Nigeria’s Past, Global Futures: Wole Soyinka’s Kaleidoscope of Structurally Adjusted Lives March 10, 2011

275 Rarig Center, University of Minnesota

Catherine M. Cole, University of California, Berkeley

Wole Soyinka’s play The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope is set in an impoverished neighborhood in Lagos--the thriving urban hub of Nigeria, a place notorious in all of Africa for its density, crime, and corruption. The play provides, as its title promises, a kaleidoscopic view of the city in 1994. Just as a kaleidoscope isolates and fragments detail by refracting images through a sequence of mirrors thereby creating astonishingly beautiful visions out of quotidian and even banal details, so too does Soyinka’s kaleidoscope capture in isolation images of life in urban Lagos in ways that suggest an inner beauty and symmetry that may not otherwise be readily apprehended, and may, in fact, be an optical illusion. Refracted through the mirrors of Soyinka’s language, the gritty realities of Lagosian life become, if not beautiful, at least perceptible in a way that suggests the possibility of some larger, knowable form within a world that seems otherwise chaotically, arbitrarily out of balance. Cole argues that Beatification of Area Boy represents a shift in Soyinka’s oeuvre in which his longtime patron deity Ogun is augmented or even perhaps replaced by a more active embrace of a situational strategy of productive disruption characteristic of the god Eshu. In composite form, Eshu and Ogun together provide a model for navigating the contemporary neoliberalized global economy, an approach that is simultaneously mytho-poetic and practical, impotent and efficacious, ethically bankrupt and morally grounded.
Catherine Cole is a Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010) as well as Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (2001), which received a 2002 Honorable Mention for The Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and was a finalist for the Herskovitz Prize in African Studies. She is editor of the journal Theatre Survey and co-edited the book Africa After Gender? (2007). Her dance theater piece Five Foot Feat, created in collaboration with Christopher Pilafian, toured North America in 2002-2005.

Official Website: http://theatre.umn.edu