From 28th August to 31st August 2024, traditional leader and indigene of Nnewi, Nze Tobe Osigwe, resurrected the traditional Igbo theatre in an event he tagged Afịa Ọlụ Extra 4.0. The Afịa Ọlụ Festival is an annual festival celebrated in Nnewi, a popular commercial city in Anambra State, Nigeria. The festival, observed in honour of Ufiojiokwu, the deity of land fertility, celebrates the New Yam (considered in many parts of the Igboland as the king of crops).
For four years, Nze Tobe Osigwe has been committed to using the period of this celebration to demonstrate that Nnewi is not just a land for capitalist pursuits, but also one where culture and capitalism, no matter how antagonistic they may look, can coexist. He has hosted dance and masquerade performances, lecture series, film screenings, etc., as part of the festival celebrations in his Obi Eziokwu. This year’s celebration privileged the theatre, showcasing the traditional Igbo theatre in its full majesty, from the Egedege dance performances to the masquerade displays, especially that of Ajọ Ọfịa, Nnewi.
Ajọ Ọfịa, the Many Faces
Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi is unarguably the most popular masquerade in Nnewi and one of the most popular in Igboland. Ajọ Ọfịa’s fame is well captured in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, with the respect accorded it as the leader of the egwugwu (a group of masquerades that has law enforcement as part of their primary duties) that accosted the white preachers over the desecration of the land. Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi represents many things to many people. To some it is a fearsome spectacle, an embodiment of deities, a spirit, and to others a human. Some see it as a spiritual figure, while to the others it is a source of entertainment.
Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi is a musician, and papers have been published, analysing him as an oral poet. Comparisons have been made between Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi and Bob Dylan who “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition“(2016 Nobel Committee) and was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for that. Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi has been, for decades now, in the business of creating new poetic expressions within the great African orature. Unlike Dylan, Ajọ Ọfịa’s location in the cultural industry may mean that he may never be in the contention for the Nobel Prize. Not that he cares though.
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For me, Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi is a moving theatre. It took a conversation I had with doctoral candidate, Richard Umezinwa, and Dr. Ikechukwu Erojikwe both from the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka for me to come to this realisation. Everywhere Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi appears is Ajọ Ọfịa’s stage. He is also himself a stage, one set up by tens of crew members. Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi travels in a truck (doesn’t that remind you of travelling theatre troupes?) alongside tens of his all-male crew. And when he is performing, the demarcation between the dead ancestors and their living descendants is bridged. The oji is an important part of his props, a rattling staff which he always asks his followers to keep on striking for him in his song titled Mabalu M Oji (keep striking the oji for me).
In his performances through songs, he tells of old stories which may have been forgotten but shouldn’t. Be it in Ezi Uzo (song of crimes committed) where he recounts the shooting of protesting miners by the 1949 colonial government at Enugu State, Kwusi Inu Kayikayi where he admonishes against harmful consumption habits like alcoholism and the use of hard drugs, Oke Osisi where he commemorates fallen heroes remembering the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, his townsman who was the leader of the defunct Biafra state, and Chinua Achebe, the most popular Nigerian novelist who introduced the Ajọ Ọfịa masquerade to the world, amongst many others. In his songs he also blesses his listeners, filling in the spiritual leader role. In Things Fall Apart like in the precolonial Igboland land, masquerades like Ajọ Ọfịa Nnewi were also administrators and law enforcement agents.
While these performances may be overlooked as theatre, Nze Tobe Osigwe makes sure to bring to the arena a form of theatre that we cannot overlook. It is community theatre. And it goes beyond the kind of productions designated to commercial theatre spaces. In this production, which opened the festival on the night of 28th August, the professional theatre (Pentagram Pictures) marries the academic theatre (Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka) and they in turn marry the Nnewi community. Here, the gown meets the town and the town is happy to see itself in the gown.
The play King Orizu, written by Oluchi Victoria Osigwe (wife of Eze Tobe Osigwe) is an ambitious one. Yet unlike many ambitious projects, this one neither falters nor fails in its ambitions. The ambitious playwright meets even more ambitious directors in Ikechukwu Erojikwe, Victor Emenike (Co-Director), Richard Umezinwa (Technical Director) and the rest of the crew and cast are on fire with enthusiasm and expertise.
Traditional Igbo Theatre and Community Theatre For Social Change
When I typed “community theatre” into my search engine, the first community theatre project I saw, described as one of the most popular in the United States, is The Laramie Project. After the young Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten and tied to a fence for hours by two other young men uncomfortable with his sexual orientation on October 7, 1998, an assault that resulted to his death few days later, members of the Tectonic Theatre Project embarked on this project. At the end of over 2000 interviews, the created performance faithful to the events of that night.
