Technologising Orality: A Reflection on Femi Lasode’s ‘Sango’

Résumé

Film makers in Nigeria, like literary writers, have made recourse to traditional materials and oral aesthetics and blended them with technology in their narratives in order to achieve a unique film tradition. This paper assesses Lasode’s deployment of oral and film aesthetics in reconstructing the story of the legendary hero-god, Sango. It focuses on the narratology of the text, ‘Sango’, in its adaptation of oral materials in a technogised art. Relying on the concepts of adaptation and translation, the paper adopts character and the matic analytical approach in order to justify the findings. Among other things, the paper establishes that the film has combined technology with orality to present Sango, not only as a legendary figure who inundation his world with mystic grandeur but a tragic hero whose misfortune arises from the bitter politics of his time and whose moral lapses or character traits leave a pattern for the modern society to learn from. In the treatment of his subject, Lasode uses technology to demonstrate the adaptability and continuous relevance of oral materials, (drum, songs, chant, gong, flute and myth) to achieve harmony between the past and the present. Furthermore, songs and drums become the non- human character, motivating, warning, instructing and informing humans in their interactions with one another. In all, Lasode uses technology to demonstrate the adaptability and continual relevance of oral material in contemporary narratives. Word count = 226