Ghana's Concert Party Theatre

“Ohia Ma Adwennwen,”or “Use Your Gumption!”

78 Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre “Ohia Ma Adwennwen,” or “Use Your Gumption!” THE PRAGMATICS OF PERFORMANCE, 1927–1945 4 Whereas concerts from 1895 through the mid-1920s were consumed largely by Western-educated audiences residing in coastal cities, concerts from the 1930s onward attracted working-class audiences and farmers from coastal, inland, and northern areas. The most formative years for Ghana’s popular theatre were between 1927 and the end of World War II. It was during this period that Bob Johnson, E. K. Dadson, and other young men from the Western Region introduced concerts to new social classes and geographic regions. By incorporating African languages, blending imported characters with homegrown tricksters, and taking their shows on the road, pioneer actors of the 1930s made concerts a genuinely popular and profitable theatre form. The sociology of actors and troupes and their experiences of everyday life while on trek reveal the many ways that concert practitioners used their ingenuity to manipulate the established social and cultural order. Out of a leisure activity, they invented full-time jobs. Rather than work for large organizations, they founded lucrative, independent entertainment businesses. Concert practitioners exploited the colonial infrastructure of roads, railways, mines, and formal education in ways that engineers, commercial developers , and colonial administrators never anticipated. These early pioneers of the concert party form transformed a ritual of colonial power—variety shows that they performed as schoolchildren on Empire Day —into a successful commercial enterprise and opportunity for personal advancement . While Empire Day shows were intended to celebrate the joys of being a colonial subject, school boys from Sekondi such as Bob Johnson and Charles “Ohia Ma Adwennwen,” or “Use Your Gumption!” 79 Horton appropriated these performances for very different purposes.1 According to Johnson, “It was after Empire Day parade in my school days, when my fellow mates and I would entertain people in the school compound” with “mock performances ” (Sunday Mirror 1960c). Johnson and his cohorts infused English songs and dialogues with Fante, and they created a stock comic persona known as “Bob,” a character with a bulging stomach who, like the trickster Ananse of Akan folklore, lived for his appetite and survived by his wit (figs. 16 and 17). Finally, Johnson and his friends took their shows on the road, touring local villages and towns in order to collect money. In addition to Empire Day theatricals, concert party actors of the 1930s and 1940s appropriated and refurbished a wide range of available cultural idioms, be they of local or distant origin, from recent times or the historical past. In her survey of popular arts in Africa, Karin Barber argues that the method by which modern syncretic arts combine old and new sources is neither automatic nor random : “It is the result of conscious choices and combinations” (1987, 39–41). The concert party is an example of what Michel de Certeau identifies as an “art of combination,” a collage of “this and that,” an art of “making do” in which consumers transform the dominant cultural economy for their own interests and their own uses ([1984] 1988, xiii, xv). Like “silent discoverers in the jungle of functionalist rationality,” concert actors used British colonial culture and American mass media to form what de Certeau calls “unforeseeable sentences,” indirect trajectories propelled by “interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the system in which they develop[ed]” ([1984] 1988, xviii). By what grammatical rules did concert practitioners create these “unforeseeable sentences”? What principles guided their process of invention? This chapter and the one that follows explore the principles that guided the process of selective appropriation and incorporation among concert innovators. I will first address the pragmatics of life on the road, examining the sociology of actors and troupes and their experiences of everyday life while on trek during the period from 1927 to 1945. The subsequent chapter addresses the creative process by which early concert party practitioners poached from sources ranging from ananses3m, a storytelling tradition with deep roots in Ghanaian culture, to the comic cinema of Charlie Chaplin. Rather than automatically imposing interpretive categories generated from outside Ghana onto the concert party, my objective in this chapter is to discern the discursive principles operative within this tradition itself, to uncover the theories implicit in the concert party’s production and consumption. One of the driving questions of Africanist research in recent years has been whether epistemologies, conceptual systems, and interpretive categories derived from Europe and North America are adequate...