A PAST REVISITED…
Obele and the Storyteller, I guess that was the play’s title. Actually, the programme said it was a dance drama. Perhaps, that was because of the flow of the production was interspersed with choreographed dances. Kudos, by the way, to the production team: Beeta Universal Arts Foundation. To think that the play was staged under one of the most uncomfortable conditions: the closing ceremony of UNESCO Port Harcourt World Book Capital 2014 at the Atlantic Hall of Hotel Presidential on Friday, May 8. Written by Oladipo Agboluaje, it was directed by Israel Eboh.
The play’s narrative revolves around an attempt to counter the negative Western perception of Africa with the true African story.
The tale soon took an interesting twist, veering towards a profiling of the African. The latter was depicted as one who would sacrifice common sense and sense of propriety for commercial gains, selling his own kindred as slaves to the white man. This became fodder for Obele’s book.
But rather than uphold the values that the oral tale spells out, a corrupted version is woven to make Obele a liar. Armed with this twisted tale that is differs with Obele’s, the white man arrived just after the Berlin Conference of 1884 where the European powers had partitioned the continent among themselves, drawing arbitrary boundaries to separate people that once lived as one.
To justify their plundering of the resources of the African, the West also began a conscious process of historical modification. They were after all the conquering race. Hence they began a narrative that fitted their own perception of the world and displaced the existing one.
For the white man, Obele’s book became an oracular endorsement for his self-appointed mandate as judge and lord over the people and the land, which he had carved up into convenient portions for his selfish use. Even Obele’s remonstrations were not heeded. Her own people not only felt betrayed, but also blamed her for their woes. She was consequently expelled from their midst for betraying her heritage and selling out.
Thus, Obele embarked on the journey of recovering her story so it could be written in the light in which she had originally told it. But this proved a gruelling mission, as she wandered from one civilisation to another, from one country to another to find the man who upturned her tale for a wrong one to emerge.
When she eventually found him close to a university town, things took a different dimension. The fraudster of historical patrimony had grown rich on his subversion of the African story. How would Obele retrieve her tale and restore it to its original form? This was the question. The fraudster would, of course, not oblige her. But her encounter with a student who was determined to write a counternarrative to the ones the likes of Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) and Joyce Carry (Mr. Johnson) had written about Africans revived her spirit. Here was the chance she was looking for to restore her tale and dignity. Conrad and Carry had written these tales to suit and sustain European bias against the continent still unable to write about itself.
But things soon changed. With the educational system introduced by the colonial government, the first young crop of Africans soon began to recognise the lies and false narratives of the West had fabricated against their continent. They also began conscious revisionist efforts to rewrite accurately both the historical and fictional accounts of their beloved continent that had been so maligned and marginalised by dominant Western narratives.
Thus, Obele and the Storyteller is the conscious, accurate retelling of the African story by her sons and daughters. And the story was told chronologically from the past to the present, retelling the old oral tradition in written format and in modern, European languages for a wider audience and education of the entire world.
The Beeta Universal Arts Foundation, by the way, plans a fuller performance of Obele and the Storyteller during the next year’s Easter season.