Africa’s Democratic Despot and Its Transition

This play is a dramatic exposé of agelong concerns on why Africa as a continent has not been able to completely break the yoke of military rule. Sulyman Abaya probes the three-pronged anathema of Africa—poverty, war, and illiteracy—within the context of its undemocratic governance and inability to totally embrace democracy as the real reasons why the continent has been on the back seat. As the play tries to capture the Western incursion to free Africa completely from the vestiges of military rule, it collapses into the glooming complexities of the deceit and chicanery of the sit-tight military rulers, who keep endless promises of transition from militarism to democracy. The line drawn by the global trend to see the whole world become a democracy and the recurring decimal of military takeovers is where this play has found its voice to locate indices of Africa’s retrogression.