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Plot Summary of Kaffir’s Last Game
Kaffir’s Last Game is an experimental drama written by Ahmed Yerima that explores the socio-political landscape and the “love-hate relationship” between Nigeria and South Africa in the mid-1990s. The play begins in the passenger waiting lounge of the Johannesburg Airport in October 1997. Professor Benjamin Omodele Omobusola, a well-dressed 65-year-old renowned Nigerian Professor of Political Science, sits quietly waiting for his flight when Mbulelo Kwandebele Makwetu, a 40-year-old African National Congress (ANC) Campaign Officer and the Professor’s former student, rushes in. Mbulelo is ecstatic about South Africa’s newly won freedom following the end of apartheid. He proudly chants “Sekunjalo!” (we are free at last) and “Amandla!” He declares that his countrymen are working to build the “rainbow country.”
However, the Professor’s mood contrasts with Mbulelo’s joy. He reveals he is fleeing Nigeria to find “freedom from intellectual strangulation and poverty.” To Mbulelo’s dismay, the Professor explains he is abandoning Nigeria for a two-year, $80,000 contract as a Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town. Mbulelo begs him not to go, but the Professor details his suffering; notably, his meagre salary equivalent to $116 a month.
The two men share a drink of brandy and exchange the painful details of their personal lives. The Professor reveals that his wife left him for an American professor after she won the American Visa Lottery. This happened during a period when Nigerian universities were shut down, and the staff were not being paid. Later in the play, Mbulelo shares his own tragic past: after leaving Nigeria, he underwent military training in the Soviet Union and went into exile. He reveals that his first wife, Poppy, was an activist who was murdered in a violent massacre in Sebokeng.
As they wait, they analyse the political states of their nations. They debate Nigeria’s looming transition to civil rule under General Sani Abacha and the annulment of the June 12 election. They mock corrupt African politicians with a satirical song about leaders who buy votes to become “President-for-life.”
The plot deepens when Mbulelo reveals he recently purchased the Professor’s new book, Politics and International Policies, calling it his new “Holy Bible.” The Professor is completely dumbfounded to see it in print. He explains that years ago, he was sacked as a Political Adviser and arrested by the police simply because of a rumour that the manuscript revealed the ills of the Nigerian government. He had to secretly smuggle the manuscript out of his house on the night of his arrest. The Professor details how his political detention broke him psychologically; that the breakdown led him to become a born-again Christian in his cell. Moved by the story, Mbulelo writes a heartfelt dedication in the book and gives it back to the Professor.
The men discuss the treatment of figures like Winnie Mandela and the severe issues plaguing their youths. Mbulelo is heartbroken that young South Africans who carried AK-47s at age seven are now escaping reality through drug addiction. The Professor counters that Nigeria faces a terrifying epidemic of violent student cults in universities. Cynically, the Professor notes that Nigeria’s only strategy to solve its political and economic woes is relying on national committees for prayer and “dry fasting periods,” rather than practical leadership.
They perform a mock swearing-in ceremony of an embezzling African president to map pattern of the continent’s corrupt leadership. The Professor laments that while South Africa eternalises its heroes like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, Nigeria buries its heroes and quickly sweeps away their legacies the moment they lose power.
Mbulelo makes a final, impassioned plea for the Professor to return to Nigeria rather than staying in South Africa. As he tries to persuade the Professor to care about the future, the title of the play is directly addressed. He explains that “Kaffir” is a derogatory Afrikaans word for a black person, which in usage means “a black slave, a black fool.” He tells the Professor that as black Africans, “we lost yesterday, we have today, but do we have tomorrow? That is the game.” He argues that a country meant to lead Africa needs its “shrines” and heroes, like the Professor, to return home and guide the future.
Mbulelo’s flight to Mafikeng for an ANC congress is finally announced. The two men sing “Oh happy day,” share a hug, and Mbulelo rushes offstage. Left alone, the Professor hears the boarding announcements for two different flights: South African Airways to Cape Town and Air Afrique to Abidjan (connecting to Nigeria). The play ends on a cliffhanger: the Professor stands centre stage, staring at both his tickets, physically torn between his lucrative escape to South Africa and Mbulelo’s plea to return to Nigeria, as the lights slowly fade to black.
Background of Kaffir’s Last Game
Kaffir’s Last Game is written by Ahmed Yerima, an award-winning playwright, scholar, and former Director-General of the National Theatre and National Troupe of Nigeria. Yerima wrote the play as a direct reaction to the complex “love-hate relationship” and the sociopolitical dynamics between two major African powers: Nigeria and South Africa in the mid-1990s. He noted that the differences between the two nations mattered just as much as their sociopolitical similarities. He aims to dramatise government instability resulting from succession crises, while simultaneously critiquing and offering solutions to the myriad of problems plaguing both nations.
