CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

Aristotle defines drama as the “mimesis of life on stage before a given audience” (Jide Balogun 2010, Lecture Notes on “Studies in Drama”). Shakespeare in his critical evaluation draws an analogy in his definition as he opines that “life is but a stage” (quoted by B.F. Ibrahim and Akande F.F 2000:37). By implication, life is a drama, and all humans are characters, taking actions from God’s ordained-plot structure of the universe. From the literary and academic point of view, drama, which is one of the three genres of literature including prose and poetry,

replicates the activities of man through the use of characterization, dialogue, costumes, etc.,presented on a stage in the presence of a given audience. Drama is an imitation of the real world because the characters in action only represent and imitate some preconceived personalities in the real world.

The concept of African Drama implies a type of drama nurtured and developed by Africans, using African’s aesthetics and features for the African audience and the world at large. The African experience of drama is traceable to the creation of man and other animate phenomena because drama is a replication of man’s daily activities with his fellow man, his immediate environment as well as the unseen world in terms of ritualistic performances. This experience has been extensively argued to have originated form Egypt, Greece and the ancestral worship of African descents among other sources. Egypt, as the first source of African Drama rests on the notion of her being the origin of civilization coupled with the historical evidence of the Egyptian sacred drama celebration in 2000/BC. The Grecian evidence is associated with the worship of an ancient deity called Thespis. The classical celebration of the great medieval Judeo-Christian myth among others has also contributed to the growth and development of the contemporary African Drama.African dramatic practitioners structure their works after the tenets of Tragedy, Comedy, Tragic-comedy, Melodrama and Farce. However, the comic genre has been more closely associated to the African society as the tragic genre was associated with the classical age (JideBalogun 2009, Lecture “Notes on African Drama”).

Sociology, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (6th edition), is the scientific study of the nature and development of the society and social behaviors. Over the years, literary scholars and social analysts have been investigating the society in order to expose the anomalies therein and inform social harmony and political stability among other issues. As time went by, sociology metamorphosed into an approach in the literary field through which

writers and critics assess the society using social parameters.

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