Collaborating with a Dead Man: The Cultural Politics of Ahmed Yerima’s Otaelo

Several contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare address important, as well as ongoing, socio-cultural and political situations in their various societies. While this approach suggests collaboration with Shakespeare rather than contesting of the colonial political and cultural hegemony that the English Bard privileges, it also underlines the influence that Shakespeare has on the writers and cultures with which he has been in contact. From the perspective of collaboration with Shakespeare through Othello, this essay examines Ahmed Yerima’s Otaelo, which dramatizes the debilitating and tragic effects of the Osu practice among the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria and emphasizes the play’s strong echoes of other plays by Shakespeare, including Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus. Yerima’s play underlines how adaptation makes it possible to view the relationship between an older writer and a young (or new) one in the context of both influence and collaboration.