African Drama and Performance (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: African Drama and Performance Esiaba Irobi African Drama and Performance. Edited by John Conteh Morgan and Tejumolan Olaniyan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; pp. xiv + 274. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. This collection of essays is a welcome relief for scholars and professors of African descent who feel that they are treated like invisible acrobats by the academic majority in the US. The book, apart from reconfiguring the variations of theatrical practice in Africa—a continent where you can find everything from Greek and Shakespearean drama to "The Theatre of Necessity" by HIV/AIDS orphans—also introduces readers to scholarly approaches and theoretical discourses currently marginalized in the theatre studies curriculum in North America and totally ignored by a book like Theatricality, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait. African Drama kicks off with a spirited critique of "the theatre of fascism" in Africa by Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate and playwright. Conflating the political message of his play King Baabu (King Nothing) with the desperate need for a renaissance vision on the continent, Soyinka frames a provocative invitation to both African leaders and their Western mentors to create a space that will make a democracy of intelligence possible in Africa. Other essays in this first section, titled "General Contexts," include: "Dimensions of Theatricality in Africa" by Joachim Fiebach, "Theatre and Anthropology: Theatricality and Culture" by Johannes Fabian, and "Pre-Texts and Intermedia: African Theatre and the Question of History" by Ato Quayson. These opening discussions negotiate the interface between African history, politics, performance culture, globalization, and contemporary literary, theatrical, and electronic media. Part two, "Intercultural Negotiations," is the bomb of the book. It contains four stunning essays: "Soyinka, Euripides and the Anxiety of Empire" by Isidore Okpewho, "Antigone in the Land of the Incorruptible: Sylvian Bemba's Noces Posthumes de Santigone (Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone)"by John Conteh-Morgan, "Gestural Interpretation of the Occult in the Bin Kadi-So Adaptation of Macbeth" by Marie Jose Hourantier, and the superlative "Yoruba Gods on the American Stage: August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone" by Sandra L. Richards. These four scholars bring a sophisticated African theoretical intelligence to bear on their rereadings of their chosen texts. Most outstanding is Richards's retheorization of the ontological nexus of August Wilson's masterpiece as an African diasporic dramatization of a ruptured history and an existential quest for a new but problematic identity. Her deployment of Soyinka's and Yoruba theories of drama from "The Fourth Stage" and Yoruba orature is, perhaps, the most resourceful, successful, and inspiring theoretical breakthrough I have come across in contemporary performance studies discourse. Her work is a powerful and coherent response to Soyinka's intellectual war-cry in Myth, Literature and the African World,in which he argues that we black Africans, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have been invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of definition by individuals whose theories are derived from their own history, their social neuroses and value systems. "It is time to respond to this new threat, each in his own field" (x). Part three, "Radical Politics and Aesthetics," examines the revolutionary theatres of Ngugi wa Thiongo, Femi Osofisan, and Sony Labou Tansi in Kenya, Nigeria, and Congo, respectively. The essayists articulate why theatre in Africa is an act of community and such an explosive cultural and political force that it actually threatens governments. They explain why, whereas good Western dramatists are often given prizes and awards, enterprising African dramatists are often imprisoned, sent into exile, or simply killed by their governments. Part four, "Popular Expressive Genres and the Performance of Culture," incorporates essays on Theatre for Development, Television, Soap Operas, Yoruba Traveling and Popular Theatre, Video Films, and Popular Dance Music in an effort to contextualize how aspects of indigenous, precolonial African theatres reinvent themselves in the varied media of African modernity. Bob W. White's essay, "Modernity's Trickster: 'Dipping' and 'Throwing' in Congolese Popular Dance Music," is a luminous and delightful examination of the theatricality of the atalaku in East African popular music culture. White, however, falls short of clearly contextualizing this creative figure and his performative...