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Learning of The Laramie Project means learning of the 2002 documentary of the same title directed by Moisés Kaufman and produced by Declan Baldwin. It means watching this documentary shot out of the materials this theatre group gathered. The documentary makes of Matthew Shepard, not a cultural icon or a statistic or just a reason for one legislation or another, but a full-blooded 21-year-old human being, whose life was cut shut, by his own peers, just for expressing love in a manner different from the majority.
Before I was done with The Laramie Project, the algorithm was at work, so that somewhere on my screen a recommendation of Boys Don’t Cry, a 1999 biopic of yet another 21-year-old man, Brandon Teena, appeared. Five years before Shepard was murdered, Brandon Teena, a young trans man was also, after being raped, brutally shot and stabbed to death, alongside two friends, by two other ‘friends,’ upon discovering that he is a transman. Like The Laramie Project, Boys Don’t Cry is not a movie you see and not feel depressed.
When my editor wrote to ask whether I was done with the review, I cited some vague reasons for not having written it. What she did not know, what I never wrote back in my response, was that I was actively struggling, to look at my laptop’s screen again. That screen had shown me brutal scenes of violence. As morning turned to night and night reverted to morning, it became clear to me that I may need to write my editor that I can no longer write on the King Orizu production she sent me to see. Knowing her she’d understand, but it’s a good thing I never sent that message as that would have totally defeated the whole idea of community theatre, of what I want to write about traditional Igbo theatre, the Afịa Ọlụ Festival and Oluchi Victoria Osigwe’s King Orizu.
The traditional Igbo theatre is fully and purely a community theatre. This is mostly seen in dance drama productions in the community. These productions can come in age grades, for both the men and womenfolk, or by occupation (hunter’s guild, warrior’s guild etc.) or by achievements and positions (like some dances meant exclusively for titled men). These dances tell stories and the accompanying songs, the call-response, give voice to the words performed with the fluidity of the bodies. Let’s say a particular hunter tracks and kills a marauding leopard in the community, the womenfolk may gather and produce a dance on that story. In the production, through dance, mimicry and tales of exaggerated bravery, the name of the hunter is story told, their name immortalised.
For one trained with the Western or institutional idea of theatre, they may not see a theatrical production there. But on a closer look, we begin to see props and props manager and costume/makeup and stage director in that production. Some people are in charge of choosing the clothes the dancers will wear, of selecting hunters who will join the dance troupe to display the commemorated hunter’s skills, of carving gun-like properties, and of applying the uli and other body and hair decorations. The women choose the best dancers amongst them, and the stage is always a communal space, say the village square or an elder’s or chief’s compound.
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While in western-style theatre, the stage is a sacred space, in this traditional theatre the stage is everywhere, a dynamic and fluid space. There is no demarcation between the audience and the actors and actresses as through call and response methods, the audience also become actors. The role of the scriptwriter and director isn’t well defined in this sort of theatre. As for the script, the story is communally owned and takes many members of the troupe to recount and choose which parts are displayed. With directing, while someone takes charge, almost every actor/actress is also a director. On the day of production, even the crew members become spectators and spectators at many points turn actors and actresses themselves.
This nature of the traditional Igbo theatre also contributes in how it is critically evaluated. Chinweizu and his colleagues, most popularly referred to as the Bolekaja Critics, observe that in this form of theatre, there is no special role known as that of the theatre critic (Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature: Vol. 1). That is to say that in a theatre like this, people like me have no jobs. But that does not in any way mean that the productions are not critically evaluated. The stories are owned by the community and the actors are community members. Being communally owned stories, almost anyone of age can critically evaluate it.
After the production, at the farms or at home during dinners, at the market, village stream or just on the paths, groups of two, three, four or more cluster to discuss such performances. Sometimes an exceptional performer is sighted in the market or any public space and hailed, hugged and congratulated on their performance. In these group discussions people talk of the parts they liked most, the parts they disliked, which age grade’s outing was the best and which was abysmal. With time, some productions are forgotten, but some are never, mostly because they were too good or sometimes because they were very terrible. These productions are then used as reference points for future productions with people aiming to outdo them or not to be like them. In that manner a critical consensus is reached without deferring to a group of people with ‘critic’ as their job descriptions. In that manner canonisation takes place. Sometimes, a group with a stellar performance are called to repeat these performances in different other parts of the community and sometimes outside of the community. The successful community theatre group thus becomes a travelling theatre without necessarily aiming to be one, without even knowing they have become one.
