AFRICAN DRAMA FEMI OSOFISAN: Women of Owu Justify the assertion that the people of Owu are the architects of their own destruction.

Answer Details

In Women of Owu, Femi Osofisan reworks Euripides' Trojan Women to dramatise the fall of the Yoruba kingdom of Owu, destroyed by the allied armies of Ijebu, Ife and Oyo. While the play's fiercest sympathy lies with the suffering women, it also insists, through the gods and through the events recalled, that Owu's ruin is partly of its own making. The assertion that the people of Owu are the architects of their own destruction can therefore be firmly justified.

Owu's past aggression and expansion. Owu had grown into a proud, warlike power that conquered and oppressed its neighbours. It had earlier destroyed other towns and lorded it over the region, sowing resentment that the allied coalition later harvested. The very enemies now at its gates are settling old scores. A kingdom that lived by conquest is undone by conquest.

The seizure of the Apomu market. Owu had forcibly taken control of the great Apomu market and the lucrative trade that passed through it. This greed for commercial dominance gave the allies both motive and pretext, for they claim to be liberating the market. Owu's economic aggression thus helped to invite the war that consumes it.

Complicity in the slave trade. Osofisan pointedly notes that Owu, like its attackers, had profited from selling human beings. The allies march under the hollow banner of abolishing slavery, but the charge exposes Owu's own guilt. Having dealt in the misery of others, Owu now tastes enslavement itself as its women are shared out as spoils.

The pretext of the abducted woman. The war is also linked to Iyunloye, the beautiful woman whose abduction gives the coalition its excuse, much as Helen does in the Greek original. Owu's entanglement in this quarrel draws it into ruin.

The verdict of the gods. The ancestral deity Anlugbua and the divine framework of the play make plain that Owu is being punished for its own excesses. The gods do not save Owu, for its arrogance, cruelty and pride have earned this reckoning. Divine judgement confirms the human evidence.

A necessary qualification. Osofisan does not excuse the invaders, whose greed and brutality are savage and whose noble slogans are lies. Guilt is shared. Yet the play repeatedly turns the mirror on Owu itself, so that its citizens cannot claim to be wholly innocent victims.

Conclusion. Owu's expansionism, its seizure of Apomu, its trade in slaves and its arrogance all helped to summon the catastrophe that destroys it, a judgement sealed by the gods. To a large and telling extent, then, the people of Owu are indeed the architects of their own destruction, even as the play mourns the innocent women who pay the price.