THE HAGHER INTERVIEW

 

Professors Tor Iorapuu, Agunloye and Gbilekaa interview Professor Iyorwuese Hagher.

 

In this chapter, Professor Hagher accepted an AMA (Ask me anything) Interview, from his former students and colleagues. Iyorwuese Hagher straddles playwriting in Africa in the 20th and 21st Century, with an oeuvre of 16 plays, that significantly showed direction to younger playwrights. He co-founded theatre for development, and was unarguably the most trenchant critic of the political class. Unarguably also, he remained peerless as playwright politician who was a grassroots politician and a professor of dramatic arts and diplomat. This interview took place over one week on phone and email. The questions are simply indicated here as TIS, representing Professor Tor-Iorapuu, Vice-Chancellor Benue State University, Professor Irene Isokan Agunloye head of Women, Gender and Film studies University of Jos, and Prof. Saint T. Gbilekaa, University of Abuja. IH indicates Iyorwuese Hagher’s answers to the questions. 

 

TIS: As a foremost African playwright, humanities scholar and politician how have these multiple identities or engagements challenged your playwriting?

 

IH: Let me start with a caveat. I do not presume to be “foremost African playwright.” Africa is a huge continent, the size of which The United States, Russia, India, Europe and China are swallowed. Africa is big, variegated, various, diverse and largely oblivious. There is so much playwriting going on in different parts of Africa that remains largely unknown and ignored. When my plays are translated and acted in Francophone and Lusephone Africa, then I will allow myself to be a “foremost”. I do confess to multiple identities indeed. Been this, gone there, done this and that has been my destiny and lot. I have been in eclectic and ambivalent lifetimes. But I have also clothed myself with a single identity that encapsulates my being. I am a story-teller. Storytelling, lies at the intersection between playwright, politician, and teacher. The playwright tells his story as an ideal mirror to reflect and correct society. The politician tells his sugar-coated stories with a spin to market his party and himself to power and the professor tells his sanitized stories as qualitative arrangements of words, eschewing bias. Even a professor of mathematics narrates his arrangements of figures to arrive at plausible answers to problems, telling stories quantitatively.

 

I have been a university professor and most of my plays were written as workshop plays with my university students and performed in spaces around the Nigeria. I wrote some of my plays while serving in government, and all my plays are unabashedly about positions taken by me on political and ideological issues. I have never allowed any identity to becloud my mission as playwright to be the conscience of my society which (society) in its broadest sense means humanity. I hold it as a resolute duty of the playwright to be engaged with my community and society. Detachment from the moral issues of my time is not my option. Every playwright must man the gates of justice, and the good, without compromise. 

 

My playwriting experience stretches from the last thirty years of the twentieth century to over two decades of the 21st Century. This is a blessing but also a grim responsibility to be a carrier of cultural artifacts. In my plays, I have struggled in agony and ecstasy to give illumination and hope. Being born in the British Colony of Nigeria and watching the country evolve from independence through various shades of military dictatorship to its manifestations in dysfunctional democracy has been my biggest challenge to steer consciousness for the greater good.  I still consider myself in mid-career not withstanding my age and my retirement from the academy. There are plays bubbling inside me to be written and acted out. My biggest challenge has not been my diversity and multiple identities. My biggest challenge is time. It rushes pell-mell at us and before we know it we are old and getter older.  I have not allowed getting older to challenge my ability to write neither. I believe this present time is the best time to be creative and to tell stories of sufficient complexity that can result to greater empathy and understanding of the other in our society where the other is being demonized and excluded.  

 

TIS: What was the main drive that attributed to your becoming a playwright?

 

IH: Let me say that as far back as I remember, I told stories. When people talk about the time in the past when there was no Television nor Cinema to our rural living and people entertained themselves with folktales, it resonates with me. That was me. Tales by moonlight, or by bush lanterns or bonfire, that was me. I was nurtured with folktales, growing up in the bush with my parents: local Christian missionaries who were Church planting.

