{"id":813,"date":"2017-06-25T07:04:12","date_gmt":"2017-06-25T07:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/15\/?p=813"},"modified":"2023-06-03T07:53:05","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T07:53:05","slug":"nigeria-the-challenge-of-and-for-the-female-playwright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/15\/nigeria-the-challenge-of-and-for-the-female-playwright\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigeria\u2014The Challenge of (and for) the Female Playwright"},"content":{"rendered":"

Onyeka Iwuchukwu<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

Playwriting and Publishing<\/strong><\/p>\n

Playwriting in Nigeria, like other forms of literary creativity, was dominated by male writers before the emergence of women writers. The first published play by Ene Henshaw was in 1954, while the first published play by a woman, Zulu Sofola, was in 1968, more than a decade later. Tess Onwueme joined the literary ranks later, in 1983, so Zulu Sofola, as the only female playwright, stood astride the Nigerian dramatic scene for almost two decades.<\/p>\n

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Playwright Zulu Sofola. Photo: Web<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Luckily, more female playwrights have emerged thenceforth. Zulu Sofola basked in the popularity of her craft as her plays were taught in schools and staged freely. Her plays were able to reach a very wide audience because reputable publishers published and marketed her plays and paid royalties to her.<\/p>\n

Tess Onwueme started publishing with an unknown publisher, but, luckily, Heinemann published her before her relocation to America, where she rose to international prominence and fame. Later entrants have been unable to reach a wide audience like Zulu Sofola. Even Tess Onwueme\u2019s plays were relatively unknown beyond literary conferences and few critical works that included her work before her sojourn in America. The reason is that almost all of them engage in self-publishing and marketing, so their plays end up confined within their localities.<\/p>\n

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Tess Onwueme. Photo: Web<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This problem of publishing is not peculiar to a particular gender but to playwriting as a specific literary form. Generally, plays are created for performance and not necessarily for reading, so publishers give more attention to novelist than to playwrights. For instance, I sent my plays to Spectrum books and, because there was no title (Mr. or Miss), I \u00a0received a rejection letter that stated, among other things, that they can only publish a play by a Wole Soyinka or an Ola Rotimi, and that it must be a recommended text. Publishers complain that they do not have a sustainable market for drama, as \u201cit hardly goes into school syllabus (Osofisan and Adeoti 104). However, some of them are willing to publish plays for fees and with a promise to \u201chelp\u201d the writer to market the plays. Some fraudulent ones would print one thousand copies for the writer as well as extra copies which they market for their companies. Writers resort to self-publishing. Julie Okoh captures the reality of playwriting publishing and puts it succinctly:<\/p>\n

I have never come across any publisher in Nigeria who is willing to publish my work free of charge, and later pay me royalty as it is done elsewhere. I write to communicate to the public. So how do I achieve this purpose if I lock my manuscripts in the drawers in my library? . . . Nigerian publishers are not willing to invest their money in promoting writers, neither is government offering grants for that purpose. . . . Marketing books constitutes the biggest discouragement to me as a writer. You spend resources to write a play, you pay to have it staged, you pay to have it published.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Video 1<\/h6>\n