Femi Osofisan or Ahmed Yerima?

Abstract The aim of modern African drama was to disrupt the grip of Western tradition on performances on the continent, and to propagate indigenous narratives. There was an extensive enterprise at decolonizing colonized cultural spaces. Playwrights such as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in Kenya and Efua Sutherland in Ghana incorporated traditional performance aesthetics in their works as a way of advancing the decolonial agenda. In Nigeria, apart from the Nobel Laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka, two dramatists that have been able to bridge their corpus of works with the ideology of their times are the socialist, Femi Osofisan, and the postmodernist, Ahmed Yerima. Although numerous contentions abound in regard to the most prominent of these two dramatists, this article uses content analysis method to examine their works and contributions to theatre practice in Nigeria and Africa. The study investigates the ideo-aesthetics, and style of the two playwrights, and the relevance of their works to their immediate societies.