Verbal Miscues or Cultural Agency? Icheoku: An Introduction

This paper examines the limits of British power in light of cultural and linguistic ambiguity in colonial Igbo society. Through humor, the interactions between the British District Commissioner and his Igbo court clerk and translator in the Nigerian drama Icheoku become opportunities to explore the notion of cultural agency through oral speech forms. Although Icheoku’s humor lies in the translator’s difficulty understanding the commissioner’s affective English, this essay proposes that what is performed as consequence of a language barrier is actually the clerk’s way of undermining his colonial employer’s authority by tapping into his culture’s verbal resources. The essay expands the discourse on native agency in the face of colonial cultural and political dominance, here through popular theater.