Wole Soyinka did not coin the term shotgun writing—“you discharge and disappear”—until the 1970s.¹ He had, however, produced occasional subversive satiric sketches throughout the previous decade, and his unpublished one-act Royal Court entertainment The Invention (1959), a caustic tour de force on universal racism set in a futuristic South Africa, had been written in the broad satiric tradition of the revue. During the deepening crisis of Nigeria's First Republic, as political murders became more frequent and blatant intimidation by power-addicted local chiefs escalated daily, Soyinka opted increasingly for the direct thrust and immediate corrective impact of the revue sketch performed hot on the heels of the event. In The New Republican (1964) and Before the Blackout (1965, published in selection in 1971) the targets were various acts of public cowardice and sycophancy performed before both the new time-serving, opportunistic politicians and Nigeria's traditional rulers, portrayed in the sketches either as lecherous rogues or as corrupt feudal chieftains who had betrayed their people throughout history.

Soyinka, however, acknowledged in his preface to Before the Blackout the familiar paradox of the satirist: the acute topicality of the material made it libelous in print and dangerously open to political reprisal, but once its targets were dead or dethroned and it ceased to be a threat, it also ceased to be topical. Thus those sketches have worn least well in which Soyinka, working on the assumption that wrongs are only correctable if identifiable, attacked the individual villain rather than the villainy and took little trouble to camouflage his identity. Possible afterthoughts on the short life of close-range satire prompted him, in his prefatory comments, to leave loopholes for updating and contemporary adaptation, and it is significant that the most enduring and most frequently revived of these sketches make no specific contemporary references (notably, the perennially popular Childe Internationale, in which a traditional Yoruba father takes in hand his affected been-to wife and his obnoxious daughter, outrageously Americanized by one of the new international schools).² The issues raised by this form of satire served as an example, and also as a warning, for Soyinka's later work in the “shotgun” mold, to which he returned in the midseventies.

The year 1975, which brought Death and the King's Horseman and Soyinka's return to Nigeria after five years in exile, was something of a watershed in his dramatic career. About this time, whether in response to the exigencies of the worsening political situation or to the pressures of criticism leveled at his work by the Nigerian Left, the dramatist chose to strip from his drama its complex ritual and mythological idiom and informing Yoruba world view in favor of the subversive, agitprop satiric revue, written for performance rather than for publication. This more popular form was adopted for the purpose of urgent political communication with a mass audience, and the works written in it, usually published some years after production and in some case not at all, are theatrical amphibians with one foot in the textual world of Western drama and the other in the improvisational comic folk theater, or alawada, of the Yoruba world. Whereas the 1960s revue sketches left occasional loopholes for topical adaptation, this later work was much looser in structure and more openly experimental in approach. “The text of the play was never completely written as it was ever being rewritten and reshaped during rehearsals,” Yemi Ogunbiyi has said of Soyinka's production of Opera Wonyosi (1977). “Nothing was finally arrived at until the play closed. … For him [Soyinka] the text, even his own text, was merely a map with many possible routes.”³ This largely unscripted, hit-and-run kind of street theater, targeting specific political enormities, mounted with minimal publicity, and vanishing before the players could be rounded up by the police of the latest repressive regime, maintained a topical commentary which was best suited to the raw atmosphere of marketplace and lorry park. “The cosy, escapist air of formal theatres tends to breed amnesia much too quickly,” Soyinka had remarked of his earlier sketches of the 1960s.⁴

Over the next decade the links between Soyinka's theatrical and political involvements were to be particularly close, and the “shotgun” satires, running a constant caustic calypso on public affairs, were a frontline force in the responses to Nigeria's succession of political and economic crises and subsequent scandals and outrages: shrinking oil revenues, plunging foreign exchange, the chronic shortage of books and information, and multiplying ministerial embezzlements and political murders. Sometimes pointedly Nigerian in reference, as in Before the Blowout (1978) and Priority Projects (1983), and sometimes concerned with evils on the African continent at large, as in Opera Wonyosi, the revue satires have in their favor the urgent relevance of their political comment and the spontaneity of the theatrical “happening,” with its capacity for surprise, shock, and audience involvement. In their published form, however, they inevitably suffer from a limiting topicality and ephemerality. Performance here has priority, and when the works' virtuoso satiric techniques are allowed to interfere with the dramatic integrity of fully-crafted stage plays, the results are apt to be disappointing: a satiric meanness of characterization, instanced in the mechanical lining up and wheeling on of slight and unsubstantial targets (Requiem for a Futurologist, 1985); and a linguistic flatness and general thinness of texture (A Play of Giants, 1984), the more noticeable after the verbal richness and somber grandeur of Death and the King's Horseman. The invasion of Soyinka's stage drama by the styles and techniques of the opportunistic satiric revue has, I suspect, had much to do with the marked dilution of the substance and quality of his later dramatic writing.

