Ojaadili: an Igbo folk tragedy - a translation and expansion of Ojaadili by Odunke Artists

In 1974, a Nigerian collective called Odunke Artists staged the play Ojaadili, an interpretation of the Igbo folklore about a wrestler who, after winning bouts in the Lands of Animals and of Spirits, breaks the ultimate philosophical dictum by challenging his chi, his personal god. They published it in Igbo, committing the oral tale to writing for the first time. But among the Igbo, the drama genre never took strong roots, despite them being at the forefront of Anglophone African literary traditions due to their flagship excellence in fiction. In Nigerian literature, drama was dominated by the Yoruba, whose indigenous rituals and comparability to the Greek tragedians lent easily to the requirements of the form. Today, the genre has fallen behind fiction and poetry, in both creative and critical output as well as in infrastructural support.

There may exist English translations of Ojaadili — I have not seen any — but this thesis, titled Ojaadili: An Igbo Folk Tragedy, is the rare formal translation that finetunes the structure to the conventions of contemporary playwrighting. It tweaks and curates the language of the original folktale, expands and complicates its plot and themes, and grants the characters a psychological dynamism that raises them to the heights of those heroes of oral lores.

Developing alongside and later than Nigerian literature has been its cinema and film subcultures, the best known of which is Nollywood, which gained prominence in the 1990s by bringing a world of Igbo metaphysics, masculinity, and stakeholder capitalism to audiences. This thesis, which will continue as a screenplay, bridges these two pillar industries by clarifying and deepening those ideas in a time when they have become cultural lightning rods. Ojaadili: An Igbo Folk Tragedy takes old storytelling resources and refreshes them for the modern reader.