African Theatres and Performances

Osita Okagbue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134407859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

African Theatres & Performances looks at four specific performance forms in Africa and uses this to question the tendency to employ western frames of reference to analyze and appreciate theatrical performance. The book examines:

• masquerade theatre in Eastern Nigeria
• the trance and possession ritual theatre of the Hausa of Northern Nigeria
• the musical and oral tradition of the Mandinka of Senegal
• comedy and satire of the Bamana in Mali.

Osita Okagbue describes each performance in detail and discusses how each is made, who it is made by and for, and considers the relationship between maker and viewer and the social functions of performance and theatre in African societies. The discussions are based on first-hand observation and interviews with performers and spectators.

African Theatres & Performances gives a fascinating account of these practices, carefully tracing the ways in which performances and theatres are unique and expressive of their cultural context.

1	Introduction

Concepts of performance and theatre in Africa

What is theatre or performance in an African context? By what terms do African peoples designate their performances? Most African cultures and languages, in fact, seem not to have specific words for theatre or drama. But they, however, have terms that broadly encompass a host of performance activities, ranging from ritual to play, from sporting activities such as wrestling, boxing and hunting to masking, dancing, singing and acrobatic displays. It is also interesting that the descriptive verbs for these activities generally tend to be the same in a lot of African cultures. The Igbo of Nigeria, one of the cultures whose performance will be looked at in this study, is a good example. For them, the word egwu is used to refer to ‘play’, ‘dance’, ‘song’ and ‘music’. The Hausa use the term wasa as both a noun meaning ‘play’ and a verb ‘to play’. In Hausa the concept ‘theatre’ is expressed as wasanin gargajiya, which roughly translates as ‘traditional performances’, where wasanin means performance in general. The Hausa also have the expression wasan kwaikwayo, which is used to designate any kind of performance in which any form of mimesis or imitation play is involved. The Krobo of Ghana, according to Zagba Oyortey, use the term fiem to mean ‘play’ as in children’s play and theatre; fie do means to drum and do also stands for song. The same can be said of other West African languages in which the various activities, which in English are generally classed as performance or theatre or drama, are very often designated by a single term. However, verbs are then used to specify which type of activity is being referred to. So for the Igbo, ‘to play’ is igwu egwu, ‘to sing’ is igu egwu, ‘to dance’ is igba egwu, ‘to play music’ is iti egwu, iti igba is ‘to drum’. Iti mmo is ‘to mask’ or ‘to play mask’, iti okpo is ‘to box’ and igba ngba is ‘to wrestle’ while igba oso is ‘to run’. The Igbo also have the expressions ife emume (literally meaning ‘something that is done’) to refer to any kind of public celebration and ife nkili (‘something to look at’) to mean any kind of public performance or spectacle. Thus, it is obvious that in African cultures, the concept of performance is rather a comprehensive one, and the fact that not very serious effort is made to put the various types of performances into compartments indicates an acute awareness that there are elements which these activities have in common. In this respect, they predate radical performance thinkers such as Richard Schechner, Eugenio Barba and Western European avant-garde theatre theory and practice, which moved theatre discourse into the domain of performance, away from the much narrower frame of dramatic theory and criticism.

In Africa, the idea of performance is very much about ‘showing’ and ‘seeing’. It is about spectacle, a feast for the eyes. It can sometimes be an auditory feast for the ears, as Igbo Ayaka performances show. In such shows, people are already in bed or inside their homes while listening to the music, the songs, and the dialogue of the Ayaka performers as they walk through the town or village in the middle of the night. These night performers are not meant to be seen. For most African cultures, a measure of what is perceived as performance is whether or not the three elements of space, performer and spectator are present in the activity. The space can be anywhere, usually a village or town common, or any other open space, including public roads and family compounds. A performance happens wherever the spectator encounters and engages with the performer, and the two automatically define, and continuously redefine, the enveloping space of their meeting throughout the duration of the performance. Equally, their roles, as performer or spectator, go through a similar process of renegotiations and re-definitions as the performance progresses. The fluidity of the space is responsible for the constantly shifting positions of and alternating roles between spectator and performer in most African performance contexts.

