Ghana's Concert Party Theatre

2. Reading Blackface in West Africa [Includes Image Plates]

Reading Blackface in West Africa 17 Reading Blackface in West Africa WONDERS TAKEN FOR SIGNS 2 I first encountered the Ghanaian concert party in the Northwestern University library in 1992. It was there I found Efua Sutherland’s small booklet The Original Bob, a biography of the famous concert party actor Bob Johnson (1970). On the cover was a picture of Johnson in top hat and tails, wearing a plaid tie, his beaming smile broadly painted in white, his hands extended outward at his sides: a perfect evocation of Al Jolson exclaiming “Mammy” (figs. 1 and 2). This picture of Johnson, so suggestive of the controversial and racially charged American minstrel genre, raised questions about how blackface traveled all the way to West Africa. Why did Africans wear blackface? Did this makeup, clearly influenced by American and British minstrelsy, signify ideas about race circulating during British colonial rule? Perhaps colonial Ghanaian performers were offering what Homi K. Bhabha calls a “revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects” (Bhabha 1986, 173). Blackface performance practices might have been subversive strategies through whichAfricans disrupted racist colonial domination by turning “the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (173). Yet as someone who strongly believes that postcolonial theory is desperately in need of historical specificity, I question just how such an interpretation of concert party’s subversiveness could be supported with historical evidence. Would it require intentionality on the part of the performers? Or would audience reception be more important? Subversiveness may not be consciously articulated at all, for concert parties are comedies, and humor, as Freud has shown us, registers in regions of the human psyche often beyond the reach of 18 Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre rationality, inaccessible to the historian searching for evidence firm enough to move an argument beyond speculation and surmise. While questions of audience reception in theatre history are notoriously problematic , they are especially so in Africa. Spectators of colonial concert parties had extremely limited access to writing and preservation, thus diaries or memoirs recording their recollections are not to be found in the archives. Oral history, the mainstay of African social history since Vansina’s foundational treatise (1985), is of limited use: Spectators’ memories of ephemeral theatricals enacted over sixty years ago are sketchy at best, when even extant. Performers’ recollections are far more vivid and accessible through oral interviews, and their testimony supplemented with contemporaneous performance reviews in colonial African newspapers as well as my experiences in Ghana of the 1990s constitute the evidentiary basis for this chapter’s exploration. My concern to find evidence substantiating how a performance convention such as blackface was interpreted in the historical past arises from what I see as a problematic gap between academic disciplines in the study of colonial and postcolonial cultures. Postcolonial literary theory has converged on occasion with debates in colonial and postcolonial historiography, most notably in Gayatri Spivak ’s critiques of the Subaltern Studies Group ([1987] 1988). However, there has been a tendency for the fields of literary study, history, and political science to explore issues of subaltern agency and colonial power independently, since a common ground between disciplines is difficult to maintain when accusations of history’s empiricism are countered by rejections of literary theory’s ahistorical flattening of the experiences of colonized people (Ahmad 1996; Cooper 1994; McClintock 1992; MacKenzie 1994; Slemon 1994). Postcolonial literary theory makes generic claims about “the postcolonial condition,” a state of being that freely transgresses historical and cultural boundaries (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995). This leads, asAijaz Ahmad points out, to some rather peculiar assertions , as when one postcolonial primer suggests, in reference to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, that the Indian government is Islamic and Irani clerics are postcolonial (1996, 277). While poststructural theory, upon which much postcolonial theory is based, has undermined facile claims to empirical truth, it has authorized, ironically, truthclaiming interpretations of entire cultures and epochs. Consider the work of Eric Lott, a literature scholar whose award-winning book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) explores the historical significance of American minstrelsy. Lott offers at one point an extensive analysis of a single illustration from a 1901 edition of Huckleberry Finn. As is typical of his overall methodology, Lott treats one image as sufficient basis upon which to interpret the thoughts and feelings—the “structure of feeling”— minstrelsy cross-dressing...