Performance, Politics and Activism

P. Lichtenfels, J. Rouse, P. Lichtenfels, J. Rouse

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137341051
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Considering both making political performance and making performance politically, this collection explores engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media, on various scales of production within structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power.

Part I

Expanding the Political with Performance

1

Performance and Language Diversity in a Globalizing World

Moradewun Adejunmobi

The events that precipitated a turning away from writing in English to writing in Gĩkũyũ for the Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, are well known to most scholars of African literature and African performance. According to Ngũgĩ, the first steps were taken during his involvement in the writing and production of a play in a village called Kamĩrĩĩthũ on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1976. It seemed only natural that a play by and for residents of this village, comprising mainly peasants and some factory workers, should be in a local language. The experience and the events that followed had a transformative effect on Ngũgĩ, and from then on, he was to do virtually all his creative writing in Gĩkũyũ. Ngũgĩ himself acknowledges as much in his book, Decolonising the Mind, where he stated: ‘It was Kamĩrĩĩthũ which forced me to turn to Gĩkũyũ, and hence into what for me amounted to an epistemological break with my past, particularly in the area of theatre.’¹

And yet, what is often overlooked in the many commentaries that have since followed on Ngũgĩ’s decision is the role of performance, and in this case, drama, on Ngũgĩ’s transformative experience with his mother tongue. Most readers of Decolonising the Mind have rightly drawn conclusions for African creative writing rather than for African performance from the positions taken in this book. This is hardly surprising since the thrust of Ngũgĩ’s argument in Decolonising the Mind serves to foreground the practice of schooling, the written text and literacy. Decolonising the Mind does indeed offer a polemic about the role of African languages in the contemporary world, but it is a polemic articulated specifically in relation to writing.

My argument in this chapter is that the wrong conclusions have been drawn from Ngũgĩ’s transformative experience in Kamĩrĩĩthũ. On the larger question of preserving language diversity, and ensuring a public role for African languages among other marginalized languages in the contemporary world, it is the performed text working in tandem with the written text, rather than the written text by itself that will make a difference. Effective language diversity prevails where a variety of languages spoken within a community have a public role and presence. The more marginalized a language is with respect to the functions of government and bureaucracy in any community, the more likely it is that texts in the language become part of the public sphere mainly through performance. And in speaking of performance here, what I have in mind is verbal performance of speech forms that would correspond to texts as defined by Karin Barber rather than everyday speech acts that are not necessarily recognized as texts within the community where they occur.²

The concern with the place of indigenous languages in a globalizing and often postcolonial world that we see in Ngũgĩ’s work is part of a large and growing movement to protect the world’s biocultural diversity, attracting the support of scholar/activists around the world. David Harmon³ argues that diversity in nature and culture is the very thing that makes us human. For Luisa Maffi,⁴ biological diversity is significantly correlated with linguistic diversity, so that the success of biological conservation efforts will often depend on activities designed to protect endangered and marginalized languages. Unlike many of those committed to language conservation efforts, however, Maffi has also called for the recognition of ‘a right to orality’, in order to protect indigenous knowledge systems often based on oral transmission.⁵ This is a rather unusual position. Where interested scholars consider specific proposals for protecting marginalized languages as part of a program for ensuring global cultural diversity, they more frequently focus on formal education and the spread of literacy in the language under consideration as the most effective means for protecting the language.⁶ The positions taken by Ngũgĩ’ and many African advocates of writing in African vernacular languages belong with this particular school of thought on how best to ensure cultural diversity and to protect indigenous peoples’ rights in the contemporary world.

