African Drama and Performance (review)

In 1999, Indiana University Press published a special number of Research in African Literatures edited by John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan and devoted to drama and performance. The title showed an appropriate awareness of the increasing recognition of the importance of performance studies when looking at African creativity, and marked a significant shift from the title of Conteh-Morgan's 1994 publication, Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa. The issue was well received, and five years later the same publishers, and the same editors, brought out African Drama and Performance. The final paragraph of their introduction begins:

This volume contains all the articles in the special number except Soyinka's, which has since been committed elsewhere. It has, however, gained immensely in both depth and breadth by the addition of seven new contributions. . . . Judging from the enthusiastic public response to the journal volume, we hope this expanded book version would [sic] be an even more invaluable teaching tool and scholarly resource for both students—undergraduate and graduate—and instructors.

(7)

Moving between the journal and the book format requires editors to adjust perspective and ambition. Different time-scales and different expectations are involved; some sections (reviews) are lost, and other sections (such as an index—patchy in this instance—and a composite bibliography) are gained. A collection of articles such as that published in 1999 represented a stimulating issue of a journal but would have made a somewhat inadequate, unfocused, arbitrary volume as a book.

Even where I quibble about decisions made and complain that the editors could have established a tighter focus, I appreciate the interest of the material presented in African Drama and Performance. I am happy that the editors have been bolder than they give themselves credit for being. I say this because, despite the "contains all" in the quotation above, they have been prepared to take the scissors to the RAL volume: they left one of the essays from it on the floor of the office.

In bringing together the RAL issue, Conteh-Morgan and Olaniyan were resourceful and imaginative; they gathered fascinating and well-organized papers and had a pile of books reviewed that ensured many relevant topics were raised. In the paragraph reproduced above, they drew attention to a major policy consideration (sticking with the original material) they kept in mind for the book, and mention the loss of Soyinka's "From Ghetto to Garrison." They replaced that essay with one that shows the intensity of the engagement with political issues that has frequently narrowed the range of Soyinka's writing.

Other new essays, and these must be my concern here, reflect the editors' concern to "expand" the volume and include one by Karin Barber. In some ways, her contribution has been overtaken by Generation of Plays, but in other respects it stands as an immensely vigorous twelve-page analysis of Yoruba theater that many readers who will never get through her substantial book will find enlightening. Catherine M. Cole is present through a study of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—a study that provides a finely argued analysis of theatrical elements, and important insights into postapartheid South African theater. Ghanaian scholar Ato Quayson contributes a version of an essay that originally appeared in the Africa volume of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, edited by Don Rubin—an article that suffers by being placed beside tightly focused and sharply written contributions.

Other essays in the book that were not in the journal include those by Akin Adesokan, on "The Politics and Aesthetics of Nigerian Video Films," and by Dominic Thomas, on "The Politics and Theatre of Sony Labou Tansi." By including Adesokan's piece, the editors blurred the focus of the volume. The same can be said of the inclusion, in the journal and the book, of Bob W. White's article on "Congolese Popular Dance Music" and of that by Sandra Richards on...