuoum, Ahmed Bakathir, Reda and Aly AMahmoudda, Athol Fugard et al,.

I have seized on the experimentation in stage-craft and radical ideology inhering the theatre of dramatists who reconstructed indigenous oral narrative performance models with influences from the revolutionary dramaturgies of Piscator and Brecht, with distinctive self-re-invention. I have again seized on the experiment of radical Nigerian performance aestheticians typified in Femi Osofisan’s theatre, which I have configured first as fabulist aesthetics but re-adjusted with the collaboration with my younger colleague, Abubakar Abdullahi in 2006 as fabulous asthetics. Space will again obstruct an elaborate narration.

The debate over the extent of ideological and aesthetic dependence of radical African playwrights on established European cannons and models, as I mentioned above briefly, refuses to abate. In rather uncritical circles, and as I have stated earlier, there is a wholesale attribution of radical Nigerian dramaturgical aesthetics to Brechtian epic. It is indisputable that there are correspondences and coincidences in the Brechtian canons and the African folk performance in the areas of audience participation, style of acting and the use of music and songs. Yet, the critical question of chronology – of which theatrical style precedes the other – remains indeterminate. This fundamental question prompts a fresher look at Osofisan’s dramaturgical experiment in his resolve to pioneer a ‘new way’ (Awoniyi 1993:73), which we refer to in this discourse as ‘fabulous theatre’. This recourse to Osofisan’s experiment is only a case study and not an exclusive aesthetic evolvement.

The concept is borne out of the realization that a hybrid product is necessarily different from any of its genealogies. But some critics of Osofisan’s dramaturgical patterns align him with the Brechtian epic theatre (Awodiya 1995; Amuta 1989; Gbileeka 1997) while others apply the ‘folklorist’ parameters (Ukala 2001). It is obvious that some aspects of Osofisan’s style (and those of other radical African dramatists) agree with materialist precepts, but these also coincide with African folk performative aesthetics. Therefore, Osofisan’s approach could be said to be a fusion of African thought-structures and foreign forms. This observation is partly made by Olaniyan where he states that Osofisan’s theatre is ‘characterized by deft appropriation and reinterpretation of indigenous performance forms, a fine-tuned materialist revision of history and a consummate dramaturgic sophisticated openness that takes us a few steps beyond Bertolt Brecht’ (1999: 74). The choice of the ‘fabulous’ notion in describing Osofisan’s experiment is informed by his combinations of absurd situations, total theatre and myth/legend.

Basic Concepts
‘The created world’, states Sha’aban Robert, ‘repeats itself within the nations of human being in order to show their common origin and their great unity’(Mapanje and White 1983:1). In spite of this close association in human origins and descent, certain peculiar features abound in the superstructure of every human community. While the end may to create a world where peace and justice reign, the means will vary because of obvious contextual differences in the superstructures. The Brechtian dramaturgy is stimulated by Erwin Piscator’s new perception of the theatre as an objective political laboratory, which he describes as epic. As a participant in Piscator’s experiment with new theatrical devices, Brecht was part of the early attempts to evolve ‘a (new) drama, which could be used for public “discussion” of political and social issues’ Brecht’s inclination toward poetry makes language his major focus. All the same, Brecht owes his politico-theatrical tutelage to Piscator.

Osofisan creates a link between the socio-political functions of the African performers – court poets, griots and bards – on the one hand, and modern dramaturgies, on the other, to envision dialectical reforms in modern Africa. This, to him, is expedient because in Africa the debate between pure aestheticism and socio-political commitment is largely mute. ‘Such is the force of history in our environment that those of us who come into the shrine of Art, either acolytes or worshippers, enter into an already predetermined space. The dominant and seductive tradition is of an art fully entrenched within the survival rituals of the community, consciously and ideologically catalytic. Whereas, in the west, politics is theatre, in Africa theatre is politics.’ (Osofisan 2001:87).

