Entertainment: The historical background of drama in Nigeria

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O.Ogunba

INTRODUCTION
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Lagos, a theatre tradition developed featuring well-known English and European musicals, concerts and operas. The actors, concert groups and clientele of the foreign
tradition were the new, Westernised elite. The artists featured included Handel and Mozart. Similar concert groups were set up in lbadan and Abeokuta. Soon, there was a clamour for works based on indigenous Nigerian subject matter, and one D. O. Oyedele is said to have written a play entitled 'King Elejigbo' (1904) in response to the call.

The play cannot now be traced, but there are references to it in the Lagos theatre reviews of the period. This theatre tradition did not last beyond the first decade of the twentieth century. Politics was already in the airin Lagos and in other parts of Nigeria, and many of the leading spirits behind the Lagos Theatre Movement, like Herbert Macaulay, soon found politics more attractive than the theatre.

Hubert Ogunde:
For about forty years after the play 'King Eiejigbo', there was no notable development, in the Nigerian Theatre until Hubert Ogunde came to the scene in 1944. Hubert Ogunde, who wrote both in English and in Yoruba, more than any one else, created the awareness of the modem theatre tradition in Nigeria. His was an operatic travelling theatre, and he took his plays to various parts of the country, and also to other West African countries, particularly Ghana and Sierra Leone, for about forty years.
Ogunde's plays have religious, social and political themes and titles such as Garden of Eden, Nebuchandnezar's Fieign, Herbert Macaulay, Journey to Heaven, Tiger's Empire, Strike and Hunger and Yoruba Ponu (Yoruba rethink). Occasionally, he came into confrontation with the political authorities and had his plays banned.

Hubert Ogunde was professionally remarkable in another sense. Early in his theatre career, he confronted the problem of the frequent resignation and departure of his actresses, especially as soon as they got married and their husbands objected to their wives continuing as actresses because of the stigma attached. Ogunde then solved this problem in a practical way by marrying virtually all his actresses. This stabilised his performing company such that he often had too many actresses and sometimes made some of the women to perform male roles. Ogunde was the first professional theatre man in Nigeria who lived entirely by the art and, indeed, for it.

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