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Memory and the Theatre of Resistance
Some historical figures are so firmly embedded in national memory that bringing them to the stage is almost an act of confrontation.
Herbert Macaulay’s name carries the weight of political history, colonial resistance, education, landed property and the early struggle over what Nigeria should become.
He is so etched and pertinent in history to have been endowed with the title of “Father of Nigerian Nationalism”
For a playwright, however, the challenge is not simply to recount the life of such a figure. It is to take a man already reduced by history to dates, achievements and familiar descriptions, and return him to the uncertainty of human conflict. Theatre must make the past breathe. It must turn historical events into living confrontations, political ideas into voices, and a celebrated figure into a character whom an audience can actually question.
“We are not asking the play to “humanize” colonial oppression, but it could make its colonial oppressors more vividly portrayed, and Macaulay more of a realistic than an idolized man.”
Both the writer and the director of ‘EJO’NGBORO‘, staged at the Muson Centre on September 17 & 18, largely understand that responsibility.
They present Macaulay not merely as a name from Nigeria’s political past, but as a man caught in the battles of his time—over land, education, dignity, power and the right to shape the future of a people with a great sense of accountability.
The play opens aesthetically scintillating; traditional Yoruba singing and chanting, to usher us into the world before Macaulay’s political arguments come to the fore. The unsettling questions about ownership are immediately put in a cultural context by the indigenous soundscape. There is a people, there is a city and there is a memory before colonial officials begin to make documents as well as issue proclamations. The history of the play is therefore not a narrative that starts with the British; the British enter into a history that is already in progress; a land that is already owned by a people. Macaulay is vividly portrayed not as the nationalist remembered in the annals of Nigerian history, but as the son of Thomas Macaulay and the grandson of Bishop Crowther, who were both undaunted intellectual and religious figures. Snippets into his family life further show that he is after all a human, too, first with his personal challenges but who subsequently must now make sacrifices to carry out a bigger burden with national significance. Macaulay’s declaration that it is the engineer who constructs a city carries more than the literal expectation; it is the first of a series of major metaphors in the play. Throughout his life, Macaulay will ask what it means to create a city, a society, and finally a nation. Thus, his father’s candid statement that education without character amounts to abomination is a foreshadowing to what would become the tenets of Macaulay’s empathisation and doggedness .
The question of what kind of man Macaulay becomes is given substance when he returns from Britain and enters the public works service. One of the play’s most effective ways of building his character is through the discrimination he encounters there. A European junior colleague is promoted above him repeatedly. This instance is a sharp testament to white supremacy and the favouritism that exists in a place where fairness ought to be the metrical measure for promotion. By the time Macaulay is finally considered for a better working condition, he has chosen to detach himself from such institution that only acts as a cankerworm. He resists all the offers to make him stay. This resistance finds its clearest expression in the play’s most memorable image: Macaulay’s assertion that a free man, with a compass, can measure his own destiny. The line works because the compass is not an arbitrary metaphor. It belongs to Macaulay’s profession as a surveyor, while also anticipating the political direction his life will take. The compass becomes an emblem of self-determination—a tool through which a man trained to measure the physical world begins to question who has the authority to define his place within it. It is one of those theatrical ideas that carry more weight as an object than it would as an explanation; the compass almost becomes another voice in the play.
When Macaulay’s authority to represent the affected people is questioned in court on the grounds that he is not a lawyer, the production finds a more interesting answer than simply defending his qualifications. Macaulay knows the land. He surveyed it. He knows its boundaries, its families and the communities whose histories existed there before the British, the Crown’s, claim. His expertise, therefore, becomes evident. The very profession through which the colonial system taught him to measure and document land gives him the knowledge with which to interrogate the system’s claim to possess it. This is arguably where the play is at its peak of wit. Macaulay does not challenge the colonial argument by pretending that the law does not exist. Instead, he turns the language of the law back upon itself and asks what the law has chosen not to see. Who owned this land before the Crown? The simplicity of the question is precisely what gives it force. It does not require an elaborate ideological argument. It exposes the historical absence beneath the legal claim. If the Crown can establish ownership through documents and proclamations, what happens to the people whose relationship with the land predates those documents? The political argument suddenly becomes human and immediate: before land became a legal category, it was already someone’s home.
