Ghana's Concert Party Theatre

Notes

1. INTRODUCTION 1. On asafo music, see Nketia (1974, 7, 24); on highlife, see Collins (1976b and 1994b). 2. See Bame (1985); Barber (1982, 1986, and 1995); Barber and Ògúndíjo (1994); Barber, Collins, and Ricard (1997); Clark (1979); Collins (1994a); Darkey (1991); Jeyifo (1984); and Ricard (1986). 3. Popular theatre forms are generally improvised and non-scripted. Only very recently have productions been recorded on videotape. 4. For more extensive treatment of the concert party from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, see also Bame (1985); Barber, Collins, and Ricard (1997); Collins (1994a); and Darkey (1991). 5. “Chop bars” are West African fast food stands. 6. See for instance Gates (1988); Mudimbe (1988); Drewal (1991); Appiah (1992); Taiwo (1995); Jeyifo (1996); Oyêwúmí (1997); and Adéeko (1998). 7. While I considered trying to incorporate more of these archival sound recordings into this book because this material is so rich, I felt it was important to give a balanced treatment of each era of concert party history and not weight the study too heavily in the 1960s, the period when the archival recordings were made. 2. READING BLACKFACE IN WEST AFRICA 1. For a similar critique of the status of history in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, see Dayan (1996). 2. See for instance an interview with Ghanaian playwright Mohammed ben Abdallah (1992, 33). Notes 164 Notes to Pages 21–26 3. See for instance Scott (1998). 4. Whether or not there exists a direct relationship between American minstrelsy and performance traditions exported from Africa and retained by slaves in the New World is a notoriously vexed question in theatre historiography. See Ellison (1964, 45–59); Sacks and Sacks (1993); and Toll (1974, 40–51). Some scholars assume that there were no “genuine” elements of African and African American culture in minstrelsy; the genre was a white construction of blackness that had little to do with the “real” thing (Lyon 1980, 150–159). Although a number of early American minstrel performers claimed to have observed and copied the dances, dialects, and jokes of slaves, these claims may be interpreted as hyped-up fabrications created for advertisement. But this dismissal of the possibility that minstrelsy appropriated “genuine” African and African American performance traditions is premature. William Mahar’s linguistic analysis of stage dialects used during the first forty years of blackface entertainment asserts that white Negro impersonators deployed three distinct varieties of black English: West African Pidgin English, Plantation Creole, and Black English vernacular (1985, 260–285). If “Negro” speech in minstrelsy was not based on observation of slaves, how could such distinct dialects have made their way into sheet music lyrics and sketch books? In addition, Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks’s groundbreaking study Way Up North in Dixie persuasively demonstrates that minstrel entertainers had ample opportunity to observe and indeed collaborate with black musicians in the north, not simply on southern plantations as white performers often claimed (1993). 5. While minstrelsy scholarship is vast, no single study has yet considered the genre’s international dimensions. On Jamaica, see Hill (1992); on Nigeria, see Owomoyela (1991, 199–201); on South Africa, see Coplan (1985, 37–42) and Erlmann (1991, 27–37); on Australia, see Waterhouse (1990). 6. My analysis of minstrel dramaturgy is informed by extensive examination of the Harvard Theatre Collection’s (HTC) holdings of minstrel playbills, posters, sheet music, jokebooks, and dialogue pamphlets, as well as the University of Chicago Library’s Atkinson Collection of Ethiopian Drama (ACED). On the dramaturgy of minstrel shows, see Toll (1974, 51–57). 7. The written history of the concert party credits solo comedian Teacher Yalley as having created the concert party form (Bame 1985, 8–9; Collins 1976a, 50–57; Darkey 1991, 30–31; Sutherland 1970, 6–7). However, my interviews of older residents in Sekondi and Tarkwa, oral histories of veteran performers, and archival research in colonial newspapers and the files of the Optimism Club of Sekondi indicates that the perceived importance of Yalley may be the result of an over-reliance on Sutherland’s biography of Bob Johnson as a sole source of primary documentation. Colonial newspapers give evidence that African amateur comedians performed at elite social gatherings, quite possibly in blackface makeup, as early as 1903 (Gold Coast Leader 1903). While numerous secondary sources on the concert party credit Yalley with having begun his performing career at the Optimism Club in 1918, there does not seem to be any documentary evidence to...