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6 Let Us Be United in Purpose: Variations on Gender Relations in the Yorùbá Popular Theatre Adrienne MacIain May God give us good husbands. May God give us good wives. Amen. You know that whatever a man becomes in life, it’s partly due to his wife. And whatever a woman becomes in life, it’s partly due to her husband . . . so anyone who likes can say amen to this prayer that I want to make. Oyin Adéjobí, Kúyè Strange Bedfellows; Powerful Progeny The marriage of gender and African studies—a shotgun wedding of sorts, greeted with as much controversy as celebration—has encouraged a largescale reexamination of both disciplines and has initiated long-overdue dialogue among peripheral disciplines. The resulting liaisons have frequently been passionate and contentious power struggles, each discipline grappling for top billing and/or ¤nal analysis. Yet these heated struggles have ironically underlined the need for, and indeed paved the way for, an interdisciplinary dialogic approach to gender studies within African contexts. Thus, however quarrelsome a couple African and gender studies may seem, their alliance and its quickly proliferating progeny have indubitably enriched the larger scholastic community. This embracing of interdisciplinarity has not only in®uenced the direction of current scholarship but has invited a reexamination of previously studied material from alternate disciplinary angles. My intention in this chapter is to bring to the scholarly community’s attention a rich and heretofore largely neglected resource for culturally speci¤c material that is pertinent to scholars in multiple disciplines: the Yorùbá popular theatre. Popular performance makes evident many of the assumptions that remain implicit and invisible in the written press and the recorded observations of outsiders; popular theatre therefore offers invaluable insight into that which is all too often left unsaid within and about the culture of which it is a product and a re®ection. Karin Barber has undeniably proven this to be the case with Nigeria’s Yorùbá popular theatre, a genre she has deftly used to shed light on historical shifts in Nigeria’s socioeconomic landscape. Barber’s introductionto Yorùbá Popular Theatre (Barber and Ògúndíjo 1994), a collection of three plays that she and Báyò Ògúndíjo co-translated from the Yorùbá, seeks to contextualize Kúyè, Láníyonu, and The Road to Riches (Ònà Òlà) within Yorùbá society, a project that re®ects Barber’s commitment to anchoring her research within speci¤c cultural contexts during particular historical periods instead of making sweeping claims about an imagined monolithic ahistorical “African culture.” However, while Barber raises extremely useful questions about the money-related anxieties within the three plays, she does not address other anxieties that are implicitly,if not always explicitly,present within all three: anxieties over gender relations and the institution of marriage.1 My aim in this chapter is to recuperate some of the still-buried treasure within these texts by applying Barber’s own arguments to the three plays she helped to translate. More speci¤cally, I explore the range of female characters and malefemale relationships offered within these three plays and contextualize these shifting portrayals within the Nigerian social and political landscape during the speci¤c historical moments in which these plays were written and performed. This is not intended to be an exhaustive study of the wealth of material available within this rare collection of translated plays. Rather, it is a relatively brief example of the uses to which popular performance archives like those collected by Barber may—and by all rights ought to—be put by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum. Exploring gender relations within an African context is always a challenging endeavor. It cannot be assumed that notions about the construction and application of gender categories are necessarily cross-culturally relevant. For example , Oyeronke Oyewumi argues in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses that the concentration of feminist scholars on the status of women—an emphasis that presupposes the existence of “woman” as a social category always understood to be powerless, disadvantaged, and controlled and de¤ned by men—can lead to serious misconceptions when applied to Òyó-Yorùbá society. (1997, xiii) Oyewumi and fellow Nigerian scholar I¤ Amadiume, who claims that the gender system in precolonial Igboland was ®exible and separate from biological sex (1987, 185), argue that the concept of gender difference has emerged in Africa only as a result of European colonialism.2 I...

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