 

While in the Secondary School, I was exposed to Western Drama, and started acting Shakespeare. Then it happened, Judy Dench a famous British actress, and star visited our school courtesy of the British Council. She spoke and enacted some sketches of Shakespeare. I decided I would be an actor and be Shakespeare. Then American Films about cowboys and Indians were our first experience of Western cinema. I became a playwright of short skits where we acted out the characters of the Wild Wild West. I went to the University determined to be a writer, and I studied creative writing at the Ahmadu Bello University, department of English. I joined the Zaria players and became a lead character in Aladdin, an operatic performance. The rest is so much water passing under the bridge. I became a Graduate Assistant, Research Fellow and head of the Performing Arts Company of the Centre for Nigerian Cultural Studies, and started writing in earnest in 1977 after I came back as production assistant to Professor Dapo Adelugba in Nigeria’s entry to FESTAC 77, The All-World Black Festival of Arts. My first published play Swem Karagbe was influenced by Wale Ogunyemi’s Langbodo. We toured with it to Lagos, Ibadan and Enugu. I have not stopped writing plays since then, even though I have only written sixteen stage plays.

 

TIS: Do you have a specific creative style of playwriting?

 

IH: Yes, I do. I write plays to instigate a moral indignation and an ethical revolution. In order to do this, I have moved closer to the Brechtian model, and validated by the folktale roots in the Tiv Kwagh-hir, model which is epical like Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. My plays are character driven, episodic and the scenes and plays dovetail into each other. My grand intention is to string all my plays together someday, like a Kwagh-hir event, to be produced back-to-back in a week or two weeks. I believe like Brecht, that a play that makes no contact with the public is nonsense. I don't write plays to make people happy and comfortable with status quo. My intention is to make my audience or public to feel uncomfortable with the realities of my indignation at the inhuman conditions, and injustices. My overriding goal is for my public to reject, resist and overthrow all forms of oppression. I have deliberately constructed my plays as loosely and simply as possible, choosing simple rather than complicated settings, and characters. I deliberately chose the epic theatre model as that which best provided the playwright the ideological superstructure for a solid and practical restructuring of a post-colonial Nigeria.   

 

My search for a dramaturgical style took in several factors. After I had studied Western drama and theatre through the drama establishments and examined the World’s greatest dramatists, I realized that drama like all arts was a never-ending conversation and each generation must create its own drama that is relevant to its society. Western society has never let go of Shakespeare because his drama reminds the West, of its predominance, even though Shakespeare ceased to address Europe three hundred years down the road when the monarchies were deposed by the capitalists who were the new aristocrats. Further down the road, today, the western society got richer and more powerful.  Venture capitalists control the neoliberal world. My roots in Western drama exposed a worrisome secret. A large chunk of humanity was missing in the dramatic conversation.

 

I entered the dramatic conversation when the West began to question their assumptions of drama; including their dramatic styles. Anton Chekov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Samuel Beckett, Constance Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook intrigued me. But it was to Brecht I turned. Then it happened. As it turned out, Brecht was in my opinion the greatest theatre ideologue and Western playwright of the 20th century. Co-incidentally Tiv story-tellers had in 1948 questioned Shakespeare’s handling of the Character of Hamlet in their encounter with Hamlet at the hands of the ethnographer Dr. Laura Bohanan, in what has become the “Shakespeare in the Bush” affair. I was born in 1949. In 1950, about the same period, Brecht released his “Short Organum of the Theatre”, and went on to criticizing the character Hamlet in the same vein as a “reluctant hero”. To the Tiv story tellers, Hamlet was an anti-hero, a precocious rude youth who had no business questioning his elders about matrimonial, murder and succession issues which were the domain of his elders.

