Syncretic Arenas : Essays on Postcolonial African Drama and Theatre for Esiaba Irobi [1 ed.] 9789401211802, 9789042038981

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Syncretic Arenas

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

177 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Syncretic Arenas

Essays on Postcolonial African Drama and Theatre for Esiaba Irobi

Edited by Isidore Diala

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

COVER IMAGE Victor Ehikhamenor, Door of Coronation (2007; acrylic on paper, 76.2cm x 55.9cm). Courtesy of the artist. COVER DESIGN Inge Baeten, Senti Media The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3898-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1180-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands

To him that wrote: When I die, may I be buried in the sky a star, or in the mud a diamond: Esiaba Irobi

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

xi xiii

Foreword HELEN GILBERT

xv

Introduction ISIDORE DIALA

xix PART ONE

Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile OLU OGUIBE

3

Esiaba Irobi: A Personal Note MARTIN BANHAM

21

Esiaba Irobi and His Muse GEORGINA ALAUKWU–EHURIAH

25

Remembering Esiaba Irobi at the International Research Centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures” in Berlin, 2009–2010 ERIKA FISCHER–LICHTE

35

Esiaba Irobi: Death Does Not Kill a Song FEMI OSOFISAN

39

On My Birthday TANURE OJAIDE

45

Omonla: Your Like Will Never Be There Again – 7 Prose Poems/Haikus BIODUN JEYIFO

47

Half a Century Death BENEDICTUS NWACHUKWU

53

Madding Crowd OBIWU

57

Seven Stations of the Cross OLU OGUIBE

59

Esiaba Irobi’s Legacy: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance ISIDORE DIALA

61

Between Soyinka and Clark: The Dynamics of Influence on Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi HENRY OBI AJUMEZE

91

Eclipsed Visions: Esiaba Irobi Interviewed LEON OSU

103

ESIABA ALONE AND IN COMPANY: A PHOTO GALLERY

135

PART TWO Theatre and Modernization in the First Age of Globalization: The Cairo Opera House CHRISTOPHER BALME

141

Autobiography as Counter-Memory in The Orange Earth of Adam Small HEIN WILLEMSE

159

Directing Politics: Soyinkan Parallels in the Works of Uganda’s Robert Serumaga DON RUBIN

183

Afrika Cultural Centre: Phoenix Under Apartheid and Burnt Ember Under Democracy? BHEKIZIZWE PETERSON

195

The Anxiety of Class in Kenyan Drama: A Reading of Boy’s Benta and Sibi-Okumu’s Role Play CHRISTOPHER ODHIAMBO JOSEPH

223

A Heritage of Violence: Paradoxes of Freedom and Memory in Recent South African Play-Texts ANTON KRUEGER

237

African Drama and the Construction of an Indigenous Cultural Identity: An Examination of Four Major Nigerian Plays KENE IGWEONU

251

The Creative Development, Importance, and Dramaturgy of Duro Ladipo’s Ÿba Kò So OLUSEYI OGUNJOBI

291

Critical Responses: The Evolution of the Theatre Critic in South Africa TEMPLE HAUPTFLEISCH

319

“I want to dialogue”: Chief Muraina Oyelami Talking O‹ogbo and Beyond CHRISTINE MATZKE

333

Notes on Contributors Index

347 353

List of Figures

ESIABA ALONE AND IN COMPANY: A PHOTO GALLERY F I G U R E 1 : Esiaba Irobi in Barbados (2008). Courtesy of Georgina Ehuriah.

135

F I G U R E 2 : At Sentinel Poetry Live (London 2006). Courtesy of Molara Wood.

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F I G U R E 3 : Esiaba in Olu Oguibe’s apartment. Courtesy of Olu Oguibe.

135

F I G U R E 4 : Esiaba. Courtesy of Georgina Ehuriah.

136

F I G U R E 5 : The Ufo-bearer in Irobi’s Nwokedi, Commassie Arts Theatre, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria, November, 2012.

137

F I G U R E 6 : The Ekumeku in Irobi’s Nwokedi, Commassie Arts Theatre, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria, November, 2012.

137

F I G U R E 7 : Esiaba Irobi and Isidore Diala at their first meeting (London, March 2006).

137

CHRISTOPHER BALME F I G U R E 1 : Egyptian Pavilion, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1867.

148

F I G U R E 2 : The Ezbekiyah Gardens in the new quarter of IsmƗ’ilƗyah showing the conglomeration of modern institutions such as banks, the stock exchange, post office, law courts, libraries, and hotels. Source: Meyers Reisebücher Ägypten (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Insitut, 1904).

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F I G U R E 3 : Khedival Opera House, c.1870.

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F I G U R E 4 : Kursaal Music Hall in Cairo, c.1920.

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F I G U R E 5 : Printania Theatre in Cairo, now derelict (http://www.great mirror.com).

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CHRISTINA MATZKE F I G U R E 1 : Muraina Oyelami (second from left) playing the king of the Igbos in Duro Ladipo’s Moremi, O‹ogbo, 1966. Courtesy of Iwalewa-Haus/ D E V A , University of Bayreuth.

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Acknowledgements

I

to the Humboldt Foundation for creating the space for this endeavour; to Mark Stein for his encouragement; to the contributors for their insightful submissions and for their patience; to Professor Helen Gilbert for agreeing to write the Foreword to the book in particularly challenging circumstances, and to Ruthmarie Mitsch for her invaluable editorial assistance. My profound thanks also go to Georgina Alaukwu–Ehuriah, Irobi’s friend, and Uloaku, Irobi’s widow, for all their support and help. In a special way, I also thank my wife, Chy, and our children, Bubes, Chijos, Noly, and Too, for their love; Rich, Oly, and her family, and the Boniface Imoko family for their continuing support to my career. AM PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL

For permission to reprint already published material, we are indebted to Indiana University Press for Isidore Diala’s article “Esiaba Irobi’s Legacy: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance,” published in Research in African Literatures 42.4 (2011): 20–38; to Critical Stages /Scènes Critiques, I A T C Webjournal/Revue web l’A I C T , in whose issue No. 2 (April 2010) Temple Hauptfleisch’s “Lady Anne’s Blog: Some Initial Thoughts on the Evolution of Theatrical Commentary in South Africa” first appeared; to Maple Tree Literary Supplement 7 (June 2010), where Olu Oguibe’s “Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile” was first published; and to Uhie publishers for Irobi’s “Seven Stations of the Cross,” first published in Oguibe’s I Am Bound to This Land by Blood: Collected Poems (2013). Esiaba, this too, to the glory of God, is for you! And thank you, Lord, for your blessings.

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Foreword

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E S I A B A I R O B I O N C E , just a few weeks before he died. We had both been invited to speak at a think tank on identity politics at the Dahlem Humanities Centre in Berlin in the early spring of 2010. The specific content of his talk eludes me now, but I remember his commanding performance as an orator, and the nimble, ferocious intelligence that informed it. As he sparred with other luminaries in the room, swooping like a hawk on complacency and privilege, there was nothing to suggest the ravaging illness that would soon take his life. We shared a taxi to dinner and swapped anecdotes about our respective experiences as expatriates in Britain. I made a mental note to follow his work, even though my research was heading in other directions. Reflecting on Irobi’s legacy now, and on this book’s contribution to recognizing his prodigious talent, I am struck anew by the extent of African theatre’s global reverberations over the last half-century, thanks in no small measure to the verve and tenacity of playwrights who have never been content to simply depict the temper of their times. Long before postcolonial theory became part of the tool kit for politicized studies of theatre in various parts of the world, African performance-makers were developing the conditions of possibility for such methodologies through a syncretic repertoire that relentlessly probed the nature and provenance of both Western and home-grown traditions. It was only a matter of time before intellectual giants such as Wole Soyinka would formalize those achievements in analytical and creative texts that resounded abroad. In this foment, artists were not only critics, exiles, dreamers, iconoclasts, and revolutionaries, but also, and above all, citizen–activists charged with the task of forging indigenous performance idioms in the (ongoing) wake of colonialism. Irobi’s oeuvre speaks to, and within, this tradition. In his book Returns, James Clifford argues that tradition is not “a ‘residual element’ in the contemporary mix” but, rather, a mode of continuity, of ONLY EVER MET

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“actively connecting different times.”1 The writings gathered here examine that kind of continuity, both in relation to Irobi’s life and work and in the broader context of postcolonial African theatre. Contributors who focus directly on Irobi’s considerable achievements as a practitioner and thinker are acutely aware of the genealogies of performance that ground his work in Nigerian cultures, connecting it to the dramaturgies pioneered by Soyinka, John Pepper Clark–Bekederemo, Femi Osofisan and others. The personal tributes also reveal something about such connections, about the creative and intellectual roots of Irobi’s practice, how it developed in exile, and the networks that anchored it to his homeland. To bring such a multifaceted account of Irobi’s work into dialogue with critical studies of other African drama and theatre traditions, as this book does, is a fitting and timely project. It has become fashionable in recent years (at least in elitist versions of theatre and performance studies) to cast postcolonial methodologies as theoretically blinkered, overly invested in the politics of the past, or simply insufficiently equipped to tackle the complexities of cultural analysis in a world that is rapidly globalizing. We are urged to embrace intercultural, post-dramatic, cosmopolitan, post-human or, at best, transnational perspectives on our subjects, freed, where expedient, from the burden of history. As this book’s contents attest, however, holding on to postcolonialism as a broad analytical strategy makes intellectual as well as political sense, not least because its theoretical tools have been honed by a wide range of scholar–activists extending well beyond the constellations of Western academia. Scholars working in African studies have been among the most vocal critics of postcolonial theory’s pitfalls – particularly when its overarching concern with anti-imperial resistance blurs specificities of history, ethnicity, gender, and geography – but they have productively dissected and reassembled its critical apparatus to better account for differences and divisions, producing, in the process, culturally matrixed critiques suited to local circumstances. Achille Mbembe’s scholarship comes to mind here, and, in theatre and performance studies, the work of Tejumola Olaniyan, Biodun Jeyifo, Loren Kruger, John Conteh– Morgan, Yvette Hutchison, and Isidore Diala, to name just a few. In the pages that follow, there are no naive claims to an explanatory paradigm that would somehow produce postcolonial African drama as a singular (literary) genre or even a set of common conventions. Instead, Isidore Diala 1

James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2013): 28–29.

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has brought together fresh and diverse perspectives under the productive concept of “syncretic arenas,” a term that suggests the radical energies of theatre itself as a contingent conjunction of ideas and enactments situated in time and place. The spectator is very much a part of this equation, and in that sense “syncretic arenas” might also encompass the locations from which we see and interpret the action. That the substance of this volume comes from, and sometimes via, such a wide array of places –in Ghana, Germany, the U K , Nigeria, South Africa, Canada, Kenya, and the U S A – indicates the international reach of African theatre and dramaturgy conceived within such a framework. What more could be in keeping with Esiaba Irobi’s restlessly creative spirit? HELEN GILBERT

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Introduction I SIDORE D IALA

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N I G E R I A N P L A Y W R I G H T , actor, stage director, drama theorist, and poet Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010) liked to describe himself as a Biafran who led all his life “in exile in Nigeria, the U K , and the U S A .” Undoubtedly poignantly political, the statement also demonstrably delineates the cultural contexts of Irobi’s education: the Igbo nation where he drew the breath of life and in the ambience of whose enthralling oral lore and performative heritage he attained consciousness and would later relentlessly explore and reinvent for an engaging dramatic paradigm;the manifold cultures of Nigeria that he traversed, even if he recurrently returned to the Yorùbá; and the Western heritage whose hegemony he contested but with which he remained in creative dialogue. Locating “some of the most exciting dramatic work performed across the world in recent decades” in postcolonial cultures, Helen Gilbert associates that theatre with both a “strong urge to recuperate local histories and local performance traditions” and a “widespread engagement with Western texts and performance idioms.”1 Irobi’s art exemplifies this theatre, being an audacious amalgam of the indigenous heritage of his Igbo culture and dramatic paradigms of other cultures he knew, African and Western. His response to the postcolonial situation, moreover, derived from a distinguished Nigerian tradition. The colonial creation of a multicultural country of formerly sovereign nations differentiated by, among other factors, language had the expected consequence of privileging English as the language of the elite, a position further entrenched by its institutionalization as the country’s official language. 1

HE

Helen Gilbert, “General Introduction,” in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, ed. Helen Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2001): 1.

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However, defined not only by their class privilege but also by their consciousness of their responsibility for cultural resurgence, the emergent middle class in Nigeria of the 1960s recognized the indispensability of cultural syncretism. Reviewing the political and artistic ferment of this historical period, Dan Izevbaye recognizes writers as the representatives and mouthpiece of the age and contends that this dilemma is the core of a central trope in the work of the preeminent poetic voice of the age, Christopher Okigbo: There seems to be a strong penitential element in much of these gestures towards the study, appropriation and assimilation of traditional arts into the culture of the new middle class. The psychological character of these gestures towards indigenous culture is highlighted in the guilt-ridden return of Okigbo’s prodigal at the beginning of Heavensgate, presented as a drama of a poet who abandoned the priesthood of Idoto for modern western education and the vocation of writing.2

Okigbo’s own poetry, as Ben Obumselu avers, is a creative appropriation of sources of inspiration deriving from diverse and transcultural elements of the human patrimony that his wide reading gave him access to.3 Irobi’s trajectory could hardly be different, given his repeatedly acknowledged discipleship to the eminent scholar of indigenous Igbo performances James Amankulor and Africa’s preeminent playwright, Wole Soyinka.4 Amankulor methodically studied traditional performances among the Igbo to account for both the presence of mimetic principles that are basically universal and the distinctions that derive specifically from Igbo culture.5 In Amankulor’s conviction of the dramatic integrity of indigenous performances as well as the potential for transformation and renewal of its resources deriving impetus from other known dramatic paradigms, Irobi found a blueprint for his dramaturgy. For Soyinka, the indispensable hybridity of all cultures is

2

Dan Izevbaye, “Living the Myth: Revisiting Okigbo’s Art and Commitment,” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 48.1 (2011): 15. 3 Ben Obumselu, “Christopher Okigbo: A Poet’s Identity,” in The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honor of Professor Ben Obumselu, ed. Isidore Diala (Trenton, N J : Africa World Press, 2006): 77. 4 See Isidore Diala, Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance (Ibadan: Kraft, 2014). 5 James Amankulor, “The Art of Dramatic Art in Igboland,” in A Survey of the Igbo Nation, ed. G.E.K. Ofomata (Onitsha: Africana First, 2002): 162–76.

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taken for granted; the crucial question is the nature and terms of cultural exchange: The history of cultures and their arts has always been one of contact, resistance, accommodation and/or assimilation and of course – suppression and even outright supersession. Isolationism has ever encountered short shrift – a fate from which even the invading culture is spared. The contentious question was ever this: what elements of one culture predominate in the context of exchange? Are those elements from the superficial, tinsel aspects, or from the deep reaches of culture, drawn from the more integrative functions, and sometimes even universalist potential of such cultures?6

Soyinka’s own practice, which Irobi found instructive, is an adventurous synthesis of his indigenous Yorùbá tradition and the Western, in which the former is accorded dignified representation. The first part of this book appraises Irobi’s life and career and pays particular attention to his negotiations of the two Nigerian traditions, indigenous practice and the literary appropriation of that tradition. H E N R Y A J U M E Z E , in “Between Soyinka and Clark: The Dynamics of Influence on Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi,” searches for Irobi’s dramaturgical antecedents in Wole Soyinka’s and J.P. Clark’s deployment of ritual and inscribes his ideological approach to the carrier myth as the interface between Soyinka’s and Osofisan’s. His focus is on Irobi’s canonical play Nwokedi. By contrast, I S I D O R E D I A L A , in “Esiaba Irobi’s Legacy: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance,” attempts a close appraisal of all Irobi’s drama and highlights the impact on his drama and acting of both the indigenous African performance heritage and his discipleship to Wole Soyinka. This part of the book also contains a hitherto unpublished interview Irobi granted to L E O N O S U in 2007 as well as a tribute of poems from some of Irobi’s friends and colleagues: F E M I O S O F I S A N , TANURE OJAIDE, BIODUN JEYIFO, BENEDICTUS NWACHUKWU, OBIWU, and O L U O G U I B E . Moreover, in their reminiscences, located also in this section of the book, O G U I B E , O S O F I S A N , G E O R G I N A A L A U K W U – E H U R I A H , M A R T I N B A N H A M , and E R I K A F I S C H E R – L I C H T E highlight Irobi’s great gifts as well as the passions that drove him on, mourn that such great promise was

6

Wole Soyinka, “The Creative Pursuit in Global Time,” in Africa in the World & the World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2011): 247.

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tragically hindered by his circumstances and early death, and pay homage to his tenacity and distinguished output. By its interrogation of the representational biases of Western theatre and especially by its presiding conception of the body as socially inscribed, postcolonial theatre has strengthened the tradition of the politicized stage. J. Ellen Gainor recognizes “the unique nexus of theatrical performance as a site for the representation of, but also the resistance to imperialism.”7 It is the compelling presence of human corporeality on stage, its powers and its limitations, that the body in performance accentuates. In performance, the abstract is embodied and so brought to life, and the contemporary and the past, the political and social, are intensely re-lived in the here and now. Citing Anita Naoko–Pilgrim, Deirdre Osborne notes: Most obviously, the performativity of the socially inscribed body and the body in performance is also a visual experience creating simultaneity of receptive possibilities, where ‘the physical is very present but the historical, social and political may also be articulated.8

The second part of the book, in delineating the varying concerns of postcolonial (African) drama and theatre, privileges its preoccupation with the political. Several of the contributions extend insights into the necessarily syncretic nature of postcolonial drama and theatre. C H R I S T O P H E R B A L M E in “Theatre and Modernisation in the First Age of Globalisation: The Cairo Opera House” discusses theatre as an essentially Western-influenced artistic practice in multiple forms which, especially in the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and modernization, spread across the globe. He dwells both on the considerable impact of theatre on its host cultures and on its inevitable mutations in response to its new environments, leading inevitably to the emergence of an 7

J. Ellen Gainor, “Introduction” to Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (London: Routledge, 1995): xii. 8 Anita Naoko–Pilgrim, “Shall We Dance? Identification Through Linguistic Tropes and Performance,” in Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance, ed. Maya Chowdhry & Nina Rapi (New York & London: Harrington Park, 1998): 71, cited in Deirdre Osborne, “ ‘ I ain’t British though / Yes You are. You’re as English as I am’: Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama Today,” in Hybrid Cultures – Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post) Colonial World, ed. Ulrike Linder, Maren Möhring, Mark Stein & Silke Stroh (Cross / Cultures 129; Amsterdam & New York, 2010): 204.

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autochthonous syncretic theatre tradition. He focuses on the conception, history, and offerings of the Cairo Opera House in Egypt as his demonstration-piece. In “The Creative Development, Importance, and Dramaturgy of Duro Ladipo’s Ÿba Kò So,” O L U S E Y I O G U N J O B I sets in relief Ladipo’s immersion in the rituals and mythology of Yorùbá deities, especially Œango, and the history of the Yorùbá nation as well as Ladipo’s Christian background and close study of the Bible. Ladipo’s recognition of Christ and Œango as comparable figures is representative of syncretism. Irobi’s account of his childhood exposure to both African and Western traditions (in the interview he granted to Osu) virtually replicates Ogujobi’s portrait of Ladipo. Ladipo’s absorption with and appropriation of Yorùbá/African myth, ritual, and history mediated by Soyinka’s powerful advocacy to generations of younger African playwrights like Irobi became paradigmatic of postcolonial African theatre. C H R I S T I N E M A T Z K E ’s recent interview with Muraina Oyelami, who was a prominent member of Ladipo’s theatre troupe (that interview concludes this volume), accentuates the understanding of the meeting of cultures as a dialogue, and suggests the possible role of the German Ulli Beier in Ladipo’s transition from an initial phase characterized by a dramatization of biblical narratives to one marked by its investment in Yorùbá materials. In the same vein, K E N E I G W E O N U ’s “African Drama and the Construction of an Indigenous Cultural Identity: An Examination of Four Major Nigerian Plays” examines both the indispensability of the syncretism of contemporary African drama and theatre and its appropriation of indigenous performance and narrative techniques to construct a distinctive cultural African identity. He is equally interested in the periodization of African drama as well as the constituencies and audiences of the contemporary African writer and director. An integral aspect of the crisis of the postcolony is the deliberate entrenchment of structures that perpetuate the dependence of the ‘postcolony’ on the ostensibly withdrawing colonial powers, and the aspiration of the emergent elite political class to replicate colonial configurations. James Clifford’s seminal insight comes to mind here: “There are no postcolonial cultures or places: only moments, tactics, discourses [. . . ]. Post- is always shadowed by neo-.”9 The articles on South and East African drama and theatre here adequately demonstrate this. In “The Anxiety of Class in Kenyan Drama: A Reading of Boy’s Benta and Sibi-Okumu’s Role Play,” C H R I S T O P H E R O D H I A M B O 9

James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 328.

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examines the compulsions of the emergent postcolonial Kenyan middle class to claim the position vacated by the colonizers as representative of the African experience. He shows how the social, economic, and especially human consequences of this obsession are at the core of Cajetan Boy and John Sibi-Okumu in Benta and Role Play, respectively. D O N R U B I N , in “Directing Politics: Soyinkan Parallels in the Works of Uganda’s Robert Serumaga,” paints a portrait of the Ugandan novelist, dramatist, stage director, actor, and economist as a Soyinka figure, in terms both of the breadth of his work in the theatre and of his passion to refine the politics of his country. An insightful appraisal of Serumaga’s oeuvre and development, the essay also throws new light on the significance of Wole Soyinka as writer and activist. The significant cluster of essays on South African drama and theatre in this book bears ample testimony to the crucial role that the arts played in the antiapartheid struggle and continue to play in post-apartheid South Africa. As André Brink notes, “theatre, often allied to spectacles of dance and music and poetry readings, became one of the focal points of popular conscientization and resistance against apartheid.”10 H E I N W I L L E M S E ’s “Autobiography as Counter-Memory in The Orange Earth of Adam Small” reads Small’s work as fictionalized autobiography that, in its passionate anti-apartheid commitment, sets in relief the compact between language, religion, memory, and violence in apartheid South Africa, particularly the paradoxes and tensions inherent in the duality of Small’s own linguistic and cultural affiliations. B H E K I Z I Z W E P E T E R S O N and A N T O N K R U E G E R deal with different ironies of post-apartheid South Africa. In “Afrika Cultural Centre: Phoenix under Apartheid and Burnt Ember Under Democracy?,” Peterson appraises the history of the Afrika Cultural Centre as paradigmatic of the paradoxical fortunes of community art centres in post-apartheid South Africa. Embattled by apartheid policies, given their place as privileged black public sphere in the apartheid era but nonetheless playing crucial cultural and political roles in the resistance to black marginalization, community art centres not only fail in their envisaged role of articulating alternate aesthetics, pedagogies, and epistemologies for a post-apartheid South African era, but are condemned to struggle for survival in the context of new debilitating notions and policies. Krueger’s “A Heritage of Violence: Paradoxes of Freedom and Memory in Recent South 10

André Brink, “Challenge and Response: The Changing Face of Theatre in South Africa,” Twentieth Century Literature 43.2 (1997): 166.

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African Play-Texts” interrogates a notion of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa that entails the exaltation of an aggressive, violent, patriarchal heritage. Discerning undoubtedly new themes and approaches to configurations of South African identities in his representative survey of four post-apartheid plays, Krueger indicts a fixation with the preservation of a questionable concept of national identity that is inextricably linked with violent patriarchy, and privileges instead a humane reconception of notions of history, nationhood, and identity. In “Critical Responses: The Evolution of the Theatre Critic in South Africa,” T E M P L E H A U P T F L E I S C H traces the development of theatrical commentary in South Africa from the leisurely to the professional, the text-bound to the performance-oriented, and pays close attention to the compact between the mutations of the discipline and the imperatives of both imperialism and local South African politics and history. His insight is that both black and Afrikaner nationalisms had a rather beneficent impact on the quality of theatrical commentary in South Africa. The political is at the heart of Irobi’s endeavour as a dramatist, his abiding fascination with Igbo metaphysics notwithstanding. Embittered by the plight of the masses in a country abundantly blessed with mineral and human resources, and the gross ineptitude and greed of her rulers, military and civilian alike, he created drama that is explicitly political in its striving for social transformation or even political revolution. As an actor, too, Irobi memorably filled the roles of Styles in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Yet perhaps it was as Elesin in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman that he made his greatest mark as an actor, privileging the metaphysical pilgrimage over the crucial political context of the experience. In real life, too, Irobi was a mimic, habitually observing people to isolate character traits that were fodder for comic mimicry. And he usually listened as though hypnotized to the tapes of the popular Igbo comedian Uche Ogbuagu, and – with hardly any talent for smiling – laughed with all his being. At the Christopher Okigbo International Conference held at Harvard University in 2007, Irobi, though visibly ill then, regaled the audience with Igbo folksongs. His talent for responding to the various forms and demands of the theatre was enormous. The common denominator, however, was the intensity that he brought to the various roles he played, a quality which, as a theatre theorist, he traced to the soulfulness of the actant in traditional African ritual. A recurring metaphor for this intensity in the recollections of Irobi’s close friends is that of a wound-up coil about to spring up. Typically unstint-

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ing and absolutely self-giving in his devotion to the theatre and to his friendships, which he cultivated with uncanny skill, characteristically ardent in his convictions, consumed by his passion for transformation – for just how long could Irobi endure, subjected also as he was at home and in exile to the thousand (un)natural shocks that (postcolonial) flesh is heir to? In 1989, only twenty-nine, Irobi published a collection of poetry, Inflorescence, in which the first poem, significantly titled “My Epitaph,” clearly underscores that his deepest craving was hardly to comb grey hair; against death’s arrogant reduction of all humans to mere dust, he instead envisioned life-enhancing beauty and even immortality as redemptive human virtues: There is beauty in my breast Even here where all things rest I am the flower of the twilight That blossomed in the night.

WORKS CITED Amankulor, James. “The Art of Dramatic Art in Igboland,” in A Survey of the Igbo Nation, ed. G.E.K. Ofomata (Onitsha: Africana First, 2002): 399–412. Brink, André. “Challenge and Response: The Changing Face of Theatre in South Africa,” Twentieth Century Literature 43.2 (1997): 162–76. Clifford, James. “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. Diala, Isidore. Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance (Ibadan: Kraft, 2014). Gainor, J. Ellen. “Introduction,” in Imperialism and Theatre:Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (London: Routledge, 1995): xiii–xv. Gilbert, Helen. “General Introduction,” in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, ed. Helen Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2001): 1–7. Irobi, Esiaba. Inflorescence (Selected Poems 1977–1988) (Enugu: A B I C , 1989). Izevbaye, Dan. “Living the Myth: Revisiting Okigbo’s Art and Commitment,” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 48.1 (2011): 13–25. Naoko–Pilgrim, Anita. “Shall We Dance? Identification Through Linguistic Tropes and Performance,” in Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender and Performance, ed. Maya Chowdhry & Nina Rapi (New York & London: Harrington Park, 1998): 65– 77, Obumselu, Ben. “Christopher Okigbo: A Poet’s Identity,” in The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honor of Professor Ben Obumselu, ed. Isidore Diala (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2006): 57–78. Osborne, Deirdre. “‘I ain’t British though / Yes You are. You’re as English as I am’: Staging Belonging and Unbelonging in Black British Drama Today,” in Hybrid Cultures – Nervous States: Britain and Germany in a (Post)Colonial World, ed.

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Ulrike Linder, Maren Möhring, Mark Stein & Silke Stroh (Cross/Cultures 129; Amsterdam & New York, 2010): 203–27. Soyinka, Wole. “The Creative Pursuit in Global Time,” in Africa in the World & the World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2011): 173–202.

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E S I A B A I R O B I I N T H E L A T E 1 9 8 0 S , after I made the ill-advised decision to return to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where, as a former student leader, I was already a pariah, rather than accept an admission offer from Harvard Graduate School. In Nsukka, Irobi, then a graduate assistant in Dramatic Arts, was already fully engaged in a battle that would dog him across three continents and mark his entire adult life, a battle that he came ever so close to winning only in the last few months before the tragic hand of fate struck him down in Berlin on 29 April 2010. He was waging a war of survival with the academy. His prodigious talent, irrepressible garrulity, and seemingly affected eccentricity had not endeared him to some very powerful people at the university who made sure not only that he failed to graduate with first-class honours but also that life would be miserable for him there as a graduate assistant. His mentor and distant kin, Professor Jas Amankulor, was away in the U S A , where he sadly met his untimely death through cancer. In Amankulor’s absence, Irobi was a fair target for his powerful adversaries, “imbeciles,” as he often referred to them, cursing under his breath. Men who once were just as bright in their own youth, perhaps not quite as talented, yet full of energy and promise but who, with time, had lost the will to excel and eventually retired to the little fiefdom of the academy, whence to wield their cudgels at the younger talents who reminded them of their own earlier promise and, perhaps more poignantly, their failure to reach that promise. “Imbeciles,” he would spit, “absolute cunts! Scavengers loitering around looking for putrid flesh. Accursed vultures!” They would have to feed on their own mothers’ flesh, not his, he would say to me. MET

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Ultimately, those vultures drove us out of Nigeria into lifelong exile. We both wrote about that exilic fate, versified our own deaths, and wished for funerals in the homeland, yet we held onto stubborn hope that, in spite of every tribulation, we would prevail even over exile and banishment, and one day return alive to build a new republic. Esiaba Irobi never made it. In 1987, when we met, I was a budding artist and writer who had taken to producing literary and art criticism for money because I was indigent, although my dearest wish was to be a poet and make my art. Irobi, on the other hand, despite the human demons that haunted and persecuted him, was a prodigy not only in the popular sense of that word but, in fact, in his outrageously copious output as a poet and dramatist, also. In addition to his classroom duties, he was directing plays, some of them his own, often in long, sold-out runs; he was producing a seemingly endless stream of playscripts; he traded barbs with me in the national weeklies about literature and language; and he performed weekly at the Anthill, a literary cabaret that the artist and musician Gbubemi Amas established on the outskirts of the university as a den for poets, dramatists, budding singers and songwriters, and the lot. And every so often, he took a theatre troupe on the road to perform. His troubles with his senior colleagues in the Drama Department did not seem to slow him down; instead, they drove his exceptional industry even as they whetted the edge of violence that marked his work at that time. Theatre students, young actors, budding playwrights and poets alike adored him, and their adulation fired his spirit as he enjoined them not only to confront the many ills in what was already a failing postcolony, but to aspire to great personal accomplishment in their own lives as well. Despite his legendary mirth and loud laughter, he was also a perfectionist both in class and on the set. He did not give an inch to mediocrity or lousiness on a young actor’s part or that of a student lighting director, and his temper, though always short-lived, was as explosive as the revolutions that he espoused in his plays. Most important, he taught by example as he poured everything – indeed, every drop of sweat – into his work on stage or on the set. I recall Irobi in the lead role of Elesin Ÿba in the legendary director Eni Jones Umuko’s production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. In the play, based on real events, the monarch dies and the commander of his cavalry, the king’s horseman, prepares to commit required ritual suicide so he can herald the dead king into the afterworld. But then, as is to be expected in such great tragedies, an even greater tragedy occurs. The colonial authorities learn about the rumoured ritual suicide and decide to step in and

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prevent it, not knowing how precariously the universe of their subjects rests on that critical ritual. A British prince is expected in the colony the same day, and the district officer would rather not take chances. For his part, the king’s horseman also delays his preparations so he can take a last bride before his long journey to the beyond. This distraction creates a time lapse and opens the door for the colonial authorities, who eventually succeed in arresting the cavalier and foiling his bid to fulfil his pledge to his king and his people. The monarch’s spirit is left to wander, without a ferry to take it into the greater realm. At that point the horseman’s son, who is studying in England, returns to bury his father, as is his duty as an eldest son, only to find that his father has failed to accompany the king, bringing dishonour on the family and potential destruction to the clan and the kingdom. The grief-stricken son disowns his father, and then takes the disgraced cavalier’s place by committing suicide to save the day. In his role as the cavalry leader, Esiaba Irobi put in one of the most memorable performances ever seen on stage. From the proud and rumbunctious royal cavalier to the flirtatious and colourful groom on his wedding night, Irobi was nothing but spellbinding. But theatre became life became sacred rite when he stepped into the cavalier’s final preparations before death. With throbbing music and elegiac praise-singers egging him on, he became transcendent, like a great masquerade, ritual in slow motion, every step and every gesture testifying to the unimaginable burden of a man who must die to please his king and save his people and their universe. As the sweat poured from his brow each night, and hearts thumped all around to the relentless drums, every sinew in his body bore that testament, heroic and monumental, in silence greater than silence itself, spirit already severed from the albatross of flesh. Most had never seen theatre quite as electric and probably never would again. Earlier acquaintances had seen Irobi in Shakespearean roles, but those who also saw him in the role of Elesin Ÿba attest that nothing else could compare. In 1989, Irobi and I left for the U K on British Foreign and Commonwealth Office fellowships, he to Sheffield University and I to London. In those last few years before our departure, especially between 1986 and 1989, Esiaba Irobi was at the height of his powers as a poet, playwright, actor, and theatre director. One of his great motivators was the annual award competitions run by the Association of Nigerian Authors. Each year he would submit at least two full-length manuscripts in both the poetry and the drama categories, always meticulously finished and bound. Each year he would end up a runnerup, but never a winner. He would curse the “impotent” and “incestuous”

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judges and do a routine of showing them his arse in absentia. “Philistines,” he would say, “who have no understanding of what poetry is.” In other countries, he would remind me, people appreciate their youth, recognize their talent, and encourage their efforts, “but here, they pull the cotyledons with bare hands and leave them on sidewalks to die.” He would stew and curse and spit for a day or two, metaphorically turn out the Association of Nigerian Authors and its “senile” judges just as he turned our bedsit upside down every morning looking for his toothbrush, and then he would be back at work, always on two or three manuscripts simultaneously, ready for the following year. In time, scholars will eventually leave their views, but I dare say that Esiaba Irobi’s greatest work as a poet and playwright was written during this period, while he was in his late twenties, before we went into exile. The classic poems that he is now best remembered for – “Judy,” “Soniya,” “Frankfurt,” “Mabera” – were all written in Nsukka during this difficult period. So were the great, revolutionary plays that now define his theatre, what I referred to back then as the theatre of the bloody metaphor. Nwokedi, in which the youthful hero and his radical age-group, the Ekumeku, oust the old order in their town, the age-group named and modelled after an historic nationalist movement among the Western Igbo; Hangmen Also Die, in which the same revolutionary themes of prevalent corruption, societal decadence, and violent dislodging of the old order recur; and even Cemetery Road, which won the annual International Student Playscript Competition at the British National Student Drama Festival in 1993 – all were written during this same period. While he rehearsed at the theatre at night or perhaps performed on stage, he kept a pad open on his office desk on which he toiled at scripts. And just as every writer has his or her writing eccentricities, even down to the colour of the paper they write on and to what point of the compass they face their desk, Irobi had his, too, one of which was to write almost exclusively on the back of old wall almanacs. The logic of this, which I was to discover and the ingenuity of which I found particularly fascinating, was that the broad empty space on the back of a wall almanac and calendar was spacious enough that one did not need to turn pages as one would with a notebook. You could write, edit, correct, cross out, and replace several hundred lines of poetry on a single spread with notes all around including dialogue for other projects, without ever having to turn a page and in the process lose either your train of thought or the track of what lines you had already written. Your whole day’s or whole week’s effort was all laid out before you. This was particularly useful for the long poems in several movements that Irobi was writing at the time, espe-

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cially inspired by T.S. Eliot and Derek Walcott. As I was to discover, it was a lot easier to dismember and restructure a long poem this way than if one wrote in a regular notebook or in typescript. There were no personal computers in Nigeria at the time. And, there is a rigorous, muscular, and daring engagement with form and sound and sense of space that we find in those early efforts that seldom appears in Irobi’s work in exile. It is almost tautological to describe a writer as erudite, but when I met Esiaba Irobi he was certainly one of the most well-read individuals I had ever encountered. This is relevant because, in the late 1980s, Nigeria had already begun to experience the gradual throttling of intellectual pursuits that made access to books harder and harder, especially books published abroad. Although it was still possible for individuals to travel abroad and return with books and journals, subscriptions were rarer and books were already less available in the bookstores. That being the case, the breadth of Irobi’s reading and the level of his familiarity with global literary currents was impressive, to say the least, and that would remain the case for as long as I knew him. Not only was he a voracious reader, he also wholly owned every text that he read, picked through it with a fine scalpel, and instantly and effortlessly fed whatever he found useful or pertinent into his work. This encyclopaedic erudition would mark his poetry even while, in his drama, he determinedly refrained from the deference to European classics that one finds in the work of earlier Nigerian dramatists. The vast literary references in his poetry did in fact create occasional unease between us, as I found reason every now and then to take issue with what I considered unnecessary instances. Interesting enough, this was the case with his last collection, Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems. I recall taking very strong exception to the title, as I did the title poem, because I assumed both to be unnecessary reactions to literary events and figures wholly inconsequential to our work and our world. Who the hell cares about Philip Larkin, I remember cursing out loud at him, and why should it matter what he did or did not do? But, of course, Larkin was only tangential to Irobi’s theme, which was more the trials and misfortunes of the African poet in exile. It was exile, after all, that terminated Irobi’s promise as a writer and almost destroyed his art. Uncannily but quite characteristically, he foreshadowed his exile in his long masterpiece, Cotyledons, the last book of poetry that he published in Nigeria before our departure, and one of the finest, most sophisticated treatises ever crafted on the tragedy of lost nationhood and the heart-

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break of exile. At the end of one movement of the poem titled “The Wall,” Irobi wrote: THE TALLER TREES

gigantic in their height, S T A N D in the best places in the sun. UNDER

their canopies and shadows, THE CREEPERS, wriggling, crawling, rolling, WEARY WITH TOIL, The creepers, men like me, THE EXILE; I leave to live, I exit to exist.1

It is quite true that Irobi could not have survived for much longer in Nigeria had we not left when we did, but it also has to be admitted now that his prognosis of the exile experience, beside the gnawing wound of nostalgia and loss, was perhaps too optimistic. While we were not entirely naive about the cultural and political travesties of the West, and while departure most certainly saved us both from an early demise, either at our own hands or at those of the state, what we did not anticipate and could not imagine was the enormous price of the ticket. We left to live, all right, but in exile we could only barely exist. While home actively tried to destroy us, it nevertheless fuelled a resistant charge back in anger, if you will, amidst a community of equally young, equally indignant and defiant talents that gave context and meaning to our art and drove our creative outpourings. In the cold and palpable isolation of exile, all that disappeared, leaving each man to his own individual circumstances in disparate locations and climes. The focus of our endeavours, that nationalist locomotive that powers the fire and fervour of every generation of creative minds, was no longer at our disposal, and with it something gradually dissipated and died as we rallied to new irritations and challenges, new distrac-

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Esiaba Irobi, Cotyledons (Poems) (Enugu: A B I C , 2009): 23.

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tions and disappointments, most of which were now, at least in Irobi’s case and tragically so, quite personal and often, quite mundane. The great and rousing vision and determination to create a whole new national literature pertinent to our circumstance and moment in history, to take the great legacy that we inherited from Achebe, Soyinka, and Okigbo and propel it into the future as a collective, historic, creative, and intellectual powerhouse embroiled in the double-barrelled task of survival and national revival, slowly got leached away by petty, nagging, personal trials and assaults in a foreign land where such high-minded visions found no footing. We had left to live, and now, living proved so dreary and the cost so dear. Esiaba Irobi enrolled at Sheffield for his doctoral degree, but soon grew discontented. His goal had always been to study with the African theatre scholar Professor Martin Banham at Leeds University, where Wole Soyinka had studied back in the 1950s. And so, after a spell at Sheffield, he moved to Leeds to study with Banham. Although he felt isolated and dissatisfied at Sheffield, the larger rationale of the move to Leeds was never clear to me apart from the distant association with Soyinka. It did not strike me that there was much that Irobi could learn from Banham or Leeds that he didn’t already know, and I still hold that view. If anything, moving to Leeds threw a spanner in the works of the fellowship grant under which we were both studying in England, which required that fellows complete their doctoral programme in thirty-six months or lose their sponsorship. By moving to Leeds, Irobi inevitably missed the schedule; soon after, his three-year fellowship ended, leaving him in dire straits. While still enrolled at Leeds, he took a job as a lecturer in the Drama Department at Liverpool John Moores University, and moved there. He spent five years in Liverpool and that half decade would prove to be one of the most trying periods of his entire adult life. In an interview published in the Nigerian daily The Guardian in 2006, he mentioned the “extreme racism” that he suffered at Liverpool John Moores, but he and I often spoke about it while he was there and at times he would spend hours detailing the deep resentment and diabolical frustration that became his regular lot. That experience, in addition to the fact that it grievously distracted him from his work at Leeds, would also undermine whatever little faith he had ever had in the basic decency of the British and would inject a new and highly corrosive acidity into his poetry. In the final stanzas of “An African Poet in England Curses His English Head of Department,” written toward the end of his period at Liverpool John Moores and published in 2004 as part of a cycle of poems titled Rejection

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Slips, Irobi addressed the following words to his boss, whom he refers to as “My dear H.O.D, i.e., Head of a Donkey”: May your students mistake you for Caligula or Grendel or the Cyclops or Nero or Nebuchadnezzar or Jack the Ripper or Richard West or Jeffrey Dahmer and deal with you accordingly. When you bid the earth adieu, preferably by stoning or public strangling, may you be buried in the belly of a thousand wolves and foxes and hyenas and other scavengers. May vultures share your flesh shred by shred As they sing their national anthem in German.2

In an otherwise seemingly humorous poem that the writer introduces by explaining in the opening stanza that in the culture that he came from “it is okay for a poet to curse, provided it is in verse!,” the depth of his bitterness is only barely masked. While Irobi kept up his active schedule as a stage director, albeit in mostly college productions, his career as a playwright and, in fact, an active publishing poet effectively came to an end in Liverpool as he increasingly shifted his attention to scholarship. He was profoundly interested in indigenous African theatre, which was not only the subject of his doctoral research at Leeds but had always been the source of his theatre. He had long been an enthusiast of the work of August Wilson and Derek Walcott, and this interest would in time extend to African-American and Caribbean theatres, which he taught for many years. I must confess that Irobi’s shift to scholarship did not meet with a warm reception on my part, just as his earlier obsession with Leeds did not. I felt rather strongly that it grievously distracted him from what I thought was his true calling and duty, his creative writing, and I did not refrain from regularly making my disappointment known, though it was hard not to appreciate and respect why his brilliant mind was drawn to scholarly inquiry. The suggestion that one should ignore scholarship and concentrate on creative work is one that I am quite familiar with, and I know that it is always with more than slight irritation that I have to wave it off. So, I know that although he never betrayed his irritation or engaged me in an argument about it, he did not 2

Esiaba Irobi, Rejection Slips (2004), www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol9/irobi/ (accessed 25 August 2013).

