Hubert Ogunde's <em>Strike and Hunger</em> and the 1945 General Strike in Lagos: Labor and Reciprocity in the Kingdom of Ọba Yéjídé

Abstract

Hubert Ogunde's little-known 1945 opera Strike and Hunger provides a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which late colonial politics were reimagined in drama. Strike and Hunger was inspired by the 1945 General Strike in Lagos and offers an allegorical dramatization of these events. This article will suggest that we move beyond previous accounts of the opera, which understood Strike and Hunger as emblematizing nationalist resistance to colonialism, and will instead argue that the opera's account of colonial rule was grounded in an ethics of reciprocity. It will demonstrate that Ogunde's opera reconstructs the strike in terms of the failure of Ọba Yejide to redistribute resources to his subjects. The central concern of the opera is the quest to restore the supply of food and end hunger. This account of hunger is at one level a literal description of the food shortages of the strike, but it can also be read metonymically as representing the flow and exchange of resources that define status in Yoruba culture. The Ọba's dishonorable failure to redistribute resources leads to a crisis in which he accumulates resources, but his subjects starve. Ogunde's critique of the colonial government is epitomized not in terms of a nationalist resistance to colonial rule, but in attempts by Yejide's subjects to remake their unwanted and foreign Ọba in their own image. Together, they succeed in teaching Yejide how to be a patron or a big man.