African Theatre 11: festivals by James Gibbs (ed.) (review)

As a former guest editor of African Theatre (Special Issues 6 and 10), I am aware of the difficulties which accompany the task of achieving a balanced issue. You want to provide a geographical and thematic spread, but when the articles for selection arrive on your computer that’s not how it turns out; familiar sources of articles tend to prevail. I suspect this is what James Gibbs, editor of African Theatre 11 (AT11) experienced. One of the articles is from Southern Africa, as is the interview, and one article is from Egypt; the other nine articles or information pieces are from West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal), despite Gibbs’s attempts to elicit articles from other regions. Obviously, that makes for some imbalance in the material.

However, Gibbs is able to provide unity to the collection by drawing attention in his introduction to some of the common themes shared by festivals. He rightly picks out Mshengu Kavanagh’s article on Zimbabwe as a keynote for the whole volume, because it articulates the most important issues. Kavanagh acknowledges that festivals can provide an incentive for theatre workers to gain skills, but he says that this can only happen if government supports theatre with provisions for training, theatre venues and publicity. Unfortunately, in Zimbabwe ‘independent professional production and performances were starved of funds [but] festivals did secure support’. Kavanagh also asserts that foreign donors, for PR reasons, also prefer supporting festivals rather than providing ‘sustained developmental assistance to the arts’ (p. 10). The overall picture is one of festivals diverting funding from theatre development.

Funding issues constitute a continuous thread throughout the collection. Although some authors (Pahwa, Egypt, and Oteh, Jos) feel that, on balance, money is well spent on festivals, others are adamant that it is criminally wasteful. Amy Niang quotes newspaper sources speculating that the Senegalese government spent as much as £330 million on FESMAN, which she identifies as a grotesque PR instrument for President Wade. Sonali Pahwa’s informative and balanced article on the Cairo international Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) acknowledges that ‘vast amounts of taxpayers’ money (are) spent on accommodating foreign visitors in five-star hotels’. On the positive side, she feels that the ‘internationalization of CIFET prompted local dramatists to explore the diversity of culture within Egypt’. She clearly struggles to make a cost–benefit analysis when the benefits are easy to identify, but difficult to measure.

Many of the issues debated in AT 11 relate to two early events, ihe Dakar Festival of 1966 and FESTAC in Lagos 1977. Both were huge Festivals hosting major stars, not only from Africa, but also the black diaspora. Their lavish nature needs to be related to the independence euphoria of the 1960s and the new-found oil wealth of 1970s Nigeria. As Gibbs explains, both festivals performed to a sub-text that looked to a confident and prosperous African future. The disillusionment which set in during the 1980s and 1990s is reflected not only in the smaller scale of events but their more fragmented nature. One symptom of this was a concern less with the size of the audience than with its constitution. In his very articulate interview, Andrew Buckland is painfully aware that, even after 1994, the bulk of the audience attending his Grahamstown Festival performances has been white. Victor Yankah deplores the way the Ghanaian Pan African Historical Theatre Festival (PANAFEST), active in the late 1990s and up to 2010, departed from a small-scale, culturally local vision to a grandiose event more appealing to tourists than to local citizens. Patrice-Jude Oteh offers a different view on the annual Jos Festival in Central Nigeria, which is relatively small and appeals for the most part to local audiences. However, despite all the efforts to bring Christian and Muslim audiences together, sectarian violence, through no fault of the Festival organizers, caused its cancellation in 2010 and 2011.

All in all, religious, social and economic forces make the optimistic futures imagined in the 1960s and...