By Anote Ajeluorou
How does a writer deal with the psychological trauma that war
imposes on a hapless people? How does a writer respond to two young army
colonels – Emeka Ojukwu and Yakubu Gowon, who, not being able to manage their
personal egos, resort to war to test out their wills and therefore subject
their people to the horrors of war? What does an author make of the carnage of
human lives sent too early to their graves? What happens to the countless dead?
To what degenerate levels can man sink when faced with the tragic consequences
of war? These must have been some of the thoughts that went through Wole
Soyinka’s mind when he wrote the cynical play Madmen and Specialists.
These issues were also
played out before a packed audience when it was performed last Sunday at Terra
Kulture by PAWS Production and directed by Kenneth Uphopho. There is a repeat performance
of the play today at 3pm and 6pm.
It is the Nigerian
Civil war of 1967-1970 and just about the time the playwright Soyinka was also
imprisoned for 22 months while the war ragged and the innocent and hapless
Biafrans (Igbo) were being pummelled by the federal forces. While Soyinka
emerged from prison with The Man Died,
his prison memoir, he couldn’t turn away from the grim realities of a senseless
war on account of which he went to prison in the first instance. The result of
his views on the war is what Madmen and
Specialists is about.
Bero (Patrick Diabua)
is a doctor of sorts who goes to war and is soon converted into intelligence
unit. His father, too, joins the war and, stunned by the orgy of violence and
countless dead, devices an ingenuous way of dealing with the situation. Rather
than allow the dead to go to waste, he begins to preach the philosophy of
cannibalism, turning the dead into meat and actually savouring the human flesh.
After all, when other animals are killed they are eaten. Why not humans who are
killed by the willful acts of man? Bero, too, becomes a convert to his father’s
morbid taste.
Meanwhile, Siberu is
Bero’s sister who is made to keep the home front while the men are gone to war.
She keeps her brother’s medical paraphernalia of herbal materials going and
piles up some more while he is away. She has the assistance of two elderly
women, who also versed the art of herbs. In fact, they serve as counterpoise to
the war’s ravage and wreck, as earth mothers whose role it is to preserve the
fragile earth on which destruction is being visited by the war. They are the
ones who, while Bero and his father are away at war, help Siberu to maintain
sanity and focus and the probable loss of the two men in her life to wat.
Meanwhile, Bero had
detailed a group of beggars, who carry various war scars, to keep watch over
Siberu and her activities and the earth women. The beggars are also Bero’s
father’s eyes and ears. Bero and his father, who he secrets away at his
laboratory after suffering the psychological blow of war, are locked in the
ideological contest of ‘AS’, as the symbol of all knowledge and the morality
otherwise of the method chosen to execute their scheme. In exasperation, Bero
kills his father to end what has obviously become a mad proposition.
On account of the
complexity of the play that deploys the typical Soyinkaen language that goes round and round in confusing circles,
the producers had to intervene in a question and answer session to further
throw light on the play. This produced its own hilarious moments both for the packed
audience and the cast. Also heartwarming was that the performance of Madmen and Specialists during the long
break the hall filled to capacity with guests; it somewhat gives a lie to a poor
appreciation of live performances charged against Nigerians. The producers
would pleasurably delighted should they record such massive audience attendance
in the two shows billed for today to bring Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists’ performance to an end.
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