The Art of The Ozidi Saga

When in 1977 the Nigerian poet-playwright John Pepper Clark[-Bekederemo] published The Ozidi Saga, a folk epic from the Ijo of the Niger Delta, he secured for himself a place in African (and world) literary history quite as distinguished as he had won for his creative writing. ¹ The story was recorded neither in its hallowed delta home, Tarakiri Orua, nor in its traditional context, a periodic festival honoring the culture hero Ozidi, but at a command performance in the university city of Ibadan, nearly three hundred miles from Orua, by a troupe led by an outstanding storyteller named Okabou Ojobolo. The performance was hosted in 1963 by an Ijo matron, Madam Yabuku of Inekorogha, before an audience made up partly of Ijo residents in Ibadan (a Yoruba town) and partly of non-Ijo Nigerians and expatriate colleagues of Clark from Ibadan University. The uniqueness of The Ozidi Saga lies mainly in the fact that whereas festival re-enactments of the Ozidi myth usually entailed dramatizing key episodes or moments in the career of the hero—as evidenced by the film Tides of the Delta, made from one such performance, Okabou's performance, freed from the protocol of ritual acts that traditionally defined the festival, gave full vent to the word-hoard of the storyteller, augmented at relevant moments by dance and histrionic displays for graphic effect. The result was a narrative of true epic status that has, in significant ways, aided our understanding of the nature of this subgenre of oral literature.

While preparing the full text of the story for publication, Clark had published a play, Ozidi (1966), from a composite of sources available to him. He had become so convinced of the classic quality of the material he had brought to the world's attention from the traditions of his people that in a postscript to his general introduction to The Ozidi Saga he set his efforts within the context of analogous achievements in the traditions of Europe:

In my play, Ozidi, I treated the combined accounts of the Ozidi myth given by Okabou, Afoluwa, and Erivini just as Shakespeare in his Roman and English plays handled history that Plutarch and Livy, on the one hand, and Hall and Holinshed, on the other, had written up. The parallel may be stretched to the Greek playwrights in their exploitation of a body of myths that was the public property of their people. With The Ozidi Saga, I have simply presented a recreation of the epic by one bard. Here lies then one vital distinction, first pointed out to me by the Director of the Centre for Folklore at the University of Indiana, Professor Richard Dorson. Whereas the master dramatists drew on historians writing up events at several removes, long after they had happened, it was my singular privilege to hear in action an actual Homer, recounting, in person, another of the world's great stories, this time, that of Ozidi. (lv)

In invoking Homer, Clark-Bekederemo was of course aware of the history of scholarly prejudice with which African traditions of this kind had been viewed. "The word epic," he says in his Preface to The Ozidi Saga, "is used here with all due deference to those scholars who doubt the existence of the genre in Africa" (xxxi). ² But he had no doubts that he had captured a work of uncommon scale and excellence among the recorded oral traditions of the world.

In judging the artistic achievement of The Ozidi Saga, it will be well to recall that even Homer's legendary success has long been subject to considerable questioning. The debate was inaugurated by Friedrich August Wolf's 1795 lecture, Prolegomena ad Homerum (Preface to Homer), in which the German scholar sought to demonstrate that Homer's epics were originally performed in scattered episodes that were eventually gathered into composite whole. The effect of this thesis was to eventually set classical...