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always receive kindly my constant nagging about the issue. In the end, his published scholarly output was modest at best, although, given the numerous ideas that we discussed over the years, there is every reason to expect that his unpublished scholarship will prove quite formidable when his archives eventually come to light. Esiaba Irobi left Liverpool John Moores in 1997 and moved to New York, where he took up an appointment at the Tisch School of New York University. Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o and Caryl Phillips were among the many luminaries teaching at New York University at the time. Also, New York, with its vibrant theatre both on and off Broadway, seemed like a city made specially for Irobi, and he wasted no time before immersing himself in it. By this time, however, something of the brazen edge that always drove him towards the centre in our younger years appeared to have been blunted by his experiences in Britain. He attended and spoke at conferences, took up with a lady from his home county who lived in Harlem and worked as a nurse, and devoted himself furiously to stage-directing. But, as with his last years in the U K , his efforts were now limited to college productions and fringe projects. He taught African theatre, especially the work of Femi Osofisan, as well as African-American drama, with particular interest in the plays of August Wilson. He developed courses that traced the poetic and performative elements of hip-hop to West Africa, and could hold any audience rooted to the spot as he discussed the work of Nas and Jay Z, his favourite rap artists. He directed the plays of Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi. But none of his own plays went on stage. We endlessly discussed ideas for new projects in dance-drama, including offBroadway revival of his own great dance-dramas such as Nwokedi, but nothing came of those discussions. From the mid-1990s onwards, his energies were given almost entirely to his scholarly research, and to teaching and directing the work of other playwrights. It seemed as though he had reached the conclusion that he stood no chance of success in the West as a playwright. This might come as a surprise to anyone familiar with how much has been made of the award that Cemetery Road won in Britain in 1993, but, as I indicated earlier, the International Student Playscript Competition award, which is often referred to as the World Drama Trust award in his biographical entries, is an obscure, albeit important, student prize that had in fact earlier been won, consecutively in 1989 and 1990, by younger Nigerian playwrights at much earlier stages of their careers (Biyi Bandele–Thomas in 1989 for his play Rain, and Ndubuisi Anike in 1990 for Catalyst of the New Dawn). It was not the Obie or Emmy that a playwright of Esiaba Irobi’s genius and stature

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might expect at that rather mature stage in his career, and was far from enough to get his plays staged at the Royal Court or on Broadway. But he had determined, I am convinced, even that early in our journey, rightly or otherwise, that the West would never warm to his ideas or provide the space for his work. I believe he reached the wrong conclusion, and much too early, and I put this down to a number of reasons, among them the fact that he began his period in Britain in the far isolation of Sheffield, and routing his journey through Leeds and Liverpool did not help. I am strongly convinced that had Esiaba Irobi spent his years in Britain living and working in London, the story would have been different. Unlike Sheffield, Liverpool, or Leeds, London not only had a vast and vibrant theatre scene, perhaps more important for a sensitive writer like Irobi, it also had a diverse and active conglomeration of international theatre communities that could have provided a welcoming space and home as well as a dependable audience for his efforts. During the period in question, London’s diverse theatre scene had provided opportunities for non-Western writers like Caryl Phillips, who in fact started out in Leeds and Sheffield, Odia Ofeimun, who is better known as a poet, the young Bandele–Thomas, who, like Phillips, gave as much time to fiction as he did to playwriting, and quite a list of others. And there was not only stage, including several minority theatre and dance groups with regular programmes on different niche stages and very much suited to Irobi’s unique theatre in the round; there was television, too. In the isolation of Sheffield and Liverpool, none of these was available to him. Another reason, which I have already stressed, was Irobi’s decision to pursue scholarship rather than devote his whole attention to creative writing. Had he decided differently, and followed in the footsteps of his idol Wole Soyinka, who, in the late-1950s, abandoned his plans for postgraduate studies in Leeds and instead moved to London to devote his energies to theatre, I believe that London would have discovered Irobi’s genius and allowed him the space to re-invent himself and pursue a most productive and thriving career as a dramatist. Instead of the debilitating teaching job that he took in Liverpool, he could have survived in London on his writing and the support of his family, especially his elder sister, who still resides there, as well as friends. London would have provided the creative, intellectual, and cultural community that he needed and so sorely missed. A third reason, and a crucial one, is that, despite Irobi’s uncanny foreshadowing of his exile, the tragic circumstances and hasty nature of our departure

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from Nigeria meant that we really did not devote any time to crafting strategies for survival in the West. It is not clear to me if Esiaba Irobi had in mind to become a permanent expatriate, despite such implications in his poetry. I know, for my part at least, that although, in A Gathering Fear, I wrote about all my years being “blown / Away in distant lands / Like husks of millet / In Harmattan wind,”3 such lines were written more from anxiety and dread than as indicators of any wish or desire to live permanently in the West. In other words, with our minds set on a speedy return home, few of us ever looked carefully into the requirements for visibility and effective integration into the culture of the centre. We simply rolled with events, committing one strategic error after another, such that, by the time we realized that return was well away in the unknown future, it was more or less too late to adapt or adequately re-invent ourselves for the peculiar challenges of survival. Irobi noted in the Guardian interview mentioned earlier that while Europeans who moved to other parts of the world to settle were referred to as “settlers,” folks who are now moving in the opposite direction to Europe are referred to instead as “immigrants,” thus underlying the general hostility and marginalization that meets postcolonial expatriates in the West. Now, while that hostility and instant relegation most certainly represent the immigrant’s most visible obstacles, it is the case, also, that many of us arrive in the West with the mind-set of momentary travellers, even seasonal migrant labourers, with no stake in their new abode and no desire to settle. This is altogether typical of African expatriates. When people arrive with no desire to settle, they make few plans and rather little effort to compete for a permanent place, no matter how well deserved. Because the intentions are ad hoc, and the focus is on return, the psychology of the African expatriate experience in the West goes a long way to explain our often far from resilient will to carve out a place and register our name not as fleeting players from elsewhere, but as rightful contenders, as settlers. In other words, it is not just the place that defines us as immigrants rather than settlers; we, in fact, arrive with the mentality of immigrants, and not settlers. Settlers dig in, immigrants give in. Or give up. It would be inaccurate to state or imply that Esiaba Irobi did not contest for his place in the West. In fact, over the course of the first few years of the period he spent in the U K , he relentlessly sent manuscripts and proposals for 3

“For You, Homeland,” in Olu Oguibe, A Gathering Fear (poems) (Ibadan: Kraft,

1992): 78.

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new work to editors and publishers, but little came of it. He even recorded this quite graphically in one of the ‘curse’ poems from Rejection Slips, aptly titled “A Frustrated African Poet Curses His Publishers” (2004). The first three lines of the poem register his own testimonial: All you shit-faced publishers who thought I was finished who tried to dampen my spirit and cripple my soul with your lorry loads of rejection slips, watch out!

Time and again, his efforts met with rejection, even silence. Stunned and increasingly frustrated, he responded with rage at first, then acerbic cynicism, and, finally, injured retreat. Further on in the poem, he admits this retreat: I am the hibernating bear with real fire in his belly and a bellow as terrifying as a tornado approaching you in a car with a broken windscreen along the expressway somewhere in New Mexico near the Grand Canyon. I have been sleeping now for seven years . . .

His hurt was deep, but it was not peculiar. I, too, had given up in many areas and in many ways, and precisely around the same time that he did. First, I gave up poetry, having determined that the themes that drove my poetry no longer held particular interest for me, and, at any rate, stood no chance of taking my efforts into a Western mainstream that elevated mediocrity above serious poetry. I also gave up painting, frustrated as I was with the slow response to my work in Britain, although continental Europe responded quite positively to it. It would be a full decade before I returned to painting. Irobi and I responded in almost the same way, and the manner of our reactions goes to illustrate my point about lack of a strategy for survival, and the inhibiting psychology of exile. Since my creative work still enjoyed patronage in continental Europe despite the cold response in Britain, logic would dictate that I quit the U K and move to Germany or Switzerland, where I had enthusiastic patrons. Instead (as I said), I gave up painting altogether, moved to the U S A , where I had no patrons or foothold whatsoever, and retreated to the academy and scholarship. In response to the mainstream rejection that initially met his work, Irobi quit trying, retreated to the academy, and after a half decade of misery in Liverpool, moved to the U S A and devoted himself to teaching and scholarship. We may have fled frustration and persecution at home, but we nonetheless both arrived in England with a mind to get through a brief period of studies and then go back home. We had no game-plan for engaging with what we

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would later discover to be a formidable and secretive culture machine that required not simply talent or industry to broach, but also tact, wily charm, and the ability to adapt easily and swiftly. A certain combination of resilience, persistence, and nimbleness, if you will; even a stomach for mediocrity. When the hope of swift return fizzled, our exilic minds did not dig in as would those determined to settle, but instead went into a second exile, Irobi for much longer than I, for, while he gave up playwriting almost entirely and refrained from trying further to place his poetry with the relevant organs of the literary mainstream, I continued to make art and to exhibit internationally, though I grimly refrained from painting, and have yet to return fully to it. Esiaba Irobi could not adapt. If the cold shoulder of exile nearly put paid to Irobi’s art, his experiences in Liverpool also damaged his health, and by the time he arrived in New York in 1997, he was battling chronic blood-pressure problems that put him on constant medication and required exercise and diet regimens. He was still in his mid-thirties. He earned little from his job as a professor at New York University, often ran into money troubles, and kept a full and impossibly hectic schedule. Moreover, the job at New York University was on a short-term, renewable contract and therefore not secure, none of which made things any easier. But in New York, he had community outside theatre; he reunited with his kinsmen in the vast New York–New Jersey Igbo diaspora community, including the family of his late guardian and mentor, Jas (J.A.S.) Amankulor. This close kinship he had not had during his years in the U K except on his occasional forays into London. In New York it became part of his sustenance and healing even as his art almost ground to a halt. When he moved to Towson, Maryland, in 2000 in search of a more secure professorial job, and then finally to Ohio University in 2002, he lost that community which had sustained him in New York, and his battles with the academy resumed. In Ohio, he quickly came up against the same collegial resentment and persecution that had poisoned his years in Liverpool back in the 1990s and in Nsukka two decades earlier. This all came to a head when his bid for tenure at Ohio University was initially turned down, despite his formidable body of work and his three decades of experience as a teacher. He would expend enormous time and energy, both mental and emotional, fighting the battle for recognition in Athens. He eventually won that battle, and was granted indefinite tenure, but it was too late. More than two decades of relentless struggle and hardship had taken a great toll on him, not only in terms of time and focus

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and creative work, but, most sadly, also in terms of his body. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, and thus began the last battle of his life. This time, he fought without retreat, and fought on several fronts at once. After months of excruciating chemotherapy, during which he was literally bedridden, the tumour went into remission by late 2006, and Irobi swung back to work with an obvious sense of urgency. He travelled to international conferences and delivered papers. He applied for and received fellowships. He bought a beautiful home in Athens, Ohio, that he loved, and a car. And he renewed his efforts to have his scholarship published in book form, a goal that, regrettably, he was never able to meet. In our conversations, he would often tell of another African scholar who, the story goes, wrote his most important book and one of the most significant contributions to contemporary thought after he was diagnosed with cancer, and then made a full recovery and is still alive. There was little doubt what was on his mind. In May 2009, at the age of forty-eight, Irobi, who had been single all his life, finally got married in a traditional ceremony in Nigeria; just as importantly, he made contact for the first time with the son he had fathered in England in the mid-1990s shortly before his relocation to the U S A , but had never met. The child was now in his teens. Long a jazz devotee, especially of Miles Davis’s music, Irobi had bought a saxophone a few years earlier with the intention of learning the instrument, but never made much progress with it. At what would turn out to be their last meeting, he passed the saxophone on to his son. My last conversation with Esiaba Irobi was in the early fall of 2009. He was getting ready to leave for Berlin, where he’d been appointed a fellow at the International Research Centre at the Freie Universität. His proposed project was on ‘the politics and aesthetics of international performance in the age of globalization’. We had discussed his fellowship quite a few times previously, and he was very excited about his project, but also at the prospect of leaving Ohio for a year and inserting himself back into the intellectual circles in Europe. However, there was a problem that we could not agree on. In addition to the project he proposed to the Freie Universität, which he planned to turn into a book, he intimated that he also wanted to work on and finish an earlier book project focusing on African-American performance, another one focusing on African theatre aesthetics, as well as a book of fiction based on his experiences in Britain that he’d often spoken about over the better part of a decade. All that seemed rather inordinately ambitious for a single year of research leave in Europe, not least for a man who had not only just got mar-

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ried but was also undergoing a fourth course of chemotherapy. I urged him to focus on the project for his fellowship and ensure that it was done, rather than investing his time and attention in a dozen impossible places that meant he would get none of the work finished. As was the norm in our long friendship, he did not seem to take offence, and calmly reassured me that he would get the work done. He could sense my exasperation with what I had begun to consider a chronic lack of focus on his part. He would constantly speak of four or five books he was working on, even going so far as to list their titles in his biographical entries, complete with dates of publication and names of publishing houses; yet the books never got past the proposal stage, let alone anywhere near completion. I felt rather strongly that if only he would concentrate and focus on one research project at a time, one book at a time, and drive it through, then he would have his books on the shelves and not just as ideas for conversation. In retrospect, I believe that he shared my frustration, but at that point his understanding of time had gone beyond mine and he’d begun to deal with a different sense of urgency. With his illness becoming less predictable, he’d begun to sense the looming shadow of his own mortality, but he was not about to yield to anxiety and fear. He would live and dream and extrapolate and fantasize as much as always, and he would give his waning energy to as many tasks as his fertile mind commanded, and let the chips fall where they might. He would not allow the phantom of death have dominion over him. So, he was absolutely excited, spoke with genuine joy about his contact with his little boy, and seemed over the moon about his marriage and the pending trip abroad. Friends who spoke with him later indicate that they could gradually sense a widening crack in that wall of bravery. He seemed increasingly impatient, and at times he would betray an effort to come to terms with what must be, and a consequent melancholy. In their conversations and even in his last writings, he began to refer to his late guardian, Dr Amankulor, who also lost a battle with cancer. Like the royal cavalier that he played in Death and the King’s Horseman almost a quarter-century earlier, he’d begun to prepare for his journey, although he seemed to hold out hope that, like the cavalier, fate might still intervene at the very last hour, and spare his life. And so it was that, on 8 April 2010, he and Professor Homi K. Bhabha of Harvard University appeared together as guest speakers on a panel about identity-politics at the Dahlem Humanities Centre of the Freie Universität, Esiaba Irobi was his full, ebullient, and boisterous self as he sparred with

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Bhabha and entertained Berlin’s intellectual community. A colleague who blogged the event described the exchange between Irobi and Bhabha thus: Homi Bhabha and Esiaba Irobi were really funny: it was like a highbrow (maybe not that high) version of Martin and Lewis. But they never really broke loose and went all out crazy (like Jerry Lewis at his most frenzied). But still, they gave an indication that there was a way to have fun with the topic.4

There was little indication that here was a dying man. Exactly three weeks to the day, however, on Thursday, 29 April, Irobi came down with an unknown ailment and quickly lapsed into a coma. He would never recover. The previous evening he’d spoken to a number of friends in England, each of whom, it appears, he berated for one reason or another before asking their help in organizing his Christian church wedding, which was slated for mid-May in London. At the hospital he was diagnosed with meningitis and placed on lifesupport. Five days later, on 3 May 2010, his spirit left this world. He left behind the young wife he had taken with him to Berlin, the teenage son that he had only begun to get to know, his siblings scattered around the world, and his numerous unfinished projects. Since his passing, Irobi’s life has been celebrated in memorial events around the world from Athens, Ohio to London to Abuja, Nigeria. In Nigeria, a literary prize has been named in his memory. Reminiscences and eulogies have been written by close friends and colleagues, one of whom has been commissioned to write an official biography. There is already renewed interest in his writings, and new plays have even been written already to commemorate his life and legacy. The brilliance, bravery, energy, and industry that he brought to his work, especially in his early years, produced one of the most remarkable literary legacies of our time, with no fewer than a dozen plays and collections of poetry that marked the coming of age of a generation of African writers. His combative voice and acerbic humour both charged and humanized a new theatre and literature and extended a tradition of deeply engaged creative practice in Africa. His boisterous and charming personality and his erudition endeared him to many around the world. But his was also a very difficult life plagued by discrimination and uncollegial scheming almost everywhere he worked, and career disappointments that not only denied his enormous talent 4

Darl Chin, So–Documents on Art & Cinema undefined d-a-c.blogspot.com/2010 /. . . / past-Few-days-have-been-probably-best.htm (accessed 23 August 2013).

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and accomplishments but, even more regrettably, forced him to retreat from full creative engagement at the height of his powers. Our exile in the West, beginning in the late-1980s, saved him from imminent violent confrontation with certain forces in Nigeria, but it also took away from him the very things that were most crucial to his art: an engaged and engaging community, and an appreciative audience. He struggled in the U K to find a place, to get his work out, to locate a space in which to continue to flourish, and when that failed, he relocated to America; but fate dealt him no better a hand there. Exile destroyed his promise, sapped his vitality, and eventually took his life. However, in an uncanny yet critical move at the end of the 1990s, he placed almost all of his extant drama in print and in 2003 published what may now be considered his last testament. Irobi’s last collection of poems, Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems, provides very frank insight into his journey into exile, his frustrations, his losses, but also his numerous loves and founts of strength; the book constitutes a veritable testimony to his perseverance. Scholars will study his work, and biographers will detail his life, and as long as literature and memory survive, his remarkable journey through remarkable times will be remembered.

WORKS CITED Chin, Darl. So–Documents on Art & Cinema undefined d-a-c.blogspot.com/2010/. . . / past-Few-days-have-been-probably-best.htm (accessed 23 August 2013). Irobi, Esiaba. Cotyledons (Poems) (Enugu: A B I C , 2009). ——. Rejection Slips (2004), www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol9/irobi/ (accessed 25 August 2013). ——. Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems (Nsibidi Library of Nsukka Poets 2; Owerri: Nsibidi, 2005). Oguibe, Olu. A Gathering Fear (poems) (Ibadan: Kraft, 1992).

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Esiaba Irobi: A Personal Note M ARTIN B ANHAM

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L E E D S in the mid-1990s to study for his PhD, entitled ‘Community Theatre in Nigeria’. Anyone who knew him will appreciate that his was a lively presence! In the copy of his Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems (2005), which he gave me, is the inscription “For Martin. Smoke and Lighthouse.” Like so much else about Esiaba, this is splendidly enigmatic. I’ve no doubt that he enjoyed the thought of leaving me with a puzzle. He spent his time at Leeds with all his customary energy and unpredictability – voraciously consuming theatre, reading widely, travelling adventurously, debating and arguing passionately. I often asked Esiaba to give seminars to our undergraduate students, which he did with skill and wit. I recall one incident that, for me, sums up much about Esiaba. Shortly after his arrival in Leeds, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester staged the first performance in Britain of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. I arranged for a party of students to travel over to Manchester with me to see the performance (to which I had made a very small contribution in an advisory capacity). The production was supported by distinguished Nigerian artists, including Peter Badejo, as “choreographer and Nigerian advisor,” and Muraina Oyelami, as “Musical Director and Composer,” and was directed by Phyllida Lloyd. It was a production that – quite rightly – enjoyed considerable critical acclaim. In the incident when Elesin Ÿba is moving to his intended ritual suicide in the marketplace, the actor (George Harris) expressed his destiny to join the departed Ÿba by dancing energetically up and down on the spot accompanied by vigorous drumming, and ululation from the women of the market. I recall it as a powerful moment in a production set in the round so that the Elesin could spin round and face all sections of the audience as if they SIABA IROBI CAME TO

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were themselves part of the community. But this action infuriated Esiaba! On the way back to Leeds he raged against the action, insisting that it completely misunderstood the rite of passage that the Elesin was undertaking. His fury was alarming! The next morning he came to see me, contrite and apologetic that his response had been discourteous to my generosity in arranging the theatre visit. It is this passion that I recall about Esiaba, but equally the courtesy and desire to explain the cause of his anger. And, of course, I gained from him a short but lucid seminar on ritual action. In 2006, Esiaba Irobi invited me to read the manuscript of his proposed book African Festival and Ritual Theatre: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora Since 1942. He then asked me to write an introduction to the book, which I was delighted to do. Perhaps some indication of the book’s richness may be found in the Introduction I wrote: “A coconut” observes Esiaba Irobi, “that floats from the shores of Accra across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, is still a coconut.” This exuberant and wide-ranging study argues that indigenous performance forms from Africa, having always essentially chronicled and shaped the social, political, and cultural identity of the home community, inform and generate theatre, carnival, dance, and art in the diaspora. He asks (and offers answers to) important questions – “what was there on the continent of Africa as theatre before the arrival of Europeans?” – and shows that “African cultures were existential spaces where life was and still remains an intensely ritualized and performed activity.” That “still remains” is important, for Irobi’s study powerfully illustrates the continuity of the central function of performance in African cultures: “the African,” Irobi claims, “is master of his or her time, not the other way round.” A central thesis of the study echoes Wole Soyinka’s famous statement in his essay “Drama and the African World-View” that what distinguishes African from ‘Western’ performance forms is a difference between the former’s “cohesive understanding of irreducible truths” and the latter’s “creative impulses directed by period dialectics.” The core examples Irobi draws upon to show the roots and continuing relevance of African performance culture are taken mainly from his own Igbo nation in eastern Nigeria. Igbo society has an astonishing range and scale of complex festivals and ritual enactments, remarkable in every sense of the word ‘scale’. We are introduced to festivals that are prepared over months or years of rehearsal, that show the power of women in Igbo society (“the primary carriers of culture,” Irobi suggests), and that are central to society’s sense of its own identity and – crucially –

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its relationship to a colonial and pre- and postcolonial world. The role and power of performance, Irobi shows, is not limited to specific occasions or individual community celebration: it is a powerful weapon in its own right. For instance, in a chapter on “Feminine Aesthetics in African Theatre in the Colonial Period,” Irobi shows how the women of Igbo society confronted both the colonial power and their own corrupted male leaders in the poll-tax riots that occurred in the late 1920s. Here we are shown women, outraged by injustice and the ineffectuality of their menfolk, challenging, parodying, and fighting their oppressors, using as tools dance, song, and satire, often literally in the face of bullets. Here, as elsewhere, Irobi restores one’s faith in the power of performance to counter oppression. It makes the role and impact of much Western theatre look positively anaemic by comparison. Irobi does not neglect the modern literary drama of Africa, but argues that it is rooted in ancient traditions and cannot be fully appreciated without that understanding. It may, as it were, draw the eyes of contemporary attention like the snow-cap of Kilimanjaro, but exists only because of the ancient mountain below it. He also, through chapters on theatre for development and theatre involved in the fight against A I D S , shows old remedies being applied to new problems. All is not light in this study, however, for while he celebrates the fundamental strengths of Africa’s various traditions of performance, he also recognizes the corrosive effect of the impact of westernization on contemporary African culture. Sometimes, as he illustrates, it is the coconut that has been its saviour, carrying the power and purpose of African performance to flourish and develop in the diaspora. Critically, this passionately argued study draws on an impressive range of theories and argument, plays and performances; most importantly, it prioritizes the African perspective, countering the dominance of much Western theorizing with a vigorous alternative view from an African and diasporic perspective. To date, this study has not been published. It should be.

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Esiaba Irobi and His Muse G EORGINA A LAUKWU –E HURIAH

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I D O N ’ T L I K E P H I L I P L A R K I N & O T H E R P O E M S was published by Esiaba Irobi in 2005. It was his last published collection of poetry, and the dedication page bore “For Georgina Alaukwu.” In the glossary he provided at the end of the book, Esiaba gave this short explanation: “Alaukwu, Georgina. My ex-lover now married.” Further down, he described Festac Town as a borough of Lagos where Georgina once lived. Esiaba devoted the five poems which make up the entire Part V of the collection titled “Where Thunders Go to Die” to telling the story of this unfortunate love, which is intertwined with his life journey and his preview of its end. Given the prominence Esiaba gave “Georgie of the World” in his written works, and as I was told by Nnorom Azuonye, in his life performances, I understand a lot of people think it is a metaphor. That is far from the truth. Earlier on, in his play The Other Side of the Mask, Esiaba had depicted a character, Ziphora, lurking in Jamike’s bedroom, but with the persona of a dog in the manger of his matrimony. He called me his Muse. Esiaba Irobi and I met at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (U N N ), where we were students in the Department of English between 1979 and 1983. Our freshmen library cards were signed by Professor Chinua Achebe, who was Head of Department. Through our four-years sojourn, our young minds and dreams were influenced, moulded, and changed forever by the great U N N theatre maestros Professor Kalu Uka, the late Professor James Amankulor (J.A.S.), and the late Professor Ossie Enekwe. In those heady intellectual days, U N N was brimming with men full of idealism, high intellect, and creativity. There was Dr Meki Nzewi in the Department of Music, Professor Obiora Udechukwu in Fine Arts, and Professor HY

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Ikenna Nzimiro in Political Science. Of course, we had Professor Chinua Achebe, Professor Emmanuel Obiechina, and Professor Donatus Nwoga in the English Department. I mention these names so that the explosive liberation of innate talents that attended the English Department class of 1983 will be understood in that context. Esiaba was a prodigy, and U N N was the crucible that forged the tools of his genius. His proclivity started budding when, instead of writing notes during classes, Esiaba wrote his own verses. When lecturers gave class assignments, Esiaba critiqued established literary works, analysed them, and gave his personal opinion. That required a lot of courage and self-confidence, because it often resulted in Esiaba engaging the lecturers in intellectual sparring, when his views were contrary. In our 100-level class, Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died was a compulsory text. But it was difficult reading for the students. All of us depended on the lecturer to explain the narrative, except Esiaba, who started and finished reading it and even wove a coherent thread in his analysis of the novel. In our class, then, Esiaba was primus inter pares. He had a preppy look, and, pretty soon, the acting roles started falling in his lap. He was everything I was not and, naturally, many of us girls had a crush on him. I kept a reasonable distance from Esiaba – until a class essay I wrote brought me face to face with him. Our nemesis in the Department was a certain Dr Orji, who prided himself on being a graduate of “Havard and Yales.” This Dr Orji taught English Grammar and Style, and most students dreaded it due to the woeful performances and mass failures in the assessment tests and exams. It was difficult to please Dr Orji. On that occasion, we were given an assignment to write individual essays on ‘A Person I Admire Very Much’. On the day Dr Orji returned our marked essays, he characteristically upbraided the entire class for sloppy and unstructured writing. Surprisingly, he was excited about one essay, which he commanded everyone to read and learn how to write well. He read excerpts from the only essay he gave an ‘A’ grade, and I recognized it was mine. Since the essay in question has been preserved by me from 1980, when it was written, to date, I reproduce most of it below: Of all the people I have met in my 18 years of life, he ranks as the finest of them all. I admire him most because he is hardworking, humorous, humane, creative and above all, he is a young philosopher. …. He is very conscientious in his studies and hardly does he fail any of his class tests. The interesting thing about him is that he does not limit his studies to those books relating to his course of study alone but

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rather reads intensively and extensively. This has made him fluent in whatever subject he is discussing and in whatever field. One will think that with all his knowledge, Esy, as he is fondly called by his friends, will spare no time to share a joke. But, far be it from him as he has a high sense of humour. People around him never get bored because he always has something new and interesting to make them laugh… Were it not that he has moments of seriousness, when he will not laugh nor cause anybody to, he would have earned himself the name of a clown or, worse still, a jester. Apart from this, Esy is very humane. He exhibits a kind of gentleness and kindness to his friends which people, who merely see him outwardly, will never credit him with… He is generous with his affection and never fails to praise and encourage anybody who shows an extraordinary talent…. Furthermore, he has a talent which has shown that he is destined for great things.… Esy thinks with his pen. His essays have marked him out as a great writer of the future. Though limited in number, they portray a high sense of reasoning. He has also written some short plays. These have been declared “good” and one of them even won him a literary prize…. Esy has a high sense of imagination which he has used to his own advantage. In fact, he is so sold on his creative power that he forfeits his meal and sleep just to give vent to his creativeness through writing. …. All his writings convey a message and he believes he is on a mission in the Nigerian society. Nevertheless, just as no human being is perfect, Esy has his own human weaknesses. Although he does not take offence easily, he has a temper which when it flares, makes people around him cower in fear. His eyes will light up crazily and glower at the offender. He will clench his teeth, set his mouth in a thin line, and roll his hands into fists. But he seldom hits anybody with them. Esy has a charming personality and a dazzling smile…. He walks with a light gait and head held high like an orator which he is. He may be called handsome. Esy has a superior mental endowment and an innate creative ability common to only a few.… Esy is washing his hands in this academic community and he will surely eat with kings.

It didn’t take magic to know that the person I wrote about was Esiaba, so I made a mental note not to give out the essay. But immediately after class and before I could escape, Esiaba was in front of my desk and quickly snatched

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the four-page essay, which he read through to the end. He said “I see,” dropped the essay, and walked away. I wanted the ground to swallow me! It was like I had made an indecent love proposition to a man. For two weeks, I hid behind dark sunglasses. But as cliques began to form in the class, Esiaba gently propelled me to his group, which had the irascible but charismatic Tonnie Egun. It was an odd but intense collage of personalities with Kem Abonta, Ngozi Aki-Uduma, Vic Elendu, and Nancy Etim at the core. We became lifelong friends eventually. We knew Esiaba was writing, just as did most members of our class. After all, we were taking creative-writing classes. But Esiaba was writing more purposefully and bringing out serious and original material. We began taking him seriously as a writer in 1981. He had already achieved campus celebrity-status much earlier as a handsome actor in leading roles in some of the big stage productions at the University Arts Theatre. In 1981, former President Shehu Shagari visited U N N in the company of then Governor Jim Nwobodo. In honour of the dignitaries, the Vice-Chancellor commissioned the English Department to produce Sizwe Bansi is Dead by Athol Fugard at the University Arts Theatre. Esiaba was Mr Styles, while Nancy and I were stage-hands. There was no recorded National Anthem, so all the actors and stage-hands behind the curtain were conscripted to sing it for President Shagari. We were a sight to behold – all rag-tag and in rigs for back-stage work. Anyway, President Shagari, Governor Nwobodo, Dr Ibrahim Tahir, and all the accompanying political bigwigs in the presidential entourage stood up as we belted out our unrehearsed version of the National Anthem. Then the unthinkable happened. President Shagari left his high seat, stepped onto the podium, and shook hands with each one of us. Nancy and I did not wash our hands for two days to preserve the lingering perfume President Shagari left on our palms. Esiaba, who could not hide his disgust at such vanity, however, gave a rousing performance! Not long after, Pope John Paul II visited Nigeria, and was effusive in his praises for President Shagari and Governor Jim Nwobodo. This infuriated Esiaba, who felt that the Pope should not have praised the political leadership, because of the massive corruption in the N P N -led government and the crass immorality being perpetrated by these men in power who were luring young girls with money for sexual favours. We were preparing for the celebration of our Nsukka Conference of Creative Artistes’ Week when Esiaba informed us he had written a play for the event. It was titled The Pope Lied. Kem Abonta, Vic Elendu, and I were cast in the leading roles.

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Esiaba made us do incredible things on stage. The challenge faced by the stage-manager for that play was to find an object that resembled the President’s most treasured body part, which had been severed by the young military boys that took over power in the story. We finally settled for the tail of a cow, and the butcher was given adequate instructions on the size and dimensions. Esiaba then required me to hold and dangle the cow’s tail while saying my lines. This was not easy, as the audience had been told that what I was holding was the President’s missing genitalia. Several years afterwards, when people asked me why I abandoned acting as a vocation, I did not hesitate to recall that incident and the sense of embarrassment I used to feel each time I remembered it. Esiaba’s writing took off like wildfire in our third year, in 1982. That was the year Esiaba achieved popularity as a playwright and my place in his life was enlarged. He not only gave me leading roles in any play he wrote, and they were many, I also had the privilege of reviewing his raw manuscripts and editing them. That was no mean task, considering that Esiaba was fond of monologues and soliloquies. Since he was so attached to anything he wrote, it was always difficult getting him to agree to cut out whole pages of monologues that I felt would send the audience to sleep. He compared me to Charles Larsen, the celebrated literary critic that Achebe took to the cleaners for “Larsony.” Esiaba came to respect my views when his works (after our vetting fights) began to receive critical acclaim. No matter how much we had the editorial fights, Esiaba always brought his writings to me before making them public. But there was another role I played in Esiaba’s life which was known only by his very close friends. I knew for certain that Esiaba was possessed by his genius. I saw him write for days in hidden corners of the Paul Robeson Drama Building, unkempt and without food. If he had filled up his notes and books, he wrote on his palms and on his jeans trousers. I found out that his brilliance did not extend to the management of his upkeep funds. He would spend his entire money on the purchase of writing and typing sheets, biros, and for paying typists all over U N N who were producing his many manuscripts. The result was that he frequently ran out of funds and stayed without his necessaries and in an unkempt condition. So we agreed on a system whereby, at the start of every term, he handed over his upkeep money to me, which I then ensured would be spread over the whole term. Apart from being his treasurer, I took on the task of overseeing his general well-being on campus, ensuring

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that he did such mundane things as eating and laundry. This was in addition to editing his writings. I became Esiaba’s mother hen. In early 1982, Esiaba gave me a script to study; it was titled What Songs Do Mosquitoes Sing. One evening, he called me for a rehearsal and, that done, he told me to dress like a widow on the evening of the following day and come to the Paul Robeson Drama Building. Thinking it was a dress rehearsal, I arrived and went backstage to meet and go through the motions with the young boy, my son in the play, who was the only other character. He did not have much of a speaking part, as it was mostly a monologue. After a while, I heard a retinue of voices and Esiaba would not let me peep. Then the curtain opened and, to my horror, I saw a packed house. Before the shock settled, I saw Professor Chinua Achebe, Professor Ebun Clark, visiting from the University of Lagos, and Professor Emmanuel Obiechina, then H O D , all sitting in the front row and looking with rapt attention at my mouth. I opened my mouth and started crying. Luckily, the character was a widow, and I received thunderous applause for the genuine lamentation! After the curtain call, I had the rare privilege of being photographed with Professor Achebe when he walked up to congratulate me. It was also in 1982 that Esiaba wrote the play that brought him much fame and recognition, The Colour of Rusting Gold. For our third-year project, we were to select and produce a play without the assistance of the lecturers and the Department’s technical crew. Esiaba informed us that he had written a play, and we took a decision to produce The Colour of Rusting Gold. It was a massive risk because the unpublished, never-produced script of a student is not a wise selection for a class examination production. Our lecturers explained to us several times what would happen to our scores if there was a flaw, either in the script, acting, or production. This was an examination and the no-nonsense external examiner, Professor Ebun Clark, was coming from the University of Lagos. Although we were quite scared, we went ahead with the production; we worked very hard to ensure there were no flaws. Tonnie Egun and I were the artistic directors. Over several meetings and fights with Esiaba, lasting into the wee hours of the morning, Tonnie and I wrested artistic control of the production from Esiaba and decimated the script he gave us. The end-product was a taut, intense play with incredible humour woven into the tragedy. By 8.30 pm on Wednesday, 4 August 1982, the play was produced at the Paul Robeson Drama Building with Vic Elendu as Otagburuagu the native doctor, Kem Abonta as his apprentice Ogidi, Tonnie Egun as Oriakanjonuchichi, the mentally deranged boy, Ralph Awa, a

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Cameroonian student, as Nanimgaebi the politician, and Nancy Etim as Nketa, the politician’s mistress. The play was extremely hilarious but profoundly tragic. The sight of a pot-bellied politician carrying a briefcase full of money, with his paw-paw-coloured girlfriend in tow, being frog-jumped, wheeled round in his agbada, and held prostrate on the floor at gun-point by a mad-boy when two of them met in the waiting room of a famous native doctor made the spectators almost choke with laughter. The whole University was agog as people discussed it at all corners. We were graded a resounding ‘A’ and Esiaba Irobi became a household name at U N N . Despite the passage of time, I still remember the tremendous strain this exercise put us through, such that Tonnie and I disagreed on virtually everything, became enemies several times, and reconciled, all in the process of giving birth to this play. But all our labour and suffering were rewarded that production night. The following excerpt from the production brochure amply captures what we went through: There is a cliché used at the end of any job done – it hasn’t been easy at all. In trying to meet up with the encouraging challenge thrown by our Lecturer, Group A decided to produce an unpublished play written by one of us. Esiaba really wrote this play for the purpose of this exercise and made sure the script has all the problems we are expected to solve in producing a play – editing (cutting) the script, designing and constructing a suitable set for multiple simultaneous setting, lighting challenges, sound effects, make-up, and a wide range of costume and props. It is quite difficult solving a problem one has set for oneself with the intention of impressing one’s superiors. The group really went through a tough time trying to solve this self-imposed problem. We thank members of Group A for tolerating all the long periods of rehearsals and sometimes the infuriating temperaments of the directors.

In December 1982, the Vice-Chancellor commissioned The Colour of Rusting Gold as the University’s Convocation Play, and preparations commenced for the elaborate production at the University Arts Theatre. This time around, Professor Ossie Enekwe, Professor J.A.S. Amankulor, and Domba Asomba were put in charge. The cast was strengthened, and since I was not in the director’s chair, I played the tragic role of Ngasi, Oriakanjo’s mother. We were at our best, but Tonnie Egun was electrifying as Oriakanjonuchichi. Till the last time I saw Esiaba, when he visited Nigeria in 2007, he still talked

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about that production and his dream of bringing back the original cast for a production. In June 1983, we mounted a monster production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman with Esiaba in the riveting role of Elesin Ÿba, under the direction of Kalu Uka. As rehearsals for the production progressed, Esiaba’s interpretation of the role became more sublime and intimate and his lines lyrical. It was at this first production that he bonded with the character of Elesin Ÿba. Esiaba probed his lines and sought to get into the psyche and spirit of Elesin. He became more adept at using the words to bring out the Yorùbá nuances and idioms, so much so that he waxed lyrical, thus achieving a stylized journey of the Elesin’s transition to join his dead master. His interpretation of Elesin Ÿba evoked sympathy and, in the end, he did not strip the Elesin of his dignity and nobility. Esiaba delved so much into the character of Elesin Ÿba that he developed a proprietary attitude towards the role. In 1992, he sent me a mail from England: I am here at Exmouth for a week to assist some students trying to make a mockery of Death and the King’s Horseman. They are all Europeans. Imagine. Anyway, the pay is good…

In 1983, we drifted out of Nsukka for National Youth Service Corp and other life pursuits. Esiaba returned to U N N and I joined the Federal Government Service in Lagos. But Esiaba and I remained connected and I followed his evolution avidly. In 1988, his play Nwokedi was brought to the National Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos by the U N N Alumni Association. That week, to our everlasting pride, young Esiaba Irobi’s photographs graced the national newspapers. I did not go to the National Theatre to watch the play. For no particular reason, I felt like a mother whose child had grown and left the house. But to my surprise, Esiaba came knocking at my door after the production. After Esiaba relocated to the U K , I consistently sought him out during my several stopovers in the course of international travel. Neither of us was married. I was a regular feature in his crowd. We were soul mates, and each time we reconnected, we caught up on our successes and disappointments over ugba and stockfish. And, oh, the laughter and unbridled hilarity! Esiaba was a humour merchant, and I believe he would have made a living as a successful comedian had he not chosen the arduous vocation of writing. Although he was always ecstatic and invited his friends over, he saw that I was disappointed that he was not making any type of impact in the U K . Ben Okri was the anointed of the white establishment.

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By the time Esiaba left Nigeria for Britain, he had become very popular in Nigeria as a playwright and a poet. He was also prolific in his output. I was therefore very disappointed that his works were not received with the enthusiasm and adulation he enjoyed in Nigeria and his output appeared to be on the decline. I expressed this much in several of the e-mails we exchanged, such as the one below, which I sent him in 2005: It really pains me that you have turned your back completely on this country. Whatever it is, let your works filter back here so that they can be read. [. . . ] Please just think of how wonderful it will be for your works to be celebrated in this country and your name a household name.

Surprisingly, Esiaba replied in two poems, “Treasure Island” and “Hope Place.” In part V of Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin, he sums up the net effect of his overseas sojourn and calls it the place where his thunder died. “Treasure Island” is written in form of a response to a letter I had written him on this matter: I N Y O U R L A S T L E T T E R , you wanted to know how my gift

Has been received here, in Treasure Island, by publishers. since there is no public here, for poetry, except in the pubs?

Esiaba went on to describe a deeply frustrating existence in England: It was dark here Georgie. Very dark. For seven years, I was a candle under a bushel, flickering in Hope Place, postponing my suicide daily, only by writing. O Georgina, It was lacerating to the mind and devastating to the spirit.

All through these intervening years, I had consistently suggested to Esiaba that he should return to Nigeria, where his writings flourished in his younger years. In his poems “I Shall Return” and “Horizons,” he explained in detail what led to his deciding on exile and ominously promised to return, “in glory, in story or in song.” I have read the several e-mails I exchanged with Esiaba, which are now my priceless collection; as recently as July 2008, when he sought my opinion on a matter, I had replied: “Boy, you know where I stand, I want you home.” On 12 December 2005, I received a surprise e-mail and gift from Esiaba: Your book has been published. I have paid you all the debt I owe you. I have immortalized your name in stone, steel and even the bronze mind of our immediate humanity where neither wind nor rain can erase it.

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The book in question was Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin. Esiaba said that he dedicated it to “my one and only Georgie of the World.” I didn’t know what debt he was referring to and I was certainly at a loss how to repay the honour he had done me. In 2008, the American University, Yola, Nigeria, during their recruitment drive in the U S A , offered Esiaba an appointment. Esiaba sought my opinion. It was my considered opinion that he should accept the offer and return to the country, since there was now democratic rule and the country was relatively stable. Most importantly, I told him about how much Nigerian university students would benefit from his writings, papers, and stage productions. He promised to tidy up some private matters and return finally within a couple of years. One of the private matters he mentioned was to get adequate follow-up treatment and monitoring of the cancerous ailment that had afflicted him. On the morning of 4 May 2010, I got a phone call from Tonnie Egun. Esiaba had died the previous night in Germany. Esiaba’s immortal legacy is his writings, but his eternal achievement on earth was his gift of honest and sincere friendship. Esiaba easily commanded the adulation of crowds wherever he went, so he didn’t need praise singers. He had friends who criticized him, encouraged him, believed in him, and kept him grounded. He acquired his friends and preserved them like treasures, from childhood till death. I was privileged to be one of them, and at the time he died, the friendship had lasted thirty years, which was all of my adult life then. I felt like a dark void had opened under my feet. In my search for comfort, I stumbled on an e-mail Esiaba sent me on 6 September 2005: Georgie, I am always here for you. Esiaba.

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Remembering Esiaba Irobi at the International Research Centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ in Berlin, 2009–2010

E RIKA F ISCHER –L ICHTE

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B E R L I N in September 2009. He came as a sick man determined to fulfil his mission. At the time of his arrival we knew nothing of his illness or his mission – although the latter shone through the abstract of the project he was going to pursue during his stay as a Fellow at our International Research Centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’. Despite his illness, he devoted all his time and energy to this mission – be it in his research, at conferences, or in teaching. Esiaba’s research project, entitled ‘There Is a Thief in All of Us: The Politics and Aesthetics of International Performance in the Age of Globalization’, was meant, as he stated in the project description, SIABA IROBI ARRIVED IN

to highlight the complexity and uniqueness of the ‘interweaving’ contributions that practitioners, communities, and societies from my part of the world, namely the African continent and its diasporas, have made to contemporary, global theatre practice and theoretical discourse.

Through the planned book resulting from his stay he hoped to bring to the awareness not only of our international Fellows but also of the whole community of theatre researchers, practitioners, and audiences that in African societies new forms of theatre were being developed through interweaving, which he described as “appropriations, borrowings, adaptations and graftings.” Moreover, he succeeded in demonstrating to his interlocutors that these new theatre forms entail new theories, that they are exemplary models of a theatre which, through its means, develops its own theory, thus taking seriously the shared etymology of ‘theatre’ and ‘theory’.

