Drama and Performance ed. by John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan (review)

Reviews as it reflects on the desire for "realism" in ethnological show business and the skills of the Africans as perfonners. Toward the end of the book, we get two articles primarily about the exhibits (as opposed to the men who exhibited them). Both Clicko and LoBagola (who was actually an American posing as an African) are described as being mentally disturbed (Clicko with his wild fits and LoBagola as a pedophile drunk with a number of scandalous exploits and arrests). From a performance perspective , far more interesting is the brief discussion of Clicko's ability to enter a trance state for performances (which explains his wild fits) and LoBagola's ability to create an identity for himself by naming himself and fabricating a life and persona. Overall, the reader will appreciate the detailed research and descriptions of some of the most important players in this industry. She will have to go elsewhere for discussions on the significance of ethnological displays and their implications for our understanding of history, society, and civilization. JOHN CONTEH- MORGAN and TEJUMOLA OLANIYAN, eels. Drama and Perfonnallce. Special issue of Research in African Literatures 30.4 (Wimer 1999). Pp. 240. Reviewed by Martin Orkin. Ulliversity ofHaifa This number of Research in African Literatures brings together essays on "drama," by which the general editors mean "the Western-inspired literary play" (I), and on "oral, nonliterary modes of perfonnance" (I). SO far as the first of these categories is concerned, the edilors allege the "vitality of theatrical activity in Africa" (I), in which "plays continue to be written and published " (I) (not perfonned?). There is, however, relatively little to learn about the current state of theatre activity in Africa in this volume published at the end of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the collection does provide ongoing and often infonnative discussion of predominantly familiar terrain. Wole Soyinka takes an anecdotal and retrospective glance at his own experiences in the 1960s and 1970S in Nigeria and at the emergence of what he calls socially iconoclastic and politically provocative orisunic theatre. He also recalls, tellingly, the continuation of his work in the early 1990s, notably in the production of The Beatification ofArea Boy - but now in exile, in Jamaica. Isidore Okpewho deals with Soyinka's adaptation of Euripides's Bacchae by going straight to the published text (1973), with no interest in perfonnance history. In contrast, Nicholas Brown identifies covert contemporary political criticism and traces Brechtian resonances in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's ventures in the seventies with the Kamiriithu theatre group, as well as in Mother, Sing For Me in the early 1980s. He also directly addresses conditions of performance and, like Soy- 650 REVIEWS inka, indicates the extent to which, in Kenya as well as in Nigeria, theatre has been and often still is treated by the ruling powers as dangerously subversive. But only with Tejumola Olaniyan's study of the "uncommon sense" (77) that unsettles conventional social and political expectations in Femi Osofisan's plays is the focus of this volume directed more deliberately at theatre of the past decade or so. Sandra L. Richards's account of African influences on August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), again against the editors' view of theatre as "dramatic literature" (2), also pays some interesting if relatively scant attention to performance conditions, and it offers, as well, a rare instance of African cultural influence on the West rather than the reverse. Indeed, another interesting aspect of these essays is the extent to which they provide detailed instances of hybridization of cultural influences from Europe in their analysis of attempts to develop indigenous theatre. Such hybridization is evident not only in the discussions of the work of Ngugi and Soyinka but also in what are, too, noticeably essentialist (in an old-fashioned sense) accounts by both Sidibe Valy and Mari-Jose Hourantier of the Ivory Coast Bin Kadi-So adaptation of Macheth. Loren Kruger's record of the contradictions in the production of a radio and television soap opera in South Africa is this volume's sole reference that region. Thisleavesquite untouched any investigation of current South African theatre, or of its problematic enfeeblement...