An Ecofeminist Study of Abubakar’s A New Weft in The Loom and Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers

This paper applies the ecofeminist lens to Abdullahi Abubakar’s A New Weft in the Loom and Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers. It elucidates how these plays depict the interconnected crises of environmental collapse, social disintegration, and gender oppression in the Nigerian society, through the Yoruba cosmology. Informed by the author’s approach to socio-economic, political as well as cultural issues pertaining to the experience of modern Nigerian society the analysis retains its original qualitative literary approach. It situates the narratives within ecofeminist theory, which holds that “the destruction of the environment and the historical oppression of women are deeply linked”. Both plays dramatize the consequences of patriarchal greed; economic injustice, environmental disaster, and the utter disregard for womanhood. This paper further highlight the authors’ suggestion of women’s crucial role in restoring communal harmony: through the findings underscoring that neither environmental nor social problems can be solved in isolation: as one commentator notes, any strategy for change “must take into account its impact on the other”. In conclusion, this study reinforces that ethno-cultural unity is a possible way of solving the disintegrated.