African Drama and Performance

11. The Politics and Theatre of Sony Labou Tansi

11 The Politics and Theatre of Sony Labou Tansi Dominic Thomas The impoverishment to which many Third World countries have been subjected will have immeasurable consequences for the future of relations between people on our planet. Fewer and fewer people will accept to be insigni¤cant, insulted, ill-considered, disregarded, wretched, exploited. . . . Reason will gradually give way to indiscriminate violence and revolt. Those who are denied their humanity will choose to act with the lawlessness of wild beasts—listening only to their instinct for survival, exhibiting the gaze of a hunted animal that feels compelled to bite. —Sony Labou Tansi (1986a, 25)1 Only a few weeks during the summer of 1995 separated the deaths of the celebrated Congolese novelists and playwrights Sylvain Ntari Bemba and Sony Labou Tansi.Their friendship was well known,as was the unique nature of their collaborative spirit, factors that accorded an additional dimension to these sad losses.2 Yet there remains a comforting quality to the thought that their intimate relationship and creative journeys were ¤nally punctuated by the premature termination of their productive trajectories. In a similar fashion, Bemba’s own characterization of his dear friend’s writing process in terms of a writer who “writes as he invents and invents as he writes”(Bemba 1986, 50) echoes in many ways the experience of reading and discovery available in the legacy of Sony Labou Tansi’s work. Invariably we ¤nd ourselves transported by the cyclical nature of the recursive mechanisms his work insists upon given its perplexing, innovative, and challenging qualities. Indeed, whether one has been afforded the opportunity of reading his work, attending the performance of one of his plays, listening to the writer discuss his work, or addressing the circumstances of postcoloniality, one soon uncovers the symbiotic attributes that connect each of these categories.Aesthetics and political commitment are inextricably linked, co-joined as the mutually constitutive elements of a sociocultural project. Sony Labou Tansi’s politics and theatre are not the product of autonomous agendas, so the coordinates I propose in this exploration are more concerned with delineating the connections that exist between them. While Sony Labou Tansi’s biography underlines a strong record of social activism that ultimately culminated in his elected position as a deputy of the Mouvement Congolais pour le Développement de la Démocratie Intégrale (MCDDI) for Brazzaville’s district of Makélékélé in 1992, his strikingly original corpus of politically committed writing provides us with the clearest understanding of his thinking on the question of the exercise of political authority in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. Having published ¤ve novels between 1979 and 1988 with the Editions du Seuil in Paris (and a sixth one posthumously), the deceleration of his novelistic output after 1988 did not coincide with a parallel reduction in theatrical output.3 The publication of, most notably, Conscience de tracteur, La parenthèse de sang, and Je soussigné cardiaque during the late 1970s and early 1980s, in addition to the remarkable regularity with which these plays were performed by the Rocado Zulu Théâtre under Sony Labou Tansi’s directorship and by other troupes (at the Festival international des francophonies in Limoges, the Espace Kiron, the Théâtre national de Chaillot, etc.), accorded unusual visibility to the playwright.4 Yet it is signi¤cant that Sony Labou Tansi’s fundamental belief in the potentialities of drama remained uninterrupted, as he generated complex plays such as Antoine m’a vendu son destin, Moi, veuve de l’empire, and Qui a mangé Madame d’Avoine Bergotha? My interest in this chapter resides in these later plays, and I am motivated by two essential factors. On the one hand, these plays have not received the same degree of critical attention as their predecessors and, on the other, the emphasis on the examination, denunciation, and indictment of the exercise of dictatorial power in the African postcolony has migrated in these works toward a concerted foregrounding of the exploration of the psychology of authoritarianism. In turn, this information provides us with invaluable archival material from which to formulate a more concise rendering of Sony Labou Tansi’s political philosophy. In his groundbreaking book Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction, JohnConteh-Morganconcludedthat “[f]rancophone drama is a drama of social and political combat, of revolt. . . . It believes in the need to awaken the spectator to his condition in an effort to provoke him into action. . . . [T]he one thing on which they...