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By Toyin Akinosho
Rasheed Gbadamosi’s Behold My Redeemer, written in 1970, first performed in London in 1973 and published by the Oxford University Press in 1978, is largely set in an asylum compound.
This play on the drama of mental health, which I first saw at the National Theatre in Lagos in 1986, is a fictional take on the radical psychiatric experiment that Thomas Adeoye Lambo conducted as the specialist in charge at the (then) newly built Aro psychiatric hospital, in Abeokuta.
The playwright’s Trees Grow in The Desert, written long before it was published in 1991, explores the collective angst of the country’s youth, which helped propel the first military coup in the early to mid -1960s.
These two plays are full length, fleshy narratives with clearly defined thematic concerns and thought-out plot strategies. The characters are animating, if highly opinionated.
So, why do critics see only the ‘class question’ in Gbadamosi’s plays?
Why do some argue that there are no complex layers of thought, no experiment with form?
Why would anyone suggest that Rasheed Gbadamosi employed, in his plays, ‘a language register which is simple and lucid, but invariably undifferentiated’?
It is probably because the most widely publicized observations of Gbadamosi’s plays are about The Mansion; Greener Grass and Sing the Old Song for Me, all short pieces published in a collection titled: Three Plays, which seem to have travelled much farther in the popular imagination than any of his other drama texts, published or not.
Comparing these three short plays with works like Behold My Redeemer and Trees Grow in The Desert, one is tempted to recall Graham Greene’s differentiation of his own works. The British novelist often referred to some of his books as ‘Entertainments’; separating works that he considered serious art, from those in which he was out to have fun. The ‘entertainments’, were relatively unweighty, subject-wise although, as Greene’s stature grew, critics began to find the distinction problematic. If we stretch the argument to Soyinka’s material, then a difference of that kind would be between, say, his Jero’s Metamorphosis (entertainment) and Madmen and Specialists (serious art), but it’s unlikely that the Nobel Laureate would appreciate a classification of his works along these lines.
Whereas Gbadamosi paid detailed attention to historical context, movement, mood, scene setting, overall atmospherics, even specific choices of music, in Trees Grow in The Desert and Behold My Redeemer, he dispensed with the rigour of theatrical arrangement in the texts of the Three Plays. He handed over a blank cheque to whoever is the director.
All through the proceedings at the symposium, the only references to Gbadamosi as a playwright was a passing mention by Mufu Onifade, the moderator (himself a playwright and painter) and by Yemisi Shyllon, the Keynoter whose opening statement sought to establish Gbadamosi as a man of many parts.
Yet Rasheed Gbadamosi as a playwright deserves more careful study than some random reference in some random occasion, however well intended the reference.
Which is not to say that the issues treated in Three Plays are readily dismissible. They all speak to human frailty, a persistent subject in the author’s arguments with the world. On the surface, The Mansion is about the struggle between old Lagos money and the new country growing around it, but it is also about loneliness, about the ‘politics’ of finding life-long companionships and is peopled by lives in transition. The events are situated in a country moving from colonialism to independence. Mother doesn’t want Lola to marry Akin, an ambitious, hard-working lawyer whose upbringing she ranks beneath the family status of the Turtons. But before she passes on, Akin has “proven her right” by showing Lola he couldn’t keep to one woman. Lola slams the door on the relationship and grows into middle age, unmarried; a high-profile society lady who is everyone’s choice of a Godmother and the default chairperson at Charity Bazaars. Her close friend Titi has two children. And Agnes, an old acquaintance married to a diplomat with whom she moves constantly from one far-flung country to another, is desperately thinking of a divorce. Meanwhile, Akin has built his own mansion right by the creek. One particular scene is hard to ignore: Seven years after they’ve separated, in a sort of reunion over drinks at Lola’s place, Akin, firmly married and settled, still makes a valiant attempt at romancing his old love. The way it plays out in Gbadamosi’s drama, Akin wasn’t going to re-commit to Lola and separate from his Madam at home. He just wanted to take advantage.
IT IS ALSO HARD to resist the temptation to compare Lola in The Mansion, with Ranti in Sing the Old Song for Me. In the course of a conversation in a beach chalet on a rainy afternoon, Ranti frames spinsterhood quite uniquely:
Zak: You strike me as being lonely
Ranti: Well, in the ordinary sense, yes. But aloneness has its positive dimension. Don’t you feel you oftentimes want to be alone? Aloneness is liberation at times, freedom to contemplate and enjoy a piece of human creativity, to mediate, to reflect…
Zak: Any man friend?
