Politics and Festival in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest
by – Dr M Vishnupriya, Vol.II, Issue.XXIII, December 2016
Introduction to the Author:
Dr M Vishnupriya M.A. (S V University), PhD (SK University), PGDTE (CIEFL Hyderabad) is currently working as an assistant professor of English at MITS, Madanapalli, Andhra Pradesh. She has ten years of teaching experience in this field and is very much interested in research.
Politics and Festival in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest
Abstract:
Nigerians are very zealous about their community festivals. The New Yam Festival is very popular in all towns and villages in Eastern Nigeria. The festival has a different history behind it in different places. The Festival of New Yam, which is celebrated after the harvesting of the crops, in order to give thanks to the god of agriculture and to ask for new blessings for the coming year. Invitations are sent out to friends and relatives from neighboring villages about a week before. This festival and many others are recorded by African writers, who attach great importance to them. Kongi’s harvest grew out of Soyinka’s concern with human rights and political liberties out of his conviction that the role of political activist was an important and an honorable one, out of his perception of political developments on the continent of Africa and out of his anxiety to root his theatre in the idioms of African Festival performances.
Key words: New yam, festival, celebration, politics, tradition.
Soyinka’s Kongi’s harvest was inspired entirely by a sentence which (he) once heard an African leader pronounce ‘I want him back alive, if possible’1. In the East, every god or goodness has a feast day in the year on which, early in the morning, the Osu (that is, cult slaves) receive presents on their behalf. In Onitsha, it is said that the early settlers there crossed the Niger the Benin. They comprised a family of nine. They had no food and so they were very happy when they arrived at Onitsha and saw wild yams there. They were afraid to taste them, because they thought they might be poisonous. However, forced by famine to explore every possible source of food, the people decided to eat the yam. Precautions were taken to avert possible harmful effects. The youngest member of the group was asked to eat the yam first. Later they became bold enough to eat the yam in various forms; each attempt was accompanied by prayers, incantations and offerings to the gods and ancestral spirits to make them allies in the act. No evil befell them. Yam thus became a solution to their problem and a cherished source of food. This family then decided to settle at Onitsha to cultivate yams instead of allowing them to grow wild. They also decided to celebrate a feast every year in memory of the discovery of the wild yams.
This eventually led to the feast. The ritual ceremony starts in the morning when the elders of the villages collect all their farming tools and put them in front of the appropriate shrines. They kill goats or hens in front of them and sprinkle the blood on the tools and the shrines as their share of the sacrifice. After cooking the meat and pounding the New Yam, they give portions to the shrines. When the sun is overhead the invited guests begin to arrive. If a bride and bridegroom are celebrating the feast with their in –laws, they take wine to present to them. The in-laws feed them on food and take wine to present to them. The in-laws feed them on food and palm wine and also give them pounded yam to take home and share among their well-wishers. All the invited guests eat a great deal. In the evening people go to the village squares where there is a gathering with masquerades. Music is supplied by the local drummers to which everybody in their best clothes dances. On this and other big occasions, the chiefs wear multi-colored robes with coral beads and headwear studded with tiny bells, small mirrors and beautiful ostrich features. Young girls paint themselves with red cam wood powder and draw delicate patterns in indigo all over their bodies. They wear rows of beads round their waists, and they plait their hair and stick decorative, carved ivory pins into it. This is done to attract young men. When everybody has had a good time they all go home.
This festival is celebrated in a slightly different form among the Yoruba. The ritual ceremony in the morning is not followed by dancing in the evening. Instead the women in their different age groups; accompanied by local drummers, dance to a central spot where a bigger shrine has been erected for the celebration. They are dressed in their best clothes and carry pounded yam and soup in white calabashes to the shrine. Each group deposits its present of pounded yam and dances back home.
They are also much concerned with describing and emphasizing the part played by chiefs and different age groups in the political, social and economic organization of a tribal society. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe gives an idea of the heavy responsibility which a title imposes on the holder and how the religious beliefs of the people affect their actions and attitudes, for instance in the wrestling match in the village square. The background of Achebe’s writing is the Ibo way of life. The same thing is true, though to a lesser extent, of other Eastern Nigerian writers, such as Onuora Nzekwu, Nkem Nwankwo, Gabriel Okara and J. P. Clark. Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, Duro Ladipo, Hubert Ogunde and the writers and artists of Western Nigerian origin operate against a Yoruba background which is different, and they describe the customs and festivals popular in communities of that area.
