ABSTRACT
Substantial amount of African literary works are adaptation of older
classical, Elizabethan modern and even African playwrights. These
adaptations show that writers admit to being influence by other
playwright but not without elements of their creative imagination in
most cases. What their creative imagination in their literacy work shows
is that the claim that adaptation is akin to imitation is false. Thus
this paper is a comparative study of J.P Clark’s The Raft and Femi
Osofisan’s Another Raft as a literary adaptation the study brings out
adaptations used in Femi Osofisan’s Another Raft from J.P Clark’s The
Raft.
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Literature describes adaptation as an
attempt to achieve medium of expression through the medium of inherited
material”. Thus the source material in itself is a raw material used as
by the artist to practice his creativity on. It is important to note
that adaptation should ote be used as tool for plagiarism especially by
literacy artist.
Adaptation is undoubtedly the means of relocating the context of an
existing story to an entirely different setting or period to update the
initial story, change its ideological purpose, create an entirely new
perspective to the story etc. The use of adaptation by literary scholars
can be use for cultural or historical references just as we see in
Osofisan’s Another Raft He adapts The Raft by Clark which discusses the
socio-political diriftedness of the Nigerian society towards doom and
goes beyond by creating a possible way of solution which for him is
(UNITY and TOGETHERNESS). Adaptation is universal and has been carried
out by several playwright all over the world for various reasons.
Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928) is an adaptation of john
Gay's The Beggar's Opera (18 Century), and was later adapted by wole
Soyinka and he called it Opera Wonyosi (1977). the bacchae of euripides
by wole Soyinka is an adaptation of The Bacchae by Euripides, so also
is The gods are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi an adaptation of Sophocles’
King Oedipus.