In this edition of The Book Review, we visit Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Notto Blame, which tells the story of man’s struggle against fate. It pits free willagainst fate to demonstrate how the gods use man’s weaknesses as triggers for the manipulation of his destiny.
The play is a brilliant adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, given a Yoruba setting and internalized into its cosmos. The play, also replete with proverbs, is a rich demonstration of the undiluted culture and beliefs of the Yoruba people before the advent of Europeans and Arabians.
The Gods Are Not to Blame shows how the wheels of fate and the weaknesses of a man conspire against him and set him on a cyclic path of bad fate.
Usman Umar is our guide.