In addition, however, I suspect that the responses of African advocates of vernacular language writing continue to be haunted by what Ruth Finnegan has called ‘Great Divide’, theories attributing the major differences between wealthier and poorer nations mainly to significant differentials in literacy levels.⁷ Both African and Africanist scholars have subjected the conclusions on differences between predominantly oral and literate societies, drawn by Walter Ong, Jack Goody and Marshall McLuhan among others, to rigorous criticism over several decades. Notwithstanding these criticisms, the tendency to attribute Africa’s developmental challenges to the sole factor of illiteracy remains widespread. As Finnegan remarks, ‘The older ideas about “primitive mentality” are now rejected by modern scholars [....]. But [...] this kind of crude image of non-literate peoples is still surprisingly prevalent’ (55). Such thinking continues to prevail, not only among international agencies that prescribe literacy as the singular or most important cure-all for a variety of African problems, but also seems to infiltrate the positions taken by those African scholar/activists who present writing in the mother tongue as the indispensable element for ending the marginalization of African vernacular languages and for jump-starting economic development. By and large, African scholar/activists seeking greater prominence for African languages tend to speak of African orality in positive terms. For the majority of them, however, the mainstreaming of Africa’s indigenous languages will depend overwhelmingly on the expansion of writing, and on the increased production of texts written in those languages.

There is, though, growing interest in what has been called the oral–written interface in contemporary African performance and literature,⁸ but the significance of this interface for the protection of Africa’s vernacular languages has yet to be explored in detail. What I hope to demonstrate in this chapter is that the singular focus on the production of written texts alone as a way to foster increased visibility for African vernacular languages is misplaced. On the contrary, and as I will argue, it is performed texts, which may or may not also exist in a written format, that will likely fulfil this function in contemporary Africa. To make the argument, I will refer to an African language with a relatively robust practice of creative writing: Yoruba.

Modern yoruba performance and the oral–written interface

The Yoruba currently reside in southwestern Nigeria and are one of the larger ethno-linguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, probably numbering 28 million or more people.⁹ They are also one of the so-called majority groups in Nigeria, a country with an extremely complex linguistic situation. Though linguists disagree on the exact number of languages spoken in Nigeria,¹⁰ most proposals range from between 300 to 450 languages. Alongside English, the languages spoken by the three largest ethno-linguistic groups in Nigeria have also been recognized as official languages (47). These are Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. While translation of official documents into Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo is on-going, in actual fact much government activity and virtually all the writing done on behalf of the government tends to be initially transacted in English or rendered only in English.

The Yoruba can boast of what Barber describes as ‘a large and thriving sphere of Yoruba literary production’¹¹ that continues to generate sustained critical analysis and documentation by Yoruba intellectuals. Beyond and in addition to the literary, other types of Yoruba language publications such as newspapers and religious pamphlets are also in circulation. Yoruba language literary writing is certainly one of the more vibrant forms of African language literary writing in contemporary Africa, and has been since the early decades of the twentieth century. However, and notwithstanding an impressive track record in the production of texts written in Yoruba including literary texts, the majority of Yoruba continue to interact with the Yoruba language outside the sphere of home and family, within a context, best described as one of performance. Whether it is at religious events such as church services, or life-cycle celebrations such as weddings, or in leisure activities such as the viewing of films, or on radio and television, more Yoruba are likely to encounter Yoruba in live or recorded performance than in a print text. This is all the more noteworthy given the fact that the initiators, and increasingly the consumers of the many performance types that have emerged in Yoruba communities over the course of the twentieth century, are themselves overwhelmingly literate.

Some of the most popular performance types that have flourished among the Yoruba since the latter half of the twentieth century represent an attempt to work out a productive balance between the practice of writing and the practice of performance. Such is the case with Yoruba travelling theatre, which thrived in Yoruba communities from the 1940s until the late 1980s, when it was supplanted by the Nigerian video film industry, Africa’s most prolific. On the whole, the practitioners of Yoruba travelling theatre represented the lower echelons of educated Yoruba society, but they were generally literate. Their desire to create a ‘modern’ form of entertainment such as the theatre probably derived, at least in part from their exposure to formal education and the kind of performance practices associated with schools. At the same time, their limited literacy skills may have discouraged them from engaging in extensive creative writing. Nonetheless, they succeeded in creating an extremely popular art form integrating both indigenous and newer performance practices, while attracting audiences from a wide cross-section of the urban Yoruba population. By the late 1960s, according to some estimates, there were already over a hundred travelling theatre groups performing in churches, school buildings, and community centres among Yoruba communities in Nigeria and elsewhere on the West African coast.¹²