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When Esiaba talked about this subject, he did so with the passion of a man possessed by the necessity of convincing others but who is also afraid of running out of time. He found it completely unjustified that the works of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Lepage, or Robert Wilson, to name a few, are not only better funded but also regarded as more “prestigious” in international theatre circles than those of Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Femi Osofisan, Alvin Ailey, Ralph Lemon, Bill T. Jones, and others, whose theatrical creativity he deemed aesthetically much more innovative in their use of interweaving than the much-praised works of their white, often European, postmodern contemporaries. He relentlessly fought for the international recognition they deserve. Over and over again, Esiaba emphasized that their innovative approach is not adequately described in terms of aesthetics alone but that it is by its very nature highly political in itself. This inextricable interpenetration of the aesthetic and the political was also at the heart of Esiaba’s contribution to the Dahlem Humanities Centre’s workshop on “Identity Politics.” In his paper, which, as he put it, was meant to be as provocative as possible, he reframed the question of the workshop ‘Who are we?’ by asking about the task of artists and intellectuals in today’s society. He was explicit in his answer: The task was to transform society, to turn it from an intransitive into a transitive one. Proceeding from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, Esiaba explained how identity-politics always begins with “what you read and do not read,” whereby reading referred not only to literature but also to dance, film, and painting along with all the other arts. By contrasting Invisible Man to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, still the most popular novel in the U S A , and quoting some of its passages in which the narrator describes slaves as “creatures of small intelligence,” “small children running wild,” with no place in the political structure of the U S A , Esiaba confirmed Toni Morrison’s assertion that racism is a form of education, as well as his own statement that identity-politics begins with what you read. Going through the history of African Americans from the first arrival of Africans on the new continent to Hillary Clinton’s statement that Barack Obama is “unelectable,” and taking recourse to Carlyle’s, Hume’s, and other ‘enlightened’ philosophers’ opinions on black people, Esiaba unfolded his talk as an ardent plea for an identity-politics that is not malignant: i.e. aggressive in its sense of superiority, but benign: democratic, inclusive, participatory, advancing the self-improvement of society. He ended with the question, “What do you do as an intellectual in order to change society if society privileges your identity?”

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The workshop took place at the beginning of April 2010 – three weeks before Esiaba’s untimely death. The traces his illness had left on his body by then could no longer be ignored. Still, he spoke with such energy and conviction that the audience fell completely under his spell. In retrospect, it is as if we were all witnesses of his legacy that day. In the subsequent panel discussion, in which Homi Bhabha, Akeel Bilgrami, Dan Diner, Luiz Costa Lima, and others also participated, Esiaba made another important point. On the one hand, he emphasized how accidental national identity can be, taking himself as an example. Conceived during British colonial times, he was born on the first day of independence of the newly and somewhat arbitrarily assembled state of Nigeria. During the secessionist Biafran War, he, born as an Igbo, acquired Biafran nationality, reclaiming his Nigerian citizenship after the war. Having thus relativized the question of national identity, Esiaba referred to his identification as an Igbo. Here, on the other hand, he praised the democratic achievements of Igbo communities, particularly the power women hold in them. This was another of Esiaba’s favourite topics, to which he often referred in discussions at our Centre and elsewhere. It was important to him to stress that the democratic structure of Igbo society was guaranteed and secured by women and their positions of power. He had many stories to tell about women standing up to the authorities during colonial times. When he touched on this topic he turned cheerful, stating repeatedly that women will carry on democracy in the future. During his stay in Berlin, Esiaba never reserved his energy, never held back in any way. Although he was undergoing treatment, he did not seem to think twice about his health. In addition to his research, his papers, and various talks he gave, he insisted on being involved in teaching as well. Esiaba decided to work with his students on Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman. Nobody present during this seminar session will ever forget how Esiaba started reading out the play, according each character different features. Particularly impressive was his reading of Elesin’s part. If you closed your eyes and just listened to Esiaba’s voice, you could see Elesin act and dance before you. It was a great experience. Although Esiaba was so deeply committed to his mission, he was very open to the projects of the other Fellows. Each presentation inspired thoughtful comments and reflections on his part, which were often taken up gratefully by the speakers. Esiaba’s presence contributed to the atmosphere of congenial intellectual dialogue at the Centre; he was not only highly respected by the

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other Fellows but also loved by the whole staff – from the directors to the student helpers. When Esiaba’s wife, Uloaku, called to tell me that he was in the hospital and that it seemed very serious, my first reaction was utter disbelief. Only two days earlier he had scheduled his next presentation, ‘Does the Body Have a Memory? Form, Phenomenology and Femininity in African Diasporic Performance’, at the Centre for July and had reassured us that he was very much looking forward to the theatre festival in Braunschweig in June. Although he had been sick for quite some time already, his death was still unexpected, mercilessly wrenching him from his ceaseless activities and plans for the future. At the memorial service for Esiaba at his church in Berlin, the ‘Jesus Miracle Harvest Church International’, a video clip was shown, recorded at the last service Esiaba had attended before going into hospital. It showed him dancing down the aisle towards Pastor Bismarck Impieri and embracing him. The short clip revealed so much about Esiaba that we were all deeply moved. Esiaba, thank you for sharing with us the last months of your life – your mission, enthusiasm, and vision of a better future! In your memory, we shall carry on your mission.

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Esiaba Irobi Death Does Not Kill a Song

F EMI O SOFISAN

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B E R L I N T H A T S P R I N G M O R N I N G , and it was anything but spring. It was cold and dreary, the sky was overcast, and a soft drizzle had begun. But the first thing I did, after quickly dropping my case at the ‘I B Z ’ apartment on Wiesbadener Strasse, was to take the bus down to the International Research Centre [I R C ] some kilometres away at the Freie University campus along the Grünewaldstrasse. I was anxious to meet Esiaba, who had come to the I R C about a year earlier. Somehow, all along the flight down from Lagos, he had been very much on my mind. I kept recalling the scene of our most recent meeting earlier that year in March when, at the invitation of the organizers of the Conference on Conventions and Conversions in African Literature at Humboldt University at the other end of town, I had gone to the same Berlin to give the keynote address. One slack morning, I decided to leave the conference to pay a surprise visit to the Centre, where I, too, was a Fellow. Knowing from previous correspondence that Esiaba had arrived there as a Fellow since my own last visit and was already well settled, I asked to see him, and was duly shown where his office was, on the first floor. I hurried upstairs, knocked on the door, and, on being asked to come in, opened the door – and almost beat a hasty retreat. Behind a desk computer in the massive office sat my compatriot, his entire torso completely unclad! But he saw me, burst into a shout of surprise and pleasure even as he rushed forward – and retreat was no longer possible, especially as he then introduced the only other person in the room with him as the new wife he had written me about. And it was later on that I would learn, ARRIVED IN

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from one of the staff downstairs, that it was the effect of the cancer that he brought with him from Athens, Ohio in the U S A , combined with the chemotherapy he was obliged to undergo regularly, that kept his body uncomfortably hot. We parted then, with the hope of reconnecting later on my own return to the I R C in Spring. In the meantime, however, I had received an e-mail from him, in which he sounded very clearly upbeat, confident that he was now on the mend, that the cancer was definitely beaten. Much of this optimism came, too, from his renewed life as a husband, with a wife he was evidently happy with, and with imminent prospects of fathering another child. In the letter, he described the situation as follows: Cancer has taught me to calm down – the imperative for healing and recovery. And marriage also! I am now married to a young and sweet and delicious young woman called Uloaku. When you arrive in Berlin, she will cook the best Igbo cuisine to welcome you to Germany.

Then he added, with characteristic Irobian mischief: My wife has been most supportive but I am afraid that her arrival has totally stalled my creative work. We are trying to make triplets or twins – at the least – in our first boxing/wrestling match on the little stadium in our bed room…

The concluding words were yet more cheering: Thank you very much for your elder brother’s words. I am scheduled for two more cycles of chemotherapy here in Berlin and perhaps a final radiation treatment to get rid of some recalcitrant lymph nodes. But I am taking it all in good faith and with a lot of stoicism. My creative writing has kept my spirit afloat all this while and I have really been very, very productive.

Later, he was to read my play Tegonni, and, according to him, fell in love with it. As expected, he was just as effusive in his praise, sending words that he undoubtedly knew would swell the ego of any artist: I read Tegonni all through the night and I am so happy that there are no laws against plagiarism in playwriting. (Besides, I believe that playwriting is an egalitarian and communal occupation in which there is no fixed ownership of any text, theme, technique or structure! Watch for your footprints in M O R E M I ). This is an excellent and extraordinary piece of writing. A powerful exemplar of interweaving and intertexuality. A mature masterpiece from a seasoned playwright at the height of his powers whose every

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turn of the wrist yields a gem for his immediate humanity and the globalizing world each full moon and harvest season! Congratulations! – Esiaba.

I think some would chuckle at these lines, especially those who remember Esiaba’s polemical essay long ago at Nsukka, where he took me and a few others of my group (Biodun Jeyifo, for instance) to the cleaners for our ideological stance. Then he followed the essay up with the no less vitriolic play Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. Furious at first, and then just curious, I sought out this fiery adversary on a visit to Nsukka, and discovered, to my surprise, a very pleasant young man, who not only made fussy apologies, but became a friend, if not actually a disciple! Esiaba, I would come to learn, might be an angry and fire-eating rascal with a caustic pen, but he was at the same time a down-to-earth humane individual, capable of surprising tenderness. Then, several years later, in a different corner of the world, an older Esiaba came to my apartment while I was a visiting professor at the University of Leeds. His PhD thesis had just been stood down by the panel of examiners, and he was asked to make a few important corrections. But an indignant Esiaba would not comply, which meant that he risked being failed completely. He might have grown older then, but his character had obviously not changed a bit! So his supervisor, the highly respected Professor Martin Banham – whose innate capacity for compassion and munificence, incidentally, are still to be equalled by anyone else I know – asked if I could step in as a mediator with his recalcitrant student. Of course I did not hesitate. I invited Esiaba to lunch, and we had a very useful and positive conversation. At the end of it all, Esiaba agreed to make the required corrections, but that was not what impressed me most about the encounter. What astonished me was the discovery, after his departure, that Esiaba had not only washed up the plates and cutlery we used for the meal, but he had also very meticulously cleaned up the entire kitchen for me! I was astonished, and really touched, by this show of courtesy and deference that, traditionally, younger people in Africa used to offer to elders. How many others, even younger than Esiaba, had come and fed in my apartment, and left without the slightest glance at the mess they left behind! How ironic, then, that it was a rebellious, iconoclastic spirit like Esiaba that would retain this fast-disappearing feature of our African culture. So, I arrived in Berlin, then, that unsmiling morning, in a mixed frame of mind. And as soon as the preliminary courtesies were over at the office, I

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asked about Esiaba. Quietly, Christel, the Associate Director, took me to the adjacent room, which we use for brief meetings. And there she informed me: Esiaba was in hospital, and in a bad way. After an apparently healthy week and an evening walk with his wife, he had slumped suddenly, and no one knew for certain what the outcome would be. But they were all awaiting news from those who had accompanied him to the hospital. I understood then the meaning of my inner agitations on the journey down. I sat down, speechless, and decided to wait with the others. It didn’t take long for the news to arrive. Sadly, we learnt, the doctors had not been able to save our friend. In the days that followed, we had time at the Centre to meditate on his death, and on his life. Everybody who had known him and worked with him at the Centre attested without hesitation to his humanity, his fearlessness, his peppery and polymorphic brilliance. Despite the fact that he knew he was dying, he fought against the cancer with all his combative will, refusing to succumb to despair or defeat until, indeed, it did seem at one point that he was going to win. Strangely, in fact, it was not the cancer that killed him in the end, but a side-attack of cerebral meningitis, obviously fatal to someone in his enfeebled condition. And perhaps we should appreciate this – that it saved him from the final horrendous agonies that cancer inflicts on its victims. Everybody witnessed that Esiaba had been truly happy in Berlin. That was a great consolation to me, to learn that he had passed his final months in an atmosphere of felicity. He was glad to have left the U S A , where he was never quite comfortable, never felt genuinely welcome. And also his new marriage was a boon, a rejuvenating elixir. His church pastor regaled us with Esiaba’s last day of worship in church the very Sunday before his collapse, how Esiaba was full of laughter, energy, and ebullience. He was obviously saying his farewell then, but how could anyone have correctly interpreted it? It was for him a most fruitful period in his life. Esiaba, in the cosy euphoria of his new German environment, made lots of new friends and wrote a good number of important essays and some still-unpublished playscripts. One script in particular I am still longing to read, because of what he said about it: Prof, I think that you will love and enjoy my play/screenplay M O R E M I enormously! Fully bilingual! Only in Yoruba and Igbo, with a satiric dash of English at the end. No anger at all. Its visual grammar is stunning. The play celebrates the myth of Moremi in its full mythological and political complexity and, as in most of your own plays, addresses its relevance to contemporary political and social life

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in Africa while also exploring significant aspects of the semiologies, ontologies, and teleologies of two outstanding “C U L T U R E S O F O R A T U R E ” in Africa… Jisike! Esiaba.

And again the words ring in my ears: “My creative writing has kept my spirit afloat all this while and I have really been very, very productive.” The Centre, at a brief memorial service, agreed to have his last works collected and published, and I volunteered to edit them. Unfortunately, that venture had to be aborted in the end, probably because the widow and the sister, who had custody of the scripts at the time, had other options, or were not sufficiently confident about my competence to entrust the scripts to me. But without doubt, the stay in Berlin had had a most fertilizing impact on Esiaba’s creativity. Indeed, so much did he come to feel at home in Germany that he made plans to remain there, perhaps even permanently, and had finally secured some employment with the University of Bayreuth. But we make our plans, we mortals, and the future laughs at us. All those plans had come to an abrupt end now. As preparations began, to send his body home, and help his young wife back to the U S A , a powerful cloud of loneliness sank over me. I passed by his old office and entered into mine just next door. I looked out the windows, into the garden below. And there Esiaba was, in his pants, naked to the waist, bending to some dance. And of their own volition my lips began to formulate a message, softly, to him: S O , Y O U too,

you have gone, Esiaba, & left an empty summer in our hands; you have left pollens of pain in the budding flowers, a garden of tears, & sorrow swirling free In the winds of a season suddenly weary with loss! Ah, pagidari!. .. The forest is the home of the lofty elephant: The sea, the home of the mighty whale The market is the home of arguments: The pulpit, the home of skilful perorations

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FEMI OSOFISAN The sky is home to the dazzling rainbow: Early death is the home of genius – Yes, every meteor is born to brief acclaim & transient flame Pagidari!. .. But Death does not kill a well-crafted song: We shall meet again, my brother – Even the Hunter of Heaven cannot close our tongue: We shall surely meet again to sing our song… OKINBA LAUNKO.

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On My Birthday T ANURE O JAIDE

On my birthday I see ghosts of colleagues once strutting Marxist peacocks out everywhere to create a spectacle of their plumes, a proletarian costume still living but dead from the turncoat shame after suffering the massive stroke of charlatans who had brandished firebrands at every march and carried the standard for credulous folks but soon diverted and fell into the cash-covered ambush to be stifled silent by the weight of greed. Unmentionable names nobody wants to hear, no parent allows children access to their stale rhetoric; vultures that hover over every corridor of power, nobody sees them without spitting in revulsion. These living dead are already buried deeper than the true dead that are remembered; they won’t ever be ancestors of anybody but forever remain outcasts of humanity those scholars arguing in defense of AaBa Cha, the half-literate butcher of Abuja;

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those griots kissing Ogiso’s fungoid feet and stoking fires of torture in Aso Rock; those experts who for knockout pay prepared racks to silence freedom fighters in their midst; those guards who broke into overflowing coffers and ruined forever the republic’s fortune of oil; those doctors who volunteered their services of lethal injection to please a mass murderer – they are living but condemned to holes in which they lie buried in infamy. On my birthday, let me flee further from the bacchanalia of Asaba, let me not stop at the debauchery of Abuja that makes mockery of fifty years of adulthood; let me not be a heart-beat away from executives, ritual masters who turn democracy into witchcraft; let me remain the vagabond walking my way singing in the streets of love and friendship and let me be friends with those who shun the wayward fraternity of the living dead. On my birthday I take flowers to the dead whose days are always lit with noble splendour and shun those living whose unmentionable names already buried them alive and made them ghosts.

(24 April 2010)

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Omonla:* Your Like Will Never Be There Again* 7 Prose Poems/Haikus [For Esiaba Irobi]

B IODUN J EYIFO

When the whirlwind claps its feet, it is the moistening moment of breath… — Wole Soyinka, “Agemo” (Preface poem to The Road)

1.

È‹ù threw a rock yesterday…* The rock thrown aeons ago Nanoseconds after the unorigin Atundacious* in its flight through spacetime What can ever dislodge you, us, from it? In the dream, you are running. Behind you a throng of runners follows in the wake of your flightlike, glidelike run. They are all young, all in their prime. They are not in mourning. They are not in celebration either. They are focused on you, focused on trying to catch up with you and then outrun you. Your back is a silhouette in front of them; it is all they can see of you. But it is your face, it is what is on your face that they wish to see. If only they can see this, they muse, perhaps then they can mourn. Or perhaps not mourn if the face with which you flyglide into eternity is exultant, undefeated, the visage, the spirit of an Omonla to the very end, even to spaces before and after the very end. You are running and windstreams of a destiny without beginnings and endings run with you, Esiaba…

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2.

It kills a bird today… The bird killed is not life But life ravenous on itself Destroyer of spirit, psyche & soul Predators then, now and forever themselves endangered In the dream, the elders and the ancestors watch your flightglide run and the throng behind you. It is a motley crowd, these elders and ancestors watching. Some are watching with rapt, prayerful attention. In their time, these elders and ancestors also ran, air, water, and fire corralled into their titanic struggles to sustain and enrich life. The weariness now is in their limbs, not in their souls. But there are elders and ancestors and there are elders and ancestors. Others among the watching progenitors are severally bemused, agitated or retraumatized. This purifying cavalcade of a run through spacetime by you and the throng behind you stirs unassuaged and unassuageable guiltshame emotions in them. Overseers and slave drivers to generations of slaves and peons, labourers and conscripts in mines, wars, ships and labour camps, the cries of the billions of the souls of their victims ring through the ages and haunt their unquiet sleep in the bosom of nature. You and the throng behind you are running past them, all these elders and ancestors, running beyond the conflicted calculus of their reveries, regrets or terrors that mirrors the calculus of our own reveries, regrets and terrors. You are running and the axis of the world, of the past, the present and the future turns around your flightglide run, Esiaba… 3. È‹ù throws a rock today…

Like every age before it The present age bestirs itself To right old follies with new wisdoms Let future ages do the reckoning with our follies Nightmare billows into the dream, like sails unfurling to confront the terrifying, howling winds of a typhoon about to become a hurricane. You and the throng behind you press on, even as the nightmare envelopes you all. You, far

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ahead of the throng, are shouting. No, it is more than a shout; it is a scream, a howl. Some words, some utterances sound like savage imprecations, curses hurled at the winds, at traitors, false friends, traducers of African dignity and human worth. You who were never at a loss for words, never prey to the speechlessness of the cowed or the diplomatic reticence of the prudent, you sound hoarse, incoherent, inarticulate, even to some of the throng behind you. The nightmare envelops you, but still you press on, Esiaba, the space and the time of eternity before you… 4.

It killed a bird yesterday… Like È‹ù’s projectiles Truth Commissions reorder time South Africa, Latin America, Central Europe Silences of graveyards become rancorous public spheres of the living To some in the throng behind you, the incoherence of your shouts and howls when the nightmare invaded the beatific euphoria of the dream seemed like a pushbutton playback of the many quarrels you waged on this side of the grave. These became confused, racked by the perplexity of doubt and vaguely unrecognized misgivings. But others in your trailing throng knew better; they knew that your intemperate bouts of righteous indignation were never selfserving, never malefic, never gratuitous. They knew that you consciously sought the company, the inspiration of those throughout the ages who had said No! to Africa’s enslavement, to Black people’s historic dispossessions, and to humanity’s alienation from its noblest promptings of hearts and minds. You are running, even as tailwinds of doubt and hope, confusion and idealism blow like a gale behind you, Esiaba… 5.

È‹ù sleeps in the courtyard; it is too small for him… In our continent cities, regions, and nations Franchises of scale for the merchants of the soul For evangels who proclaim themselves Esu’s nemesis Space deprivation even in the vastness of Africa

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In the dream, space is your ally, your guide and herald. You cross borders, thresholds, frontiers, horizons. Space and time contract and expand fluidly and effortlessly, responsive to the inextricable compact between your will and your imagination. The nightmare episode in the dream is over and you are reenacting your announcement to the whole world that you were a Biafran in exile in Nigeria and the planet. This conscionable romance of exile, this singular utopian restaging of the Ahiara Declaration* you transformed into a robust pan-Africanism, a capacious embrace of the sufferings and the hopes of the African diaspora in its entirety. Now your exilic home is eternity itself. You are running, time and space are on your side, the throng is still behind you and its numbers keep growing, Esiaba… 6.

È‹ù sleeps in the bedroom; it is still too small for him… Overcrowded with tongues, faiths, altars No space is large enough for the plunder And poverty achieves a sublime apotheosis A sublimity of poverty ineffable in mind and spirit The document of civilization that is also a document of barbarism, this becomes prismatic in its clarity in our age, the age you just left behind you. This is both the dream and the reality, this barbarism that wears the mask of civilization. You are outside of time and space and yours is the dream only, no more the reality. To Nigeria, above all, belongs that reality. Biafra – all the ‘Biafran’ utopias that we can and should inclusively imagine in our continent and our world – remains suspended between the dream and the reality in a netherworld of improbable probabilities. You are running, running against the tide of the follies of the dead, the living and the yet to be born, Esiaba… 7.

È‹ù sleeps inside the kernel of a palm fruit; now he has room large enough to sleep in Whirlwind that moistens breath Breath that freezes at that moment Firi* in its unending instantaneousness Lodged in a kernel that is womb to a profusion of possibilities

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The dream recurs endlessly. Sometimes you are running and your strides are long, your pace hurried, your mien agitated. Other times you are at peace, almost in repose and your pace is slowed to freeze-frame unhurriedness. At such moments, the throng behind you also slows down and it begins to dawn on some among the throng that they will perhaps never catch up with you, will never get the cue from what’s etched on your face as you flyglide into eternity and beyond. Thus arises among the throng a decision both to mourn and to celebrate, to keen in sorrow but also to ululate with exultation. You are running, Esiaba, at home now in that eternity which is home to all of us… Notes * In alphabetical order: Ahiara Declaration: Co-authored by Chinua Achebe, Ikenna Nzimiro, and other members of a body called the National Guidance committee, the Ahiara Declaration was proclaimed by General Odumegwu Ojukwu on 1 June 1969 as the ultimate ideological and philosophical expression of the secessionist Biafran Republic’s statehood. Based partly on and, indeed, echoing Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration, the Ahiara Declaration is unquestionably one of the most radical and progressive political documents to have come out of Nigeria and Africa in the postcolonial era. For the brief period that it lasted, Biafra did not – indeed, could not – bring its principles and ideals to realization. But that is now beside the point. It remains for us to reclaim, renew, and re-invent its spirit and principles. In his lived and embodied expression of these utopian principles and ideals, Esiaba seemed to have taken this injunction to heart and, definitely, this seems to have been the basis of his insistence, to the very end, that he was a “Biafran” in exile in Nigeria and the world. Atundacious: from the Yorùbá mythic figure Atunda, primal slave of Ori‹a-Nla (Ÿbatalá), the original unified godhead against whom Atunda rebelled, smashing him into the pantheon of divinities, an act that made the resultant order of the lesser ori‹as putatively more amenable to propitiation and negotiation than Ori‹anla. The godhead is dead; long live the deities!: Atunda’s rebellion succeeded; but it also failed. Esiaba was endlessly fascinated by this myth, which he apparently ecstatically encountered in Wole Soyinka’s innumerable creative and theoretical re-workings of the myth. From this encounter Esiaba coined the term “Atundacious,” making it a central axis of a multiplicity of philosophical, metaphoric, and aesthetic ideas in his own creative and scholarly writings. È‹ù threw a rock yesterday, etc, etc: All the seven stanzas of the prose poems and haikus are organized around some particularly haunting ironic ideas and motifs in the praise poetry of È‹ù, the Yorùbá trickster god of mischief, indeterminacy, and con-

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tingency. Esu seems to bear some inscriptional resemblance to the Igbo deity Ekwensu. But he has not even the remotest affinity with Satan of Christian theology, even though the Christian faith in Yorubaland has effectively assimilated È‹ù into the originary Evil of Satan. Firi: A Yorùbá expression that phonemically and semiologically tries to capture a unit of time, sight, sound, feeling or intuition that appears and disappears in the same instant. The traces that “firi” leaves supposedly recur and resound repeatedly, subject to the weight of the impression that it makes on the mind and its mnemonic powers of recollection. Omonla: Literally ‘giant, outsize child’, this figure from the Yorùbá folkloric imagination is similar to the German Wunderkind or prodigy who amazes with an excess of talent, appetite, spirit, and imagination that almost invariably leads to a proclivity for breaking out of and exceeding limits and boundaries, especially when the gifts, the traits, survive well into adulthood. Your Like Will Never Be There Again: a variation on a phrase that recurs throughout the narrative of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, a masterpiece of novelistic parody on the subject of Irish nationalist self-regard. What “will never be there again” ought, in principle, to be rare. But in The Poor Mouth, the phrase is encountered endlessly, thus carrying within itself both its iterative legitimation and its celebratory selfdeflation.

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Half a Century Death B ENEDICTUS N WACHUKWU

If how the minstrel bears ash explains why the colour of the sky is blue then there is no need to labour and toil daily. It wears you out too soon on In the theatre, on stage, the players play your words. Know this: the cap falls off your head. Death knocked your life down You’ve written the words, played and danced the words. Your legacies, light for those who follow the words the pages of time; the metaphor of death. Half a century’s like a blink. It tears the shade, no rest Like the formation of seamen. Moments later it dies Could you see? Yes – So sudden, moments of excellence the minstrel departs so mindlessly the owl hoots by your side Ascend the rhythmic flow. Am waiting, watching where words and footprints salute one another Drama, dance and poetry embroiled Like canvas thrilling with refreshing candour

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Each sentence, each phrase and each metaphor each moment the stars evaluate your testimony of words of excellence on the cemetery road And they differ, certainly they differ. Each cadence of words printed on the pages of time, inflorescence Each asks: will hard work ever last, will I conspire against my image printed on leaves? Consider first, the other side of the mask Carved with precision on the road to ascension After moments of denials. You murdered death? Unevenly play the dirge towards the cemetery road. Your performance strategy thrilled those in the house of words who profess truth; the Soyinkan model, the Shakespearean compass. Cultural appropriation to the core. Half a century plague. Creative, one, like pollination, east and west. You presented us with words of gold, frankincense and myrrh moments later you departed from the forest of words. Turn back. The stars beckon on you. Turn back the creative one where words have continued to act of stench gathered in the nose, please vomit In truth, the further you go. Your voice echoes on the pages of time. This death, this departure, this journey tells of being and nothingness. There is a dirge even in the sky. It is held in a blink. There is no pattern for how eternal life starts. It plays on those who never expect the journey too soon keeping each passage in endless swelling of the eyes Uncertain; half a century it comes.

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The minstrel bears half a century death, words at the margin. See the house of words shut between the drum and rhythm. The air around you could have been lenient. See. The engine has knocked but the seat belt remains. The painters sermon I M M A C U L A T E between the roller and the brush the distance increases. The cemetery R O A D is beautiful. The O O M P H of your creation. Fare you well, the B U R G H E R of words. The I L L U S T R I O U S performer, the master artist. You’ve gone too soon, half a century but your footprints remain. Indelible

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Madding Crowd (For Esiaba Irobi and Kofi Awoonor)

O BIWU

Two men in the waiting room of a labour ward The waiting room is a meeting place of strangers Man is a lighthouse on a lonely beach Woman is a boat on a crowded shore A child is a guest at a port of disembarkation Two men sharing a Scotch in the waiting room The labour ward is a port of call and a sacristy The yell of a mother The howl of a child The sigh of a father The confessionals of two men on a binge Pour like rounds of Scotch in a waiting room Cries of mother and child pierce the ears of walls The secrets of men in the waiting room Flow like Scotch in the labour ward of memory.

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Seven Stations of the Cross (for Esiaba Irobi)

O LU O GUIBE

From Leeds to Liverpool Liverpool to London London to New York New York to Towson Towson to Athens The beaconer takes his bow in Berlin And the exile becomes myth Seven Stations of the Cross I leave to live, said he I exit to exist.

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Esiaba Irobi’s Legacy Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance1

I SIDORE D IALA

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E S I A B A I R O B I (1960–2010) on 3 May 2010, contemporary African theatre lost a distinguished playwright, stage director, actor, literary theorist, and scholar. Educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1979–83), the University of Sheffield (1989–90), and the University of Leeds (1991–97), both in England, Irobi’s specialization was in drama, film, and theatre studies. Irobi was both a theatre practitioner and a scholar, and at various times taught at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Liverpool John Moores University in England (1992–97), as well as at New York University (1997–2000), Towson University in Maryland (2000–2002), and Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (2002–10), all in the U S A . He was on a fellowship at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, at the time of his death. However, if Irobi’s life was a restless search for new horizons, his deep anchorage in the oral tradition of his Igbo ethnic group, its rituals of self-renewal, myths and legends of enigmatic and daring deityheroes, its lore of the mysteries of life and transcendence of the human spirit, its rousing chants, masquerades, and dramaturgy remained the indispensable source of his creative imagination and critical thinking. In a tribute read at Irobi’s graveside at Amapu Igbengwo Umuakpara Osisioma Ngwa in Abia State, Nigeria, on 16 July 2010, his friend and colleague, the veteran stage director Eni–Jones Umuko, highlighted Irobi’s talents as

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PON THE DEATH OF

I wish to acknowledge the Alexander Humboldt Foundation and the University of Münster for the incentive and the space to write this essay.

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actor, stage director, and playwright.2 Umoko described in fascinating detail Irobi’s role as Elesin in a production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman which Umoko had directed and as Styles in Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead in a production of the play directed by the renowned theatre scholar J.A.S. Amankulor (whose extensive and engaging work on traditional Igbo performance was to have an enduring influence on Irobi). Deeply moving and explicitly panegyric as most graveside tributes generically strive to be, Umoko’s oration, in describing Irobi’s acting generally as “trance-like” and his role as Elesin specifically as having a “hypnotic” effect on the spectators, nonetheless offers a sober and critically insightful assessment consistent with Irobi’s own account of his interpretation of that role. For Irobi himself was certain that the role of Elesin, which he played first as a final-year student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1983 and then several times more between 1985 and 1989, was clearly the most “satisfying role” he played on stage, comparable only to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which he had played as a second-year student in the university, but a greater role, because of its multidisciplinary demands on the actor. You have to dance, sing, chant, mime, tell a story in the traditional African sense, play musical instruments, act, have sexual intercourse with the young bride in scene three, fondle the breasts of market women in scene one, enter into sacred/occult moments as well as secular ones in the play. You continuously oscillate from deep tragic moods to exhilarating high comic feelings in a matter of seconds while on stage. It is an awesome role, the most transcendent and spiritual and phenomenological – not merely cerebral – that I have ever played. It is arguably the most challenging role in modern world drama.3

Irobi further exalted the role as typifying “indigenous African initiatory and mythopoeic acting styles,” which he considered superior to Stanislavski’s “magic if.” He traced to that role insights that eventually led to his own development of a theory of African performance with “entrancement” or “possession” as a distinctive feature and basic canon of his own practice not only as actor but also as stage director producing numerous plays, including his own, 2

Eni–Jones Umuko, “Esiko! Flower of the Twilight,” in Esiaba Irobi: The Return of the Minstrel (Programme of a Memorial Event organised by Abuja Writers Forum, Abuja Literary Society, Friends and Schoolmates of Esiaba Irobi, New Chelsea Hotel, Abuja, Nigeria, 6 August 2010): 12–13. 3 Irobi was responding by email to my question on his experience of playing the role of Elesin.

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in Nigeria, Ireland, Hungary, the U S A , Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, England, Portugal, and Scotland. ™ Irobi’s articulation of an African/African diasporic aesthetic theory in his essays “The Theory of À‹Æ”4 and “Taking the Bull by the Horns”5 covers basically the same ground, though the latter strives towards greater comprehensiveness in scope, where the former illustrates its insights primarily with the drama of August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Djanet Sears. Irobi’s acknowledged basic inspiration in his enunciation of an African/African diasporic theory in the latter essay is Henry Louis Gates’s challenge to black scholars to recognize their dual patrimony as heirs not only to critical theory but also to the black vernacular tradition and thus to appreciate the need to define theory from within black culture. Irobi then proceeds to aver the existence of a body of performance theories that are African in conception and expression which have been excluded from contemporary intellectual discourse by both African and Western scholars because of the dominance of typography and European languages as the primary media of instruction, scholarship and validation in the Western academy.6

Contending that theory does not have to be expressed only typographically, Irobi notes its articulation in non-Western cultures in other forms of signification such as “orature, dance, theatre, music, festival, ritual, carnival performance, video and film”7 as well as the metalanguages and metanarratives which, he argues, constitute the primary polysemic infrastructure for encoding and transmitting history, performance traditions, identity, critical/theoretical discourses 4

Esiaba Irobi, “The Theory of À‹Æ: The Persistence of African Performance Aesthetics in the North American Diaspora,” in African Theatre: Diasporas, ed. Osita Okagbue & Christine Matzke (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2009): 15–24. 5 Esiaba Irobi, “Taking the Bull by the Horns: On the Oriki Theory of African and African Diasporic Orature,” in Africa in the World & the World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2011): 173– 202. 6 Irobi, “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 174. 7 “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 178.

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about art among most non-Western cultures and civilizations of the world.8

Irobi discerns in the sculptures, choreography, drum languages, oral poetry, masquerade forms of non-Western cultures inscriptions of the people’s myths, world-views, values, and ontological concepts that account for the structures and dynamics of their other artforms such as theatrical performances. Irobi concludes: These metalingual constructs, as performance texts, contain within their complex configurations theoretical concepts and discourses about history, politics, identity and race that predate the colonial moment.9

Irobi justifies his attention to the oríkì – a ceremonial salutation among the Yorùbá in which the sterling accomplishments, titles, and personal distinctions of an individual and his lineage are chanted to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing – by identifying it as paradigmatic of African praise poetry and as a distinctively African mode of the poetic, the mythic, and the religious.10 In appropriating the oríkì, performed oral poetry as the pivot of a theory on theatrical aesthetics, Irobi approaches the oríkì primarily as “an oral, embodied and performative construct as well as an instance of enactment, re-enactment, spirituality and community.”11 Irobi’s own postulations and the authorities he invokes clearly invest in “entrancement” an intensity of sensitivity and perceptiveness that grants the possessed access to powers and insights ordinarily beyond the human. The paradigm, no doubt, is the oríkì chanter’s experience of ritual transformation in the presence of invoked deities. But Irobi also thought that the oríkì – in its humanistic exaltation of human perfection and accomplishments and in virtually re-creating the human image as divine by its indulgence in superlatives – enhanced that transition. In Praise Singer’s apocalyptic projections into the mind of the silent and entranced Elesin at the moment of transition in Death and the King’s Horseman, Irobi discerns a visionary appropriation of the powers of the oríkì: By deploying the oriki as an enabling text which opens the door for the conflation of oral poetry, incantation, chant, spoken word, music, dance, enactment, community, audience engineering, into a synesthetic experience, the Praise Singer dynamically awakens in the community 8

Irobi, “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 179. “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 180. 10 “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 195. 11 “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 182. 9

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their age-old communal acting technique of using “possession” as an aesthetic for ecstasy, becoming, divinization, transformation and revelation, through which he, the Praise Singer, is actually transformed, as an actant, not just an actor, into the consciousness of the supposedly dead Elesin Ÿba. Through a pre-emptive albeit prophylactic and oracular use of the oriki text, the Praise Singer is thus able to communicate to the audience and theatrical community, the fears, anxieties, doubts, and regenerative vision the Elesin Ÿba has for his community in his absence as Western modernity marches in and begins to trample and erase this pre-modern acting aesthetic or technique.12

Irobi’s call for a potential proliferation of theories that foreground the “self-sufficiency” and “distinctiveness” of different cultural blocs as a resolution of the homogenizing tendencies of postcolonialism apparently underestimates the impact of hybridity which he repeatedly invokes; it equally underestimates the need for a theory comprehensive enough to illuminate historically related situations of oppression and resistance. However, Irobi’s basic assumption is possibly unassailable: African artforms could hardly have reached their significant levels of advancement and sophistication without the existence of a body of guiding aesthetic principles that regulated the practising artists’ education and self-criticism as well as societal approval and censure. Equally, his signal insight of the necessity to recognize peculiarities in deploying so totalizing a rubric as postcolonialism is at the core of ongoing revaluation of postcolonial theory. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, whose work on postcolonial drama Irobi cites approvingly, indeed claim: Critiques of post-colonialism are frequently responses to arguments based primarily on attempts to homogenise texts, histories, and cultures.13

Citing Alan Lawson and Chris Tiffin to note that, while “difference” in colonialist discourse marks subordination, in postcolonial analysis it marks identity,14 they conclude: 12

Irobi, “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 201. Helen Gilbert & Joanne Tompkins, Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996): 4. 14 Alan Lawson & Chris Tiffin, “Conclusion: Reading difference,” in De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and textuality, ed. Lawson & Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 230. 13

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A theory of post-colonialism that fails to recognize this distinction between ‘differences’ will re-create the spurious hierarchies, misreadings, silencings, and ahistoricisms that are part of the imperial enterprise.15

However, Gilbert’s attention to correspondences in the postcolonies is equally keen, as she identifies the development in nations formerly colonized by Western imperial powers of drama that exhibits a strong urge to recuperate local histories and local performance traditions, not only as a means of cultural decolonisation but also as a challenge to the implicit representational biases of Western theatre.16

Highlighting cultural practices with both an historical and a discursive relationship to Western imperialism, and generally illuminating any kind of resistance to class, race, and gender oppression, such drama, Gilbert contends, is “currently a major force reshaping the ways in which we can think of performance as social praxis.”17 Like Irobi, she notes deviations from narrow conceptions of dialogue-dependent performance and stresses various forms of local articulation such as storytelling, folk forms, and ritualized enactments.18 Irobi concurs, locating the roots of African and African diasporic drama in ritual and noting in such work “a direct echo of our indigenous ritual performance, invocations, chants, ululations, yodelings, etc.”19 In his article “The Theory of À‹Æ,” Irobi emphasizes the embodiment of theory in non-Western cultures as a crucial component of the “notion of theatrical experience as a transcendent experience whose texts are inscribed, incubated, performed, and translocated by the human body” as opposed to “the prevalent European diasporic episteme of the theatre as a cultural/artistic activity driven by a literary text or dramatic literature.”20 He writes at greater length on the pivotal roles of the body in African performances:

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Gilbert & Tompkins, Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, 4. Helen Gilbert, “General Introduction,” in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, ed. Helen Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2001): 1. 17 Gilbert, “General Introduction,” 6. 18 “General Introduction,” 4. 19 Esiaba Irobi, “My E-conversation with Esiaba Irobi: Interview with Nnorom Azuonye,” Sunday Vanguard (21 September 2003): 49. 20 Irobi, “Theory of À‹Æ,” 16. 16

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cultures of the African diaspora understand and acknowledge that the human body is somatogenic. It has its own memory and an intrinsically wired phenomenological “software” for encoding and decoding historical, artistic, and performative information meant for enactment and remembrance. In the sensibility or imaginary of most African and African diasporic cultures of orature, the human body is a site of discourse, the slate on which are written the most precious aspects of the narratives of life through a complex network of sonic, proxemic, tactile, iconographic, olfactory, kinaesthetic literacies and other forms of subversive intelligence. Theatre for these African diasporic nonWestern educated communities consists of performance texts instead of literary texts.21

Irobi’s approving citation of Gilbert and Tompkins’s conception of the “ritual body” and its potentials in his later essay on the oríkì theory is thus clearly understandable when he highlights the model ritual transformation undergone by the performer of the oríkì at the invocation of deities: In its ability to traverse the human/spirit divide, the ritual body confounds the rational processes of imperial discourse and thus refuses capture and containment. Ritual renders the body open and mutable while requiring or producing highly formalised actions, such as dance or processional movement, which display the ritual force as energy in action.22

But Irobi was aware of inhibitions and of the need to accept participation in challenging negotiations. He called himself “a scholar working within and against the hegemonic intellectual and theoretical orthodoxies of the Western academy in the twenty-first century”23 and acknowledges that the indigenous theories he canvasses have been hybridized both on the continent and diaspora due to a European-enforced modernity or naturally creolized in the New World as a result of circum-Atlantic slavery and other transnational migrations.24

In “The Theory of À‹Æ,” he similarly notes that African “performance texts are unavoidably syncretized by the performer’s experiences of colonialism and slavery” and underscores the necessity to resist not hybridity but “total 21

Irobi, “Theory of À‹Æ,” 16. Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 62. 23 Irobi, “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 198; emphasis in original. 24 “Taking the Bull by the Horns,” 174. 22

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westernization or Europeanization as intended by the slave masters and colonizers.”25 Irobi then recognizes his “African” aesthetic theory as “transnational, international, syncretizing, non-essentialist and migratory,”26 and argues with consummate passion for an African name for it, since the process of naming theories in African languages will prove that we have theories of our own performances and had them before the arrival of the Europeans with their languages.27

However, by canonizing the mere process of naming as the irrefragable marker of African identity while conducting the crucial business of theorization and creating works of art in a European language, Irobi seems to take for granted analogies between cultures and languages which his theory explicitly denies. Moreover, his own African-naming often challenges logic – unless, anyway, his logic is that there is no need for any logic in the invocation of the icons of a civilization to denote just anything in that civilisation! In negotiating the transition from a distinctive African identity to an enlightened partaker of a possible human patrimony, and from orature to literature, Irobi found a peerless guide in Wole Soyinka. Soyinka had been vociferous in his condemnation of the West for its expectation that Africa accept its artistic paradigms as universal: We Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonialism – this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.28

Soyinka’s recognition of the centrality of cultural, historical, and even individual imperatives is a key motivating factor in his enunciation of a tragic vision derived primarily from his interpretation of the mysteries of the Yorùbá deity Ogún. Yet, as Tejumola Olaniyan has noted, “Soyinka’s theory of African tragedy, ‘The Fourth Stage,’ is inconceivable as it is without Nietzsche

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Irobi, “Theory of À‹Æ,” 16. Irobi, “Theory of À‹Æ,” 7. 27 “Theory of À‹Æ,” 20. 28 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976): x (emphases in original). 26

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and ancient Greek mythology.”29 The central myth of Atunda fragmenting the unified essence, the Original One, which necessitates Ogún’s plunge into transitional ether to retrieve a fullness of being, is a variation on the Greek myth of love and the compulsion for reunion and completeness. Soyinka himself acknowledges the necessary complementarity of all human cultures: Nothing in these essays [that make up Myth, Literature and the African World] suggests a detailed uniqueness of the African world. Man exists, however, in a comprehensive world of myth, history and mores; in such a total context, the African world, like any other ‘world’ is unique. It possesses, however, in common with other cultures, the virtues of complementarity. To ignore this simple route to a common humanity and pursue the alternative route of negation is, for whatever motives, an attempt to perpetuate the external subjugation of the black continent.30

The Soyinka model, a compelling theatrical aesthetic deriving from a triumphant amalgam of the ethnic Yorùbá tradition and the European heritage and anchored in the Nigerian political experience, is the paradigm Irobi enthusiastically adapts. Guided by Soyinka’s example, Irobi explored his own Igbo cultural background for enabling myths and artistic forms to regenerate a moribund postcolony. He dramatizes typical postcolonial themes: oppression, migration, and cultural alienation, identity-crisis, revolutionary violence, a revalidation of indigenous traditions, interrogation of colonial stereotypes. But in dealing with these themes, he is engaged in an audacious and often iconoclastic recuperation of Igbo myths and performance traditions with the aim of appropriating them to facilitate crucial political projects. ™ Irobi’s published plays include: The Colour of Rusting Gold (1989), Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh (1989), Hangmen Also Die (1989), Nwokedi (1991), The Other Side of the Mask (1999), The Fronded Circle (1999), and Cemetery Road (2009). At the time of his sudden death, he was also working on the final drafts of many other plays, several of which were in fact already in 29

Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995): 5. 30 Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, xii.

