1: UNDERSTANDING AFRICAN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN THE SET AND COSTUME DESIGN OF FEMI OSOFISAN’S MANY COLOURS MAKE THE THUNDER KING

The study examines the portrayal of African indigenous knowledge in the set and costume design of Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder King. In today’s world, where cultures are mixing and native knowledge are going into extinction, studying indigenous knowledge with modern ideas helps us understand how Africans hold on to their indigenous knowledge, accept diversity, and sometimes push back against outside influences. While existing literature has documented African indigenous knowledge from anthropological and historical perspectives, there is a noticeable lack of analysis that situates this area of knowledge within postmodern theoretical frameworks. This gap limits our understanding about how African culture that houses African indigenous knowledge, adapts, reinterprets, or challenges modernity and global cultural flows. Underpinned by Afrofuturism theory, the work argues that the performance’s set and costume design functions as a collection of African indigenous knowledge rather than mere aesthetics and decoration, and this understanding should not be given a different interpretation. Through content analysis and personal interview, the study interogates how material objects such as Sango’s red war garments with talismans, elephant tusk, throne, and mortar encoded indigenous African knowledge of power, justice and survival. It also analyses how costumes design of the production embodies indigenous African knowledge and postmodern rejection of singular narratives. The study reveals that colour symbolism and indigenous artefacts operate as semiotic contents that transmit communal values, cosmology, and historical memory. By reflecting Yoruba material culture and symbolic systems, the design and costume of the production enacts cultural decolonization and affirms Africa as the primary epistemic reference. The findings demonstrate that set and costume of the production are important materials for preserving, interpreting and revalidating African indigenous knowledge.