In Odenigbo, Ahmed Yerima dramatises the usurpation of power by leaders and the perversion of the powers usurped. Ahmed Yerima is a Nigerian playwright, director and professor of Theatre and Cultural Studies at Redeemer’s University, Osun State, with over sixty plays. The prolific playwright writes majorly in the historical genre, and one may loosely place Odenigbo, published in 2017, in that genre. Here Yerima examines, not the usual subject of failed political leadership, but that of failed religious leadership.
A God Captured
Odenigbo is the central deity of the Obodoije Community, served by the wile and cunning priest, Ubanta. Ikedi, the brother of Ukatu, is a respected member of the community who wants to be king. For him to achieve that, since he is not of a royal lineage, he conspires with Ubanta to discredit the current king, Ezeidu. Unknown to Ikedi, Ubanta harbours even a more dangerous ambition. Ubanta not only wants to usurp the royal throne, but also to be a very powerful and feared ruler. He uses Ikedi as a pawn in his own coup attempt.
To usurp the throne, Ubanta needs to use Odenigbo. To use Odenigbo, Ubanta needs to place Odenigbo under his control. It is rumoured in the play “that he has travelled the seven villages to possess powers that will make him more powerful than the god he serves.” Using these powers, Ubanta starts by destabilising the community, making it almost ungovernable for Ezeidu, taking death to many households. The long list of tragedies Ubanta, now in control of Odenigbo, inflicts on his people, the same people he is appointed to serve, is best captured by Mgbeke who says:
I have just returned from the third place sorrow and sadness bore fruits this morning. Death here and there…young children…young women dying at childbirth…men dying foolish deaths which cannot be explained. Obodoije is in trouble, and Odenigbo does nothing even after our visit to its shrine (12-13).
Having destabilised the community, Ubanta shifts his attacks to the king himself, desecrating his palace, and giving him only ten years to live. He sees an opportunity in the death of Okezie, the chosen carrier of the Odenigbo mask, to finally strike directly at the king by claiming that Odenigbo required the king to dance with the mask, a dance known to all to be a dance of death.
See also: On Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods
Ubanta is a power drunk religious leader who feels that his spiritual power places him above the king and the whole community. When Ikedi, his co-conspirator tries to caution him, he shuts him up saying, “We remain infallible even at the very centre of a blazing flame.” When Ukatu, an Ada Agbara and sacred maiden of another strong and powerful deity of Obodoije, leads the women to caution Ubanta, he dismisses them as:
Dried up mothers of the land! Cursed bald vultures, all! Watch them go like a band of spent wet butterflies once brightly plumed, now stained with age and soaked in blurred fuzzy colours. Pity. Bite the fingers that once fed you? Weak words of old spoilt rattles now attempting feeble clings. See them wobble home, common dried up empty barrels (8).
Ikedi, who gradually turns from his partner in crime to a voice of reason and conscience, reminds him that “each god has its place.”
Yerima does a lot of foreshadowing in the play to ground themes and ideas. From early in the play, Ukatu threatens that the people “shall bite the fingers that feed us” if Odenigbo continues to be used against the people he has previously served. It is, therefore, not surprising when the people, under their king’s leadership, demand for a new god—deciding to cast away Odenigbo. Ubanta’s eventual failure is prophesied many times in the play, by Ukatu, the king and other elders. Ukatu, for example, tells him, “Do not be like the clay effigy who demanded to feel the coolness of raindrops. You will melt in shame”. The king reminds him of Obiageli:
Obiageli the old witch dances, having sucked to her fill the blood of the young child. She sits under the coconut tree to celebrate and breathe the taste of the new life in her fangs. Then comes a whiff of breeze which shakes a coconut. It falls straight on the head of the old witch and crushes her skull. (Chuckles again sadly.) I shall crush Ubanta’s head, I swear! (21).
All these warnings, of course, fall on deaf ears.
See also: Madagascar: A Musical Adventure JR – A Festive Treat at Peoples Theatre
The Women of Odenigbo
Yerima creates a cast of powerful and daring women in Odenigbo, women who are ready to become change agents, even to the point of self-sacrifice. This is epitomised in the character of Ukatu, who refuses to cower in the face of Ubanta’s tyranny. While everyone including the king and even Udengwu, a highly placed chief and former apprentice at Odenigbo’s shrine are intimidated, to varying degrees, by Ubanta’s power, it is Ukatu and the young members of the community who remind Ubanta that a god is only as powerful as his worshippers. Ukatu captures this well when she says to Ukachi, whose services are consulted in the carving of a new mask for a new god:
Ta! A god becomes what man wants it to be. A god must serve the people, not the people serving the god. A god must grow with the face of the people. Our Odenigbo has another face…strange and bitter to us. He derives pleasure from our pains (69).
Before taking on Ubanta, for example, she already handles Nkem, a man who rapes a young girl named Kelechi. Elder Obi, afraid of what Ukatu would do to Ubanta when she discovers that he has killed her brother, Ikedi, reminds the other elders of the incident thus:
You remember what she did to Nkem, the drunk, who raped the young girl, Kelechi? She went to him when he was supremely drunk, beat him to a pulp and tied his private part to a tree trunk then left him stark naked (73).
She does not find out about the murder. Empowered by her courage and the power of the deity she serves; she decides to pay the ultimate price—sacrifice herself—to neutralise Ubanta’s hold on the community. In her self-immolation, we discover that the rumour that Ubanta overpowered Odenigbo is true. Mbachu, a young eyewitness narrates the incident:
Firmly, she held on to the mask as they burnt. Then Ubanta tried to save the mask by pulling it from Ukatu. It was then the mask pulled him in instead. May the gods punish me if I lie! We saw the hands of Odenigbo grab and pull him into the fire as Ukatu continued to laugh as if the fire were a soothing welcome to her body (75).
Beyond Ukatu, Yerima tries to nuance his depiction of courageous and daring women in the play with the character of the princess, Chisom, whose rape of Okezie drives him to suicide. By having Okezie, a man appointed to carry the mask of Odenigbo, raped by Chisom, he dispels the myth that men cannot be raped and that women cannot rape. His project here is not complete though. It becomes problematic when we consider that it takes male accomplices for Chisom to successfully rape Okezie.
See also: Keamogetsi Joseph Molapong: The Director Behind God of Women
Conclusion
While Yerima’s Odenigbo may not be the kind of work one immediately falls in love with upon first read, it grows on its reader once the reader grows into it. In all its political inclinations, it would be wrong to say that the play, as art, crumbles under the burden of a social change tool, for it does not. The artistry is there, to be discovered especially on a second read. In Odenigbo, one sees the artistic use of Igbo proverbs in the play and is reminded of the work of Chinua Achebe’s which largely seems to influence the play.
Ubanta’s path to his self’s and god’s destruction mirrors Ezeulu’s in Arrow of God. He may well be described as an extreme form of, or the evil version of Ezeulu, a priest that “leads a god to ruin himself”. If, on the other hand, we should consider that Odenigbo as a god allows himself to be overpowered by his priest, we may agree with Akuebue that “perhaps a god like [Odenigbo] leads a priest to ruin himself”.
Artwork: her profile…collage and acrylics on board by @Ronexarts 2025
Discussion about this post