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press: Sycorax (initially titled The Shipwreck, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Theater, U S A ), Foreplay (commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre, London), What Songs Do Mosquitoes Sing, I Am the Woodpecker that Terrifies the Trees, Zenzenina, The Harp, John Coltraine in Vienna, among many others. Added to his collections of poetry, Cotyledons (1987), Inflorescence (1989), Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems (2005), the Irobi canon is undoubtedly significant. The three plays that Irobi published in 1989 were all experimental and exploratory gestures in the emergent writer’s search for socially viable and responsible themes and even possible artistic models. He did not envisage as his initial task the staging of the drama of colonization and forms of resistance to it, though he would much later be engaged with the mythologies by which the West continued its annexation of Africa. He was more immediately embroiled in the great challenges of negotiating the transition from pre-colonial to postcolonial praxis and saw as crucial in that struggle the appropriation of the morality of old Africa inscribed in its value-systems and rituals of communal expiation and regeneration in the evolution of a viable postcolonial political philosophy; he equally explored staging the drama of postcolonial Africa by appropriating the techniques of those rituals and other performed events as a necessary aesthetic component of the same project. Arguably, the least dramatically successful of the three plays, the most controversial and probably the last to be written, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, foregrounds these in a special way. Given its reference to Soyinka’s Nobel Prize, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh obviously could not have been completed before 1986, though its academic freight harks back to the crucial literary debates of some two decades earlier. The play, indeed, is possibly a parody of the many conferences of the 1960s and 1970s in which African writers and scholars attempted to identify and define the prime virtues of neo-African literature. As was to be expected, Irobi does not give his characters quite the names of the historical writers and scholars whose roles they play. However, given his accumulation of revealing clues, characteristic expressions, positions, and affiliations, the very thin veil thrown over the already suggestive names is easily lifted. The sober, sagacious, self-effacing but firm figure named ‘Achibiri’ who intervenes in the heat of the debate, drawing on the proverbial lore of his (Igbo) ethnic group, is unmistakable even without his curious allusions to the titles of his novels:

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Lady and gentlemen, with my characteristic modesty I must say that we are no longer at ease. (Pointing at Prof. Ogun) Up there is a man of the people. (Pointing at Izuwa and Co) Here are the arrows of African literature. With characteristic impartiality I will not take sides. No sane father stays at home and watches his children fight to death.31

Irobi equally provides swift access from the character Femi Osofola to the Nigerian playwright and poet of renowned Marxist affiliations, Femi Osofisan, through Osofola’s fiery oration: The only way out, as far as I am concerned, is a revolution. It is the only ray of light in this dark night of purposeless and misguided creative writing and criticism. The writer must, repeat, must gear up his efforts towards revolutionizing the minds of our people. This is what I call the revolutionary ethos. We must aim at reforms, sweeping reforms. We must seek the lot of the common lot. We must forget about mythologies and ancient gods and their modern reincarnations because these turgidities are responsible for the literary pandemonium in the air today.32

However, the main burden of the play is the allegations on the part of the ‘Troika critics’, directed at Professor Ogun, of indulgence in obscurantism and the use of an esoteric mythological framework. These allegations, too, like Osofola’s final remark in the passage above and the debates they generate, have well-documented historical antecedents. That Soyinka is named in Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh after the Yorùbá deity whom he has so passionately proclaimed as his god and given preeminence in his writing in the Yorùbá and even African pantheon is easy enough to establish. It is Irobi’s attitude to the character that is intriguing. Ogun’s response to the allegation about obscurantism is to hew the style in marble: Obscurantism is the creative symptom of a deep running inspiration. It is the distinguishing characteristic between a great writer and middleof-the-road writers. It is the volcanic effluvium of literary ingenuity.33

Irobi’s amplified mimicry of Soyinka’s famous dismissal of Negritude does not merely serve to identify the writer; it is an obvious parody meant to evoke censure: 31

Esiaba Irobi, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh (Enugu: A B I C , 1989), 39–40. Irobi, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 46. 33 Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 25. 32

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A tiger does not preach his tigritude. Neither does a gorilla preach his gorillatude. Only buffoons preach their buffoonery and nyncompoops their nyncompoopery.34

And he demonstrates that the arrogant desperation to achieve distinctiveness of style can easily degenerate into sheer absurdity: Exciting artistry founts from a selective eclectism. A recapitulative, retrospective and expansive sensitivity may mechanize the universal syzgy of this sonsodius umbra.35

Yet by ending the play with Professor Ogun’s triumph, Irobi apparently turns Ogun’s experience into the ordeals of the visionary artist whose measures ought to be recognized as distinguished from the measures of ordinary mankind. The Nobel Prize-winner holds a deep fascination for the younger playwright, for whom he apparently incarnates the temper of genius: “Obviously, obviously, I am a genius. Souls like mine appear once in every three generations.”36 The defiant affirmation of distinction re-echoes much later in Irobi’s work in the anguished voice of the protagonist of The Other Side of the Mask, Jamike, reputed, also like Professor Ogun, to create in a state of entrancement, and is equally the embodiment of the visionary artist, part-genius and partmadman. That Jamike is in many ways arguably also Irobi’s veritable selfportrait is telling. The trajectory of Irobi’s career was to tend more and more to Wole Soyinka’s, only with a more explicit interest in politics. That deeper political interest on occasion apparently resonates with Osofola’s /Osofisan’s impassioned espousal of a Marxist revolution, except again that Marxism excites further the iconoclastic zeal in the young writer for the demolition of old structures. Born on the day of Nigeria’s independence, 1 October 1960, Irobi interpreted that striking coincidence in terms of a destiny shared with the Nigerian nation, a destiny of agony and pain. In 1989, he told an interviewer: The historical rigor mortis and political epilepsy of the country itself has left cracks on the mirror of the mind. Whatever has happened to the country has happened to me.37

34

Irobi, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 29. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 29. 36 Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 51. 37 Esiaba Irobi, “Interview: Irobi Chats with Nengi Ilagha: Call the University a Ministry of Certificates,” Newslink (May 1989): 11. 35

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Irobi’s diagnosis of the cause of that “political epilepsy” locates it in the corruption of the Nigerian leadership – politicians and soldiers alike. Assuming a responsibility for engendering political rebirth in the country, Irobi’s theatre expectedly has covert political preoccupations. He is fascinated both by the will to power and by the psychopathology of dispossession, as well as their compulsion to violence. Contending that power typically seeks its own perpetuation through violence, he equally demonstrates that material dispossession induces mental possession and that terror enhances the self-esteem of the dispossessed. Thus, Irobi’s mode of contemplating society and his preferred paradigms for transformation apparently invoke Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, but only with strategic modification. Frustrated, paranoid, exalting violence as a self-justifying ideal (until conjured by the priestess Tamora to a purposeful revolutionary consciousness), Irobi’s gifted but jobless young protagonists in Hangmen Also Die recall their ideological exploitation as students by the mesmerizing Marxist ideologue lecturer, Dr Ahitophel Ogbansiegbe. The playwright’s exposure of Dr Ogbansiegbe as a mere vengeful power-hungry politician initiates a career-long interrogation of self-acclaimed Marxist messiahs that would also comprise the womanizing Dr Animalu in The Other Side of the Mask, for whom Marxism is mere rhetoric, and Lawani in Cemetery Road, who recants the Marxist ideology of his university days for bread and butter. Narrowly egoistical, incapable of selfless commitment, treacherous to friends and the fatherland, they illustrate the hollowness of mere tags in the struggle for social reform. Irobi offers no theoretical refutation of Marxism, but his depictions of Marxist characters consistently radiate unrelieved moral gloom. It is significant that Animalu is killed at a moment of self-indulgence by a masked figure; the other two are victims of affirmative communal action. In Irobi’s drama, these modes of death are strongly suggestive of indictment. Irobi’s dialogue with Fanon is equally revealing. The incremental depictions of violence and repeated passionate espousal of terrorism apparently resonate, in Hangmen Also Die, with that canonical work, The Wretched of the Earth, with Irobi self-consciously using the latter as a framing device to attract comparison with his own postulations. The comment ascribed to Ogbansiegbe and the legion kindred passages in the play apparently validate, even seem to echo, Fanon’s fanatical exhortations to revolutionary violence in The Wretched of the Earth: Write this down on the walls of your mind, remember it now and always, that revolutions are always based on terrorism. Revolutions

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are always based on violence. On bloodshed and terror. Revolutions are never achieved by holding hands and singing ‘We shall overcome’.38

Yet Irobi’s work is also an interrogation and modification of the Fanonian insight into the attainment of inner unity through violent action. If Irobi reveals terror as a mask worn by the oppressed to confront a society whose hostility emasculates and demeans them, he equally argues that that mask is invariably the mask of madness.39 He was deeply perturbed by the perception that social dispossession reduces its victims to mere fury and rage. Irobi’s ideal is the reconciliation of purposeful revolutionary zeal with selfless social commitment. The Colour of Rusting Gold had its first important production in 1982 at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as the University’s Convocation Play. An early but important item in the writer’s oeuvre, the play highlights some of the themes that were to remain a constant for Irobi. In the play, Irobi is enthralled by Igbo concepts of liminality and divination as well as the human frailty that hinders the life of ritualized piety. His diviner–herbalist protagonist, Otagburuagu, reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s towering protagonist, Ezeulu, in Arrow of God, describes himself as “half man, half spirit”40 and as a helper of God, the creator: I help the creator Chukwu . . . I am the fountain, the stream, the spring that floods the barren earth making it a virgin soil that yields a harvest that amazes the eyes of the sky.41

Celibate, poor, and with a profound aversion to blood, Otagburuagu lives a life of self-mortification to keep the spirit awake and give it full rein: I am a medicine man. A man called to the service of the gods; a man who bridges the gap between the shrine of the spirits and mud walled world of men. A man whom the spirits he serves have decreed that he must not marry… [A man] who stands at the seven cross-roads and ferries the spirits of troubled men over the other world. With bare fingers I bring the yolk of the moon before it hardens in the throat of men.42 38

Esiaba Irobi, Hangmen Also Die (Enugu: A B I C , 1989): 25–26. Isidore Diala, “Violent Obsessions: Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Discourse of Terrorism,” Modern Drama 49.1 (Spring 2006): 62. 40 Esiaba Irobi, Colour of Rusting Gold (Onitsha: Ofo, 1989): 10. 41 Irobi, Colour of Rusting Gold, 35. 42 Colour of Rusting Gold, 34–35; emphasis added. 39

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Irobi’s fascinating association of the moon with madness in the passage above and in a later one in which Otagburuagu’s mad patient, Oriakanjonuchichi, links his condition with the phases of the moon is possibly just a pedantic play on the etymology of ‘lunatic’ as ‘moon-struck’. However, the invocation of the moon to suggest madness and the conception of Otagburuagu’s moral integrity in terms of luminosity resonate in a striking manner with Achebe’s gripping symbolism of the moon in Arrow of God and thus strengthens Otagburuagu’s resemblance to Achebe’s Ezeulu. Commenting on Achebe’s association of the moon with both madness and mystic illumination in Ezeulu’s experience, Abiola Irele writes: It is significant that [Ezeulu] is introduced at the beginning of the novel in the act of searching the heavens for signs of the new moon, and the immediate association of this activity with his priestly function suggests the possibility of its unsettling effect upon his mind. The narrator establishes, moreover, a connection between what we have seen as Ezeulu’s inclination towards a mystic disposition and the artistic endowment manifested by his son Edogo, with the power of illumination that this confers.43

It is, of course, precisely Otagburuagu’s loss of this mystic radiance that is the central theme of The Colour of Rusting Gold and the source of its title. For, desecrated by blood (even if only as an act of compassion to save a dying pregnant woman) and, ironically, dazzled by the glint of gold, Otagburuagu violates the immutable sanctity that is imperative in his vocation and is inflicted with the ailment he is renowned for curing, madness. In the eerie episode in which Otagburuagu, after killing his apprentice, encounters his patient, Oriakanjonuchichi, each is hysterical and in terror at the self’s apprehension of a frightful self-image in the demented countenance and vision of the other: ORIAKA: OTAGBU: ORIAKA: OTAGBU: ORIAKA: OTAGBU: 43

(spots Otagbu) Who are you? Who are you? There is an insane grin on your lips. There is an insane grin on your lips. You are mad. You are mad.

F. Abiola Irele, “Ezeulu as World Historical Figure: Preliminary Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God,” in The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honor of Professor Ben Obumselu, ed. Isidore Diala (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2006): 103.

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I am not. I am not. Why are you behaving so strangely? I have just killed myself. Killed yourself? What are saying? What are you saying yourself? You are mad (shrivels) Okay, I am mad . . . You are sane I believe. Now, can you give one and a half reasons why you should be here, at this time of the night, in another man’s house. My mother brought me here. To be cured of madness . . . 44

The intriguing relationship between madness and genius, possession and inspiration, and the paradoxical manifestations of basically the same species of energy in violence and in creativity fascinated Irobi throughout his career, and he thought that politics was a preeminent determining factor. In making the politician Namimgaebi the source of Otagburuagu’s two temptations, Irobi indicts Nigerian politics as a contagion and a source of defilement in a life of high-mindedness. Even in this early play, Irobi’s two central themes – Igbo metaphysics and Nigerian politics – are already manifest and his horror at the insidious threat of the contamination of the former by the latter is obvious. The Western-type politician, just like the affluent Western-trained Dr Uba of the play’s The Lord is My Shepherd Hospital enriched through procuring abortions, typifies the threat of Western capitalism to pre-contact ideals of a life of higher purpose represented by Otagburuagu. Irobi’s search for transcendent ideals capable of regenerating contemporary society always led him to pre-colonial African life. His next play, Nwokedi, equally illustrates this. In Nwokedi (indebted to Soyinka’s The Strong Breed and Death and the King’s Horseman in terms both of the interpretation of the ritual event and of the exploitation of ritual music), Irobi appraises the relevance of a traditional festival for communal expiation of guilt, Ekpe, in the context of contemporary political corruption.45 Amankulor’s close study of the festival reveals a complex and well-organized carnivalesque re-enactment of an ancient purification

44

Irobi, Colour of Rusting Gold, 53. See Isidore Diala, “Ritual and Mythological Recuperation in the Drama of Esiaba Irobi,” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 87–114. 45

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rite involving an entire community.46 Appropriating music to advance the plot and to signal the modulation of mood from an initial state of exultation to one of chastened anxiety at the climactic moment of the sacrifice and then that of jubilation at its success, Ekpe is the paradigmatic traditional performance whose well-developed aesthetic principles inspired Irobi’s observations: an African community without a clear theory of its intended performance cannot create a theatrical form or tradition which involves the participation of all members of the community, from men to women to children. Equally without an organizing theory, the much desired spiritual and political efficacy of the performance which stems from a competent activation and execution of the iconographic, sonic, kinaesthetic, calligraphic, sartorial, proxemic literacies of the given culture cannot be achieved.47

Irobi retains the metaphysical framework of the festival in Nwokedi but expands its purification and redemptive functions to contemporary politics. Replacing the traditional sacrificial ram with a representative corrupt politician, Irobi’s protagonist, Nwokedi, and his peer group, the Ekumeku, custodians of tradition turned into a revolutionary vanguard, espouse a radical ethic of responsibility for political transgressions that inhibit social progress. As Gilbert and Tompkins have noted, in many African and Afro-Caribbean rituals, the rhythm of the drum – the most significant musical instrument – is no mere accompaniment but one of the principal forces guiding the action: it shapes the dance and song and helps summon spiritual power(s).48

In Nwokedi, at the climactic moment of the ritual, the drumming, the incantations, and the dancing initiate a supra-rational consciousness and Nwokedi is appropriately invoked as the god incarnate: Nwokedi nwa Nwokedi: you are a spirit. We made you a spirit. But at this hour, as you cross that spill of blood, you will become a god. And like a god you will walk the earth. With your naked feet you will stomp the barren soil until it stirs with the greenness of a new life. 49 46

See J.N. Amankulor, “Ekpe Festival as Religious Ritual and Dance Drama,” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981): 113–29. 47 Irobi, “Theory of À‹Æ,” 18. 48 Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 64. 49 Esiaba Irobi, Nwokedi (Enugu: A B I C , 1991): 91.

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Irobi also exploits dreams and a sense of foreboding consistent with the extraterrestrial phenomenon of possession to deepen the sense of tragic inevitability. Mrs Nwokedi cautions the husband, Nwokedi Snr, about going to the festival: I perceive the smell of blood. And the stench of graves. In my inner mind, I see fresh mounds of earth. (mystically) Senior, the scent of death is thick in the festive air.50

Nwokedi’s own dream is an uncanny foreshadowing of the decapitation episode and is appropriately infused inextricably with the idiom of ritual music and possession: you know how dreams are. It was at the festival. The drums were pounding and the voices dirging for the old year. The earth cracked under the thunder of our thousand feet. The music banged in my brain with the obstinacy of blood. I was possessed. They brought out the ram. I peered at the ram. I only saw you there bleating like a ram… But my knife was already in the air. Its glinting edge descended on your neck. Your head, severed with that single stroke, fell off that way. Your body this way. And blood! Blood drizzled from your body like rain. It drizzled on and on until the contour of the earth was covered with a garment of blood.51

On stage, Nwokedi’s recollection of the Ekumeku’s exaltation of his act in the dream is seamlessly woven into the Ekumeku’s chant, “Evula agbala oso,” both a lionization of Nwokedi and a perceptive comment on the powerlessness of one in a state of possession to restrain oneself even from murder. Dream and reality, the intangible and the corporeal merge to eerie, astonishing effect in the rousing chant of physical bodies on stage, a chant that in reality is a comment on the remembered kindred action of their own shades in a dream. Irobi’s translation, typically aimed at evoking the sense of the Igbo folk chants he aptly deploys in his plays rather than at an unperceptive literal transliteration, is insightful, except that his inclination often to create variants for repeated lines occasionally denies the songs the incantatory intensity that repetitions more easily evoke: CHORUS: SOLO:

50 51

Irobi, Nwokedi, 86. Nwokedi, 83.

The ram is on the run. Nwokedi! Nwokedi! The name we chant into the battle.

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The ram is on the run. Nwokedi! Nwokedi, the pillar of our boast. The ram hears his name and runs away. Take his matchet away from him. Take also his gun. The ram is already on the run… He is possessed and can slaughter anyone. The ram is on the run.52

Yet while the discourse of ritual possession would invoke spiritual animation to account for Nwokedi’s execution of his father, Nwokedi Snr, and brother in-law, Arikpo, as representative corrupt politicians, in Nwokedi the pivotal action coincides with Nwokedi’s own convictions and makes him culpable for his action. The purported mask of the gods resembles Nwokedi’s face so closely as to retain its inscrutability. In the two plays that he published in 1999, The Other Side of the Mask and The Fronded Circle, Irobi extends his study of the Igbo world-view through a sustained examination of the nature and significance of Igbo artforms – religious carving and sculpture in the former play, and Igbo funerary music in the latter. Sculptor and scholar, Jamike in The Other Side of the Mask is also a priest of Amadioha, the Igbo god of thunder and lightning. The scholar’s rigour, the artist’s passion for excellence, and the priest’s obsession with perfection mark Jamike’s devotion to art. He observes that he carves “out of a spiritual reserve” and identifies his basic goals as “the formation of souls” and the “creation of a new world.”53 Jamike’s instinctive awareness of the inhuman powers of the carver lies in his signal recognition of the inherent apotheosis of the human who creates gods. Noting the changing demands of a god, he privileges the call of blood and life, remarking that a god’s festivals are the avenues for the celebration of life. And as, in the festival, the “god must wear a garment of wood on his face to smear the earth with blood,”54 Jamike locates the power of the artist beyond the human: A time there was when a sculptor had his place in society. When he was venerated. When he moulded the images of the god of his clan. When he, a mere artist, held captive, for one whole year, the garment

52

Irobi, Nwokedi, 98. Esiaba Irobi, The Other Side of the Mask (Enugu: A B I C , 1999): 76. 54 Irobi, The Other Side of the Mask, 83. 53

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of wood for the naked spirit of the festival of life. When he stood out among his fellow men and was revered.55

It was Irobi’s conviction that a vocation could hardly be more hazardous.56 In Jamike’s self-mortifications, his enduring mental anguish, and suicidal despondency, he recognizes himself as a victim not only of a cynical political dispensation but even primarily of implacable forces hostile to the human aspiration to distinction: Why is it that every work I carve becomes a knife that laughs into the flesh of my life. Every song I sing becomes an arrow that turns back in flight to find the eternal target of my heart. What unforgivable evil is it that I chose a chisel as the instrument with which I will reshape the face of the world and leave it more beautiful than I found it?57

In a manner reminiscent of Soyinka and the Greeks, Irobi characteristically points to human dilemmas beyond explicit political frameworks, integral instead with the timeless vision of tragedy. Irobi’s revelation in The Fronded Circle is the seriousness of “play” in a rite of passage. As the dialectic in the drama is predicated on the willingness of Afonne, the Western-trained musicologist alienated from his Igbo roots, to approach a rite of passage as “mock ritual”: i.e. as imitation, mimesis, and the typical Igbo conception of ritual as serious, Irobi sets in relief the distinctions between two views of performance. Citing Kacke Götrick, Gilbert and Tompkins argue that, while Western drama is essentially based on the principles of Aristotelian mimesis, the African is not.58 Remarking on the ritual imperative at the core of Götrick’s argument, Irobi himself notes her observation in Africa of enactments that are simultaneously presentational and representational, real and fictitious; he identifies this as a “holistic definition of theatre as a mythopoeic, aesthetic, ritual, political, spiritual, communal, participatory,

55

Irobi, Other Side of the Mask, 84. Irobi often discussed the episode in Achebe’s Arrow of God in which Ezeulu remonstrates with Edogo for ignoring his advice against carving deities. His unpublished essay “What Would Picasso Have Said?” and the interview with Leon Osu refer to that episode. 57 Irobi, Other Side of the Mask, 53. 58 Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 56. See Kacke Götrick, Apidan Theatre and Modern Drama (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984): 130–31. 56

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and regenerative experience.”59 In a more detailed consideration of the subject, Michael Echeruo contends that the African festival is African theatre par excellence, and concludes: The concept of Aristotelian mimesis is not only not a condition for all art, but is a feature of a particular, and historically specific, realization of it. Specifically, I argue that there are forms of “play,” the African festival being my example, that deliberately seek to reject mimesis, socalled but instead espouse the principle of expressionism as the vehicle for their dianoia. The term expressionism, commonplace enough in Western art history and theory, may be used here in a sense of a nonmimetic, nonrepresentational fictional statement. A festival, in this African sense, is without presumption of a mimesis either of words or deeds.60

Music/dance, typically at the heart of Irobi’s drama, in this play is privileged as the basic metaphor through which he illuminates the Igbo attitude towards life and death and the accomplishments that culturally make life a valuable experience. Writing on the peculiar funerary music, Ese, which Irobi explores in The Fronded Circle, the renowned Igbo musicologist Meki Nzewi, collaborating with two Igbo master Ese musicians from Ngwa Igbo (Irobi’s part of Igboland), Tom Ohiaraumunna and Israel Anyahuru, identifies the cultural role of Ese music as that of canonization. Nzewi considers dramatic dialogue as crucial to the Ese performance event and cites Tom Ohiaraumunna to contend that Ese is a solemn cosmic drama in which the living and the dead reaffirm the cultural ethos of the people in the declamations of the achievements of the deceased, usually by the first son: I call the name of the entitled actor (who is on stage to declaim on the Ese-spirit). The actor runs to the compound entrance as I pound the race-theme […] to prompt him. When he races back to the presence of the drum stand, he puts his right foot on the spirit-drum. I candence the race-theme, and immediately change the music to the chant-accompanied, declamation section of the Oso nkwa (martial music compartment). Over the orchestral background of this section, I querry the declaimer on the Ese drum, as follows – if he is the first son of the deceased: “Mgbaji! Nna gi, O mere gini eme? O mere gi eme? (Mgbaji! 59

Irobi, “Theory of À‹Æ,” 16. M.J.C. Echeruo, “Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode,” in The Play of the Self, ed. Ronald Bogue & Mihai Spariosu (Albany: State U of New York P , 1994): 139. 60

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Your father, what did he achieve in life, to merit being buried by the Ese music?). For it is the Ese music that symbolically buries as well as canonizes into ancestry, a meritorious adult male person.61

This episode is followed by another in which the first son of the deceased undertake[s] another race to the entrance of the principal road leading into the compound. The entrance to a compound is a sacred spot. It marks the neutral boundary between the human occupants of a compound and the supernatural forces who interact, as ever present, immanent, and affective spirit essence, in that particular human abode.62

He thereafter declaims, equally on oath, his own accomplishments that qualify him to bury his father with Ese music. He then makes a “final race, to ‘embrace’ the spirit forces at the entrance of the compound” and returns to a celebration in dance of his successful performance of the Ese.63 In The Fronded Circle, however, Irobi transforms what is a rite of passage partly into a propitiatory rite and, equally by presenting cultural alienation as mortal, turns into a tragedy a grandiose elemental drama aimed at celebrating life as an experience of value in spite of death. With a doctorate in European musicology but ignorant in folk music and ways, married but with no child, Afonne has no credentials to participate in the ritual declamations of the Ese and steps on the sacred drum, with fatal consequences. Afonne’s lot is significant, as he is Irobi’s representative alienated African intellectual. Irobi’s Cemetery Road plays dangerously between the sacred and the profane, the macabre and the hilarious, the solemn rituals of the African mask and the exigencies of a drama class, and attempts to appropriate the total resources of the theatre, ancient and modern, African and Western. Probably Irobi’s most ambitious play in terms of its scope (spanning as it does the African experiences of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, the Nigerian civil war, military rule, international espionage, human-rights violations) and in terms of his appropriation of various performance media, the play foregrounds both the continuing cynical Western exploitation of Africa and the historical African complicity in its own enslavement. Irobi focuses on the various white mythologies through which Africa has been contained; traces to African invocations, incantations, and other oral skills the origins of popular performance styles among African American artists and illustrates their 61

Esiaba Irobi, The Fronded Circle (Enugu: A B I C , 1999): 98. Irobi, The Fronded Circle, 98. 63 The Fronded Circle, 99. 62

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powers; and demonstrates not only the adaptive capacity of Western colonialism but also the continuing metamorphosis of the conniving selfenslaving African through history. Mazeli, Irobi’s protagonist, like Irobi himself an academic, actor, and stage director, in his censure of Douglas, a B B C correspondent and MI6 undercover agent, indicates a firm grasp of Europe’s violations of Africa and the means by which the African has been excluded from the ‘human family’ through the creation and perpetuation of “authorized” representations of the African: For seven centuries now you have plastered negative images of Africa on your glittering screen. Images of Africans as beings less than human. The Noble Savage. The Hottentot Venus. The Dancing Ape. The Primitive Pigmy. Somalian skeletons choking on crumbs of bread. Inkatha warriors wielding clubs and pangas.64

Expectedly, Mazeli’s theatre is overtly political and his lot persecution. By his establishment of a community theatre, he not only works with the common folk, assuming responsibility for their welfare, but also makes their daily struggles for survival the substance of his theatrical performances. Threatened as he is with death, his acceptance of his tragic destiny is complete and rooted in his conviction of his immortality: I know it is my destiny. After all Che Guevera died at the age of thirty five. But at least he struck a blow for the wretched of the earth. And his memory has become an image, a symbol of resistance that survived the corporate capitalistic greed of the twentieth century.65

The association is obviously with Christ-like persecution when Mazeli is tortured with “a crown of thorns made from barbed wire,” when this etches a discernible halo around his head (“the ring of blood is still around his head”66) and in his later affirmation of his representative martyrdom: The poison running through my veins, the wounds on my head and the blood on my face are not mine. They are scars inflicted on the skin of this nation and the flesh of the future by full-fed beasts who have no vision for our children and their tomorrow’s womb.67

64

Esiaba Irobi, Cemetery Road (Enugu; A B I C , 2009): 44. Irobi, Cemetery Road, 47. 66 Cemetery Road, 135. 67 Cemetery Road, 113. 65

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Moreover, his betrayal and murder by his closest school friend accentuate the obvious allusions. Mazeli’s world-view is, however, firmly rooted in Igbo metaphysics, with Irobi exploiting the apparent Biblical allusions only as a metaphor for Mazeli’s absolute social commitment. It is the African mask that Mazeli recognizes as a “sacred spirit,”68 repeatedly invokes in veneration as “Father,” and entrusts with the responsibility of re-creating the political order, contingent not so much on his martyrdom as on his assassination of the President of the country: Father, as your wisdom knows, our ancestors said that a great man is he who wrestles with power and overpowers the overpowering power of power . . . We want a future even if it is wombed in blood.69

In choosing to assassinate the President while playing the role of a mask in a play meant to entertain that personage, Mazeli evokes the traditional conception of the mask as the ancestor-incarnate capable of dispassionate justice – he invokes a representative cultural symbol as an agent of revolutionary change. Irobi’s play Sycorax70 is a provocative ideological adaptation of Shakespeare’s much-travelled The Tempest, highlighting Africanist and feminist perspectives blanked out by the relentless maleness and whiteness of the Bard’s narrative. Exemplifying postcolonial drama’s interrogation of the representational biases of Western drama as well as its syncretic nature, Sycorax, in filling in the gaps Irobi discerned in Shakespeare’s narrative, is typically iconoclastic, audacious, innovative, and controversial. Irobi is fascinated by Prospero not only as a demiurge but also as a human being, and speculates about how he negotiated his sexuality in the enchanted island. For a writer whose work is often redolent with brazen sexual imagery and innuendo, this is a realm of wonders. Not only is Prospero’s relationship with Miranda incriminating, the battle with Sycorax is overtly sexual and leads to the emasculation of Prospero. By further presenting Miranda as sexually obsessed with an uninterested revolutionary-minded Caliban, Irobi gleefully stands Shakespeare’s The Tempest on its ideological head. It is, however, in appropriating the aesthetics of oral literature to translate a written text that Irobi’s innovativeness is set in relief. He writes in the “Author’s Note”:

68

Irobi, Cemetery Road, 113. Cemetery Road, 113–14. 70 Sycorax (Enugu: A B I C ) was published in 2013. 69

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This adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest marks a new approach to my playwriting and theatre-making process. In the past I have written plays and directed them based solely on the vision and aesthetics I inscribed in the text. With Sycorax and subsequent plays, I now want to use the initial drafts of my plays as open maps and negotiating tools through which I allow actors and audiences in different parts of the world to participate, in a more democratic way, in the process of creating the performance text. After a number of productions, the final version of the play will then be published as evidence of a collaborative effort between me, the playwright, and the creativity of these other theatre makers who, for so long, have been subjected to the passive roles of subordinates and consumers, especially in the West. My new approach to play-making parallels the way theatre is traditionally created in indigenous African communities. It encourages the maximum participation of the entire community thereby breaking down barriers of class, wealth, age, and Western education. It also makes for the inclusion of indigenous performance aesthetics.71

Thus, Irobi approaches The Tempest like an oral performance (for example, Ekpe) – Sycorax indeed assumes a carnivalesque structure – to highlight the intrinsic dynamism and pliability of ‘performance texts’ as opposed to the greater fixity of ‘dramatic’ texts. Amankulor notes how, in Umuode-Nsulu in Ngwa (Irobi’s part of Igboland), Ekpe retains the core of its performance idiom while imperceptibly renewing itself by incorporating a new form of dance from another Igbo community and by responding to modern and Christian influence in modifying its essentially tragic outlook and reconceptualizing sacrifice. Irobi himself appropriates the Ekpe festival as a possible model for the purification of the sordid arena of Nigerian politics. Through the theory guiding his adaptation of The Tempest, Irobi uses Sycorax to demonstrate that the contextual exigencies of a performance, among which the prevalent political situation is paramount, are critical and that a ‘text’ in reality can only be a pre-text for performance. Yet, I believe, the play Irobi would want to be remembered most for is The Other Side of the Mask. Supremely assured of his talent, Jamike nonetheless sees laurels as emblematic acts of public recognition necessary for an artist’s consolidation of his self-image. His deep passion for preeminence leads him to approach every creative endeavour as a soul-searching quest for ultimately unattainable perfection, a daring lunge at the elusive ultimate laurel. Irobi’s symbol of the re71

Irobi, Sycorax, 4.

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presentative visionary artist seeking transcendence of the wreckage of history and the seductions of the human herd through his art and yet paradoxically condemned to the judgment of society, Jamike in his self-acclamation is absolute: I am the next [master artist]! The next! The very next! I am a genius! Everything I touch turns into gold. Everything I create is an ultimate masterpiece.72

But with the denial, six years in a row, of the national prize for sculpture, doubts assail him and undermine his self-esteem. Appraising his work in a moment of deep, sad self-introspection, Jamike is confronted by the image of ultimate futility: (caresses the works) I thought there was craft here. I thought there was beauty here. I thought there was ecstasy here. Industry! Energy! Sincerity! Honesty! Truth! Power! Love! And Triumph! I thought there was art here. But they say there is none. (He covers the works) Perhaps I have nothing to offer the world. Nothing. No message. No talent. No gift. No flint of genius. Nothing.73

The antithesis between a schema that is self-constituted and another that derives from external attribution is often the realm of madness. And Jamike goes mad. Irobi thought literary awards contingent with politics. In making Professor Njemanze, the chairman of the national award-giving panel for sculpture in The Other Side of the Mask, draw Jamike’s attention to the extraneous factors, rather than to the intrinsic qualities, that account for the award of prizes, Irobi presents canonization through the award of prizes as a performance: you must also understand that simply because a work wins an award does not mean it is better than all the others submitted. In fact it does not even mean that [it] is a great work of art or a meaningful contribution to society, humanity.74

However, seeking international recognition, Jamike gets it at the first attempt. But he is already driven to suicidal despondency by a haunting sense of failure. At thirty, he already had his epitaph carved on the door of his bedroom: There is beauty in my breast Even here where all things rest 72

Irobi, The Other Side of the Mask, 67. The Other Side of the Mask, 53–54. 74 The Other Side of the Mask, 64–65. 73

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I am the flower of the twilight That blossomed in the night.75

Interestingly, the epitaph first appeared in Irobi’s work under the title “My Epitaph” as the first poem of the collection Inflorescence (Selected Poems 1977–1988). Irobi was twenty-nine when it was published in 1989. By sharing the epitaph he wrote for himself with Jamike, Irobi privileges that artist-character as a possible studio self-portrait. Moreover, his own desperate yearning for laurels as public validation is equally well-documented; in 2007, he told an interviewer: “Actually, there was a time in Nigeria when I wanted some validation, some recognition, and I felt that there was a lot of politics in what was happening.”76 Intimations of immortality are recurrent in Irobi’s work, both drama and poetry. His epitaph is a testament to the triumph of artistic beauty over even death. In the final poem of Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin, his last published collection of poems, Irobi repeatedly evokes the myth of the eternal return, itself a myth of the immortality of the human spirit. Irobi inscribed the many immortal cries of his tormented artist-characters for recognition and the acceptance of their work as part of the human heritage. But his sustained contemplation of oral literature filled him with even deeper awe by his discovery of the immortality of the oral artist in the living traditions of the people and the abiding power of oral literature to survive by self-renewal even in adverse circumstances. Following Soyinka’s magnificent example rooted in Yorùbá tradition, Irobi was devoted in his study of the enduring legacies of oral Igbo tradition but easily perceived the pervasiveness of basically the same tradition in other African cultures; he thought the translocation of this tradition in the diaspora awesome, as it was embodied, not written. And the innovativeness that he brought to bear on his appropriation of that tradition as actor, stage director, drama theorist, and playwright to illuminate and transcend the limitations of his postcolonial society is his legacy as a stage artist.

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75 76

The Other Side of the Mask, 15. Esiaba Irobi, “Eclipsed Visions: Esiaba Irobi Interviewed,” in this volume.

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WORKS CITED Amankulor, J.N. “Ekpe Festival as Religious Ritual and Dance Drama,” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981): 113–29. Diala, Isidore. “Ritual and Mythological Recuperation in the Drama of Esiaba Irobi,” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 87–114. ——. “Violent Obsessions: Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Discourse of Terrorism,” Modern Drama 49.1 (Spring 2006): 60–75. Echeruo, M.J.C. “Redefining the Ludic: Mimesis, Expression, and the Festival Mode,” in The Play of the Self, ed. Ronald Bogue & Mihai Spariosu (Albany: State U of New York P , 1994): 137–56. Gilbert, Helen. “General Introduction,” in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, ed. Helen Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2001): 1–7. ——, & Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996). Götrick, Kacke. Apidan Theatre and Modern Drama (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984). Irele, F. Abiola. “Ezeulu as World Historical Figure: Preliminary Notes on Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God,” in The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honor of Professor Ben Obumselu, ed. Isidore Diala (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2006): 97–111. Irobi, Esiaba. Cemetery Road (Enugu: A B I C , 2009). ——. The Colour of Rusting Gold (Onitsha: Ofo, 1989). ——. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh (Enugu: A B I C , 1989). ——. The Fronded Circle (Enugu: A B I C , 1989). ——. Hangmen Also Die (Enugu: A B I C , 1989). ——. Inflorescence (Selected Poems from 1977–1988) (Enugu: A B I C , 1989). ——. “Interview: Irobi Chats with Nengi Ilagha: Call the University a Ministry of Certificates,” Newslink (May 1989): 11–12. ——. “My E-conversation with Esiaba Irobi: Interview with Nnorom Azuonye.” Sunday Vanguard (21 September 2003): 49. ——. Nwokedi (Enugu: A B I C , 1991). ——. The Other Side of the Mask (Enugu: A B I C , 1999). ——. Sycorax (Enugu: A B I C , 2013). ——. “Taking the Bull by the Horns: On the Oriki Theory of African and African Diasporic Orature,” in Africa in the World & the World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2011): 173– 202. ——. “The Theory of À‹Æ: The Persistence of African Performance Aesthetics in the North American Diaspora,” in African Theatre: Diasporas, ed. Osita Okagbue & Christine Matzke (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2009): 15–24.

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——. Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems (Nsibidi Library of Nsukka Poets 2; Owerri: Nsibidi, 2005). Lawson, Alan, & Chris Tiffin. “Conclusion: Reading difference,” in De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and textuality, ed. Lawson & Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 230–35. Nzewi, Meki, Israel Anyahuru & Tom Ohiaraumunna. “Beyond Song Texts – The Lingual Fundamentals of African Drum Music,” Research in African Literatures 32.2 (Summer 2001): 90–104. Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest / Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995). Umuko, Eni–Jones. “Esiko! Flower of the Twilight,” in Esiaba Irobi: The Return of the Minstrel (Programme of a Memorial Event organized by Abuja Writers Forum, Abuja Literary Society, Friends and Schoolmates of Esiaba Irobi, New Chelsea Hotel, Abuja, Nigeria, 6 August 2010): 12–13. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976).

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Between Soyinka and Clark The Dynamics of Influence on Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi

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E D D E M . I J I O B S E R V E D a persistent tendency among researchers, chroniclers, and critics of theatre and literary arts that compels them to “juxtapose, compare and contrast the works of earlier writers [.. . ], with those of newer writers [. . . ], with a view to establishing dominant influences, similarities or convergences, and divergences that may exist,”1 the highlight is ultimately placed on literature and theatre as dialogic and discursively engaging. This phenomenon assumes a seminal dimension in the abiding exploration of the origin of style, technique, convention, and even the ideological undergirding of literary personalities. Though Joachim Fiebach has argued that since the democratization of communication channels in the nineteenth century, literary and artistic influence is never onesided,2 colonial contact was a watershed in literary influence among firstgeneration African writers. Efua Sutherland’s Edufa, J.P. Clark’s Song of a Goat, Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame etc. are more than a “one-sided” demonstration of classical Greek influence on African dramatists whose adaptation of the Hellenic tradition, myth, and tragic convention re-reads a context that is unmistakably African.3 1

HEN

Edde M. Iji, Background to Femi Osofisan’s Philosophy of Drama and Theatre (Calabar & Benin: Baaj International, 2001): i. 2 Joachim Fiebach, “Comments on Methods of Presentation and Communication in Theatre of Europe and the Third World,” in Theatre and Social Reality, ed. Joachim Fiebach & Jutta Hengst (Berlin: G D R Centre, 1971): 71. 3 For a recent and thorough study, see Astrid Van Weyenberg, The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy (Cross/Cultures 165; Am-

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This comparativist impetus among critics, however, transcends the older African writers and dramatists, and has become a paradigm for the evaluation of the contemporary generation. The late Nigerian dramatist Esiaba Irobi seems to have had more than his fair share of critical comparison with the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Earlier in his career, in the 1980s, Irobi obviously started the temper of this comparativist discourse with the publication of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, mostly interpreted as a satire on Soyinka, whom he named Ogun in the play after Soyinka’s patron-deity. In a review of Irobi’s postcolonial legacy, Isidore Diala discerned in that play Irobi’s early reverence for Soyinka. While acknowledging the play to be Irobi’s “least dramatically successful” yet “the most controversial,” Diala intimates that the play ends in Professor Ogun’s triumph apparently turning his experience into the ordeals of the visionary artist whose measures ought to be recognised as distinguished from the measures of ordinary mankind. The Nobel Prize winner holds deep fascination for the younger playwright for whom he apparently incarnates the temper of genius.4

However, a most astounding comparison between Irobi and Soyinka can be found in Adetokunbo Abiola’s Midweek Arts Review analysis of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. While explaining Irobi’s lack of interest in “systematized pre-occupation at the dislocation of language to reveal its involvement in nonsensicality and incoherence” as the twentieth-century Absurdists had done, Abiola argues that recourse to “a patois in pidgin English” is in consonance with the linguistic engineering of the parody that explores “the satiric and ironic possibilities fixed into it with regard to Professor Wole Soyinka.”5 Apparently recognizing Irobi as an iconoclastic dramatist, Abiola may have thought him a likely candidate for the Absurdist experimentation with language popularly referred to by Martin Esslin as “incoherent babblings.”6 Abiola ascribed the Absurdist anti-language to “lack of respect,” as if Irobi, being an iconoclast, required conformity with established language conventions. Thereafter, Abiola sterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013). Van Weyenberg deals particularly with Athol Fugard, Femi Osofisan, Wole Soyinka, Yael Farber, and Mark Fleishman. 4 Isidore Diala, “Esiaba Irobi’s Legacy: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance,” Research in African Literatures 42.4 (Winter 2011): 27. 5 Adetokunbo Abiola, “Esiaba Irobi Drives Me Crazy!” The Observer (11 July 1990): 12. 6 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972): 22.