However, although everyone is believed to be able to perform, it is also accepted that some people are much better at it than others, and that some derive more pleasure from doing it than others. This perhaps explains why in a lot of African performance traditions, no attempts have been made to formalize training processes since every individual, male or female, is expected at some point in their lives to take the stage. This could be in a performance qua performance, or it could be in some of the many volitional or mandatory rites of passage, such as weddings, initiations, naming ceremonies, and/or other status enhancement ritual performances that are part of most African communities’ cultural life.

But how are these performance activities differentiated from other everyday activities? The first characteristic of performance events is that they take place in a time out of time. This means that performances are placed outside the usual work-a-day times; they are usually fitted in a time when the community is taking a time out, as it were, from the normal daily processes of life, of making or earning a living. Performances also take place in a time specially set aside and agreed by all parties involved. It means therefore that such events or activities also have an agreed temporal duration. Thus, there are formal openings and closings, and mechanisms in place which frame the spatial compass, as well as the temporal duration of these events. Secondly, such activities are used to mark special occasions or significant moments in individuals’ lives or in the life of the community. The third quality of these events is that those engaged in them are very much aware of themselves as being on show, as being in the public gaze. Therefore, behaviours for the duration are designed and executed with this awareness in mind – the result being that such behaviours tend to be exaggerated, stylized, presentational or representational, and consciously done for the viewing other. The fourth is that performance activities in African cultures are not done ostensibly for any immediate material reward for the participants. They may however be done with a hope for possible future benefits for those involved in the doing or for those for whom they have been organized, and for the good of the community as a whole. And finally, these activities are marked out by the fact that they are sometimes done just for the joy and fun which they bring to all who take part.

Cultures and their performances

Cultures, according to Victor Turner, are most fully expressed and made conscious of themselves through their rituals and theatrical performances. Performances, he adds, declare our shared humanity, yet each suggests the uniqueness of the culture from which it originates. For Turner, we will understand one another better by ‘entering one another’s performances and learning their grammars and vocabularies’ (in Schechner and Appel, 1990: 1). The ideas underpinning this vision of a world community based on mutual respect and appreciation of cultural differences seem not to have existed for scholars, such as Molly Mahood (1966), Ulli Beier (1967), and Ruth Finnegan (1970), in their assessments of African performance forms. Every culture has its own traditions of performance and theatre, its own forms and modes of artistic expression. Equally, each culture has its own framework and language for organizing, presenting, describing, and assessing its artistic impulses and manifestations, which include theatrical and performance processes. But the scholars mentioned above, instead of ‘learning the grammars and vocabularies’ of African performances, opted instead to read these performances using European critical terminology and vocabularies, subjecting African performances to Western analytic frames, with the result that there was a significant disjunction in their understanding and assessment, since these performances resisted, and sometimes totally refused Western categorizations. This resistance and refusal were ideational and structural since the impulses, processes and purposes of African theatres and performances were intrinsically different from those of Western Europe.

Only an ethnocentric tendency to approach the foreign through one’s own can account for Finnegan’s claim that:

Though some writers have very positively affirmed the existence of native African drama, it would perhaps be truer to say that in Africa, in contrast to Western Europe and Asia, drama is not typically a widespread or a developed form … There are, however, certain dramatic and quasi-dramatic phenomena …. (1970: 500)

Not wising to waste time disputing Finnegan’s critical framework and its implied embryonic primitivity of African theatre or performance forms, this book merely seeks to highlight the narrowness of such a critical framework, based as it was on the very limiting field of dramatic theory and criticism. Finnegan in her analysis listed what she considered to be the crucial elements of drama – these are, the idea of enactment, of representation through actors of persons and events, linguistic content, plot, represented interaction of several characters, specialized scenery, music, and dance. She found that it is very ‘seldom in Africa that all these elements of drama come together in a single performance’ (p. 501), and one wonders of course where these elements ever come together in a single performance. Yet, for her, drama in Africa is a minority and undeveloped form because all the elements hardly come together.