In African festival theatre the narrative performances is often buried and digging it up does not necessarily enrich the experience of participants. The play is set in the imaginary African state of Isma during the presentations for, celebration and aftermath of a new yam festival. The ruler of Isma, Kongi is a repressive, ambitious autocrat who is assisted by a ubiquitous Organizing secretary, advised by a fraternity of largely sycophantic Aweris and enthusiastically supported by a brutal carpenters’ Brigade. He has put some of his most powerful opponents, including Oba Dandola, into detention, but he has not, as the opening sequence ‘Hemlock’ makes clear, quarreled the Oba’s ebullient and independent opposition. Kongi’s rule is also challenged by his ex-mistress, the mysterious and beautiful Segi, by her female supporters and by Daodu, Danlola’s much-traveled nephew and heir who is the leader of a successful farming co-operative. The dictator wants to usurp Danlola’s position; specifically, he wants to receive the new yam from the Oba’s hands at the new yam festival and by eating part of it, to present himself to the people as their protector and spiritual leader. Danlola is understandably unwilling to abdicate his religious functions by co-operating in this image-making exercise, but Segi, and Daodu are anxious that he should at least pretend to co-operate in order to draw Kongi to the public celebration of the new yam festival. There they plan to have him assassinated just as the new yam is presented to him, just when he is about to commit an outrageous blasphemy.
In the course of the play, plans are discussed and move forward. Danlola is persuaded to accede to Kongi’s request and Kongi agrees to release some political prisoners. A detail of the assassination plot is changed slightly when Segi’s father escapes from detention and takes on the role of marksman. But before he can kill Kongi, he is himself shot. In an ‘improvised’ dénouement to part Two, Segi dances in accompanied by her women supporters and presents Kongi with her father’s severed head. This is followed by ‘Hangover’ from which it seems that, despite the shock which the system has received, Kongi remains in control.
The plot that makes an impact on all is the yam festival. The play builds up to that celebration; much of the dialogue is about the preparation for it and the most spectacular scene is the festival itself-or an improvisation based on it. Soyinka has found an idiom for this piece in the celebration of the new yam festival, the image and the new yam and the songs which celebrate it provide a cultural and dramatic context for the working out of his ideas. The festival provides an excision when the paranoid Kongi is out in the open and can be hit by an assassin’s bullet. To strike him down at a moment when he is violating a taboo is a refinement which will win friends for the plotters. The play, inevitably contains a great deal more than the festival and when this extra material is studied it reveals that Soyinka has employed techniques which have become familiar from the examination of previous plays; these include careful attention to comparison and contrast but not, in this instance, shifts into the past.
The opening scene ‘Hemlock’ shows Danlola in detention; the leader under the old dispensation has been placed behind the barbed wire by the new the khaki uniforms and detention camp regulation speak volumes about Kongi’s regime and by showing us these things Soyinka saves hundreds of words. The Oba’s poetic, musical, richly dressed retinue, vivacious despite Danlolas captivity, places before the audience an image of the old order in durance vile’. Here, these is a moment of particular tension when in the middle of the praise song for Danlola, the superintendent ‘seizes the lead drummer by the wrist and everything stops’. After a pause and in the ‘complete silence’ which follows, Danlola asks with great deliberation, ‘You stopped the royal drums?” The interruption of the ceremonies of Oba is not, Danlola makes do not clear, the first, nor will it be the last. Indeed, it looks back to the imprisoning of Danlola and anticipates both the bursting of Danlola’s drum by Daodu and the interruption of the new yam festival.
Danlola is, it is apparent not completely at the superintendent’s mercy, and in order to show this he ‘makes a notion as if he means to prostrate himself’ before the slave in khaki. The superintendent is sufficiently affected by the attitudes of the community in which he was reared to beg the Oba not to reverse the appointed order by prostrating before him. The recognition of the honor due to Danlola by the superintendent is contrasted in the scenes which follow with the over-wearing ambition of Kongi, who thanks it right and proper that the Oba should hand the new yam to him. The enormity of this demand is made clear by the exchanges and gestures in ‘hemlock’ between Danlola and the superintendent even if we come to the play ignorant of the respect due to Yoruba Obas this scene provides information about expected attitudes and behavior.