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manages a most unusual comparison between the language of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh and Wole Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman: Death and the King’s Horseman serves as an epitome of creation arranged by an imagination versed in the manipulation of language, while Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh was written by a naturing (sic) artist fast absorbing the indices of knowledge and craft whose evolution might terminate in the mastery of the genre.7

Meanwhile, Irobi continued stoking the comparativist temper. In an interview with Nengi IIagha, Irobi reportedly declared: “I would as a writer do for this generation what Soyinka, Achebe and Okigbo have done for their generation.”8 It may be said, therefore, that Irobi’s most Soyinkaesque play, Nwokedi, had been stimulated by his ebullient role in Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman at its University of Nsukka performance. Describing Esiaba Irobi’s absorbing performance of Elesin Ÿba’s role, Olu Oguibe affirms that “most had never seen theatre quite as electric and probably never would again.”9 After an incisive and pace-setting appraisal of Irobi’s drama as a demonstrable recuperation and exaltation of Igbo myth, traditional folk drama, and primordial ritual, Isidore Diala concludes that “Irobi’s drama, therefore, recurrently recalls Soyinka’s.”10 In Diala’s view, and rightly so, Irobi’s recourse to “cultural imperative” as a vital source of his drama is traceable to the influence of Soyinka’s universalist and counter-hegemonic propensity: To this unapologetic exaltation of Ogun may well be traced the vital source of the inspiration and model firing the zeal of generations of African writers to search the African pantheon, myths, and legends for deity-heroes capable of stimulating the creative imagination and dramatic action or illuminating the human situation. Irobi’s career is in this regard revealing.11

However, I would like to state that even though Irobi’s dramatic vision was influenced by Soyinka’s, especially in the mythic adaptation of Nwokedi, 7

Abiola, “Esiaba Irobi Drives Me Crazy!” 12. Esiaba Irobi, “Interview: Irobi Chats with Nengi Ilagha: Call the University a Ministry of Certificates,” Newslink (May 1989): 11–12. 9 Olu Oguibe, “Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile,” Maple Tree Literary Supplement 7 (2010): 1. 10 Isidore Diala, “Ritual and Mythological Recuperation in the Drama of Esiaba Irobi,” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 90. 11 Diala, “Ritual and Mythological Recuperation,” 90. 8

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there are other discernible influences in the playwright’s dramatic evolution. There are also structural points of divergence with Soyinka’s world-view and dramaturgy. Although Diala has pointed out that Nwokedi was inspired by Soyinka’s The Strong Breed and Death and the King’s Horseman, there is also an obvious touch of John Pepper Clark’s Song of a Goat, a play whose understanding of cosmic resolution through sacrifice is equally shared by both Soyinka and Irobi. While Clark’s exploration of cosmic pollution is centred on the incident of illicit sexual intercourse between Tonye and his elder brother Zifa’s wife, Ebiere, Soyinka and Irobi’s plays both involve a seasonal purgation. However, the three plays require sacrifice as a propitiatory ethos for a society caught up in the web of physical and metaphysical contamination and evil. While Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (with The Strong Breed included in this bracket) and Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi foreground the characteristic hereditary saviour, variously termed ‘the strong breed’, Clark’s Song of a Goat, significantly, manages a mild invocation of that trait. A play of strictly classical Greek character, Song of a Goat invokes a family tragedy in which communal pathos is limited to the chorus of Neighbours. Hence, the sacrifice Clark calls for in the incestuous act is equally strictly limited. However, Clark’s obvious predilection for bestowing the heroic character trait on family lineage is evident in Ebiere’s advice to her son, Dode: EBIERE:

Leave leopards alone to the elders of the family. Your father is honoured for collecting their scalps but everybody discredits your mother who only sees them in visions . . . .12

Later in the play, before the incest occurs, Ebiere will challenge Tonye solicitously: “Floor me / march on me, strike me down as / You did Benikpanra the Bull to show / You are the strong man of the family.”13 Clark’s decentralization of heroism among his major characters differs markedly from Esiaba’s (and Soyinka’s), whose dramatic aesthetic centres on individualism and the resul of overweening pride and hubris, the intensity of which is discernible in the characters of Elesin Ÿba and Nwokedi Jnr. Yet Zifa’s description of the mode of sacrifice suggests that Clark’s work demonstrates a more than casual influence on Esiaba Irobi’s dramaturgy. It is to Clark that Irobi turned for the concept of the “single stroke” of the knife for the sacrificial mode: 12

J.P. Clark, “Song of a Goat” (1961), in Clark, Three Plays (1964; Ibadan: Ibadan

U P , 2008): 19. 13

Clark, “Song of a Goat,” 27.

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You shall Be satisfied with all that I do today, Mother. Here, Tonye, hold the goat by The feet and I will by the horns. And you, My wife, see how with one stroke of my knife I sever the head from the trunk A brave stroke, my boy, a brave stroke! There was only one man in all the creeks Who could do it like that, but he died many Years ago . . . .14

In essentializing his role as a strong breed in a conversation with Fingesi, Nwokedi Jnr’s self-exaltation, hubris, and description of the sacrifice “with one stroke” recall and approximate to Clark’s dialogue given above: NWOKEDI:

FINGESI: NWOKEDI:

(benumbing silence) I’ll leave you now. I must leave you now because the ram is bleating at the shrine. And this hand . . . (flexes his muscles). This hand . . . with one stroke of the knife . . . just one stroke . . . Nwokedi! There is a magic in my name!15

Irobi’s drama demonstrates an insight that advances from a whimpering and scampering Emma in The Strong Breed, a carnality-seeking Elesin Ÿba in Death and the King’s Horseman, and an impotent suicide-bound Zifa in Song of a Goat to a marauding, masquerading Nwokedi Jnr; and from Clark’s agnatic propitiation to a communal cleansing of the Soyinkean dimension, albeit with a more violent and iconoclastic propensity. When Zifa states that blood “should cleanse the compound of all corruption today,” it becomes obvious that Clark, too, metaphorizes the family feud beyond the compound. Irobi’s predilection for blood as a method of sacrifice against Soyinka’s metaphysical passage and transition foregrounds a closer approximation of Clark. However, Irobi’s drama suggests a more bloodletting oeuvre than that of his mentor: NWOKEDI:

14 15

But my knife was already in the air. Its glinting edge descended on your neck. Your head, severed with that single stroke, fell off that way. Your body this way. And, blood! Blood drizzled from your body like rain. It drizzled on and on until the

Clark, “Song of a Goat,” 36. Esiaba Irobi, Nwokedi (Enugu: A B I C , 1991): 45.

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contour of the earth was covered with a garment of blood.16

Clark’s use of goat for the sacrifice as against Irobi’s ram is in keeping with the Aristotelian tragic mode (‘goat song’) from which the play is derived. Conversely, in Irobi’s Nwokedi, the ram is a symbolic and semiological response to postcolonial re-ordering in the Igbo and African ontology of human sacrifice. Irobi’s recourse to human sacrifice (in Nwokedi Jnr’s view) foregrounds the enormity of the postcolonial social and political anomie for which the ritual is required. Indeed, Soyinka’s review of the production of Clark’s Song of a Goat, where he spoke of “a rather lively goat,”17 recalls Nnorom Azuonye’s equally alarming reflection in a conversation with this writer on the production of Nwokedi at the premier N U T A F performance: “[Irobi] made us slaughter live chickens on stage and splash audience members with blood.”18 Indeed, Irobi’s initiation into the Ekpe society to which Nwokedi is dedicated validates his deep bond with Igbo lore and mythology, reminiscent of Soyinka’s world-view. Nwokedi Jnr’s predilection for human sacrifice in the play indicates a concomitant panacea for the social and political decadence of Nigeria at a crucial moment in the country’s historical reality. Nwokedi Jnr makes this clear in his conversation with Habiba: FINGESI: NWOKEDI: HABIBA: NWOKEDI: HABIBA: NWOKEDI: HABIBA: NWOKEDI: HABIBA: NWOKEDI:

With what animal do you perform this rite? A ram. But this year I would prefer a man. A man? Nwokedi you mean your people still indulge in these primitive rites? We do At the turn of the 21st century. Even now. Where will you find the man? One of these foolish politicians will do. Your father is a politician. Suppose it was him. I wished it was him.19

Nwokedi Jnr’s decision to use a man instead of ram is a personal one, a hijacking of the communal rite for a hubristic self; it demonstrates what Paul 16

Irobi, Nwokedi, 83. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976): 45. 18 Online conversation with Nnorom Azuonye, February 2012. 19 Irobi, Nwokedi, 37. 17

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Ugor, writing about the phenomenal ascendency of youth militarization in sub-Saharan Africa, referred to as “personalization of sovereignty”20 on behalf of a community attached to a seasonal world-view. It is constitutive of Nwokedi Jnr’s distortion of the communal metalanguage, a coup de narration of the ritual circle of a people. It is therefore the first hint of the impending tragedy that culminates in the killing of his father – a fatalistic incident, to use Soyinka’s words,21 reminiscent of Isola’s killing of his father Rev Erinjobi in Soyinka’s Camwood on the Leaves. In making the strong breed a vanquisher, instead of a victim of the ritual exercise, Irobi perhaps insulated Nwokedi from the critique of reactionary world-view proffered by Biodun Jeyifo22 against Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. In Irobi’s dramaturgy, there is no privileged carrier, but a privileged killer. Essentially, Irobi endorses Soyinka’s logic of ritual sacrifice as an exercise in social regeneration. In choosing the option in which society sets aside a hereditary formula for the sociopolitical regeneration of society, Irobi wades into the metatextual argument between Soyinka and Femi Osofisan in support of the former. In an interview with Iji, Osofisan, while acknowledging the profundity of Soyinka’s logic for human sacrifice as regenerative act, however, makes a clear statement: What I do not believe is that people should be designated or coerced into it, who have no hand in ruining the society. I think if you are going to cleanse the society, it should be of those very elements who have been responsible for dirtying society, for bringing sin; these are the people who should bear the burden of cleansing it. But I think they get away too easily . . . if there is any purgation, these are the people who should bear the brunt of such purgation; be made to sacrifice themselves.23

Yet, in making the strong breed the administrator of the regenerative ritual instead of the victim, Irobi distances himself from Soyinka. Therefore, while agreeing with Osofisan on the choice of victim, Irobi’s Nwokedi interrogates 20

Paul Ugor, “Failed States and the Militarization of Youth in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Narratives of Citizenship, ed. Aloys N.M. Fleischmann, Nancy Van Styvendale & Cody McCarooll (Edmonton: U of Alberta P , 2011): 82. 21 Soyinka’s explanation for Elesin Ÿba’s failure to commit ritual suicide in Death and the King’s Horseman. 22 Biodun Jeyifo, The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London: New Beacon, 1985): 34–35. 23 Iji, Background to Femi Osofisan’s Philosophy, 5.

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Osofisan’s proposition on the procedure for apprehending a victim in a judicial and democratic society. What Osofisan obviously underrated was the complex dynamic involved in subjecting those who balkanized the state and control the apparatus of state power to self-sacrifice against their will. Osofisan’s Marxist response to the challenge begs much of the question. With Soyinka there is a willing institutionalization and design in the feudal system of the Ÿyº Kingdom, yet Death and the King’s Horseman dramatizes the historical moment in which, despite the long-standing tradition of the system, Elesin Ÿba is confronted with the reality of fear. So is Emma in The Strong Breed. More so, the fate of the strong breed is not an easy one. But Irobi is wary of Marxism; in designating the strong breed to be the executioner instead of the victim, Irobi orchestrates an elemental force with a metaphysical and mythic justice distinct from Osofisan’s Marxist approach. While the feudal system of the Ÿyº Kingdom adheres to traditional lore in the staging of the cavalier’s sacrifice in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, the villages in The Strong Breed can easily set aside an idiot for sacrifice, or a stranger. However, Esiaba Irobi’s Nwokedi dramatizes the complications of subjecting those in control of the instruments of state power to acquiescence in self-sacrifice. This difficulty is clear in the following exchange between Nwokedi and Arikpo: ARIKPO: NWOKEDI: ARIKPO: NWOKEDI: ARIKPO: NWOKEDI: ARIKPO:

(advertising the pistol). A man is what he hides. (frozen) Is that not one of those pistols Ezinna told you to stop importing? It is. So, don’t force this hand. (enraged) Murderer! I will force your hand. (nervously) Nwokedi, don’t throw away your life foolishly. (stalks) You criminal. Nwokedi, don’t force this hand.24

It is this that makes EsiabaIrobi’s Nwokedi more violent and bloodier than Soyinka’s plays. For Clark, Soyinka, and Irobi, ritual sacrifice is embodied in violence. However, when Patrick Taylor asserts that violence does not automatically initiate a process of liberation; it does not engender from within itself an immanent flowering of freedom, except where accompanied by a vision of the future.25

24

Irobi, Nwokedi, 70.

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one comprehends Irobi’s foresightedness in textually casting the people and place of his play in the mould of the future, one that transcends the palliative of superfluous political appeasement that has become the hallmark of the Nigerian political landscape. Little wonder, as Diala observed, that Irobi’s plays are peopled by dispossessed youth seeking their future. Most shockingly, for Irobi, the definition and meaning of the future is lost on the oppressive ruling class. Irobi’s future is not a temporal concept; it is, rather, a proactive consciousness that marks the epoch of events through change, negotiating the Nigerian present and future political system through the teleology of a past myth, if recuperated, to use Diala’s concept, without subsumption in the Soyinkean feudal state, or the precolonial fiefdom of Igboland. As Ozomena declared to the Ekumeku age-grade: Our time has come. And Time is not the tick-tock of your wristwatches. Neither is Time the rising and setting of the sun. Time is event. Time is decision. Time is action. Time is made when young men flex the muscles of a new resolve and decide to change their fate. Decide to change the world. Change the course of history. Create a new order. That, my generation, is how Time is made.26

Indeed, Irobi has clearly entrenched a futuristic dimension in Nwokedi. This is evident in the conversation below: Junior, since it is your future you want, I will give it to you now (pulls out a cheque book). ARIKPO: No, In-law, let me give him a future. Nwokedi, I will give you a future right away. [He brings out a large cheque book and scribbles hurriedly. As he gives it to Nwokedi] ARIKPO: This is a cheque for fifty thousand naira. With it you can buy yourself a future and stop terrorizing people with a matchet. And remember, my brotherin-law, I am giving you this money as a token for my life. I hope you understand. Take the cheque. NWOKEDI I want Ezinna. NWOKEDI SNR: Nwokedi, how can you go through life blindfolded by day dreams? NWOKEDI (opens his palm) The future. NWOKEDI SNR:

25

Patrick Taylor, Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1989): 87. 26 Irobi, Nwokedi, 13.

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How can you see the sun when you are lying on your stomach?27

Adebayo Williams has remarked that in Elesin’s ritual passage death is magically transformed into an ally of the ruler.28 Williams’s contention that “in death, the power and grandeur of the rulers remain” is sharply distinguished from Irobi’s semiological refraction of the horror of death. In Nwokedi, death is nowhere a “willing” accompaniment of man’s ritual and purgative passage. Irobi’s concept of death is that of a scourge-making phenomenon. Although the “Ekpe is a festival of life,” Aripko asserts that the “drums I hear are the drums of death.”29 Aripko’s fear of death contrasts with Soyinka’s heroic “threnodic essence.” Irobi is appreciated both as a poet and as a dramatist. Indeed, he perfectly fits Oyin Oguba’s description of J.P. Clark “as a poet in the theatre.”30 Ola Rotimi’s declaration that Irobi’s “language is like listening to music”31 foregrounds a drama constructed on the mellifluous flow of Igbo rustic and oral poetry. One may discern classical Greek influence, not only through the poetry of the drama but also in the extrapolation of Ekpe festival as a kind of rural Dionysia, through which the play derives its cyclical and structural form, the chorus of villagers, etc. While Irobi’s Nwokedi may seem to validate the Aristotelian injunction that tragedy be “embellished with several kinds of artistic ornament,” it clearly demonstrates what Ousmane Diakhate termed “the product of accretion of diverse forms.”32 Seekers of literary influence on Esiaba Irobi’s drama must go beyond Soyinka, beginning with classical Attic tragedians and tracing a line down to Clark and Ola Rotimi, whose play The Gods Are Not to Blame he directed at the Ohio University Theatre as an experiment in the “ritualistic acting style” reminiscent of his Elesin Ÿba

27

Irobi, Nwokedi, 80. Adebayo Williams, “Ritual and the Political Unconscious: The Case of Death and the King’s Horseman,” Research in African Literatures 24.1 (Spring 1993): 76. 29 Nwokedi, 85. 30 Oyin Oguba, “Modern Drama in West Africa,” in Perspectives on African Literature, ed. Christopher Heywood (London: Heinemann Educational, 1971): 91. 31 Quoted in blurb to Nwokedi. 32 Ousmane Diakhate, “Of Inner Roots and External Adjuncts,” in The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, ed. Don Rubin (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 17. 28

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performance in Nsukka in the 1980s.33 Thus, Irobi’s Nwokedi draws abundantly on the colourful festival of the Ekpe ritual ceremony of the Ngwa-Igbo people which echoes the Greek Dionysian rites that gave birth to the Attic tragedies, while interrogating the metatextual dialogue between Soyinka and Osofisan, whose African purgative motif started with Clark. That Irobi’s drama is set against an unmistakable Igbo background undergirds the profundity and depth of the playwright’s dialogue with other cultures, ancient and contemporary. It can be argued that a significant contribution of Irobi’s Nwokedi to African drama is a validation of the Soyinkan ideology of the universality of myth, the transcendental impact that courses through the Hellenic Greek, Clark’s Ijaw, and Soyinka’s Yorùbá down to Irobi’s own Igbo ethnic milieu.

WORKS CITED Abiola, Adetokunbo. “Esiaba Irobi Drives Me Crazy!” The Observer (11 July 1990): 12. Clark, John Pepper. “Song of a Goat” (1961), in Clark, Three Plays (1964; Ibadan: Ibadan U P , 2008): 5–36. Diakhate, Ousmane. “Of Inner Roots and External Adjuncts,” in The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, ed. Don Rubin (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 17–25. Diala, Isidore. “Esiaba Irobi’s Legacy: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance,” Research in African Literatures 42.4 (Winter 2011): 20–38. ——. “Ritual and Mythological Recuperation in the Drama of Esiaba Irobi,” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (Winter 2005): 87–114. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Pelican, 1972). Fiebach, Joachim. “Comments on Methods of Presentation and Communication in Theatre of Europe and the Third World,” in Theatre and Social Reality, ed. Joachim Fiebach & Jutta Hengst (Berlin: G D R Centre, 1971): 65–79. Iji, M. Edde. Background to Femi Osofisan’s Philosophy of Drama and Theatre (Calabar & Benin: Baaj International, 2001). Irobi, Esiaba. Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh (Enugu: A B I C , 1989). ——. “Interview: Irobi Chats with Nengi Ilagha: Call the University a Ministry of Certificates,” Newslink (May 1989): 11–12. ——. Nwokedi (Enugu: A B I C , 1991).

33

Natalie Taylor, “A Dance of African Images,” Theatre Design & Technology 41.2 (2005): 35.

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Jeyifo, Biodun. The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London: New Beacon, 1985). Oguibe, Olu. “Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile,” Maple Tree Literary Supplement 7 (2010): 1–4. Ogunba, Oyin. “Modern Drama in West Africa,” in Perspectives on African Literature, ed. Christopher Heywood (London: Heinemann Educational, 1971): 90–112. Rotimi, Ola. The Gods Are Not to Blame (Ibadan: Ibadan U P , 1971). Soyinka, Wole. The Bacchae of Euripides, in Wole Soyinka, Collected Plays 1 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1973): 233–307. ——. Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976). Sutherland, Efua. Edufa (London: Longman, 1987). Taylor, Natalie. “A Dance of African Images,” Theatre Design & Technology 41.2 (2005): 32–38. Taylor, Patrick. Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture, and Politics (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1989). Ugor, Paul. “Failed States and the Militarization of Youth in SubSaharan Africa,” in Narratives of Citizenship, ed. Aloys N.M. Fleischmann, Nancy Van Styvendale & Cody McCarroll (Edmonton: U of Alberta P , 2011): 81–104. Van Weyenberg, Astrid. The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy (Cross/Cultures 165; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013). Williams, Adebayo. “Ritual and the Political Unconscious: The Case of Death and the King’s Horseman,” Research in African Literatures 24.1 (Spring 1993): 67–79.

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Eclipsed Visions Esiaba Irobi Interviewed

L EON O SU

I

N 1 9 8 9 , E A R L Y I N M Y U N D E R G R A D U A T E S T U D I E S at Imo State Uni-

versity, Okigwe, Nigeria (now Abia State University, Uturu), Udenta O. Udenta introduced my ‘Introduction to Drama and Theatre’ class to a budding writer, Esiaba Irobi, whose The Colour of Rusting Gold, alongside Bode Sowande’s Flamengo and Tess Onwueme’s The Reign of Wazobia, we put on stage. Later in my career, as I tinkered with the idea of the African tradition and revolutionary aesthetics in drama for my Master’s thesis, Professor Isidore Diala suggested that Irobi’s plays would blend well with those of Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o to give the best result. The success of that work and the intellectual attention it attracted (especially with the Irobi aspect) made me more enthusiastic to explore further the career of this now-established Nigerian dramatist and poet of Igbo extraction. Thus, when he came home on holiday in 2007, I went in the active company of Dick Adindu (a course-mate of mine at Imo State University, Okigwe) to interview Professor Esiaba Irobi at Irobi’s cousin’s residence in Amakohia Owerri, Nigeria. Here now, posthumously, is the text of that exclusive and probably last extensive interview that Irobi gave. Encompassing the ambitious, daring, and passionate dreams of his life and career, it also provides background insights to virtually all his creative works as well as his motivations as artist and social critic.

™ L E O N O S U : How did Esiaba Irobi come into this world? E S I A B A I R O B I : My father’s name is Enoch Amaikpe Irobi and he was a headmaster. My mother is Rosana Nwambueze Akwarandu and she was a seam-

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stress, an oral poet of the first order, and a teacher of the domestic kind, teaching to make cakes, how to sew, and all that. My village is Amapu Igbengwo in Umuakpara, where you have Eke-Akpara market (which was the revered headquarters for the Aba Women’s Revolution in 1929. That was where the women who had guns were waiting, five miles to Aba). My mother is from Owahia. All these are in Obioma Ngwa in Abia State, Nigeria. LO: What is the educational background that informed your intellectual growth? E I: Succinctly, one, I had a holistic education. Holistic, this means that I had access to the best of Ngwa culture as well as the best of Western education. I would like to illustrate, even though I want to be succinct. We were brought up in a mission school. But, interestingly, my father’s village did not embrace Christianity very quickly. They had a lot of masquerades, and every Christmas when we came home, we would be exposed to those masquerade groups. It was in my father’s village that I learnt how to play masquerade music, and how, though that music is not written, each time it is played it tells a story. So when you make the usual masquerade music rhythm, everybody who is an initiate knows what you are saying. Thus, I was exposed to a holistic education which involved the performative and the literary. Then I went through a good primary school. And because my father was a headmaster, of course we had a lot of exposure to what was the best in the house. Thereafter, I went to secondary school – Wilcox Memorial Grammar School, Aba, which also exposed me to the culture of Aba people. We had a very good literature teacher, E.F. Kuku, who introduced us to Wordsworth and other Western authors. We didn’t do West African Verse when I did my W A S C . We did the Europeans because that was what he learnt at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. But our results were seized. I knew that what he was teaching us was good but it was dangerous. I got the best of the West. I went to Mbawsi Secondary school, Aba, to do my “Second Missionary Journey,” that is, my second attempt at the W A S C exams. And our teacher there gave us West African Verse. I learnt the core African poetic culture in print – from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, etc. – so that they made, for me, the connection between my mother’s poetry and literature. And then I got the confidence in what came from my own culture instead of Western culture. So, you see those two traditions coming together again. Thereafter I went to Nsukka, after I had gone to Uzuakoli Teacher Training College for one year and I taught for some time at Akabo Girls’ Secondary School in Imo State. I couldn’t go to the

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sciences, even though my father wanted me to be a medical doctor. I couldn’t have been a medical doctor; I wasn’t interested in it. I mean, I could not stand somebody who had fever. That was what happened. Then I also taught at Mbawsi, and the three years I taught were the most important years of my life because, in the course of teaching, I started writing. I started educating myself. I read and read and read. So by the time I got to Nsukka, I was prepared. And the other special thing that happened when I got to Nsukka was that Chinua Achebe was our Head of Department. So here is this man that I read as a child, sweeping the house! We had No Longer at Ease that was torn into pieces. And each time I was sweeping the house and I saw a page or two, that was the end of the sweeping for the day. I would just hide behind the sofa and hide the broom somewhere and sit and be reading whatever page it was for hours. And my mother used to beat me then. My father would say, “Beat him.” And my mother would say, “Edisii” – that is, “He forgets himself. He forgets himself. He can never live like this.” So, when I went to Nsukka, Chinua Achebe was there. In the first year at Nsukka, I won the first prize for drama, and then for the short story. In my second year I also won the prize for poetry. Then Professor Obiechina would say, “Anybody here who wants to amount to something in writing and who does not tap impulse from the presence of Chinua Achebe, would not amount to anything anywhere else.” That is, if your destiny has put you to cross paths with Chinua Achebe and you want to be a writer and you don’t make it, you can’t make it anywhere else. So I interviewed Chinua Achebe and he told me a few things. Unfortunately, that tape was stolen. However, I discovered that my temperament was more on the performative side because of my mother’s influence. So I went into drama. And that was how I started writing plays. LO: Any special influence from your parents on your education? E I: My father, Enoch Amaikpe Irobi, was a headmaster, and he was extremely studious, an extremely scholarly person. In fact, my father read till 3:00 am every night. He would sleep in the afternoon and then start reading around 9:00 pm. Whenever you woke up to go to the rest room, you would see him reading. He always used candlelight, and he read so voraciously. So our house was a house built of books. The man spent so much money buying books. There was hardly anything that was excellent literature that you didn’t find in our house – Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, etc. I read Things Fall Apart when I was in elementary four or five, I think. I didn’t quite under-

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stand the ideological and historical undercurrent of the book, but the beauty of the language, the phrasing, so fascinated me. My friend who is a lawyer told me that he also read it at that stage and that what fascinated him was that when you are reading Things Fall Apart, you get to a certain point where you don’t know whether it is written in English or in Igbo. I think that’s a great achievement. This hermaphroditic manipulation of language, so competent that you are able to transcribe the cultural intelligence of one part of the world through the language of a colonizer, and in such a beautiful way that you don’t betray the subtleties, the beauty, and the sophistication of this other language, which is the subordinated language, in this instance, the Igbo language. So, from my father, I got immersed in literature, in writing, you know, what the West gave to us – typographical literacy – and which most people think is the only form of literacy. From my mother’s side I gained the art of storytelling. My mother comes from a family of storytellers, raconteurs. The phrases that my mother was using in the Igbo language were just extraordinary. My aunt, Da Marta, in Umualeatawom, also used to treat little children to folktales, just to tell you the genealogy that my mother comes from. My mother was an oral poet, you know. But this my aunt, my mother’s immediate elder sister, used to tell stories to children. The family she was married to was a huge compound. She would gather all the children and she would tell folk tales about the tortoise and the rabbit and all that, every night. She would play all the characters, play the roles, and she could tell stories for three hundred and sixty-five nights and not repeat a single story. You are dealing with an encyclopaedia! Of course, a Westerner, or people like you and me who are educated or who went to school, would still say she is an illiterate – with all that performative literacy, with all that callisthenic literacy, you know, she would still be considered an illiterate! You know, without that woman and without my mother I wouldn’t be here with you. Everything that I have done comes from them. It did not come from my reading Western literature. The work that I have done as a playwright couldn’t have happened without my mother, without what came from my mother’s side. What the West has done is to give me the tools to deal with what they have given me, to question it, to challenge it, and to alter it, to change it and to be ambitious enough to say, ‘This is not enough for me!’ There is something else that was missed out: largely our orature. What the West came with is literature. But orature is superior to literature, because

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orature also incorporates literature. So, from my mother’s side, and from my mother, I learnt storytelling, song, and poetry. In fact, one of my most famous poems, “Pentheus,” demonstrates that inheritance. What I was trying to capture in that poem is my mother’s prowess as an oral poet. “Pentheus” is taken from Greek mythology. Pentheus was the king and Dionysus was the god whom the women were worshipping. (Remember the people who built Greek civilization were slaves; they came from Asia Minor and they worshipped the god called Dionysus. Dionysus was one of the gods that preempted Christianity.) So these women would go to the hills and they would drink a lot of grape wine; and (so incensed) they would invoke Dionysus with chants. Under that ecstasy they would do outrageous, anti-establishment, and counterhegemonic political things. And it threatened the government. So Pentheus wanted to hide to watch what they were doing. And at the peak of their orgy these women would strip naked; they would tear off the heads of bulls and they would drink the blood. And Pentheus went to hide. His mother, Agave, was the leader of the women. Agave got possessed by Dionysus and as she looked on, the bull rushed in the void, and she saw a face that she thought was a lion in her possessed state. Then she grabbed the lion and tore off its head and gave it to the women to drink its blood. And as some of the priests came in and neutralized the ritual, that was when she discovered that she had torn off the head of her son. This shows that when you transgress on power, you will be destroyed by a power greater than you. In essence, Dionysus as a god (the supernatural) is superior, more powerful, and transcendental; he has a force that is greater than organized or constituted authority. But Pentheus’s own power is constituted authority, and is constituted by the limitation of his mythology, his history, his geography. So I created this poem that is entitled “Pentheus.” But it is one of the greatest illustrations of oral history, orature (mainly on account of its being fully realizable or consisting in performance). There was this man who was trying to get me out of the English Language and Literature Department at Nsukka. He recommended that I be sacked, at the age of twenty-three. And it took Professor Edith Ihiekweazu, who was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, to stop his action. She said, “You cannot get rid of this young man. He is a playwright, he is a director, he is a wonderful teacher. So if we sack him, we have to close down the department.” That was how I stayed back at Nsukka. The man persuaded a student to say that I failed her because she didn’t take part in my play. This was a girl who was playing ‘Mrs Nwokedi’ in the play Nwokedi and would go on the weekend and come

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back on Tuesday. She would go to Benin and go off with any man. So I wrote this poem (in obvious response to the man): Run, Pentheus, run The young rascals are coming See, Pentheus, see They’re climbing up the hill Flee, Penhetus, flee Or they will tear you limb from limb Or turn your face And steel your will And pretend not to see The seasons are singing Of the sprouting of the seedlings See, Pentheus, see The cotyledons are sprouting Hear, Pentheus, hear The cotyledons are crying I say run, Pentheus, run The young rascals are coming.

And I used to do this: I had a pair of jeans trousers that my sister bought for me and it had side patch pockets. And I would put toy pistols in them. I had an orchestra, and they would be playing. So first of all I would do the poem as it is written, in the Western tradition. I could do it with an English accent, then I would show what the oral tradition is and how the oral (African) tradition is enacted. It involves the body, it involves the spirit, it involves the soul, it gives the latitude for improvisation and for commenting on what is happening at the moment that you are creating. So it is not a fixed text; it is open, it is explosive; and it is subversive – it subverts the political structure. So what I have done in that poem is to combine the oral tradition, the orature and literature, as the two elements that came from my father and my mother. So, in a sense, my father created the atmosphere and the licence, but my mother did all the work. This shows that education really is not a matter of what big school your children go to. (That would help, though.) But if parents don’t sit down to teach their children, the children can’t truly learn what would help them get jobs and survive; the education that gives a child the power and the possibility to know who he is can only be given by the parents. Only the parents can give you such education. Like when those grandfathers would call you and say to you, ‘Nnaa kpooruo, kpooruo. I huna, ihe a m di igwaghu o dighi onye ozo di

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igwaghu ya. Hiele m di igwaghu bu ezi okwu obu otu nna m si gwa m ya. M ghaa ugha, mmuo na ndi n’ihu ya gbuo m. I hula ala a, obughi anyi nwe ya. I hula hie ke a ije ime ugbua, ejeghi eme ya eme . . . . I hula nsogbuu unu di nwe, obudighi nwanyi gi kpatara ya, obudi gi’ (Sit down; do sit down, my son. You see, this thing that I’m telling you, no one else will tell you. What I want to tell you is only but the truth. It is exactly what my father told me. If it is a lie that I’m telling you, let the spirit in whose presence I’m kill me! You see this land, it is not our own. You see this very thing you are about to do, it is never done; it is an abomination. You see this problem you have with your wife, she is not responsible for it. You are indeed the problem). Do you see? You are given the morality and the ethics of life. The divorce rate in New York, U S A , for example, is so high. A boy and a girl who have had no training, going to live together in a flat. And you are seeing weddings and all that. Then the next day you are saying ‘fuck you’ to each other in the hallway. Then the marriage collapses. No uncle is interested. LO: What do you think of the Nigerian and especially the Igbo society vis-àvis the U S A ? E I: I have the inclination to come back to Nigeria and do some work here. I would just like to articulate what I think and feel honestly about Nigeria and about the Igbo nation, to reconstitute Igbo identity and Igbo history, in the consciousness of our children particularly. If there is one thing going abroad has taught me, it is that fiction – the creative imagination – is more powerful than facts, than politics. Every nation that I know of was shaped more by literature, imagination, film, than what is happening politically. Politics is subservient to what has been imagined in literature. America is ruling the world today not particularly because of the subversive activities of the C I A or because of their money or because of their efforts, but largely because of the activities of Hollywood. It is Hollywood and their music that excite everybody about America. So when you go there for that, the little material comfort that they give you, because you may not be able to get that in the Third-World countries, what makes the U S more exciting than, say, Canada, Sweden, Britain, etc. is simply the cultural life. And that cultural life was produced by black people. So when I started studying Toni Morrison, I found out that what Toni Morrison tried to produce in her fiction was an African-American traditional imagination. So she imagined an African-American nation as she created it in her fiction. And that is now shaping a new intellectual population of people who know that submerged under the Anglo-American entity called the

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U S A is an African-American nation. They shaped that country economically,

artistically, and intellectually. The inventions created by emancipated slaves between 1865 and 1995 outstripped what white Americans had invented or patented between 1818 and 1995. Most of the things we attribute to white Americans were actually created by black Americans. Most of those black Americans, if you trace their ancestry, were Igbo, Yorùbá, Hausa, and all that. LO: How do we harness and put to use the Igbo intellectual and cultural legacies established by the likes of Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo? E I: The only way to do it is by starting something like a conference on Igbo orature in the universities in eastern Nigeria – a huge conference, where you invite renowned literary and cultural intellectuals to speak. If you don’t do this, as young ambitious Igbo intellectuals, we will keep bemoaning that Igbo culture and all the gains of the literature of Achebe, Munonye, et al. are dying. You cannot talk of lack of support at this point. The Okigbo conference at Harvard University redefined everything. We now know what the problem was. We know what we were supposed to do. However, we need people in Igboland who are hungry for knowledge of Igbo cultural origins, people who have the desire. Therefore the question you ask is, ‘What do we do?’ You are already doing the right thing by asking the right question. All you need more is to use your position to organize a conference on Igbo orature, not literature, not language. It is in orature that all these things cohere. And you may need to back it up with a play production in Igbo. In the conference, you make this argument and you talk to other people who are interested. You contact people like M.J.C. Echeruo, who did a dictionary of the Igbo language; we focus on this important question of the reconstitution of the Igbo identity. That’s not your job: that’s the job of the intellectuals! That’s what Frantz Fanon talks about. The responsibility of the intellectual is not to ride a Citroën or a Mercedes, to wear a suit in this hot sun, and to go to class and talk with disintegrating teeth about something you are regurgitating! So, ‘What is needed?’ as you asked; the answer is partly in why Soyinka was able to do all his plays and all that he has done. And it is because the Yorùbá people know how to organize. They support each other. Igbo people do not; they believe in ‘I have achieved everything, any other person can go to hell’. That’s our psychology. There is no cooperation. And whatever you do, incorporate the girls. They are the people who will make it work. If you want to sow the seed that will work, sow it in the girls. They are more passionate. When they believe in a thing, you can’t take it away from them.

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LO: Many Igbo children born even in Igboland cannot speak the Igbo language. How can we check this culturally dangerous trend? E I: I want to be certain that such a thing can indeed happen – that an Igbo child born in Aba, for example, cannot speak Igbo! I want to be certain that what is happening is not that an Igbo child takes Igbo language to school and then learns to speak English. This is because the current definition of child abuse (for me) is for parents to deny a child the right to acquire his/her mother tongue naturally first, that an Igbo child going to the village cannot communicate with his grandparents unless they can speak English. Such parents need to know that there is no greater child abuse than that you gave an Igbo name, Ugoeze, to a child and that child does not know the meaning of her name. You are invalidating that child. If these parents are Christians, do they know that God hears prayers in all languages, not only in Latin and English? Is it true that the Igbo people are now destroying their own forms of cultural practices such as ‘Ituaka na efe’ and ‘okwukwu’; that there are some Igbo people questioning the relevance of these performances? Is it true that Igbo people now prefer to name their children George, Clinton, Bush, Hillary, etc. in the wild hope that these children will become the inheritors of the American dream? In other words, if your name is Ehilekpu, or Oriakanjo etc., you cannot immigrate to the U S A and fulfil the American dream like Barack Obama? So why must you change your child’s name to English? Is it true that Igbo people whose surnames or names are Nwosu, Nwanjoku, etc. are now renaming themselves Nwa Jesus, Nwapope, Nwabishop, etc? This question of Igbo parents not ensuring that their children learn the Igbo language first before any other is the most relevant question for any Igbo person who is alive. Any Igbo person who is not asking this question today, therefore, is dead. And it is only a dead fish that flows with the stream. The living swims against the current. The reason why we have children is for them to do what we cannot do. LO: What, from your experience, is the reason why a creative artist cannot live exclusively on his/her work in Nigeria? E I: Yes, it is impossible in the Nigerian context – not because we cannot create a system: we have enough readership in Nigerian for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to live in this country (i.e. exclusively on her works). But look at her novels – nobody has read them, not even Igbo people. Yet it is their story. You see what I am saying? What are the values of leadership? What is

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the value of a government? Are you telling me that we do not have enough intelligence in this country to make it possible to read these novels? We have the infrastructure. We don’t want people to read; we keep them in ignorance. Arsenal vs Chelsea every night so they won’t read. We give them ‘bling bling’, we give them T V . Reading is no longer important. Kids all over the world are reading Harry Potter, at least creating a value for reading, the discipline of reading. How many of our kids are reading Harry Potter? Children in the West go mad over Harry Potter. So are you telling me that this is not deliberate? Are you telling me that it is not a conscious effort by the appropriate organs to keep people in ignorance? Social liberation is in the imagination, it is the mind, it is reading. So if we do not have a conscious way of regulating and percolating ideas, of thought, which is what the novel is all about, the novel of ideas, then we are imperilled. And that is why I say that Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is a great novel because it is as detailed as it is historical. So if you make a novel interrogate everything that citizenship is all about, as a discourse, if you make it interrogate everything that democracy means as a discourse, everything that republic means, that civilization means as a discourse, it becomes a tool for cultural redefinition – all of these are in this novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. If I teach this novel to a class of ten, five of those students will become novelists. So the answer to your question is: until we make thinking, the mind, and intelligence our priority instead of indulgence and enjoyment, we cannot make much progress. The political elite make people think that all you need to do to be civilized is to think like the Americans, like the West. That is what they present to people and that is what the kids are picking up (from television and films, music, etc.) to form their lifestyles; where everybody drives, like, three–four–five big cars, and most people have big houses. And that’s why we have armed robbery. That’s why we have 419 [fraud]. Reading is no longer the in-thing. Writers and intellectuals are no longer valued. LO: Would you consider Nwokedi a crucial work in your oeuvre? E I: It was aesthetically a breakthrough. We finally saw how indigenous ritual aesthetics could be used as an infrastructure for modernist politics. That’s what Nwokedi represents – the metamorphosis of what is considered ritual into an infrastructure for political discourse. What is considered fixed and sterile is now found useful for political discourse; for dialogue in democracy. That’s what Nwokedi is all about, a dialogue in democracy from the perspective of the black man who has been dismissed as lacking in ideas. The

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films I would like to make are Igbo films. I want to teach screenwriting in the Igbo language. If you want to learn screenwriting in Yorùbá, I will be happy to teach that, I know a lot about Yorùbá culture and mythology. If you want to do it in Hausa, that’s what I’m interested in. I’m not interested in English. That is the only way we can create an indigenous film industry. The Chinese do not make films in English – their best films; the Japanese do not, the Pakistanis do not, the Indians do not. Yet their film industries are flourishing. If films are made in their indigenous languages, this is where the beauty of the language comes across, through proverbs etc. The truth is that you have white people who are angrier than you and me about what their people did. There are thousands of them. Most of them are people who have Christian backgrounds – the genuine Christians. Some of them are people whose parents were colonial officers, whose childhood, whose sense of the world came from Africa. Some of them are people who are naturally humanitarian. Some of them are people who are embittered by injustice. You see, even when slavery, colonialism, was going on, we always had a faction that was opposing it. That was why they had to bring theologians to prove that the black man did not have a soul. It was because there were their own people who opposed it. At all times, societies are made up of these dialectics. I believe in Christ. I believe that Christ helped to heal me and has been leading me in everything I write, and all that. But there is no way anybody can explain to me that there is something wrong with Igba ekpe: that is, dancing to Ekpe music, which is simple symbolic ritual. And that was one of the most dangerous things the Church did, to call everything indigenous ‘pagan’. LO: Several Nigerian writers living outside Nigeria have won various international awards. Do they represent the best of Nigerian writing? E I: There are two factors responsible for their winning the awards. It is not only the capturing of the predicaments of a people (of the Igbo, African), which Adichie, for example, did. I mean it is so indicting of Britain at all stages. She says, “If these people were not vandals, why did they burn the library at Nsukka?” This is one of the most terrific things I have seen in my life, the style of her dialogue. But what makes a novel win an award is not so much what you say. It is how you transform language, how you imbue language, how you rarefy language with a new meaning. Your first enterprise as a novelist or a poet is your linguistic enterprise – what you contribute to the language, how you deform it, how you deconstruct it, how you say something that has not been expressed in the same way before, and the competence, the

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sophistication, the beauty of the rendering. One of the novels that won the Booker Prize, Vernon God Little by DPC Pierre, is a farce, very funny, very ridiculous. But what the guy does with language, Jesus Christ! I have never seen anything like it before. Therefore, the first yardstick for judging a creative work of art is its linguistic and imaginative possibilities, what it does that has never been done in the field, in the form. Then you begin to look at what the person is saying, the content. So you cannot win a prize for fiction because you are writing about feminism, or because you are writing about ‘rape’. You have to do it in such a way that you engage people. I mean, Chimamanda Adichie’s greatest magic is that she told the Nigeria–Biafra war story from the viewpoint of a houseboy who is illiterate when the story starts. You see his development, his valuing of education. And in the end he writes the story the white man wanted to write. You see? So the view that we see is not Adichie’s, as educated as she is, as erudite as she is; it is this young man’s. What that allows her to do is to speak his language, which is Pidgin, which is bad English. And it is that bad English that makes it so exciting: that is, saying the most devastating thing in poor English. And it takes away the political sharpness, the political acuity of what she is saying. So there is that detachment. You see, great art has a lot to do with your capability to create aesthetic distance. That is why until I read this novel (Half of a Yellow Sun) I couldn’t really competently write about the Biafran experience. She taught me what I needed to do to write that story. And what did I need to do? Do what makes it any kind of story but not a war story. You can find an infrastructure that hides you. This is a growing-up story; it is a story of how this boy grows up. It is also a love story. But that’s not what it is; that is what she has used to deceive the reader. Purple Hibiscus is like No Longer at Ease (not even like Things Fall Apart, which is a work of genius), while Half of a Yellow Sun is like Arrow of God. One, Purple Hibiscus, is sociological, while Half of a Yellow Sun is metaphoric. Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart are metaphoric, while No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah are extremely sociological. They succeed at some level but they hardly escaped their sociological contexts. And what you want to do as a novelist or a fiction writer is to make sure that you transmit what is sociological to what is timeless: that is, what is metaphoric. So, the games you play with the reader are the most important thing you can do as an author. That is the transformation that the creative person does when you take up a piece of sociological information and transmit it into fiction. What happens is that what you have created begins to live a life of its

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own. That is the most vital thing for art. And that life is greater than where it comes from or who wrote it. You animate that historical, sociological, and factual information with an energy and a life that is spiritual. It doesn’t have to be intellectual, but it has to be spiritual. It is animated with a force that is beyond what history can say, what sociology can say, what academicism can say; and that is where you begin to talk about gift, being gifted or talented. But “genius is the ability to do what talent cannot do.” LO: Chimamanda Adichie actually seems to have opened a new vista of language domestication after Achebe’s earlier experimentation. How do you see this? E I: Very simply, she is creating a new paradigm of African literature in which bilingualism is the vogue. For Igbo writers, to talk about literature written in English that does not have Igbo words, Igbo phrases, after this is a waste of time. In fact, what is going to happen now is that writers are going to go bilingual. Bilingual – I mean that I start a line in English and after the third line, the fourth line is in Igbo, and then it continues, with the sixth line in Igbo etc. The one in Igbo, a lot of people argue, should not even be italicized. So what this says is that being educated in the twenty-first century is being able to learn other languages, being able to speak other languages; that our identities have become transnational. That is what globalization is all about. So the problem we have in Nigeria is that we think globalization is about our children learning English and our children speaking English, but not Englishmen learning Igbo. Some parents even think that their children should speak only English; some even smack children when they speak Igbo. That is the investment that the British made, and it is working. It is suicide; that is how a society commits suicide. Once a society loses its language, that society will become extinct. Your language is your covenant with God. That’s why God hears prayers in all languages. So, to answer the question about language paradigm: if you are Igbo, and you are writing today, and you don’t insert Igbo phrases in your work, you have a problem; there is a spiritual problem. This is because language is a spiritual thing. So, something in your spirit has been arrested, you’re not current, you’re not tapping into the source of your being. You cannot tap into the source of your being in another man’s language! You cannot. Like my play about the Aba Women’s Revolution in 1929, which I have almost finished working on, it has moments, about five, seven minutes on stage, that are totally in Igbo. It is English all right, but also totally in Igbo.