Opera Wonyosi, a ballad opera first performed in 1977 but not published until 1981, is the most substantial and sustained of these satires. With the aid of an eclectic medley of English ballads, Kurt Weill songs, jazz and blues, and the tunes of the 1950s Ibo folk singer Israel Ijemanze, Soyinka transposes the eighteenth-century London of Gay's Beggars' Opera and the Victorian Soho of Brecht's Threepenny Opera to a bidonville of Bangui, capital of the former Central African Republic, on the eve of the imperial coronation of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who was to be overthrown two years later when his involvement in the murder of schoolchildren became widely known. The obscenely decadent extravaganza of Bokassa's coronation in one of Africa's poorest countries, which took place in the same week as Soyinka's Ife production, substitutes for the royal jubilee that forms the background to the action in the Gay and Brecht originals and provides Macheath with his royal reprieve at the climax. (Significantly, in Soyinka's African version, the royal pardon which liberates vicious criminals is not extended to political detainees.) The emperor “Boky,” or “Folksy Boksy,” a crazy caricature of feudal barbarism mixed with servile, sentimental Francophilia, makes one unforgettable appearance in the play, during which he drills and clubs senseless his goon squad before stomping off to “pulp the brains” of the children who have refused to wear his uniforms. The motley collection of rogues and thugs who make up the cast of Opera Wonyosi, however, are Nigerian expatriates. These are the “beggarly” racketeers of Chief Anikura (the Peachum of the original); the venal police chief and security expert “Tiger” Brown, on loan to the emperor; the psychopathic Colonel Moses, military adviser to the same; and the thieves, arsonists, drug peddlers, and murderers gathered around the highway robber Macheath. Lest the audience jump to the conclusion that the Nigerian military regime has exported all of its undesirable elements, however, it is made clear at the outset that the expatriate cliques of the Nigerian quarter are meant to serve as a satiric microcosm of the home country during the oil boom of the seventies. In a program note Soyinka insisted that “the genius of race portrayed in this opera is entirely, indisputably and vibrantly Nigerian.”

Preferring Gay's ebullient indictment of specific historical vices and corruptions to Brecht's portrayal of universal human depravity, Soyinka uses the wisecracking cynicism of the expatriate scoundrels to draw up a ghastly inventory of Nigerian outrages in the years of the oil dollar or “petro-naira”: government-sponsored extortion and assassination; arson and atrocities by a power-drunk soldiery (notoriously, the burning down of Fela Kuti's “Kalakuta Republic”); the public flogging of traffic offenders and execution of felons; murderously punitive industrial conditions in government cement works and levels of state responsibility so low that month-old corpses were left to decompose on public highways; and a general craze for wealth which was epitomized by the wearing of the gaudy wonyosi, the absurdly ragged-looking but fantastically expensive lace that was the rage of the tasteless Nigerian nouveaux riches in the 1970s. (Ogunbiyi points out that, accented in a certain way, opera in Yoruba can mean “the fool buys.”)⁵

Anikura's beggars are, of course, more than what they seem, and their feigned physical deformities are more than distant symbolic allusions to the moral deformation of their country. Among the ragged band are lawyers, professors, doctors, and clergymen whose begging is used by Soyinka as a precise metaphor for the shameless sycophancy to “khaki and brass,” the groveling in military gutters by which the professional classes won preferment and promotion during the years of “nairomania” (“Khaki is a man's best friend,” runs the refrain of one song). Sycophancy, backed up by coercion, is the way to a slice of the national cake. In the words of the garrulous Dee-Jay, who replaces Gay's beggarly poet and Brecht's Moritatensänger, “That's what the whole nation is doing—begging for a slice of the action. … Here the beggars say, ‘Give me a slice of action, or—give me a slice off your throat.’”⁶ But Soyinka literalizes his metaphors, and labors them somewhat, by having his mendicant professionals turn professional mendicants. Professor Bamgbapo, who has “bagged” the chairmanships of a number of industrial corporations as well as his university chair by “sucking up to the army boys” (“To beg is to bag,” runs the beggars' anthem), has even come to Anikura for “a refresher course” in the form of fieldwork with full-time beggars! (65) Thus the street beggars become synonymous with fawning bureaucrats, and the small crooks actually turn into big ones before our eyes. Anikura, the brain behind the beggars' protection racket (a “beneficent society for the relief of burdened consciences”), is “chairman of highly successful groups of companies,” while Polly plays the stock market and, if we can believe it, amalgamates Macheath enterprises with a multinational corporation: “Let's go legitimate like the bigger crooks” (46, 62, 66). However, though the links between legal business practice and crime, and between capitalism and gangsterdom, are certainly present, Soyinka's play is not the assault on capitalism which Brecht meant his to be; instead it is essentially a satire on power. The culprit is the oil-produced wealth that promoted power and the target the criminal lengths to which people were prepared to go to get the money that would buy them power.