In part one of the play the little action that there is moves forward slowly as the audience’s attention is switched back and forth between Kongi’s mountain retreat and Segi’s night club. The stage direction indicates that both sets “are present on different parts of the stage and are brought into play in turn by lights”, an arrangement which is ideal for making contrasts. In the mountain retreat, against the background of a chant in honour of Kongi, the Aweris bicker and squabble as they endeavour to manufacture an image for the dictator. There are topical allusions, and through the fifth Aweri whose independence and spirit separate him from the others in the retreat, the atmosphere is sterile, the jargon barren, the image making synthetic; it is perfectly appropriate that the Aweris should be starved for it is clear they are working for a negative, life-denying force.
During the brief scene in the retreat which closes the first part, Kongi, frantic at the news that some detainees have escaped, uses almost the very words which ‘triggered’ the play; ‘I want him back-alive if possible ….’And then, as a comment on his condition, he falls into an epileptic fit. In this instance, as in many others, Soyinka uses action to speak louder – and more clearly-than words.
Kongi and his drab advisors in their austere retreat are sharply contrasted with Danlola and the vivacity with which Danlola’s supported enliven the detention camp. In part one, Soyinka establishes Segi’s club as the third point in the political, social and emotional landscape of Ismaland. The organizing secretary, whom Kongi has made responsible for the arrangements concerning the new yam festival, is nervous and out of place in the night club brisk and businesslike, he brings the chill of the Aweri’s retreat into the life-assertive club, which belongs to Segi, a woman, a femme fatale’, an inspiration and an enigma. The lyrics of a song in his honour establish the mystery of the lady.
“The being of Segi
Swirls the night
In potions round my head”.
Segi is one of a live of ‘super women’ in Soyinka’s plays which stretches back to Rola /Madame Tortoise and even to Sidi, all’ right cannibals of female species’ she are not a ‘round’ character but she fulfils an important dramatic function; she establishes that the female principle supports the opposition to dictatorship and on occasion, leads it.
The second part of the play begins as the play itself had begun, with Danlola in fine form. The excitement builds up through singing, dancing and the tension apparent in leading characters. Daodu delivers a speech in which he denounces Kongi as a ‘messiah of pain and identifies himself as a messiah of abundance joy and life’. Danlola offers the new yam to Kongi, but as the autocrat places his hand over it in benediction, there is a burst of gun fire. But it is not Kongi who is hit-it emerges that Segi’s father, the substitute assassin has been killed. Segi refuses to give way to grief and saying she is ‘tired of being as the mouse in (Kongi’s) cat-and-mouse game’, sets off to improvise a fitting denouement to the festival. Kongi makes his speed; he exhorts, declaims, reviles, cajoles, damns, curses, vilifies, excommunicates, execrates, but the sound of revelry rises and drowns his words.
“Kongi: the spirit of harvest has smitten the enemies of Kongi. The justice of earth has prevailed over traitors and conspirators. There is divine blessing on the second five-year development plan. The spirit of resurgence is cleansed in the blood of he nation’s enemies, my enemies, the enemies of our collective spirit, the spirit of planting, the spirit of harvest, the spirit of inheritable history and victory, all of which I am. Kongi is very Ismite, and Ismite . . . . (Shoots out a clenched fist). (CPII 29-30)
He is reduced to a gesticulating, sweating figure, foaming in the background, possessed by a spirit of hate. When Segi moves, she manages to take Kongi by surprise and makes a muffled symbolic statement about the regime by presenting Kongi the several head of her father.
