ABSTRACT
Nigerian female dramatists writing after Zulu Sofola have moved beyond her traditionalist views to embrace a form of resistance against cultural issues. Zulu Sofola is regarded as the first woman in Nigeria to have published a play. While she celebrated tradition at the expense of life in The Wedlock of the Gods, for example, female dramatists after her such as Tess Onwueme, Stella Oyedepo and Julie Okoh have rebelled against the ideas of women's subjugation and oppression by constructing and inscribing the woman as subject not as the “Other.” In their hands, drama becomes a weapon of resistance and assertion. Their works, thus, become a resonant site for protesting patriarchy and its effects. This paper examines the theatrical strategies employed by Julie Okoh and Sefi Atta in Aisha and The Sentence, respectively, as interventions against cultural practices that resist, suffocate and limit the being, growth and freedom of Nigerian women in postcolonial Nigeria. The study adopts Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's “Snail-sense feminism,” an indigenous feminist theory that identifies women's in-built coping strategies to interpret and engage in a rigorous analysis of the issues of women oppression and stereotyping, gender dynamics, religious injustices and inter-ethnic marriage.
