Nigerian Postcolonial Comedy, Religious Shamanism and Modernity: Soyinka, Osofisan and Kalejaiye

Shamanism is an animistic religious practice characterized by belief in a metaphysical world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits that can only be understood by shamans. This work examines religious shamanism in the face of modernity to provoke laughter through comedy. While provoking laughter, it unmasks truth; rot, deceit, corruption, and megalomania in a postcolonial site. There are three genres of drama well-articulated in Nigerian theatre: tragedy, satire, and comedy; but comedy appears to have received less critical attention than the rest, hence this research. This essay undertakes shamanic practices to interrogate modernity in the plays of Soyinka, Osofisan, and Kalejaiye. It also shows how people can be gullible and deeply entrenched in ‘animist consciousness even in the construction of modernity’s sanitized, rational, and linear teleology’ (Okoye, p. 118) without circumspection and turns it into a “battle” of persuasions. Textual and critical analysis of the selected plays demonstrates how characters in dramatic action, language, and characterization display their gullibility; hidden and controlling motives that are domiciled in corrupt, megalomaniac, and deceitful narratives as unpacked in Nigerian postcolonial comedy.