Theatre
Dear Parent and Ogre
Raymond Sarif Easmon · 1964
Synopsis
Freetown, as the country moves to independence. In the Touray household, a Creole aristocratic family proud of descending from freed slaves, the daughter of the house, Siata, wants to marry Sekou Kuyateh, a man from the interior of the country who embodies the new Africa. Her father, a notable whom the whole nation honours, opposes it, and hears himself called the ogre of the century under his own roof, in a bourgeois drawing room where politics and the trade unions also meet.
Context
Three acts, a little over a hundred pages. Wole Soyinka staged the play for the first time in Lagos in 1961, and Oxford University Press published it in 1964 in the Three Crowns series. The author portrays the pride of the descendants of freed slaves, their westernisation and their disdain for the people of the interior. Bowden Quinn saw in 1980 drawing-room melodramas nourished by Shaw and a marked admiration for England; Simon Gikandi saw a half-comic commentary on a community going through the pains of independence.
Who it is for
In English, never translated into French. It is worth knowing that the Creole aristocracy of the capital considered itself superior to the peoples of the interior, and that marriage was what was at stake in this division.
Prizes and reception
Awarded the prize of the magazine Encounter, it is the first play by its author, who produced a second in 1965, performed in several countries of West Africa.