Cultural impreatives for peace and security in African drama: Ogonna Agus

Drama in its didactic function, serves as a pulpit where playwrights pour out their experiences, sermonize on the need for change and offer probable solutions to the ills that beset the society. It is on the performance stage that our traumas and laments are orchestrated freely without the censoring hands of the law. Thus drama has the potentials to serve as a veritable medium for the installation of peace and a functional national security system. The traditional society utilizes laid down customs, traditions, norms, taboos and other cultural idioms to enforce order and subsequently institute peace and ensure the security of lives and properties. In Nigeria today, the societal ills are horrendous - lies, charlatans, thieves, corruption, king makers and the associated election rigging, armed banditry, non-responsive governments, wasteful spending, kidnapping and the latest in the mix - bombing, suicidal or otherwise. Crimes were discouraged by the traditional society through cultural dictates; therefore, one is forced to associate the preponderance of these crimes to the absence or relegation of cultural and religious measures. On the premise of this therefore, the paper argues for a return to the African traditional mode of worship which bound people together and fostered peaceful co-existence among communities. Using the qualitative method of library research, this paper investigates modes of traditional worship in Igbo cosmology and their relationship to societal order through a religious and cultural analysis of Ogonna Agu s Symbol ofa Goddess and Sunnie Ododo s Hard Choice. The paper concludes that a return to the traditional modes of worship would ensure national peace and security and institute order and value in the society.