This presentation highlights Post-Indiginist Aesthetics as entailing the following: A departure from an old approach to play writing in which African dramatists expressed their culture by composing in their native language or presenting their indigenous traditions in a foreign language in the spirit of cultural nationalism; and A new approach to play writing in which African dramatists compose in current diction to express African experience or event in a multicultural context, to project a universal lesson. The thinking is that a playwright should be a voice for his time, speaking with the imagery and materials from his time rather than depend on appurtenances from the past to speak to the present.

1. Redeemer's University,
College of Humanities Seminar Series
Post-Indiginist Aesthetics in
Modern African Drama
Isaiah Ilo, Ph.D
Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Theatre Arts

2. Introduction
This paper highlights Post-Indiginist
Aesthetics:
A literary style in which an African dramatist
creates out of engagement with the pressing
reality of his present environment instead of
in response to by-gone colonial experience.

3. Introduction
Post-Indiginist aesthetics represents the
following:
1. A departure from an old approach to play
writing in which African dramatists
expressed their culture by composing in
their native language or presenting their
indigenous traditions in a foreign language
in the spirit of cultural nationalism;

4. Introduction
2. A new approach to play writing in which
African dramatists compose in current
diction to express African experience or
event in a multicultural context, to project
a universal lesson.

5. Linguo Aesthetics
In a paper entitled “Language in Modern
African Drama,” I reconceptualised what
was previously termed "the language
question," "the language problem," "the
language factor," or "the language debate"
as a fledgling field of language aesthetics
in modern African drama.

6. Linguo Aesthetics
With its variants of constructs and proponents
and a body of literature amassed in half a
century of scholarship, the field privileges
the relationship between language and
literature in African writing and starts with
the assumption that language use
constitutes the main aesthetic and critical
standard.

7. Linguo Aesthetics
Out of the field come the three concepts
explaining the conduct of language usage in
African playwriting:

Indiginist Essentialism,

Indiginist Hybridity, and

Post-Indiginist Realism

8. Indiginist Essentialism
According to the major exponents of Indiginist
Essentialism (Frantz Fanon, Obi Wali and
Ngugi wa Thiong'o), African literature must be
written in African language: language is so
loaded culturally and ideologically that its
imposition by colonialism implies mental control
of the colonized and its use by the colonized
practically the same as propagating the worldview of the colonizers.

9. Indiginist Essentialism
In Indiginist Essentialism, the audience of
literature is the underclass users of a local
language; the purpose is to mobilize them for
revolution against neo-colonialism; in the spirit
of cultural essentialism, writers should reject
every linguistic influence of colonialism in
favour of pre-colonial African languages, and
African culture should be purveyed in the
traditional languages as antithesis to
hegemonic western cultural universalism.

10. Indiginist Hybridity
According to the major exponents of Indiginist
Hybridity (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka,
Chinweizu, Abiola Irele, and Kwaku Asante-Darko,
Lewis Nkosi, and many others), African writers can
adapt the Western language to express the native
experience, culture, and world-view: language
consists of neutral grammatical properties that may
be harnessed for cultural and ideological
communication in favour of either domination or
resistance: if the white man has used his language
for domination, Africans can return it for resistance
through literature.

11. Indiginist Hybridity
In Indiginist Hybridity, the audience of literature is
foreign and local elite readership; its purpose is
nationalism; owing to post-colonial hybrid
reality, writers should utilize the linguistic
influence of colonialism blended with precolonial African oral traditions, and African
culture ought to be purveyed in the blend with
foreign language as antithesis to hegemonic
western cultural universalism.

12. Memory of Colonialism
In answering the question: "What should
decide the choice of language for African
literature?" both the essentialist and hybrid
platforms agree that the decider should be
consciousness of the colonial
experience, but disagree about the
stratagem.

13. Memory of Colonialism
The essentialists say the decider of language
for African literature is consciousness of the
colonial experience for which African writers
should reject the dominant colonial
languages in preference for the subjugated
local tongues.

14. Memory of Colonialism
The hybridists agree that consciousness of the
colonial experience should preoccupy
African writers in the use of language, but
believe the right strategy is not to reject but
to subvert the dominant colonial languages.

15. Post-Indiginist Aesthetics
According to the proposition of Post-Indiginist
Realism, in view of the decline of
colonialism, the decider of language for
African literature should be consideration for
target audience and character realism;
language bears the tint of a user's
experience as a medium of subjective
communication; a writer can express self in
any preferred language, and may address
any chosen audience: local or international.

