What happens when betrayal mutates into destiny, when youthful transgressions evolve into life-long curses, and when friendship becomes the site of psychic ruin? These are the questions at the heart of Leonard Ifeanyi Ugwu’s Babel and Boys, a modern Nigerian play that reads as much like a clinical case study as it does a tragic drama. It is a story of two friends, of fraternity violence, of Lagos life, of love that cannot heal, and of trauma that insists on returning until everything is destroyed.
At its centre are Tunde and Babel, once inseparable, bound by schoolboy friendship, until a single act ruptures their lives beyond repair. Tunde kills Babel’s father during a robbery mandated by his university fraternity. The act is performed in the name of ‘the constitution’ of the cult, but its psychic and moral consequences are incalculable. Babel, traumatised by witnessing his father’s murder, becomes consumed by rage, while Tunde, haunted by guilt and paranoia, flees and later resurfaces in Lagos. The play unfolds as their inevitable paths cross again, leading both toward catastrophe.
The betrayal at the heart of the play is chilling not only because it severs kinship but because it exposes the fragility of youthful bonds under the pressure of cultism and violence. Babel voices this wound with striking clarity: ‘You made me hate to speak correct English because it reminds me of my past, it reminds me of the dropout that I am, it brings back the picture of my dying father’ (53). For Babel, even language is poisoned. The grammar of his education becomes a daily reminder of the life stolen from him. His rejection of English is not mere bravado but a symptom of grief, of melancholia that refuses to let go.
Ugwu sets the later action in Lagos, and the city itself becomes a theatre of trauma. From the ghetto where Babel reigns with his boys to the café where Tunde reunites with Mirabel, Lagos is chaos embodied, a psychic landscape that mirrors the disordered minds of its inhabitants. Tunde’s return to the city is greeted with violence and suspicion, a scene of near-jungle justice, where he is pursued by a mob after being mistaken for a thief: ‘Everybody in the car park started chasing me like herd of wild cats after a fattened mouse’ (3). The city here is not neutral space but an extension of fear, paranoia, and vengeance.
Mirabel, Tunde’s former lover, offers the only tenderness in the play. She returns from abroad, successful, hopeful, and still devoted to him. Their reunion is gentle, almost healing. ‘I knew someday I would see you again. I have been praying for that too,’ she tells him (36). She arranges a job interview for him, tries to restore his dignity, and even reassures his wounded masculinity when he protests her generosity: ‘you are paying very high for our meal, making me feel…’ to which she replies, ‘Comm-on Tunde, it doesn’t make you feel less of a man’ (40). These moments of love are fragile counterpoints to the violent world around them, but they are powerless against the compulsion of fate. Tunde is drawn not to love but back to the scene of his crime, compelled by what Freud once called the death drive, the need to return again and again to the site of trauma.
If Tunde is the patient, Babel is the symptom. His very name suggests fracture, confusion, a tower of resentment built on ruins. He is the residue of Tunde’s crime, the haunting that cannot be exorcised. His violence, his mockery, his rejection of English are all ways of performing his grief. He does not simply want revenge; he is revenge incarnate, the return of the repressed that Tunde cannot outrun.
The tragic climax is as inevitable as it is brutal. Babel’s boys shoot Tunde — one bullet in the head, one in the chest, while his brother Dele is also killed. It is a ritual execution, a doubling of deaths that draws attention to the futility of their struggle. The epilogue, set in Chike’s home two weeks later, is heavy with grief. Families weep, visitors come and go, silence pervades. The personal tragedy becomes communal lament, an allegory for a society that consumes its own youth.
Ugwu’s decision to intersperse the play with poems—‘Photosynthesis’ (42), ‘What If?’ (29), ‘Gong of a Dying Song’ (56), is striking. At times they disrupt the pace, but they also function as meditative pauses, like therapeutic interludes. They are reflective, philosophical, and mournful, offering commentary on the events and expanding the tragedy to generational proportions. ‘Gong of a Dying Song,’ with its reference to Christopher Okigbo, links Babel’s and Tunde’s story to the long chain of lost Nigerian youths, brilliant and doomed.
As a play, Ugwu’s Babel and Boys belongs in conversation with contemporary Nigerian drama that interrogates violence, youth, and destiny. One thinks of Ahmed Yerima’s exploration of Niger Delta militancy and broken families, or Esiaba Irobi’s depiction of violence as cyclical and self-perpetuating. Ugwu’s play shares their tragic inevitability but frames it through the psychological intimacy of two men bound by betrayal. There are also echoes of Osofisan, especially in the way communal trauma is staged as collective fate, though Ugwu’s tone is darker, less playful.
The strength of the play lies in its psychological insight. Tunde is not simply a villain; he is a man split between guilt and rationalisation, between his desire for love and his compulsion toward death. Babel is not merely a thug but a symptom, the embodiment of trauma that refuses healing. Their confrontation is not just a fight but a clinical narrative of unresolved wounds.
The play is not without flaws. The tragic inevitability sometimes feels overwrought, with Tunde’s choices occasionally stretching plausibility. The poetic interludes, while often moving, risk breaking dramatic tension. Yet these weaknesses are small in comparison to the play’s ambition and emotional power. Ugwu writes with a dramatist’s flair for dialogue but also with the ear of a clinician, attuned to the speech of the traumatised mind and the violent society that shapes it.
Babel and Boys is a play of betrayal, grief, and repetition. It is also a mirror held up to Nigerian youth culture, where cultism, street violence, and precarious futures collide with the longing for love and dignity. It insists that trauma never disappears; it returns, sometimes as Babel, sometimes as a gunshot. Ugwu’s contribution here is not only artistic but diagnostic. He has written a tragedy that doubles as social analysis, and in doing so he has placed himself within the evolving canon of Nigerian drama that refuses to turn away from the wounds of its society.
Jeff Iwu is a Nigerian novelist, poet, and playwright with a master’s in literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). He is the author of Files of the Heart and Verdict of the Gods, which won the 2024 Akachi Ezeigbo Prize for Literature. His work has garnered multiple honours, including the Green Author Prize and NSPP Awards of Excellence, and he is a fellow of the Imodoye Writers’ Residency.
