Mobilizing the Hordes: Radio Drama as Development Theatre in Sub-Saharan Africa

Chapter One. Alternative Development Theatre

1 Chapter One Alternative Development Theatre The question of the role of radio drama as an alternative approach to Development Theatre is the major ideological premise on which this book is based. Radio drama is drama that is written for production through the radio medium. It has its distinct characteristics from Drama that is written for the stage or for television. Unlike the former and the latter, radio drama is a medium of much more elastic possibilities. The elasticity of radio drama is enhanced by the fact that it generally always reaches far more people than either stage or television drama would. Because of this flexibility and the medium’s capacity to tie-down a multitude audience, radio drama could serve very relevantly as an alternative approach to Development Theatre in the African setting. Play-scripts of the Guinness-Cameroon Radio Television (CRTV) Literary Contest of 1978/1979 as well as selected productions from BBC, VOK, ZBC and SABC span Anglophone Africa and Commonwealth Literacy Studies of West, East and Southern African regions. Cameroon answers to being Africa in miniature and so Anglophone Cameroon radio drama gets central focus in this discourse. The communicative aspect of Development Theatre offers the opportunity for socio-political interaction amongst the different groupings within the community. It presents the avenue for horizontal and vertical interactions within the community and tends to facilitate the re-allocation of the dispossessed rural and urban poor in the African setting. Besides, it more or less corroborates the outlined objectives of mainstream Development Theatre, a concept whose birth and growth took centre stage in development-oriented discourses in the nineteen seventies. As a concept, Development Theatre borders on the relevance of considering socio-cultural factors in development strategies. This strategy has become one of the main approaches in ensuring social 2 and economic development via cultural practice. The coming to the limelight of this approach is salutary because it comes at a time when it is increasingly evident that most initiatives from the centres (be they in the administrative capitals of developing countries or the metropolitan centres in the West) are not delivering the avowed goods of fostering development. Most of the initiatives rather pave the way for underdevelopment thereby fighting the poor instead of fighting poverty. This phenomenon explains, in part, the reasons why the African continent has remained poor and less developed despite the glittering promises of independence and globalisation. The crises of the continent are reflected in a cross section of classes and groups. There is an army of school leavers without dignity and orientation among whom unemployment abounds. The new middle classes are caught between their indigenous values and western tastes. People in the rural areas are constantly drifting to the urban areas for want of basic needs, provisions and economic security that would neither be found in the abandoned peripheries nor in their new slump locations in the urban areas. Hansel N. Eyoh (1999, 100) captures the situation in reference to Cameroon as follows: An erstwhile hard-working agricultural people have seen the prices of their products decline in the world market. Even when these prices were good, they hardly received fair compensation for their work. The product of their labours had been used to pay salaries of an effete bureaucracy or build prestigious projects like international airports dotted around the country… The toll of all this on the population is a debilitating drop in living standards. The poverty level is worsening everyday… Everywhere you find generalised dereliction. It is a scary picture of emptiness and waste… Houses are collapsing and there is no one to rebuild them. There is little hope of rejuvenation … The masses are suffering but they cannot voice their frustrations. The 3 repressive machinery of government is expanding, both visibly and invisibly….. Eyoh paints a picture of a society in decay with its albatross manifesting itself in exploitation, greed and corruption. Ali A. Mazrui (1990, 5) ascribes such a bewildering phenomenon to dependency theory by arguing that: It is Africa’s painful process of cultural westernisation without technical modernisation. Africa borrowed the wrong things from the West - even the wrong components of capitalism. We borrowed the profit motive but not the entrepreneurial spirit. We borrowed the acquisitive appetites of capitalism but not the creative risk-taking. We are at home with western gadgets but are bewildered by western workshops. We wear the wristwatch but refuse to watch it...