Wole Soyinka
by Soyinka became more perceptible as climates of uncertainty gave
way to regimes based on terror and the fomenting of small and large
bloodbaths to consolidate and perpetuate tyrannical military and civil-
ian autocracies.
The foregoing observations indicate that there is a perceptible correla-
tion between the evolution of Soyinka’s dramaturgy and the unraveling
of the promises of political independence in postcolonial Africa that
Fanon so prophetically predicted inThe Wretched of the Earth. This evolu-
tion seems intelligible in three phases. In the first phase which spans the
lates to the end of thes, the Nigerian dramatist establishes his
power and talent as a dramatist in the originality of his handling of dra-
matic form. In plays of this period, Soyinka makes sharp, memorable
responses to the violence and creeping social anomie of postcolonial
Africa, but these plays do not take his ambivalence about the prospects
for change to the depths of the pessimism of the plays of thes and the
s. This first period is also the only period in Soyinka’s career when
he is able to work extensively, almost full-time, as a practicing dramatist,
and with amateur and semiprofessional acting companies which serve
as laboratories for the generation and staging of his plays before their
publication as written texts. Thus, irrespective of the overall moods of
the plays of this period in his career, this phase constitutes the glory
years of Soyinka’s work on the stage of the English-language theatre in
Nigeria. Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the seminal nature of
the influence that this phase of Soyinka’s career has had on subsequent
English-language drama and theatre in Nigeria.
In the second phase spanning thesands, Soyinka’s work
in the theatre is more fitful, less sustained, and this is consistent with
the exigencies of the playwright’s deepening embroilment in political
activism, the occasions of short or prolonged exile, and his final depar-
ture from the Nigerian university system in. As has been previously
noted, this period produced some of the most pessimistic, the most sav-
agely iconoclastic plays in Soyinka’sdramatic corpus. However, it is also
the case that unlike the pessimism of the earlier period, it is a fighting,
moreactivistdespair; even the nihilism that we see in some of the plays
of this “middle period” such asMadmen and SpecialistsandOpera Wonyosi
are anything but defeatist. And relatively speaking, this period consti-
tutes the phase of Soyinka’s most self-conscious experimentation as a
playwright and theatre director, a fact which seems as much a matter of
contingency as it is of deliberate policy, for with less available time for
the Nigerian dramatist to work in a sustained manner in the theatre, he