Tales of Hiroism in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are not to Blame

Apart from the dynamics in the setting of Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are not to Blame and Sophocles’ Oedipus of the King and the mythical pedagogy each evokes in the different traditions it represents, both plays are antonymous via their introductory styles. Sophocles’ play depicts the style Greek scholars refer to as in medias res. This is the narrative technique of beginning an epic or other fictional form by plunging into a crucial situation that is part of a related chain of events; the situation is an extension of previous events and will be developed in later action. Thus, the work begins with an interesting event from the middle of the story, while the supposed beginning is caught through flashback technique. Sophocles’ play opens with the city of Thebes stricken by a plague and its citizens begging Oedipus to find a remedy. He consults the Delphic oracle, which declares that the plague will cease only when the murderer of Jocasta's first husband, King Laius, has been found and punished for his deed. Oedipus resolves to find Laius' killer, and much of the rest of the play centres upon the investigation he conducts in this regard.

In a series of tense, gripping and ominous scenes, Oedipus’ investigation turns into an obsessive reconstruction of his own hidden past as he begins to suspect that the old man he killed at the crossroads was none other than Laius. Finally, Oedipus learns that he himself was abandoned to die as a baby by Laius and Jocasta because they feared a prophecy that their infant son would kill his father; that he survived and was adopted by the ruler of Corinth, but in his maturity he has unwittingly fulfilled the Delphic oracle's prophecy of him; that he has indeed killed his true father, married his own mother, and begot children who are also his own siblings. But Ola Rotimi’s play opens with the regular technique Latinised as ab ovo: a term which refers to a story which starts from the beginning of the events it narrates. Beside these, both plays dramatise certain thematic feature that reiterates the mythical involvement of the making of a hero.

A typical archetype in the Jungian concept involves the hero in a peregrination across worlds, during which he is faced with the tasks that justifies or proves and clarifies his oedipal complex. In The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, Lord Raglan reveals the several unusual events that characterise heroism among fictional texts. These includes a birth that has unusual circumstances; an early escape from attempts to murder him; or a return to his homeland, where, after a victory over some antagonist, he marries a princess, assumes the throne, and only later falls victim to a fate that may include being banished from the kingdom only to die a mysterious death and have an ambiguous burial. Reglan creates the summary of the hero’s journey through life and back to the unseen world. Holistically, this is the general life of almost every hero. But Frye has another view which incorporates certain characteristics that may not involve the hero with any valorous act, yet he is a hero. Presenting five different analysis of what stuff a hero may be made of, Frye concludes thus:

In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience (Anatomy, 33).

The life of the hero is always a complicated one. The journey that archetypal critics associate the hero with is the process or the haggard road which the hero must go through in other to attain his purposed height. Sometimes the hero is aware of this unnatural task, while in other cases the hero is completely eluded of the expectations of the society, the supernatural etc. in this case the hero moves snootily, being guided by a force he cannot actually explain, until he actualizes the purpose of his creation. At the end of the journey comes the realisation of the disillusionment that has guided his personally uninformed actions. This is the true story involved in the making of a hero; they make up the tales of heroes. The same picture is obvious in the life of Rotimi’s Hero, Odewale. The play text presents Odewale as a child born with a destiny he fought to avert. Unfortunately, his hamartia is being orchestrated by his attempts to go against his destiny. Odewale’s heroic story can be referred to what Frye terms “a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer” (P.51).

The play opens with the beginning of the story. As the tradition holds, Odewale’s birth is welcomed in nostalgia. At birth, his Parents take him to the village diviner (Baba Fakunle, the Ogun priest) to tell his future. They meet their sadness amidst their joyful thronging of drums and dancing: their first son is destined to kill his father and marry his mother and the only way to avert this is to kill him.

BABA FAKUNLE: This boy, he will kill his own father

                        And then marry his own mother.