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What I am trying to prove there is that anybody who is rushing by can understand what is happening, but there is something you are going to miss out – from the verbal mise-en-scène – even though you will get what is happening. But you will then have to ask the person sitting next to you the humour in the language that the actors are using; why it is so funny. Because it is in Igbo you know that you are missing something. And that is political, and that is power! That you can entertain and at the same time conceal, that’s power. There is something about me that you can never understand unless you learn my language, my culture. LO: Does the portrait of the frustrated artist in The Other Side of the Mask represent your vision in that work? Does it relate to your personal experience? E I: Regarding The Other Side of the Mask, you see, when you write such a work, you write it at a phase in your life. Actually there was a time in Nigeria when I wanted some validation, some recognition, and I felt that there was a lot of politics in what was happening. I submitted a copy of The Colour of Rusting Gold to A N A (the Association of Nigerian Authors). The Colour of Rusting Gold is arguably, in the classical sense, the best work that I have done. This is because, linguistically and in terms of character creation, especially looking at the character of Otagburuagu, I can’t even explain how I wrote that work. The poetry, too, is unbelievable. And that was in my second year in the university. So I submitted it to A N A but the prize was given to Tess Onwueme (i.e. the drama prize) for The Desert Encroaches. And I don’t think The Desert Encroaches comes anywhere near The Colour of Rusting Gold. But what really happened was that the one that I submitted was plagiarized by somebody who worked at the Ministry of Information or so. And he created a play by using my own words, and the play was staged at the A N A festival. And I heard the character saying my own words. A friend of mine, Adegboye, wrote an article in the paper saying that it was plagiarism. And this boy came out saying that nobody owned words. I think he was an Ibibio boy named Akpan. He worked in the archives. So he took this work and changed the name Otagburuagu into Ezeani. But the words were my own words and took up about three-quarters of the play. So that put me off the whole A N A thing. And I said: Well, my vengeance will be to get international recognition. Then, when I won the World Drama Trust Award, I thought it was good enough. But nobody knows about it here except Isidore Diala.

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LO: In what direction do you envisage your writing will go in the coming years? E I: Right now my creative career is beginning! This is the beginning. If it is God’s wish, and he gives me time and life and industry, the work I am doing now, where I have got to is where I have never been in any of these earlier works. I have just finished an adaptation of The Tempest called Sycorax, set in Jamaica, but which just shows that Shakespeare had so little political knowledge. So Sycorax is set in an uninhabited Island. This uninhabited Island has a character called Caliban, which is a pun on Hannibal. That Hannibal is the quintessential representation of the colonized in the first phase of European expansionism. Hannibal is me. So I set it in Jamaica, and it is going to be done on a beach. And I am going to be a visiting professor in Barbados soon. And I am going to do it in the Caribbean and film it. That work, when I was doing it, there was a place I got to and became frightened, frightened with the Third-World argument I was making against the West. You see, when Europe gets into the ship and wants to go back home, what they do not know is that Hannibal has mined it. And just as the ship is about to start, he blows it up, with Miranda, and Ferdinand, and all of them . . . it looks so dangerous to me . .. so terrible. In my play also, Miranda, Ferdinand, and all these people have changed. They are no longer Shakespeare’s creation. They are more intelligent, they are more articulate, and they are more rebellious against the uppermiddle class, against the aristocracy. So I thought: Why kill them if they have changed? And they have found love, genuine love, not the love arranged by Prospero. So what I did was, I then created a theatre company which presented that piece. And then, after the explosion, they said, “That was how we think we should end it! But we realized that art has a lot to do with your humanity. And it is all a human family. And so we have our alternative ending, and this is the alternative ending.” But it put Shakespeare on his head (i.e. makes him stand on his head). I also finished The Harp, which is set in Ireland and which is about racism. It is based on a true story and it is a very productive play. Another work that I finished is Juba, set in the U S , and Iyago, which is my adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. I have equally started working on several novels. One is entitled Red New University, another one is entitled A Ship Flying an Unknown Flag Has Entered the Harbour. When people read my work, I want them to know that it comes from Igbo sensibility, Igbo ontology, the Igbo world-view, Igbo consciousness, and that Igbo is not just a nation but also a civilization. And despite everything that has been done to us, deliberately, by the West –

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Britain, America etc. – you cannot stop that civilization. That’s why I think that this work is God-sent. This work, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, is unstoppable. It has defined for the whole world today the Igbo nation. The Half of a Yellow Sun symbol is the Igbo (Biafran) flag. LO: Is there anything in your early life and career that could be responsible for the socialist revolutionary resonance in your writing? E I: Yes, the revolutionary instinct has something to do with the rebellious instinct. And I think in both my father’s and my mother’s communities, there is something intrinsically rebellious. You know, in my mother’s family, her father fought in the First World War, and his brother fought in the Second World War. When my father was teaching in my mother’s village, we would always go to my mother’s compound and they would be telling us, ‘Daakanya! Da-akanya! Onye obu obu onye? Ihe ga-emeechi, ya mee taa!’ (Mark this! Mark this! Don’t let anybody intimidate you. Who is such a person? Let what would happen tomorrow befall today instead!). So there was this programming not to accept any nonsense; not to accept any structure as something fixed forever (if you are down today, you can be up tomorrow); that anything can be changed; and that it is your agency that changes things. So that was our upbringing. Then, in my father’s village, there is the masquerade culture. It was not a matter of entertainment only. You do the dancing and all, but you will remember that there are other masquerades who will meet you up along the road and you have to fight your way through. Albert m oo, onye o huru o gbuo!’ (Albert, he kills at sight!) is what turned into “Nwokedi m oo, onye o huru o gbuo” (Nwokedi, he kills at sight!) in my play Nwokedi, for example. These things are not ordinary. They became part of your psyche. In Umuakwu, they sing songs like Ugbo elem anyi o, Ugboo ugbo agala abioo (Oh! Our ship of change, Oh, our ship of change approaches.)

It progresses into Ano m na nro akpuo m ishi. Akpuchaa mu ishi aguwa anyuo Ugbo elem anyi o, ee. Ugbo elem anyi e. Unu a hulanu ihe na-eme agburu alaghi ala ee. Amata obi nwanyi enye ya otugbu uzo ee

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(I dreamt that my hair was shaved After I was shaved, the razor became blunt! Oh! Our ship of change; oh, our ship of change. You see what makes it difficult for an evil generation to end. When you understand a woman’s heart, you give her the key to your bedroom.)

You see beautiful mythology in the making! And then, the theme itself is metalinguistically and idiomatically rich. It goes into: “Obu oha ndi eze le! / Obu oha ndi eze / Obu oha ndi eze nwere nwei?” (Oh! The host of kings? / Is it the entire host of kings? / Is it all the kings that have clothing enough?) They were fighting a war with the chief (eze), and they were rebelling against the chief here. So you see the performative structure that makes rebellion an insurrection, the counterhegemony? It is . . . it’s impossible for you to resist it! The tempo increases to Obu oha ndi eze Obu oha ndi eze nwere nwei? Nnaa! Mbuo! Nto! Nno! Ise! Obu oha ndi eze nwere nwei? (Is it the host of kings? Is it all the kings that have clothing enough? One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Is it all the kings that have clothing enough?)

It is this same violent revolutionary scenario the Ekumeku enacts in Nwokedi. In Nwokedi, they didn’t just use their knives around Arikpo’s throat . . . one of the Ekumeku held something around his groin and chanted ‘one, two, three, Nnaa mbuo, nto’. As the song progress, it goes into: Ejim obara akwo aka Mbarimba, ejim obara akwo aka. Ejim obara eri ji Mbarimba, eji obara eri ji Dede Zik, eji m obara eri ji. . . (I wash my hands with blood Yes, I wash my hands with blood! I dip my yam in blood Yes, I eat my yam with blood My elder, Zik, I eat my yam with blood!)

Just before the cutting of the goat’s head, the song goes into: “Arikonko ogu lee / Arikonko ogu lee.” We are now faced with the confrontation that we

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must fight and defeat (which is what Ezeulu does, or is faced with, in Achebe’s Arrow of God). Look at how that “revolutionary regenerative impulse” is embedded in a revolutionary moment of the cutting of the head of the goat, spilling the blood for new life to begin. It is history . . . “Arikonko Ogu abiala / Arikonko ogu abiala / Asi m gi arikonko ogu abiala. . . Asi m gi obatala m n’ahu o / Ezi okwu aga m igbu mmadu o!” (The impulse for war has come / I tell you, it has possessed me! / Honestly, I am going to kill someone!). Now, remember that a goat was later substituted for a human being. Initially, it was always a human being that was used for that. So when you look at the element of revolution, rebellion, and made-up violence, it is only a metaphor for regeneration. At the heart of the whole corpus of my work is a theory of photosynthesis. A plant is in the dark, for the plant to bend towards any direction, light must come from that direction. And it is being in the dark that makes that plant desperate for light. And whatever stands in that plant’s way, it must find its way to that light. So, what I am saying in earnest is that violence is neither good nor bad. It is a facility for change, and people will always resort to it when they have tried out all other possibilities. It is inevitable. You cannot get power from people without what they used to get power. No, you cannot! So, people talk about violence as if it is good or bad. Violence is a phenomenon. And all nations in the world have at one time or the other turned to violence in order to gain their self-determination. The U S fought the British to gain their freedom. And those nations who survive through warfare and violence are often stronger than those who did not. LO: Would you say you are a Marxist writer, then? E I: There is a link between Marxism and Christianity. Marxism is interested in egalitarianism, which is working-class people, the subordinated, those who are not educated, those who are supposedly illiterate. As I was telling you about my mother and my auntie, you saw the level of intelligence in these people. That is what Western education alienated us from. And it is the same marginalization our elite, those who have gained the structure of power the colonials left, are wont to practise, as in Britain. You know, in Britain you have the Royalty, the upper-middle class, the middle class, then you have the working class. It is a society of snobbery. That is what we inherited from them here, the lawyers, the professors, and all that. So they look down on these people, the peasants. You see it? But because of my exposure as a child, I was able to assess the productivity of these people, this supposed lower

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people, what they do with language, the proverbs. If you grew up in the village, you would remember the sophisticated way in which things are said. So, because I was exposed to things like the Ekpe of Umuakwu, the Ekpe of Umuode, the folktales, the proverbs, I was able to see that these people held a body of knowledge that the university cannot give you. The late Professor Donatus Nwoga was the only professor who made the connection when he was teaching poetry. He used to teach us ‘Enwere ji acho’. It is a genre of traditional music that is now extinct because, after ‘Enwere ji acho’, nobody is doing it again. So, when I studied those things, I found out how much superior they are to the ones coming out of anywhere else, including the West. I felt that there must be something these our people have and knew that we are not engaging with. And so, in my plays and all my works, I try to make their intelligence central to all the discourses that I am creating. And in order to incorporate that discourse, I have to kind-of push or break or alter what I have been taught through Western education. I have to put in their own political agenda, which is water, light, agriculture – the essentials of what egalitarianism is all about, what Marxism is all about, and that is what Christianity is also all about. So, what I am saying is that, well, you can look at this awareness and commitment as Marxist, you can look at it as Christian, you can look at it as revolutionary, you can look at it as Fanonian. But what it is, is still what it is. Then, when you write about that, people say it is Marxist. Everybody who counters the government is a Marxist. But that is not the issue. The issue is that people in Lagos, till tomorrow, do not have water. They don’t have light. That has nothing to do with Marxism. Do you see what I’m saying? The job of the intellectual is to think their society out of its problem. That is what Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o is doing. That is what Edward Said did: presenting the Palestinian situation in all its complexities, not merely as a Marxist issue. So the Marxist appellation as used by the capitalist West is a misrepresentation of what necessitates revolutionary, counter-hegemonic, and rebellious discourse, which can manifest itself in poetry, in literature, in films. It has got nothing to do with Marxism. It has to do with the political reality that the artist is trying to articulate. LO: What is your impression of teaching foreign students African literature? E I: White kids are more excited about African literature than African kids or black kids. The best PhD dissertations on it are written by white students. And they give their lives to learn. A student in the U S watched an extraordinary film about Bambara culture, set in about 1900 A D , complete philosophy,

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complete metalanguage, the choral and oral tradition – extraordinary. The imagery was so captivating that the student who was studying for her PhD decided to do her work on the film. She came to Mali and lived for three years there, studying the culture, the history, and the metalanguages of the Bambara people. When students take my course in African literature, within the first two weeks they make a list and say, we want to go to South Africa, we want to go to Ghana, we want to see Africa. That is because they are given something that they do not have, and will never have without you. It is impossible for a student to take my course and remain the same. The point I am making is that white students respond much more powerfully to African literature because it is something they do not have, something the educational system has encouraged them not to know about. And so, when you expose them to it, they discover that it is more complete, more sophisticated, and more communalistic than anything they have been exposed to. What we need to save, therefore, is the orature and not the literature. And because these things are missing, that is why you see kids carrying A K 45s. Those were the ways in which young people filled their place in society; in their communities, in the villages. Every young man would like to cut off the goat’s head with strokes of the matchet in the Ekpe festival of Ngwa people to prove that he is man enough, that he is a good dancer, that he knows the lore, etc. Those are the cultures which you are inculcated into as an Igbo identity. So if I say, ‘I am Igbo’, I am not saying that I am some fake Igbo person. If you go to my friend’s village, Umuakwu (he is my best friend; we have been friends since elementary school) ... what helped them to achieve what they have achieved in Umuakwu is that the young men who went to secondary school came together and said, ‘We are not going to let this village fall apart’. They used the Ekpe festival to reactivate the strength of their identity through performance, through collectivism, through communality. However, that is dying now, because my friend is now an elder in the church. So, they have a song which starts: Ugbo elem anyie Ugbo o, Ugbo agala agala! . . . (This is our procession Our procession is on the move!)

What they are saying is that Umuakwu is the greatest place in the world, that the world started there, that the universe started there. Every culture has that

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kind of mythology. Americans believe that America is the centre of the world: ‘This is God’s own country’. There is no village, no culture, no community that does not have that kind of mythmaking imagination. Now, the song’s tempo reduces to “Ugbo elem anyi O! Ugbo o ... .” They sometimes sing songs that satirize and expose wrongdoers in the village. But most of the songs are songs of self- or communal pride: “Ugbo elem anyi o” (communal) and the chorus, “Ugbo nganga ugbo” (pride). The significant import is that it is a positive communal myth. The leader of the songs intones the lead and the community, the procession, completes it with a chorus that demonstrates the fact that the individual cannot be greater than the community, and also that there is an indivisible link between the individual and the community. That is an African philosophy of existence. Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am,” and an African proverb says: ‘We are, therefore I am!’ If you look at those philosophies, you see why our aesthetics is more communal than the aesthetics of the West. In that song “Ugbo elem anyie . .. ” are loaded all kinds of themes in Igbo/ African philosophy – about love, marriage, invincibility, primogenity, heroism, legend, etc. In fact, the whole gamut of Igbo cultural idiom is embedded in the song in its varied improvisations. LO: How would you assess Chinweizu’s conception of African literature? E I: Well, I disagreed with Chinweizu even before I left Nigeria. I didn’t agree with his analysis in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. I agreed with The West and the Rest of Us, though. I agree with some parts of Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, but the part they used in selling the book is what I disagreed with – that is, the idea that the indigenous poetry, Igbo poetry, which should be the mainspring of our work in modern times, is simple. It is not simple. The oral-poetry tradition in Africa is complex. Of course, Chinweizu had spent all his time in the U S . And he hadn’t done his research and, of course, he was not a trained scholar. So he was just writing freely. If he had done his research, he would have found out that our oral tradition is even more complex than anything any people could have. It is more complex than what Soyinka has in Idanre and Ogun Abibiman. Go to Ifá divination, listen to the Yorùbá babaláwo doing the incantations, it is so complex. So, to tell me that indigenous poetry is simple and it could be understood by everybody, and that it could be critiqued by market women, is rubbish. There is no field of study, even in orature, that does not need training. You

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can’t become an Ifá priest without training. You can’t become a babaláwo without training. Look at even initiation – your son is going to be initiated: what does he do? He has to recite his genealogy. Aha m bu Esiaba Esiaba Irobi Irobi nwa Amikpe Amikpe nwa Anosike. . . .

That is the genealogy of my family stretching to about three thousand years. Fixed memory-work. It is not simple. I wrote an article which everybody thought was tawdry, and I put Chinweizu in his place. But beyond that, he is a very brilliant thinker. He is a good public intellectual, and, politically, you can’t argue with him. Whatever else, he is right. He has revealed to us how Africa has been raped, cannibalized, eaten, metabolized, digested, and poured out by the West, by Europe. But when you come to an area you have no training in (he is a mathematician; he studied mathematics at M I T and dabbled in literature), you say some interesting things and you say a lot of irresponsible things. That takes away the challenge of learning .. . . The terrain of learning is difficult to walk. In Things Fall Apart, you might understand what Chinua Achebe is saying on so many levels. An Australian, for instance, can get the story, but they can’t get the metalanguage. It is like if you go to an Africanist teaching Arrow of God and ask him to explain that episode where Ezeulu goes to Edogo and asks him, “What do I hear that you are carving in Umuagu?’’ and Edogo is quiet. “Is it true that you are carving a deity, an alàsì?” And Edogo now replies, “Whoever says that does not know the difference between a mask and a deity.” And Ezeulu gets angry and tells him, “If I ever ask you this question again, take my name and give it to a dog. If you like carve all the alùsìs in Umuaro, when what will happen to you happens, you will know what I am talking about.” You are dealing with occult forces that you don’t know what they are all about. That passage, if you give it to any Africanist, no matter how many PhDs they have, nobody, not even an Igbo professor of literature, can interpret what is in that passage, that metalingual opacity which couldn’t be rendered in the English language unless he is grounded in Igbo culture. Also, look at that passage in Arrow of God where Ezeulu says something like: I saw Oye and I gave Oye this, and I saw Afo and I gave Afo that. I saw a white cock and I jumped over a ram and slew…. I heard the

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flute of the people and said, ‘can I carry this Alùsì’? . . . And the sound of the flute . . . And the sound of the people . . . .1

That is about leadership. That means that you cannot be a leader in the Igbo context of republicanism and government without the full support of the people; that your leadership is only defined by the participation of the people and not by meting out violence against them; not by despising them or by subordinating them with money, with armed robbery, and with darkness, with lack of water etc. So that passage is the definition of leadership. In Yorùbá culture, it is the same, for example, in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman where Elesin Ÿba says something to this effect: The veneration of my people . . . I am the master of my fate . . . walking down the narrowing path led by the toes of my great precursors. The sand is thicker. I cannot turn aside.2

That is preparedness – preparedness for leadership, for sacrifice. LO: You don’t seem bothered about marriage or are you? E I: (He begins on a jocular note): Well, I thought that, since this is the age of feminist revolution, a girl should come to my place, pay my bride price, and marry me. I mean, we now have equal power with women. So, since power is on their side, she should come to my village, do the research and then say, ‘Oh, we have this son of yours, he is a professor somewhere, he is a playwright, and so I want to marry him. I have made up my mind. How do I pay? Eh, give me the list’. And that would start a revolution. So women won’t just be waiting for you to buy clothes for them. Then they would marry you and

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Ezeulu’s re-enactment of the First Coming of Ulu: “ ‘ we worked into Oye and then into Afo [...] I carried my Alùsì and [...] set out on that journey. A man sang with the flute on my right and another replied on my left. From behind the heavy tread of all the people gave me strength. [...] I looked again and saw that it was Oye. [...] I took a white cock and gave him. [...] I looked to the right and saw a horse and saw a ram. I slew the horse and with the ram I cleaned my matchet, and so removed that evil’ ” ; Achebe, Arrow of God (1964; Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1986): 71. 2 “I am master of my Fate. [...] / Watch me dance along the narrowing path / Glazed by the soles of my great precursors. / My soul is eager. I shall not turn aside”; Soyinka, “Death and the King’s Horseman” (1975), in Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora, ed. William B. Branch (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1993): 7 (Elesin); “the veneration of his own people?” (Olunde, 36).

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buy you suits and take very good care of you. And then you will provide the conjugal services! Anyway, to answer that question on another note, I think it has been a question of two or three major problems. The first was that I missed the people I should have married when I was at Nsukka. You know, the quality of women that I knew when I was at Nsukka, especially when I was teaching, was the kind of women who saw me when I was nothing and who loved me for who I was and not for what I have achieved. They were wonderful friends. And the relationship is still the same today. The poem I read yesterday, “Adaeze,” was one of them. Adaeze would come to my office and sit there. This girl was so beautiful and so intelligent. She made a Second Class Upper Division (2.1) in English. She told me she worked so hard to make a 2.1 in order to be a lecturer like me, so that when we got married, when I come out she would also come out as an intellectual. This girl was extraordinary. Then there was Georgina, whom I used to give my money for safekeeping. I would go to visit my sister and I would buy records and sell them at Nsukka, and I would give her my money to keep for me so that I wouldn’t use it all to buy books. And when I wanted to buy anything she would tell me to explain why I wanted to spend the money. So they were this kind of women who cherished you, who really loved you. Once I went to the U K , once I left Nigeria . . . all those women proposed to me. But my mind was set on becoming a great writer, and I felt that I wouldn’t be able to handle marriage well. And you know, if you are a perfectionist in some way, you want it to work. And I didn’t want to hurt people who loved me so much. So, when I went to Britain, it became a problem of achieving what you wanted to achieve: that is, some measure of visibility, international visibility. And it was Britain that caused the whole problem; my outrage at what they did, as I started discovering them, made me much more desperate to find my footing, to show them what I had. And that cut into my time, into my patience, into every idea, and therefore burying the idea of marriage, momentarily, sort of. So when I revived it, when I started trying to get married in the U S , the problem was now that I was meeting a lot of women who had some baggage – they had been through so much or they were people who had a lot of personality problems. So all the attempts I made . . . I can’t go into the details now, but from the outset, you knew it wouldn’t work. That’s why I decided that the best thing was to come home and then look for somebody who is from our culture, somebody who speaks our language, so as to make sure it’s the right person.

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The good thing that has happened is that, now that I’m tenured, I can leave the U S , come to Nigeria, and teach for three years and the job is still there. I can go anywhere in the world and teach now. What I’m trying to do, therefore, is to focus on teaching in African universities, six months here, six months there. What that does is that your children can have access to your culture, your language, etc. I think, the biggest disappointment I can have is to have children who will not speak Igbo. This is because I have seen Japanese people, Pakistanis, and Chinese people who are brought up by their wives’ mothers in England. They go to Cambridge, they still make First Class but they speak two languages. They speak English with an English accent. But they still speak Bengali. Meanwhile, our own children in England do not speak Igbo at all. And when you speak English to them, they try to correct your accent. LO: What recommendations do you have for the social, educational, and political survival of the Igbo nation? E I: I want to examine how the reconstitution of the identity of a pre-modern African nation, the Igbo nation, which is submerged under a modern made-inEurope nation called Nigeria, evolves both a subversive creative imagination and the deployment of the structures of orature and mythology that are indigenous and specific to the Igbo nation, in the bid to heal it of, one: the crisis of political identity created by colonial history; two: the psychological traumas caused by the civil war, in which every single bullet fired by the federal troops was procured by the British Labour Party; and three: a schizophrenic sense of loyalty and citizenship to two nations at the same time. The Igbo, in my thinking, are torn between allegiances to two nations. One of these nations, as we know, is real and palpable. It is the kind which, based on the Igbo language, is a legal, political boundary as a precolonial African nation and an armoury of mythologies and metalanguages for reconstructing its political destiny imaginatively and realistically. This nation was not imposed on the Igbo people. It is like a nation rescued from the pangs of history; a nation refined by fire, a nation sanctified by blood and endorsed by the collective will of the people. It exists! If you submerge it for hundreds of years, it will still come up. When you pick up a little child’s toy, as the Igbo say, and you raise your hand up, when your hand is tired, you will bring it down. The other nation competing for Igbo political loyalty and patriotism is a fiction. And what we might be discussing as we go along is the difference between patriotism and nationalism. What is the difference between patriotism and nationalism? What we are practising right now is nationalism. It is not patriotism. The

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other nation competing for Igbo political loyalty – it is doubtful if it really exists, except perhaps as a drawing on a map. This phantom of a nation cannot provide its citizens with water, light, medicine or a coherent sense of political or economic direction, forty-seven years after independence: in other words, this second nation, as Benedict Anderson has argued in Imagined Communities, is a political expedient created by Europe for Europe’s own economic survival, without the consent or involvement of the numerous premodern African nations who now constitute the present concatenation of nations nicknamed ‘Nigeria’. That is the main point of my homecoming. I have felt so alienated all this while because of the messy politics in Nigeria. So that, even though all this time I had aligned my destiny with Nigeria because I was born the same day as Nigerian independence, the break came when I realized that really I am not a ‘Nigerian’. I was not privy to the creation of Nigeria, and the whole concept of the Nigerian nation is not working, has never worked, and will never work. That was when it dawned on me that part of my destiny is to help in the creation of the Igbo nation. LO: In Igboland today, about seventy percent of people going to school are women. What do you think that portends for the future of the Igbo nation where women have limitations culturally and socially? E I: Women do not have limitations. It is only women who can save us now. If you don’t involve women in whatever we are doing, we are finished. What you can use to change things in politics comes from either the house or the classroom. If you want a revolution, it will start in the home, in the church, and in the classroom. The civil-rights movement in the U S started in the church. It was a woman who led it, Rosa Parks. The song “This little light of mine / I’m gonna let it shine” moved from the worship of God to confronting the white establishment in the U S . It was women who championed it. There are many others like that created by women. So the idea that women are ‘limited’ is false, because they start early to tell them what the society is, what they are going to face, what racism is, and how they are going to fight it. So they go out and fight it, fully prepared. Thus, the idea that women are alienated is wrong. What happened is that they failed to realize how much power they had because, usually, they were told, ‘This is your limit as women’ – for example, if you place a glass barrier in a pool and restrict a fish from swimming beyond, after a month of its swimming round-and-round, if you remove the glass, the fish will never swim past that former mark of the glass. That is the way it has been with the women in

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our societies. And because we have a high value for family and marriage ... you know – in our parts, love is not the important thing; you secure marriage and family, then love takes care of itself, while the men are free to go out and pursue a political career. But what is going to happen within the next ten, twenty years, is that our girls, with people like Chimamanda Adichie, are going to get political. They are going to participate more. Do you know that the women’s religious associations and the yearly August meetings by women of Igbo extraction can be a very powerful instrument in the political empowerment of women? It’s in line with what I want to do with the play I’m doing on the Aba Women’s Revolution of 1929: to sensitize women, to make the younger girls realize the potentials the women have politically. If you don’t educate the younger women about what politics is, they will be used and abused, they won’t know what their rights are. Political education should not begin when elections are on. It starts in the house. What is going to happen in Igboland is that, as the women move up educationally, all the men who could not move up with them but who have the same quality of intelligence are going to be dropped economically. So the problem that this is going to create is that men are now going to go through what the women have been facing for centuries: i.e. subjugation by the women. The women are going to ‘shit’ on you, like what is happening in the U S . They are going to lock you out of the house. They buy a house and they allow you in, and if you mess up they kick you out. And the law is on their side, of course, because they are going to be the people influencing the law. LO: The brain-drain is a serious problem in Nigerian universities. Why did you join the bandwagon? E I: So, let me tell you one other thing [about] why I am in the U S teaching the children of the rich when I should be here teaching our own children using what I have. I cannot live with the level of insecurity here. I have an illness that is affected by emotion. By diagnosis, I already have a high level of sensitivity. I ought not to live a life where every night I don’t know who is going to knock on the door, so I can’t sleep well. I can’t live a life where I can’t walk on the road or I can’t take a walk on a path without watching out for somebody who is coming to rob me. You have to create a conducive atmosphere for people to work. I have to have water, I have to have light. And that’s what the military governments and the civilian oligarchy deny us. Even when they give something that is fairly materialistically comfortable, they have created a spiritual, psychological, and intellectual atmosphere that can-

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not help your work. I mean, I can come to Nigeria for, say, three months and do some work, but you can’t expect me to stay here for one year with all these insecurities. It is difficult. And if I have to write a brilliant piece of work, I might get angry, I might get bitter, and go back to where I was twenty years ago. And that’s not what I want. You have to have money for people to go to conferences, because that’s where you try out your ideas and that’s where you get more ideas. If I live in Nigeria, will they give me money to attend all the conferences that I attend in Australia, in England, etc.? I have got three letters for conferences at Harvard in September. Can a Nigerian university give me money to pay for all that? I left Nigeria at a point where, as a lecturer in the university, my salary was not enough to hire an apartment of three rooms. I could not pay my siblings’ school fees, I could not own a car, and definitely I could not afford to have gotten married at that time, unless the lady was to come in and feed me, you know, to contribute substantially to the upkeep of the house. But if it was to get a woman and take care of her fully, there was no way I could have been able to do that. Meanwhile, those in Britain, in Canada, etc. who were far less intelligent than me could buy houses, cars, and have light to work. I had to use hurricane lamps most of the time. I could not afford a laptop or a computer. The plays I directed were done with minimum light on the set and everything. We could not tour with the plays, because the university had no vehicles. Playwrights and directors in other parts of the world, when they do particular jobs where they need the university to sponsor their going outside to present plays, they get paid for it, if the play is very successful. If Nwokedi had been an American play, I would have been a millionaire today. People would be talking about me the way they talk about Arthur Miller. That is, it would have become an institution, because Nwokedi was a breakthrough. It is not possible for me, for the kind of dream that I have, to work in a country where there is no light and there is no water; where I cannot get easy transportation. Filmmaking involves so much logistics. So the Igbo people, despite the money they make, and all that and all that, do not quite understand what it means to invest in ideas. They want ready money. They want something that yields immediately. That’s not how America became America, that’s not how Britain became Britain, that’s not how Ireland became Ireland. We have enough money in Igboland to start a Chinua Achebe University that is going to beat any other university in this country, because Chinua Achebe is such a valid currency that American professors would like to come and teach for free if we start that

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university. But our people would spend so much money for their children to go to any university elsewhere in the world. If the military had not worked hard to destroy the university system, the education system, to make it impossible or unworkable for intellectuals to do their work, for students to enjoy the benefits of education, we wouldn’t now have the glut of young boys who don’t want to go to school, who look on fraudsters as their heroes, who want to build a castle in four months when they have no jobs or profession. They would have known what the kids in Ghana know today, that you have to walk through a process to arrive somewhere. Here we have kids who have been disoriented from that process of industry. And these standards (negative standards) were set by people in power, people who did not work for their money. People in the military did not do anything. We were not at war. A chap comes into the military as a captain, just because his father was a major general; every month, he is promoted. The alternative, therefore, is to field into politics people who are younger than Obasanjo and Buhari, who made their money through the military. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an intellectual or somebody who went to the university. It is a matter of fielding people, for example, who had some strong religious orientation, priests from different denominations, people who have abounding interest in the ordinary people, to take certain responsibilities, especially in those key ministries like health, education, justice, etc. You tell him: ‘This is the allocation for health, and you are going to use it for building hospitals, etc. in so and so place. If you don’t want to serve in this cabinet, out!’ LO: The influence of the military in Nigerian politics features so much in your writing. What is your attitude to the legacies of the military in Nigerian society? E I: It is the military that has created these armed robberies and assassinations going on in society. The war also made weapons available to the wrong people. Before the war, weapons were confined to the armoury and the military camps. So, even if you had arms, it was the Dane gun. But the question of mere children carrying submachine guns and shooting recklessly, that came after the war. In fact, the answer is in my play Cemetery Road. The military is a class to whom the days have no difference. They wake up, they go through their drills, they come back. There are supposedly intelligent people there, but they are not creating capital. They are not thinking of creating companies. They are not waking up every day to say, ‘I have five hundred naira, how do I make it better?’ They wake to take the capital that already

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exists. And if their wives are economically intelligent, they may start a company. Now, if we steal this money and build companies and employ people, I would not mind that. But to steal the money for purely frivolous personal needs, that is terrible. When you do a little research, you get angry about the way African leaders deplete the economy of their countries. Once they get to power they deplete it and would not circulate it back in the country but foolishly give it away to those who defrauded the same country in the first place. The anger is, why won’t these leaders know that these foreign countries are not interested in you? Once you go out of power, the house you built in their land becomes their own, the money becomes theirs, your children will not have access to it. LO: It has been a great pleasure speaking with you, Professor Irobi. E I: The pleasure, indeed, has been mine. Thank you so much.

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God (1964; Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1986). Soyinka, Wole. “Death and the King’s Horseman” (1975), in Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora, ed. William B. Branch (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1993): 1–53.

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C OMPANY : A P HOTO G ALLERY AND IN

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F I G U R E 1 : Esiaba Irobi in Barbados (2008). Courtesy of Georgina Ehuriah.

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F I G U R E 2 : At Sentinel Poetry Live (London 2006). Courtesy of Molara Wood.

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F I G U R E 3 : Esiaba in Olu Oguibe’s apartment. Courtesy of Olu Oguibe.

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F I G U R E 4 : Esiaba. Courtesy of Georgina Ehuriah.

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F I G U R E 5 : The Ufo-bearer in Irobi’s Nwokedi, Commassie Arts Theatre, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria, November, 2012.

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F I G U R E 6 : The Ekumeku in Irobi’s Nwokedi, Commassie Arts Theatre, Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria, November, 2012.

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F I G U R E 7 : Esiaba Irobi and Isidore Diala at their first meeting (London, March 2006).

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P ART T WO

Theatre and Modernization in the First Age of Globalization The Cairo Opera House

C HRISTOPHER B ALME

My country [Egypt] is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions. — Khedive Isma’il Pasha, 1879

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it is astounding to many that theatre, an ‘old’ medium that has been repeatedly pronounced moribund with the arrival of each successive wave of technological media, has in fact continued to flourish and expand. Today, theatre is a global artistic practice, a crucial cultural institution in many countries, and a central part of transnational networks of artistic exchange. Often defying exact definition, its manifestations range from improvised street theatre in backyard slums to multimillion-dollar edifices purveying the latest performances of nineteenth-century opera to twenty-first-century cultural elites. Despite its bewildering number of forms, which include puppet theatre, stand-up comedy, and abstract performance art, theatre-makers and audiences are connected across cultures by mutual recognition of commonality in what they do. Investigation of this artistic and cultural diversity has been a hallmark of theatre and performance studies over the past two decades. The still rapidly expanding disciplines of theatre and performance studies have devoted themselves primarily to understanding the semantic, ideological, and aesthetic specificity of performances on the basis of a number of shared theoretical and methodological tools (in EEN FROM THE PRESENT,

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the main semiotics, and, more recently, phenomenology and critical performance theory). What theatre studies has not yet attempted to do is to explain how this global phenomenon came to be. What were the factors that led to a particular, often Western-influenced, artistic practice being exported to and established in markedly diverse cultural environments? How did these processes of transposition affect the new host cultures and how did they in turn change the practices being exported? My interest, therefore, is in sketching very briefly the lineaments of this process and illustrating some of the issues by discussing the establishment of the Cairo Opera House under Khedive Isma‘il Pasha in 1869. My discussion is situated in the context of a new research project, Global Theatre Histories, recently established at the University of Munich under the auspices of the Reinhart Koselleck programme of the German Research Society.1

Global Theatre History In the one hundred and thirty years stretching roughly between 1860 and 1990, the nature of theatre was transformed radically throughout the world as it changed from being a predominantly locally defined, practised, and experienced cultural form to one that had global reach. In the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and modernization, processes that provided the political, economic, and cultural foundations of contemporary globalization debates, Western concepts, practices, and above all institutions of theatre were exported to most territories around the globe. In the eyes of most theatre historians, however, theatre remains a resolutely local, even parochial phenomenon in which the local perspective enjoys unconditional priority over other research paradigms, as some historians have begun to critically note.2 Important exceptions that signal a possible departure from existing practice include Joseph Roach’s study Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), which, navigating between eighteenth-century London and twentieth-century New Orleans, focuses on just one trajectory, while J. Ellen Gainor’s work is less focused on the early period than the title of her collection, Imperialism and Theatre (1995), suggests. The recent multi-authored Theatre Histories makes a decisive break 1

For further information, see www.gth.theaterwissenschaft.uni-muenchen.de/index .html. 2 See, for example, Marvin Carlson, “Become Less Provincial,” Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 177–80, and Jo Robinson, “Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History,” New Theatre Quarterly 23.3 (August 2007): 229–40.

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with traditional nation-based, eurocentric approaches, but does not deal extensively with the period here.3 Over the last ten to fifteen years, a vigorous debate has emerged among historians on the question of whether it is possible to speak of ‘global’ or ‘world’ history. In contrast to older and, most historians would agree, hubristic and highly eurocentric attempts to write world history in Hegelian terms, the recent debates are keenly aware of the ideological minefields implied by such paradigms. The proponents of global history are fully cognizant of the massive critique that postcolonial theory has levelled at Western historians. Nevertheless, they argue that certain fundamental changes occurred in the nineteenth century that resulted in a fundamental reorganization of the way nation-states and cultures related to one another. Global history takes up the globalization discussion with its strong presentistic focus (some globalization advocates date the beginnings of the phenomenon as late as the end of the Cold War in 1989), but argues for an historicization that usually places a caesura in the mid-nineteenth century. Representative of a much larger group, scholars such as Christopher Bayley, Niall Ferguson, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Michael Geyer and Charles Bright claim that the central challenge to a renewed world history in the present is to narrate the world’s pasts in an ‘age of globality’. The watershed for this imbricated world history are the mid- to late-nineteenth-century world-wide processes of unsettlement that saw an accelerating “mobilization of peoples, things, ideas, and images and their diffusion in space and time” and the efforts of both local rulers and global regimes (empires) to “settle” them.4 The tensions ensuing from these dynamic processes form a central focus of global history. While globalization has replaced modernization as a paradigm of change and as a social imaginary over the last decade, and the discourse of globalization claims to break with the earlier modernization discourse in important ways, most notably in abandoning a eurocentric teleology of change, the actual effects of the modernization paradigm are still being felt. It is one of the central remits of global history to make explicit the preconditions and longterm effects of modernization and thereby contribute to the ongoing critique of eurocentrism and colonialist legacies. Affirmative arguments on this legacy 3

See Phillip Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams & Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006). 4 Michael Geyer & Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100.4 (October 1995): 1053.

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can also be found,5 but they remain still a minority. Under the term ‘global history’, conferences, journals, and research projects are providing forums to vigorously debate these issues and to engage in more detailed studies of the processes identified as being symptomatic of global history. Such projects are by definition transnational, comparatist, and informed by critical theory as it has emerged in social anthropology and literary studies. The present project proposes to engage with the perspectives developed by global history and to examine concomitant theatrical processes. The idea of ‘global theatre histories’ turns on two interconnected hypotheses: that during the second half of the nineteenth century, a seismic shift took place in the way nations and cultures began to deal with one another; and that this shift is reflected in the way theatre was organized and disseminated, and how it functioned as a cultural force. This period saw in the West an unprecedented growth of theatre in all metropolitan centres that expanded into extensive touring and the establishment of theatrical networks spanning the globe. The period also saw the emergence of a new discourse or system known as ‘art theatre’, where a certain realm of theatrical activity was bracketed off and imbued with a discourse hitherto reserved for the fine arts, highbrow music, and certain literary texts. The creation and expansion of ‘art theatre’, which came to be almost coterminous with the notion of ‘modern theatre’, required also the definition of a new kind of public sphere, large and active enough to sustain it. This project is centrally concerned with illuminating the twin concepts of modernization and modernity and their mutual imbrication, as manifested in the creation of new public spheres that often transcended national boundaries.6 Broadly speaking, global theatre historiography will concentrate on structures and processes that link nations and cultures rather than emphasizing their cultural specificity. Areas of focus must take cognizance of the fact that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century theatre was driven by a double imperative: trade and ideas. Theatre as trade was motivated mainly by economic exigencies that seldom if ever joined with the imperatives of national cultural policy. It operated along continental and intercontinental trade routes, which, with a few notable exceptions such as the Meiningen Theatre, have seldom 5

See Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004). 6 For a discussion of the public sphere in connection with theatre, see Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2014).

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been studied in any depth. First, theatrical contact in colonies and in noncolonized territories alike was usually with the commercial variety of Western theatre. Of equal or even greater importance for a study of “global theatre histories” are the connections between metropolitan centres. Even familiar transatlantic routes such as London–New York or Berlin–New York remain under- or not at all researched in terms of the way they constructed and sustained a public sphere that appears to be coexistent in two places at once. Other troupes plied their trade between London and Calcutta, between Paris and Algiers, between Madrid and Buenos Aires. This notion of globalization avant la lettre will form a central focus of the project.

