Title: Three Unending Transition Play
Author: Professor Samuel Timothy-Asobele
Publisher: Upper Standard Nigeria
Year: 2015
pagination: 384
Reviewer: Simeon Mpamugoh
Wars are fought the world over for industrialists and the rich to exploit poor the more, destroy their houses, sons and daughters and make them go empty handed after the war to beg the rich for livelihood.
This is the meat of the story in the play, Three Unending Transition Play, a three part serial by Professor Samuel Timothy-Asobele to emasculate a cyclic trend that steals and plunders the national treasury and stalk in European banks instead of a focused national economic reconstruction project that will usher a future of peace and plenty.
With 54 Acts and Scenes, more than 310 acknowledgements and 4-page poem dedicated to the Martyrs of the failed Nigerian Renaissance, in what the playwright describes as the sisyphus myth of the harder they tried; the deeper they sank into the sea of mud known as Bigeria; the first part of the drama thrusts on the theme, “The Commander’s Telegraph”. It is an allegorical signpost on what happens when misunderstanding that too often leads to War, like we had it in the NigeriaN Civil war of 1967-1970, which imperils family unity.
It comprises of the casts of Captain Joe, Bigeria Army officer who served in the Congo as Prime Minster and Duduye, his sarcastic Bigerian intellectual friend as well as six other casts that characterized it.
The play was published to strengthen the most deeply cherished of all hopes, the final and right solution to human affairs, exposed woes and misery in a fallen world, mighty struggle between darkness and light, sin and righteousness, death and life, and the fear that love may not after all triumph over forces of wrong and darkness, greed and selfishness and the unsettling conflict of governance, good and evil that had beset Nigeria’s body polity.
The first Act and Scene flags off the national anthem as Captain Joe broadcasts to the nation announcing his mission to bring peace to brothers in yonder land Togo. “We do this out of conviction that man’s exploitation of man may cease once and for all, that freedom, peace, liberty and fraternity should reign and brothers to see their fellow citizens as brothers and sisters and live their lives as such,” he declares.
In the officer’s mess in Bigerian military school is a cave-like setting: flags of different colours: Queen’s own regimental flags, floor carpeted a cool atmosphere as news breaks that Bok is now the new Head of State. Enter Joe in a dialogue with Duduye discussing Sergeant Bok overthrow of government and events in Congo. Capt. Joe affirms that it like removing veil and having open quite wide his eyes and vows that such would not be allowed to continue: “Bok, now a self-proclaimed His Excellency, (HE),” he cries out.
The dialogue underscores the brainchild and undercurrent of the evil machination of diseased minds who will only be happy to discredit Africa that they cannot govern themselves. And their parochial mass media tailored to this end, beaming to the world the horror of war. Duduye takes the dialogue further with more historical facts on Lutheran war of the 1940s, and what African soldiers did in the Western Europe, their lives forced to lay down for the freedom of the French motherland.
The play transits to part two in Page 121 entitled “Paradase Ni/iN Paradise”. It is an extended metaphor of man’s perpetual search and mutability that mirrors spectacle of change of name, food, mode of dressing, and marriage alliances; essentially cultural and inspired by British Empire. The first Act and Scene of the play brings to fore Awujoh, marital ceremony, with Elder Aiyegbokiki Godwill opening the event with prayer for the bride and groom to grow and multiply in peace and good health.
Set in a posh Victorian sitting room with music issuing from the speakers, with all the paraphernalia of well-furnished house, Hullo Ironmonger, one of servants to Godwill Wilberforce, who later became Aiyegbokiki Godwill, recreates event of the previous night at Awujoh and the razzmatazz that associates it. “This ritual clearly indicates the duality of the Creole outlook: which seems to be inherently antagonistic as to make them Europeans and Africans at the same times,” Hullo explains.
The part three of the play is entitled “Dogiesola”. It captures the concept of Holy Family model of parenthood while spotlighting the gradual loss of ancient landmarks of family values. The protagonist in this drama is Prof, who, after his Western education up to PhD, decided to come home to serve his fatherland and also see to improvement of welfare of his family only to find out that his fatherland has nothing to offer him. The nucleus of the characters of the play is of Chief Salome dynasty led by Prof, the ordained intellectual, who returns fresh from Europeans highbrow, Ivy League university with Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) to the Nepa-imposed darkness inside the little siting room where hurricane lantern and candle serve Nepa’s purpose.
In Act Five Scene Six, the play’s curtain is drawn as members of the family gather for Prof’s send-forth to a new path in life. After thanking his family for their benevolence, Prof counsels his siblings that, though “having the best of certificates and attending one of the world Ivy leagues colleges is good, but it is not degrees that can make a man great. A person with a primary school certificate can become richer or a big man if only he has self-discipline, devotion, determination and dedicated. Examples abound where hardworking men are now leading people with degrees.”
The play echoes the lesson that there is no cause a people cannot achieve when they are united in a concerted way as brothers to fight exploiters, those who invented segregation and apartheid and do not grant the right to free expression. With few typos, the play is a family drama observing what happens where right leadership is lacking in the home.