Ranti: Not particularly.
ZAK: Don’t you feel lonely?
Ranti: Now, that’s a rather different concept. Yes, there are nights and even days I feel some need for company. But then I can momentarily switch to something else, like reading a book or listening to a piece of music
We soon find out that Ranti was once very much involved in a trial marriage in which they both vowed they would be “tolerant of each other’s temptations and strays, provided that whenever we were reunited, we would tell all.” In the event, the man could not keep the promise.
But Sing the Old Song for Me is not a one-track play, not as the simple beach scene, a sudden down pour, two strangers finding their way into a chalet and a lengthy conversation afterwards, would suggest. It is in the memory flood from that conversation that the author provides us glimpses of the society he wants to portray: Zak was a ‘habitue of the Cassuarina Grove’; Jaguars were popular motor cars in Lagos in those days; and there’s a textual portrait of ‘a car speeding on the Carter bridge along the Marina, the lights of boats in the harbour twinkling and assaulting the pitch darkness’. Ranti’s father died early and her Uncle squandered the cash assets of the estate and afterwards ran so much credit his own house went under the hammer and then he used the trustee’s powers to lead her father’s landed property to a bank, whose glass and concrete structure “now occupies what was once a fountain of childhood memories”. Ranti was, of course too young to put up a fight. “My teenage years consisted of a whistle stop tour of several language schools overseas, pretending to assume the title of the most fluent Nigerian in half a dozen European Languages. It didn’t work”.. She settled for a bilingual secretary course.
…
GREENER GRASS is the most mysterious drama in Three Plays. It takes place entirely in a jungle and features two people; a journalist and a homicide suspect, running away from the police. The reason for their escape unspools in the often-hyper charged conversation they have on the run. In the heat of an argument, Nekan, the (Male) suspect, grabs Toju the younger (Female) reporter and throws her down river. She is rescued by the Police, but as if she had a death wish, she runs away from the officers, and finds her way back to Nekan who, after a few more arguments, attempts now to strangle her.
RASHEED GBADAMOSI DID NOT INSIST ON BEING SEEN as a mainstream writer, as such. Unlike Saro-Wiwa, who had similar adventures in public service in his 20s (and went on writing and making money), Gbadamosi didn’t join the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) or try to lead from the front and dabble in politics. But Mr. Gbadamosi was a busy scribe in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, writing short stories, and plays for radio and theatre, many of which are either out of print or not published at all.
A widely acknowledged Nigerian public figure, and passionate connoisseur of Nigerian art, Gbadamosi never received the media attention for his role as a dramatist, at least not one anywhere comparable with those of his peers; the post Soyinka generation of Nigerian writers who emerged around the end of the Nigerian civil war.
A scion of wealthy family of merchants, he created his own personality separate from the family brand. He caught national attention when, in 1972, he was appointed the Lagos State Commissioner for Economic Planning at the age of 29. Twenty years later, he was the Federal Minister of National Planning.
While he had varied and extensive experience in working on policies for government, his media persona, at a certain time in Nigeria’s 61+ years of post-independence history, was that of the one who broke down economic jargon to the so-called man on the street.
From the late 1970s through much of the 1980s, he was the defacto public analyst of the national budget, which, unfailingly, was broadcast on National Television by the military head of state every first day of the new year. For several years during this period, every January 1 edition of the Daily Times, the country’s then newspaper of record, featured two to three pages, of rigorous evaluation of the budget by Rasheed Gbadamosi.
My sense is that he would have been widely noticed as a creative writer if he was in academia, even if his daytime duty was to teach Economics.
Instead, he was often described in the press as an economist, businessman and a policy wonk who was always present in the corridors of power, and latterly a major patron of the arts.
The last bit of description, he took quite seriously, seeking always to create a community of shared interest between artists, intellectuals and the business elite.
He always wanted culture producers to “be in the faces” of corporate overlords.
Gbadamosi’s 50th birthday, in 1994, was celebrated with a performance of Behold My Redeemer, (a play he seemed to cherish the most), directed by the respected playwright and director Ola Rotimi, at the auditorium of the Nigerian Law School on Victoria Island, after which the audience, a varied mix of chubby faced ‘captains of industry’, journalists, university teachers, visual artists, actors, and ranking public servants, were feted to lavish dinner on the open lawns of the campus.
