The Sow that Repeatedly Devours her Piglets: The Villain on the Nigerian Stage

Tiziana Morosetti

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The Sow that Repeatedly Devours her Piglets: The Villain on the Nigerian Stage

In: Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today

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Tiziana Morosetti

Tiziana Morosetti
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 175–182

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880528_020

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In his essay ‘And after the Wasted Breed?’, the Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan comments on his choice to respond to Wole Soyinka’s drama The Strong Breed (1964) with his own play No More The Wasted Breed (1982), arguing that Soyinka ‘could not but read history as a catalogue of human ‘wastage’ [...]. Africa, like the Ireland of James Joyce, is the sow that repeatedly devours her own piglets’. The theme of the scapegoat, central to both authors, is also central in describing what the ‘villain’ might be on the Nigerian stage. This chapter will aim at focusing on how both Soyinka and Osofisan subvert the stereotype of the ‘scoundrel’, identified now as a rebellious element, now as a common criminal, in order to sympathise with all those - thieves, robbers, and saboteurs - that both regard as a product of their own corrupt society. In Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero (1964) and Jero’s Metamorphosis (1973), and Osofisan’s Once upon Four Robbers (1978), Nigeria is actually portrayed as a ‘sow that repeatedly devours her own piglets’, but in all this folly both authors reasonably make a clear distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ villains.

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Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880528

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 May 2011

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- Social Sciences
  - Comparative Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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The Sow that Repeatedly Devours her Piglets: The Villain on the Nigerian Stage

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Global Perspectives on Villains and Villainy Today

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