An Old Medium Globalizes The processes that I have outlined are complex and intertwined, and resist easy categorization, especially in terms of theatrical periodization. Nevertheless, I shall propose one possible beginning (although I recognize that there are many), a starting point from which to view the following developments. I follow current thinking, perhaps even a consensus, among global historians such as Geyer and Bright, that the period from 1850 to 1914 can be regarded as the first phase of globalization. The combination of technological advances such as the invention of the telegraph, the introduction of steamships, and the growing networks of colonial trading posts and administrative centres and, in general, information exchange through the new institutions of international expositions all combined to create the prerequisites for globalization in almost the present sense of the term. This feeling of being interconnected with the globe and its peoples was forcefully and also somewhat wistfully expressed by John Maynard Keynes in his famous account of the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919, where he describes the situation on the eve of the First World War: The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages [. . . ]. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily news-

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paper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.7

This nearly complete “internationalization” that Keynes observes from economic and social perspectives (he notes, for instance, that goods and foodstuffs were never so cheap as in the period preceding the World War I) also had an impact on theatre, as it, too, began to internationalise or ‘globalize’ on an unprecedented scale. In 1889, there were 302 permanent theatre buildings in Germany, England, France, Austria–Hungary, and the U S A together. In 1926, by one calculation there were 2,499 permanent theatres in Europe alone. In the period postdating 1890, over 1,500 theatres were built, most of them before 1914. This pattern was repeated throughout many of the former and existing colonial empires, particularly in South-East Asia and Latin America.8 In addition to the construction of permanent theatre spaces, the same period saw a massive expansion of theatrical touring, which began to be organized on an industrial scale and brought European theatre to all those parts of the globe that could be reached by steamship or rail. In her study of the economics of the nineteenth-century British stage, Tracy Davis notes: changes in the logistics of [theatrical] touring carry significant implications for the entrenchment of imperialism throughout the Englishspeaking and Anglo-colonized world along the routes of British maritime trade, they also help forecast the cultural capital of the arts undergoing globalization.9

While the bulk of this theatrical trade was Anglo-American in origin, it was by no means exclusively so. A constant stream of plays and performers from Germany sustained cultural and mental connections between the large German-speaking population of New York and the Vaterland. Other troupes plied their trade between Lisbon and Rio, between Paris and Algiers, between Madrid and Buenos Aires. The world even began to be divided up into geocultural spheres of operation. The today almost forgotten English-American impresario Maurice Bandmann (1873–1922) operated a rotation system of 7

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919): 9. 8 H.–C. Hoffmann, Die Theaterbauten von Fellner und Helmer (Munich: Prestel, 1996): 9. 9 Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 336.

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continuous touring with four or five companies continually on the move between Gibraltar and Yokohama, Cape Town and Australia, London and the West Indies.

The Beginnings: The Cairo Opera House In contrast or parallel to the free-trade undertakings of touring companies, there emerged at roughly the same time the idea and institution of theatre as a sign of modernization. One could argue that a particular technological and cultural model of theatre was perceived as being a necessary corollary to modernization in the areas of administration, health, and industrial technology. In order to understand the developments in Egypt and in particular Cairo, which form our focus, we must regard theatre less as a form of rampant capitalism than as a marker of state-driven modernization. The establishment of theatre in the European style in Egypt is intimately related to the modernization programme initiated by Khedive (Viceroy) Isma‘il Pasha (1830–95) in the 1860s. He continued the projects begun by his grandfather, Muhammad Ali, who wrested control of Egypt from the remnants of Mameluke power following the French expedition under Napoleon in 1811. He recognized that Egypt needed to catch up with Europe in terms both of technology and of its economic and institutional structures. He sent Egyptians abroad, in particular to Paris, to study European languages and set up translation schools to translate a wide range of texts into Arabic. He also set up the first printing press in the Arab world, overcoming religious opposition to the new medium. He laid the basis for the Egyptian cotton industry and manufacturing. When the French-educated Isma‘il assumed the throne in 1863, Egypt was still a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire but a de-facto independent state. Whereas the city of Alexandria was part of a thriving cosmopolitan Mediterranean economic and cultural network, Cairo was a city still dominated by medieval construction and building. The Khedive’s modernization programme, which extended operations begun by his grandfather, aimed at bringing the medieval city into the modern age by building canals, regaining land, and implementing a sewage system. Jacques Lacan has written about what he terms “the prodigious analogy that exists between sewage and culture [.. . ]. A great civilisation is first and foremost a civilisation that has a waste

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disposal system.”10 If we apply Lacan’s observation to Khedive Isma‘il’s programme of urban renewal and blend it with Brecht’s famous saying “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral” (first the grub, then morality), we can observe that Isma‘il first embarked on a public-works programme by building a system of canals and establishing the Cairo gas and water companies in 1865 as separate bodies. The new quarter of IsmƗ’ilƗyah that became the administrative and cultural centre of modern Cairo was made possible by the building of the canal of the same name. A crucial step and influence in Isma‘il’s concept of a new Cairo was the 1867 Exposition universelle d’art et d’industrie in Paris, where Egypt was represented with its own Egyptian Park devoted to its Pharaonic past and not its Western-oriented future (Fig. 1). Although the Khedive’s plans to modernize Cairo pre-dated the exposition, there is no doubt that this international showcase of French and European technological progress accelerated the institutional translation process. The exposition was planned as the apotheosis of Baron Haussmann’s urban refashioning of Paris, and, among the many highlights, conducted tours through the new sewers of Paris proved to be a major attraction.

F I G U R E 1 : Egyptian Pavilion, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1867.

As Janet Abu-Lughod notes in her history of Cairo, this exposition in particular had an immense impact on cities throughout Europe and beyond; “Egypt, too, was deeply affected by the ideal incorporated in the Exposition 10

Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, tr. David Macey, preface by Jacques–Alain Miller (1985; London & New York: Verso, 2008): 65.

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Universelle.”11 The Haussmann system meant, however, the destruction of existing dwellings and buildings to enable the realization of new ideals of symmetry and wide boulevards. Around the Ezbekiyah Gardens in the new quarter of IsmƗ’ilƗyah (Fig. 2), old palaces and adjacent buildings were demolished to make way for roads, thoroughfares, and public buildings, including the national Théâtre de la Comédie, a circus, and the Opera House, all of which were inaugurated during 1869, just in time for the Suez Canal celebrations. Over the years, more public buildings were added, so that, by the end of the century, the Opera House, located at one end of the Place de l’Opéra, was part of an ensemble consisting of the Cairo Stock Exchange, the law courts, the telegraph office, and various luxury hotels and banks.

F I G U R E 2 : The Ezbekiyah Gardens in the new quarter of IsmƗ’ilƗyah showing the conglomeration of modern institutions such as banks, the stock exchange, post office, law courts, libraries, and hotels.12

The first theatrical construction financed by the Khedive was the Théâtre de la Comédie, a stylish wooden building made up of stalls and boxes intended to provide the appropriate architectural framework to accommodate visiting French companies. It opened in January 1869 with a performance of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, the Khedive’s favourite play. The theatre was designed to present drama, operetta, and vaudeville. It was followed by the construction of a hippodrome for circus entertainment and a fully equipped opera house (Fig. 3). 11

Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1971): 104. 12 Source: Meyers Reisebücher Ägypten (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Insitut, 1904).

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F I G U R E 3 : Khedival Opera House, c.1870.

The opera house itself was constructed over the course of six months under the supervision of the Italian architect Pietro Avoscani, who oversaw not only the building itself but also the internal furnishings and even the programme for the opening night. Its construction was a typical case of Haussmann-inspired urban renewal predicated on removing ‘old’ buildings and inhabitants. It was built on the site of a derelict palace but also on space occupied by oldstyle Arab houses and shops. Since some of the occupants refused to accept the somewhat parsimonious offer of compensation, the Khedive had their houses and shops clandestinely burnt down to make way for ‘progress’.13 The Théâtre Khédivial de l’Opéra opened in November 1869 with a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto. A wooden construction, it seated approximately 850 and was divided into boxes and stalls. It received substantial financial support from the Khedive and was frequented by the Europeans and the local elites. In its first season, lasting from November 1869 to March 1870, sixty-six performances of Italian opera were given, with some of the leading singers of the period attracted by the promise of munificent recompense. The Khedival Opera House was also the site and, indeed, occasion for Verdi’s opera Aida, which was performed there in 1871. In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has analysed the complex entanglement of this commission with the imperial project, with the discipline of Egyptology, and, more broadly, with the Orientalist project analysed in his most famous book, Orientalism (1978). Said regards the Aida project as an example of early 13

Philip C. Sadgrove, The Egyptian Theatre in the Nineteenth Century: 1799–1882 (Reading, U K : Ithaca, 1996): 52.

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globalized theatre in the context of imperialism: “not so much about but of imperial domination.”14 He emphasizes that the Khedive involved Egypt ever more deeply in “what has been called the ‘world economy’,” leading ultimately to indebtedness, bankruptcy, and British annexation.15 In Said’s reading, the Khedive’s operatic project, both architecturally and in terms of repertoire, represented metonymically by Aida, “was an imperial article de luxe, purchased by credit for a tiny clientele whose entertainment was incidental to their real purposes.”16 While Said’s critical reading remains representative of postcolonial perspectives on such undertakings, I propose that we revise this somewhat dismissive assessment and ask instead what catalytic effect the theatrical modernization project actually had. The rapid construction of these three performance spaces – a theatre, a circus, and an opera house – demonstrates, in fact, how the implementation and establishment of theatre on the European model was always part and parcel of modernization and imperatives for urban renewal. The close contiguity with other modern institutions, such as banks, law courts, and museums shows also that theatre is not a special sanctified space but, rather, an integral part of a cultural and institutional network incorporating interlocking judicial, financial, and communication systems.

Public Spheres The global processes of colonialism and imperialism created communities of expatriates and local elites who settled in considerable numbers in a country such as Egypt, which was modernizing at great speed, at least in certain areas. These elites lived in a state of mental bifurcation. While physically abroad, they often resided mentally in their countries of origin. By 1897, the number of foreigners in Cairo alone was estimated at around 30,000, against a total of 590,000, which is a sizable population for cultural activities. We are speaking, of course, about a colonial class with Europeans monopolizing the important government posts and enjoying privileges and a style of life that made them the envy not only of Egyptians but also of their countrymen at home. And, perhaps most important of all, especially for the theatre: “By 1897 the destinies of Egypt and Europe had become inextricably intertwined.”17 14

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993): 138. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 152. 16 Culture and Imperialism, 156. 17 Abu-Lughod, Cairo, 99. 15

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The emergence of theatrical institutions in the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and modernization created public spheres in the target countries that were by definition ‘transnational’, although such a term may be construed as anachronistic in the age of colonialism and imperialism. The institution of theatre and particularly its sustainment by touring troupes and communication with metropolitan centres meant that audiences and publics defined themselves implicitly or explicitly as being in some way ‘in touch’ with other nations or cultures or even with the ‘West’ as a collective cultural imaginary. Viewing an Offenbach operetta in a theatre in Cairo performed by a Parisian theatre troupe implied a palpable connection with a metropolitan centre for both colonial and indigenous spectators. Institutions such as national theatres were, on the one hand, predicated on the creation of an “imagined community” of the nation,18 but, on the other, legitimized culturally through contacts with larger metropolitan centres (London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna), whence they derived technology, repertoire, and, ultimately, cultural recognition. Some of the contradictions of such superimposed institutions, yet ones financed and supported by local elites, can be seen from the Suez Canal celebrations of 1869 when the crowned and many other heads of Europe descended on Egypt for a sustained jamboree of parties, celebrations, and performances of many kinds. The whole process was marked by cultural contradictions and misunderstandings on many levels. As Abu-Lughod notes, IsmƗ‘il did his best to create a European image of himself and his country; the Europeans wanted only the exotic >. . . @. The guests at IsmƗ‘il’s grand reception at the Qasr al-Nil Palace were treated to a chamber concert and a performance of the Comédie Française; they had looked forward to an evening with Scheherazade.19

In Georges Douin’s detailed account of the celebrations, we find numerous documents by writers, artists, and crowned heads. The French Empress wrote back to her spouse, Napoleon I I I , that Cairo reminded her of Spain, the dances, music, cuisine all being “identical,” including the prayers of the whirling and screaming dervishes that she attended.20

18

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). 19 Abu-Lughod, Cairo, 112. 20 Georges Douin, Histoire du règne du khedive Ismaïl (Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello stato per la Reale società di geografia d’Egitto, 1933): 445.

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The new European theatres were all manned by French – or, for the opera, Italian – staff, a kind of technological and artistic development aid avant la lettre. Audiences were treated to “les plus belles productions de Verdi, de Rossini et de Donizetti.”21 The Théâtre de la Comédie performed, as noted above, a mixture of vaudeville, comedies, and operetta. Douin remarks that the inhabitants of Cairo displayed a clear preference for vaudeville as opposed to comedy, despite the presence of plays by Scribe, Labiche, and Sardou. The repertoire of the operetta troupe consisted almost entirely of works by Offenbach. The circus performed a combination of equestrian displays, “pantomimes bouffes, pieces féeriques, tableaux militaires, historiques, mythologiques.”22 Such celebrations are, of course, unique events and tell us little about the place of theatre in Cairene society. However, the buildings were there; the troupes were also there, or at least they came and went; and there was a growing audience for the performances. As Egypt came ever more under European influence, culminating in the de-facto annexation by the British in 1882, so, too, did the number of foreign residents increase who provided a growing audience for theatrical entertainments. The emergence of theatre in Egypt is very much a story of intertwined cross-cultural contact as familiarity with European theatre and its genres increased. Initially, Alexandria with its large cosmopolitan population was the more important locus of theatrical activity. Well before 1850, there had been visits by touring troupes and also attempts to build theatres on the European model. Equally important, however, were the activities of Arab-speaking performers, in particular Syrians who emigrated in considerable numbers during the nineteenth century and who found in Egypt and particularly Alexandria a more dynamic society than their own province in the Ottoman Empire. During the remainder of the century, an autochthonous theatre tradition emerged that fused European and Arab cultural traditions.

Theatrical Transfer Although the official birthdate of Arab drama in the European sense of the term is usually given as 1848 in Beirut when an adaptation of Molière’s comedy L’Avare written by the Maronite Christian Marun al-Naqqash (1817– 55) under the title Al Bakhil was first performed in an amateur context, Egypt quickly became the main locus of activity. Here the main focus of experimen21 22

Douin, Histoire du règne du khedive Ismaïl, 471. Histoire du règne du khedive Ismaïl, 472.

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tation with the new medium oscillated between Alexandria and Cairo. The former possessed a larger European population, while the latter had the advantage of state support in the persons of the khedives and their ministers. The generally acknowledged founding father of European-style drama and theatre in Egypt was James Sanua (1835–1912), a Jew of Italian descent who was born and raised in Cairo.23 With the support of Khedive Isma‘il, he had studied in Italy and was well acquainted with European theatre forms. In 1870, he began to write and perform in Cairo comedies and operettas in Arabic; his activities thus coincided with the Khedive’s efforts to establish theatre on the European model. His first plays were performed in the Théâtre de la Comédie under the Khedive’s patronage. As some of these works dealt with controversial themes (polygamy, drug addiction), his theatre survived for only two years before Sanua was forced to emigrate to France, where he continued his criticism of Egyptian society as a journalist. His activities were continued by others, however, in both Alexandria and Cairo. There developed both a highbrow and a commercially oriented musical theatre combining European dramaturgy, Arabic language, and diverse musical styles. This form of “adaptation theatre”24 spread from Egypt to other Arab countries in the course of the twentieth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, travel guides for Egypt featured not only the usual sights of Egyptian antiquity and the newly established Egyptian museum, but also theatres, both Arab and European. Baedeker’s guide to Egypt of 1898 notes for Alexandria three different theatres offering French and Italian operas and operettas.25 In Cairo, visitors could choose between the Khedival Opera House, the Summer Theatre in the Ezbekiyah Gardens, and also “Arab Theatres,” for information on which the reader should “see the newspapers”; Port Said also offered entertainment in the form of two cafétheatres, one offering musical performances, the other featuring a “theatre of marionettes.”26 In Cairo, important additions were theatres such as the Kursaal specializing in music hall (Fig. 4) and the Printania (Fig. 5), a major 23

He was also known as Abu Naddara and ωϮϨѧѧѧѧѧѧλ ΏϮѧѧѧѧѧѧϘόϳ – Ya‘qiib ibn Rafa‘il Sannu‘. 24 Friedrike Pannewick, Das Wagnis Tradition: Arabische Wege der Theatralität (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000): 91–93. 25 Baedeker, Egypt (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1898; New York: Elibron Classics, 2000): 6. 26 Baedeker, Egypt, 29, 170.

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venue for touring European troupes. A recent historian of Arabic drama in Egypt, Muhammed Badawi, notes that the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth saw the emergence of a large number of theatre companies that included local actors and playwrights: “As early as 1900 the Egyptian theatre had become not only a permanent feature of Egyptian urban life, but a political force of some significance.”27

F I G U R E 4 : Kursaal Music Hall in Cairo, c.1920.

F I G U R E 5 : Printania Theatre in Cairo, now derelict (http://www.greatmirror.com).

By the beginning of the First World War, the Cairo Opera House had become an institution catering for two public spheres: the communities of expatriates and a growing public of Egyptians who began to demand theatre in their own language. A key transitional figure in the ‘translation’ of theatrical institutions was the Syrian–Lebanese actor Georges Abiad (1880–1959) and his troupe, which performed initially in French and later in Arabic. Abiad had received khedival support to study acting in France. On his return in 1910, he formed a 27

M.M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge U P ,

1987): 5.

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bilingual troupe and performed a European repertoire in French in the Opera House with the financial support of the Khedive. With Abiad, the process of institutional translation we have been examining now moves into a new phase of actual translation. Soon after this season, Abiad was commissioned by the then minister of education, Saad Zaghloul, to ‘arabize’ Egyptian education to counter the colonial dominance of the existing educational structures. Abiad proposed translating European dramas into Arabic. He also began to perform in Arabic and became a central figure in the history of Egyptian theatre and beyond, as he also toured North Africa. With the arrival of Abiad (and his competitors) on the theatre scene, we can observe the completion of what we might call the first phase of theatrical modernization in Egypt and, indeed, more broadly in the Middle East. The modernization processes that had begun in the early nineteenth century and that were initially military and economic in nature were extended with substantial, although not always entirely reliable, state support into the cultural sphere. The idea and institution of theatre as a signal of ‘modernization’ became a sign of global theatre in the sense that a particular technological and cultural model was perceived as being a necessary corollary to modernization in the areas of administration, health, and industrial technology. In order to better understand how these processes of institutional translation took hold and were ultimately effected, we should examine more closely the mutual imbrication of these twin modernities: the political and economic modernization project, on the one hand, and the cultural imperatives, on the other. It is necessary to ask how the symbolic institutional power of theatre was integrated as part of the modernization process (which was sometimes but not necessarily coterminous with the idea of a ‘national theatre’). Theatre historians have begun to recognize that the emergence of their own discipline is inextricably entwined with the formation of new theatrical institutions with a programmatically ‘artistic’ focus. The example discussed is only one of many and needs to be integrated into a much more comprehensive study of theatrical modernization.

WORKS CITED Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1971). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991).

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Badawi, M.M. Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1987). Baedeker. Egypt (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1898; New York: Elibron Classics, 2000). Balme, Christopher. The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2014). Carlson, Marvin. “Become Less Provincial,” Theatre Survey 45.2 (2004): 177–80. Davis, Tracy C. The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000). Douin, Georges. Histoire du règne du khedive Ismaïl (Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello stato per la Reale società di geografia d’Egitto, 1933). Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004). Gainor, J. Ellen, ed. Imperialism and Theatre: Essay on World Theatre, Drama and Performance (London: Routledge, 1995). Geyer, Michael, & Charles Bright. “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100.4 (October 1995): 1034–60. Harvie, Jen, & Don Rebellato, ed. “Theatre and Globalization: A Symposium,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006). Hoffmann, H.–C. Die Theaterbauten von Fellner und Helmer (Munich: Prestel, 1996). Keynes, John Maynard. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919). Lacan, Jacques. My Teaching, tr. David Macey, preface by Jacques–Alain Miller (1985; London & New York: Verso, 2008). Pannewick, Friedrike. Das Wagnis Tradition: Arabische Wege der Theatralität (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000). Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia U P , 1996). Robinson, Jo. “Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History,” New Theatre Quarterly 23.3 (August 2007): 229–40. Sadgrove, Philip C. The Egyptian Theatre in the Nineteenth Century: 1799–1882 (Reading, U K : Ithaca, 1996). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). Zarrilli, Phillip, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams & Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. Theatre Histories: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006).

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Autobiography as Counter-Memory in The Orange Earth of Adam Small H EIN W ILLEMSE

Introduction

A

across all ethnic, class, and social sectors of South African society with presently more than sixty percent of its first-language speakers classified broadly as black.1 However, since

FRIKAANS IS SPOKEN

An earlier, abbreviated Afrikaans-language, version of this essay was published as part of a commemorative issue of Tydskrif vir letterkunde (49.1 [2012]: 70–81) on Adam Small’s seventy-fifth birthday. 1 Statistics South Africa. This discussion of The Orange Earth necessitates the use of South African ethnic terminology, most often the term ‘Coloured(s)’, which refers to the descendants of indigenous people, slaves, indentured Asian labourers, and European settlers. During the early colonial period (from the mid-seventeenth to early-nineteenth centuries), the term ‘Afrikaner’ signified such people or the descendants of colonists born locally. Since the late-nineteenth century but especially in the twentieth, the term ‘Afrikaners’ identified mainly white Afrikaans-speaking people, although a more encompassing meaning referring to all Afrikaans-speakers (i.e. across ethnic divisions) also occurs, though no longer common. In the play, Small occasionally deploys ‘Afrikaners’ in the latter sense. Depending on the context, the terms ‘nonwhite’ or ‘black’ are used. ‘Black’ in its generic sense refers to South Africans (African indigenous people, ‘Asians’, ‘Coloureds’, and ‘Indians’) who were not classified as ‘white’: i.e. of European descent. During the last third of the twentieth century, the term ‘black’ signifying black political unity was used in opposition to apartheid ethnic nomenclature. Where necessary, linguistic categorizations are employed in this essay, such as the concept ‘Bantu-speaking’. ‘Bantu’ (literally, ‘people’) has gained infamy in South Africa when the apartheid regime promoted it as a replacement synonym for derisive ethnic labels to identify indigenous South Africans. However, here the term is

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the beginning of the twentieth century, white writers, aided by accommodative political, economic, educational, and media systems, have dominated its literary processes. By the 1950s, only a handful of non-white writers, mainly young university-educated teachers, had published in Afrikaans. One of them is Adam Small (b. 1936), a brilliant student who published his first collection, Verse van die liefde (Love poems), in 1957, while completing a Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. Small was born in Wellington, a small town in a wine-producing region, colloquially known as the Boland, about seventy kilometres northeast of Cape Town. He is the firstborn of a teacher, a Dutch Reformed Protestant, and a Muslim woman of partIndian extraction. He spent his early youth on a farm hamlet, Goree, about 160 kilometres east of Cape Town and completed his schooling at a Catholic high school in the city. Although Small grew up in an Afrikaans environment, he completed most of his education in English. Following the completion of his Master’s studies, he taught philosophy at the Universities of Fort Hare and the Western Cape. Even though he has written essays and longer fiction, Small is best known for his poetry and plays. He has gained wide recognition in Afrikaans literary circles with his third and fourth collections of poetry, Kitaar my kruis (Guitar my cross, 1962) and Sê Sjibbolet (Say Shibbolleth, 1963). His first play, Kanna, hy kô hystoe (Kanna, he is coming home, 1965), created the memorable figure of Makiet, a long-suffering, resilient woman of modest means trying to keep her family together amidst an increasingly predatory environment. Small also introduced several imaginative dramatic techniques resulting in Kanna, hy kô hystoe’s being considered one of the foremost Afrikaans and South African plays. Although he was educated in English, Small’s primary linguistic identification is with Afrikaans and an encompassing Afrikaans culture, a relationship that has been fraught with contradictions and deeply felt emotion.2 His initial works were produced in the standard Afrikaans variety, but he found his niche when he wrote his poetry and plays in the language’s Cape vernacular, the Cape Peninsula urban-working-class variety, colloquially known as Kaaps. His subject-matter subsequently changed from its contemapplied in its technical sense indicating African languages characterized by affixes, verbal prefixes, open syllables, and reduplication. 2 Adam Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks: A Coloured Poet and Philosopher Looks Ahead (Munger Africana Library Notes 8; Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1971): 5.

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plative, philosophical, and youthful orientation to gritty, socio-politically committed writing foregrounding the plight of the urban poor – particularly the Coloured poor – and the dispossessed and marginalized. The Orange Earth is discussed here as a fictionalized autobiographical account in which Small reflects on the impact of apartheid, creating a counternarrative of a marginalized life during that political system. The concepts of autobiography and counter-memory are briefly introduced in the next section, followed by a section on the Afrikaansness of the main character, Johnny Adams, the fictionalized alter ego of the author, and the cultural and linguistic relationship between Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people. Thereafter, the intersection between language, religion, memory, and violence is explored. It is argued inter alia that Small’s choice of English as a language of literary expression could be interpreted as a counter-discourse on cultural disaffection and political disillusionment, just as his option of urban violence as a solution to apartheid, his “cry for citizenship,” amounts to a desperate act rather than one of revolutionary violence. Actions and activities that may have been regarded as trivial and personal become political in the play. In the context of the autobiography as genre, The Orange Earth becomes an act of writing against forgetfulness. The article concludes with a discussion of the multiple meanings associated with the title that serves as a metaphor for the counter-memory of Small’s narrative. ™ The primary aim of this article is to analyse The Orange Earth as the dramatization of a particular life story during the apartheid years in South Africa. Adam Small, in interviews on his play, expressly frames it as semi-autobiographical. Autobiography as an open genre has been defined as “a narrative of a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on individual life and the development of his personality.”3 The constitutive elements of self-representation and self-reflection on a life lived are among the key features of this literary genre. Telling a life story amounts to the recognition of a life as much as it communicates the unfolding of that life with its successes and failures, triumphs or painful experiences.4 Of particular importance for the play is the consideration that the autobiographical work could be viewed as “cultural 3

Lejeune, in Linda Alexander, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2011): 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991): 114, 118–19. 4

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memory” where the personal is employed in “search for community.”5 In such an instance, the autobiographer bears witness to a past and the history of the downtrodden. In its most politicized and mediated form, this genre – often autobiographies or life writing from below: i.e. the voices of the voiceless – is most commonly known as testimonio, where the author’s development of identity is entwined with the social experiences and political lives of others.6 The Orange Earth most obviously presents itself as the rationalization of a sensitive and emotionally tortured individual, a thinking man – an intellectual – who has done a dastardly deed that he must explain to the court and to himself. In a contested space, the role of the oppositional intellectual is to define the terms of his or her opposition. The Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, posits a position that is of relevance in this instance: The intellectual’s role is to present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national identity and mission [. . . ]. The intellectual is perhaps a kind of countermemory, with its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep.7

In Afrikaans literature, Small remained true to himself in the creation of a counter-memory in challenging the nature and impact of apartheid on the black experience. Since his poetry collection Kitaar my kruis, he developed a recognizable counter-discourse in his selection of his subject-matter, just as he used an urban-working-class language variety to express himself against the official, formal register of domination and oppressive legislation. In The Orange Earth, this counter-discourse is present in the centrality of an anguished, disillusioned intellectual as well as the writer’s deliberate linguistic differentiation in using English as his language of literary expression.

The Play: The Orange Earth The Orange Earth, subtitled “Essential Elements of a Personal History,” is Small’s first English-language play. It opened at the Baxter Theatre in Cape 5

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 114. John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2004): 19, 30–31, 33–34. 7 Edward W. Said, Academic Freedom, White Power and Black People ((New York: Columbia U P 2004): 141. 6

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Town in the winter of 1978. Although the play was staged widely in South African metropolitan centres and in the U S A and broadcast on B B C Radio’s World Service, it remained unpublished until September 2013.8 An Afrikaans translation, entitled Goree, was broadcast as a radio play in 1996, and was also published in September 2013.9 As often in Small’s oeuvre, The Orange Earth is an exploration of topical social issues, invariably matters of poverty, social identity, and the interrelations between people as individuals or members of social groups. Considering its subtitle, the playwright regards his play not as a “direct autobiography” but as an “imaginative autobiography.”10 Years later, he described the play as “the story of my life’s imprisonment within the four or 10 walls of my skin.”11 The Orange Earth is a fictionalized account of autobiographical memory, structured as a play of ideas rather than external action. It revolves around the life and experiences of a sensitive Afrikaans-speaking man, Johnny Adams, and his family under apartheid. The play consists of eighteen scenes with a basic set where elementary light changes effect scene transitions. The action alternates between a court of law, the prison cell of the main character, and flashbacks to defining episodes of his earlier life. The first scene opens with the loud bang of a detonated bomb in a supermarket that kills a white child, Deidre.12 In subsequent scenes, the confirmed anticommunist but radicalized main character, classified Coloured under apartheid legislation, appears in court, denies guilt, and puts forward the basis of his defence. The play retrospectively explores Adams’s considerations for his act of violence through his relationships with his wife, daughter, brother, mother, and father, all of them marked by the impact of apartheid on their lives. Johnny’s wife, Brenda, nicknamed Babie, is featured in several court scenes 8

Maureen Barnes, “BBC Breakthrough for Adam Small with Long-Lost Play,” Sunday Times (27 March 1983): 9. 9 Margot Luyt, “ ‘ Goree’-uitsending herdenk Small,” Burger (17 May 2006): 14. 10 Anon., “Adam Small skryf oor homself,” Volksblad (26 July 1978): 12. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are mine. 11 Gorry Bowes Taylor, “Call from De Klerk Struck Chord with ‘Returning Brother’,” Argus (25 November 1993): 6. 12 “The Orange Earth,” 3–4. All quotations are taken from a copy of the 1984 B B C playscript of The Orange Earth, completed well before its formal publication. I thank Steward van Wyk for providing that photocopy. Further page references are in the main text.

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interspersed with flashbacks in which she retells aspects of their marriage of seventeen years that produced an only child, Djamila, aged sixteen. She recalls the bitterness caused by their enforced conformity to the dictates of racial classification and her husband’s reluctance to bring any further children into an apartheid-defined world. In an important scene, Babie recounts Johnny’s distressing experience of registering their daughter’s birth, which condemned her to an underling ‘race’, an inferior education, and a world of limited opportunities (32). In a flashback with his son, John Adams Snr (Pappa), familiarly known as Jan, tells of their pastoral life in the hamlet of Goree with its orange earth. Throughout the play, several scenes explore the cultural relatedness of Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people from the Boland area in the Western Cape. In a key scene, Johnny relives the moment of his mother’s humiliation at the hands of a white farmer’s wife. The tension between resistance and patriotism is introduced with the death and military funeral of his younger brother, George, who joined the South African Army as a member of the Cape Corps, an ethnically separate Coloured combat unit. Djamila is reported to view this choice as complicity with the apartheid regime: i.e. the actions of a “sell-out,” an Uncle Tom. George died when he stepped on a landmine in the “operational area,” known in local parlance as the “border.” The Orange Earth concludes with considerations of the dead child, the main character’s act of violence, and his brother’s patriotism. In a flashback, Babie tells how Johnny, at the military funeral and overcome by emotion, lurched forward and ripped the flag symbolizing apartheid South Africa from the coffin, tearing it. The play ends with her lingering question: “Someday there’s a flag for . .. all of us?” (81).

A Pivotal Element of Being: “I am Afrikaans” It is significant that Small wrote The Orange Earth within two years of the nation-wide public demonstrations of 1976 and 1977. The uprisings started in mid-June 1976 as remonstration against the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction in schools attended by mainly Bantu-speaking students. Although Small in none of his interviews on the play mentions the revolt of 1976, it is certainly too much of a coincidence that The Orange Earth was written and produced in English rather than Afrikaans. Similarly, his introduction of urban violence into a literary work was comparatively new; at the time few South African literary works ventured into this subject-area.

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Since his debut, Small’s oeuvre has gone through considerable linguistic, literary, and philosophical change. His previous essays, poetry, and plays were published in Afrikaans, and he consistently defended his use of the language. The depth of his association with Afrikaans and his cultural kin, the Afrikaners, is exemplified by the dedication – to “his people, the Afrikaners” – in his essay collection, Die eerste steen? (The first stone? 1960). Further, he achieved fame and notoriety with his use of the variety of Afrikaans spoken in the Cape Peninsula working-class districts. In his private life, though, he has struggled with the way in which his mother tongue was associated with the apartheid government’s divisive and nefarious political activities. His family deliberately changed their home language from Afrikaans to English and all his children were educated in the latter.13 He also temporarily changed his language of literary expression. A similar shift took place regarding his philosophical alignment, so that by the 1970s he increasingly associated himself with the Black Consciousness movement. His only English-language collection of poetry, Black Bronze and Beautiful (1975), his homage to blackness and Black Consciousness, pre-dates the language-inspired uprising of 1976 and, like The Orange Earth, is indicative of his internal turmoil and the uncomfortable duality of his cultural affiliations. In spite of these personal changes, language remains a pivotal element in Small’s understanding of the cultural association of Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people. He held the doyen of Afrikaans poetry, N.P. van Wyk Louw, in high regard and even quoted him in The Orange Earth: “Who was it, someone, who said, the day you’re really white, you go and see the doctor” (54).14 Small also published a book of English translations of his work entitled Oh Wide and Sad Land (1975).15 Judging by his various pronouncements on the matter, Small would agree with the sentiments of the anti-apartheid (white) Afrikaans novelist Jan Rabie, who described Afrikaans as one of “South Africa’s most nonracial attributes” and the Boland as the cradle of Afrikaans-speaking people.16 This view emphasizes the history of Afrikaans as a contact language, spoken mainly among the descendants of indigenous people, slaves, an underclass, and territorially isolated agriculturalists. Yet, 13

Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks, 5. See N.P. van Wyk Louw, Oh Wide and Sad Land: Afrikaans Poetry of N.P . van Wyk Louw, tr. Adam Small (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1975). 15 For his admiration of Louw, see Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks, 8–11. 16 Jan Rabie, Polemika 1957–1965 (Cape Town: Jan Malherbe, 1965): 108, 111–12. 14

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there is also a more pronounced ethnic-nationalist conception of the language. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, emerging anti-imperial, urbanmiddle-class Afrikaner nationalists have claimed the language as the primary symbol of their political identity and post-1948 enacted legislation affirming that belief. This claim led to the widely adopted anti-apartheid slogan ‘Afrikaans is the language of the oppressor’. Although The Orange Earth is written in English, its emotional core is the relationship between Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people: “an Afrikaans experience in English.”17 The Orange Earth wrestles with these complexities of cultural association. With its foregrounding of Afrikaans and the Afrikaansness of its main character – “I am Afrikaans” (8; emphasis in original), he says – the play creates a counter-memory of a suppressed history of Coloured Afrikaans speakers and, at the same time, despite the divisive impact of the apartheid policies, affirms their cultural connectedness. Small suggests that this relationship was fundamentally harmed by the introduction and implementation of the apartheid policy. In this sense, Small regards his play as “a cultural onslaught” against apartheid, which offers a radical, if destructive, solution to a vexing relationship: i.e. “a decision to allow the culture and language that you share with another to die out deliberately.”18 On a practical level, this intense resolution also comes about as a result of the playwright’s experience of the limitations of his language of choice: I’ve reached a point where I feel that I can’t break through with Afrikaans; I’ve a feeling of helplessness. Now I’ll see whether I can do it in English – they’re also snobbish – but one has to see what one can do.19

Contradictorily, Small experiences the impotence of his intended message, since his Afrikaans audiences – from the context, it is obvious that he has his white Afrikaans audiences in mind – identify too readily with his plays. His intentions are misunderstood and his social message is rendered ineffective. Although his voice of resistance is recognized, it does not reach effectively beyond the limits of his language. In another interview, he expresses this sentiment differently:

17

Small, in Garth Verdal, “The Orange Earth,” Argus (17 July 1978): 2. Small, in Lionel Jack, “Adam Small slaag,” Rapport (16 July 1978): 15. 19 Anon., “Adam Small skryf oor homself,” 12. 18

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I sense increasingly the difficulty as an Afrikaans writer in breaking through to a wider South African audience in Afrikaans. I am an alienated Afrikaner – the language is fencing me in.20

Besides reaching a new audience, he attempts, by using English, some measure of theatrical alienation, not necessarily in its Brechtian sense: It’s better to allow your words to speak back to you from a distance about your situation. [. . . ] It’s only that I want people to listen to me after [I’ve] done a roundabout [and that I’m] now speaking back through [my English] words.21

In general, a sympathetic fellow writer like Rabie understood this kind of linguistic gesture as a way of turning one’s back on white Afrikaans-speakers for denying their fellow non-white Afrikaans-speakers their civil rights: we [white Afrikaans speakers] are losing the Coloured elite [. . . ] as it appears that they are flagellating their white brothers with English.22

Afrikaans, in this broader context, is associated in a Foucauldian sense with the mediation of power and authority in apartheid South African society, while Small’s new language of literary expression, English (despite its colonial associations elsewhere), is established as part of a powerful counterdiscourse signifying cultural disaffection and political disillusionment.

Language, Religion, Memories of Humiliation and Violent Resolution Quite early on in The Orange Earth, Johnny Adams refers to the lived reality of apartheid prohibitions – in this case, the fact that he, an Afrikaans-speaking man, was “not allowed” to attend his university of choice, an Afrikaans university, and that he had to register at his second choice, an English-medium university. The relatively extensive treatment of this in the play signals the significance of prohibition (“could not”) and refusal (“not allowed”) in the main character’s psyche: COUNSEL: JOHNNY: COUNSEL: 20

You could not, had you wanted to . . . I had wanted. But I could not … I was not allowed ... You could not. You were not allowed.

Small, in Verdal, “The Orange Earth,” 2. Small, in Jack, “Adam Small slaag,” 5. 22 Rabie, Polemika 1957–1965, 77. 21

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That’s right. Those words, they were . . . I mean, they are important words in your life? (Cynical) Yes. [. . . ] They are important words . . . in my life . . . yes (Laughs). [. . . ] You could not . . . I could not . . . cannot . . . You are not allowed . . . I am not allowed . . . (8–9; emphasis in original)

Small’s South African audiences would have understood this reference – “not allowed” – to be the very basis of life under apartheid. Political scientists often define such prohibitions or denials and their enabling policies as “structural violence”: i.e. the impositions of a dominant minority on the powerless classes through “a combination of exploitation, repression, and fragmentation of the majority,” resulting in “minimum level of existence” and “disadvantage.”23 Apart from demarcating South Africa into distinct regional political units, racially based neighbourhoods, institutions (such as universities), and civil services – i.e., groot (‘grand’) apartheid – the National Party also devised Jim Crow-like ways of public separation with respect to common social spaces such as local recreational amenities, parks, park benches, buses and trains, station and shop entrances – the daily irritations of klein (‘little’) apartheid. This was a life of prohibition (with the ordinary person’s moments of resistance) told in many anti-apartheid poems, stories or novels, most memorably in James Matthews’s short story “The Park.” While for non-white people prohibition was at the very basis of social life in South Africa, it is seemingly of great significance for the main character that the refusal happens in spite of his Afrikaansness. Throughout the play Johnny Adams has several interactions with his white warder, Bokkie Visagie, in which he points to their similarity while the latter initially emphasizes the apartheid orthodoxy of separation and difference or anderskleurigheid (‘other colourness’, 54). Besides language, Johnny’s perception of the sameness of Coloured and white Afrikaans speakers is vested in their religious practices,

23

Okwudiba Nnoli, “Revolutionary Violence, Development, Equality and Justice in South Africa,” Africa Today 34.1–2 (1987): 27.

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prayers and hymns (53, 56, 58). Yet, the most poignant moment of denial in the play happens on the eve of Easter. The playwright chooses a moment of everyday interaction rather than a grand political event to explore these attitudes and social behaviour, more particularly the intersection between language, religion, and memory. In a flashback with his father and his wife, the main character, Johnny, recalls the impact of social power premised on racial dominance: And she looks at Mamma, this white woman, and Mamma is young and brown and beautiful. And she looks at Mamma, but she also does not look at Mamma . . . She looks right past her, as if Mamma isn’t there. [. . . ] And she says, this white woman, and she’s talking to Pappa, not to Mamma . . . (Pause) “Adams,” she says, “Se (sic) vir jou meid . . . It’s all right, she can go around the back, and she can have the flour.” (Pause) And she smiles. For she has just been very kind to us, you see . . . And she’s speaking our language . . . Afrikaans . . . mine and Pappa’s and Mamma’s and Georgie’s . . . and hers . . . “Adams, tell your girl it’s all right, she can go around the back and she can have the flour.” (48)

The scene from which this passage is taken is elaborately set up to emphasize the intrinsic pride, cultural sophistication, and Afrikaansness of the Adams family amidst the threatening presence of whiteness. For instance, it is “the first time that we [i.e., the Adams family] were together like that . . . , ” and Johnny’s father is described as “proud ... my teacher at the school” and his mother as “beautiful,” “oriental, eastern, lovely,” a woman who reads “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Hansel and Gretel . . . All in Afrikaans . .. My language . .. Arabian nights . . . Hans Christian Anderson .. . And of course, the Bible . . . ” (47). This scene intuitively counters a history of Afrikaans and South African literature in which people classified as Coloured were often portrayed as intellectually, morally, and socially deficient. In opposition to this description of uprightness and sophistication is the main character’s impression of the overpowering dominance of whiteness. The farmhouse that they approach is described as “white, blinding white in the bright sun . . . Like the walls of all those white farmhouses” occupied by the “white woman of this white house” (47). Besides this reference to ethnic dominance, whiteness is also associated with the flag symbolizing apartheid South Africa – “If only the white wasn’t there . . . ” (76) – and it is explicitly connected to sterility and imprisonment:

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“Sterile. White. White walls, all around . .. Prison” (61). All these point to the centrality in the play of the go-around-the-back scene and the family’s humiliation. The impact on Johnny’s mother (who is not present as a character) is implied rather than enacted. For the Muslim woman who converted to Christianity and Dutch Reformism, the humiliation is manifold: not only is she told to go around the back, for she is not considered an equal and therefore cannot enter through the front door, it is a denial of her very being that the white woman addresses her husband rather than her directly, and she who has committed apostasy, for her husband experiences rejection during Easter with its core Communion ritual that she now shares with the white Christian woman. To top it all for the main character, the insult is delivered in Afrikaans, their shared first language, sullying it. The scene is pregnant with meanings of injustice and emancipation, especially considering the Old-Testament precursor of Easter, namely Passover, the feast of the unleavened bread, following the freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery (Exodus 12:15–19). Given its broader Christian doctrinal context – communion, crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation – one also recognizes the suggestive possibilities that social injustice and betrayal will eventually be defeated and that the transgressors will have to seek redemption for their sins. However, the potential deliverance from bondage or redemption that religious belief offers in the narrative is not developed to its logical conclusion in The Orange Earth. It appears that the semi-autobiographical nature of the text does not fully lead to this end. The episode serves to record the playwright’s autobiographical and familial histories rather than the potential of the play’s internal logic. Small concentrates on the more immediate experience of disempowerment and denial. In an interview thirteen years after the play’s first run, Small described non-white Afrikaans-speaking people’s experience of apartheid as intensely personal: their subjugation and degradation were proclaimed in a shared language and culture: It is not the language that insults you, but the insult happens in your language through the other person who [. . . ] also speaks your language [. . . ] we live in the reality of language and language defines – most probably – our humanity.24

24

Anon., “Die verhouding is een van liefde-en-verydeling,” Volksblad (29 August

1991): 6 (emphases in original).

