His play Barber Shop Chronicles was a big hit at Leeds Playhouse – and around the world. Now he talks to Precious Adesina about returning with Once Upon a Time in Sokoto from 11-14 November

For Nigerian-British poet and playwright Inua Ellams, his new play Once Upon a Time in Sokoto is more than a carefully crafted narrative. “I think of it as a historical period drama set in pre-colonial northern Nigeria; it’s about the fall of an empire and the rise of another,” the 41-year-old says of the show, which is produced by Fuel as part of Touring Together, a touring initiative run by the theatre production companies Fuel and China Plate in collaboration with Leeds Playhouse, Brighton Dome, Oxford Playhouse, Royal and Derngate, Northampton and Warwick Arts Centre. 

Known for the acclaimed Barber Shop Chronicles, which brought six barbershops in the UK and Africa to the stage, Ellams’ latest work explores the wealth and fall of the Sokoto Caliphate, a 19th century Islamic state that existed in West Africa from 1804 until it was conquered by the British in 1903.  

Ellams says it is a complex story of slavery, hierarchy, gender and war that he explores with a nuance he believes is often missing when discussing northern Nigeria. “The things happening to the society and the communities in the play are historically accurate. Within that, I weave through these fictional characters who tell that story,” he says. 

What is the role of the Sokoto Caliphate in the play, and how familiar are you expecting audience members to be with it? 

The play begins six decades after the founding of the Sokoto Caliphate. Even though I was born in the region, I wasn’t familiar with it until I started researching it, so I don’t think audiences will be either. I tell this story through the lens of four main characters: Zinari, an upper-middle-class Muslim Fulani woman; Nafisa, a woman who Zinari’s family enslaved; Hadiru, a man Zinari employed; and Yusef, who returns home from what is now southern Nigeria with an understanding of the British forces making their way to the north and hoping to alleviate the suffering that he knows is about to come.

One of the play’s strengths is that there is no hero or villain. What does it mean for you to resist moral binaries within your storytelling?  

I read Sensuous Knowledge by the Nigerian-Finnish author Minna Salami. She grew up in a Muslim household steeped in feminist theory and ideology, and pointed out that these binary systems of good and evil aren’t African. You see this when you look at the orishas [divine spirits in traditional Yoruba religion], for example. There’s no figure like Satan, who in the Western religious canon is the binary opposite of Christ. They are just forces.  

Salami also talks about restorative justice. Rather than punishing people, there are practices where a community reminds a culprit of the good things they have done as a way of forcing them to question their actions. That really got me thinking about how to tell a story that dramatises those philosophical thoughts. 

The play is both critical of the misuse of religion while respectful of faith. How did you find that balance?  

I was born into a multi-faith household. My father was a Muslim, my mother was a Christian. Growing up, I regularly went to both the mosque and the church, so I understand religious pluralism. When news about Boko Haram came, many indigenous Nigerians demonised Islam, whereas my earliest relationship with Islam was about peace and community. So, I’m able to divorce true religion from the weaponising of religion by extremist groups such as Boko Haram, or even the far right in the UK with Christianity. 

What do you want people to take away from the play?  

That in the last 200 to 300 years, not much has changed. Unfortunately, women are still struggling for liberation; capitalism and power still contribute to toxic masculinity; and many of us are still striving to tell our own stories and be understood. Also, that no war is ever justified, however much you dress it up.