ABSTRACT
The generation born in the late 1940s in Nigeria came to young maturity in the late 1960s, just as the hopes expressed at the 1960 independence celebrations had collapsed into civil war. For Femi Osofisan, who was in his midteens when Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests first sounded a warning about overly romantic constructions of history (1960), there was available a new theatrical tradition established in English, attempting for the first time to try to speak to the complexity of a new multilingual, multicultural nation and essentially decolonizing the colonial tongue. English, of course, is not the first language of Nigerians, but it is often a useful language, helping to provide internal communication across sometimes bitter ethnic divisions. However, it cannot appeal to those who do not speak English or do not choose to engage with it, usually the masses. English-language theatre in Nigeria tends to be a middle-class or intellectual cultural activity and also of course opens a window of communication with the wider world.
