Culture and Race in Classical Reception: African Adaptations of Greek Tragedy

The staple stories of Greek tragic drama—Oedipus and his family, the internecine Atreid House, or the Trojan War with its preliminaries and aftermath— are theatrical instantiations of an infinitely malleable material, which has been subjected for centuries to innumerable forms of telling and retelling in a variety of media (Mee and Foley 2011, Michelakis 2013, Nikoloutsos 2013, Bosher et al 2015, Liapis and Sidiropoulou 2021). As an integral part of the city’s public and religious life, tragedy reinforced, justified, and sometimes even articulated the civic life, ideology, social and political roles, and the distribution of power in democratic Athens while also raising questions about these same issues. This paper explores this double-edged and malleable role, that is, the possibilities of articulating and at the same time querying official ideology, and uses it as a compass for navigating adaptations of Greek tragedies by African playwrights, with a focus on Nigeria.

Building on recent work on African receptions of Greek tragedy (Van Zyl Smit 2003, MacDonald 2000, Budelmann 2004, Hardwick and Gilespie 2007, Goff and Simpson 2008, Van Weyenberg 2013) which recognises the colonial and ideological history of Classical texts since the nineteenth century as well as their political appropriations by the oppressed in the twentieth century, I consider questions of androcentricity in dramatic vision, and the perennial problem of the subordination of women, foreigners, and slaves, in relation to African adaptations. My discussion centers on African playwrights’ counter-reworking of Greek source material to project multiple contemporary perspectives, including political realities and passionate expressions of hopes and fears.

The first part of my paper offers a brief general overview of twentieth century African adaptations of Greek tragedy. I discuss how in adaptations by playwrights like Soyinka (Bacchae) and Ola Rotimi (The Gods Are not to Blame), the selection and treatment of the age-old cultural practice of the Yoruba is exemplified in their engagement with and representation of other peoples and cultures. The second part of my paper examines the complexities of culture and race in Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni, an African Antigone and MEDAAYE: a re-reading of Euripides’ Medea, utilizing the concept of "symbolic violence", as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept is pertinent here for penetrating the means by which dominant groups assign identities and roles to the dominated, and also for identifying how the latter may then accept or reject the dominant construction depending on the resources of resistance that they command and can deploy. I argue that a similar struggle revolving around symbolic violence is visible in racial and gender constructions in Graeco-Roman culture, and that these two plays of Osofisan not only serve as intercultural dialogues for navigating these issues, but also provide a thread for tracing the processes of these constructions.