During the 1990s, Nigeria was undergoing severe economic hardship and political instability under military dictatorship. This era triggered a massive “brain drain,” where highly educated intellectuals, doctors, and academics fled Nigerian universities in search of better living conditions and fair wages elsewhere. Yerima uses the play to anchor the harsh reality of this intellectual migration. It positions the desperate struggle for individual survival against the grand hollow concepts of national patriotism.
The play premiered at the MUSON Centre in Lagos, Nigeria, on February 20, 1998. This original production was directed by ‘Bayo Oduneye, the Artistic Director of the National Troupe of Nigeria. The two-man cast featured renowned Nigerian actor Olu Jacobs in the role of the Professor, while the playwright himself, Ahmed Yerima, performed the role of his former student, Mbulelo. The play was later published in 2015 by Kraft Books Limited as part of the compilation, Collected Plays I, which also features other Yerima’s plays, The Sick People and The Silent Gods. Structurally, Kaffir’s Last Game uses a “free flow” technique with no formal acts or scene divisions.
Setting of Kaffir’s Last Game
Kaffir’s Last Game is set entirely in the passenger waiting lounge for connecting local flights at the Johannesburg Airport. The specific time period for the play is October 1997. The main set consists of easy chairs for the waiting passengers and features clearly marked signs with arrows pointing in opposite directions for gates E1-E35 and E36-E47.
Beyond the literal walls of the Johannesburg Airport lounge, the setting of Kaffir’s Last Game is defined by a charged socio-political atmosphere that captures a transitional period for both South Africa and Nigeria in the mid-1990s. The airport waiting lounge, in this instance, can be regarded as a liminal space or crossroads in that it mirrors the critical turning points both nations are facing, as well as the personal crossroads of the two characters.
On the South African side, the play is set in its post-apartheid era. It takes place in a freshly liberated South Africa under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. The atmosphere is one of hard-won freedom and a miraculous new beginning, with efforts underway to build a “rainbow country” and a “stable society for the future generation” through national campaigns like Masakhane. However, the “honeymoon is over,” and the setting is also defined by the harsh realities of this new era, which among other things include the immense cost of democracy, trade union strikes, and a generation of traumatised youth turning to drugs.
Conversely, the Nigerian backdrop is one of severe political instability, intellectual strangulation, and economic despair. The play is set against the looming, uncertain transition to civil rule expected in 1998 under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. It is a time shadowed by the annulment of the June 12 election, government corruption, the silencing of intellectuals, and a mass exodus of professionals seeking better lives elsewhere.
Ahmed Yerima explicitly uses this temporal and spatial setting, concretised through the collision of these two distinct national realities in a single room, to dramatise the broader African struggle with “instability in government due to succession crises” and the crisis of leadership on the continent.
About the Author
Professor Ahmed Parker Yerima is a Nigerian playwright born in Lagos on May 8, 1957. He is one of Nigeria’s most prolific contemporary dramatists, academics, and cultural administrators. He holds a PhD in Dramatic Criticism from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Yerima has built a distinguished career balancing the ivory tower and the theatre stage. He previously served as the Artistic Director of the National Troupe of Nigeria and the Director-General of the National Theatre. Currently, he is a Professor of Theatre and Cultural Studies and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun State.
He is famous for his pioneered use of “faction,” a seamless blending of historical facts with theatrical fiction. His writing features, among other things, cultural and mythological syncretism, the aesthetics of dreams, and the female question. He is known for moving fluidly across Nigerian cultural landscapes. His plays are rooted in Yoruba, Hausa, Edo, and Igbo traditions. He also frequently uses recurring nightmares and supernatural dreams as psychological devices to foreshadow the tragic fates of his protagonists. For a traditional male playwright, Yerima is uncharacteristically regarded for his “womanist” perspective because he deliberately crafts strong, assertive, and resilient female characters who fight systemic oppression.
Yerima has published dozens of plays in the course of his decades-long writing career. Some of his celebrated titles include Hard Ground, Attahiru, Pari, The Wives, and The Sisters. Hard Ground is arguably his most successful play. It won Nigeria’s most prestigious literary award, the Nigeria Prize for Literature (NLNG), in 2006. His other notable works include The Trials of Oba Ovonramwen, Yemoja, Orisa Ibeji, Owiwi, and Otaelo.
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