Ola Rotimi

• Born: April 13, 1938
• Birthplace: Sapele, Nigeria
• Died: August 18, 2000
• Place of death: Ife, Nigeria

Other Literary Forms

Ola Rotimi is noted only for his plays, although he also wrote critical articles on Nigerian theater.

Achievements

Ola Rotimi was one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s foremost dramatists, both a theatrical teacher and an entertainer as well as a playwright. Two of Rotimi’s plays, Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, are historical tragedies that recapture pivotal moments in the history of the Yoruba people and the glorious empire of Benin. Three other plays, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, If, and Hopes of the Living Dead, constitute a dramatic sociopolitical trilogy, an extended inquiry into the themes of struggle and integrity of leadership. In these plays, as in others, Rotimi warned his people to beware political charlatans who have continued to lead postindependence Nigeria to one poor harvest after another. A dominant subject of Rotimi’s plays was official and unofficial corruption on such a massive scale that the traditional African sense of community had been sacrificed to personal greed, personal power, and personal self-glorification. The Gods Are Not to Blame, first presented at the Ife Festival of the Arts in 1968, has as its theme that the real source of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) was mutual ethnic distrust among Nigerian people and not the work of the great political gods of the freshly decolonialized world, the United States and the former Soviet Union as well as France and England.

The Gods Are Not to Blame was awarded first prize in the African Arts/Arts d’Afrique playwriting contest in 1969. The politico-domestic comedy Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, written in 1965, when Rotimi was in his final year as a graduate student of playwriting and dramatic literature at Yale University, was honored as Yale Major Play of the Year. Both of these plays have seen numerous successful revivals in Europe and North America. The Gods Are Not to Blame has become a standard text for English literature classes in Nigeria, and Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again was a resounding triumph at its revival at the University of Toronto in June, 2000.

Rotimi’s plays are often filled with dance, mime, music, and song. Frequently, the songs or chants are in his native Yoruba. They offer thematic commentary on the actions of individual characters and on the destiny of the community. Like the words of the Greek chorus in the plays of Sophocles, the songs articulate the views of reason and social stability; at the same time, they are often humorous, frequently with a satiric intent. Rotimi merges the serious with the humorous in nearly all of his plays, for he believed that the dramatist must entertain as well as teach. Action in the Aristotelian sense is the essence of his drama. A distinctive characteristic of Rotimi’s work among that of contemporary African playwrights is the large number of characters, singers, and dancers on stage at one time. In his plays, the stage often becomes a meeting place for large crowds. Rotimi thus sought to re-create the spirit of communal participation that existed and still exists in traditional African ceremonies. However, Rotimi died before fulfilling his dream of producing a play with five hundred extras and characters.

Along with Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, Rotimi belonged to the vibrant first generation of modern Nigerian dramatists writing in English. Throughout Nigeria, their plays are continually produced. In the late twentieth century, new dramatists, inspired by Rotimi and his contemporaries, emerged: Zulu Sofolo, Wale Ogunyemi, Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, and Samson Amali. Rotimi was one of the two or three most highly regarded dramatists in Africa and as such played a major role in the development of a dramatic literature on his continent.

Biography

Emmanuel Gladstone Olawale Rotimi was born on April 13, 1938, the son of a Yoruba father from western Nigeria and an Ijaw mother from Rivers State in the Niger Delta of eastern Nigeria. His father, principal of the Engineering Training School of the Ports Authority in Lagos, often directed plays, and his mother had her own dance troupe. The young Rotimi took part in some amateur plays directed by his father, making his stage debut at the age of four. This tradition of family involvement in dramatic performance continued throughout his life. Rotimi met his wife, Hazel Mac Guadreau, a white woman, at Boston University when they were both undergraduates. She was always involved in his plays—on stage or backstage. A talented musician in her own right, she led the chorus in productions of If, while Kole Rotimi, Ola’s son, has appeared in a principal role in the same play. She died a few months before her husband in May, 2000.

Ola Rotimi attended primary school in Port Harcourt in eastern Nigeria and the Methodist Boys High School in Lagos, Nigeria’s capital. Capable in four languages—English, Ijaw, Yoruba, and Pidgin—the playwright Rotimi drew on his rich linguistic heritage: Although his plays are written in English, they contain a smattering of the other three languages as well, and his English is not an imitation of the language spoken in Oxford or Boston; rather, it is alive with the rhythms, the aphorisms, and the pulse of Nigerian English. His later plays increasingly included African languages and a Nigerian version of Pidgin English in their dialogue, although English remained the main language.

