Ibrahim A. Odugbemi
The Media School,
Indiana University-Bloomington
Toyin Falola’s Feminism, Africanism, and Globalism: Doyin Aguoru’s Voices through Drama (Carolina Academic Press, 2026) is a 360-page critical study of the Nigerian playwright Doyin Aguoru through the viewpoint of the historian’s own long-standing preoccupations with culture, gender, and Africa’s place in a globalized world. Falola, better known as a historian of Africa than as a literary critic, approaches Aguoru’s plays less as objects of formal dramaturgical analysis than as documents of African social and political life. This choice shapes the book from its opening pages to its close, giving it a cross-disciplinary depth.
The book is organized in three loose but interconnected movements which Falola lays out in an early section titled “How to Read This Book”. The first four chapters establish the cultural and intellectual terrain: an introductory chapter on narrative and narrators, a chapter situating Aguoru within a broader lineage of African women intellectuals, a chapter on the costs of globalization for developing countries, and an opening reading of the play, Stolen Seeds. The middle chapters (five through eight) turn to the consequences of globalization as dramatized across all Aguoru’s published plays, while chapters nine and ten shift toward the ideological and philosophical questions — feminism, economics, genocide — underlying Aguoru’s work. A final chapter draws in the South African playwright Athol Fugard as a comparative reference point, before a concluding chapter synthesizes the whole through the idea of “glocalization.”
Much of the book’s analysis engages Aguoru’s plays from different angles across multiple chapters rather than treating each once. Stolen Seeds anchors chapters four and seven, both concerned with the cultural weight placed on childbearing in Yorùbá society. In chapter four, Falola describes children as, in the play’s cosmology, a link between the living and the ancestral dead, which makes infertility a source of social and spiritual crisis rather than simply personal misfortune. Chapter seven returns to the play for a sharper illustration: two female characters discuss how a woman was blamed for years for a couple’s childlessness, only for it to emerge that her husband was infertile all along. Falola uses this scene to argue that inherited gender assumptions can persist in African communities well after scientific understanding has overtaken them.
The play She occupies chapters five, six, and twelve. Falola traces the character Bakari Assani — a wealthy philanthropist secretly running a cross-border smuggling operation — as a study in how criminal wealth can be laundered into social respectability through visible generosity, with a supporting cast of complicit associates and under-resourced enforcement agencies. Chapter six follows Bakari’s alter ego, Benjo, through a risky surgical procedure meant to alter his face and evade capture, which Falola uses as an opening for a wider, more discursive reflection on bodily autonomy and identity politics. The throughline resurfaces in chapter twelve, where Falola places Benjo’s surgical reinvention in conversation with the identity-swap at the center of Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. He suggests that both cases dramatize survival strategies devised under systems — Nigerian organized crime, South African apartheid — that leave ordinary people few legitimate options.
A third play, Refugees of the Great Lakes, set against the backdrop of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, structures chapters eight through ten. Chapter eight offers a reading of the character of Nyatu as a modern echo of Moremi, the Yorùbá legendary heroine, tracing how she organizes refugee-camp women covertly under cover of routine domestic duties. Nyatu is betrayed and is killed by a stray bullet — a death Falola presents as the turning point that forces the play’s male characters to recognize women’s political capacity. Chapter nine builds on this to make the book’s most direct feminist argument, framing colonial contact as having imported a more rigid, exported version of patriarchy onto societies Falola describes as having had more flexible precolonial gender arrangements. Chapter ten steps back from Nyatu’s story to consider the play’s genocide setting more broadly, opening with a general account of how competition over land and resources produces mass violence.
The book’s final substantive chapter, eleven, focuses widely on the relationship between religious belief and scientific reasoning across African, American, and Asian societies before narrowing back to Aguoru’s plays as illustrations. This sets up the concluding chapter, “The Quest for Evolutionary Adjustment,” in which Falola draws together the book’s themes — using, among other things, a plot detail about a husband misled by a religious leader over his own infertility — and closes by invoking Walter Rodney’s account of European exploitation as the deep historical cause of African underdevelopment.
By bringing the lenses of history and political economy to bear on dramatic texts, Falola demonstrates a cross-disciplinary rigor that enriches the book. For readers interested in African literature as a window into lived social and political concerns — infertility and stigma, organized crime, identity and survival, genocide, and the uneasy meeting of tradition with global modernity — the book offers an accessible and wide-ranging guide to a body of dramatic work deserving of wider attention.