Although this claim has annoyed and engaged generations of scholars of African theatres and performances, a majority of these advocates of African ‘dramatic’ arts completely miss the point at issue. Finnegan may have been partially right in her assertion that drama, especially of the Aristotelian Western type, is not a very widespread form in Africa. But, she was wrong in the second assertion since where it exists, such as the Kote-tlon in Mali, the Ekong comic plays of the Ibibio of South-eastern Nigeria, and in some of the masquerade plays of West Africa, drama is well developed, and there is absolutely nothing ‘quasi’ or ‘pre-drama’ about them as our study of the Koteba in Chapter 5 will show. This study, however, is not concerned unduly with this kind of view, or with the now tired debate between the evolutionists and relativists about what is or is not drama or theatre in Africa. Scholars, such as Emmanuel Obiechina (1978), Oyin Ogunba and Abiola Irele (1978), Meki Nzewi (1979), Ossie Enekwe (1981), who represent the ‘relativist school’, have challenged Mahood, Finnegan, Beier, and the African scholars who followed in their footsteps, such as Kalu Uka (1973), Joe de Graft (1976), Michael Echeruo (1981), James Amankulor (1981), and Nnabuenyi Ugonna (1984) – the last four belong to the ‘evolutionist camp’. Unfortunately, the relativists fell into the trap of using the same narrow Western terms and classifications to challenge the Eurocentric viewpoints of the evolutionists, as well as explain African musical, ritual and theatrical performances. It seemed that in their determination to expose the inappropriateness of the essentially Western critical viewpoints, they go to extremes to try and prove that what Mahood had termed ‘pre-drama’ and Finnegan ‘quasi-dramatic phenomena’ are, in fact, full grown drama. Some of the performances studied here, such as Bori of the Hausa, Jaliya of the Mandinka, some Igbo masked performances, are not and do not aspire to be drama, and they should never have been or be assessed now using purely dramatic frames of reference as was and sometimes still is the practice in Western theatre and performance scholarship.

Going through the arguments put forward by some African scholars, such as Amankulor, Enekwe and Ugonna on Igbo masking theatre, one is somewhat disappointed to find them defending Igbo theatre by trying to find similarities between it and Greek or Western models of drama – the very thing the evolutionists were doing. The only difference is that while the evolutionists, such as Echeruo and Uka, feel that Igbo masquerade performances are still some distance away from being drama, the relativists argue that for their respective African communities they are already drama in their own right. Ugonna, in particular, devotes so much time in his study trying to tease out an elaborate linguistic content and dramatic structure for Igbo masquerade performances that are absolutely alien to the form. Amankulor, in his own study, explores the similarities in aesthetic principles and performance processes and structuring between the Ekpe masquerade and Greek festival performances out of which Western classical tragedy evolved.

But all these efforts, in my view, were unnecessary. What the scholars failed to take note of and question is the issue of whether or not every performance, every theatre event, has to be drama. And second was their failure to make any distinctions between the terms ‘drama’, ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. Unfortunately, the imprecision in terminology still persists today in a lot of the critical writings about performance, not only in African performance and theatre scholarship, but also in performance and theatre discourses worldwide. All the critics involved in the relativists versus evolutionists’ debate on the nature and status of African drama, performance and theatre frequently used the three terms interchangeably in their essays and books.

However, Richard Schechner’s Performance Theory (1977) helped to rescue discourses of drama, theatre and performance from the prolonged aesthetic and taxonomical hegemony of Aristotelian tragic drama, and the Western product-led fascination with the dramatic script as the be-all and end-all of the theatre process. Most writings about the theatre up to this point had concentrated on dramatic criticism, dramaturgy, dramatic structures and themes, and story and character; they were hardly about the process of making and receiving theatre, or the place and function of the spectator in this process. But, by moving discussion away from the restrictive frame of drama to that of performance, from the prototypical dramatic criticism of Aristotle’s The Poetics and its numerous dramatic theory and critical off-shoots – these, by the way, usually exclude performers and spectators – to the more comprehensive analytical frame of performance theory, Schechner put forward a more inclusive framework for looking at the performance forms from across the world. His differentiation between the terms, ‘drama’, ‘script’, ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’ is very clear, and will be useful frames in a study of African performances and theatres.