As he journeyed into his mid-sixties, Gbadamosi sought to formalize that sort of inclusive parley through the special easter Holiday exhibition- lecture-lunch he hosted annually at the Grillo Pavilion, a facility he built in his hometown of Ikorodu, in the north of Lagos.
This expanded soiree was working itself to becoming an annual pilgrimage for the art house crowd when he passed on in November 17, 2016.
NOW, IT IS CLOSE TO SIX YEARS SINCE GBADAMOSI’S DEATH AND BY SOME STRANGE COINCIDENCE, an arthouse symposium honouring some of the country’s recently deceased, distinguished art collectors, featured as an event in the overall programme of the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) on November 16, 2021, right on the fifth anniversary. Titled State of the Collectors Vault, the event was co-organised by the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA).
Fried bean cakes, a traditional Yoruba delicacy commemorating such anniversaries, were shared by the Gbadamosi Family, as the guests milled on the lawns of the Freedom Park after the Symposium, watching performance art: Mokoo Moro (Nomadic Performance) by Jelili Atiku and Atupa (Lamplight) by Yusuf Durodola.
But all through the proceedings earlier at the symposium, in that crowded room filled with visual artists, regular LABAF festival attendees, and members of the families of the honoured art collectors: Sammy Olagbaju, Abdulaziz Ude, Frank Okonta and Gbadamosi, the only references to Gbadamosi as a playwright were a passing mention by Mufu Onifade, the moderator (himself a playwright and painter) and by Yemisi Shyllon, the Keynoter whose opening statement sought to establish Gbadamosi as a man of many vocations and careers.
Yet Rasheed Gbadamosi as a playwright deserves more careful study than some random reference in some random occasion, however well intended the reference.
His Trees Grow in The Desert is located at an inflection point in the country’s history, a fork-in-the road-kind of period like the one we are now.
The Iginlas are experiencing a tumult in their close-knit family, like many households in the sixth year of Nigeria’s independence from Britain. The story can be gleaned from the angry outburst from Lakunle, the 24-year-old army lieutenant:
LAKUNLE: (Unmoved, his thoughts running around his home, family and the country.) You see, my father walked out on his grandfather to follow the course of a dream he had. By the time he was forty-five, he was the richest man around here. It was a race in his own time; they had youthful drive. Of course, they had to impress the Empire people that they deserved and wanted our country back. And when they got the old parcel, they did not open it with care, and so it blew in their faces. Now is the turn of my generation. (Pause.) It is astounding, sitting at home, talking about Lekan when all I really wanted to do was to shout at my father and accuse him of ruining his own son. Lekan had a rough deal; my father pushed him too far, faster than his own pace and now, poor brother, he is neurotic.
Trees features four main characters and several extras. Chief Iginla was a big businessman who secured his stream of contracts for military supplies with mere 30 second phone calls. But in the moment frozen in time for the purpose of this play, he can’t even be dignified with a polite response from the telephone operator at the Supreme Headquarters, as the highest office of the ruling military junta used to be called.
Lalekan, the elder of Chief Iginla’s two sons, trained abroad in expensive schools, has returned home doing nothing better than locking himself upstairs, in the view of his parents.
Lakunle, the family’s hero boy, as Mrs. Iginla describes him, is a lieutenant in the Army. His father is proud of him, but he is the one who breaks the news, with neither sympathy nor empathy, that the Chief has been earmarked for jail. Lakunle belongs to the Secret Revolutionary Army Corps. Out of his father’s earshot, he confides this much to his brother: “Yes, he is appearing before the tribunal. He has been on our list even before the revolution!”
Trees Grow in The Desert, was the play that announced Gbadamosi the world as a playwright. That this introduction happened in a very dramatic way, has become part of the folklore.
As the newspaper columnist Owei Lakemfa narrates in an insightful obituary piece in Vanguard in November 2016, “the play had been successfully delivered on stage several times and there had been glowing tributes about it. Then Edward Fiberesima thought it should be adapted for radio. There was a scene about an army mutiny in which the Head of the Armed Forces and the Chief of Staff were kidnapped. On stage, it was an innocuous scene. But that hot afternoon in Lagos when the play was on the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), it sounded real; that a coup was on. The authorities did not wait to hear the rest of the production which would have made them realize that it was just a play. He was arrested when he came out of hiding and thrown into the high security Kirikiri Prison”.
In the end we witness Chief Iginla crumble from high society figure to a fraud suspect handcuffed by agents of the new military regime; but as we all now know, the politics of the country never evolved into a tidy ‘we versus them’. Several members of Lakunle’s Secret Revolutionary Army Corps are mowed down with bullet fire from counter forces whose raison detre is not clear in the play and Lakunle himself, hoping to help his father escape, apparently goes down with him.
