Africa’s memory of the transatlantic slave trade will move from the archive to the stage in Lagos on Saturday evening when Odigbose: The Play premieres at the MUSON Centre.
The historical production is scheduled for 7pm at the Agip Hall in Onikan. Written by cultural entrepreneur Olawanle Wanle Akinboboye and produced by Atunda Entertainment, it aims to retell one of the continent’s most painful chapters through an African voice and African performance traditions.
The production combines drama, traditional chants, music, dance, choreography, colour and oratory. Its creators say the audience will encounter the capture, brutal treatment and forced transportation of Africans while also seeing the courage, dignity and resilience of people who survived a system designed to erase identity and humanity.
Akinboboye said the purpose was to allow Africa to tell its own story “in its own rhythm, with its own tears, with its own truth”.
Reclaiming who tells African history
Stories about the transatlantic slave trade have often reached African audiences through foreign textbooks, museums, films and academic accounts. Odigbose enters that conversation from a different direction by using live African theatre to place historical memory before a contemporary Lagos audience.
The production is presented as an African account rather than a conventional historical lecture. Movement, sound, costume and spoken performance carry the narrative, allowing the emotional and cultural dimensions of the story to sit alongside historical reflection.
That approach matters because the slave trade was not only a movement of people across the Atlantic. It fractured families and communities, disrupted cultural transmission and left consequences that remain visible across Africa and its global diaspora.
By staging the story in Lagos, the production also connects the city to a wider Atlantic history. Lagos has long been a meeting point for Yoruba, Nigerian, African and diasporic cultural expression. It is therefore an appropriate setting for a work concerned with memory, identity and the right of Africans to narrate their own past.
A Yoruba creative voice with a continental subject
Akinboboye is known for projects that bring tourism, performance and African cultural presentation together. He founded La Campagne Tropicana Beach Resort and has used Atunda Entertainment as a platform for music, dance and theatrical production.
With Odigbose, his creative focus turns to the historical wounds of enslavement and the survival of African identity. The work is continental in subject, but its presentation in Lagos and its use of indigenous performance traditions also place Yoruba creative practice within the telling of a shared African story.
The play’s use of chants, music, dance and collective storytelling draws upon forms through which Yoruba and other African communities have preserved knowledge for generations. Before written archives became widely accessible, oral performance allowed history, values and communal memory to travel from elders to younger people.
Bringing those techniques into a modern theatre does more than create spectacle. It demonstrates that indigenous artistic forms remain capable of addressing difficult global history and inviting serious public conversation.
History for a younger generation
The producers have identified younger audiences as an important part of the play’s purpose. Historical memory can become distant when it is reduced to dates and statistics, particularly for generations separated from the events by centuries.
Live theatre can make that history immediate. An audience sees bodies constrained, hears voices raised in grief or resistance and witnesses the emotional choices of characters facing violence, separation and displacement.
The production is expected to balance that pain with a message about African survival. Its emphasis is not solely on suffering but also on the spirit that endured, rebuilt communities and carried language, belief, music and identity into new parts of the world.
That wider legacy is visible in diasporic cultures across the Americas and the Caribbean, where African memory survived through religion, rhythm, food, language, visual culture and family traditions. A stage production created in Nigeria can therefore speak both to local audiences and to descendants of Africa across the world.
A cultural gathering at MUSON
Traditional rulers, historians, theatre practitioners, scholars, cultural ambassadors, diplomats and other supporters of African arts are expected at the premiere.
For Nigeria’s cultural sector, the event is also a reminder that theatre can serve several purposes at once. It can entertain, preserve heritage, create employment for performers and technical crews, support cultural tourism and strengthen public understanding of history.
The challenge after the premiere will be to extend the production’s reach. School performances, touring opportunities, recorded educational material and partnerships with museums or diaspora organisations could help the work reach audiences beyond one evening in Lagos.
Odigbose: The Play begins at 7pm on Saturday, 17 October 2026, at Agip Hall, MUSON Centre, Onikan, Lagos. Reservations and confirmations are available through the production contact on +234 913 055 4013.
Readers attending the premiere can share their observations with Podium News as we continue documenting Yoruba and African theatre, heritage and cultural storytelling.
