1. Dr Kemi Atanda ILORI
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Vagabond Minstrels
Osofisan’s new play reveals materialism as an unprofitable end
A Review of Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels
A play by Femi Osofisan
First published in The African Guardian, April 24, 1986.
Kemi Atanda ILORI
Femi Osofisan’s play Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels re-opened on April 12, 1986 at
the Pit Theatre, University of Ife. Esu is a parable play displaying for us the dilemma,
hunger, perversion and choices of four itinerant musicians proscribed and, in sequel,
deprived of their mainstay, by a new government that had just swept out of office a
civilian regime. There are copious hints of Nigeria’s rice scandal, import license
imbroglio, the doctor’s brutally-crushed strike, the squander of public funds by high-
placed officials. Osofisan is not interested here in institutional corruption but rather in its
facets as manifest in the lives of individuals within the society.
In this wise, all but one of the four musicians – Omele – were willing to exploit the
misfortunes of their fellow citizens for immediate personal gains.
In their wanderings the minstrels had come to Sepeteri, a place as notorious as the
abode of Esu – the Yoruba erratic god of Fate. Driven to desperation by hunger, they
resolved to risk the wrath of Esu by stealing such offerings as were brought to him by
victims of one misfortune or the other. But they did not succeed. For not only were these
offerings either cowdung or sawdust but the hallowed precincts of the crossroads –
Esu’s hearthplace – rebelled against their presence, trapping them in its own stillness,
its web of superstitions and sorcery.
First their feet were gummed down and clamped in invisible vices, next appeared Esu
amidst a retinue of minstrels intoning his cultic hymn. After a loaded harangue on the
devilry, greed and vanity of humans, Esu promised to restore the minstrels to positions
of trust and influence in society. But first, his test: bestowed with some of the magical
powers of Esu, the minstrels must each find some person in some real misfortune,
provide a redress and demand only that gratification which is human and moral.
But Esu’s instruction was not stated in so many words. Such was the conceit, the
epigrammatic phrasing of his bidding that all but Omele seemed to catch the trap in his
words:
“Choose your target carefully, according to your personal
wishes…and you will be well repaid! As for me, I’ll be back here
tomorrow to see your hoardings. And whatever you have won, Esu
will double it for you!”

2. Dr Kemi Atanda ILORI
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All the minstrels expended Esu’s magical powers for one cure, one social redress or the
other. In fact, Omele attempted it twice but each time the bargain was deliberately – at
his own instance – against his advantage, against his personal comfort. Unlike Radio,
the leader of the troupe (Kola Oyewo), or the fiery Epo Oyinbo (Tunji Ojeyemi), or Jigi
(Yinka Ige), or Sinsin (Pauline Ugbodaga), Omele (Jimi Sodimu) chose those targets
which only brought him the derision and scorn of his friends and finally their desertion
and cruelty when he contracted leprosy.
But the much anticipated return of Esu did not end in a money-doubling show but rather
in a severe condemnation of greed and materialism and a heavy handed sense of
retribution. Restoring Omele to good health, Esu commands: “Let the disease go back
to those who have won it, those who seek to be rich without labor, who have put their
selfish greed first before everything, including their humanity!”
Immediately the transformations began. Obaluaye, the god of smallpox, went to work.
He had led away the leprosy stricken trio while Omele rose to have encomiums poured
on his acts of heroism, his self-denial, his compassion and humanity.
Although the above sketch was the potential theatrical gravy during the production of
Esu, the real delicacy, however, lay elsewhere – in those vital moments when Osofisan
either shocks our conventional expectations or merely indulges them, giving them a
wistful banal humor that rebounds on our morality even as we laugh or sing with his
characters. Constantly at issue is our moral standards, our understanding of social
success or failure.
In their passion for wealth, in their intrigues, jests and despair, the minstrels represent
aspects of our culture, its decadence and possibilities, its contradictions and
conservative nature. The choices of doomed minstrels are, ironically, human choices in
a society overflowing with evils, with human degradation, mass poverty and
dispossession. But they are not humane, not merely in the present society but in a
society of the future where not greed or cruelty will reign out compassion and self-denial.
It is only in this respect that Omele’s choice is significant, that his suffering and anguish
prepare him for a redeemed world.
Whilst the script betrays the usual stage puns and devices of Femi Osofisan, Esu in
performance is a grandiose tableaux of dramatic episodes knitted together by the theme
of cruelty versus compassion, survival versus social extinction.
Like a pageant, the re-enactments flow through the fluid but variegated acting skills of
the performers – students and members of the University of Ife theatre, the
choreographed movements (by Folabo Ajayi) screened-off downstage to create
silhouettes, the music provided by a standing band (from the University’s Department of
Music), the aura of lamps and the bare, merely impressionistic setting – designed by
Agbo Folarin of the Fine Arts department. The total effect is akin to the environment of
our traditional festivals where excitement and danger lurk in the feat of the priest and
other minstrels. Beneath the ebb of the color and song, the poetry and prize of the

3. Dr Kemi Atanda ILORI
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contest lurks Esu’s double-edged blade of fate, his notoriously erratic nature counter
balanced by Orunmila’s rational will and placidity.
Though emphasis may shift through such devices as the electrical explosion on stage,
the projection of songs on slides, the imaginative picture conceived in stage groupings
and movements against the foreboding plinth of Esu and the mystery of the crossroads,
yet Esu re-enacts for us its allure, its risks and morality which tests nerves, professional
ethics and standards. And for the audience, a stretch of nights to know as one of the
songs insists that:
If wealth is all we seek
And don’t care what means we’re using
If our ways seem so slick
When we keep strange rendezvous
One day we’ll come to reason
At some Sepeteri
Where Esu – or History –
Waits in ambush with his noose!
Dr Kemi Atanda Ilori