Schechner suggests a ‘model of concentric overlapping circles’, with the outermost, largest and least strictly defined standing for performance, and drama, the smallest and innermost, being the most specifically defined (1977: 71). Theatre is the middle circle and shares in part the loose definition and inclusiveness of performance, and the strict definition and exclusiveness of drama. I will leave out Schechner’s fourth category, script, because the performances studied are not script based. Looking more deeply into Schechner’s model, three key facts become obvious. The first is that both drama and theatre are types of performance. Second is that drama is a kind of theatre. And the third, which is relevant in this context, is that not all theatres or performances are drama. Schechner also points out that while theatre and performance are about doing, drama and script refer to the idea or record of the doing or what is done, and as such are more concerned with the written. Schechner further differentiates between drama, theatre and performance by saying that:

The drama is the domain of the author, the composer, scenarist, shaman … the theatre is the domain of the performers; the performance is the domain of the audience. (71)

And he concludes, using his oppositional dyad model of drama-script versus theatre-performance, that within cultures, to the extent that the drama-script dyad is emphasized, to that extent will the theatre-performance dyad be de-emphasized, and vice versa. However, a majority of cultures of the world, he argues, emphasize the theatre-performance dyad, while it is only modern drama, especially in the West, since the late nineteenth century ‘which has so privileged the written text as to almost exclude theatre-performance altogether’ (p. 73). Unfortunately, this privileging of the drama-script dyad still dominates Western performance practices and literature, in spite of the avant-garde non-western emphasis on theatre-performance. One can therefore begin to recognize the ethnocentric subjection of the mainly oral theatre and performance forms of African and other non-Western cultures to mainly literary derived analytical frames.

The polarization in thought in the seventies and early eighties about the existence or otherwise of native African drama, or how indigenous theatres and performances can ‘develop’ into drama mentioned earlier has remained. It is evident in the writings of newer scholars, such as Victor Ukaegbu (1996), who concludes his speculations on the future of Igbo masking theatre by suggesting that what should be done would be for the theatre to begin to identify more with individual struggles as ‘a means of furthering its identification with contemporaneity and opening itself to a wider audience’ (p. 267). Lurking here is a veiled evolutionist suggestion that indigenous African theatre should bow to the demands and pressures of modernity by ditching its traditional aesthetic principles and structures in favour of ‘modern’ Western European dramatic ones. That is to say, it should become more drama than performance or theatre.

The evolutionists–relativists debate, although framed in the context of Nigerian drama and theatre, could have been about drama, theatre and performance in any other place in Africa. Also, although it was wrongly framed as a discussion on whether an African indigenous performance form was drama or not, it was, because of similarities in performance practices between African cultures, in reality about notions and perceptions of drama, theatre and performance in Africa. The evolutionists, influenced by their exposure to Western theatre history and development, argued for African drama and theatre to evolve from African ritual and myth, in the same way that Greek classical drama evolved from Greek mythology and Dionysian rites. The relativists, however, counter by pointing out the cultural relativism and specificity of performance and theatre practices. For them, the Igbo have developed the kind of ‘drama’ which they needed based on the material available to them, and they perform it in a manner specific to them. It did not have to be like ‘drama’ or theatre or performance performed anywhere else. Thus, African drama or theatre does not have to be like European drama or theatre. The four performances studied in this book are all culturally specific, rooted in and formulated by their respective African contexts.

Both the evolutionists and Eurocentrics are right that drama as it exists in Europe is not a widespread form in Africa; and the Eurocentrics are also right that African theatre and performance forms are not drama. But the three European scholars were wrong to rely on only the drama criteria in their analysis. By using only ‘drama’ – a term which Schechner has shown designates a specific and circumscribed kind of performa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mmonwu: Igbo masquerade theatre
• 3 Bori: A Hausa ritual theatre
• 4 Jaliya: The art of Mandinka griots and griottes
• 5 Koteba (kote-tlon): Comedy and satire of the Bamana
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index