Opera Wonyosi is devastating, merciless satire, and the government's prompt intervention to prevent a Lagos production was proof that the play had struck powerfully home. There are odd moments of pure hilarity (Anikura's reference to the American habit of “pleading the Fifth Commandment”), and the dialogue crackles with verbal play (“While Mackie and Brown were ripping the insides of foes” in the civil war, the notorious corpse-stripping “attack traders” were “ripping off both sides”), but the sugar coating on the bitter satiric pill is usually very thin (71, 43). Sometimes the tone is brash, swaggering cynicism in the Brechtian mode, as in Macheath's remark that the stupidity in a Nigerian can be only temporary or feigned because “the smell of money endows the dumbest Nigerian with instant intelligence,” or Anikura's comment that fraud by one's fellow countrymen is an infallible alibi for destitution, since everyone knows “that any Nigerian will rob his starving grandmother and push her in the swamp” (54, 4). The latter threatens to have an army of real beggars march on coronation day, not to embarrass tyranny with poverty but to blackmail it into arresting his personal enemy Macheath. At other times the satire is pure vitriolic rage, as in the Bangui equivalent of the Bar Beach Show at Mackie's execution, where schoolchildren are given a holiday to watch the spectacle on television and a deathbed patient from the hospital falls over his wheelchair in righteous bloodlust for a ringside seat and promptly bursts into a gruesome parody of Donald Swann's “Hippopotamus Song”: “Blood, blood, glorious blood / Nothing quite like it for offering to God / Banish the gallows / So I can wallow / In the crimson juice of the criminal sod!” (78). Reality here seems always one step ahead of satiric invention, and the unspeakable needs little enhancement from the writer to provoke a sense of outrage.

The terrorizing of civilian populations by megalomaniacal military buffoons and the squalid compliance of the professional classes, cowed by a mendicant mentality, were the painful Nigerian and African realities of the 1970s, and satire targeted at them walks the fine edge between the real and the surreal. Soyinka stated in the playbill to the 1977 Ife production that “the characters in this opera are either strangers or fictitious, for Nigeria is stranger than fiction, and any resemblance to any Nigerian, living or dead, is purely accidental, unintentional and instructive.”⁷ The repellent historical originals of characters like Boky, more grotesque than any invention, have a way of parodying themselves, but even in the case of the more generalized Nigerian material the preposterous reality keeps breaking through at unexpected moments to dissolve the conventional safe divisions between the stage world and the “real” world. The very closeness of these two worlds made possible a number of surprise effects in performance: Soyinka had the “attack trade” women descend into the audience at the interval to sell their grisly wares, and a coffin, ostensibly containing the real corpse scooped from the roadside the previous day by Tai Solarin, was carried by pallbearers into the auditorium, thus implicating everyone in willful blindness to the daily public obscenity. In one performance the shock tactics of the Theater of the Real were even turned against his own actors: on Soyinka's secret instructions, his orchestra halted the opening number so that Professor Bamgbapo (played by a real-life academic) could be dragged from the chorus and, in front of a university audience, thrashed by a figure looking very much like a real-life Nigerian army officer.

