ABSTRACT
As if anticipating Soyinka-twenty years before he called Nigeria an “open sore” on the African continent-Nigerian drama provides an accessible archive and index to the script of resistance against docile citizenship by projecting voices that placed the government on notice. To continue with the metaphor, state-sponsored and autonomous women’s mobilization in Nigeria during this period is a scarcely remembered postscript to this resistance. Femi Osofi san’s Morountodun, conceptualized and developed during the period of Nigeria’s second attempt at a transition to democracy (1979-1983), and performed at the Universities of Ibadan and Ife, illuminates trends in the feminist movement, dramatic production, and national politics in the country. In this play Osofi san turns the spotlight on democratic imaginings by revisiting the Agbekoya peasant rebellion of the 1960s and foregrounding the contribution of women in revolutionary movements. While Osofi san’s play does not originate in a revisionist historical impulse, there is a conjuncture between his emphasis on revolutionary praxis and Nigerian feminists’ efforts to seek participation in the country’s second experiment with democratic renewal. The play can thus be seen as a performance event drawing from and commenting on amendments proposed to alter gendered structures of political power in Nigeria. Reading the play in this manner enables an inquiry into the reality and vision of postcolonial nationalism in Nigeria: fi rst, the revolutionary project (whether secessionist, resource redistributive, or pro-democracy) as indelibly gendered and
sexualized; second, cultural production and the women’s movement in Nigeria articulating “postcolonial desire,” or the “act of imagining, living and negotiating a social reality based on democracy, cultural pluralism, and social justice” (Ampka 10).
