Gyamfi’s Golden Soap: Commodity Marketing, Reform Legitimation, and the Performance of Cultural Authenticity in Ghana’s Popular Theatre

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 189 GYAMFI’S GOLDEN SOAP Commodity Marketing, Reform Legitimation, and the Performance of Cultural Authenticity in Ghana’s Popular Theatre DAVID AFRIYIE DONKOR In June 1997, the multinational company Unilever relaunched its Keysoap product at the National Theatre of Ghana. The re-launch featured an “allstar group” blending “seasoned and delightful” popular theatre actors in a “concert party” play entitled Gyamfi’s Golden Soap. In the play, a royal chief offers his daughter to whoever can perform her marriage rites “in the traditional way.” One suitor brings money, a second brings alcohol, the third brings cloth, but the chief rejects them all. The fourth, Gyamfi, conjures a giant-size bar of Keysoap, which descends from above on to the stage to audience applause. He presents the giant soap to the princess and assures her “of a cleaner, healthier and better life.” The chief, satisfied that Gyamfi has properly followed tradition, offers the princess to him in marriage (EshunBaidoo 1997: 1). In this paper I explore how popular theatre and multinational commodity marketing intersected with authenticity, as a national-cultural style in Ghana during the 1990s.1 Through an examination of the lived Ghanaian context, I suggest that the deployment of Keysoap represents a recuperative and inventive dynamic that draws on a conception of culture and tradition . It is a narrative that has informed Ghanaian leaders’ effort to redress colonial cultural alienation after the country’s political independence in the 1960s. The interrelationship of popular theater and commodity marketing, I argue, is no coincidence, but discloses a process of legitimation. Further, this process reveals the doctrine of neoliberalism that is operating in the socioeconomic, cultural and political context of late twentieth-century 1. For a history of commodity marketing in Ghana, especially as carried out by Unilever , see Murillo 2009a, 2009b. 190 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 Ghana. Crucially, this doctrine appropriates a localized “alternative” sense of modernity to facilitate its global spread.2 Unilever and the Concert Party: Brief Histories The concert party is a genre of popular theatre in Ghana. It originated in the performances of a “partially educated” intermediate class that burgeoned in the Gold Coast at the turn of the nineteenth century as colonial commerce and education generated new social formations.3 With “neither firm roots in English cultural traditions nor a complete allegiance to their native heritages,” this class, exemplified by the “ordinary salariat” of clerks, interpreters, catechists and pupil teachers, was the most open to emulating colonial behavior (Agovi 1990: 10–11). One form of emulation was the “concert,” which developed from the “amateur British Theatrical” events held in colonial schools on Empire Day. For this occasion, African schoolchildren danced “Scotch reel” and “sailor’s hornpipe” and enacted “Britannia ’s Court” (Agovi 1990: 7; Cole 2001: 24). From the 1930s onwards, “concerts” developed beyond the colonial school to acquire a broader audience by becoming itiner ant, appropriating the characters and style of local folklore, using the widely spoken Akan vernacular language and faithfully dramatizing its expanded audiences’ 2. For discussions on “alternative modernities” see Appadurai 1996; Gaonkar 2001; Hefner 1997; Holston 1999; Knauft 2002; Rofel 1999; Spitulnik 2002. For discussions of an alternative “African” modernity see Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Ferguson 2006; Deutsch et al. 2002; Diouf and Rendall 2000; Donham 1999; Englund 1996; Geschiere 1997; Hodgson 2001; Larkin 1997; Paolini 1997; Piot 1999; Pred and Watts 1992. 3. The word “education” was used in the Gold Coast in a narrow sense. “Namely, formal instruction in European-type schools.” School took ten years, from infant classes through seven elementary “standards,” with a Standard Seven Certificate upon completion . Many schools crowded “half-taught subjects into an ill-regulated curriculum” and, lacking trained instructors, relied on post-standard—five boys as salaried “pupil teachers.” Retention was poor but the schools produced interpreters, catechists and others who found salaried jobs in “commerce” as “government clerks” (Kimble 1963: 62–64, 75–76). Donkor • Gyamfi’s Golden Soap 191 frustrations and aspirations.4 With this, the itinerant concert parties played a pivotal role among a...