NARRATOR:   Priest bears boy to Gbonka, the king’s special messenger,

                        and orders him to go into the bush with the little boy,

                        to the evil grove. (P.3)

But since the will of the supernatural surpasses those of men, Gbonka becomes more pathetic for the known-nothing child. Rather than kill him as the instruction says, he finds a foster father for the child and returns to his place of service. The foster parents, Ogundele and Mobike, who also has no child, happily take the child as their own. Although a few people know that the child is adopted, none has information about the true parents of the child because Gbonka left the two men in the bush without saying much. Odewale grows up in the household of Ogundele, the only father known to him. His closest friend has been Alaka, the man who has his history in his head but refuses to tell him.

As an adult, Odewale’s foster uncle told him the truth about his destiny, but failed to mention that his real parents were not known. To avert this ominous circumstance, Odewale believes that running away to a distant land would help out. He runs away to Ede. There he buys a farm at the point where the three foot paths meet. There he works hard to establish himself. Some days later an old man comes to the farm land to make claims of the land. The man presses him harder as he tries to speak for his innocence that he is not the thief the old man calls him. At first he tries to avoid all form of rancor, but when the man turns around to insult the village he thinks he has come from, Odewale could not take it anymore. To end the insult, Odewale tries to use his mystic powers against the old man but the old man’s powers seem to be more potent than his. When it becomes pressing he seeks to save his life. In such a defence, yet the man keeps advancing, he strikes the man with a hoe and he dies.

For killing a man Odewale did not know who he is or where he has come from, he becomes restless and runs from town to town for months until fate brings him to Kutuje. The inhabitants have just lost their king and their boundary neighbours have taken advantage of this to attack them. Odewale, vested with unquantifiable meekness, could not hesitate to fight for the people’s freedom.  In anger, hearing what has befallen the inhabitants, he gathers the people and leads them to war against their invaders and conquers them. The expression by Baba Fakunle fits Odewale’s haste to injustices:

BABA FAKUNLE:       Your hot temper, like a disease from birth,

                                    Is the curse that has brought you trouble.

The Kutuje inhabitants, beholding how gallantly he could fight, decide to make him their king in lace of their late king to protect their land. This is the beginning of the hero’s problems. The fact that the people unanimously agree to break the cultural protocol to make him their King is the starting point of his tragic incidence. And as the tradition demands, the new king has the mandate to possess the widow queen. This means that odewale has to marry the queen, Ojuola (his actual mother). At this point the hero fulfills Baba Fakunle’s prophecy; what Frye refers to as “a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer”. Explicitly, he rightly kills his father and possesses his mother as is fate upon him.

Up to this time, Odewale has not realized himself. And like a puppet in the hands of certain supernatural powers, Odewale stakes his words on exposing the killer of King Adetusa a task that must be actualised. Following his unalloyed plan to unravel the killer of the former king of the land whose perturbed spirit has constituted the terrible disease that plagued the people of Kutuje, he draws a line of alienation with the people that one time cheer him. First, the priest accuses him of being the man he is looking for. Secondly, his old friend, Alaka, pays him a visit and the hidden old stories become laden with a new meaning. Gbonka is now stricken with old age; employs Alaka to lend meaning to the stories.  Alaka finally tells the truth that Odewale is the abandoned child, the son of the late king and the son of the queen mother whom he now called wife, and also the mother of his four children Odewale has. Unable to bear the truth, the queen kills herself. The king, in order to fulfill his promise to the people of Kutuje, plucks out his eyes and gives an order for the proper burial of the queen. He then banishes himself with his children after mending the wounds he has created in his relationship with his brother Aderopo.

It is apparent from the selected speech act functions of the hero’s words that the conversation in the drama plays out maxims of cooperative principle on the amalgamation of the reality of Odewale’s life crisis of his birth; his heroic activities, the crisis of his identity that the play celebrates the kind of heroism that the hero appears completely ignorant of the fate that befuddles him. Everything comes to him in a reversed form. Odewale’s verbal dexterity and vibratory words to his people suddenly shudders and becomes subversive the moment the story of his heroism unfolds the dominant circumstances from the moment of his birth, origin and identity. In other words, the hero is destined to be a king by means. And as his ignorance could drive him on, he serves as a puppet toward gratifying the mind of the deity who hunts him back and forth, projecting incidences to entrap him at the end. Odewale’s life is here an explicit example of Niyi Osundare’s view of the fate of man in the hands of the supernatural like that of grasshoppers.