From 1959 until 1966, Rotimi studied in the United States. He received a Nigerian Federal Government scholarship to attend Boston University, where he majored in playwriting and directing, after which he attended Yale on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. Receiving his master of arts degree from Yale in 1966, he returned to Nigeria to become senior research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ife. While living in Ife (now renamed Ile-Ife), in the heart of Yorubaland, he familiarized himself with Yoruba oral tradition, including various musical forms that he was to inculcate into his plays. During his tenure there, he directed the university theater company, the Ori-Olokun Players. This company was invited by the French government in 1971 to the World Festival of Theatre in the city of Nancy in eastern France. Rotimi left Ife and moved to the University of Port Harcourt, where he directed his plays at the University Theater, The Crab. Using both student actors and trained actors from the Arts Council of Rivers State, he brought the vibrancy of his art to the Port Harcourt area. From 1982 to 1984, Rotimi was dean of the faculty of humanities at the University of Port Harcourt. His play Hopes of the Living Dead was first performed at the University of Port Harcourt theater in 1985.

In April, 1992, Rotimi retired from teaching in order to found his production company, African Cradle Theatre, or ACT. Initially, the Nigerian International Bank promised to subsidize Rotimi’s company, and Rotimi launched ACT with a production of his absurdist play, Holding Talks, in Lagos in September, 1992. Rotimi’s project to take his historical play, Hopes of the Living Dead, on tour across Nigeria failed because of a lack of funding. The lack of economic support or independent sponsorship also led to the folding of ACT. Even though his satirical play, Man Talk, Woman Talk, played to a packed and enthusiastic audience in 1995, Rotimi became disillusioned with the corrupt dictatorial regime of Nigerian general Sani Abacha, who hanged Rotimi’s fellow playwright, Ken Saro-Wiwa, for his a political activism in 1995.

In 1995, Rotimi, who has been described as diminutive in size but magnificent in talent, accepted a position as the Hubert H. Humphrey visiting professor of international studies and dramatic arts and dance at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He taught at Macalester until 1997, often producing his own plays with great enthusiasm.

After the death of Abacha and the return of democratic rule to Nigeria at the end of 1998, Rotimi returned and became a professor at Cbafemi Awolowo University in lle-Ife. He died of a heart attack on August 18, 2000.

Rotimi spoke English, Yoruba, Ijaw, Igbo, Hausa, and Pidgin but wrote primarily in English. In 1989, at the Talawa Theatre’s revival of The Gods Are Not to Blame, at London’s Riverside Studios, Rotimi explained, “I believe that in Nigeria’s multicultural situation writers should be less partisan. So I write in English. But I try all the time to use simple words and introduce the speech patterns and cadences of Yoruba villagers.” His later plays, notably If and Hopes of the Living Dead, make use of Nigerian names and proverbs.

Analysis

It would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that almost everything in most traditional African societies is a form of theater. The community itself is the central actor, and the village is the stage. Wrestling matches, funerals, initiation rites, religious ceremonies—each of these rituals involves the entire community. It is not surprising, then, that in this modern time, a time that has witnessed the effulgence of written literature, African drama has been nourished by traditional sources. Contemporary writers have returned to the marketplace to be inspired by oral storytellers, whose dramatic tales are often accompanied by musicians and dancers, all of whom are engaged with the audience-community in a statement of social value. The actor and audience are both active participants in the affirmation of the community. One cannot appreciate African drama without recognizing the essence of ritual in the nature of traditional communal activity. The theatrical stage is the village meeting ground, and the dramatist cannot function apart from the society to which he or she belongs.

The theater of Ola Rotimi, like that of fellow African Soyinka and the Greeks Aristophanes and Sophocles, is rooted in ritual. Songs, chants, dance, and mime are as elemental as dialogue and monologue. In his plays, Rotimi, the contemporary artist-historian, taught his people of their past so they can better understand the present and build a constructive future.

Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again

Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, written in 1965, foreshadows his career as a dramatist with a sense of social responsibility. The play’s protagonist, a former military major, Rahman Taslim Lejoka-Brown, takes to politics not out of feelings of patriotism but rather out of vanity. His political naïveté is matched by his marital ineptitude. When his American wife rejoins him unexpectedly to discover two other wives whom he has married without her knowledge, the major begins to suffer major symptoms of discomfort.

Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again is a drawing-room comedy of sorts. Most of the action takes place in Lejoka-Brown’s living room; his political ambition is paralleled in his private life. When the play begins, the audience learns that his sophisticated American-educated wife, Lisa, is due to arrive in Lagos. Lejoka-Brown has not told her about his two other wives, Mama Rashida and Sikira, both of whom are in the mold of market women. The play contains a very humorous scene in which Lisa, believing Sikira to be a housemaid, manages to antagonize the two other wives. They know that the newly arrived fowl needs to have her proud feathers plucked.

It is generally known in traditional Nigerian societies that if a man cannot handle his wives, he probably will not be able to handle political responsibility. Lejoka-Brown thinks that he is in control of his wives; he is not. Once the wives learn to accept one another and work together, the poor major has no chance. At the end of the play, Sikira, with the support of the market women, is to become the candidate of the National Liberation Party. Lejoka-Brown’s world is turned upside down. He laments that before he became caught up in the craziness of politics, he was doing very well running his cocoa business.

The political figure in Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again is a former military major. His National Liberation Party mouths slogans of freedom for the people of Nigeria, for Africa. In actuality, political freedom really means unlimited license for corruption.

From the beginning, Rotimi warned Nigeria of the dangers that threaten the stability of society in the modern world. In his dramas, which examine the fate of a people in need of sociopolitical hope, he looks at Nigerian democracy and shudders. Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, first staged at Yale University in 1966, was very popular in Nigeria during the hiatus from military rule that lasted from 1979 to 1983. Nigerian electioneering maneuvers seem to have changed not at all between 1966 and 1983. Party members in Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again are all thugs, and the politicians are nothing more than greedy charlatans interested only in instant wealth. The play has also been a critical success outside Africa.

The Gods Are Not to Blame

Rotimi’s next play, The Gods Are Not to Blame, was written in 1967, while the civil war was raging. The war took strength from long-standing tribal rivalries and was fostered by private political aspirations and corruption in high quarters. The Gods Are Not to Blame is an indictment of this Nigerian fratricide.

In The Gods Are Not to Blame, however, Rotimi warns Nigerians that the nation cannot excuse its own failure merely by blaming foreign powers. Written in 1967 as civil war was raging in Nigeria, The Gods Are Not to Blame reinterprets the Oedipus myth in the light of the Nigerian situation. Certainly the causes of the civil war are many and are rooted in the time of British colonialism. The military coup of January 15, 1966, in which the Hausa leaders of the north were killed, was followed by an orgy of slaughter of Igbo people living in the north. Those Igbo who could escaped to the safe confines of Igboland in eastern Nigeria, and on May 30, 1967, the Igbo declared that eastern Nigeria—now called Biafra—was an independent nation. Three years and millions of deaths later, Nigeria became reunited. The war inspired many works by Nigerian dramatists, poets, and novelists. Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, however, was one of the first literary responses to the conflict.

The play’s protagonist, Odewale (Oedipus), the son of King Adetusa and Queen Oguola of Kutuji, grows up far from his native town. A man of an irascible nature, Odewale, like Oedipus, unwittingly slays his father, marries his mother, and in so doing pollutes the land. To save his people, he must be cleansed. There are, however, distinct differences between Odewale and Oedipus. Odewale’s tragic flaw is not primarily pride; it is tribal animosity. When he attacks the old man (his father, the king) who has intruded on his farmland, Odewale is determined not to be violent, but when the old man refers to Odewale’s tribe as a bush tribe, the protagonist loses all control and slays the intruder.

Throughout the play, the theme of tribalism reappears. When the village seer, Baba Fakunle, accuses Odewale of being the murderer of the former king, Odewale’s immediate instinct is to see tribal bias. Odewale believes himself to be an Ikejun man among the people of Kutuje. Although it is not uncommon among Nigerian people for a member of one tribe to become head of another, Odewale chooses to see tribal resentment as the basis of any criticism directed toward him.

Rotimi alters the Oedipus story when necessary. For example, in the Nigerian cultural setting there can be no justification for a young man to strike an elder in a dispute over a right-of-way, as happens in the Greek tale. A young man who resorts to violence against an elder is justified only in very specific circumstances, one of which is if the elder has stolen or intends to steal the young man’s property. This is the situation that initiates the conflict between father and son in The Gods Are Not to Blame.