16. Post-Indiginist Aesthetics
In the Post-Indiginist approach, the purpose of
literature is to express any subject matter in
a contemporary mode; in an environment
of cultural diversity, a writer may use any
language on the basis of competence and
communicative criteria; African culture is
not in assertion, in a multicultural context in
which the reign of western cultural
universalism has receded.

17. Post-Indiginist Drama
The paper proceeds with an illustration of
Post-Indiginist Aesthetics, and considers
Ahmed Yerima's Prize -Winning Play, Hard
Ground as a consummate representative of
the emerging style.

18. Post-Indiginist Drama
In 2006, Hard Ground won Nigeria's most
prestigious and Africa's richest literary award
- the Nigeria Prize for Literature.
With the prize, the sponsor - Nigeria LNG,
celebrates and projects the achievements of
the country's best writers.

19. Post-Indiginist Drama
As may be deduced from the report of the
Panel of Judges, the play won essentially
due to its Post-indiginst style.
After examining 77 play entries, the panel
observed a general trend among the writers
“to go back to African traditional cultures in
search of solutions to modern social
problems.”

20. Post-Indiginist Drama
The panel noted that some writers seem to
assume that patronizing African traditional
cultures inevitably means digging up forms
of traditional worship with all its rituals
and paraphernalia. “When some of the
playwrights address contemporary
problems,” the report said, “they attempt to
solve such problems by going back to
traditional roots.”

21. Post-Indiginist Drama
The judges hailed Hard Ground as “writing of
high thematic value, and of national and
international relevance as it affects not only
the nation’s deep concern with the current
crises in the Niger Delta, but also Nigeria’s
international image.”

22. Post-Indiginist Drama
Again, in the 2010 edition of the NLNG
competition, the panel further endorsed
the style, as Ahmed Yerima's Little Drops
and Adinoyi Ojo Onukaba's The Killing
Swamps, both of which were written in the
Post-indiginist style and equally addressed
new perspectives of the current Niger Delta
crisis, were finalists.

23. Post-Indiginist Drama
The play mirrors an existing social problem the Niger Delta crisis; the dramatis-personae
are typical characters from the region; the
setting is equally an existing one – the Niger
Delta territory, which was the site of the
crisis; and the diction of the play consists of
words actually used in the crisis.

24. Post-Indiginist Drama
Hard Ground addresses an urgent social
problem directly, by examining the dynamics
of a crises that had become a major
headache. The situation, as the play
reveals, is a result of the greed, doubledealing and rivalry of the elite of Niger Delta,
which sees them sending the boys against
their opponents, and the boys themselves
eventually growing up in virulence and
consuming even their sponsors.

25. Post-Indiginist Drama
The so-called struggle for resource control has
metamorphosed into a behemoth consuming
the people it sought to help.
By looking at the sore Niger Delta problem
and discussing it, the play itself was an
important contribution toward dialogue,
peace building and conflict resolution. Its
message was driven home: A hater might
make a victim of his object, but he equally
ends up a victim of his hate.

26. Post-Indiginist Drama
In seeking social equilibrium in the Niger
Delta, the play aired the grievances of the
people, but at the same time denounced the
excesses in how the agitation was
conducted.
Perhaps, the play, whose stage performance
toured the nine states of the Delta, helped in
getting the people prepared to eventually
accept the amnesty proposal of the Federal
Government.

27. Post-Indiginist Drama
The approach may be contrasted from Ola
Rotimi's style in The Gods are Not to to
Blame (1968), an adaptation of a Greek
tragedy, Oedipus Rex, which the playwright
explained as an allegory of the Nigerian Civil
War of 1966 – 1970.

28. Post-Indiginist Drama
In the play, incensed Odewale kills Adetusa,
an elderly stranger who spat on his
supposed tribe during a brawl on his farm.
Later he discovers that the man was his
father and the woman he subsequently
married was wife to the man and his own
mother.

29. Post-Indiginist Drama
The play features Yoruba chants, incantations,
charms, proverbs and choral singing with
drumming. The deities are invoked.
However, without the disclosure by the
playwright, about the play being a metaphor
of the Biafran War, it is difficult to associate
the play with that event.

30. Post-Indiginist Drama
Yerima too has written many such cultureasserting plays. But, it is noteworthy that of
all his many plays, Hard Ground which is
post-indiginist is so far the most popular.
In Hard Ground, the playwright addressed a
contemporary problem using contemporary
characters, setting and diction.

31. Post-Indiginist Drama
He did not have to rely on myth, ritual,
legend, or history; nor use characters,
setting or diction from the past allegorically
to address a contemporary social problem.
The lesson from Hard Ground and the PostIndiginist approach is that a playwright
should be a voice for his time, speaking
with the imagery and materials from his time
rather than depend on appurtenances from
the past to speak to the present.