Time has, inevitably, taken the sting from the satire in these topical allusions, which call for constant updating, but Soyinka has been equal to the task. One year on he reassembled his beggarly crew on Nigerian soil to satirize political opportunism at the lifting of the ban on political activities and a contemporaneous national wave of car thefts: in the two sketches of Before the Blowout, “Home to Roost” and “Big Game Safari,” Chief Anikura (now Onikura) returns home to pursue the career of a popular philanthropic politician and smuggles in new and stolen cars to sell at inflated prices or use in his electoral campaign (the cars are the “big game,” hidden in the jungle and hunted down with metal detectors). In a 1983 revival of the opera itself Soyinka dispensed with Colonel Moses altogether, replacing him with a subtle and slippery academic advisor more suited to the civilian government of the Second Republic. This ability to improvise modifications around basic structures of dialogue, song, and mime to suit changing venues and historical contexts is, along with the amount of audience participation, in the best traditions of the traveling mask theater, the alarinjo, which name originated, appropriately, as a term of abuse referring to “rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.”⁸

The published text of such works can give only slight indication of their effectiveness in performance, but few critics would single out Opera Wonyosi as Soyinka's best work. The musical score has not been widely commended, and even within the loose and highly stylized form of the Brechtian play-with-songs, which attempts no naturalistic blend of lyric and action, the plot creaks with some rather obvious devices. Chief among these is Macheath's invalidation of Anikura's charge against him by having the begging fraternity declared a secret society of the kind banned by the Nigerian military regime: the point is simply to set up the satiric tour de force of the beggar-lawyer Alatako, who succeeds in proving that the government is itself a conspiratorial secret society, a cartel created for mass exploitation and terrorization, implemented always by “unknown soldiers.” The extreme length of Wonyosi draws attention to its episodic, patchwork structure—neither a full-length play nor a series of revue sketches—and the mechanical tying of the action back to the Gay and Brecht originals proves irksome at times. Mackie's sexual intrigues and betrayals are poorly integrated into the anti-Nigerian satire, and, though Macheath's largely allegorical connection with big business hints cynically at the “moral” of the big fish going free, this is but a faint gesture toward exploding the light opera's conventional happy ending. In accordance with the latter, he turns out to be a lovable rogue whom we feel, in some way, deserves to cheat his fate—an impression quite at odds with that conveyed by the local satire that he is a vicious and evil force rotting society from top to bottom. Macheath, in this version as in the Gay and Brecht models, is a rather artificial villain, something of a satiric dead end, and Soyinka's use of the character has a free rein only when he departs from his originals or takes such liberties with them as to make them say something entirely new.

In his foreword to the play Soyinka envisages his task as “the turning up of the maggot-infested underside of the compost heap” as “a prerequisite of the land's transformation” (iv), and he has said elsewhere that if satire is to have any reformist or revolutionary purpose, the satirist must first arouse “a certain nausea towards a particular situation, to arouse them [people] at all to accept a positive alternative when it is offered to them.”⁹ For Soyinka, the satirist appears to be a kind of purifying carrier who, through ridicule and disgust, clears away the junk of the existing order to make possible the construction of an alternative one; it is the role of another—the reformer—to discover that alternative. He does not take the negative view of satire as a social safety valve, having merely therapeutic or cathartic value, but neither does he see it as offering solutions. Opera Wonyosi was criticized, somewhat unfairly, by the Nigerian Left for its failure “to lay bare unambiguously the causal historical and socio-economic network of society” and for its lack of “a solid class perspective.”¹⁰ Soyinka has replied to these critics that the satirist's business is not exposition but exposure—in this case of the “decadent, rotted underbelly of a society that has lost its direction” (iii)—and that programs of reform and revolutionary alternatives are the province of the social analyst and ideologist, to whose roles the writer's own distinctive vocation is merely complementary (ii-iii).

Still, there are varying depths and densities of exposure, and if there is in Wonyosi surprisingly little penetration, for such a long play, of the forces underlying the crimes and corruptions passingly referred to, then the fault is not that exposure is unaccompanied by analysis but that too much is being exposed for anything to be focused very clearly. In the last third of the play the topical references to guilty parties crowd too thick and fast into the text—some speeches are mere lists of suppressed riots, arson, and lootings—and the result is satiric overkill. The opera takes on too many issues, is too thinly all-embracing, and the overall effect is a diffusion of intensity, a kind of satiric tear-gassing instead of a few carefully aimed bullets, more smoke than shot.