His effort to sustain his heroism, responsibility and maintain his face is hedged on proving his origin and identity. In connection to this, his search for identity is to prove his innocence in the murder crime accusation. Incongruously, Odewale’s search becomes the journey back to his real self identity and revelation of guilt of murder. His mistaken self-identity is revealed to him, and that revelation constructs him as the murderer. Again, he must pay for that crime to prove his passion for accountability and passion for responsibility. To do this, he allows his hot temper and self-will to play to the end, thus standing the test of time as a politically responsible leader and culturally conscious Yoruba person, who must reclaim and redeem his origin and identity. He can be heard vividly saying,

No, No! Do not blame the Gods. Let no one blame the powers. My people learn from my fall. The Powers would have failed if I did not let them use me. They knew my weakness, the weakness of a man easily moved to the defence of his tribe against others. I once slew a man on my farm in Ede. I could have spared him. But he spat on my tribe. He spat on the tribe I thought was my own tribe. The man Laughed and laughing, he called me a ‘man from the bush tribe of Ijekun’. And I lost my reason. Now I find out that that very man was my… own Father, the King who ruled this land before me. It was my run from the blood I spilled to calm the hurt of my tribe that brought me to this land to do more Horrors. Pray, my people-(71)

In general term, Cooperative Principle maxims of quality and quantity are regarded inadequate and broken as the conversational trends do not satisfy Odewale’s yearning for information to get the truth he wants. Such conversations bring out his hot temper in most cases. Citable cases include his encounter with Aderopo on the information from Ile-Ife about the sickness in the town (19-20). His encounter with the Ifa priest, Baba Fakunle who seems to be holding back on the information as to the killer of King Adetusa is another (27-29). Finally, his encounter with Alaka, his childhood friend, who tries to hold back the truth about Odewale’s origin on discovering the danger that the telling might bring, is also a case in point (68). This scheme seems to engineer and assures Odewale’s conspiracy allegation, and the eventual pursuit that Odewale engages in, in searching for the truth. Odewale finds the real truth and heroically accepts and fulfills his destiny.

In this play, Rotimi emphasizes that the hero is also contributory to the making of his story. The hero does this by ignoring what he finds as his threat; not giving heed to what should be done in other to salvage himself from the betiding fate. We find this true with Odewale in the following ways. When Odewale arrives as a stranger in Kutuje, he exhorts the people to struggle against the Ikolu attackers: "Up, up, I all of you; I to lie down resigned to fate I is madness" (p.6). He also commands the people to do something about the plague. He asks: "What have you done to help yourselves?", and declares: "If you need help, search for it first among yourselves" (pp.12-13). In the case of Odewale, the dramatist clearly shows what share he has in his own fate. He especially stresses his hasty temper. In this respect he resembles the god Ogun. Odewale's friend Alaka mentions that he used to call him “Scorpion” because of his temper: “One that must not be vexed. I smooth on the surface/like a woman's jewel; I poison at the tail” (p.43). Baba Fakunle reproaches him with it: “Your hot temper, like a disease from birth, is the curse that has brought you trouble” (p.29). After the quarrel with Aderopo, Odewale admits it himself and tries to be calm like Ojuola: “let her cool spirit enter my body, and cool the hot, hot hotness in my blood - the hot blood of a gorilla!” (p.39). The most fatal result of this failing was the killing of the old man on the farm near Ede. In this case his hot temper, aggravated by an insult to his tribe, has led to an act which he bitterly regrets. In the final examination it proves true the predictions of the gods. Therefore, Odewale is thus held responsible for what has happened to him, not the gods.