BY EZECHI ONYERIONWU

Among the oft-cited second generation of Nigerian literary scholars, to whom the credit of sustaining the dignified heritage of Nigerian literary intellection as diligently inaugurated by the now legendry pioneers of the tradition is most glowingly ascribed, Onuora Ossie Enekwe is undoubtedly a leading light.

Perhaps with the exception of the high-riding Havard-based Professor Biodun Jeyifo, the inimitable Professor Enekwe would have few generational rivals in the promotion, projection, defense, intellection, propagation, growth and development of Nigerian literature in the period between 1973 and 2000.

Onuora Ossie Enekwe

Thus, beyond being one of the dominant forces of Nigerian literary creativity within the same period, with telling interests in all genres of literature (including the short story and the biography), Ossie Enekwe’s contributions to Nigerian literature as a literary/dramatic critic rank among the most seminal.

This is where and why the citation on him in The Companion to African Literatures (2000) by Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe, a bibliographical guide on African Literature bears a fundamental flaw.

Killam and Rowe barely mention anything about Enekwe’s impact as a scholar and critic of African literature, sparsely describing him as “Nigerian poet, fiction writer, and playwright” (93). But we know that no serious minded student of Nigerian literature, especially in the dramatic bias can afford to dispense with Enekwe’s fundamental permutations, and programmatic significance as a scholar to the Nigerian literary establishment. Enekwe could therefore afford to say of himself in an interview he granted this writer:

A good number of my scholarly works are considered by many active scholars as ground-breaking, or trail-blazing, because they counter obsolete theories that negate the true nature of products of human creativity, and redirect and reposition scholars who are amenable to reorientation1

It is very instructive to note at this point that Enekwe’s scholarship and criticism hinge greatly on the enduring need to join the important, constructive and decisive conversations that are happening in the literary firmament, whose significance to the growth and development of the national literature cannot be over-emphasized.

Enekwe is therefore not particularly excited with the trend of writing papers that have no further objectives than to qualify the writer for academic promotions and this account for the relatedness of almost all his major papers. In the regard of contributing statements to literary debates that have the potentials to adjust the complexion of the discipline, Enekwe shares something really special with Professor Michael J.C. Echeruo, a foremost African literary scholar and his former teacher at Nsukka. Echeruo has the following to say about his own intellectual peregrinations which now has a five-star world acclaim:

The job of the scholar is from this point of view, quite simple. It is to join an ongoing conversation (or else initiate one) about literature and the business of literature and to document that process. I join in the conversation when I think I have something to say that makes a difference and moves the conversation along. I initiate one when there’s a still unresolved issue worth exploring and documenting2

Like his former teacher, Enekwe can hardly be found among those scholars who throw in desperate papers on different, unrelated and disconnected issues to make unconvincing points about their standing in the league of intellectuals and caring little about the need to properly define the inspiration and driving force of their enterprise. Thus, the imperious Isidore Okpewho may have also had the likes of Enekwe in mind when he says about Echeruo:

Echeruo, in particular, is inclined to examine various sides of an issue and come out with just as many books [or essays], and do so with such thoroughness that there is very little left to say on the issue (“The Dignity”, 185)

The major conversation which has shaped Enekwe’s profile as a scholar-critic revolves around the somewhat sacrosanct need to establish and sustain the integrity of the authentic ‘Africanness’ in all African literary and culture activity. Enekwe pursues this detail with the commitment and passion that has seen more than ninety percent of his scholarly output arguing from different related perspectives, about the validity of the African cultural heritage as a formidable undercurrent to the continent’s literary and artistic consciousness. And in no other genre of literature has Enekwe demonstrated this scholarly/conversational resilience as he has in drama, his major constituency, so to speak at least as far as in intellection goes.

Onuora Ossie Enekwe is often refered to as one of the most visible members of the Relativist School of Nigerian drama, “who perceives a complex fusion of various distinctive happenings and phenomena” and for whom “festival, or ritual or celebration is both drama and theater” (Uka, Creation and Creativity 21). In other words, Enekwe’s conviction of the “need to broaden the definition of theatre perspectives in a way to accommodate the theatre experience of different parts of the world in their ethnological distinctiveness and world-view, moral order and levels of social implication” (Uka Creation and Creativity 22) has formed the dominant vision of his critical and scholarly enterprise, and recommended him quite early in his career as a dramatic/intellectual voice worth listening to.

