Performance and Drama in Africa

The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader, edited by Frances Harding. 2002: Routledge

The Athenian Sun in an African Sky, by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. 2002: McFarland

The Performance Arts in Africa consists primarily of previously published essays on African contemporary performances and dramas, documenting ritual practices, storytelling, public performances, and community issues through fieldwork and analysis. This study's strength is in the details it provides; its shortcomings are the datedness of some of the essays and its arbitrary organization. Some of the essays concentrate on political events in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, considerable changes have occurred in African politics, rendering these essays somewhat obsolete in view of more contemporary studies. Editor Frances Harding has assembled the work under four categories: theory; performers and performing; voice, language, and words in performance; and spectators, space, and time in performance. This breakdown is only partly successful; concepts of theory, performers, language, and spectatorship frequently overlap, straining the exclusivity of Harding's categorization. However, there are some remarkable essays that reveal detailed anthropological facts and insights.

Harding's introductory remarks clarify five important comparative distinctions common in African theater: African performance as ritual; as drama; as popular theater; as representational social reality (performances dealing with real public concerns); or as representative of fiction (performances concerned with myths enacted through masks and stylized gestures). Thus Harding sets the stage for the book's discussion of community participation and the formation of ritual practices, as well as the modalities of performance in African performing arts in general.

The first section's essays examine dramatic rituals and practices among the Nigerian Igbo, the conflicts between myth and ritual in Nigeria, the significance of mask in Ebira culture, post-apartheid performances in South Africa, and finally, dance traditions in Tanzania. Ossie Enekwe's essay on myth and ritual raises the significant point—frequently repeated throughout—that African performances are generally "not interested in portraying an Aristotelian action that is whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle and an end, or working out the subtle meaning of a play." Rather, African performances and dramas are "more presentational than their European counterpart," creating "considerable interest in activities that are designed to astonish and delight the audience," and yielding more "participative and celebrative" dramatic activities than other cultural traditions.

The essays in part 2 concern the community theaters of Serumaga, Kalabari religious dramas, mask performances in Mende Sande, and initiation rituals, costumes, and performance style of the West Voltaic. In addition, "Theatre for Development" in Zimbabwe and puppetry in the youth theater of Mali are closely scrutinized. Robin Horton's essay on the roots of Kalabari performances and Oga Abah's study of the autochthonous theatrical developments in non-Western stylizations are particularly engaging as well as informative. Part 3 considers the variety of languages and voices in Sierra Leone storytelling, the use of Anglophone by Cameroonian playwrights, and politics among Congolese playwrights. The history of masks in Yoruba societies, comic operas in Ghana, folklore in the plays of Cliff Lubwa p'Chong, and comedy in the dramas of Niger receive deserving attention. The final section explores the space and time in African theater and audience responses. These essays take into account South African theater in an age of reconciliation, masks in the Chewa society, and even tourism in Dogon. The final three essays are among the strongest, covering theater and social issues in Malawi, politics and myth in recent Zambian dramas, and festive arts and practices in Ghana.

What emerges from this work is recognition of the flexibility of performance, text, and audience that remains the hallmark of African performing arts. In...