Ageing in Nigerian literature: James Ene Henshaw's the jewels of the shrine

Abstract

James Ene Henshaw is Nigeria 's first and oldest living mode rn playwright. 1 A medical doctor, Henshaw was born in 1924 in Henshaw Town, Calabar, a city located on the banks of the mangrove swamps of southeastern Nigeria. When I interviewed him in July, 1999, he told me that he qualified in 1949, and that his first play, This Is Our Chance, 2 was first staged in Dublin, Ireland, in 1947, rather than in 1945, as scholars and critics have often claimed. Between the late 1950s and the early part of the 1970s, Henshaw was west Africa's most popular playwright3 and his plays helped inculcate a sense of responsibility in successive generations of young west Africans. T h e thematic preoccupat ions of Henshaw ' s art have established h im as one of Africa 's foremost p ioneer creative writers. His plays, often simple in na ture¢ are reflections of a society undergoing radical social, political, and economic transformations. T h e y have served as a foundat ion on which the works of art of younger Niger ian playwrights have been predicated. The Jewels of the Shrinefl Henshaw's second play, was published in 1956 as part of a collection that includes This Is Our Chance and A Man of Character. 6 It has a cast list of only five, and all the action takes place in the m u d walled house belonging to an old man, Okorie, the central character. As with every play by Henshaw, the didactic importance is glaring. Through The Jewels of the Shrine, he shows the link between literature and medicine, v-l° He teaches the virtues inherent in being responsible, in being humane , and in respecting the older and ageing members of society. In the play, the aged are seen by the youth as embodiments of senility and backwardness. However , from Henshaw's perspective, old people are the epi tome of invaluable experience and are symbols o f the centuries-old cultures of Africa's diverse tribal entities. In This Is Our Chance, Henshaw calls for the integration of African culture with western civilisation or modernity. Interestingly, in The Jewels of the Shrine, he seems to have had second thoughts about his previous position; there has been a change in the artistic phi losophy guiding his art. A much more experienced Henshaw discusses the debili tating effect of modern i ty on African culture. He speaks through Okorie, who tells Stranger, one of the characters: