The “drama of existence”: sources and scope The way we deal with mavericks
he’ll scream for human rights
So his club was burnt to cinders
The culprit was unknown...
This cat’s mother fixated
why the obsessive worry?
She fell out of the window
soldiers don’t say ‘sorry’
Does he let her rest in peace?
He tries to deposit
Her coffin on our doorstep- well, that really does it!
Resurrect her if you can,
build another Kalakut’
You’ll learn the truth
of power, Mr. Cool-and-Cute!...
As the saxophonist is overwhelmed, manacled and encased in prison clothes, his entourage
disappear one after the other (–)
This brief scene contains a wealth of allusions to very specific incidents
and realities which only Nigerians, and even more narrowly those of a
certain generation, would be capable of identifying, let alone relating
to emotionally. For instance, the detail in the stage directions about the
“skimpy figure clad only in even skimpier underpants” refers of course
to the late musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, with many other details in
the quote alluding to both overt and more tacit aspects of his radical,
nonconformist lifestyle and the violent clashes of Anikulapo-Kuti and his
commune with the military dictatorship. Another detail, that of a “shina-
manic dance” in the stage directions alludes to a popular musician from
the period, Sir Shina Peters, and the fast, furious and rather manic dance
steps associated with his style of music which became the rage of Lagosian
socialites in the lates ands. It was a common, but definitely an
insider’s knowledge that the ‘shinamanic’ dance style was part of a gen-
eral militarization of both popular and elite culture in the period. This
order of allusiveness to an irreducibly specific time- and place-bound
collective experience pervadesFrom Zia with Love, paradoxically giving it
its frenetic energy and its extremely narrow frame of reference in many
parts of its dramatic action. Among the more memorable and telling
items of this socially “intramural” allusiveness of the play are the ref-
erences to the late Hubert Ogunde, especially in his brushes with both
colonial and postcolonial censorship and repression; the near-complete