Iyunolu Osagie, African Modernity & the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba

Summary

Femi Euba is a Nigerian playwright and novelist whose work has probably not received the critical attention it deserves. Perhaps more than any other writer of his generation, particularly those whose works have engaged with or challenged Wole Soyinka's ideology and interpretation of Yoruba cosmology and the idea of black consciousness, Femi Euba has situated his writing in Soyinka's ‘fourth area of existence’, the chthonic realm where the mysteries of origin, life and tragedy are located. Until the publication of African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba however, little is known about Euba's writing, and there has been no critical appreciation of his work. African Modernity is therefore an important contribution, not only for the study of Euba's oeuvre and his position in African playwriting, but also to the deeper understanding of African dramaturgy and the pervading influence of Yoruba philosophy and culture in modern Nigerian drama and on drama from the black diaspora.

What makes Euba's drama further important is his approach to writing from a tri-continental perspective. To inform his writing, Euba draws upon his Yoruba heritage, his performative experience on the London stage where he was for several years an actor, and his decades of living in the United States of America, with its many multicultural influences. These are factors that elevate the contributions of Euba to African playwriting, as Iyunolu Osagie expresses in this book.

The first of African Modernity's five chapters, ‘Archetypes of Modernity’, introduces us to the Yoruba ideology that underpins Euba's writing. He chooses the Yoruba god, Esu, as his dramatic muse, and his plays are significantly set at the crossroads, the market place, or junctions of history, places where Esu mythically resides. Esu is believed in Yoruba culture to control the relationship between the people, their destiny and their gods, and Euba re-appropriates this particular relationship into the major characters in his plays. The chapter also discusses the centrality of Esu to the generation of meaning and the creation of dramatic action in Euba's writing. According to Osagie, Euba ‘insists on a global Esu whose characters and actions implicate the entire world’ (xxvi) and articulates his philosophy within this discourse of modernity with the use of ritual, myth and the performance elements in Yoruba culture.