THE IRRUPTION OF TRANCE IN CONTEMPORARY YORUBA THEATRE: THEATRE, WITCHCRAFT, AND SOCIAL FRAGMENTATION IN LAGOS, NIGERIA

Abstract

The golden age of Yoruba folk opera, Yoruba travelling theatre, and Yoruba theatre is over and the brightly coloured trucks carrying the companies that cruised the Nigerian Federation up to the middle of the 1980s have certainly long since been dismantled. Although many actors, musicians, and directors have indeed moved from theatre to the flourishing home-video industry, a community of actors continues to present live performances that can be categorized as “neotraditional.” This genre of Yoruba theatre is undergoing a crisis in the context of an unrelenting economic recession in Nigeria that began in the early 1980s. This situation has released tensions that lead to a real and sadly all-too-justifiable sense of insecurity and to proliferating accounts of witchcraft attacks. The outcome has been a rise in violence manifested in the unleashing of the powers of witchcraft and enflaming relations between small rival groups hitherto unified under the sway of a salaried and—at least until the beginning of the 1980s—optimistic middle class. Yoruba neotraditional theatre that represents deities on stage that belong to “an invisible world” is playing with fire and, by conjuring up the powers of witchcraft, has in turn itself been bewitched.

Key Words:

• theatre
• witchcraft
• social conflict
• Yoruba
• Nigeria

Notes

1. Taken from a filmed interview conducted by Alain Ricard (1990).

2. The peak of which was 1973.

3. Yoruba traditional theatre is performed in the five Yoruba states in the southwest of the Federation of Nigeria. The population of these regions is around 20 million (about 18 percent of the total Nigerian population of 120 million inhabitants). The rate of urbanization and industrialization of the five states is high compared to the rest of the Federation and the continent as a whole.

4. In the late 1980s, inflation and wage controls had drastically eroded the incomes of the middle classes. It was not unusual to find a professor's campus garage used as a warehouse for his trucks and the equipment in his construction business, and behind the house pens, where his wife conducted a poultry business. Others sought to emigrate, especially skilled people, such as doctors, lawyers, and professors, who realized they could do much better abroad. The sudden decline in the income of the middle classes resulted from Nigeria's belt-tightening policies. Business people, especially those in trade, were less affected by inflation, but the recessionary effects of the structural adjustment plan (SAP) had cut into their incomes as well, by lowering demand or by controlling imports and exports more tightly. By the late 1980s, however, many of the middle classes and even the elites were being obliged to adjust to a lower standard of living.

5. Between December 1994 and July 1999, the Nigerian National Film and Video Censors Board registered 1,300 new Nigerian video films (Haynes 2000).

6. The initials of my interviewees are used throughout this essay to provide anonymity.

7. Musicians generally belong to lower social class than the director, the actors, and the audience.

8. This neo-Yoruba traditional theatre is not a popular art form anymore. Founded in the nineteenth century by a merchant class, which since the mid-twentieth century and in the aftermath of the Oil Boom, expanded to form the middle classes and—to a certain extent during a short period—rural and urban classes. These Nigerian middle classes have been the ones to suffer most from the recession, which began in the early 1980s.

9. The word “Aladura” (the prayer people in Yoruba) refers to various independent churches of West African origin characterised by their belief in prayer, divine healing, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The belief in the possibility of deliverance from evil forces reflects a perception of the continual presence of God's power and the need to pray, to prophesy, and to heal assumes the possibility of immediate divine intervention.

10. The name given to members of the very heterogenous movement of neo-Pentacostalist Churches. The adepts are said to begin a new existence by being reborn in Christ after rejecting all “satanic” practices (Marshall-Fratani 1998).

11. Ifa corpus is a compilation of texts, proverbs, and philosophical propositions, which the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria regard as their “bible.”

12. This play was staged at the National Theatre, Lagos, 12 February 1998.

13. “The personality type in Yoruba society know as àjé, conventionally rendered into English as ‘witch’ by Christian missionaries and a disappointing number of social anthropologists, may more specifically be interpreted as referring to persons of extraordinary intellect rather than this folkloric bugaboo […] It is also relevant to note that Favret-Saada eventually concluded that, even for the prelogical ‘peasants’ who were the subjects of her study, there were no clearly identifiable human beings in these communities who could in fact be considered witches. What did exist more importantly, for these contemporary citizens of France were undesired and undeserved misfortunes which were attributed to the malevolent thoughts of indeterminate ‘others,’ and which could be reliably disarmed via the ministration of local healers” (Hallen 2000: 62–63).

14. A few figures speak for themselves: between 1983 and 2001, the gross national product fell from $1,000 to $300 a year. Daily production of petroleum fell from 2.4 million barrels in 1979 to 1.4 million in 1985. Between 1980 and 1990, Nigeria was reclassified into the category of the world's poorest countries, with more than 80 percent of its population living below the poverty line (in 1980, this figure was 40 percent, making it the least poor in black Africa). Despite strong initial reluctance, after 1987 Nigeria progressively adopted the program of structural adjustment prescribed by the International Monetary Fund. It should be added that General Buhari was meanwhile deposed by the former head of the army, General Ibrahim Babangida. Salaries have been frozen since 1980. The minimum monthly salary of 125 nairas, at that time worth $170, was worth about $30 in 1988. In 1984, an average civil servant spent less than a year's salary to buy a car; three years later, to buy a Peugeot 504, assembled in Nigeria, he would have spent five years’ salary. It is paradoxical that Lagos, which a few years ago was the most expensive capital in the world, has become one of the least expensive for visitors. The country has provided itself with a new capital (decreed on 1 February 1979 and inaugurated twelve years later in 1991) and since 1 October 1996, is made up of thirty-six states, whereas in 1980 the Federation had only twelve. The population has risen from 85 million to around 123 million; the rate of urbanization has increased from 31 percent in 1984 to around 44 percent in 2000. According to World Bank estimates, the number of inhabitants in Lagos alone has gone from 4 million in 1982 to more than 10 million in 2001.

15. Durkheim defines the habitus as “the general disposition of mind and will that makes one perceive things in a particular light” (Durkheim 1974 [1923]). Bourdieu (1980: 154) gives the term a more practical definition: “a system of lasting and interchangeable standards, set principles predisposed to function as shaping structures, that is, which serve as the source and organizing power of behaviour and perception.” These principles can be objectively adapted to achieve their goal without implying the conscious seeking of that goal or the deliberate mastering of those operations necessary to attain it. Thus, the habitus is what distinguishes one class or social group from others that do not share the same social conditions. The habitus serves as the materialization of collective memory, reproducing in later generations the acquired patterns of earlier ones. In this way, it permits the group to perpetuate its being.

Ricard, Alain 1990. Wole Soyinka, Film documentaire: 5 continents, FR3/la 7.