African Drama and Performance

Introduction

Introduction Tejumola Olaniyan and John Conteh-Morgan The growth of critical interest in African theatre has been one of the exciting developments in African cultural criticism over the past decade. Valuable booklength studies have been published on the subject during this period,1 not to mention reference books wholly or partly devoted to it—The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994) and The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (1995), both edited by Martin Banham; The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, volume 3 (1997), edited by Don Rubin; and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2003), edited by Dennis Kennedy—or the founding in 1999 at the University of Leeds of African Theatre, a journal which has already ¤rmly established itself at the forefront of African theatre studies. Equally signi¤cant are the growing number of pedagogical tools that are being produced and made available to the teacher and student of African theatre alike: anthologies2 and ¤lm and video versions of some notable plays.3 This expanding academic interest in African theatre has focused attention on, and contributed to a greater understanding of, a medium of cultural expression which (compared to the novel) has suffered relative critical neglect—a neglect that is at odds with theatre’s vitality in Africa and its importance, both in the colonial and postcolonial periods, as a site of cultural self-de¤nition, political and social critique, and resistance, among other roles. Not only do plays continue to be written, performed, and published (see Dunton’s Nigerian Theatre in English, 1998; see also Zimmer 1992; Schérer 1995; and Wurtz and Thfoin 1996), African social life never fails to impress with its own theatricality and its rich variety of constantly evolving nonliterary performance genres (sacred and secular, “traditional” and “popular”) whose functions range, with varying degrees of overlap, from the instrumental to the purely aesthetic. It is with a view to exploring aspects of this diverse performance activity, of which “drama” is only a subset, and to drawing further critical attention to it that Research in African Literatures originally decided to devote a special number to it; we pursue that objective further in this book-length expansion of the sold-out special issue. One of our primary concerns as editors has been to avoid what we see as a major pitfall of current African theatre criticism, namely its inordinate attention to literary drama and its stage realization at the expense of the many non- scripted performative genres and events for which the continent is justly noted, many of which are now receiving sustained attention. (See, for example, Fabian 1990; Nkashama 1993; Barber 1994; Gunner 1994; Kerr 1995; Barber, Ricard, and Collins 1997; Cole 2001; and Harding 2002. For some notable earlier works, see Jeyifo 1984; Bame 1985; Coplan 1985; and Ricard 1986.) Although a minority art form in strictly numerical terms, this drama, mediated through writing even when it sometimes aspires to the condition of orality and inspired by European stage conventions even when these are contested, has established itself as the hegemonic performance practice in Africa. Perhaps this goes without saying, for literary drama is the art form of the hegemonic group itself, the Western-educated elite, and Westernization is still the most potent marker of class hierarchy, whether of bodies, cultural forms, or discourses, on the continent . No such hierarchy of performance idioms informs Drama and Performance. Our aim is not to privilege any single sub-class of performance that is then held up as a model in relation to which all others are judged. It is rather to present an expanded view of performance that includes but is not limited to dramatic literature, to align critical discourse on the theatre with the cultural reality on the ground, which is one of constant interpenetration of performance modes. The most innovative literary drama, for instance, seeks creative inspiration in oral idioms of performance, as can be seen in Isidore Okpewho’s chapter in this volume, and oral forms in turn aspire to the “condition of writing, and [are] deeply internally con¤gured by this aspiration,” as Karin Barber demonstrates in her chapter on Yoruba popular theatre. The chapters in our volume, in other words, provide not just creative interpretations of major playwrights (Sylvain Bemba, Femi Oso¤san, Wole Soyinka, or Sony Labou Tansi), they also examine and demonstrate new ways of studying popular expressive forms such as the Yoruba traveling theatre and its relatively recent incarnation in video drama, South African soap operas...