Soyinka has always been more of a crusader than a revolutionary, campaigning for selected causes rather than for the total transformation of society, and in the late seventies he advanced some of these causes by directing the Oyo State Road Safety Corps, bombarding the press with letters on police harassment, censorship, and political corruption, and, in 1980, affiliating himself with the short-lived People's Redemption Party. At the launching of his autobiography Aké in 1981 he protested that his “faith in an inevitable revolution” had nothing to do with his own actions but was based squarely in the depredations of the Shagari government.¹¹ Nevertheless, Soyinka's use of his Guerilla Theater Unit to mobilize opinion against the Shagari government and his attempts during the years of the Second Republic (1979-83) to reach a wider audience by experimenting with the more popular mediums of street theater, Gramophone records, and film have all the makings of revolutionary art. Rice Unlimited (1981), in which the actors piled sacks marked “rice” in front of a police-guarded House of Assembly, attacked the running down of food production during the years of oil mania and the subsequent government racketeering in the sale and resale of imported rice, which made staple foodstuffs unavailable or unaffordable for most of the population. Another unpublished collection of sketches, Priority Projects (1983), provocatively performed under the nose of Shagari's personal security guards during a presidential visit to the University of Ife, targeted abortive agricultural and building schemes designed to enrich a ruling party in open connivance with business tycoons, police commissioners, and traditional chiefs. In these sketches the nation which the civil war was fought to keep united is seen as really being two countries: “Mr Country Hide and his brother Seek.” The big political brother hides millions of naira, pouring them down bottomless pits of extravagance and corruption (the futile digging and filling in of holes is a prevailing image) while his brother on the street searches in vain for some visible return from the reckless spending. Some of the songs from Priority Projects appear on Soyinka's hit record Unlimited Liability Company (1983). The scandals of the anarchic Shagari administration—illegal currency exportation, private jets and helicopters, criminals appointed to company directorships, arson and massacre, deportation of political opponents, municipal breakdowns resulting in part-time electricity and mountains of uncollected refuse—are mercilessly exposed in their sharp, instantly graspable pidgin lyrics: “You tief one kobo, dey put you in prison / You tief ten million, na patriotism.”¹²

This was candidly experimental theater, rehearsing and performing in the public view on street corners, in markets, and in open spaces on university campuses and casually inviting audience participation. It was also dangerously confrontational in its use of guerrilla tactics to deliver bold and brave satire, and Soyinka himself came under some pressure over his record, which quickly made him a household name across the country (government action was taken against radio and television stations which played it). The writer's last word on the Shagari government was the film Blues for a Prodigal (Ewuro Productions, 1984), about the political recruitment of scientists as demolition experts to blow up the opposition. Filming commenced in the dying days of the now thoroughly rotten republic but still had to be shot secretly, with minimal scripting and several switches of location to evade the authorities, and to be processed abroad. “We utilized the guerilla tactics of the travelling theatre,” Soyinka said in a recent interview.¹³ Ironically, the Lagos print of the film was immediately impounded by the security forces of the new military regime, which thus identified itself with the repressions of its civilian predecessor.

Perhaps as a result of overactivity in revue work and in other mediums, Soyinka published only two full-length dramatic works in the eighties, both, predictably, in the “shotgun” mold. Returning, in Requiem for a Futurologist,¹⁴ to the theme of religious charlatanism explored in the two earlier Jero plays, he pokes fun at the astrologists and parapsychologists who came to exercise considerable influence over public and political life during the Shagari years (the main target was one of Shagari's toadies, the powerful Dr. Godspower Oyewole). The specific model for the play, fully acknowledged by Soyinka in the introductory material, is Swift's satiric prediction and later announcement, in The Bickerstaff Letters, of the death of the astrologer John Partridge, who then had great difficulty convincing people that he was still alive. In Soyinka's vision the rogue-futurologist, the Reverend Dr. Godspeak Igbehodan, is caught in the trap of his more cunning protégé Eleazor Hosannah, who, with a view to superseding his master, predicts his death during a television program. As Eleazor has the Godspeak pedigree, everyone instantly believes the prophecy, and when he publishes Godspeak's obituary, an impatient mob of the faithful lays siege to the master's house, determined to pay their last respects and refusing to be swayed in their resolve by any amount of live appearances.

Eleazor, the archmanipulator and master of disguise, tricks his way back into Godspeak's employment under the semblance of the metaphysician Dr. Semuwe, in which guise he causes the hapless Godspeak to doubt the reality of his own existence and to entertain the possibility that he may, after all, be dead. In this cause Eleazor even bribes the local egungun to feign recognition of a fellow spirit in Godspeak's figure at the window (no religion is sacred in this play). As the furious mob prepares to storm the house, the bewildered master reluctantly agrees to play dead and lie in state, and the play ends with Semuwe revealing that “everything is under control,” becoming Eleazor again and proclaiming himself the reincarnated Nostradamus, a figure who is the source of much comic disquisition in the course of the play.