Consequently, while Brecht, in line with Piscator’s precept, subverts theatrical antecedents (theatre as imitation, or impersonation and empathy-driven) and replaces them with epic theatre, Osofisan links the political functions of traditional folk performance with modern theatrical forms to fashion out a new dramaturgy aimed at socio-political reforms in modern Africa. This new approach by Osofisan is what we have consciously and deliberately elected to christen fabulous theatre. By fabulous, we do not simply refer to the art of constructing astonishing tables. We also establish the coinage of theatrical artistry from a creative interrogation of the connecting nexus of the empyrean with the terrestrial – the recurring metaphor and presence of mythical and legendary figures in the mundane life of the human society, from which new visions are etched as basis for socio-economic and political codes in contemporary society.

There are closely related elements in the dramaturgies of these playwrights that suggest a great influence or even a suspicion of an outright adoption of the dramaturgical approach of the former by the latter. However, through a subliminal investigation, the distinctions between the two dramaturgies become obvious, in spite of the general tendency to link Osofisan with the Brechtian epic theatre.

To start with, Brecht’s epic theatre of revolutionary change subverts Aristotle’s empathic concept of literature (Needle and Thompson 1981: 187). However, Osofisan’s theatrical precept advocates changes that are pedestal on a desire to provide an alternative to war and bloodshed, tenancies found among the ruling class and engendered by first generation Nigeria playwrights. He particularly opposes Soyinka’s adoption of Ogun’s philosophy of war and opts for Orunmila’s wisdom and justice (Obafemi 1981 and Awodiya 1993: 67-70). Essentially, while Brecht advocates change through subversion of the past, Osofisan champions a change through a synthesis of the past revolutionary ideals and modern dialectics, since as he aptly avers, ‘no nation can grow after all, which abandons its roots’: Osofisan (2001: 159). defines his theatre as praxis and post-Negritude;

Unlike Negritude, post-Negritude does not… believe in, or promote, a wilful mystification of the African past, the blanket exorticisation of which people like Senghor were often guilty of … But post-Negritude does not reject the past either, it only demands a critical attitude to the exhumation of our heritage that will not just present it as a static, nostalgic monument, but rather, as a dynamic process, hybrid and sometimes, even self-contradicting (Osofisan 2001:172).

Olu Obafemi

It is this attempt at hybridism that necessitates this new effort.
Fabulous Theatre

Osofisan’s source of inspiration is Orunmila’s ( the Yoruba god of wisdom and foreknowledge) principle of justice and wisdom, which is founded on Africa’s concept of retributive justice as panacea to social insecurity. The playwright explores historical antecedents and mytho-metaphysical beliefs of his people to propound a theory of struggle against oppression and dehumanization. Fabulous theatre bases its groupings on attitudes towards social relations, justice, freedom and collective responsibility, which are considered pre-requisites to equity, peace and tranquillity.

It is not concerned with class interests alone; its focus is to reform the entire society through collaborative efforts, in order to eradicate all forms of oppressions and injustices culminating from disorientation and wrong value judgement. It adopts Africa’s traditional story telling patterns to distinguish the world of fiction from the world of reality through the association of the empyrean and the terrestrial. Meanings are drawn by analogy through a replication of human activities in the animal or spirit world (fabulous world).

Fabulous theatre tests the audience’s intellectual ability through riddles, proverbs, witty expressions and questions, in order to relate the world of fiction to the world of reality. It also adapts widespread tales and history, popular songs and cultural values that provoke audience participation as in traditional performance.

It appropriates the style of Africa’s disguised world of the animals and personification of the empyrean to give the necessary impetus for analogy between theatrical actions and the reality. Fabulous theatre borrows the folktale’s style of multiple roles: the narrator leads/expatiates the roles, thereby de-emphasizing the characters and accentuating the encoded actions. It amply adopts the traditional concept of death (in a struggle) as a process in societal rebirth.

We find that the theatre aligns with Africa’s pragmatic approach to the interaction between the empyrean and the terrestrial in which man is the initiator and regulator and can challenge all forces, including the supernatural. It re-analyses existing history to emphasize past revolutionary tendencies; collectivism, communal survival, humanism and heroism, and de-emphasizes the individuation of success. It approaches myth dialectically with exclusive aim of de-mythologizing (non-progressive myths) and mythologizing (providing alternative versions) in order to re-awaken tendencies that culminate into heroism in the past to suit present dispensation.

