Infectious Humanity

OFF BROADWAY

Drama is far less emergent in Africa than the new nations themselves. The special gift of Nigeria's Wole Soyinka,* the continent's foremost black playwright, is to speak to Africans about Africa in the concrete context of today but with a keen residual sense of the past. He is emancipated without being alienated. Blending mock humor with flare-lit passion, he is both a satirist and a mythopoet.

The last two aspects of his talent are most in evidence in The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed, though the two one-acters rank among his lesser plays. Brother Jero is a broad spoof of a religious humbug, a con man of prophecy who lives by mulcting his worshipers, or "customers," as he calls them in moments of absent-minded lucidity. He preys on their hopes, fears and vices, his own trial and joy being inveterate womanizing.

One hilarious paroxysm of physical prostration and rhetorical incantation involves Brother Jero's efforts to keep a member of his flock from beating his wife. If he permitted the man to do so, the prophet confides to the audience, the wife beater would be so inwardly satisfied that he might never return for more of Brother Jero's ministrations. The title role is played with unerring finesse by Harold Scott, who is sly, playful, sanctimonious or lecherous, as the occasion demands.

The Strong Breed delves into the dark and obscure realm of tribal taboos. Exorcism and witchcraft flicker along the edges of the action, but the convoluted flashbacks of a meandering plot never indicate exactly how and why. The core of the play concerns a teacher-stranger (Scott) who is out of sympathy with the annual tradition of a sacrificial human scapegoat known as a "carrier," but who lacks sufficient nerve and emancipation to fight the ancient tribal custom.

Soyinka, 33, has no complexes of self-consciousness about being an African. While fond and proud of his Nigerian heritage, he has small use for such concepts as "negritude." "Does a tiger feel his tigritude?" he asks. A member of the cultured and sophisticated Yoruba tribe, he was educated at the University of Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. He has worked for London's Royal Court Theater as playwright, actor and producer, and taught English literature at the University of Lagos.

Thus he is steeped in two cultures. His novel, The Interpreters, relies on stream-of-consciousness techniques and other Joycean devices; yet the symbolism and spirit of the book are unwaveringly African. His play, The Road, which won first prize in the first and only Dakar Festival of Negro Arts, is infused with patterns and dialogue reminiscent of Beckett and Pinter, but the message is uniquely African. A kind of African Waiting for Godot, it concerns a group of drivers, thugs, passengers and autoparts scavengers in a broken-down truck who are dominated by an ex-minister awaiting a revelation. The revelation is that the road itself is a god: "The great dusty snake in whose life all their lives are contained, in whose coils death lurks at every bend."

Despite his current political troubles, Soyinka is both a cultural and a popular hero in Nigeria. When he drinks palm wine at his favorite juju bars, people improvise songs to him. His plays share that infectious humanity.

*Who was jailed by the Nigerian government in Lagos on Aug. 17, on charges that he had aided leaders of the secessionist province of Biafra in their civil war. He had just been named head of Black Africa's only university drama school at the University of Ibadan, which is the capital of the country's Western region. Soyinka said that he was conferring with the Biafrans to urge a cease-fire.

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