There are, however, distinct cultural similarities between the Greek society of Sophocles and traditional Yoruba society. Like the Greeks, the Yoruba have their pantheon of gods: Ogun, Shango, Obatala. These hero-gods provide the framework for traditional Yoruba religious beliefs and moral codes and also are symbolic vehicles for aiding Yoruba men in facing the ambiguities of human tragedy. There is a sense of cosmic totality among the Yoruba as there was among the Greeks. What Soyinka calls the ritual archetype is the foundation on which Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame is built.

The title of the play refers ironically to the great political powers who became involved in the Nigerian War. The Biafrans blamed the Soviet Union and Great Britain for aiding the Nigerian Federalists in their attack on Biafra. The Federalists blamed France and the United States, through its charitable organizations, for supporting the Biafran’s secession. Rotimi knew that ethnic distrust was the root of the conflict. Though Nigerian politicians play on the theme of foreign control, The Gods Are Not to Blame unsparingly rejects such self-serving rhetoric. In his final speech, Odewale warns the people not to blame the gods. Odewale warns those who will listen about the weakness of a man easily moved to the defense of his tribe against others. Because tribal hatred is a learned response, it can be unlearned.

The Gods Are Not to Blame was first produced by the Ori-Olokun Acting Company at the Ife Festival of the Arts in 1968; Rotimi himself played the Narrator. The rhythms of Ogun, Yoruba God of War and Iron, are never distant. The play is filled with many Yoruba proverbs and choral chants that echo principal themes. Ultimately, Rotimi is saying that when the wood insect gathers sticks, it carries them on its own head.

Colonialism and Dictatorship

With the military takeover in Nigeria from 1966 to 1979, Rotimi articulated the anxieties of this period of his country’s history. Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, Kurunmi, Akassa You Mi, and The Gods Are Not to Blame deal with warfare, military rule, and the need for responsibility of leaders to the society. The plays also call Nigerians to a recognition of the nation’s past and the need for Nigerians to be free from foreign exploitation and control. Both Ovonramwen Nogbaisi and Akassa You Mi deal with nineteenth century confrontations between England and the Nigerian people. The former tells the story of the sacking and destruction of the capital of the great empire of Benin; the latter narrates the attack by Brassmen in the Niger Delta at the British trading outpost in Akassa. These plays tell Nigerians that their ancestors did not passively accept the tyranny of colonialism; in fact, they did all they could to resist oppression and domination. The British raped Nigeria in their quest for economic expansion. Rotimi told his modern audience that unless Nigeria frees itself economically from foreign control, there can only be a continuation of a national malaise based on a feeling of unworthiness. There can be no real development if European interests come first.

Ovonramwen Nogbaisi

Rotimi’s commitment to his people and his heritage is passionately made manifest in the three-act historical tragedy Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, a play that tells the story—well known to Nigerian audiences—of the brutal end of the empire of Benin.

In the fifteenth century, the empire of Benin was famous throughout West Africa. Indeed, in the mid-fifteenth century, under Oba Ewuare the Great, the fortified city of Benin, surrounded by three miles of walls, was the center of a great civilization. With organized guilds of palace artisans, the arts flourished. Most famous are the Benin bronze works, recognized today as one of the apogees of the history of art. Work in ivory and coral was also of high quality. In the sixteenth century, Oba Esigie ruled for nearly fifty years. At that time, Benin had a standing army of more than 100,000 men, and Benin City had more than thirty streets that exceeded 120 feet (37 meters) in width. The Yoruba Wars and the incursions of Muslims from the north led to the decline, from the mid-sixteenth century, of the once powerful empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, Benin had seen its greatest days, but its bronze art was still a testament to its greatness, and its oba or chief, Ovonramwen, carried on the tradition of the god-ruler.

In 1897, the British destroyed the capital, captured Ovonramwen, and exiled him to Calabar in eastern Nigeria. The British account of the events leading up to the sacking of Benin City is as follows: An unarmed British trade delegation was massacred by the oba’s men, and the British retaliated, destroying the capital, a center of human sacrifice and barbarousness. To save the bronze artwork, the British carried the statues and reliefs back to London, where they can be seen today in the British Museum. Rotimi tells a different story. He does not romanticize Ovonramwen. In the first act, the audience sees a leader trying to hold his empire together, struggling with rebellious chiefs and recalcitrant followers. Fear is his weapon in dealing with his people. The arrival of the British, who mask their desire to gain control of the rubber trees of Benin with treaties of friendship, leads to inevitable conflict. The royal bards chant hymns of hope, but their hopes are not to be fulfilled.

