By Anote Ajeluorou
You do not sell ice to the Eskimos is
the oft-quoted mantra for importing a people’s culture to them. Why, the Eskimo
land is ice incorporated, attempting to sell ice to them would seem the most
futile of ventures ever. The same could apply to Lagosians and their beloved area boys, those ubiquitous denizens that
pepper the underbelly of this city of dreams. However, the area boy seemed a benevolent monster conjured from the magician’s
box of tricks to full manifestation. And the merchant of this sole article is a
mere visitor to the city, although a frequent visitor with an honorary
citizenship status at that, who comes all the way from the remote ‘Forest of
Ijegba’ tucked away in rocky Abeokuta.
Welcome
to the enchanting world of Wole Syinka’s tragi-comic play The Beatification of Area Boy! Lagos city festers with area boys in one guise or the other, and
daily, they make life hell to anyone who innocently falls into their dens. Surprisingly,
the area boy was the sole item the
maverick and incomparable playwright and civil rights campaigner sold to
ecstatic Lagos audiences on stage last week (Tuesday - Thursday) at Freedom
Park. The play was having its premiere outing at Lagos Black Heritage Festival
(LBHF) 2015 that ended yesterday.
How did he do it? Simple; this is the dreaded days of the military and
society doesn’t exactly rely on talents or excellence to forge ahead. The
military in power aren’t looking for excellence; their civilian cohorts are
worse. Short cuts and how to circumvent the system for the profit of a few are
the norm of governance. Those who do honest work are derided as lacking the
skill to fit it. Ironically, things haven’t quite changed a bit after 16 years
of democracy in the country, some 25 years after the play was written during
the Gen. Ibrahim Babangida years in 1990. How do you account for a society
saddled with monsters strutting the national landscape as leaders? What counterfoil
is there to set up again? How do you counterbalance the national madness for
the sanity of ordinary citizens trying to make sense of their lives? Soyinka finds
the answer in his offering of the area
boy, Sanda or Oga Security (Wale Ojo) to counter the inanities of
leadership and those ruining the nation with their greed and avarice.
The
play was director by Soyinka, with assistance from Wole Oguntokun.
Sanda
is a university dropout, who takes up the job of a mere security man or maigadi of an upscale shopping complex
in the heart of Lagos Island. This is also the home of area boys in the city, but Sanda, through deft maneuverings, has
turned the tide in his favour. He controls the entire area and the boys are all beholden to them. They
defer to him and he uses this to his advantages. Overtime, Sanda becomes
street-wise and masters the psychology of living on the street, and by
extension, that of the national psyche and how to deal with it appropriately to
survive. Also, through his vintage position he encounters all sorts of patrons
to the complex, the high and mighty and those in the lowest rung of humanity. Sanda
mediates in the problems shoppers encounter in the neighbourhood. He also has
an assortment of neighbours – the tailor (Sola Iwaotan), whose superstitious
belief is enough to build a cult of followership, a petty trader (Makinde
Adeniran), a mamaput food seller
(Ijeoma Agu) and a debarred judge/lawyer straggler (Ropo Ewenla), who often
comes by to rant about his discoveries about the oddities of the human race and
he intends to save lost souls.
Mamaput is from the Niger Delta, a
people who have had their own share of suffering, passing from one hand to the
other in a civil war in which they become bystander casualties. Her husband and
her brother died in it; she still suffers nightmares from that war. Added to
her nightmares is that of occupants of recently evicted Maroko dwellers by the
military, slum dwellers on the fringe of upscale Victoria Island, whose
stricken, hapless humanity stream pass not unlike the refugees of war-torn
Rwanda or the civil war some 20 years before.
But the clincher comes when Sanda’s former
classmate, Miseyi (Ina Erizia) comes shopping. She is shocked to find Sanda in
security uniform and a lively exchange follows, how disappointed she is for him
and he feels sorry for her in return in her poor reading of what their society
has become. In the end she apologises; they had been in a campus band together and
were quite close, but the intervening years had done their damage to them.
