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Theatre Journal 55.1 (2003) 181-182



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The Athenian Sun in an African Sky. By Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2002; pp. viii + 232. $32.00 paper.

Toward the end of The Athenian Sun in an African Sky Kevin Wetmore describes a moment in a student production of Euripides' Hippolytus in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1998. The actress playing Phaedra stepped out of the action to comment to the audience: "Early on in the rehearsal process the directors told us to visualize our characters. I saw [mine] as being tall, willowy, with long blond hair." Then, Wetmore continues, "the action onstage . . . stopped as other actors looked at her looking at the audience" (213). This metatheatrical engagement by an African actress and woman of color with European tradition highlights some of the questions and possibilities surrounding modern African adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy. The incident might have been used to argue for a straightforwardly Afrocentric rejection of the European colonizers' cultural traditions. But Wetmore adopts a more complex position. If Greek tragedy can—as he has argued earlier—be used as a frame for reflection on postcolonial Africa's situation, that frame can itself, as here, be exposed and challenged. Theatre, he suggests, is particularly suited to this enterprise because of its endless potential for restaging and recontextualizing fictional identities, including those assigned to its subjects by colonial power.

Greek tragedy reached Africa through the colonial education curriculum. Since the 1960s, in the wake of independence, however, African productions and adaptations of Greek tragedy, far from declining, have been on the increase. Besides the special case of South Africa, Wetmore includes works from Nigeria, Ghana, and the Congo. Represented are not only adaptations by well-known playwrights such as Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka but also less familiar works like Edua Sutherland's Edufa, based on Euripides' Alcestis, and Nigerian J. P. Clark-Bederemo's Song of a Goat, which as its title suggests alludes formally to Greek tragedy, the original "goat-song," rather than adapting a specific play. Most were written by members of a Western-educated intelligentsia with university connections. Often, too, they were part of a project to develop post-independence national theatres. Sutherland founded a theatre and a drama school in Ghana shortly after independence; Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame, based on Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, was written after its author returned from the West to the University of Ife. Plays like these, produced only in the playwright's native country, raise familiar dilemmas about the continuing influence of colonial literary traditions. Is it, then, the privileged status of Greek tragedy in Western traditions that accounts for its appeal in postcolonial Africa?

Wetmore opens with several hypotheses as to why Greek tragic forms not only took root in Africa but remained popular when other Western literary traditions were subject to anticolonialist backlash. He identifies general affinities: the pre-existence in both cultures of mythical and, more specifically, oral epic traditions; their use of anthropomorphic cosmologies; and rich pre-theatrical performance traditions in both, often involving choruses. Particularly intriguing is his suggestion that in both cases the tragic moment is one of transition: from orality to literacy, and to a modernity generated in Athens by the development of an abstract and generalized notion of civic identity, and in African countries by the encounter with Europe. Greek tragedy's survival as a model in Anglophone literature is also explained by its semi-outsider status. While writers such as Racine and Corneille incorporated classical tragic forms into French literature, Greek tragedy's more distant relationship to English literature left it free of colonial taint and capable of being perceived as fundamentally "unEnglish" (Ngugi wa Thiongo, quoted on 32).

Some of these lines of speculation are flimsily documented, and—understandably in the space of a single book—not all are developed. When Wetmore moves on to specific adaptations, his declared preference is, following Carl Weber, for the model of "transculturation," a process that ends in the "disappearance of the model into the next text or technique within [the...

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