There is a limited amount of political satire in Requiem in the form of parallels between religious and political opportunism. Regimes, like the prophets they refer to and rely upon, promise what they fail to deliver, and cling to power long after their authority has outrun its legitimacy. It was no accident that in the 1985 published version Godspeak's demise is predicted for New Year's Eve 1983, the date of Shagari's downfall. Though the play was written for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the University of Ife, Soyinka withdrew it because even its limited political content had drawn the threat of government interference and censorship, and when the play went on a tour of the university campuses, he made a point of opening each performance with a procession of political parties and different religious faiths. There are also a few sideswipes at favorite local abominations, such as “the highly original driving habits” that provide a roaring trade for the play's undertaker, and some satire at the expense of the death industry itself, notably the Ghanaian “Master Carpenter” who allows his clients' vulgar fantasies of wealth and status to carry over into the grave in the form of designer coffins shaped like their Cadillacs and television sets. The bulk of the satire, however, is reserved for the human gullibility that invests superstitious faith in the pseudoscience of charlatans. Because of their automatic and absolute belief in astrological predictions, the prophet's followers, who know a walking corpse when they see one, are unable to accept the idea that Eleazor has merely pretended that Godspeak is dead: they therefore believe that the master is really dead and pretending to be alive. Thus is Godspeak boxed, farcically, into a corner from which every protest that he is alive is taken to be one more proof that he is dead. Underlying the verbal and visual humor of this situation, and the fantastically credulous newspaper cuttings cited in the introductory paraphernalia, there is the disturbing picture of a society caught in a spiritual malaise, thirsting after illusion and virtually begging to be deceived. (The play, with its multiple disguises and costume changes, is itself a kind of conjuring trick, depicting a world where all is trickery.) Still, whatever its darker implications, Requiem is essentially lighthearted and acutely local satiric comedy, disappointingly slight as a stage play (it evolved out of a much shorter radio play) and with the elaborate joke on the life-death inversion carried on perhaps a little too long. If Requiem is really, as Soyinka has bemusingly claimed, part of a “trilogy of transition,” following The Road and Death and the King's Horseman, then it relates to these two towering achievements as the satyr play related to the tragedy in the Greek festival: as satiric postscript and light counterweight.

A Play of Giants, written for a fully equipped theater and with at least one eye on international audiences, is more substantial fare and represents the author's political satire at its most ferocious. Soyinka gathers under the roof of the Bugaran (meaning Ugandan) embassy in New York, and under the transparent anagrams “Kamini,” “Kasco,” “Gunema,” and “Tuboum,” a gruesome quartet of real-life African dictators: Amin, Bokassa, Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, and Mobutu of the Congo. In the first part of the play, while ostensibly sitting for a sculpture for a Madame Tussaud's exhibition, these strutting, gibbering psychopaths explain with sadistic relish how their appetites for power are satisfied, their people terrorized, and their barbaric despotisms maintained: by voodoo (Gunema), cannibalism (Tuboum), and an imperium of “pure power” (Kasco). Kamini, who has no talent for analysis, does not have to speak of power: he is power, in its most fearsome and ridiculous embodiment, and never ceases to exercise it.

The play is a succession of Kamini's psychopathic explosions, which, like those of the real Amin, arise from willful misconceptions, the paranoid twisting of trivial offenses, and pure, groundless delusions, such as his bizarre notion that the Tussaud statuettes are really life-size statues intended for the United Nations Building across the road from the embassy. When the Chairman of the Bugara Bank informs him of the World Bank's refusal of further loans and explains that he cannot print any more banknotes because the national currency is worth no more than toilet paper, Kamini has his head flushed repeatedly in the toilet bowl; and when the British sculptor, revealing the true destination of his work, utters the unguarded aside that its subject properly belongs in the Chamber of Horrors, Kamini has him beaten up and maimed. The sculptor represents symbolically the obsolete, lame Western view of Amin—that he was not a dangerous threat but a circus freak whose savagery could be contained like a waxworks horror in a museum—and it is ironically apt that when the sculptor next appears, he is a museum piece, gagged and “mummified” in bandages from head to foot.

