The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader (review)

As many dance researchers know from experience, it is no easy task to compile and edit a reader. Because readers intend to provide an overview of a field in formation or transition, the fragmentary materials available do not necessarily “add up” to a coherent volume. Previously published documents straddle intellectual developments and historical events, rendering aspects of their contents dated or, worse, irrelevant. Terminologies seldom correspond; documentation slips and slides according to the context of the original publication; and entire areas of inquiry go unexplored when the editor cannot find suitable material related to that particular topic. Authors misplace photographs or visual materials that accompanied the original article, and, in many cases the new publisher will rarely fund the reprinting of these visuals. In all, the challenges of editing a reader can be as significant as those of writing a manuscript from scratch.

So we can empathize with Frances Harding, who apparently fell into all of these pitfalls as she edited this first anthology on African performance directed toward an English-language academic audience. A sturdy compilation of twenty-four articles, almost all of them reprints, the volume intends to “draw attention to the performer as a creative artist and to performance as a creative art” in order to “give an understanding of some of the particular qualities of performance in rural and urban Africa” (xiii). In this modest goal the volume succeeds, as any of the essays highlight the contributions of individuals as artists in societies that clearly value performance. Considered as a whole, however, the volume collapses under the weight of trying to encompass performance in Africa. In trying to cover so many geographic areas across so many eras, political situations, and performance practices, Harding delivers a fragmentary offering that can satisfy only those looking for specific information contained in essays that, ironically, might be readily found elsewhere.

Harding’s introductory essay lays out the methodology that informed her choices, one grounded in performance studies. She argues that “performance is the preferred form of iteration, explication, and reinforcement of social order in a primarily oralate society,” as well as “a primary forum for the exploration of new ideas, a new order” (7–8). Within this framework it is possible to consider that “all performance is ultimately about pitting established order against the challenges of change” (8), a perspective forwarded by most of the articles. A limitation of this sort of analysis recurs throughout the volume: The actual aesthetic practices of performance come in for short consideration, eclipsed by discussion of what the performance might be able to do for its audiences. Discussions of teleological structures that could shed light on how the performance arts in Africa achieve transformative status as potential agents of social change are not to be found here. Readers of the volume may be granted a sense of how audiences respond to performance in various settings but will get little sense of how performance feeds its performers.

The articles split neatly between textual analysis of literary theater—that is, plays in the Western mode, with individual African playwrights claiming sole authorship of works—in South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Congo, and detailed renderings of a variety of masking events— performance events honed by communities of participants over generations—in sub- Saharan regions. Throughout the volume, dance arises almost exclusively in this latter context. Unfortunately, however, the depiction of dance here usually amounts to a few descriptive words. Readers willing to wade through articles that focus on other aspects of performance besides dance will find mentions of the importance of Zulu dance in the formation of the Darktown Strutters, a variety troupe, in an essay by Loren Kruger; the importance of dancing well in order to protect the memory of the ancestors among the Kalabari people of the eastern Niger delta in an essay by Robin Horton; dance as an aspect of the women’s Sande society initiation rituals of the Mende of Sierra Leone...