The Ozidi Saga is a choreographed folklore epic performed as part of the oral history of the Ijaw (Ijo) people of the Niger River Delta in southern Nigeria. It is traditionally performed as a periodic festival honoring the folk hero Ozidi.
Overview
The saga is an oral epic transmitted through a combination of spoken verse, song, dance, and dramatized performance. The performance dramatizes key episodes in the myth, presented in a nonlinear narrative. A ritual officiant dressed in white and holding objects traditionally identified with the hero solicits participation by acolytes and members of the audience.
Plot
The narrative centers on Ozidi, a legendary folk hero. After his father is murdered by treacherous colleagues, Ozidi seeks vengeance so that his father can join his ancestors. His goal is to call home his father from a limbo-like evil grove where the murdered go instead of joining their ancestors.
Before each battle, Ozidi vomits his sword and battle outfit out of himself. He is accompanied by his musician-assistants, his grandmother, and the animals and objects that he regurgitates. His grandmother coaches him to many victories. However, Ozidi goes too far and kills his uncle as well as an innocent woman and her newborn son. The Smallpox King comes to take Ozidi in punishment, but Ozidi's mother insists that her son was only afflicted by Yaws, a mild childhood disease. The Smallpox King retreats in confusion. Upon recovery, Ozidi gives up his battle sword for good.
The saga essentially narrates a series of successive fights—fourteen in all—between the hero Ozidi and powerful figures that constitute a menace to life and leadership in his society.
Documentation and Scholarship
A performance in 1966 was filmed and later transcribed and translated by playwright and poet John Pepper Clark (J. P. Clark-Bekederemo). Clark's translation was published as The Ozidi Saga by Howard University Press in 1991 (ISBN 0-88258-108-2).
Scholars such as Isidore Okpewho have extensively studied the saga. Okpewho's works include The Art of The Ozidi Saga (published in Research in African Literatures) and the book Blood on the Tides: The Ozidi Saga and Oral Epic Narratology (University of Rochester Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1580464871).
Significance
The Ozidi Saga stands among the grand oral epics of Africa, performed for centuries by Ijo bards with chant, drum, and dance. It embodies the Ijo people's themes of justice, vengeance, the corruption of wrath, and the restoration of harmony. The saga also incorporates African performance elements such as mime, music, dance, poetry, and ritual.