With his seminal book Igbo Masks: The Oneness of Ritual and Theatre (1987) and his several highly fundamental papers – “Modern Nigerian Theatre: What Tradition? (1978), “Myth, Ritual and Drama in Igboland” (1981), “Structure in the Modern Nigerian Theatre” (1985), “Theatre in Nigeria: The Modern vs The Traditional” (1976) etc, Enekwe has been able to form a formidable intellectual camaraderie with the likes of the inimitable Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan and Oyin Ogunba fellow Relativist to trade tackles with the Evolutionists, Refrentialists, and Alienistics over the essential background anatomy of Nigerian drama.

Ossie Enekwe would in these highly strategic scholarly papers endorse both Wole Soyinka’s and Oyin Ogunba’s statements about the authenticity of African festival and ritual performances as drama. For Soyinka in Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), the supposed dividing line between ritual and theatre should not concern us much in Africa, the line itself being one that was largely drawn by the European analyst (7). Oyin Ogunba in an equally well-articulated argument concludes thus:

We may then find that in its conception, articulation and artistic development, the African festival performs the same function and evokes a similar response to what literate drama does in the western tradition (“Festival Drama” 25)

In “Modern Nigerian Theatre: What Tradition? Enekwe takes the modern Nigerian theatre establishment as manifested in the several efforts of University departments of Theatre Arts and their early products to task on the grounds that they have not been ‘nourished’ by the indigenous culture” (“Modern” 28). Enekwe traces the roots of this fundamental sour point of Nigerian dramaturgy to the University of Ibadan, where Englishman Geoffrey Asworthy ran the English Department in the early 1960s:

It was mainly in this institution that the dominant European impulse, which has led modern Nigerian theatre groups into a blind alley, was nurtured and sustained. Student theatre groups eventually became a common feature in other Nigerian higher institutions (“Modern” 26).

In this essay, Enekwe’s disdain for what has come to be known as ‘Modern Nigerian Theatre” is not hidden. To arrive at the conclusion that the modern drama has not really made the required impact, he juxtaposes it against the Yoruba Operatic Theatre – a form according to him, that is “ nourished in the rituals of the people” (29), and popularized by Hubert Ogunde and Duro Ladipo. For Enekwe, “The fruitfulness of growth based on indigenous forms has been demonstrated by performers in the Yoruba Operatic Theatre” (28).

If it is somewhat curious that this heated conversation about dramatic backgrounds and identities of African traditional performances pitches Enekwe against some of his most influential former teachers and mentors, the effrontery of his logic is to say the least, incredible. “In Modern Nigerian Theatre: What Tradition?” Enekwe rejects the thesis of both the self-professed evolutionist, Kalu Uka and the evolution- referentialist, M.J.C. Echeruo. Enekwe in this essay categorically refutes Uka’s standpoint about the non-existence of the concept of traditional theatre. According to Enekwe, “Uka is unequivocally against the notion of a Nigerian traditional drama “because it is not textual” (31). Enekwe, obviously at his incisive best, against the above background, further argues:

However it is clear that this statement is arbitrary. We know of the commedia dell’arte which was based, not on written texts, but on improvisation. The twentieth century also provides examples of drama without text-Max Reinhardt’s staging of Sumurum a mime drama based on the tales of the Arabian Nights in New York (1912). Besides several Asian dramatic forms are not based on written text (“Modern Nigerian Theatre” 26).

With the above permutation, Enekwe dismisses the opinion held by Uka and the other evolutionists about the tendency to distinguish between “untextualized African dramatic genres deriving from indigenous oral performances, whether religious or secular, on the hand, and textualized African plays, written in foreign (European) languages or in indigenous African languages, on the other hand” (Ebeogu 3).

M.J.C. Echeruo’s celebrated but controversial Research in African Literatures essay “The Dramatic Limits of Igbo Ritual” (1973) in which the famous scholars asserts that ritual and myth posseses authentic dramatic promise and resources, but “would first of all be shorn of their coagulating sacredness and rendered sufficiently mobile for use in a secular drama built on the destiny of differentiated, individual characters” (Obiechina, “Tradition and Modern” 28), is at the centre of Enekwe’s disagreement with him. Though admitting to the many merits of “The Dramatic Limits…” “which he says sums up to a good aesthetic basis for a research into Igbo traditional theatre” (“Modern” 31), Enekwe, faults Echeruo’s treatise by taking exception to the latters “interest in myth-criticism which assumes that myth or story is the essence of drama.