Osofisan tackles the problem of audience participation in his dramaturgy by categorizing his audience into what we describe as ‘integral’ and ‘integrated’ audiences. The integral audience forms a corporate part of the play, while the integrated audience is the theatre audience, which is also sporadically drawn into the performance. These are aimed at changing the audience’s aloofness, which is an inhibiting feature of the modern theatre.

For example, in the prologue to Osofisan’s Many ColoursMake the Thunder-King, the song-leader, drummer, Women, elder and voices form an integral part of the play, (as audience to Igunnu, the master story-teller). They partake in the opening of the narrative by approving of Igunnu as a narrator and consent to the choice of Sango’s adventures as a story.

Song leader: Igunnu, it is because of your scintillating tales that each year, after harvest, we embellish street and shrine, clear the debris from home and market, and wear our finest clothing.

Drummer: It is because of your stories, so rich in wisdom and laughter, that children abandon school, women their stalls, and men their tasks on the farm, to throng the square.

Song leader: Why should a man even think of marrying a river?

Igunnu: Suppose he does, my people? What step must he take next?… The answer is simple: If a man dares and marries a river, then he must also bring in a forest as her co-wife. (12).

Songs, Music and Dance in Many Colours make the Thunder-King
Songs are core to performance in most African traditional settings. Hardly can a performance subsist (be it ritual or mundane) without its being embellished with songs music and dance. Obafemi (1986: 14) reiterates that no traditional performance can be conceived outside poetry (songs) and folktales, on the one hand, and music and dance on the other hand. It could be added that of all verbal arts (folktales, proverbs, riddles, incantations etc.), song is the commonest. It features frequently in and outside performance because it is easily accessible. Events are recorded and are easily recalled through a song. Its brevity and musically make references to it and inferences from it easy. Thus songs, in a performance, are not about entertainment only. They encode, and decode the messages therein. As a theatrical medium in modern time, Ogundeji (2003:23) observes that songs can form sub-structures to acting. In fabulous theatre, there is a resourceful use of songs, music and dance as tropes to meaning, in manners that make them pre-emptive, proactive and interactive.

The two categories that are relevant to Many Colours are largely the use of songs, music and dance to pre-empt actions or events in the story and those that proactively advance the plot. Many colours opens with song, music and dance to welcome a mask as part of annual communion with the ancestral spirit, Igunnu. The drumming, singing and dancing before an expectant mammoth crowd, which consist of the old and the young, pre-empts a big event crucial to the existence of the community. Also, the appearance of a mask, the applause and the celebration, which greet the appearance, suggest positive reactions and fulfilment of a desire (that motivated a confluence of colourfully dressed youths and the aged to throng the market centre on a day other than the market day). The celebration equally suggests a long awaited reunion, from which much is expected. The song goes thus:

Welcome, welcome!
Welcome, we greet you!
Do as you (only can) do!
Strut as you (only can) strut!
Jump as you (only can) jump! (10).

From the content of the song, the visit is a recurring one and it has usually brought desired things, which the crowd converges for. If the expected thing is from an ancestral spirit, it is obvious then that it should be something of common interest to both the living and the visiting ancestors. Also, since the ancestors are considered the representatives of the community in the spirit land, it must be good news that accompanies the dancing mask; news that will benefit and advance the communal course. This opening equally pre-empts the mythical base of the story enacted in the play.

Theatre and Democracy
It has been said, time and again, especially by materialist thinkers, that unless African literary drama and theatre show an acute concern with urgent contemporary issues by interrogating the popular economic and political aspirations of the masses-urban and rural our drama and theatre, as a vital arm of the cultural superstructure of the economy, it stands the risks of consigning itself into permanent irrelevance. Our theatre, in this democratic transition, needs to be positively interventionist and critical of the State. As we all theatre practitioners and thinkers know, no other cultural activity has such power of engagement, of arrest, of captivation, of mobilization and conscientization as the theatre. Our theatre therefore, in this moment of national emergency, threats of national distintegration, balkanization arising from Boko Haram, renewed violent militancy in the colour of Avengers, vandalization of pipelines, violent killing and assaults by herdsmen, new Biafran calls for secession should begin again to take the lead in the search for an alternative, differentiated national/continental sense-making and identity. It must bear the burden of healing and recuperation.

