In 1968, more than a decade before any other female playwright would make her mark, 'Zulu Sofola emerged on the Nigerian theater scene with the performance of The Disturbed Peace of Christmas (1971). In her assessment "The Literary Contributions of Nigerian Women" published in the 13 June 1985 issue of The Guardian in Lagos, Mabel Segun ruminated on the marginal performance of members of her gender as writers and advanced some probable causal factors, including "the traditional reticence of women which make them automatically take a back-seat ... the problem of running a home and going out to work at the same time ... [and] the sparse opportunities for getting published." There are also the more fundamental issues of women's historically stunted access to literary and formal education and the remnants of archaic patriarchal mores that see women's education as an impediment to their roles as wife and mother. Sofola surmounted these odds to...