Although scholars like Ogundele hold the rise of film in the 1980s responsible for the decline of theatre in Nigeria, Osofisan traces the problem all the way back two decades earlier to the civil war that broke out in 1967. In the years leading up to that, as we have seen, theatre was in bloom. The theatre in Yoruba had been thriving since the 1940s, while that in English, though relatively new, had become incredibly significant, what with artist groups like the Mbari Club and expat critics like the German Ulli Beier promoting the works of talented theatre artists. There was relentless activity and development in theatre in those years, exemplified, just to pick one example, by the crossing of paths of the two traditions of theatre (Yoruba and English): it was in this period, for example, that the University of Ibadan School of Drama, then headed by Geoffrey Axworthy, collaborated with famous Yoruba dramatist, Kola Ogunmola, to stage the latter’s adaptation of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s classic novel, The Palmwine Drinkard. German critic Ulli Beier, also during this period, translated several plays of Yoruba dramatists such as Duro Ladipo to English, and even famously compared Ladipo’s work to that of Austrian conductor, Herbert von Karajan. In 1965, Ladipo’s play, Ọba Kò So, was performed at the first Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1965. It was also during this period, in 1967, that the genius Nigerian architect Demas Nwoko began the construction of the New Culture Studios, in Ibadan, intended as an art space, with its breath-taking great theatre.

So, there was a boom in the country for theatre. But then came the civil war. Osofisan tells me:

The civil war more or less shattered everything. The Mbari club in Ibadan was scattered. People left. There were a number of expatriates like Ulli Beier who had to go back home; Geoffrey Axworthy, Martin Banham—you know people who were promoting our theatre—they left for their homes due to the civil war. And things have never been the same since.

It is not that Osofisan denies that theatre continued to be popular, if not exactly thriving, after the civil war. How could he, when it was in that reconstruction era that his generation of dramatists came of age? He tells me that his generation of dramatists was full of optimism and enthusiasm for theatre and for the nation in general—he himself produced a steady output of plays from the 1970s up until the early 2000s. Neither does he deny the damning impact of film on the practice of theatre. He simply argues that if the rise of film in the 1980s was the knockout punch, the civil war dealt the first dizzying blow. If it did not exactly shatter the structures that had held up the camel’s back, it nonetheless introduced if not all then many of the factors that would subsequently contribute to the decline of theatre in Nigeria.

For one, the insecurity of the war and post-war eras greatly crippled the activities of Yoruba theatres, most of which were itinerant, in the tradition of Ogunde. The risks of travelling often became too much to bear, not only for the troupes but also for their audiences. Gone were the days when everyone could safely travel through cities and states to catch their favourite plays; now, after the horrors of the civil war, only the bravest could dare it. This facilitated the adoption of video technology by dramatists, which, remarkably, was pioneered by the ever-dynamic Ogunde. Ogundele reports that Ogunde began by ‘producing plays with brief film insertions’ in the late 1970s, the success of which led him to produce his first full-length feature film, Aiye, in 1979. He followed this swiftly with two other films: Jaiyesimi (1981) and Aropin N’Tenia (1982). Contrary to what I previously thought, Ogunde was not the first to get into film: before Aiye, there had been Ajani Ogun (1976) produced and directed by Nigerian filmmaker, Ola Balogun, and Ija Ominira (1979), directed by Balogun but produced by Adeyemi Afolayan. But Ogunde was the first prominent theatre practitioner to explore film. And since, to reiterate the words of Professor Ebun Clark, ‘what Ogunde introduces, other practitioners of the form generally adopt and adapt’, there was, as Ogundele puts it, ‘mass desertion of the stage for film’ amongst other theatre artists.

But it wasn’t a sudden leap from theatre to film. Straddling both phases of Yoruba popular culture was the age of video plays, or ‘televised popular theatre’. Where before theatre companies travelled all over the country to perform for audiences, they now preferred to record their plays and broadcast them on television, an innovation that quickly caught on. Of course, the emergence of video technology made this possible, but it was really the post-war condition of the country that facilitated its immense popularity. No longer, as we have seen, willing to travel but still eager to enjoy theatre, audiences now opted for the option of viewing plays on television. It’s not that television was by any means a novel phenomenon in the country, only that it had been hitherto quite restricted: television stations were few and far between, located only in state capitals and not reaching far beyond them. Also, where before the sorry state of the economy meant only a handful of people could boast of owning a television set, the economic buoyancy that resulted from the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the continuous creation of more states (and thus state capitals, which, as Ogundele notes, ‘were felt to be incomplete without television and radio stations,’) facilitated the democratization of television. It was only a matter of common sense, then, to enjoy your plays in the safety of your home rather than risk the dangers of the road. It was only a matter of time before someone got the initiative to transfer the video plays to videocassettes for sale, a move that further boosted their popularity. Ogundele reports that the ‘early and middle 1980s was the golden era of televised popular theatre in Yoruba society.’

But by then, Nigerians had begun to suffer the consequences of their government’s mismanagement of oil revenue. Economist Brian Pinto traces Nigeria’s post-oil-boom economic decline to 1982 when the prices of oil crashed. The Dutch effect coupled with extreme government corruption and embezzlement ensured that the economy would not survive the collapse of oil prices, not even after the Structural Adjustment Programme of 1986.

Interestingly, this economic decline happened only five years after the military government’s famous and much-criticized elaborate display of wealth that was the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, shortly called FESTAC ’77. If theatre artists had any hopes that the government’s seeming enthusiasm for the arts, as demonstrated by the massive splurge that was FESTAC ‘77, would boost the condition of their practice (after all, the construction of the National Theatre, Iganmu—now Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and the Creative Arts—had been swiftly completed in preparation for the festival), their hopes would too soon be dashed. According to Ogundele, the government built a cultural policy around FESTAC ‘77 which, ‘in all its elaborateness, only amounted to equating culture with tourist trade. Significant in this policy was the failure to promote theatre by providing theatre houses in big and medium-sized towns for the companies, itinerant or not.’

And so, with worsening insecurity, a declining economy, and an unsupportive government, there was little chance for theatre to grow. Yoruba theatre artists transitioned more and more into film; and as for the theatre in English, it became, in Osofisan’s words, ‘more and more literary, written for the classrooms, for students to read and digest’, such that by the 1990s, it had become undeniable that theatre in Nigeria had declined massively.