I CAN'T tell you all the suffering I've been through!' With this telling metaphor in the Edo language, Odia Odeimun, through his most recent dance-drama, Itoya: A Dance Drama for Africa, has once again retraced Africa's troubled history, and what possible future of optimism can be created if only the architects of the continent can show the will to 'organise' rather than continue to 'agonise' over its many past and current woes.And, as the sparse audience saw Itoya at its second showing at Agip Recital Hall, MUSON Centre, Onikan, Lagos, Africa's checkered history laid its bare back on the sun.The lacerations of centuries resulting from slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism, wasted independence and the West's continuing meddling in the internal affairs of quasi-independent and a balkanized continent into disjointed parts echo greatly.However, Nigeria, nay Africa, would be the worst for this historical dredging, with history as a subject being erased from the school curriculum. And as legendary novelist, Chinua Achebe aptly put it: If you do not know where the rain started beating you, you will not know where it stopped beating you! Future generations are being fed a historical void, and so stand the danger of not knowing how their respective societies arrived at where they are, at the junction of so much socio-political confusion, with a future looking so bleak.What is worse, with the vice chairman, Senate Committee on Education, Prof. Sola Adeyeye, forcefully arguing against making history compulsory in secondary schools, future generations will be the worse for ignorance and illiteracy on the continent's centuries of travails in the hands of outsiders, from which they must wean the continent for survival.Through arguments, counter-arguments and then affirmative vision, Ofeimun reminds those who have so easily forgotten the hard road Africa has traversed, and why all the hopes invested on the continent's greatness seem a mirage after so many years of working at it by successive regimes, both civilian and military. Africa's great empires lost out through the spitting stick (guns) wielded by a handful of white men. Why and how this was possible'Of course, with such conquest came the imposition of the conqueror's ways of life to indoctrinate the defeated with Western lifestyles, the result of which was that Africa's informal educational system gave way for a Western one, with its redolent abuse of whatever is black and African. The continent's young ones are being drilled on superficial Western education designed to undermine and erode everything African ' the culture, the rich knowledge in herbal medicine and the art and science that made Africa thick.But how do you argue against the conquerors' logic' 1884 signalled the end of Africa's cohesion, when Western powers sat in Berlin and partitioned the continent to suit their political and economic whims, having lost out on the slave trade front. Africa was balkanised, fragmented and brought together again along disjointed tribal lines, with the result that internal cohesion became impossible for many. Internecine wars became booby traps to which various independent nations fall, and still fall.Then came periods of agitation for independence, and how the founding fathers fell for cheap arguments that eventually negated the possibility of a united front for Africa, insisting instead to be lords in their different fiefdoms. Never letting Africa go, the West's stranglehold on the continent's economic resource has remained ever firm: from slave trade to the various agricultural products ' cocoa from Gold Coast, coffee from Kenya, minerals from South Africa and Congo; and later oil from Nigeria and Angola.Fledgling independent nations of Africa soon fell to the neo-colonial thralldom, with many of the promising countries falling to Western-induced uprisings and the death of revolutionary ideologies based on authentic Africa models. These, Europe saw as threats to its hold on a continent's economic resource. Coups and counter-coups became the order, with Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Congo's Patrice Lumumba and many others falling early victims.How can Africa reinvent itself' Through what political, economic and cultural means would the continent shed its toga of continuing visionlessness and forge ahead' Through a re-education of the mind! Having been long held hostage to Western ideologies that have caged the continent's mind to everything Western, now was the time to begin the process of rethinking so as to unearth Africa's forgotten ones.Africa, Ofeimun reaffirms, must shed its disorderliness and begin to organise its house rather than agonise over centuries of failure to take the lead in anything. It is this failure to take the initiative in leadership that has kept it under the yoke of foreign domination.If the continent organises its affairs properly, the visionary Ofeimun poetically argues, then it would be possible to have a railway line running from The Gambia to Cairo, a highway from Lagos to Lusaka for an integrated Africa, whose trade amongst its countries alone is enough to reposition it to compete with the rest of the world.Indeed, Ofeimun's vision for Africa is etched boldly in Itoya, A Dance for Africa, a dance that was abrogated through Western interference from centuries past. It is a dance that Ofeimun, like all visionary sons of the marginalised continent, wants put to a stop. For him, 'Africa is for Africa', and must be made to reflect so in totality, not an appendage to some neo-imperialist agenda.AND spiced with intermingling, vigorous dances, Itoya' comes through as a great historical dance piece packed with Afrocentric ideologies, capable of energising this giant of a continent to take up its respective position in the comity of nations. Ofeimun's play is culture put to immense political use, to rouse a sleeping continent from its centuries of slumber and inertia.How does this paralysis go away for the true potential of a people to come through' The continent's young must be re-educated on all the suffering Africa has undergone in the hands of outsiders and the roles some of its wayward children played in bringing the Motherland to its knees.Ofeimun's cultural interventionist dance piece is patriotism taken to its peak. It is cultural intervention in the face of failed politics; yet Ofeimun cannot run away from the politics. Africa's political kingdoms must first be made to work otherwise all else would be a mirage and a further crumbling. But there's grim hope here, as African countries totter through one party system to military rule or quasi-military or 'political systems. Yet, in all this will hope be made to triumph over centuries of sufferings inflicted on a continent'The pair of Mawuuyon and Toma Enakarhire surpassed themselves in the grueling lines they had to vocalise. The success of the performance owed much to their untiring spirit in putting life to Itoya' It did dance on their lips.While the director, Mr. Felix Okolo stands commended for his directorial role in bringing the grand sweep of history to bear on stage, he would nevertheless have to rethink the choreography for all Ofeimun's dance dramas ' A Feast of Return, Nigeria the Beautiful and Itoya, A Dance for Africa ' so the dances don't look the same.From one piece to another, the similarities in dances appear too glaring. Different choreographers will need to reconceptualise the dances to bring a newness and freshness to distinguish them.Also, the dances in Itoya' appear too jazzy even in sombre situations that demand a dirge or mournful songs and dances. While the jazzy dances and songs suggest imperialist glee over their conquered territory, there are situations, like Nkrumah's overthrow and the tragic failures that are daily experiences on the continent, to call for soberness. Not much of this alternation came through in the performance.But beyond these, Itoya' is a grand theatric piece that calls for encore performance for a bigger audience than the one that saw it last Sunday. And, its is only Ofeimun, who could call for more of such theatrical competition from other playwrights and theatre practitioners to come forward and further enliven the Nigerian stage, which he appears to be doing single-handedly.
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