A History of Theatre in Africa

This book aims to offer a broad history of theatre in Africa, covering the entire continent. The roots of African theatre are ancient and complex and lie in areas of community festival, seasonal rhythm and religious ritual, as well as in the work of popular entertainers and storytellers. Since the 1950s, in a movement that has paralleled the political emancipation of so much of the continent, there has also grown a theatre that comments back from the colonized world to the world of the colonists and explores its own cultural, political and linguistic identity. A History of Theatre in Africa offers a comprehensive yet accessible account of this long and varied chronicle and is written by a team of scholars in the field. Chapters include an examination of the concepts of ‘history’ and ‘theatre’ in Africa; North Africa; Francophone theatre; Anglophone West Africa; East Africa; Southern Africa; Lusophone African theatre; Mauritius and Réunion; and the African Diaspora.

MARTIN BANHAM is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the School of English, University of Leeds. His publications include African Theatre Today (1976), The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (edited with Errol Hill and George Woodyard, 1994) and The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre (1988, and with subsequent editions as The Cambridge Guide to Theatre). He has written extensively on African Theatre in international journals and is co-editor with James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan of the annual journal, African Theatre.

A HISTORY OF
Theatre in Africa

Edited by Martin Banham

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Columbus 10.75/13.75 pt.      System LATEX 2_e      [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
A history of theatre in Africa / edited by Martin Banham.
      p.      cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 80813 8
1. Theatre – Africa – History. 2. Performing arts – Africa – History.
1. Banham, Martin.
PN 2969.H57 2003
792′.096 – dc21 2003055280

ISBN 0 521 80813 8 hardback

To the memory of Geoffrey Axworthy, Dele Charley, Peter Lwanga, John Masanja, Rose Mbowa, Wale Ogunyemi, Sonny Oti, Ola Rotimi: fine friends, great artists, with the ancestors.

Contents

Contributors

DAPO ADELUGBA is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ibadan. He has written widely on Nigerian theatre and is also extremely active as a director, having staged work by such leading Nigerian playwrights as Wale Ogunyemi and J. P. Clark in Nigeria and the UK.

SOLA ADEYEMI studied theatre arts at the University of Ibadan and then worked as a postgraduate on a comparative study of Yoruba and Zulu cultural performances at the University of Natal, South Africa. He is currently living in London and is completing his doctorate on a postcolonial study of the performances of Femi Osofisan.

ECKHARD BREITINGER is Professor of African Studies at Bayreuth University. He has held visiting professorships in several African universities, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and, substantially, Uganda. He is the editor and publisher of Bayreuth African Studies, a distinguished series concerned with African arts and culture that has published over fifty titles. Breitinger’s contribution to the series includes editing Theatre and Performance in Africa (1994) and, with Yvette Hutchison, History and Theatre in Africa (2000).

CIARUNJI CHESAINA is a professor in the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi. She spent a considerable period as the High Commissioner for Kenya in the Republic of South Africa.

JOHN CONTEH-MORGAN, formerly of Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, is currently Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Ohio State University and editor of Research in African Literatures. His publications include Drama and Theatre in Francophone Africa (Cambridge, 1994) and he was a major contributor to The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge, 1995) and The Routledge Encyclopedia of African Writers (London, 2002). His translation of Paulin Hountondji’s The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa was published by Ohio University Press in 2002.

JAMES GIBBS has taught at the Universities of Ghana, Malawi, Ibadan and Liège and is currently a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has published widely on African literature (including Wole Soyinka, London, 1986) and is co-editor, with Martin Banham and Femi Osofisan, of the annual journal, African Theatre.

YVETTE HUTCHISON is a South African teaching at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. She is assistant editor of the South African Theatre Journal. Her doctorate was on the relationship between theatre, myth and history in post-1960s Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

DAVID KERR has taught at the Universities of Botswana and Malawi and at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He is currently Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Malawi. His extensive writings on African theatre include African Popular Theatre (London, 1995) and Dance, Media Entertainment and Popular Theatre in South-East Africa (Bayreuth, 1998). He was guest editor of the fourth issue of the annual journal African Theatre (African Theatre: Southern Africa, Oxford, 2004).

ASHERI KILO is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts at the University of Buea, Cameroon, and is the co-ordinator of the drama and theatre arts programmes. She is a director of the university’s theatre troupe.

AMANDINA LIHAMBA is Professor in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Dar Es Salaam. She is also a performer, director and playwright and has worked in theatre for development within and outside Africa.

LUÍS R. MITRAS is a South African at present based in Lisbon. He has published on Lusophone literatures and has translated novels, short stories and poetry from Portuguese and Spanish. He is adjunct associate professor at the European Division of the University of Maryland.