This is something The Laramie Project and the King Orizu production, even though separated in themes and location, share in common. While both productions were embarked upon by professional theatre practitioners and scholars, respectively, they achieve the status of community theatre by engaging with the community members, even making some of them members of the cast and crew. King Orizu even positions itself in an important community festival, the Afịa Ọlụ festival, while integrating the traditional Igbo theatre practices with some western-styled academic theatre practices.
Traditional Igbo Theatre and King Orizu
If we are to strictly follow Boehm & Boehm (2003)definition of community theatre “as a special kind of socio-political theatre, in which social criticism is presented by members of the community themselves, that is, the very people who suffer from the depicted stigma, social problem and hardship,” (Community Theatre as a Means of Empowerment in Social Work: A Case Study of Women’s Community Theatre) the argument may arise that with its cast made mostly of students from different parts of the country, some of them not Igbo themselves, King Orizu does not qualify as community theatre. Such an argument would be shortsighted. For a start, the script was written by a Nnewi indigene and directed by another Nnewi indigene. Amongst its official cast and crew are some Nnewi indigenes but like already stated, in such productions, the “official” cast are not the only cast. Even the audience, made up mostly of indigenes, are also co-creators of the play.
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The playwright understands this properly and makes an inclusion of a masquerade appearance, the masquerade itself a moving theatre, in the play. The masquerade emerges from the audience and performs for a moment without ever climbing the stage. Activities on the stage freeze and the stage moves away from that designed and designated space to the same space occupied by the audience, the lights following the masquerade as it performs. Here, the audience becomes themselves performers just as much as the performers on stage and that is what informs the movement of the stage, keeping in mind the fluid nature of “stage” in traditional Igbo theatre. It becomes fully a community theatre production, with spectators hailing the masquerade in the way they do in the community and the masquerade performing some dance moves and making its own chants as it performs. The audience responds to the chants, since they are popular call-and-responses in the village, becoming also an immersive theatre. This movement is important in the course of the production as it evidences my assertion of the stage as a fluid space. It reminds one immediately of the Igbo proverb that ihe narụ ọrụ bụ ọrụ (that which prevents work is in itself work)—a call to flexibility in the human mind and action.
King Orizu tells the story of three different generations of the Orizus, starting from the first Orizu who first encountered the colonisers to the current Orizu, Kenneth Orizu, fondly referred to as “Igwe na-eje ụka” in recognition of his status of being the first amongst the Orizus to become a Christian.
At the heart of the play is the disunity that crept into the four communities that make up Nnewi town: Otollo, Uruagu, Umudim and Nnewichi. These communities are formed by the descendants of and named after these four sons of Nnewi, in a descending order of seniority. While the four Obis in charge of these communities were able to govern Nnewi together as co-leaders in the times past, the government’s recognition of the Obi of the eldest, Otollo, in this case Kenneth Orizu, as the official king of Nnewi, would threaten this unity as it presents the Obi of Otollo not as a co-leader but as the supreme leader. Ogidi, the Obi of Uruagu, the direct junior of Otollo, would escalate this issue, pointing out that the other Obis have been reduced to subject level like Ulasi (the King’s Adviser), and that he must not take. It became more serious when some years ago, as narrated to me in a post-production interview I conducted with Nwachukwu Ojukwu, a traditional rainmaker, when the then governor of Anambra State, Chinwoke Mbadinuju, recognised Uruagu as an autonomous community, elevating Ogidi to a king. King Orizu as a play focuses on how King Kenneth Orizu was able to handle this disunity and reunite the four communities.
The handling of time here is marvellous and does not escape the notice of the audience. In a post show interview I had with Dr. Arinzechi Chigozie Emmanuel, an indigene who saw the play, he particularly praised the handling of time in the play. While Dr. Arinzechi praised the brevity of the scenes that introduced the first two Orizus without becoming boring or losing significance, what he did not say was how faithful the costumes were to those time periods, courtesy of Michael Esther who was in charge of the costume.
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The scenes that introduced the earlier Orizus stick to establishing the major issues each faced and how they overcame it. For the first Orizu, it was the coming of the missionaries, for Orizu II, the lack of a male heir. Orizu II’s scene ends immediately one of his wives conceives a male child, who is Kenneth Orizu and the rest of the play focuses on the disunity he faced as a ruler and how he worked to overcome it. By not trying to tell us the full story of each of the Orizus but focusing only on a problem, we learn what major problems defined their rule and through how they solved them, what kind of leaders they were. These brief captures provide a sufficient introduction to each of the Orizus while not losing time as not even a person’s story can be told in two hours later on that of three generations of kings. Michael Esther, it was clear, did her research into how people, royalties and otherwise, dressed in each of those time periods. With the first Orizu scene, we see clothings mostly made of animal skins and hides. When the second Orizu is introduced it becomes clear that trading with foreigners was going on and that evident in the garments, yet the styles are far removed from our current reality. With Kenneth Orizu, the actors and actresses are dressed in the same way people dress today in Igboland.