Again, the story of the roughly 200 Lagos families displaced from their homes gives that argument its necessary humanistic feel. This matters because land disputes can become dangerously abstract on stage. Documents do not bleed; proclamations do not sleep under roofs; legal titles do not watch their homes disappear. People do. By placing displaced families behind the legal dispute, the play prevents the conflict from becoming merely a contest between Macaulay and a colonial official. The real stakes are not simply who wins an argument in court, but what happens to people when a system changes the legal meaning of the ground beneath their feet. Behind the documents are houses, families and lives being reordered by an authority they did not create.
Yet it is within these very scenes that one of the play’s central weaknesses begins to show. Macaulay is so consistently given the strongest argument, the sharpest question, the historical evidence and the final declaration that he sometimes ceases to feel like a man discovering himself through conflict and begins to feel like a man the play has already decided must always be right. His opponents are frequently positioned to be defeated rather than to genuinely challenge him. The effect is admirable in one sense—Macaulay emerges as intellectually formidable—but dramatically limiting in another. A character who always possesses the answer leaves little room for uncertainty, contradiction or failure. The play is most compelling when Macaulay is forced to discover what his knowledge means; it is less dramatic and convincing when it simply confirms what the audience has already been told about his greatness. The paradox is that the more the production protects Macaulay from losing an argument, the less opportunity it gives him to become fully human. A man who has nothing to lose can win every debate and still lose some of his dramatic complexity.
Without any iota of doubt, the opposite is true for the colonial officials. They tend to be written basically as tools of opposition. They are very condescending and very entitled, but their characterisation is relatively weak in the play, too. They question Macaulay, forcing him to reply, they are the wall upon which his rhetoric can fall. The outcome is a politically obvious, but far from simple, situation. We are not asking the play to “humanize” colonial oppression, but it could make its colonial oppressors more vividly portrayed, and Macaulay more of a realistic than an idolized man. The historical development following the land dispute widens the scope of the play. The Eleko struggle, the pressure exerted on the traditional ruler, the eventual Privy Council case and the 1931 decision shift the focus from the individual to the collective. But now, Macaulay is not just fighting for his own dignity. It enters into broader debates regarding representation and the right to be represented — and the right of a people to decide what governs them.
The change from court to crowd is especially noteworthy. The play recognizes that the law is not enough to bring about political freedom. It thus moves towards organisation, the free press and the formation of the NCNC. The crowd becomes another character – loud, collective and more aware of its own political agency. The focus on the press is also crucial. The play is an allegory of a local newspaper as a tool for revealing injustice and informing citizens of their rights. This is not an arbitrary addition to Macaulay’s story: journalism was an important part of his political practice. His connection with the Lagos Daily News historically put the press on the same level as political organisation and public speaking as tools of nationalist agitation. The play is therefore right in its interpretation of the struggle for political consciousness as a struggle over who would shape the public conversation.
its discussion of education is one of its most intellectually stimulating threads. The British are given credit for giving the people spelling books, Bibles and school education, but the play makes a clear point that the people were not taught how to demand their rights. This is beyond mere assertion of whether education is good or bad. The play acknowledges that education is a two-way street; it can be a means of reproducing a system and can also provide an individual with the intellectual means to challenge that system. Macaulay is typically the embodiment of that contradiction. The colonial educational system is a part of the production of the engineer who is going to challenge colonial authority. His expertise in surveying is helpful in resisting land grabs. His expertise in the law and public affairs is useful in petitions. He has a voice because of his education, but his character is what he does with it. In that respect, the father’s early warning about education and character subtly reappears at the end of the play.
It’s suffice to say here that the most significant imagery posed by the play is the compass imagery. Macaulay starts out as a surveyor. He concludes as a man who is insistent on measuring freedom. In between these two identities is the whole drama – the humiliation of colonial service, the fight over Lagos land, the courtroom drama, the displacement of families, the Eleko drama, the free press, the political movement and the demand that Nigerians stop being spectators when making their own country. The play overall poses a question that is just as relevant to the present day as it was in Macaulay’s time: What’s the point of knowing where you are if someone else knows where you have to go? The solution to Macaulay’s problem is to grab the compass and aim for home.
