ABSTRACT
War, in its cause and effect, creates displacement, exile, bitterness, deaths and a host of other miseries. The anguish and desolations generated by war in turn manifest in psychologically disturbed societies. The current social and political configurations of Yorubaland are largely the results of several internecine conflicts, particularly in the nineteenth century. These wars of patriarchal militarism and imperial expansionism were motivated in part by such factors as honour, power and egoism. In Femi Osofisan’s Medaaye, a cultural translation of Euripides’ Medea, the playwright transposes the ethos of ancient Greece into nineteenth-century Yorubaland to effect a re-reading that reappraises the nature of patriarchy and its effect in the definition of women and their roles in society. This chapter explores how the play’s eponymous character navigates her sojourn in a foreign land against the backdrop of marginalization and objectification. The themes of love and war are articulated in many forms. Medaaye’s transgression strikes at the heart of the patriarchal family. She violates all the positive ideals associated with the female in precolonial Yorubaland. She eventually regains respect for herself as she pursues a painful struggle for self-actualization and retribution for the humiliation she suffers at the hands of Atipo, her husband, in exile. My thesis in this chapter is to explore the role of Medaaye as a woman whose mental anguish conflicts with and refracts the objectification of women in the patriarchal ideal of nineteenth-century Yoruba hegemony.