The play treats of Kongi’s modern regime; how in the sections concerned with traditional rulers, the play is rooted in African tradition, especially in the elaboration of concepts concerning the feast of the new yam, in the extensive employment of proverbs and in the ritual of the king’s dance. The dance that Oba Danlola and his retinue perform in the introductory ‘hemlock’ section of the play seems to have a royal quality. These words from the praise song, sung by Oba Sarmi, pay tribute to the night and majesty of the king:
“Oba mi I f’epo inu ebo rain none but the king
Orisa l’oba Takes the oil from the
Cross roads
Oba ni I f’epo inu ebo r’awaje And rubs it in his
awje Orisa l’oba. The king is a god
(KH 3)
These lines stress the spiritual authority of the Oba when he anoints the head’s pulse centre with the oil of sacrifice as well as his power as a god. But the Oba now has only the trapping of royalty, since he is in detention after being stripped of his political power by Kongi. The regal dance is therefore sheer make-believe, as we discover when the superintendent stops the dance by grabbing the wrist of the lead drums. Danlola exhibits his resignation to his loss of power when he says:
“My friend, you merely stopped
My drums, but they were silenced
On the day when Kongi cast aside
My props of wisdom, the day he
Drove the old Aweri from their seats” (KH 4)
The drums which sound now have a hallow ring since the real drums which symbolize power have been snatched from the Oba by president Kongi. In the play, the dance of the king, with all its pomp and majesty, is a remind of the departed graces of traditional authority to which the Obas hark back nostalgically. The abrupt ending of the dance brings a jolting return to the reality.
The feast of the new yam is an indispensable ritual of celebration in traditional black Africa which symbolizes the renewing cycle of the nature. It also symbolizes the supremacy and power of the clan. The yam, as a symbol of harvest embodies the fertility of the tribe and the festival symbolizes the purgation of the clan’s sins and the restoration of its commonweal through the medium of its spiritual head. Soyinka thus deals in this play with the classic conflict between religion and polities that led, some centuries back, to the cleavage between church and state in Western Europe. In the African context, Soyinka portrays the ineluctable scarifies of tradition on the altar of modernism.
Although the forces of Kongi will prevail in the end, the death of tradition will be a disaster for the new nation since the wholesale abandonment of traditional culture will mean ridding the state of good as well as bad customs. As Oba Sarumi points out at the start of a dirge which is sung traditionally when a king dies:
“They complained because the first of the new yams
Melted first in an Oba’s mouth but the dead will witness
We drew the poison from the root” (KH 7)
In fact, Kongi personifies the poison in the body politic. Though he professes harmony, yet it is already suggested in the sentiments expressed in Oba Danlola’s final chant of the dirge of ‘ege’ sentiments that predict the impending blighting of tradition.
“This is the last Our feet shall touch together We thought the tune Obeyed us to the soul But the drums are newly shaped And stiff arms strain On stubborn crooks, so Delve with the left foot For ill luck; with the left Again for ill-luck; once more With the left alone, for disaster Is the only certainty we know.” (KH 10)
Kongi’s newly shaped drums do not beat a harmonious rhythm since the leader is preoccupied with power and divinity as ends in themselves. His reformed Aweri fraternity is a part of his propagandist machine. Soyinka unsparingly satirizes these new Aweri in their use of bombast to mask their vacuity. Although they pretend to spin their predecessors’ “glamourised fossilism” (KH 24) their own so-called “Enlightened ritualism” is patterned on the policies of the Old Aweri. In spite also of their rejection of proverbial wisdom in favour of “ideograms in algebraic quantum” (KH 13) which they themselves do not understand, their petty squabbling is a far cry from the image of “positive scientificism” which they claim will dominate their pronouncements. Since they are hollow men bandying words about, it is fitting that they envision themselves, in self-contradictory terms, as “youthful elders of the state” and as “a conclave of modern patriarchs” (KH 12). They are in fact simple minded stooges of Kongi who view their image of themselves as Magi as “one step to his inevitable apotheosis” (KH 11). For, not content with usurping Danlola’s role as god’s viceroy on earth, their master, Kongi, wants to be a god in his own right.
The barren hypocrisy of Kongi’s messianic is open to view as he operates from his cell in a mountain retreat on the eve of the festival. He is supposed to be fasting and meditating as Isma stands on the threshold of its second Five Year Development Plan. But the image of total harmony which he is busy setting up for the state has been disputed by the recent bomb throwing attempt on his life. Kongi’s pretentious posing for “Last Supper” portraits instead of engaging in earnest meditation betrays the fictional foundation of his mission which the secretary helps him fabricate:
SECRETARY: It’s all part of one and same harmonious idea my Leader. A Leader’s Temptation….. Agony on the Mountains….. The loneliness of the Pure…….The uneasy Head…..A Saint at Twilight…….. The Spirit of the Harvest……. The Face of Benevolence….. The giver of life who knows how many other titles will accompany such pictures round the world. And then my leader, this is the Year of Kongi’s Harvest! The presiding Spirit as a life-giving spirit. We could project that image into every heart and head, no matter how stubborn. (KH 39).