If anyone is looking for comparisons between Fadeke, Lakunle’s presumed Fiancée in Trees Grow in The Desert with Lola in The Mansion and Ranti in Sing the Old Song for Me, here’s a clue from the scene of Lakunle and Fadeke’s breakup:
FADEKE: No, you can’t mean that. You can’t really be saying you’re breaking it up. After all these years.
LAKUNLE: Two years! And they have meant different things for you and me. For you, it’s been a round of glamorous adventures in Brussels, with your father in the diplomatic world. Remember those postcards you sent to me every day from Montreux when you were skiing and all about how lovely it was to get away from that French Language School (He turns to take a few steps to the corner). We’re having it so bad here: riots, strife, graft and violent decline into anarchy. The New Year’s Eve uprising here shed more blood than all the stands the Yoruba Afonjas made at Oyo Ile. My father contributed his share o the chaos. But the subject is taboo in the family. We don’t talk about the essential things. We just turn on Lalekan and he turns to poetry. But now in the dark tunnel there’s a tiny spot of light, and I see the new regime pulling us through. Now I go into the barracks and we’re going to turn this land upside down. Try and understand, Fadeke. You’ve got no part in this.
So there. In the tumult of the first six years of Nigeria’s independence, another young lady is thrown out of a relationship into aloneness. But of course, Lakunle’s speech is a succinct summary of what the play is about. The playwright just can’t help himself borrowing from his various texts.
For me, the saddest, even if it is the most ambitious, most multifaceted and most multilayered, of all the Gbadamosi plays available in the public domain, is Behold My Redeemer.
Shiju, the mental health patient and protagonist of the play, blames herself in the end. But she had been let down by everybody; by her father who lied to her about who her mother was; by his mistress who moved into her father’s bed right after her mother’s death; by the man she dated and whose lifestyle she funded while a trainee nurse in the UK; by Professor Ilori who proposed their sojourn in idyllic place where they could turn a new leaf; by Pastor, who took advantage of her loneliness; by Alao, the uncouth village drunk who saw in her only flesh. It is instructive however that Shiju herself keeps coming across as a nymphomaniac; grabbing at the Psychiatrist at first sight, wanting to ‘take’ the palmwine seller.
Shiju’s case is the prism through which the playwright explores the mechanics of the psychiatric experiment that Lambo initiated at Aro; an Africa-culture centric institution proposing indigenous response to Sigmund Freud’s globally accepted, Vienna sourced, western theories of psychoanalysis. Gbadamosi used Behold to highlight a multitude of issues: the South African Sharpeville massacre of the mid 1960s; the twin possibilities of petroleum exploration and allure of tourism development in Badagry; and the shenanigans of Pastors. This is a 1970 play with a robust take on the lies and deceits of so-called men of God. It would seem that, 10 years after Soyinka’s premiere staging of The Trials of Brother Jero, the idea of the “Unethical Pastor” had, at the time of writing of this play 52 years ago, become a staple of Nigerian literature.
RASHEED GBADAMOSI DID NOT INSIST ON BEING SEEN as a mainstream writer, as such. Unlike Saro-Wiwa, who had similar adventures in public service in his 20s (and went on writing and making money), Gbadamosi didn’t join the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) or try to lead from the front and dabble in politics. But Mr. Gbadamosi was a busy scribe in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, writing short stories, and plays for radio and theatre, many of which are either out of print or not published at all.
One recurring idea in Gbadamosi’s plays is the notion that the female folk is unrelentingly a victim of male machinations. And that while women often need men to complete them, men can be just fine without women.
When Behold ends, Shiju had just been raped by Alao, a man she considered no better than a dog and who she desperately tried to avoid. But if we consider drama pieces as some form of reportage, we can assume that the playwright’s coverage tilts more towards the male sensibility in the game of gender balancing.
Critics who say that the Rasheed Gbadamosi’s characters are undifferentiated and his plays are largely explorations of the class divide, haven’t taken enough time to study him. He was a story teller focused on Lagos, yes, but the city is used as a vantage point to engage with the world.
In merely reading through a few of his material, even for routine journalese as this effort, it is clear that the complexity of Gbadamosi’s dramas hides in plain sight. It is also clear that this author has a larger place in the sun of Nigerian drama than has been widely acknowledged.
