The Drama of Black Africa by Anthony Graham-White (review)

REVIEWS Anthony Graham-White. The Drama of Black Africa. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1974. Pp, xii + 220. Anthony Graham-White’s, The Drama of Black Africa, does not, as its title implies, illuminate a continent; but it is a beginning. It would be no less a beginning with a suitably modest, and tolerably accurate, title like “Aspects of African Drama with Special Reference to Nigeria.” Its matter is predominantly West African, particularly Nigerian, and what is not West African is, at best, adjunct. Graham-White’s knowledge of Africa comes through the medium of libraries. He had not visited Africa prior to the publication of this book which he first undertook as a doctoral thesis at Stanford University; but he sifted numerous sources for his materials, and the bibliography for the original thesis—not included here—ran close to two hundred pages. Viewed from the perspective of American college courses in African literature, which consist primarily of the study of works by West Afri­ cans writing in English, this Nigerian emphasis has a certain appropri­ ateness; and the book will provide a useful supplement to materials gen­ erally available for such courses. Despite its somewhat gratuitous de­ limitations, this is a substantial study without predecessor in its general area, and it is encyclopaedic on some aspects of the development of a variety of dramatic forms in Africa particularly where traditional rituals and African techniques of storytelling contribute—in addition to Euro­ pean models—to modem dramatic forms. But Graham-White does not build the rationale for his primary focus on West Africa on the limitations of American college courses. The “Black Africa” of his title has political significance related to twentieth century African nationalism. He does not accord the status of “Black African” to all persons bom both black and in Africa. It is a status that has to be earned. His survey of the drama in Africa includes, therefore, only the drama of those African nations who, having undergone a colonial experience during the nineteenth century, have recently emerged from it into independence. On this ground he excludes from considera­ tion in The Drama of Black Africa not only the white-dominated south­ ern states, but also such nations as Ethiopia which, in his view, were not purified in the purgatorial fires of colonialism. This conception of “Black Africa” enables Graham-White to whittle down the vast African continent to manageable size. He first disposes of its northern half: The Africa of which I write is Black Africa. This means sub-Saharan Africa, for the people of North Africa have quite different customs and traditional beliefs from those of most of the rest of Africa. There 78 Reviews 79 has been a good deal of influence from Arab countries across the Sahara and down the East coast of Africa but, since Islam is an­ tagonistic to drama, this has not led to any theatrical developments. (P-4) He next excludes Ethiopia and the Republic of South Africa because “they have not shared the typical experience of the succession of colo­ nialism and independence.” While this may be ideologically sound, it sits uneasily with his own table of statistics where we find in the cate­ gory, “full length plays in African languages,” a box score of sixty-three written by black South Africans compared with seventeen written by Nigerians. Yet he excludes the writers of these plays in Southern Afri­ can languages, not because of any inherent qualities, but because thenpresent rulers have the wrong credentials: I have felt free to draw upon South African and Ethiopian examples where the theatrical experience of these countries matched that of the rest of Africa, but have not felt under any obligation to cover the theatrical histories of these countries, although some information on them can be found in the nation-by-nation chronology that com­ prises an appendix. He also excludes the drama of “the Portuguese colonies—Angola, Mo­ zambique, Portuguese Guinea—and Rhodesia” because they “remain under colonial rule” (at time of writing). The same, of course, cannot be said for Sierra Leone or Liberia. But Graham-White excludes them, too, because their “historical experience . . . has been a-typical.” The...