Modern African Drama (review)

Known for their canon-making authority, the Norton Critical Editions series have also tended to neglect literature and especially drama outside the British and American centers. The appearance of a critical edition that is also an anthology of African drama is thus a reason for celebration. This collection offers both seasoned scholars and new students a range of plays and critical essays in one volume, which will give drama and African studies higher profiles in universities. The volume combines oft-anthologized plays like Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and the less well-traveled Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels by Femi Osofisan, from the usually well-represented Nigeria and South Africa, with others less known but no less important, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Mirii's I Will Marry When I Want (Kenya), Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost (Ghana; the only play by a woman), and Collision of Altars by Ethiopian Tsegaye Gabre Medhin. It also includes criticism on individual plays and key theoretical essays, from writers and activists like Fanon, Soyinka, and Ngugi, and from scholars, including the anthology's editor, which place African drama in the broader postcolonial context.

This collection is an important addition to the Norton library and to the still short list of African drama anthologies, but it might have made an even greater contribution had the editor tested the claims of his preface. In this brief statement and in his inclusion of North African plays, Fate of a Cockroach by the Egyptian Tawfik al-Hakim (trans. from Arabic) and Kateb Yacine's Intelligence Powder (from French), Biodun Jeyifo challenges the "pervasive practice of separating Africa north and south of the Sahara," although he acknowledges that the "practice is defensible" (ix). He goes on to note that "the sheer volume and social impact of English- and French-language drama of Africa is [. . .] one of the contemporary world's most significant cultural developments" (xi), but the absence of plays by leading African authors educated in French, such as Bernard Dadié or Werewere Liking, who have lived in several African countries, leaves this claim untested. Given that Yacine and al-Hakim demonstrate more connection to the cultures of the Maghreb and France in the first case and the Arab Middle East in the second (noted in the anthology's own chronology; 639), than to sub-Saharan francophone or anglophone dramatists, this editorial decision seems to rest on political strategy rather than on the evident cultural and artistic links between Dadié and Liking and their anglophone counterparts.

Perhaps as a legacy from the time when these nations were under neocolonial rule, cut off from independent Africa, the anthology gives short shrift to Southern African voices. Given the momentous change in South Africa over the last decade, it would have been useful to complement the influential anti-apartheid play Sizwe Bansi with a postapartheid play such as We Will Sing for the Fatherland by Zakes Mda. Although written in Lesotho exile the 1980s, this satire offers a still topical critique of postcolonial African corruption and moving portrait of activists betrayed by the new regime. The general rubric of "African Drama and Theatre" does include a contribution from David Kerr on Zimbabwe but misses an opportunity to include an extract from Mda's theoretically rigorous and practically grounded book on development and activist theater, When People Play People (London: Zed, c1993).

Critical selections on individual plays are also uneven, especially on Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. Rather than the uniformly affirmative pieces by Vandenbroucke, Walder, Seymour, and Fugard himself, the editor would foster more student discussion by including fellow South African Kavanagh's leftist critiques of Fugard in Theatre Research International or The African Communist (now buried in the bibliography), or Martin Orkin's analysis in...