Plays of this nature always fall victims of being propaganda machines and King Orizu as a play had its own propaganda, just not the cliché kind one would expect. While some similar plays would have dedicated a scene or more to lament how the coming of the colonisers and their dabbling into local administration sowed the seed of disunity, King Orizu simply shows what is as it is, trusting the audience to be intelligent enough to link actions to their causes. And while the play title may suggest a canonisation of the king, no such thing occurs. The current king is neither canonised nor his colleague, the troublesome Ogidi, vilified. In fact, Ojukwu told me that the production helped him better understand Ogidi. Ojukwu, who is from the Uruagu part of Nnewi, had encountered Ogidi on one occasion. That encounter left him with the impression of Ogidi, the real life Ogidi, as a troublesome, power hungry individual. He had gone to his Obi to report something to Ogidi and while there he addressed him as “Nna Anyị,” an endearment used for respected elders, instead of as “Igwe” used for Kings and Ogidi went off on that and paid little attention to his complaints. King Orizu helped Ojukwu, in his admission, to put Ogidi’s misgivings into context: Ogidi is simply annoyed over the fact that Kenneth Orizu, it seems, helps feed the idea that he is the superior leader because of the government’s recognition. King Orizu’s singular agenda was advocating for peace and unity that had been agreed upon is fostered and kept forever, maka ọdịmma Nnewi.
Oluchi Victoria Osigwe’s King Orizu at Afịa Ọlụ Festival is an unrivaled excellent piece of community theatre. Dabeluchukwu Christabel Ibik shows she is an adept hand at stage management with the way she coordinated the stage, a stage totally different with what she is used to in school. Here, the stage was shared with the DJ’s materials not needed for the play but which for logistics reasons must be there and exits and entrances not defined. Yet, in her stage management, the DJ’s materials not only became a necessary part of set design, but spectators left with a defined sense of stage entrances and exits.
Freshman Tamarauketemene who managed the set and light may not be mentioned in years as spectators narrate the play, but without his excellent delivery, without his mastery of light and darkness even in an open space, there would have been nothing for the spectators to talk about for they would have seen nothing.
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The Orchestra led by Toriola Ogbe understood the Igbo song tradition and used their songs to not only advance the play, but give more depth to the scenes, with their opening song announcing to all that what we were about to experience is indeed a true story.
At the end of the play, Johnbosco Chiemerie Ugwu shines as Igwe Kenneth Orizu, with his carriage that points to the meeting of the modern with the traditional as seen in the real Kenneth Orizu; Nwachukwu Sopuluchukwu in his almost wordless yet very communicative performance as Nnaji Orizu II; Samuel Ginikachisiri Amechi as the funny yet serious and wise Ulasi, the king’s adviser and Emmanuel Ossai in his short but memorable role as Macpherson, the White Man who met the first Orizu.
Emmanuel Odunwankpa, who played an exciting role in the first scene as Macpherson’s interpreter but who won the hearts of the audience with his role as Obi Uruagu, Ogidi, in the ending parts of the play with a performance that can only be written of in the superlatives, shines the most as the undisputed star of the night. Odunwankpa’s growth from Macpherson’s interpreter to one of the Obis may have been a decision made to reduce cast number but it reminds one of the prophetic nature of Ezeulu of Achebe’s Arrow of God who “had thought that since the white man had come with great power and conquest it was necessary that some people should learn the ways of his deity.” Odunwankpa’s embodiment of Ogidi was hailed by Ojukwu who said to me that “he shouts on people exactly like Ogidi” and Dr. Arinzechi who said “he even walks like Ogidi.”
Beyond being a piece of community theatre, King Orizu’s staging in Nnewi, a commercial city where capitalism is king, and its resonance with the audience is another way of proving the importance of education, especially in the Arts and Humanities, to a people who measure Return on Investment on spreadsheets. It is yet another way to correct the impression that the university does the duty of disconnecting the young ones from their roots, that Athenian idea of Socrates, and by extension, philosophy, as corrupting the youths. The King Orizu cast and crew are like the “artist[s] in the traditional African milieu” who Chinweizu et al. tells us “spoke for and to [their] communit[ies].” While The Laramie Project preaches tolerance and acceptance especially as it concerns sexual identities, King Orizu preaches peace and unity especially in the socio-political sphere of the Nnewi town and I am glad to have experienced both, to different levels of involvement.
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