AFRICAN DRAMA FEMI OSOFISAN: Women of Owu Discuss Maye Okunade's reasons for attacking Owu Kingdom

Answer Details

In Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, Maye Okunade is the commander of the allied army of Ijebu, Ife and their supporters that razes the ancient Owu Kingdom to the ground. The play, an adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women set against the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars, exposes the gap between the noble reasons Maye offers for the war and the greed and personal grievance that truly drive it.

The stated, public reason: liberation and free trade. Maye and his allies present the assault as a war of liberation. They claim to have come to break Owu's stranglehold on commerce and to reopen the great Apomu market, which Owu had seized and closed, thereby strangling the trade of neighbouring kingdoms. He casts himself as a deliverer freeing oppressed peoples from Owu's arrogance and its practice of enslaving fellow Yoruba. This lofty language of freedom and justice is the banner under which the coalition marches.

The personal reason: the recovery of Iyunloye. Beneath the political excuse lies a private wound. Maye's wife, Iyunloye, had been taken from him to Owu, an echo of Helen of Troy in the source play. His desire to recover her and to avenge the insult to his honour is a powerful private motive that he conveniently dresses in the robes of a just war. The personal and the political are deliberately blurred.

Ambition, plunder and the hypocrisy of the "liberators". Osofisan makes it clear that imperial appetite drives the war as much as any principle. The allies covet Owu's wealth, its people and its land. Once the city falls, the "liberators" loot the shrines, enslave the surviving women and murder the royal child Aderogun, behaving no better than the tyranny they claimed to overthrow. The Erelu and the chorus of Owu women repeatedly puncture Maye's justifications, showing that the rhetoric of liberation masks conquest.

Conclusion. Maye Okunade's reasons for attacking Owu are therefore layered: an official pretext of liberating trade and freeing oppressed peoples, a personal thirst to reclaim his abducted wife and salve his honour, and an underlying hunger for plunder and power. Osofisan uses this mixture to condemn all wars fought behind the mask of high ideals, insisting that the true victims are always the innocent women left to mourn.