Towards a Cleaner and Healthier Nigerian Environment: An analysis of Bode Sowande’s Mammy Water’s Wedding and Femi Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder King

Abstract

 Drama is a veritable tool of criticizing unacceptable patterns of behaviours in the society. Playwrights, in every society, use their works to re-engineer the society and challenge deplorable behaviours, especially when they come from leaders and notable personalities in the society. Femi Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder King and Bode Sowande’s Manny Water’s Wedding exemplify such situation and characters. In these plays, the playwrights engage with one of the most critical challenges facing humanity today- climate change- a consequence of environmental abuse, degradation and neglect which has become a major threat to the survival of man on the planet. Foregrounded in ecocriticism and eco-literature, this study examines the attitudes of Sango, a Yoruba legend and King, in Femi Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder King, and Adagun-Odo and Akila in Bode Sowande’s Mammy Water’s Wedding to reveal the consequences of man’s actions on the environment. The study analyses the actions of these characters in relation to the natural elements such as trees and water as employed in the texts by the authors. Its findings are that power, human negligence, oversight, and advancement in technology and expansion for human habitation, are some of the reasons man abuses his environment. It advocates that humanity must intentionally strive for the preservation of the environment to avert the looming danger of self and communal destruction.