 

It was at ABU that I morphed from Aristotelian drama taught in my undergraduate, and which I was steeped in acting with the Zaria Players, and the Operatic Society. As a postgraduate student, I was mentored by three leftist scholars: Andrew Horn, Michael Etherton and Rex Moser, all on my Doctorate committee. Marx’s Capital was compulsory reading, and Etherton introduced me to Bertolt Brecht. Then we went out of the campus by rejecting the proscenium stage of the Assembly Hall opting to go out to contract our theatre on the model of the village. We started experimenting with epic theatre in the production of Brecht’s plays, then further experimentation threw us, literary, into the adjoining Samaru village, with what we named “popular theatre”. I was dissatisfied with the Brechtian and Marx’s concept of popular as referring to the working masses. We had more poor, malnourished, thinly-clad, and uneducated ruler dwellers, than the “working masses”, the “popular’ in Marx and Brechtian model. After rigorous debate, we replaced Popular Theatre with Community Theatre, as that which was organic to the communities we were serving. While these experiments were going on I had the opportunity to research the traditional dramas of the Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and the Tiv Kwagh-hir. In 1977 I became the Chairman of the newly established Benue State Arts Council which brought me face to face with our traditional popular theatres. It was the Benue experience that made me to feel dissatisfied with the term popular theatre, and instead coined the term Theatre for Dynamic Development, in my Doctorate thesis of 1979. But even more importantly, the governor of Benue State, Aper Aku permitted me to organize Community Theatre workshops for his government. These workshops became pivotal to Aku’s governance success. Aper Aku situated Community Theatre in the Arts Council I headed, and to be in the curriculum of Theatre studies at the College of Education, Katsina Ala, from where Tar Ahura, Iortyom Mude and Tor Iorapuu became leading voices.  We provided critical feedback to Governor Aku, throughout his tenure. Theatre now could partner with government and development partners. Students of the ABU school like Steve Abah became leading ideologues. When I moved to the University of Jos, I established Theatre For Development as a course which became so successful that the National Directorate of Mass Mobilization and National Orientation engaged the University of Jos to serve the Plateau State. It was when we were engaged by UNICEF, to run workshops in Sierra Leone and East Africa for youth reproductive health, that the term TDF, became globalized as the brand for a non-Aristotelian theatre. Mention must be made of the UNICEF Chief of mission then, Mr. Bartilloi Warritay, who popularized and globalized the term TFD in the United Nations system and beyond. It with a sense of destiny when I look at TFD courses in almost all Theatre departments in Nigeria, and across the world.

 

TIS: Mulkin Mata and Mulkin Matasa, broach the theme of revolution, and yet they are two decades apart as when you wrote them. The latter one Mulkin Matasa is the sequel. In both plays you barely hide your anger. In both plays you advocate a revolution. What are these recurrent factors of politics that drove you to these plays

 

IH: I am looking forward to the time my plays will instigate an ethical revolution in Africa, when corruption will ebb and become an abomination and odious, when the African elite will show a modicum of empathy for the poor, the downtrodden, the thinly clad that live in slums and dingy hovels around Africa with no potable water and no electricity, nor schooling and no modern health care.  

 

I am angry at the African politicians and the elite class. We have recolonized our people and have continued to wreck injustice on ourselves. Our so-called Independence from colonialism has not made a difference. Corruption and ethnic identities have overwhelmed and replaced the hope of democracy. My country Nigeria for instance has continued to showcase injustice and social inequality. I am by nature totally non-violent, and an avid peace builder, and advocate of love and nurture through education. But I am angry. Every day I ask myself if the playwrights have done enough to instigate change and how we can more effectively reconstruct the life of our society on stage.   

 

TIS. Which of your plays is your favourite?

 

IH: My favourite play is my next play. It is always my next play. Wait for it. When it comes you will recognize it to be basically about the most challenging problems of our society. I feel it pulsating in my brain and through my veins. It is my favourite. 

 

TIS: In your plays we can see a pattern of character migration. Why did you choose this devise in your plays?

 

IH: My plays are epical. They are narrative series that dovetail into one another and the characters talk across the decades and time lags to the future, and backward to the past. They borrow the language of Information Technology, where applications and programs of different computers talk with each other. I learnt this technique from the Kwagh-hir carvers, who are the dramaturges. They create the same character and then present the same character in different settings and sometimes these characters act in concert with others and other times act solo. I borrowed this theatre devise from the Kwagh-hir, to enrich my realism. This literalization of the Kwagh-hir, drives me to ask other playwrights, who write many plays, to stop the homicide against characters that belong to the people. Playwrights should not kill them, or exile them. After all, my characters keep knocking in my consciousness and then sometimes I meet these fictional characters who jump out of my imagination and I see them in reality on the streets or in a village or in political settings. Ironically it was from these same setting I had plucked them, and populated my plays. 

