What Zulu Sofola offers in Wedlock of the Gods is tragedy, the ancient type of raw tragedy that emerges from the otherwise wonderful phenomenon of love. It is the sort of tragedy that proceeds when powers—economic and social, physical and spiritual—converge to put asunder two inseparable souls.
Uloko and the recently widowed Ogwoma are the two souls in love here. However, financial difficulties made Ibekwe, Ogwoma’s father, to insist on her marriage to Adigwu, a man for whom she has no affections—a man she actually hates. “Tied like a goat and whipped along the road to a man you hated,” Ogwoma lives the three years the marriage lasted with vile for her husband and all who made the marriage possible. She actively prays for a deliverance from the marriage and when Adigwu dies of what his mother refers to as a “shameful death,” Ogwoma sees in it an answer to her prayers. The fact that no child lives as a fruit of that marriage also signals to her that she has nothing, no duty to her late husband, to keep her in the shackles of that marriage. Nothing to mourn for.
However, tradition demands that a woman in mourning must not have any sexual contact with another man for three months, and when the three months are over, the woman is to be remarried to the late husband’s brother so as to bear children in the name of the late husband (in a situation where the woman bore no child for the late husband). This is a tradition Ogwoma pays no attention to. As far as she is concerned, the death of Adigwu frees her to be with Uloko, her true love. Her friend Anwasia, seeing her determination to flout tradition for love exclaims, “It is true that when the sweetness of a man touches the heart of a woman, nothing else matters.”
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Uloko, on his own part, shares Ogwoma’s stubbornness and disregard for a tradition that makes it possible for them not to be husband and wife. He believes that nothing can conquer the love they have for each other, not tradition, not even Odibei, late Adigwu’s mother, notorious for her diabolical powers: “She cannot harm you. No one can harm us.” On many occasions, he asserts his willingness to die, if that is what it takes to be with his love: “Let death come. Ogwoma will be mine.”
And death did come.
Wedlock of the Gods As a Critique of Family Fracture
The problem at the heart of Wedlock of the Gods, Ogwoma’s marriage to Adigwu, finds its genesis in the inability of her parents to raise the money needed to cure her ailing brother. Ogwoma’s friend, Anwasia, in her attempt to get Ogwoma to rethink and forgive her parents for forcing her to marry Adigwu, summarised it thus: “Ogwoma, our people say that a man’s daughter is a source of wealth to him. Your parents needed the money for a very expensive sacrifice for your brother whom sickness almost killed. You should have been happy that your money saved the life of your own brother.”
One wonders if there is no other means of raising the money except from making Ogwoma a trade article. If we ignore the commodification of the girl child inherent in their culture which presents the daughter as “a source of wealth” to her father and informs Ike’s (Ike is Ibekwe’s brother, Ogwoma’s uncle) statement that “a man does not have to keep his daughter if she becomes too much of a problem to him. There is always a husband to lead her to,” we begin to see that the extended family is an option which Ibekwe never explored. A family member, Okolie, puts it thus:
Ibekwe had not enough money for all this. But rather than lean on our backs he decided to give his daughter away. It is true that a man’s daughter is his source of wealth, but never have our people supported such action when there is another way to solve the problem. Diokpa Ata, I say that Ibekwe ignored his family and so should be left to stand alone in the rain.
Okolie’s framing of the situation shows that what Ibekwe did is something normally reserved as a last resort. Ibekwe bypasses the option of trying to raise the money through the extended Onowu family and is thus to be blamed for the misfortune. But that is before we hear from Ibekwe, before we learn that he gave his daughter away against his wish:
It is nobody’s blame that I was left fatherless when I was only a child. My mother suffered alone to rear me and my brother, Ike. When we became men we saw that certain members of the Onowu family had wiped out our father’s compound. His grave was unroofed and the shame of rain and sun poured down on his soul. In silence Ike and I managed to build another house over our father’s grave. We asked the help of Onowu family but those members who wished us disgrace and shame worked against us. Diokpa Ata, it was you who told me and Ike at your house that the members of Onowu family had the planting season on their hands and could not give any help. We asked when the help could come. You replied that you did not know. Ike and I swallowed everything and managed the best we could. Today our father’s grave is roofed and his soul is in peace.
Further exchanges in that family meeting reveal the Onowu family as one deeply fractured. Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods shows how such a fracture is the perfect recipe for disaster at a humongous scale.
Blame Game and Playing God
The play captures the very human phenomenon of refusing responsibilities, refusing to accept realities and playing the blame game. From the beginning, we see Odibei blaming Ogwoma for the death of her son, Ogwoma’s husband, Adigwu. People die, but not just Adigwu: “Adigwu died of a swollen stomach. A man who dies like a pregnant woman did not die a natural death. Somebody killed him.” And which other somebody is it that could have killed him if not the woman who was forced to marry him? When it becomes (sort of) established that Ogwoma couldn’t have killed Adigwu, at least not directly, “Then it is her harlotry that killed my son.”
In the same manner, the blame game continues when it is exposed that Ogwoma had conceived in mourning, and Uloko is responsible. For Nneka, Ogwoma’s mother, it couldn’t have been Ogwoma’s fault—the intercourse that led to the conception couldn’t have been consensual. Uloko must have forced himself upon Ogwoma or “worked medicine” on her. It is the same for Ogoli, Uloko’s mother, save for this time, the blame must rest squarely on Ogwoma: “This shameless dog has enticed my son into an abominable act, and I cannot walk the road.”
This trade in blame becomes an avoidance technique, one that delays all the parties involved from actually confronting the problem and trying to solve it before Odibei decides to play the gods.
The elder Udo informs us that “[A] woman who loses her husband must not be visited by any other man until she has been cleansed. Any action against this is an abomination and our gods deal very severely with such offenders.” Traditionally speaking, there are severe consequences which the gods have reserved for Ogwoma and Uloko. Odibei, though, does not want to wait for their manifestations. She thinks of herself a catalyst, the vessel through which these punishments must come upon the erring couple and takes it upon herself to play the gods. And she was successful in summoning death upon the couple. Only when death came, she too, was consumed.
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Odibei’s death reminds us of a quote by a character in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: “It is not our custom to fight for our gods. Let us not presume to do so now. If a man kills the sacred python in the secrecy of his hut, the matter lies between him and the god. We did not see it. If we put ourselves between the god and his victim we may receive blows intended for the offender.”
Conclusion
Zulu Sofola’s well-written Wedlock of the Gods employs the local flavour of proverbs and ancient traditional practices to interrogate familial tensions and cohesions, crime and punishment, materialism and the place of the woman in the society. Though a tragedy, it demonstrates in its own way the resilience of love, which is like a flowing water demolishing all obstacles, either by breaking them, wearing them away, or even getting absorbed into them in order to destroy them from within. At the end of the play, ‘everybody’ dies but love lives.
Artwork: mind your way…collage on canvas by @Ronexarts 2025
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