ROSHNI MOONEERAM lectures in English linguistics at the University of Central England, Birmingham. Her doctoral thesis from the University of Leeds discussed the sociolinguistics and stylistics of the Creole language of Mauritius. She has contributed to Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton’s Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge, 2002), to the annual journal African Theatre (African Theatre in Development, Oxford, 1999) and to Kunapipi.

KHALID ALMUBARAK MUSTAFA graduated from the University of Khartoum, where he was chairperson of the Students Union. His doctorate was from the University of Bristol. He taught drama at the Universities of Khartoum and Kuwait, and was Dean of the Higher Institute of Music and Drama (Sudan) and Director of Khartoum University Press. His publications include Arabic Drama: A Critical Introduction (Khartoum, 1986), Turabi’s Islamist Venture (Cairo, 2001), Tilk AnNazra (1978) – a collection of plays in classical Arabic – and a translation into Arabic of two volumes of British documents about Sudan (Omdurman, 2002). He is a published and performed playwright in both Arabic and English, and is a columnist and critic for AlRayAlAm (Sudan) and AlHayat (London).

EVAN MWANGI teaches literature at the University of Nairobi and at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. He has co-edited (with Opiyo Mumma and Christopher Odhiambo) Orientations of Drama, Theatre and Culture: Cultural Identity and Community Development (Nairobi, 1998) and Emerging Patterns for a Third Millennium: Drama/Theatre at the Equator Crossroads (with Tobias Otieno and Opiyo Mumma; Nairobi, 1999).

OLU OBAFEMI is Professor of English at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria, and a playwright, theatre director and critic. His critical works include a major study entitled Contemporary Nigerian Theatre (Bayreuth, 1996). He is one of Nigeria’s leading radical dramatists, with plays such as Nights of a Mystical Beast (1986), Suicide Syndrome (1988) and Naira has no Gender (1993). He is also a novelist and a poet, and has written on social and political issues facing Nigeria today. He has been a regular columnist in leading Nigerian newspapers since 1981.

OSITA OKAGBUE is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His essays on aspects of African and Caribbean theatre have appeared in Contemporary Dramatists, Contemporary American Dramatists, New Literatures Review, African Writers, Who’s Who in Contemporary World Theatre, Meditations on African Literature, South African Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Culture and Identity, The Continuum Companion to Twentieth-century Theatre, Contemporary Theatre Review and Okike.

KOLE OMOTOSO is a Nigerian scholar who moved to South Africa in 1992. He is a professor in the Drama Department at the University of Stellenbosch and a research professor at the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies, also at Stellenbosch. His publications include work on contemporary Arabic theatre and the theatre of the English-speaking Caribbean. A present research interest is a comparative study of Yoruba travelling theatre and Afrikaans travelling theatre.

JANE PLASTOW is Deputy Director of the Workshop Theatre and Director of the Centre for African Studies, both at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on African theatre and theatre for development, including African Theatre and Politics (Amsterdam, 1996), Contemporary African Plays (edited with Martin Banham; London, 1999) and – as guest editor – the third volume of the annual journal African Theatre, African Theatre: Women (Oxford, 2002).

KAMAL SALHI is Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, and Deputy Director of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies. His publications include The Politics and Aesthetics of Kateb Yacine (Lampeter, 1999) and, as editor, African Theatre for Development: Art for Self-Determination (Exeter, 1998). He is the founder and editor of the International Journal of Francophone Studies.

MOHAMED SHERIFF is a leading Sierra Leonian novelist, playwright and director. Co-founder (with Oumarr Farouk Sesay) of Pampana Communications Drama Company, he writes, directs and produces plays for radio, television and community theatre. His play Just Me and Mama won a prize in the BBC African Performance Radio Playwriting Competition in 1999 and was broadcast several times, on the BBC African and World Services. His theatre for development plays have been commissioned by, amongst others, UNICEF, UNDP, the National Commission for Democracy and Human Rights, and the Anti-Corruption Commission.

AHMED ZAKI is President of ITI Egypt and Professor of Drama at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, Cairo. He is a former Under-Secretary of Culture and Head of the Drama Sector. A director of over sixty plays, he was honoured at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in 1992 for his contribution to theatre. He has written extensively on theatre and was the regional co-ordinator of volume IV of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (1999).

Acknowledgements

This volume was the initiative of Dr Victoria Cooper at Cambridge University Press and throughout its preparation she has offered great and generous support and shrewd (and helpfully pragmatic!) guidance. Jackie Warren, the production editor at the Press, and the copyeditor, Hilary Hammond, have both, with great professionalism and friendliness, smoothed a multitude of rough edges and saved me from many errors. There is a Sudanese proverb that says that he who shoots an arrow upwards into the sky should have his head protected – a protective role they have both performed!