 

TIS: Your plays Global Home and Seventy-Two hours deal with contemporary reality of racism, and armed insurgency in the world. How true is it to say that your diplomatic experience and life in the US where you live now, have been major influences?

 

IH: Very true. Living in Mexico opened my eyes to the racism against the indigenous Mexicans and that against the blacks in Mexico, in which the Mexican state, denies them demographic existence. They are invisible! In Canada, I see a country trying to be a model society on earth, where humanism is a virtue and government is attempting to build an inclusive multiracial and multi-cultural society. At the same time the indigenous Inuit are being decimated through the indulgence of free food, and accommodation. In my stay in Canada, an old Inuit woman whispered to me that all this prosperity is killing their men who are no longer willing to go out in the cold to hunt the seals and the caribou. They had become drug addicts and alcoholics and simply useless.  The United States has structural racism against the minorities. The blacks have suffered institutional racism in the US since the slave trade. In the US today a black young man who misses his way and knocks on the door of a white man could easily be shot dead, and the murderer will be covered by the US laws. I have never seen anything like this. But the majority of whites and blacks are good people who are united against this racism, especially the broken-down policing since the murder of George Floyd, and the activism of the BLM movement. But Seventy-Two Hours is a play about global challenges of corruption, racism and insurgency. Every play written is a sum total of my life experiences and learning. Theatre is the chief instrument through which the society is reflected, to see itself, and retool to a better alternative. Plays reflect change, power, departure, arrival, loss and gain. Globalization has made the local and the global to compete for space if it bleeds enough or is so odious. And the world is bleeding and is odious. It is drama time now.

 

TIS: Do you have a pattern of names for your characters? 

 

IH: Yes. I love all my characters. I play God by creating them, and then play Adam by naming them. Wherever I can find a descriptive name, I give my characters to enhance characterization. But generally, I give names according to the setting. If the setting is say in an American city, or in Abidjan, Lagos or Abuja, my characters are named in expression of the cosmopolitan diversity of the city. I seldom write a play with only my ethnic names. I do not relish these petty ethnic cultural skirmishes in oppressed cultures of Africa. Africa is diverse. this is our strength. I feel my duty is to the whole world, and so I have tried to put living reality in the hands of living characters. This is different and I like it. I am not beholden to any conventional altars to which I must pay obeisance.

 

TIS: Which Playwrights inspire you most?

 

IH: Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht.

 

TIS: Why? Why these two, and just two?

 

IH: You asked me which playwrights inspire me the most. I thought these two should suffice. They inspire me because they serve their publics well.  Their drama is not just about the big people, the kings and queens, but about the ordinary people. These two dramatists also strive to appeal to the people’s reason and not emotions. This is also what I strive for in my plays. I believe that the playwright is an impartial judge and the audience is the jury. The Play is the evidence which shows the twists and turns of plot and character interactions and their development. At the end of the production the audience as Jury decides. My plays do not end. The drama continues in the people’s heads into their homes. 

 

TIJ: What keeps you awake in your retirement years as you are writing with greater spate?

 

IH: The drift to dystopia of the entire world keeps me awake at night.  Globalization and development in Information technology have become disruptive. Antisocial behaviour has been on the increase. I have watched in horror how democracy is being rolled back and is decaying. In the past four years here in the United States, I saw how easy it is for autocracy to replace democracy and how easily a determined strong man can crush opposition and poke holes in the ozone layer of democracy and bring the house down. I am writing with greater spate because I am aware that writing plays, has an overwhelming capacity for empowerment and subversion. I write plays to teach humanism. I am sick and tired of the lies of the politicians and so I am giving what I have:  writing plays to change consciousness and effect positive change.  

 

TIS: What legacy are you leaving behind the next generation.? 