Osofisan’s creative metaphors cannot be more apt and expedient in the nature, form and competence of the theatre that can lead that transformation process. The questions he continues to ask through his many fascinating artistic, theatrical paths include; will our theatre express itself in these new social realities that we have painted? It is expedient to identify the task that we have set before our theatre especially our committed theatres, for it is naive to expect all theatres in a bourgeois social economy to engage and enlist in the task of envisioning and reconstructing an alternative social and democratic order. Besides, the basic function of entertainment, of pleasure and thrill, must still be fulfilled in the theatre, if it expects any audience at all.

It is in this regard that all the options proposed by our leading dramatists and Osofisan and his generation require critical evaluation as we adopt them for:
1. Re-examining the pervasive sense of loss and self-
worth in our polity.
2. Participating in the healing process of cultural and
identity reassertion.
3. Revaluing and reinventing our societies in the context
of contemporary post and neo-colonial realities which
endanger our democratic struggle for equity, justice
and a humane social environment.

Let us then stop here, having made the point about how the seeds of committed theatre of the radical streak was sown by Osofisan and his generation, building on, and departing from, the solid foundations laid for them by their predecessors, in order that those of you coming behind can inherit a legacy of critical difference and be fertilised by it this troubling juncture of our social becoming.

It is thus irresistible for me to end this rather incoherent piece with a summative quotation from the Tribute I have mentioned before, which was written in sane and calmer season of the mind, to rest my case:

Osofisan’s life and works reveal the Herculean business of the artist, who is the arrow-head of sensitivity, compassion and the collective memory; to elucidate and paint the canvass of social pain as well as teach a visionary path towards communal healing and rebirth.

From the passionate anger and impatience of his early works such as A Restless Run of Locusts (1969) which denounces, with the fiery outburst, the political elite which thrived on the betrayal, political thuggery and violence, which led to the fratricidal carnage that was raging at the time, to the profound materialist dialectics of Morountodun (1983) % a play I will always cuddle, as it offers a name to my first and only child of that name, even to those plays which rattle the empyrean (fable and mythical) world to reconstruct new tales for the contemporary world, such as Many colours Make the Thunder-King (1997) and Twingle-Twangle A- Twining Tale (1995), Osofisan has consistently enlisted his art in the service of the down-trodden and alienated masses. Dialectics % the art of a consistent inquiry after truth, through (literary) discourse % is the creative weapon of this ‘fabulous’ aesthete and ‘alchemist of cognition’ % either in the darkness and half-light of the stage or through the rhythmic verse of performed poetry. The ardent message of this committed art is the urgent need for the ‘wretched of the earth’ % the mere pawns in the political elite’s predatory game of ‘hide and seek’ % to liberate his/her consciousness, in readiness for the imminent and inexorable struggle for regeneration and social rebirth.

As George Thompson explicates the predicaments of a creative writer as he who is “the voice of his fellow man” and he whose cry is their cry, which he can only utter. This he says is what gives depth to the plight of the people, such that if the creative writer is “to speak for them he must suffer with them, rejoice with them, work with them, fight with them”. Without this, whatever the writer says is taken as an abstraction, and will therefore lack significance. The Osofisan of our days is a creative mind who has taken upon himself to burden of all of us at one point or the other, he has solicited for us and agitated for our people, and he truly is a man of many paths and a voice of many of us who may appear to be voiceless.

