AFRICAN DRAMA FEMI OSOFISAN: Women of Owu Examin the role of the supernatural in the play

Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu, an African reworking of Euripides' tragedy about the fall of a city, gives the supernatural an important role. The gods and ancestral deities frame the human suffering, comment on it, and raise disturbing questions about divine justice and responsibility for the destruction of Owu.

The gods frame the action. The play opens and closes with the supernatural. The deities, chief among them Anlugbua, the founding ancestral god of Owu, appear above the ruined city. Their presence lifts the historical fall of Owu onto a cosmic plane, so that the massacre of men and the enslavement of the women are seen as part of a larger struggle involving the gods.

They expose divine indifference and complicity. A central concern is the failure of the gods to save Owu. Anlugbua, who founded and once protected the town, arrives too late to prevent its ruin, and the deities are shown quarrelling, shifting blame and pursuing their own grievances while human beings are slaughtered. Osofisan uses this to question a world in which the powerful, whether gods or conquering armies, allow the innocent to suffer.

They pronounce judgement and prophecy. The supernatural also delivers warning and retribution. The gods foretell that the victorious allies who sacked Owu will themselves meet disaster on their journeys home, so that the play insists that cruelty and injustice will be punished in time. This prophetic function gives the tragedy a moral shape.

They deepen the political meaning. By setting divine forces behind the conquest, Osofisan enlarges his criticism of imperial aggression and needless war, suggesting that both earthly and heavenly powers must answer for the ruin of a people.

The supernatural is therefore not mere decoration; it frames the tragedy, exposes the failure and complicity of the powerful, pronounces future judgement, and reinforces the play's protest against the horrors of conquest.