The fabrication of images that are to be forcibly projected into the minds of the people reveals the regime’s lack of creative ideas and its reliance on brute force.
Professor of The Road tries unsuccessfully to achieve godhead through a ritual of possession and the unlocking of the secret of the Word. In Kongi’s Harvest, Kongi assumes the mantle of divinity without the ritual of investiture and proclaims himself the Spirit of harvest. Unlike him, Danlola, the lecherous old realist, never forgets that he is yoked to the corporeal, a yoking that he symbolizes in an excremental image (KH 4). Kongi, however, is so far gone in self-conceit and in delusions of immortality that he is ready to change the course of the world. In his pitiless satire of the man Soyinka exposes Kongi’s approval of a new calendar that will date from the current harvest. Kongi’s rejection of his Secretary’s nomenclatures which omit Kongi’s name in favour of the unambiguous “Kongi’s harvest” (KH) and “Before Kongi’s Harvest” (BKH – “No need why we should conform to the habit two initials only” KH 37) is typical of a self-love that seeks self-proliferation.”
If Kongi were to enter into the true spirit of harvest, he would endorse those principles and practices that proclaim life and abundance. But he merely disguises his treacherous, unforgiving and murderous spirit by assuming the posture of a Messiah and of a benevolent life-giver. His hypocritical proclamation of a reprieve for the men condemned to die for the attempt on his life, when he fully intends to have them hanged, goes beyond his reputed “flair for gestures” (KH 30). It characterizes the bloodthirsty tyrant who preys on his own people. His convulsions, like those of a god possessed, actually bring him down from his pedestal to his true level of impotent humanity. Oba Danlola is right in picturing Kongi s the son of the crow which feeds on carrion. Because Kongi is so rapacious, the only way he can regain his composure is through the exercise of “scientific exorcism”. As Fourth Aweri calls the slaying of the condemned men is the circumstances, the repressive measures of this regime are not very far from the dismal world of Madmen and Specialists.
While Oba Danlola falls under the weight of Kongi’s repression Daodu, his nephew and heir, is quietly involved in a scheme to oust the dictatorial Kongi. Even Danlola, fooled by Daodu’s calm exterior, describes him as “Lately returned from everywhere and still / Trying to find his feet” (KH 54). In fact, Daodu has his feet planted in the soil and his yam will easily win the competition for the prize yam at the new Yam Feast. Ironically, however, his prize yam is a monster, “a most abnormal specimen” (KH 72) for, while the fertilizers and the labor are the soil is still Kongi’s.
In Kongi’s Harvest Soyinka presents Daodu as the antithesis of Kongi. The contrast between the two men is dramatized in the stage set by the juxtaposition of scenes. In the First Part, Kongi’s ascetic mountain retreat is worlds removed from the gay atmosphere in the night club scene where Daodu consolidates his opposition to Kongi by joining forces with Segi. Segi calls Daodu her spirit of Harvest but, in a reference to Kongi Daodu tells her resignedly “I hate to be a mere antithesis to your Messiah of Pain.” (KH 46). Instead he would like to fight Kongi with his own weapons of hate and destruction. The litany in which Daodu and Segi take part lays bare the dangerous effects of the will to power:
DAODU: Let me preach hatred Segi, If I preached hatred I could match his barren marathon, hour for hour, torrent for torrent………..
SEGI: Preach life Daodu, only life…..
DAODU: Imprecations then, curses on all inventors of agonies, on all Messiahs of pain and false burdens…….
SEGI: [with mounting passion.]: On all who fashion chains, on farmers of terror, on builders of walls, on all who guard against the night but breed darkness by day, on all whose feet are heavy and yet stand upon the world…..
SEGI: Life….life…..
DAODU: On all who see, not with the eyes of the dead, but with eyes of Death……
SEGI: Life then, it needs a sermon on life…….love….
DAODU: [with violent anger.]: Love? Love? You who gave love, how were you required?
SEGI: [rises]: My eyes were open to what I did. Kongi was a great man, and I loved him. (KH 45)
Segi, a modern version of Madame Tortoise in A Dance of the Forests, is privy to the warping effect that absolute power has had on a once loved, once great man. Since Kongi has been corrupted by the lust for power she wishes to steer Daodu towards positive goals that uphold life.