 

IH: I want my readers to find in my creative works hope. We are living in a world where the only thing that is constant is change. The speed of change is monumental. the spate of change is cataclysmic, and this change is driven by technology, science and medicine. the Internet of things and the quantum of information dumped on us is benumbing and disruptive. I pray my audience will stop and think and then pluck some hope to effect change for the better in his or her corner.

 

I am leaving the next generation of playwrights with my fighting spirit. Writing has an overwhelming capacity for subversion and empowerment. The next generation of playwrights should demonstrate purpose and have a clear purpose and mission about why they write. Appeasing and acquiescing with Africa’s leadership class has to end and the playwright must fight for what he believes in. I have read the young generation of Playwrights, and I am hopeful. Arnold Udoka, Emma Dandaura, Alex Asigbo, Saaondo Iorngurum, Edward Ossai, Tracie Chima Utah, and many others who are ready to confront the hegemons of Africa with sufficient artistic complexity that can only evoke needed change.

 

TIS: Your plays are deeply freighted with political issues. Who really do you write for?

 

IH: I write mostly for the educated elite, the politicians, and all political animals. I write for humanity. All life is political, and we are living in the era of massive apathy and widespread demoralization. I hold my plays as corrective mirrors of self-reflection so that the ruled and the rulers can all see themselves and assess themselves, and then reconstruct. I want my audience to watch my plays and be influenced to ethical imperatives.

 

TIS: What is your secret to creativity?

 

IH: I keep reading and writing every day. I keep myself healthy by eating good natural food, drinking good natural water and exercising moderately and laughter with Nancy. But above all things I pray all the times I write, because the Christian God says in the Bible, that he who lacks knowledge should ask God who will give it. An empty page in front of a writer is very intimidating. And frankly when I commit pen to paper, or type, I hardly recognize what happens. There is an entity that writes with me. Therefore, before I put a word on that white blank sheet, I say a little prayer asking for divine guidance. These work for me. 

 

Oh, I forgot! Before I start on any new writing, apart from the prayer ritual I clear my table top and clean my office, or study or dining table top. It is when everything is bare that I approach the paper and pen or word processor with humility. Then I start to write.

 

TIS: Your latest play Seventy-Two Hours, seems to be antithetical to all other plays. It is only in this play that you fail to project hope. The corruption and dystopia is globalized. And worse still evil seems to triumph? Is this pessimism justified?

 

IH: Who in this world did not contract some modicum of fear when 2020 brought a global pandemic, COVID 19, a ferocious killer machine that grimly killed without respite as humanity and the world became a plaything to obey its whims and caprices. Our world is upside down now. Our lives have changed in dramatic ways. We move along with masks as cadavers grieving over our past lives that have lost their essence. I wrote the play 72 hours as a reaction to the compulsory hunkering in place at home. I wrote it to show that corruption and violence have no boundaries and they reside in the imagination and has no borders. I wrote to show the global nature of another pandemic, corruption and insurgency. And if evil seems to triumph it must be in the mind of the reader or audience. at the end of the play i want the director and audience to vehemently disagree with me and to bring up an alternative end. In fact, the written play is a half-finished draft. The director and actors should finish their hals of the bargain and proper a different ending or meaning. The playwright at best is merely a co-creator.

 

TIS: Is it right to characterize your plays, thematically, as simply “Corruption in Africa” as the title of your published 15 plays show?

 

IH: Book titles are collaborations between publishers and writers. Sometimes publishers look at the marketability of their publication and prefer a title which they believe will sell the book. When my North American publisher’s editor summed my oeuvre and writings that highlighted and warred against corruption in Africa, and suggested the title, I gave in because corruption is everywhere in the world. After all, all plays write about corruption in ideals, values or character flaws. Corruption is not merely the stealing of money by public officers. It is the abnormal, the aberration, the grotesque. Corruption provides the major cause of conflict in drama. I am waiting for their collection of plays in the West, to be summed up as Corruption in the West. 

 

TIS: Why did you suddenly migrate from playwriting all your life to writing to novel writing.