Kamini's anxiety complexes are not entirely gratuitous, however, for defections of Bugaran diplomats are constantly reported and the mounting crises culminate in the news of a coup in his absence. Instantly assuming that the coup has been engineered by the superpowers, Kamini reacts by taking hostage a group of visiting Russian and American delegates and threatening to unleash rockets and grenades from his embassy arsenal upon the United Nations Building unless an international force is sent to Bugara to crush the uprising. In the fantastic apocalyptic finale the rockets go off and the last light fades on the sculptor, quietly working away at what is now a living chamber of horrors. Kamini, who in Soyinka's prefatory words “would rather preside over a necropolis than not preside at all,”¹⁵ turns his embassy into a fortress and then into a tomb, a pyramidal monument to his own barbaric excesses and the sycophantic self-interest of the West. The final sculpted work is, in fact, Soyinka's play, which catches in their frozen manic gestures the most monstrous manifestations of power ever spawned by the African continent.

Soyinka was one of the first to see through Amin's buffoonery, and from 1975 onward he waged a determined campaign in the African press against the dictator's reign of terror, lambasting Western and African governments and intellectuals who either supported Amin or cultivated a convenient deafness to the horror stories that were emerging from Uganda. In the play the latter forces are represented by the Scandinavian journalist Gudrun, mindlessly devoted to the dictator out of some romantically twisted concept of racial purity, and by the black American academic Professor Batey, who, out of misplaced loyalty to notions of black brotherhood and pan-Africanism, holds up to the black peoples of the world a mass murderer as a model for emulation. Both play and preface make clear that Kamini and his cronies, like their historical counterparts, are originally the postcolonial products of the Western superpowers. Kasco is a Gaullist, Gunema a Franco-worshiper, and Tuboum a Belgian puppet given to fake Africanization schemes. Kamini is placed in power by the British, financed by the Americans, armed by the Russians (until they refuse him an atom bomb to drop on his socialist neighbor), eulogized by the Western press which had unseated his predecessor, and finally deserted by all of them when support for insane African dictators is no longer in their interest. A Play of Giants is a surreal fantasia of international poetic justice in which Western support systems catastrophically backfire and the monster runs out of his maker's control: the Russian-supplied weapons are now trained on their own delegations, and the horror comes home to roost in the American sponsor's own back yard.

“I'd rather kill them, but I acknowledge my impotence,” Soyinka said of his power-grotesques in an interview at the time of the play's New York production. “All I can do is make fun of them.”¹⁶ It is, inevitably, a horrific kind of fun, and they are the more terrifying precisely because their historical originals were once thought to be merely ridiculous comic figures. Soyinka commented in the same 1984 interview that the work was not intended to be “a realistic play,” that his “giants” are artificial, composite constructs, endowed with more intelligence, introspection, and eloquence than their originals could muster. Nevertheless, many of their mouthings are reportage material based on original speeches and press statements, and the fantastic virtuoso satirizing of Amin, enough to burst the bounds of any “well-made play,” infuses the historical figure's own devilish, manic hysteria into the mood of the play. Soyinka claimed in the interview that the entire rogues' gallery of A Play of Giants are “excellent theatrical personalities.”¹⁷

History plus Burlesque does not quite equal Drama, however, and if, as Soyinka remarked, Amin was “the supreme actor,” he was a rather obvious, unsubtle one, best suited to broad farce and the 1970s television sketches which made him the constant butt of their satire. The theaters of politics and art are very different. If dramatic effigies of Hitler and Mussolini were put on stage and their mouths stuffed with their speeches and press releases, they would not be much more interesting or authentic as dramatic creations than Soyinka's gruesome foursome. There are odd quirky moments when one of them may spring to life, as in Gunema's chilling, shocking anecdote about his attempt to “taste” the distilled elixir of power by sleeping with the wife of a condemned man and then having them both garrotted. For the rest, they are the vaudeville freaks anticipated by Soyinka's opening circus flourish: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we present … a parade of miracle men … Giants, Dwarfs, Zombies, the Incredible Anthropophogai, the Original Genus Survivanticus (alive and well in defiance of all scientific explanations)” (PG [A Play of Giants], x). Cartoon puppets that they are, they burble nonsense and twitch at the behest of every passing sadistic whim and crack of the satiric whip, and the fact that their real-life models were much the same does not make them theatrically viable. Though having just enough distance from contemporary history to work as convincing satiric creations, they are too close to it to succeed as autonomous dramatic ones. The result is that A Play of Giants, like so much politically engaged art, is dramatically unengaging.

