The “drama of existence”: sources and scope of power represented by maniacal tyrants like Kongi, the dictator of
Isma.
Opera Wonyosi, a composite adaptation of John Gay’sThe Beggar’s Opera
and Bertolt Brecht’sThreepenny Opera, takes Soyinka’s exploration of the
power theme into a far more sinister and dystopian universe. The basic
performance mode employed is the comic opera, infused with large doses
of savage, caustic satire. The targets of this satire, as particularly malev-
olent examples of the corruption of power in the contemporary African
postcolony are the Nigerian military dictatorship of the initial phase of
the “oil boom” years (–), and the “empire” proclaimed by Jean-
Bedel Bokasa in the Central African Republic in the same period. In
the spirit of Gay’s and Brecht’s parodic inversions of the classical opera,
Opera Wonyosideliberately disconcerts with its deployment of raucous but
gutsy satirical songs and wild, off-scale oratory in which the boastful and
buffoonish tyrants and their henchmen expose, and thereby denounce
themselves. It is a hard task that Soyinka sets himself in this play since
this involves using, on the one hand, parody to capture the notorious
and outlandish performativity of the tyrannical misrule of many post-
colonial African dictators and, on the other hand, deploying satire to
cut the dictators and their love of pomp and display down to size by
subjecting them and their love of display to ridicule. But the satirized
realities are so grotesque, so horrific as to be almost neutralized and
aestheticized by the parodic excess of the display. These realities, which
are given sharp, bracingly parodic expressions in this play, include the
notorious “murder of the innocents” when Bokasa personally super-
vised the brutal torture and resultant deaths of school children who had
dared to protest the personal profiteering by the dictator from inflated
costs of school uniforms and school supplies; the festive carnival atmo-
sphere at the public execution of condemned robbers at stakes erected
at the beaches of the Atlantic sea-front in Lagos; the routine, sadistic
floggings of citizens by Nigerian military top-brass on pretexts supplied
by real and imagined misdemeanors of the citizenry; the rampant crim-
inal arson perpetrated by corrupt public officials on state buildings to
destroy evidence of monumental theft of state funds, often leading to
the loss of many lives. Unlike what we encounter inKongi’s Harvest,in
Opera Wonyosithere are no dissidents, no credible opposition to the bru-
tal, decadent tyrannical regimes in Lagos and Bangui; rather, the gross
abuse of power and its corruptive influence circulates, in a Foucauldian
manner, between and within the rulers and the ruled, the looters and the
“looted.”