Trickster in Nigerian Postcolonial Drama

Abstract

Trickster in black culture, as illustrated by Femi Euba, the Nigerian playwright, “whether represented in animal form (as tortoise, spider, or monkey), or as a divinity such as Esu-Elegbara or Legba in West Africa, has often been used to convey an important moral or cultural message, implied in the action the trickster describes” (167). This significant role of the trickster is embodied in the two Nigerian plays under study, Esu and The Vagabond Minstrels by Femi Osofison (1988) and Dionysus of the Holocaust by Femi Euba (2002). Given the fact that Nigeria is characterized by the largest population in Africa, over three hundred spoken languages, and a wide variety of ethnic nationalities with different cultures and religions which is clearly reflected in Nigerian drama. The bricoleur technique is adopted in the paper as a methodology as it is best defined by Denzin and Lincoln as one in which the inherent evaluations of a research project are made clear and persistently returned to throughout the period of a study. The paper concludes that all black people need to have Esu-related qualities such as escaping, creating secret codes, encouraging insurrections, deception, and dissembling to keep balance in a world full of fateful/fatal conflicts which is the hardest challenge that Esu, the God of fate introduces. The moral of the two plays is that good and bad coexist and complement each other. People learn to distinguish between them through experience and they overcome evil situations by the amount of trickery they master.