It is also curiously unpenetrating. In the interview Soyinka expressed the hope that the play would “raise certain intellectual and philosophical questions about power,”¹⁸ and the text tosses a few ideas about. It is suggested that power calls to power, that “vicarious power responds obsequiously to the real thing,” and that the “conspiratorial craving for the phenomenon of ‘success’ … cuts across all human occupations,” which would explain the professor's admiration of the idiot-tyrant (vi-vii). There is also a hint that the African dictator's power mania is the pathological product of colonialism's long suppression of traditional male authority and the continued taunting of African manhood in the postcolonial world (the Russian diplomat describes Kamini as an “overgrown child”). These suggestions, however, are more in the preface than in the play, which is concerned to deride and debunk, not to analyze. A Play of Giants is unflaggingly savage burlesque, but it does not add a great deal to the knowledge of the nature of dictatorship already gleaned from Soyinka's earlier Kongi's Harvest (1965) or from Opera Wonyosi, and it retains all the usual limitations of its medium. Its claustrophobic set and nervous constricted laughter are, of all these later satires, at the furthest cry from the expansive metaphysical universe of the dramatist's middle period, and for the first time in a Soyinka play there is no music, dance, or mime, indeed not a hint of the visual and aural spectacle of festival theater.

In the late seventies and eighties satire came to constitute Soyinka's characteristic response to Nigeria's and Africa's worsening political crises, and as the bitter-satiric element of his dramatic writing deepened, there was a thinning out of its once rich texture which has not, to date, been repaired. It is perhaps unreasonable at the present time to hope that, after more than a decade's work in this vein, he will return to subjects which, though not necessarily more worthwhile, at least have a greater dramatic viability.

Notes

1. James Gibbs, “Soyinka in Zimbabwe: A Question and Answer Session,” Literary Half-Yearly, 28:2 (1987), p. 63.

2. This sketch was originally published in Soyinka's Before the Blackout, Ibadan, Orisun Acting Editions, 1971. It is now available separately as Childe Internationale, Ibadan, Fountain Publications, 1987.

3. Yemi Ogunbiyi, “A Study of Soyinka's Opera Wonyosi,” Nigeria Magazine, 128-29 (1979), p. 13.

4. Soyinka, preface to Before the Blackout, p. 4.

5. Ogunbiyi, p. 3.

6. Wole Soyinka, Opera Wonyosi, London, Rex Collings, 1981, p. 1. Further page references are given parenthetically in the text, using the abbreviation OW where needed for clarity. For a review, see WLT 55:4 (Autumn 1981), p. 718.

7. Quoted in Bernth Lindfors, “Begging Questions in Wole Soyinka's Opera Wonyosi,” Ariel, 12:3 (1981), p. 31.

8. Joel Adedeji, “‘Alarinjo’: The Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre,” in Theatre in Africa, Oyin Ogunba and Abiole Irele, eds., Ibadan, Ibadan University Press, 1978, p. 34.

9. Wole Soyinka, “Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal,” in In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington, Karen L. Morell, ed., Seattle, Institute of Comparative & Foreign Area Studies/University of Washington, 1975, p. 127.

10. Ogunbiyi, p. 12; Bidun Jeyifo, “Drama and the Social Order: Two Reviews,” Positive Review (Ile-Ife), 1 (1977), p. 22.

11. Quoted in James Gibbs, “Tear the Painted Masks, Join the Poison Stains: A Preliminary Study of Wole Soyinka's Writings for the Nigerian Press,” Research in African Literatures, 14:1 (1983), p. 40.

12. Unlimited Liability Company, featuring Tunji Oyelana and His Benders with music and lyrics by Wole Soyinka, Ewuro Productions, EWP 001, side 2.

13. Wole Soyinka, interview with Jeremy Harding, New Statesman, 27 February 1987, p. 22.

14. Wole Soyinka, Requiem for a Futurologist, London, Rex Collings, 1985.

15. Wole Soyinka, A Play of Giants, London, Methuen, 1984, p. vii. Further page references are given parenthetically in the text, using the abbreviation PG where needed for clarity.

16. Art Borreca, “‘Idi Amin Was the Supreme Actor’: An Interview with Wole Soyinka,” Theater, 16:2 (1985), p. 32.

17. Ibid., p. 34.

18. Ibid., p. 36.