On the one hand, and as Barber argues,¹³ these theatre troupes found many ways to reference literacy practices in the narrative of the play and in the organization of the theatre group. Literate characters were usually presented in positive light in the plays. Story lines from the plays were further reprised and disseminated in photoplay magazines featuring photographs of stage scenes with bubble captions. Members of the troupe spoke of the play as if it were a fixed written text, even though there was often no script in the usual sense of the word, and actual performance made considerable allowance for improvisation. In some instances, though, they performed plays that had previously been published, and that were generally better known through the performance than through the published text. Analysing the relationship between the performed text and the references to writing and written texts in Yoruba travelling theatre, Barber comments that ‘what we have here is the yearning of an orally improvised theatre toward the condition of literacy’ (Generation of Plays, 317).

A similarly arresting intersection between writing and performance occurs in ewì, described by Rita Nnodim as a ‘semi-oral, semi-written’¹⁴ genre of contemporary Yoruba poetry. Poets are sometimes invited to perform ewì at celebrations honouring successful men and women or at events reaffirming kinship ties, though ewì is most likely to be heard on radio, records, cassettes, and CDs. Some poets publish their ewì in newspapers and books, but even in such cases, the poems are destined for what Nnodim calls ‘re-oralization’ (‘Poetics of Interface’, 250). Unlike composers of Juju music,¹⁵ another popular performance type among the Yoruba, who make up the lines of their poems on the spur of the moment, author/performers often perform a written text prepared ahead of the performance. Writing is, however, but one step towards the full realization of the poem in live or recorded performance. The situation described by Nnodim for author/performers of Yoruba ewì is not without resemblance to the practices of those Senegalese rappers who write out their poetry in both Wolof and French, but disseminate their poetry only in live and recorded performances.¹⁶ Like the Yoruba practitioners of ewì, these Senegalese rappers are literate, but interact with their audiences only through performance.

For my purposes here, I would like to describe the performance types described thus far as ‘verbal-intensive’ performances, centred on high proficiency in a given language or set of languages. Speaking, for example, about travelling theatre in the 1980s, Barber remarked that ‘Language was one of the things people went to the theatre for. Younger members of the audience often said they particularly liked certain characters or episodes because of the incantations or curses they gave vent to; adults commented that they appreciated “deep Yoruba” spoken on stage.’¹⁷ I have heard similar comments made about Yoruba video film since the late 1990s. In these instances of verbal-intensive performance, therefore, literate artistes and increasingly literate audiences find a meeting point in popular performance, notwithstanding their access to images and sounds associated with global media in contemporary Africa. Literate Yoruba typically encounter Yoruba texts in films, in religious activities, in political rallies and in performed kinship rituals, more so than in the regular reading of written Yoruba texts. This is especially significant in the case of Yoruba, where one might have expected to find greater prominence for Yoruba-language written texts given the fact that Yoruba is an official language in its country of origin, and endowed with many written texts.

Indigenous languages and performance

One way to explain the continued prominence of performance in Yoruba cultural life would be to attribute the phenomenon to the lower literacy levels that one might find in many African locations. Literacy levels are undoubtedly a factor in the continuing attractiveness of Yoruba language performance for Yoruba speakers, but this trend cannot be attributed to lower literacy levels alone since the two forms I have reviewed here emerged among literates.¹⁸ And every indication is that literate Yoruba form an ever increasing proportion of the audiences for ewì and especially Yoruba video film which has now replaced Yoruba travelling theatre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Expanding the Political with Performance
• Part II Disturbing the Political with Performance
• Part III Critiquing the Political with Performance
• Works Cited
• Index