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4. Pre-Texts and Intermedia: African Theatre and the Question of History
- Indiana University Press
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4 Pre-Texts and Intermedia: African Theatre and the Question of History Ato Quayson Theatre in Africa is demonstrably a place of greater vitality than other literary forms. It is the locus of dialogic variation. Its vitality derives not only from placing personages on stage but also from locating them in sharply recognizable scenarios that express the struggle for self-actualization and the lived vagaries of experience that breed disillusionment, fear, joy, and terror. And this applies in equal measure whether the scenarios are drawn from present-day life or from mythic times. The personages we see on stage are also often surrounded by the paraphernalia and accoutrements of everyday life: clocks,an alari or kentecloth, radios, mortars and pestles, shoe racks, handkerchiefs, even the detached back of a passenger lorry (with inscription of proverb and all), as well as all the stage props that demarcate the quotidian round. Additionally, theatre in Africa also re®ects the varying rhythms of other spheres of African culture in terms of music, dance, and spectacle. The theatre, then, might be said to provide a minimal paraphrase of life on the continent, whether in its heroic and epic past or in terms of its contemporary realities. Yet it is precisely when the theatre is accepted as a minimal paraphrase that two serious dif¤culties open up regarding its relocation within culture. Is it to be taken as an unmediated mimesis of the reality of social life or as an attenuated and indeed misrecognized form of it? Second, can its interpretation be completely separated from the discussion of other literary and not-so-literary forms evident everywhere on the continent or do we, as is done in other traditions , de¤ne an autonomous ambit for its discussion? Such literary and not-soliterary forms include the popular novels which are the subject of a ¤ne study by Stephanie Newell (2000), proverbs on passenger lorries and kiosks of various sorts (barbershops, hairdressing salons, the local grocer, etc.), and the many stories that circulate in eating and drinking places (on the social life of alcohol, see Akyeampong 1996) as well as the more canonical forms of literary expression. In other words, how do we attempt to place theatre within a total interpretation of aesthetic and pragmatic expression on the continent while at the same time attempting to generate tools of analysis that are speci¤c to it? In Africa we are obliged to pose these questions with particular urgency because of attempts to simplify the genealogies of theatrical forms. Theatre is often discussed as deriving from uncomplicated indigenous traditions severed from due historical processes that led to genre blurring in the widest sense. Or it is merely seen as the condensed and irradiating point of the encounter between Africa and the West over several centuries and historical con¤gurations from slavery through colonialism to globalization? And even when, as is the case outlined in the opening paragraph of this chapter, we try to establish the vital content of theatre, there is the danger of running together and therefore confusing two categories of experience: that of material objects (radios, shoe racks, etc.) and cultural phenomena (music, dance, and spectacle). For each of these groups provides different modalities by which theatre may be understood. Each of them has a particular relationship to the dramaturgical traditions evident in African theatre, and each discloses a different historicity. Even though this is not my main focus here, there is room to wonder what the effect of a full history of theatrical stage props and their uses might reveal about changing dramaturgical traditions on the continent. Though there are many advantages in tracing the state of theatre and of indigenous theatrical forms as having the same entangled roots and being affected by comparable historical processes, there is a sense in which this standpoint prevents theatre in Africa from being seen as a speci¤cally constituted transformative domain continually responding to a variety of both internal and external in®uences in order to produce a theatrically mediated understanding of reality. Methodologically, the central issues in analyzing the history of African theatre seem to involve 1) how to describe change without necessarily being teleological; and 2) how to de¤ne the ambit of theatre practice so as to discern its lineaments as a form simultaneously working on history as well as being worked by it. It is necessary to perceive theatre in Africa as a form of process in dialectical relationship to a wide variety of...