 

IH: The COVID 19 should be held responsible. I was holed inside my house for eight months in Dayton Ohio, without knowing when all this was going to end. Of all art forms the novel offers the deepest introspection. It is written to be COVID !9 compliant because it is meant to be consumed by one end user. The novel gave me instant power to connect with other human beings. My subject matter and protagonist, Lord Payne, was riveting as a historical representation of Empire. I stuck on the official history but when I entered the mind of my characters, I found the unofficial de-sanitized humanity compelling. I levelled the novel to travel back in historical time to the golden age of British Imperialism in the world. 

 

The novel the Conquest of Azenga gave me immense satisfaction in my discovery of a historical period of British imperialism West Africa that has been filed away in the dark vaults and archives. I rattled the dry bones in these dark vaults and they became flesh again give account of what they did when they were not accountable to anybody but themselves. 

 

I was grieving over whether I would have a theatre audience again. I had always wanted to deconstruct the colonial past by writing a historical novel. History has always fascinated me. COVID gave me my shot at it and I am even drafting the sequel now.

 

TIS: Many people consider you a conservative politician and even reactionary as when you served under the military dictator Sani Abacha, yet in your plays you belong to the radical tradition more or less. Can you define yourself?

 

IH: I do not readily conform to labels. Serving in the military regimes of my country at the time when the nation was all but broken apart was a privilege. Nigerian political parties are not organized ideologically, so it is silly to be branded conservative or progressive. The parties are peas from the same pod, without exception. What distinguishes one party form the other is ethnic and religious identity. The parties are not growing the economy or catering to the welfare of the citizens. They are all seriously engaged in destructive unenlightened self-interest and rapine. 

 

As to my being a radical I must tell you that I did not seek to be branded as such. All I know is that if you had a conscience and were educated and watched how greatly the leadership and politicians have misruled the country you would be a big fool not to be radicalized. 

 

TIJ: Do you consider yourself a feminist playwright?

 

IH: I do not go about calling myself that. It is a label. And I hate to conform to labels. In the same way, I did not subscribe to being branded Marxist as was the vogue during my student and staff days at the leftist bent Faculty of Arts at Ahmadu Bello University. If I am a feminist then, I was a feminist from birth. I grew up in a home of six sisters where I was the only male. My parents treated us with love and respect equally. When I grew up, I recognized that women and men were together equal and fully human. I was shocked to see that women were treated as inferior beings at other homes and at work places, and in the rural homes they produced the surplus that men appropriated and became big men. When I began to to read the plays and novels of Nigerian writers, I was shocked that women were not given important roles. I had issues with Marxist colleagues, who did not theorize the work done by women as work that contributed to surplus. So, the playwrights among them wrote plays where the women were invisible or merely quizzing, I took issue with this and so in my plays tried to avoid this. So, I took a research Master’s degree, studying women playwrights in Africa. My research confirmed what I had known all my life, that women were no less endowed than the men. I am a feminist if you read me as one who believes that women and men should be equal and be accorded full humanity and treated as fully equal. 

 

In much of what I saw as feminism in the 70s and 80s in Africa were men haters misandrists, claiming to be feminists. And I really think we need more male feminists. In my homes, I have made Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Simon de Beavoir compulsory reading to regulate a compassionate view of womanhood. In all my plays I have tried to respect women. In Mulkin Mata I broke the dam of my frustration at the recurrent leadership failure of men and advocated for a women revolution. Two decades later I had The Youth revolution in Mulkin Matasa, bringing together young men and women to build the future of hope. 

 

TIS: In your preface to your collected plays titled Corruption in Africa you stated that your mission as playwright was against mythical consciousness as false consciousness. Are you satisfied that you have achieved this mission?

 

IH: Yes. I have been trenchant in condemning Juju and all such wizardly and witchcraft worship in the theatre. I am aware of a silly and pathetic world view where politicians and the wilfully ignorant spread unscientific stories that fuel diabolical acts. Human sacrifice and ritual murder, still take place among these people. Many Nigerian Plays have them as existing reality. This is pathetic. I refuse to dignify perfidy and nonsensical idiocy of mendacious charlatans.

 

Culled from I. H. Hagher: Warrior for Humanism (Essays on Iyorwuese Hagher’s Dramaturgy)