During the religious festival of Agwe, British traders—with arms—approach Benin. Warned that it is taboo to visit the oba at this sacred time, the white men pay no attention. They are murdered by subalterns of the oba, even though Ovonramwen had warned his subordinates to use no violence. As the second act ends, the oba is forced to flee.

In the third act, the oba confronts the British. He declares that British intentions in Benin were suspect. After all, had not the British captured King Jaja of Opobo when he fought to maintain control of his territory? Had not Jaja been traitorously captured at a putative peace conference and exiled to the West Indies? Oba Ovonramwen knows that the British interest in Benin is rubber, ivory, and palm oil. In the end, while struggling to join guerrilla forces still combating the British, the god-chief is captured. His empire, the magnificent empire of Benin, is dead. The god-king is a mere subject of the white man. A man more sinned against than sinning must suffer the humiliation of capture, a degradation emblematic of the destiny of his people.

The play is rooted in ritual. In the first act, the prophecy of the Ifa priest of the Oracle of Oghere warns that fire and blood threaten Benin, that disaster is at hand. Despite the oba’s serious efforts to unify his people and maintain the integrity of the empire, collapse is inevitable. The chants of the bards chronicle the passage from fear to doubt to destruction. These songs and chants are derived in the main from the traditional folk-music repertoire of the Edo Cultural Group in Benin City, arranged by Osemwegie Ebohon.

In Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, Rotimi retells Nigerian history from Nigeria’s point of view, not that of history books written by the English. He warns his people that continued economic exploitation of contemporary Nigeria by Western powers undermines the independence of Nigeria.

If

With the return to democracy from 1979 to 1983, Rotimi proved to be no more tolerant of civilian political abuse than he was of military abuse. The play If, written and produced in 1979, focuses on a landlord-politician who threatens his tenants with eviction if they do not actively support his candidacy. The play, with seventeen characters excluding the twenty children and the twenty-four-person chorus, presents juxtaposed, variegated actions. Different scenes take place simultaneously. The rapid pace of If is accentuated by a series of satiric songs inspired by such different sources as African American spirituals and traditional African chants. If examines the problems faced by ordinary Nigerians after the country’s civil war.

Holding Talks

Rotimi continued to experiment in his art. He acknowledged his respect for William Shakespeare as well as for the Yoruba folk theater of Duro Lapido, and in his plays he has borrowed from diverse cultural sources. In 1979, with the publication of an absurdist drama, Holding Talks, a play in which characters talk and talk without achieving communication, Rotimi tried his hand at a different style, but even in this play, inspired perhaps by the techniques of Harold Pinter, Rotimi continued to be a writer involved with society, for its satire focuses on characters who fail when action is required. Thus, despite the evolution of his craft, Rotimi continued to devote his artistic life to further the interests of the majority of Nigerian people, who, since independence, have been victimized by self-seeking leaders.

Grip ’Am

When the Nigerian military seized power again in 1984, Rotimi chose to stay in Nigeria until 1995, when he became completely disillusioned with the utter lack of possibilities for theatrical production under a regime that became notorious for its corruption and economic mismanagement, destroying all possible funding for the arts. While the military consolidated its power, in 1985 Rotimi moved into the field of short comedy with Grip ’Am. The play turns away from the charismatic leaders that had figured so predominantly in his earlier work, and focuses on common humanity. The Nigerian elite is lampooned, and the hero is granted the magic power to humiliate his greedy landlord by trapping him in a fruit tree. After the appearance of Die, the Pidgin name for death, the play closes on the message that the people need to take their fates into their own hands.

Hopes of the Living Dead

First produced in 1985, Hopes of the Living Dead uses historical material and turns it into a dynamic three-act play. Here, Rotimi dramatizes the so-called Lepers’ Rebellion in colonial Port Harcourt from 1928 to 1932. The British had selected forty lepers for new treatment but later lost interest in the project and proposed to send the lepers, called “the living dead” in Nigerian slang of the period, back to their individual villages. Gathering around their charismatic leader Ikoli Harcourt Whyte, the lepers finally win the right to move together into a newly built village provided by the British.

Critics have praised Rotimi for developing his presentation of leadership into a more democratic and collectivist direction. Whyte is no longer an isolated, elitist ruler, and is elected by the patients to represent their grievances. Because his resistance to the British is successful, he is spared the tragic fall of Rotimi’s previous historical protagonists. The play’s insistence that people need to find the right direction through which to overcome their problems, rather than to rely on charismatic saviors to rescue them from oppression, won great critical praise for the play.

