Civil Society and the Struggle for Democratic Transition in Modern Nigerian Drama: Ken Saro-Wiwa's The Transistor Radio and Wole Soyinka's From Zia, with Love1
Despite Basi's wit, veibal ingenuity and creative imagination, his philosophy of 'survival by trickeiy' is thus anything but convincing and not half as worldly-wise or practical as Basi would have himself and Alali believe. Since all the characters in the play are engaged in the fraud...
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| Published in: | Matatu 2006 (33), p.267-368 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Despite Basi's wit, veibal ingenuity and creative imagination, his philosophy of 'survival by trickeiy' is thus anything but convincing and not half as worldly-wise or practical as Basi would have himself and Alali believe. Since all the characters in the play are engaged in the fraudulent smartness advocated by Basi, the overall result is a social zero-sum game, staged as a farcical comedy that throws the limits of the modern trickster-figure into stark relief: where the 'traditional' trickster introduces an element of creative chaos into an otherwise relatively stable society, a social world where eveiybody engages in trickster-like behaviour is not a place of anarchic creativity, but a sociopolitical disaster.14 Three aspects of this disaster that have had particularly damaging effects on Nigerian society in recent decades can be singled out in the play: the rise of an unproductive economy; the shadow cast over society by an authoritarian 'prebendari state'; and the corrosive effects of socially endemic corruption. [...]one of the reasons why The Transistor Radio (and the world of Basi and Company it initiated) became so immensely popular in the 1980s would seem to lie in the fact that despite its origins in the 1960s and early 1970s - the play prefigured, in humorous and 'microcosmic' form, many of the later predicaments of Nigerian society. Another aspect of these experiences reflected in the play is connected to the rise of what has been variously termed the "prebendaiy," "vampire," or "kleptocratic" state.22 Just like many other other new African nations, Nigeria inherited "the colonial leviathan with all its authoritarian tentacles":23 a tradition of enforced rule by an autocratic state apparatus over a population of 'subjects' rather than 'citizens'.24 Since the successful nationalist movements tended to equate politics exclusively with the state,25 the post-independence decades in most African countries became a "state-centric era [...] characterized by an essentially top-down administrative approach to state-society relations, the net effects having been 'de-politicization' and 'de-participation.'" While the state in many African nations thus appeared as an overpowering apparatus to which its 'subjects' owed little allegiance, it also became a coveted prize for the political elites that wrestled for its control: holding political or administrative office thus not only opened access to scarce resources for one's - usually ethnic - clientele,27 bu |
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| ISSN: | 0932-9714 1875-7421 |