Kemi Atanda Ilori

soon to be thrust into the arms of fate by their inimical distrust of each other and their mother Tibo’s partisan support for the younger, itinerant, urbanised but social failure, Kari. Kari suspects Tibo is a witch and the evidence is his failure to rise in life, despite his efforts in the bustling commercial capital of the British protectorate, Lagos. Kari violently assaults Tibo, Ojoboro arrives in time to rescue Tito and in the process flings Kari on the floor, killing him instantly.

However, unlike in the pre- sequels, Bikoroa is a much more aloof society, the community has become a bystander to the acts of the individual either as an appropriator of wealth or as a transgressor of communal norms. The kind of upswelling of communal fervour to prevent personal tragedies or pacify the gods to ward off the curse on the family and the clan noticeable in The Boat and The Return Home has been mothballed by, conceivably, the influence of modernity on Bikoroa. Recognising their failure to prevent or pacify, the community yields their ground to the family who mutely takes responsibility for finding a new consensus. Tibo leaves Bikoroa, returns to her own clan and, instead of a ritual to appease the gods, the community levies a token fine and a sense of community cohesion returns. THE IRENIC CLARK – A Tribute by Kemi Atanda ILORI Page 3 of 4 Arguably, as in The Boat and The Return Home, the most important outcome that Bikoroans desire is a kind of restorative justice which allows offenders to be restored to their family and clan, and salves the conscience of the community as a bulwark against reckless behaviour as well as a refuge for the disadvantaged. Although there is conflict and it can lead to tragic consequences, relations between the citizens of Bikoroa are conducted within a set of norms that privileges consensus above dissension, and communal harmony above the disharmony of feuding family members.

Accordingly, in The Bikoroa Plays, society is recreated as a series of intersecting conflicts in which the watershed is the calcifying of the instinct for a consensus rather than an all- out conflagration. Perhaps, this is why in my view, mega texts are absent in The Bikoroa Plays, leaving Clark’s theatre entirely integrative and assertive in its aesthetics and political vision. The radical function that shows in an irreducibly counteractional relationship between groups and persons is largely muted into an instinct that rallies the family and the clan into one hegemony. Continued on Opinion page tomorrow.

Ilori, former lecturer at Obafemi Awolowo University Ile- Ife, is the publisher and Editor in Chief at the Universal Books, U. K.