Sanda’s cynicism is borne out of an understanding of society while Miyesi’s is
borne out of being raised in a wealthy home. Her marriage is imminent, she
informs Sanda, and it will take place at his shopping complex. He is happy for
her, but wonders why she’d forsaken her former ideals of a better society. She
invites him to her wedding, anyway.
But she turns the tables on her wedding night when she bears the
calabash with wine to Sanda instead of giving it to her husband-to-be to drink.
The distinguished gathering is scandalized, and it rips the two wealthy
families apart. One is the military governor (Tunji Sotimirin) and the other is
a contractor bigwig (Sir Peter Badejo), who together, inflict suffering on
ordinary folks in their corrupt ways. Miseyi’s misbehaviour becomes a blow to
the cementing of two powerful dynasties whose survival depends on collaborating
to steal the joint commonwealth of the people and further impoverish them.
Sanda is also shocked by Miseyi’s action, but he is too street-wise and
practical not to understand her. She does not love the groom; she isn’t in
favour of the march designed to render the mass of humanity impotent by the two
families. Her rebellion is designed to deflate the maniac of leadership and
mercantile profiteering that governance has become. She intends to stick with
Sanda even if it will somewhat reduce her status as a woman from the super
rich; they intend to revive their campus band and start a life together.
In
The Beatification of Area Boy Soyinka
descends from the dense lexical teatise he is known for, although there are
occasional flights of it in the debarred lawyer’s ranting in seeking salvation
for lost souls that people the land. It is, however, packed with dense images
of suffering and hardship, and is everyman’s play in its accessibility. The
play is vintage Soyinka, as he effectively combines serious drama with
rib-cracking comedy that is spot on. It’s at the heart of Soyinka’s lifelong
struggles for social justice and an egalitarian society, where society’s
resources are equitably distributed.
Many features make The
Beatification of Area Boy a charming performance. It doesn’t happen in the
regular Greco-Roman stage; it’s an open street, mobile theatre close. Action
happen close to the main stage at Freedom Park under the dogonyaro tree and audience sits, stands, squats in a circle around
the stage. Rather than props being moved to indicate scene change, the actions
shift to a different stage set altogether instead and the audience is required
to move to another stage to see the action in the three stages deployed. Trust
Lagosians, who are used to scrambling for everything: once the action shifts,
they picked up the few available chairs and scramble after it, from the main
shopping complex area to the car park lot where area boys are doing brisk, fleecing business with customers who
don’t know the rules of engagement. Sanda is, of course, the inevitable
mediator and he gets generous tips for his troubles. But such scene at the
parking lot drags on for too long and becomes a bore; less time should have
been devoted to it.
Not least is the music the playwright weaves into the fabric of the
play, which effectively captures the many nuances of life that is Lagos. Giving
vocal power to this music essemble was the highlife maestro, Tunji Oyelana,
Soyinka’s soul mate in musical composition in his incomparable ‘I Love my Country I no go Lie’ fame.
Oyelana pelted the audience with some of unforgettable tunes that capture the
many-sideness of Lagos, as a city capable of offering happiness and pain in
equal doses. The prisoners, led by Toyin Oshinaike and Sotimirin, who come to
clean up the complex before the wedding, no less provide their own musical
entertainment to help add some relief to the judge/lawyer’s histrionics of salvation
to lost souls.
The
last scene change goes to the main Food Court for Miseyi’s marriage and it
perfectly so fits a newcomer would mistake it for the regular drinking and
eating ritual the place is known for. On the whole, The Beatification of Area Boy delivered premium dramatic value.
It’s ingenuous performance strategy left the audience with much excitement, with
many moments of hilarious fun. Overall, it was powerful delivery and Lagosians
couldn’t but love their area boy any
less for the counterfoil he provided to the malevolent rich and leadership!
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