Osofisan as Cultural Ambassador
Unaknowledged, mainly of course, because if you asked them, our governments, right from the beginning, never sent or appointed our men of culture to be their image makers outside of our authors. So if they have, as many of them have done—Hubert Ogunde and his troupes across West Africa, Duro Ladipo, with the help, guide and support of that cultural boundary-smasher, Ulli Beier, has played the role of our cultural Ambassador in Germany. And of course since the left fifties, as a student and fresh graduate till he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first one by Blackman, Wole Soyinka has carried the image of Nigeria across the world even at moments when the notion was at s most abjured and repugnant during the Abacha Gulag days. Ditto, Achebe and the very many humanists and writers of Nigerian origin have elevated the name and stature of Nigerians abroad when the politicians have recked ad rubbished it—Professors Echeruo, Irele, Obiechina, the late Owomoyela and Nwoga, Egudu, Emenyonu, Jeyifo, Osundare, Ojaide and their many successors—Adesanmi, Otiono, Garuba, Habila, Adichie, Adesanmi, Ifowodo, and so—have carried their Nigerian identities on their foreheads as they make a living abroad and building Nigeria exile literary culture for the nation there.

Femi Osofisan’s role as a trans-cultural Ambassador is both unique and inimitable. In the last three decades, he has traversed the world stage, almost like the modern Alarinjo, with his plays, poems and essays. He has directed, acted and taught in several countries and universities of the world; in the United States he has been on the acting and performance spaces at Evanston in Northwestern, Indiana’s Bloomington, Emory in Atlanta, Cornell at Ithaca, Iowa, Philadelphia. His plays, my of the more than fifty of them published, went up on stage at the Guthrie theatre in Minneapolis, Madison, DePau, of Indiana, Stanford, and NYU, the Chipping Norton, and Tricycle In the United Kingdom where he has played and/or talked in Leeds, Edinburgh, and Southampton. In the Caribbean he has mounted the stage in Trinida, in Sri Lanka, Sierra-Leone, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa. In Canada at York. in Ghana’s Legon as well accrediting theatre courses (along with me) in all Ghanaian Universities.

Now, in the past five years, he has been spending a minimum of three months each in China and Germany> In China, he has been teaching, researching, developing curriculum, and opening minds to African modern theatre. With his primal soul-mate, Biodun Jeyifo, he had been asked to start a course in African theatre and drama at the Peking University in China to the delight and enthusiasm of Chinese students—helping to develop postgraduate programmes and getting some Nigerian academic to do sabbatical there. He has been engaged across the country in conferences ‘talking about the developments in African literature,’ arranging translations with publishers , including doing adaptations f Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm (‘All for Catherine’) to be publicly staged soon. Modestly, as usual, he told me a few days ago, ‘I have increased Nigeria’s profile in the country (China)through our courses and through the students’

In Germany, the pathway has been equally fascinating. First, he was as Fellow (for twelve months, split-able to four months every year) at the International Research Centre at the Freie University in Berlin founded to investigate ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures (the equivalent of intercultural and multicultural performances, in sync with his now famous ‘international adaptations and the search for truly African modern theatre.’ He has recently been promoted to the Board of the Centre, which is available, with good stipend to do one’s work, write one’s plays, poems and so on, attend regular semiers and workshops, visit productions and exhibitions. This is where he has written his recent scripts’ and laundering the image of Nigeria, largely uninvited and unnoticed by yhe Nigeria government which awarded him the National Order of Merit!

Now, at Seventy, at the Miiddle of the Season of Autumn, it has been fascinating pathways for one of Africa’s most prolific and important writer—playwright, poet, novelist, translator, inter-textual aesthete, a radical artist and activist intellectual who has published One Hundred works, comprising a)fifty-one plays, b) Seven critical studies, Four volumes of poetry, c) Five novels, One published Biography, d) three translated works. e) Seven Monographs, f) Eight Edited Books, g) Eighteen Essays in Books, and h) Thirteen Essays in Journals. If it were in the mundane world of power it would been a rousing boom of 100 cracks of Seventy Gun Salutes! But for the oracle of words, and the Alchemist of Cognition, Femi Osofisan, let a thousand flowers bloom and seventy songs fill the stage . Happy Birthday, Okinba Lunko, Elereko!

Professor Olu Obafemi delivered this lecture, entitled “Traumas and Curative Metaphors: The Many Fascinating Paths of Osofisan’s Journey” to mark Profesor Femi Osofisan’s 70th birthday