Daodu’s speech at the festival is made with the assurance and the vigour of a Conquering Hero. Fully confident that Kongi will be overthrown by the time the Oba presents the sacred yam and before Kongi makes his marathon speech, Daodu speaks as a Savior at the Second Coming. In contrast with the asceticism of the First coming he declares “This trip I have elected to sample the joys of life, not its sorrows, to feast on the pounded yam, not on the rind of yam, to drink the wine myself, not leave it to my ministers for frugal sacraments, to love the women not merely wash their feet at the well.” (KH 79). Daodu will not subscribe to the false asceticism of Kongi. As Redeemer he unequivocally preaches libertinism instead and he contemplates the ismites’ liberation from the barren hold of the autocratic Kongi.
One issue on which the New Aweri seems to reach a consensus is that Kongi’s rule is “part of a normal historic pattern” (KH 20). Nations and empires rise and fall; cultures reach their apogee and decline, and the strong over-power the weak. The foiling of the plot against Kongi demonstrates that, Daodu’s assurance to the contrary, it is not such an easy matter to depose an established ruler, especially one, like Kongi, who runs a police state. For the present, Kongi is entrenched in power but the promise of greater repression after the aborted Bacchanal will not wipe out opposition to his oppressive regime. The doctrine of Inevitable History dictates that Oba Danlola cannot hold on to power indefinitely. Nor can Kongi, as long as there are those who have the will and courage to oppose him and eventually to expose him to the people for what he really is. His discomfiture when Segi serves up the head of her father in a platter as the orgiastic harvest feast becomes nightmare brings home to him the stark reality of his diabolical regime.
According to the world view of Kongi’s Harvest, Oba Danlola, Kongi and Daodu represent moribund, entrenched and challenging orders of power respectively. Oba Danlola, the wily and dilatory reactionary, is the traditional chieftain who has ruled his people with an absolute power which lies more in the paraphernalia of custom and taboo than in the exercise of brute force. He now knows that he and others of his breed are “the masquerade without/Flesh or spirit substance” (KH 53). But this realization of the loss of political and spiritual power does not deter him from resisting the nullification of his function or from indulging in make-believe pomp and majesty. Kongi, the autocrat, has inverted the old order of communal sharing and responsibility in which the individual’s actions for good or evil have repercussions on the body politic. Under his coercive and unimaginative rule, the people have the support of their traditional beliefs taken from them. Instead they are subjected to propaganda and brute force which win their allegiance through fear rather than through trust. Daodu, the quiet revolutionary, is impatient with the ritual and slow dignity of traditional authority and abhors the image-making and the unproductive terrorism of the present government. Although he adopts the productive tools of the modern world he fails to recognize that he must also respect the soil of tradition in order to produce a normal harvest. Success in the future will depend on the just matching of tradition and modernism, not on the elimination of one by the other.
Although the three characterize differing and conflicting interests, Danlola, Kongi and Daodu are afflicted, in varying degrees, by much the same syndrome of power. Soyinka considers true humility and generosity as the indispensable counterparts of power and greatness. The besetting sin of greatness is that it all too often gives rise to an overdeveloped ego with manic propensities Intimations of immortality are the direct result of a mania which causes the subject to lose touch with reality. Soyinka denounces this overblown sense of divinity in the Oba who inherits it with the rest of traditional culture as well as in Kongi and in Daodu who exhibit traits of Messianism. Kongi’s affliction is the most advanced as, through his actions; the playwright demonstrates that notions of omnipotence and divinity can reduce a man to quaking impotence. Here, Daodu is presented as the antithesis of Kongi.
REFERENCES
- Spear Magazine, P. 18, Banda’s Dead-or-Alive Search Order was reported in The Times, London, 29 October, 1964.
Textual References are cited from Collected Plays II, Soyinka, Wole,
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford, 1982, p.3-80.
Works cited:
Radhamani Gopalakrishnan, At Ogun’s feet, S. V. University Press, 1986.
Eldred D. Jones, The Writing of Wole Soyinka, Heinemann, London.
Gibbs James, Wole Soyinka-Macmillan modern Dramatists, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Hong Kong, 1986.
Etherton, Michael, The Development of African Drama, Hutchinson University Library for African, (London) 1980.