In its actual production, the lepers’ display of their disability can make for a powerfully moving spectacle. Rotimi’s inclusion of characters who speak in their own tribal languages also highlighted again the necessity, so important for Nigeria’s multitribal and multireligious society, for all members of a larger community, like the leper colony or, by analogy, a nation state, to work together toward their common goals, be it access to living space or economic prosperity.

Later Plays

Rotimi’s attempt to launch and maintain his African Cradle Theatre used up much of his great creative energy. Time and again, he stressed the need for economic support for the arts and drama in particular. He also spoke out against the use of untrained and unskilled actors and actresses. With economic collapse looming in Nigeria, even the critical success of his new productions for 1995, When Criminals Become Judges and the immensely popular social satire Man Talk, Woman Talk, failed to provide Rotimi with much hope for the immediate future of theater in Nigeria. Audiences had become fearful for their own personal safety, and domestically produced gasoline had become unavailable, making movement expensive, unsafe, and unreliable.

His years at Macalester inspired Rotimi to begin work on what he saw as a major project of his life, a gargantuan African play with a cast of more than five hundred players. Returning to Nigeria, he died before he could realize this dream. Yet his plays, in particular The Gods Are Not to Blame and Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, have become widely known in Nigeria and abroad and are wonderful testaments to his political insight and dramatic skill.

Bibliography

Banham, Martin. Dancers in the Forest: Five West African Playwrights. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Contains a perceptive study of Rotimi and his work. Focuses especially on his play If and analyzes Rotimi’s use of performance space in the play.

Banham, Martin. “Ola Rotimi: ‘Humanity as My Tribesman.’” Modern Drama 33 (March, 1990): 67-81. Quotes at length from If and offers the first close critical look at Hopes of the Living Dead, which, Banham says, is more optimistic than If. Banham states that the strength of Rotimi’s work “lies . . . in its powerful theatrical advocacy of political and social action.”

Cbafemi, Clu. “Tragedy and the Recreation of History in Ola Rotimi’s Plays.” In Contemporary Nigerian Theatre. Bayreuth, Germany: Eckhard Breitinger, 1996. Excellent study of Rotimi’s history plays by a Nigerian academic. Gives ample historical background, summarizes some of the controversies Rotimi’s plays have created in Nigeria, and has a perceptive discussion of Rotimi’s characteristic dramatic techniques.

Crow, Brian. “Melodrama and the ‘Political Unconscious’ in Two African Plays.” Ariel 14 (July, 1983): 15-31. Compares Rotimi’s Ovonramwen Nogbaisi with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (pr. 1974, pb. 1976), written with Micere Githae-Mugo. Crow says that both playwrights “articulate and assert the immanence of good and evil in the historical conflicts that they dramatize” and invite further comparisons with traditional Western melodrama.

Dunton, Chris. “Ola Rotimi.” In Make Man Talk True: Nigerian Drama in English Since 1970. London: Hans Zell, 1992. Thorough discussion of Rotimi’s life and work up to Hopes of the Living Dead by an author who has witnessed actual performances of many of Rotimi’s plays. His endnotes give useful details of many plays’ production history.

Lindfors, Bernth, ed. Dem-Say: Interviews with Eight Nigerian Writers. Austin: University of Texas African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center, 1974. Recorded at the University of Ife in 1973, the interview covers Rotimi’s education in the United States, his beginnings as a playwright, the influences of Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo on his work, and his ambitions for “a full-length massiveness in music, dance and movement lasting two whole hours . . . mobilizing a five-hundred-man cast.”

Okafor, Chinyere G. “Ola Rotimi: The Man, the Playwright, and the Producer on the Nigerian Theater Scene.” World Literature Today 64 (Winter, 1990): 24-29. Okafor, an actress and assistant director in some of Rotimi’s productions, offers firsthand knowledge of his work. She discusses Rotimi’s canon and production practices, especially on dramatic spectacle, and his breaking of the proscenium arch.

Rotimi, Ola. “The Head Without a Cap.” Interview by Adeola Solanke. New Statesman Society 2 (November 10, 1989): 42-43. An interview with the playwright on the occasion of the Talawa Theatre’s revival of The Gods Are Not to Blame in 1989. Reexamines the Oedipus Rex myth as derivation of the play, quoting Rotimi’s remark that “in my play the ‘gods’ are . . . the superpowers who control the political and economic destiny of the developing world.”