   I owe a considerable and special debt of gratitude to Judith Greenwood, who, in addition to undertaking the major task of creating the index, throughout the process of commissioning and editing read authors’ manuscripts and discussed them with me, raising important queries, making constructive suggestions and generally offering invaluable intellectual support and personal encouragement. The final product owes much to her.

   Lastly, to the individual contributors – scholars, practitioners, old and new friends and colleagues – my great thanks for their work and dedication to the project. They are the true dancers in the rich forest of African theatre.

Preface

To attempt a history of theatre in Africa is a daunting task. At the outset we have to decide what we mean by Africa, by theatre, and by history in this context. Resolving the first of these was relatively simple – a choice between a sub-Saharan Africa or the total continent including the Maghreb and Egypt. Don Rubin, in the volumes of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre on Africa and the Arab World (1997 and 1999 respectively), decided to separate north Africa from Africa south of the Sahara, on the entirely persuasive grounds that the Arab world is a cultural unity. I made the same judgement in The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994) and in the earlier African Theatre Today (London, 1976). On the other hand, as many of the contributors to this volume acknowledge and illustrate, historically there has been immense cultural interchange between all parts of the continent, and particularly from the Arab world into East and West Africa, and this is often most vividly identified and retained in aspects of performance. Hence my decision to seek to cover the whole continent, though accepting that on such a vast scale there are as many disconnections as there are connections. The second term, theatre, is more elusive and presents a greater problem. The variety of performance forms in African societies is immense, ranging from dance to storytelling, masquerade to communal festival, with a vibrant and generally more recent ‘literary’ and developmental theatre. All have to be celebrated and acknowledged in a ‘history’ (which I will come back to). Kole Omotoso, in his introductory chapter to this volume, helps us determine the interaction of various kinds of performance in creating theatre in African societies, and many other contributors return to this question. But, as the Nigerian scholar Yemi Ogunbiyi implies at the beginning of his Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book (Lagos, 1981), it is legitimate, whilst acknowledging the roots of religious ritual, festival and so forth, to refer to ‘a robust theatrical tradition’. In this volume the word theatre is used in a way that embraces a wide range of aspects of performance – in truth we use it in its largest and most inclusive sense. Finally, history. For a continent that can in some parts offer 5,000 years of record and documentation (as Ahmed Zaki observes of Egypt) and in others articulate its past significantly through oral narration, myth and legend, history cannot be one thing. A continent that has been invaded and colonised, and subject to the imposition of alien languages and governments, cannot have a convenient linear history. We are often asking ‘Whose history?’; in South Africa, for instance, there are legitimate separate performance histories of both indigenous and settler cultures. But the apparent difficulty of finding a coherent pattern of history of African performance is also an opportunity to assert its defining and uniting quality – a sense of function. The roots of African theatre in ritual, seasonal rhythms, religion and communal communication are roots common to world theatre, but whereas it may be argued that European theatre, for instance, is at so great a distance from its functional roots as to be almost unaware of them, African theatre – even at the beginning of the twenty-first century – remains directly and immediately related to them. The contemporary literary playwright is likely to be drawing upon exactly the same performance imperative as the storyteller or the masquerade; the performer is still the necessary chronicler of time and experience. The late Joel Adedeji, in a posthumous essay entitled ‘African Theatre: The Issue of an Historical Approach’ (in D. Layiwola, ed., Rethinking African Arts and Culture, Cape Town, 2000), points to the difficulties of ‘writing a history of an African art phenomenon which originates and proceeds from Oral Tradition, Oral History and what is now generally referred to as Oral Literature’. He points the historian again to ‘[T]he root elements of African theatre . . . the mimetic masks, the chant/song and the dance’, and suggests that in order for him/her to be properly critical the methodology he/she uses may have to move beyond the recording of facts: ‘it may be necessary to recreate the circumstances in which the work first manifested itself and was then developed’. Practical research has indeed informed many of the contributors to this volume.

   The contributors to this volume are mainly scholars and theatre practitioners who are indigenous to the areas of Africa they are discussing or who have significant experience within the region. My invitation to each of them was to write not to a determined framework of theatre history but from their own insights and priorities. There are inevitably moments of overlap; old colonial borders may, for instance, give a Lusophone or a Francophone focus to specific chapters, but cultural communities and traditions subvert artificial boundaries. The volume is organised broadly on regional and linguistic terms. This is often more a matter of convenience (and access for the reader) than of absolute logic: indeed, this very act of organisation may confront us again with the question ‘Whose history?’ Conscious that the theatre and performance of Africa has spread well beyond the continent, I have included one chapter, from Osita Okagbue, on aspects of the diaspora. African-American theatre is, however, not included, as this would properly demand a study in its own terms.

   My hope is that the reader will be reminded of the extraordinary complexity of African performance culture, of its richness, agelessness and beauty; that he or she will see much that offers coherence and continuity, even within diversity, on the vast stage of Africa.

   Martin Banham