African Drama and Performance

1. King Baabu and the Renaissance Vision

1 King Baabu and the Renaissance Vision Wole Soyinka Renaissance is today’s mot courant trickling down the throat of most African leaders. Some of them—a handful, of course—are genuine visionaries. They are frustrated by the negation of what they recognize as the potential of a muchabused continent and see themselves as children of a unique history and agents of change. For the most, however, what is renaissance but just another word, except that they are vaguely conscious of the fact that it has a portly, historical texture to it, almost something you can chew—not savor—simply chew in the manner in which cows ruminate, giving off that air of profound contemplation as they lie recumbent in the village shade with a mouthful of grass. For millions below that leadership, however, renaissance is a genuine yearning. Even though they do not understand the word, they are convinced that it means some kind of ameliorating change, some form of social transformation that will lift them out of their accustomed condition of social torpor and the bitter rounds of survival desperation. But what, really, does a renaissance entail? We know what it means—in the literal sense, that is—but what it entails is far more important, because then it implicates some level of awareness, a sense of planning, and a precision of direction,a willingness to embrace and endure the pains of possible convulsion that ultimately make palpable the mere meaning of the word, which is simply—a rebirth. When we speak of a renaissance within a slab of real estate, a piece of landed property that is not simply a void but one that is inhabited by palpable beings— in short, a nation, a people, or a society—we must think for a start of such mundane issues as the structure that, in effect, de¤nes the occupants of the terrain either as a series of microcommunities or as a single entity. This must be one of the reasons, I imagine, why the structure that politically promotes the singular entity of the African peoples, or at least its projection—the Organization of African Unity—is being given a face-lift. That, right now, is the current scaffolding of the African renaissance. We have killed off the OAU and now ®aunt, in its place, the banner of the African Union. Now, the African Union is made up of what? Of independent nations, of course. And what are those nations? Paper delivered at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, on the occasion of the performance of King Baabu at the Baxter Theatre in September 2002. How did they come into being? Are they viable entities? Are they expressions of external commercial and industrial needs whose origins are now the plaything of amnesia? Or of internal power surrogates specially emplaced by the departing colonial powers, entities that need to be sustained under any circumstances so that they sometimes even constitute nothing but expressions of individual egos, some of which endure as such for decades—Congo-Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko, Guinea Conakry under Sékou Touré, Central African Republic under Emperor Bokassa, yes, even Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, etc., etc. There are enormous differences, of course, even among these cited instances. The exceptions—I need not point them out—were recognized by their leaders as potential manifestations of humane, self-regulating spaces. All others remained cynical expressions or resource pools of a past imperial dispensation, upheld with ideological rhetoric, or simply murderous passion by individual leaders within the continent. And so the new body, the African Union, is as good a place as any to commence this self-interrogation. Does the Union intend, for instance, to beam its searchlight on the urgent task of terminating, as rapidly as possible, the cycle of wars that are waged so murderously over colonially awarded national boundaries —such as the recent Ethiopian-Eritrean bloodbath? If it does,it will have proved that the continent has indeed reached maturity and resolved not to perpetuate, as a mindless agent, the callous disregard, indeed contempt, for African peoples that motivated the cavalier manner in which the continent was carved up in the¤rst place.It would mean that it recognizes,as a necessary credo of the would-be renaissance, that the primary wealth of a nation is its people. That it accepts that neither nation nor society is abstract, but concretely de¤ned by the palpable existence of the humanity that animates and regenerates those swathes...