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In a public presentation in Pasadena, California, in 1971, Small described the enforced separation and split among Afrikaans speakers as “tragic” – an emotive term that reveals the depth of his feeling: [Theሿlife of the Coloured people [. . . ] is perhaps the most tragic life in South Africa [. . . ] despite [their] cultural tie-in, you have a rift [between] the White and the Coloured [. . . ] it is a very bitter thing. This is altogether tragic. In any situation anywhere in the world this would be tragic if you have people of the same cultural origins and the same cultural destiny, I would say, having this sort of difference because of politics.25

Apart from the broadly legalistic or systemic patterning of prohibition and denial present in the play, it specifically interrogates the active agency of people in executing and performing these acts and its influence on the excluded Other. In Babie’s retelling of the go-around-the-back episode, the fact is underscored that Pappa Adams and his family’s humiliation occurs through the actions of real people, not just a faceless system: Humiliation. Then bitterness. Made for us by other people . . . people . . . two hands, two feet, each one, a face, two eyes, two ears, a mouth, like us . . . but white . . . like this white Christian woman. (49)

Johnny’s recollection of his experience as a five-year-old boy coalesces into a sign of their family’s utter shame, with especially his father humiliated, disempowered and helpless: I remember, Pappa, I looked at you, and your face went ashen . . . You were angry. And you were helpless. [. . . ] God, you were so . . . dependent on those people . . . (Pause) Your eyes, looking at me there. I saw the fear in them . . . the fear and the . . . shame! (Johnny is angry, and almost crying). (48)

The primary structural feature that Small makes use of throughout The Orange Earth – the flashback – has resonance in the diagnosis of traumatic memory. The memory of bad experiences and trauma, as evidence of “an occluded part of the self,” returns “unwilled” in flashbacks or dreams “remaining beyond the conscious recall of the subject.”26 Johnny’s rationalization of his act of violence is primarily based on his attempts at understanding these recalled earlier experiences that shaped his life, the contributory role of white 25 26

Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks, 56 (emphasis in original). Cathy Caruth, quoted in Alexander, Autobiography, 130.

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individuals to his misery, his trajectory and that of his family members rather than an avowed national cause. His trial becomes a way of articulating a coherent narrative of exclusion, denial, and justification for a desperate act of resistance. It is this experience of humiliation that eventually leads Johnny to plant his bomb: PAPPA: PAPPA: JOHNNY: PAPPA: JOHNNY:

(Hesitant) Why . . . Why did you . . . [. . . ] Johnny . . . Why . . . No, I mustn’t ask . . . [. . . ] You know . . . You know why, Pappa. Yes . . . I know . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ve said it before . . . I (Then loud) Because they’ve . . . humiliated you . . . (61)

The character’s justification for his violence remains intensely personal and eventually turns into an act of retribution. In spite of his elaborate rationalization, his act remains without an expressed national (or international) association or cause. In this regard, it is relevant that he explicitly declares that he is “no communist, just Johnny Adams” (20). In the context of an oeuvre that is marked by constant attempts at defining humaneness and individuality, Small’s consideration of violence in The Orange Earth is clearly an aberration. In none of his previously published works or any of his creative works published since the play’s premiere in 1978 does he even remotely raise the matter of violent resistance or a possible war of liberation. Revolutionary violence or “humanizing violence” by definition presupposes a political programme to transform a social order, a call to collective action with the aims of establishing greater social freedom, equality, and justice.27 As a liberal thinker, Small temporarily entertains the extreme possibility of violent resistance in The Orange Earth but is never really able to fully justify its implementation, for instance regarding the oft-used notion of bellum iustum, the just war. Johnny’s bomb in the supermarket thus turns into an act of urban terrorism rather than an act of revolutionary violence. Intellectually, though, Small moves in his writing from protest to violent resistance as a resolution to apartheid – “I will not literally plant a bomb. But there is a bomb in my heart”28 – which speaks volumes for his sense of disil27

Nnoli, “Revolutionary Violence,” 27. Small in Zelda Jongbloed, “Die boodskap sit in die stof,” Rapport (1 December 1985): 6. 28

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lusionment and the extremes of his alternative narrative. In an address to a student audience following the 1976 uprisings, Small identified the violent actions he witnessed as “a cry for citizenship”: I hold no brief for violence and I do not want to. But violence – the violence we are witnessing now – can and must at least be understood. It is the expression of the cry for citizenship – for real life and the privileges of real life – from a position of insecure helplessness over against White Power. . . .29

Indeed, the extreme possibility of violence that The Orange Earth raises should be considered as Small’s “insecure helplessness,” his most personal and desperate “cry for citizenship.” Within the limits of his religious and philosophical consideration, Johnny’s act of violence is as far as Small could go intellectually.

“Our Children Destroyed in Their Beauty” Autobiographical presentation is often regarded as an open form where writers recount and structure selected episodes from their lives to reflect on their coming to consciousness.30 Although clearly fictionalized, The Orange Earth serves in part as an explicit way of telling a counter-narrative to apartheid social history, that of the author Adam Small and, more broadly, that of a person classified as Coloured in South Africa. As a play of ideas, it becomes a way of ordering the past, determining the beginnings of exceptional reactions and self-reflecting on the significance of past events. One such remembered event is the go-around-the back episode and another is that of birth registration in South Africa. The registration of a birth under apartheid predetermined the opportunities and limitations of a child’s future. In The Orange Earth, this fact influences Johnny’s attitude to bringing children into a world regulated by racial discrimination. Although they have a daughter, Djamila (literally Jamila meaning ‘beauty’ – the spelling suggests its pronunciation in Kaaps), Johnny was reluctant to have any more children. In Babie’s words, “They [the apartheid authorities] make our children bitter, they poison our children’s beauty ... 29

Adam Small, Academic Freedom, White Power and Black People (E.G. Malherbe Academic Freedom Lecture; Durban: University of Natal, 1976): 14 (emphasis in original). 30 Alexander, Autobiography, 8.

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Kill it. . . ” (29). Later in her husband’s trial, she phrases more explicitly this sentiment on the severe limitation of potential that apartheid predestined for non-white people: “Apartheid is a terrible thing, m’Lord .. . Thousands and thousand[s] of our children ... destroyed in their beauty . . . It is evil, m’Lord” (32). Addressing the court, she says, “Would any one of you have wanted another child, a boy, a girl, to grow up to such bitterness?” (30). The policy formulators of the National Party in the 1960s and 1970s often treated apartheid somewhat abstractly or described it euphemistically as ‘separate development’, ignoring its impact on individuals’ self-perception. In The Orange Earth, Small strips away the philosophical attractiveness that the policy might have held for its supporters when Babie recounts the experience of giving birth in a public hospital and the recording of a birth at a registration office: When Djamila was born, it was a humiliating thing. At the hospital . . . we were treated not like persons, but . . . coloureds . . . As always . . . coloureds . . . Do you know what it is to be treated like . . . coloureds, m’Lord? It’s an insidious thing, mostly blatant, but also subtle, in which they scorn you, even unconsciously, in every experience of your life, each day . . . White Christian people! They classify you, stamp you and brand you with the colour of your own skin, for second, third, tenth class citizenship . . . Citizenship!? (31)

The humiliation and its effect on an individual’s psyche are more overtly expressed in an expanded account of the birth registration: Johnny went to register her birth, a Saturday morning, it was raining, I remember . . . He went to this office of the magistrate, and they looked at him, those white clerks on the other side of the counter . . . as if Johnny was committing some terrible crime to want to register the birth of our child there. Only white babies, white births, were registered there . . . So Johnny was sent away, to the coloured counter! The counter for scorn . . . Do you know what is means m’ Lord, like for Djamila, when you find out later that, because of the colour of your skin, you weren’t welcome in your world when you were born? [. . . ] They give you this form, and you must fill in under the heading “Race” . . . The form requires to know that, m’Lord, Johnny says he has hated himself ever since for having had to do that, to fill “Coloured” under that heading, signing his child away for humiliation . . . Djamila Adams, “Coloured, Female”! Oh my God, to be compelled like that, to sign your flesh and blood, your own child away, and not to have a

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choice, but to do it! To condemn your child to a prison like that . . . the solid walls . . . all around . . . of a dark skin . . . (31–32)

Even though Babie voices this extended passage of self-reflection, it is essentially a report on Johnny’s inner turmoil and the events that contributed to his act of violence. Seen from the perspective of autobiographical writing, this moment of registration of the birth at a separate counter, the “counter for scorn,” the accompanying sense of humiliation and the main character’s selfloathing for his enforced complicity with apartheid record not only an individual moment but also a representative experience for Small’s South African audiences. What might have been deemed trivial becomes political and recognized for its broader social impact. With the benefit of hindsight in the postapartheid period, more than thirty years after the play’s first production, the recounted event serves an added purpose: The Orange Earth preserves a moment of private humiliation, like that of the go-around-the-back episode, and turns it into a shared experience, thereby establishing the play as an act of writing against forgetfulness.

“We come from the same soil”: Belonging and Patriotism With the significance usually attached to a title, ‘The Orange Earth’ serves as a metaphor for a comprehensive range of meanings suggested in the play. The “orange earth” becomes the central image for the main character’s memory of a past world, one that is at odds with the white sterility of his prison cell in the present (61), and the core of his counter-discourse on a history of belonging and patriotism. Soil, earth, signifying goodness, endurance, belonging, and relatedness, is explicitly identified as of primary significance: i.e. “The ground, the soil there . . . it was this orange colour, and hard. Good soil . . . ” (51). The most obvious reference to memory is also the orange soil, characteristic of Goree, the childhood place of Johnny, as Pappa Adams recalls: “The ground is hard there, kind of orange colour, Boland ground .. . ” (36).31 where it points to broader social and cultural connectedness. The “orange soil” also speaks of enduring relationships with the earth when it is directly associated with the lives of the poor, working “dusty people” of the hamlet, their tough, exploited histories and their exclusion from living fulfilled lives, as evidenced in this quotation: 31

See also 51, 61–62.

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people of the dust . . . Like the soil, the ground, like the earth, there, that’s their colour [. . . ] they sweated, those brown people – people? Slaves – black-brown and yellow-brown and red-brown . . . sweat from the farm work in the scorching sun. (57–58)

Less obviously connected to the title – The Orange Earth – is the name of the main character. Johnny’s warder asks, “Adams . . . what sort of name is that?” (53), indicating its relevance in the play. Besides its frequency in Englishspeaking settings generally, the last name, ‘Adams’, is also common among the Coloured people of the Western Cape, related in part to their history of slavery and the imposition of mythological or biblical names on their forebears. Mythologically, the name is derived from the first man fashioned from soil, and, more specifically, as formulated in the myths of origin in the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.32 In the play, therefore, the last name ‘Adams’ links the family directly to the local soil, emphasizing their long history of belonging, their connectedness as well as their social marginality. In addition, the common patronym John (of the main character and his father) with its religious connotations of the apostle John and John the Baptist, and meaning ‘God is generous or gracious’, points to the social transition of the Adams family. The father-figure is known by the Dutch /Afrikaans version of John: namely Jan, used in Afrikaans-speaking rural areas like Goree, as opposed to ‘John’, which alludes to middle-class mobility and urban sophistication. One of the recurring themes in the play is the cultural and even familial relationship between Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people. Its most explicit reference is biblical when Johnny quotes Genesis (1:27): namely, that human beings were all created in “His image” (61), linking it directly to the Adams name and its mythological connectedness to the earth. Two instances of the Coloured–white relationship are explored in The Orange Earth, the first in the go-around-the-back episode and the second in the case of the prison warder, Bokkie Gerber. During their nightly conversations, driven mainly by a talkative Johnny Adams, they come to recognize their commonalities: “Good ol’ Calvinists we are, you an’ me . . . Deep down, hey” (17). The evolving relationship between prison inmate and warder exemplifies the distance and increasingly the affinity and even familiarity of Afrikaans-speaking people from the “deep Boland” (6). On Johnny’s insistence, they establish 32

Ivor H. Evans, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, Centenary ed., 1970): 9.

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that they come from the same region, with the same soil, language and culture: You want to play uittel-uittel? Then we’ll see! Come we count! Moet ons tel! Come! [. . . ] Een, twee, drie, vier, vyf, ses, sewe, om die hoek staan Mameskewe . . . How did it go, do you remember, when we were children . . . You also played it? Mameskewe mat [sic] die boggel op die rug. Een, twee, drie, vier, vyf, ses, sewe . . . . (17)

Throughout the play this commonality is explored and developed with respect to religion – “fellow Calvinists” (77) – and language: “It’s the same world . .. Our world ... Yours and mine . . . There’s our roots, your’s [sic] and mine . .. ” (20, 52, 57); “We’re from the Boland, man ... Afrikaans, all three of us, Bokkie and I, and Pappa . .. ” (64); “The very same accents [. .. ] Your old man is the same Afrikaans, just Pappa here .. . Bolandse mense” (68). Johnny was born in Wellington and Bokkie in Goudini – one geographical region physically divided by a mountain range. Although Small does not explicitly exploit this physical feature in The Orange Earth, he deems apartheid the barrier standing in the way of greater cultural association: I have always considered white Afrikaans people, as the protagonists of apartheid, as the prodigal sons and daughters. There is no doubt we come from the same soil, not only as far as language but also in terms of religion. We share an inescapable heritage.33

One final set of meanings explicitly relates to the death of George, Johnny’s younger brother, who died as a soldier on the ‘border’ defending a country and its flag where the government denies his claim to full citizenship: Orange earth, white walls, big blue sky . . . Orange, white and blue . . . Orange . . . that is clay, Pappa, the ground, the earth, on which we played . . . Blue . . . that is the sky . . . The mulberry trees were full of it. (75)

Johnny recalls George’s death and “funeral with full military honours” as follows: What for?! For nothing, nothing. A coloured on the border! Fighting for . . . the country! Dear God, how could you, Georgie? . . . And be . . . killed, like that, for nothing, for bloody nothing . . . . (41, 42)34

33

Small, quoted in John MacLennan, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” Sunday Tribune (28 November 1993): 26. 34 See also 71–72.

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In South African literature and the popular culture of the 1980s, particularly Afrikaans literary and popular culture, the ‘border’ experience or death on the ‘border’ is often regarded as a white experience, more often than not an essentially Afrikaner experience. The Orange Earth broadens understanding of the 1980s ‘border’ experience while at the same time problematizing the notion of loyalty and belonging. The ambiguity of the notion of land (as in ‘homeland’) and belonging, nationalism, and patriotism is best exemplified by Small’s interpretation of the relationship between Johnny and his brother George and their different social (and political) orientation: The person that plants the bomb does it because he loves the country, and the person who protects the borders does so because he also loves the country. They may be brothers, as in the play, but they’re essentially two sides of the same person.35

Much of The Orange Earth is writing against marginality, none more so than in Small’s use of “the orange earth” as a core metaphor. Throughout the play, the dominant notions associated with the soil or the land are undermined so that the metaphor becomes the bearer of key meanings through which a counter-discourse of endurance, belonging, cultural relatedness, and patriotism is formulated. Apartheid orthodoxy proclaimed the incontrovertible differences of people – the anderskleurigheid (‘other colour-ness’) – while Small insists on emphasizing their demonstrated cultural commonalities, thereby defining an encompassing Afrikaans grouping: [The Coloureds] are nothing, really, but Afrikaners [. . . ] Culture goes beyond politics in any case, and history will show that these people have always been and will always be Afrikaans. And there is nothing anybody can do about that.36

In an impassioned personal declaration on the play, he said: “And if being a Boer means coming from this same soil, then I suppose I can be considered a Boer now”37 (or elsewhere: “I am nothing but an Afrikaner myself”38). In the context of the broader multi-ethnic South African nation, Small’s cri de coeur is therefore for a re-imagined ethnic-minority grouping. This is a view that at the time would have appealed to some of the playwright’s fellow writers such as S.V. Petersen and P.J. Philander, who were also classified as Coloured, and 35

Anon., “Adam Small skryf oor homself,” 12. Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks, 5. 37 Small, quoted in MacLennan, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” 26. 38 Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks, 10. 36

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several white Afrikaans writers, among them Jan Rabie and van Wyk Louw.39 It was also a position that spoke to a more oorverligte (over-enlightened) grouping of Afrikaner nationalists during the 1970s and 1980s.40 Along the spectrum of ideas on identity propagated in South Africa at the time, Small’s social position therefore transpires as moderate and, indeed, deliberately limited, with none of the right- or left-wing extremism or the encompassing notions of nation that had marked these matters since the late 1940s. Although The Orange Earth is chiefly a play about the impact of apartheid and the “tragic rift” between Coloured and white Afrikaans speakers, Small considers it, in one of his interviews, as a work about the nature of patriotism: The play deals with [my] experiences as a Coloured. [. . . ] I speak as a grey person [. . . ] As a grey person I have no feeling about identity, [I’ve] no nightmares about it. Therefore this play deals with patriotism – what is patriotism?41

This statement in itself may be less accurate than what the playwright intended, for the nature of identity, more specifically the shared cultural aspects of that identity, clearly lies at the heart of The Orange Earth. Patriotism itself is an identity-related concept, and in its more extreme performances is often associated with identitarian movements. Rather than ‘identity’, the concept of patriotism may on the surface be at odds with the individualist, liberal tenor of the play. Indeed, even in the play patriotism appears to be part of the plethora of ideas to be tolerated: Djamila laughed. Scornfully. Uncle Georgie is a sell-out, she said. Then Johnny shouted at her. You won’t say that![,] he said. You won’t say that about your uncle Georgie [. . . ] But you’re saying it too, said Djamila [. . . ]. But, still, Uncle Georgie believes differently, said Johnny[,] that’s all, do you hear? Then the two of them cried, Johnny and Djamila [. . . ]. What do you really believe? What do you? (72; emphases in original)

39

N.P. van Wyk Louw, Oh Wide and Sad Land: Afrikaans Poetry of N.P . van Wyk Louw, tr. Adam Small (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1975), and “Voorwoord” to D.P. Botha, Die opkoms van ons derde stand (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1960): v– x; Petersen, “Agter die grenslyn,” 1–2; Philander, “Klein halfaampie,” 13; Rabie, Polemika, 111. 40 See Small, A Brown Afrikaner Speaks, 8–10. 41 Anon., “Adam Small skryf oom homself,” 12.

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By its very nature, patriotism presupposes an overt group identity, “to be a part of a more encompassing narrative, to be related to a past and a future that transcend the narrow confines of an individual’s life and its mundane concerns,” and calls for the enactment of its core values of loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for the country and to value it above all: the patriot is motivated to think of the patria as blessed by all manner of virtues and achievements whether the evidence, interpreted objectively, warrants that or not.42

It is this classical notion of patriotism that informs Georgie’s involvement in the “border war”: i.e. a love of country in spite of the slew of prohibitions and exclusions that the government of the day imposed on people like him. Although Johnny’s act of violence has been interpreted here as an act of terrorism rather than one of revolutionary violence and at most a “cry for citizenship,” it is his ripping and tearing of the flag and Babie’s words “Someday there’s a flag for ... all of us?” (81) that may suggest an alternative to the traditional view of patriotism. This patriotism resides in a new democratic state that would recognize and protect the equality and freedom of all its inhabitants. Jürgen Habermas, in the context of post-Nazi Germany, raises the possibility of “constitutional patriotism” beyond national and cultural loyalties, and “embodied in the laws and institutions of a free and democratic state.”43

Conclusion The Orange Earth is Adam Small’s most personal and personalized literary work. Judging by his newspaper interviews and general commentary, he deliberately invites his audience (and readers) to experience the play as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical performance. In interpreting the work from that perspective, this article has established that the playwright created a counter-narrative of his marginalized life to the apartheid-defined life of a person classified as Coloured. Although written in English, it presents itself as “an Afrikaans experience in English” in which the humiliation of being a Coloured Afrikaans-speaking individual is shown, all of it through the conscious actions of white fellow Afrikaans-speakers. It was found that the play42

Primoratz, “Patriotism.” Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe” (1992), paraphrased in Primoratz, “Patriotism.” 43

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wright’s choice of language amounted to a counter-discourse signifying his cultural disaffection and political disillusionment. Although the specific actions presented are illustrative of a Coloured person’s life under apartheid, stereotyped views on intellect, cultural sophistication, and social morality are subtly countered, and the play as a semi-autobiography or a work of cultural memory turns moments of private humiliation into shared experiences and becomes an act of writing against forgetfulness. The most controversial aspect of The Orange Earth is the playwright’s consideration of violence in his personal struggle against apartheid. As an individualist, liberal, anti-communist writer, Small makes his most desperate “cry for citizenship,” even if it cannot be interpreted as a revolutionary act. The play is an enacted narrative of a real and imagined life but also one in which the aspirations, history, humiliations, and identity of the oppressed Coloured community are shown. However, his overall quest is for an encompassing re-imagined Afrikaans community, counter to apartheid orthodoxy, and, although obliquely stated in The Orange Earth, for a patriotism that reaches beyond the prohibitions and denials of the past.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Linda. Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 2011). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Anon. “Adam Small skryf oor homself,” Volksblad (26 July 1978): 12. ——. “Die verhouding is een van liefde-en-verydeling,” Volksblad (29 August 1991): 6. Barnes, Maureen. “B B C Breakthrough for Adam Small with Long-Lost Play,” Sunday Times (27 March 1983): 9. Beverley, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2004). Bowes Taylor, Gorry. “Call from De Klerk Struck Chord with ‘Returning Brother’,”Argus (25 November 1993): 6. Evans, Ivor H. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, Centenary ed. 1970). Habermas, Jürgen. “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” Praxis International 12 (1992): 1–19. Jack, Lionel. “Adam Small slaag,” Rapport (10 April 1983): 5. Jongbloed, Zelda. “Die boodskap sit in die stof,” Rapport (1 December 1985): 6.

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Louw, N.P. van Wyk. Oh Wide and Sad Land: Afrikaans Poetry of N.P. van Wyk Louw, tr. Adam Small (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1975). ——. “Voorwoord” to D.P. Botha, Die opkoms van ons derde stand (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1960): v–x. Luyt, Margot. “‘Goree’-uitsending herdenk Small,” Burger (17 May 2006): 14. MacLennan, John. “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” Sunday Tribune (28 November 1993): 26. Matthews, James. The Park and Other Stories (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983). Nnoli, Okwudiba. “Revolutionary Violence, Development, Equality and Justice in South Africa,” Africa Today 34.1–2 (1987): 27–47. Rabie, Jan. Polemika 1957–1965 (Cape Town: Jan Malherbe, 1965). Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia U P 2004). Small, Adam. Academic Freedom, White Power and Black People (E.G. Malherbe Academic Freedom Lecture; Durban: University of Natal, 1976). ——. A Brown Afrikaner Speaks: A Coloured Poet and Philosopher Looks Ahead (Munger Africana Library Notes 8; Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1971). ——. Black Bronze and Beautiful: Quatrains (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1975). ——. Goree (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2013). ——. Die eerste steen? (Cape Town: H A U M , 1960). ——. Kanna hy kô hystoe (Cape Town: H A U M , 1965). ——. Kitaar my kruis (Cape Town: H A U M , 1962). ——. “The Orange Earth” (M S , 1984). ——. The Orange Earth (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2013). ——. Sê Sjibbolet (Johannesburg: Afrikaanse Persboekhandel, 1963). ——. Verse van die liefde (Cape Town: Culemborg, 1957). Statistics South Africa. Census 2001 – Primary tables: 1996 and 2001 compared, http ://www.statssa.gov.za/census01/html/RSAPrimary.pdf (accessed 1 August 2011). Statistics South Africa. Census 2011 Results, http://mobi.statssa.gov.za/census2011 /First%20Language.html (accessed 10 October 2013). Petersen, S.V. “Agter die grenslyn,” Doc 118. Z. Pr. P (unpublished), D.J. Opperman archive, J.S. Library, University of Stellenbosch, 1952. Philander, P.J. “Klein halfaampie, twee soort wyn . . . ,” Volksblad (16 September 1989): 13. Primoratz, Igor. “Patriotism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2010 ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries /patriotism/ (accessed 13 August 2010). Verdal, Garth. “The Orange Earth,” Argus (17 July 1978): 2.

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Directing Politics Soyinkan Parallels in the Works of Uganda’s Robert Serumaga

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W O L E S O Y I N K A is Africa’s most publicly acclaimed man of theatre will come as no surprise to most people looking into African dramatic literature. As a dramatist, he is without peer on the continent and he is certainly one of a dozen world dramatists whose work has changed perceptions of dramatic form. This is not to take anything away from other dramatists and theatre people of note in Africa, writers ranging from Athol Fugard in South Africa to Femi Osofisan and the late Ola Rotimi in Nigeria; from the late Sony Labou Tansi in Congo to Bole Butake in Cameroon; from Moussa Diagana and his theatrically stunning The Legend of Wagadu as Seen by Sia Yatabere in Mauritania to the griotic experiments of Côte d’Ivoire’s Bernard Zadi Zaourou and dozens of others I lack world enough and time to mention here. But Africa also has – or I should say, had – at least one other man of the theatre whose work demands consideration in the same breath as Wole Soyinka. I am speaking of a man whose career parallels that of Soyinka in many ways and a man whose death by poisoning in Kenya at the age of fortyone in 1980 makes us thankful that Soyinka himself is still with us. I am speaking of the Ugandan novelist, dramatist, economist, actor, theatrical provocateur, and arguably the greatest theatrical director ever produced by Africa, Robert Serumaga. Soyinka fought his dictators in Nigeria; Serumaga fought his – most notably Idi Amin – in Uganda. Soyinka was obsessed by politics in his life and work. So, too, was Serumaga. Soyinka had his threats of death and so did HAT

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Serumaga. Soyinka had his poetry, his novels, and ultimately his plays. So did Serumaga. Soyinka had the commitment of other professional and quasiprofessional actors for long periods of his career. Serumaga ran his collective, the more or less professional Abafumi (Storytellers) Company, virtually up to the moment of his untimely death. Both had enormous national and international theatrical recognition – Soyinka, as playwright, saw his work staged by leading theatres worldwide and, of course, by his Nobel Prize. Serumaga’s work – most notably his masterpiece Renga Moi and his later production called Amayirikiti – was recognized worldwide by performances not only in Africa but across Europe, from England to the U S S R , and even in South America and the Caribbean in the mid-1970s. But where Soyinka had the personal cleverness to avoid direct involvement in government, Serumaga had an Achilles’ heel: he couldn’t resist accepting governmental power after Amin was finally overthrown, and he couldn’t resist the lure of actual guerrilla warfare (we won’t even mention his attraction to the lure of numerous beautiful women, one of whom it was who apparently did him in with poison). Finally, where Soyinka’s reputation has continued to grow worldwide, Serumaga’s international reputation (though not his national one) has vanished for the most part, perhaps understandably, given the fact that Soyinka has a written body of dramatic and theoretical work to rest on while Serumaga, as a director, has only the memory of those who saw his productions to keep his reputation alive. Yes, Serumaga did write three scripted plays – A Play (1967), The Elephants (1970), and his best written play, Majangwa (1971), still produced in Uganda. But Serumaga’s real theatrical contribution, I would argue, remains in his spectacular stagings with Abafumi, and these are best represented in productions such as the legendary Renga Moi (pronounced ‘moy’).1 This essay, then, is an attempt to re-introduce Robert Serumaga, his work and his wars, his life and his death to both the African and the wider world-theatre community, in the hope that he will one day again take his rightful place alongside Wole Soyinka as one of Africa’s theatrical masters and as one of Africa’s leading theatrical warriors. A few facts to begin with. Serumaga was born in 1939 and died in 1980. (I mention this because my friend Martin Banham has the dates as 1940 to 1981 in his very valuable Cambridge Guide to Theatre and, with respect, my own 1

The title refers to the play’s leading character, whose name in the northern Uganda language of Acholi can be roughly translated as ‘valiant warrior’.

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research has found those dates to be inaccurate.) A member of the Buganda ethnic community from the southern part of the country, Serumaga was born in Uganda’s third-largest city, Masaka, and educated at several private Roman Catholic schools, St. Mary’s College (a junior school) in Kampala and St. Henry’s College (a high school) near Masaka. Serumaga, it can also be said (with apologies to Oscar Wilde), rose from the ranks of the aristocracy. His family had land in both Uganda and Kenya and great wealth deriving mostly from his father’s management abilities in harvesting tea and coffee from the various family estates. In 1962, Serumaga went off to Europe to read Economics and then to earn his bachelor’s degree at Trinity College, Dublin. He then did two years of graduate study there in the same field. While at Trinity, he also dabbled in theatre and filmmaking and for two years contributed a programme to the B B C called Africa Abroad. As a graduate student in the mid-1960s, he wrote a novel called Return to the Shadows, which was published by Heinemann (London) in 1969 and subsequently republished in its African Writers Series (a series edited by Chinua Achebe). Published in the U S A by Atheneum a year later, the novel deals with the life of a young African intellectual who has studied in Europe and who has returned home to witness a series of coups in his country. Should he continue to absent himself from the real action at such chaotic times or should he strap on a gun and become part of the battle? That is the question. When gratuitous violence strikes his own family, it’s obvious to him where his future is to be. Serumaga’s first work for the theatre is written shortly after Return to the Shadows and is called simply A Play. Dating from 1966, A Play is rooted in gratuitous violence. A husband and wife are to celebrate their anniversary. During the celebration, a stray bullet from the social chaos going on in the outside world flies into their room and kills the wife. The reality of this pointless death wreaks havoc with the mind of her husband, who, a year later, is having trouble separating reality from fantasy. Serumaga, with connections at the B B C , managed to sell this fascinating play to B B C radio drama, which produces it later that year. It is about this time (after six years in Europe) that he decides it is time for him to go home again to take up his responsibilities in running the family businesses, ultimately to take on a well-paid job as managing director of Kampala’s venerable Ford Motor Company and, in his spare time, start a theatre company that he names, in proper business style, Theatre Ltd. Like everything else he did, he intends to pay everyone involved, and he intends to run it on a business-like basis as much as possible.

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A Play is, not surprisingly, the company’s first show. Serumaga himself plays the husband. Rose Mbowa, the doyenne of theatre at the University of Makerere, plays the wife, and it is directed by Elizabeth Keeble. The show is done at the National Theatre in Kampala as a rental in October 1967. The script is published later that year by the Uganda Publishing House. With a European education, a published novel, and a produced play already to his credit, Serumaga basks in his new hometown celebrity.His next play is entitled The Elephants. Still quite the European well-made play, the new script looks into the lives of a group of intellectuals studying in Africa, but it is clear that political pressures and particularly refugee issues are swirling around them. Should they become involved? The protagonist here is David, a research fellow in African literature and musicology, whose energy has lately been devoted, we are told, to creative writing. As this rather traditional realistic play develops, a strange figure appears, an old man – the old Africa? tradition? the not-so-bright future? – whose very presence causes crisis in the group. Uganda’s past and its future are now debated. David says that he has actually used the real-life situations to create the situation of the refugees “through the written word.” Serumaga, mocking the unengaged artist in his own introduction to the play, says that other people were creating life “through the muzzle of a gun.” The Elephants was staged in 1971 by Theatre Ltd. and was subsequently published by Oxford University Press through its Kenya office. Serumaga’s breakthrough play comes later that same year, 1971. Entitled Majangwa: A Promise of Rains, it is not so much a debate as it is a social indictment. The story of two entertainers, a husband and a wife, so down on their luck in the capital that their art has slowly evolved into sexual displays in which the husband attracts a gathering of men while his wife dances seductively for them. Over time, the public dance turns into something of a public striptease and eventually, as more and more coins are dropped around them, the two have public sex. Now chased out of the city, they wander down the dark road of life trying to find their Godot. And as they fall asleep, the play breaks free of the mimetic as nameless fears and mythical figures from the past roar by them in what becomes a surrealistic dance of death. It is with this play – Serumaga played the husband – that he at last finds his true dramatic voice. Serumaga the director also emerges here and the production is an instant success. Text has now merged with dance, mimetic drama has merged with mystery, present with past, myth with dream, and all these elements with a very real sexuality. Majangwa attracts wide attention and is

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shown over the next eighteen months not only in Kampala but also in Kenya, at the World Theatre Festival in Manila, and even at a small theatre in Chicago. In 1974, A Play and Majangwa: A Promise of Rains are published together by the East African Publishing House in Nairobi as volume five in their African Theatre series. By early 1972, Serumaga has committed himself almost entirely to Theatre Ltd. He is now determined to expand its mandate to include musicians and dancers as well as actors, and to offer them classes in everything from Stanislavski-inspired Western acting approaches to exercises in collective creation, traditional storytelling techniques, and experiments in music and dance. He begins visiting high schools in Kampala at this time looking for skilled dancers, drummers, and other musicians. Some of those he recruits have just completed school; others are in their final year. With this new core, he renames Theatre Ltd. in late 1971, now calling it Abafumi Theatre Ltd. (on its many tours, the group will also be called the Abafumi Company, the Abafumi Company Ltd., and even Theatre Ltd. of Kampala). A true 1960s collective – everyone lives together and studies together; Abafumi brings in scholars and writers to speak to its young artists about theatrical and African history, about what Serumaga insists is Total Theatre (after Artaud), about politics and storytelling (one visiting teacher to the company early on was the already renowned Chinua Achebe). Serumaga also accepts a position at this time as Fellow in Creative Writing at Makerere University. All this obviously added respectability to the company, since artists, as one member of them told me later, “were seen as little better than prostitutes.”2 Renga Moi was Abafumi’s first and biggest production to that time, with a cast of fourteen. First seen in Kampala, the production was later taken on tour several times between 1972 and 1976. Serumaga described it as “the story of a brave African warrior who finds himself faced with the universal problem of having to choose between social commitment and the realisation of personal interests.”3 The play is set in the mythical Village of the Seven Hills where “prosperity and peace have aroused the jealousy of neighbouring villages.” Renga Moi, the warrior of the title, and his wife are to have a child, and this child turns out to be twins. Strictly following tradition when it comes to the “danger” of twins, Renga Moi prepares to undergo a purification rite, one in 2

Company member Charles Tumwisigye in interview, October 2001, Toronto. This quotation is from a copy of the Renga Moi programme (photocopy in my possession). 3

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which he agrees not to shed blood. But before the purification period expires, war breaks out and Renga Moi must choose between saving his village or saving himself and his family. Renga Moi chooses the social good and goes off to war. When it is learned that he has shed blood, however, the village’s Priest– Diviner insists on a blood sacrifice in return, the deaths of his twins. In a ritual dance, the twins are skewered on spears, a segment of the play done in horrific slow motion. When Renga Moi returns home, he is enraged by the deaths of his children, but, believing it was the necessary will of the community, he agrees to go through his own purification ritual (crawling through a massive termite hill). When, however, he learns that it was not the community who demanded his children’s deaths but, rather, the Priest–Diviner, he turns on the Diviner and murders him. As Serumaga says in the programme notes, Renga Moi at that point, “rather like the modern politician, [. .. then] assumes the Diviner’s unenviable position.” Suddenly he is the holder of power. Of interest here: Serumaga cast himself in the show not as Renga Moi, but rather as the Priest–Diviner. Trying to re-create that unscripted production is difficult. One can only say here that the production had a sound score of drums and incantations interspersed with extended periods of almost total silence. Scenes were done in dance and mime, the children’s ritual murder done with company members moving through the audience uncontrollably sobbing and wailing, almost, as one reviewer put it, “to the point of terror.”4 The same reviewer said that Serumaga seemed to be “putting his actors at physical and psychological risk,” with the production moving at an almost hysterical pace through the “fantasies and improbabilities of the story.” Similarly strong responses were engendered everywhere the company played, twenty-six countries over the next six years.5 Serumaga was in virtually all of these performances and he was interviewed regularly. His statements were consistent regarding his ultimate theatrical desire:

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Bill White in the Sunday Nation of 23 July 1972 after the performance in Belgrade. Renga Moi and Amayirikiti played in the UK (at Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre Season), Poland (in Gdánsk as part of the Theatre des Nations Festival), the U S S R , Brazil, Venezuela (at the Caracas Festival), Jamaica, Italy, Finland, and Colombia. In 1985, five members of the company played excerpts from the shows under the title Namanve at the Edmonton Fringe Festival in Canada using the group name Makonde Total Theatre Company. 5

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I am seeking a black aesthetic. I want to create a theatre that is African in both form and content but one that is at the same time .[. . . ] human and universal.6

A Canadian newspaper reviewer left us one of the more evocative descriptions of what Serumaga’s style looked and felt like. In 1985, company member Charles Tumwisigye (stage name Charles Makuba) had moved to Canada and in Edmonton tried to re-create the Abafumi aesthetic with his own group, which he called Makonde. In a work called Namanve, all the Serumaga style features were clear. Liz Nicholls in the Edmonton Journal wrote: I could tell you that a baby is born, people die and others grieve, corpses are eaten. I could tell you about prayers and incantations and manic joyous dances. But I’d be telling you nothing crucial about the organic rhythm of an absolutely hypnotic amalgam of movement and frozen postures, sound and silence, that begins and ends in an extremity of agony that would constitute a chilling political manifesto in a more literary play.7

And there it is again – the interface of politics and art, communal versus personal responsibility (a theme not unfamiliar to Wole Soyinka, who at this time was both an inspiration to the younger Serumaga – they did meet several times – and someone to be challenged for working too closely with European dramatic models). To understand the importance of this interface for Serumaga, one has to simply note Ugandan and African history. Uganda had only left its colonial past in 1962, just a half-dozen years before Serumaga began writing. The year 1962 also saw the first full production of a play by an East African playwright in Uganda – Ng×g´ wa Thiongo’s The Black Hermit, done by the Dramatic Society at Makerere University. And it was in 1971, only three years after Serumaga created his Theatre Ltd., that Idi Amin came to power, telling the Ugandan people how they must live, who they will live with in Uganda, and who will have power. Amin, of course, will ultimately set himself up as all-powerful, the one who, like the Diviner–Priest in Renga 6

From an undated Kampala newspaper interview done with David Rubadiri (copy in my possession). 7 Liz Nicholls, reviewing the Fringe Festival in the Edmonton Journal (19 August 1985), Entertainment page. See also the Festival programme guide for 1985, p. 17 (namanve, charles makuba, makonde theatre company, kampala, uganda) now online and archived at www.fringetheatre.ca/programguide_archives.php (accessed 13 March 2014).

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Moi, will interpret the rules and decide who lives and who dies. It was also during the Amin period, a time when Uganda began ‘closing’ to the world at large, that Serumaga was apparently approached by the C I A , which saw in this educated and articulate freedom-fighter someone who could be useful to them, someone who was able to travel both within Uganda and internationally. According to several members of the company with whom I have subsequently spoken, Serumaga must have been recruited about 1975 and he apparently continued working with them until his death by poisoning in 1980. Why would Serumaga risk his artistic reputation as well as his life by working with the C I A ? I asked this over and over again to everyone who knew him. The response by company members – again in retrospect – was that he was absolutely determined to help overthrow Idi Amin (a man Serumaga also met on several occasions) by any means possible. All those around the company also now believe that Serumaga – whose own money was going into Abafumi – must have been channelling some (though not all) of the C I A funds into the Ugandan underground, apparently purchasing guns to be shipped into Uganda while he travelled abroad. One can also speculate that Serumaga was also using some of the C I A funding to keep his company travelling well. Abafumi, as one company member put it to me, stayed at top hotels and travelled at this difficult time “surprisingly well.” Abafumi also had no significant problems making international contacts and getting international bookings, and seemed to have constant access to upscale receptions hosted by top government officials. We never understood why we were treated so well at the time or why so many nontheatre people would mysteriously show up to meet with him at airports around the world, men in suits and sunglasses,” said company member Charles Tumwisigye, “but we later came to understand that the C I A connection had many benefit.”8

Another member of the company, Jane Majoro, was also Serumaga’s mistress for much of this period. She confirmed his involvement with the C I A to Charles and others in the group. She told them that when he disappeared for periods of time, he was travelling on underground army business to England, the U S A (he was the first Ugandan to fly Concorde), and Brazil, the latter trip apparently to buy arms.9 With this as background, then, try to imagine the spectacular drama of the Abafumi company’s final performance in Uganda 8 9

Interview with Charles Tumwisigye in Toronto, October 2001. Interview with Charles Tumwisigye in Toronto, October 2001.

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before Amin himself in April 1977. For this viewing, scheduled to take place at the International Conference Centre in Kampala, Amin had gathered a bevy of fellow dictators for a trade conference and he asked each of them to bring along some entertainment for their joint amusement. Among the leaders present – dictators may be a better term – were Sese Seko Mobutu of Zaire, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Omar Bongo of Gabon, and William Tolbert, Jr. of Liberia. That evening, more than 1,500 people jammed the Conference Centre Auditorium in Kampala for the live spectacular. Not a seat was empty. Abafumi was to perform as the fourth company on a bill of five mostly traditional national dance and music companies. The Abafumi artists were impressed to be in such distinguished artistic and political company. All in their early twenties, most of these young actors had not yet cut their own political teeth. Few at the time even suspected anything of Serumaga’s political involvements. Amin, however, had his suspicions. Where was Abafumi’s funding coming from? Who were they connected to outside Uganda? The question here, of course, is: if Amin really suspected Abafumi, why did he give them such a public political platform? What must Serumaga have felt that evening playing the Diviner (the dictator, if you will) in front of such a group? What must have Amin felt when he saw a violent struggle for power and control on the stage? Near the end of the play, when the Priest–Diviner condemns the innocent infants to death and demands that the community follow his order without question or suffer the consequences, a chill of recognition must have moved through the audience. Like the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet, the guilty must have felt less than comfortable at that moment. But only Mobutu played the Claudius card. Clearly angry at what he took to be a personal insult to himself, Mobutu stood, glared at Serumaga, and stormed out of the theatre followed by several dozen staff and security people and then by others in his delegation. After a few minutes of awkward silence, Amin gestured for the play to continue. “I kept staring at Amin,” said the actor–dancer Charles Tumwisigye, “waiting for some kind of signal.” All of us were looking at him. We couldn’t have played the remaining scenes with any real power. But when the play was over, the audience applauded and Amin, after a standing ovation for us, climbed onto the stage and shook all our hands. It was apparently a great success and he seemed happy. One of his aides then told us to join the leaders at a reception in another part of the city afterward.

“We all showered,” said Charles.

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We dressed. We looked forward to meeting these important people. We were told a bus would come for us after the final group had performed. A few minutes later, however, Serumaga came backstage. He was visibly upset. Someone had told him that the bus which was to pick us up would not make it to the reception. That it would have an accident and that everyone on it would be killed. Serumaga told us to get out of the theatre immediately and out of the country as soon as possible. He said we should each take our own routes and that we would meet a few days later in Nairobi.10 We were to use the Ford Foundation’s office there as our meeting point. He then gave each of us a thousand U S dollars and told us to use the money for bribes, should it be necessary. I couldn’t believe he was carrying that much money. Fresh hundred dollar bills.

“We were baffled,” recalled Charles, “but we did what we were told. We got out immediately.” We were, as I look back, innocents caught in a political drama, one that was not of our making. But we trusted Robert. He was a father to all of us. But how would we get to Nairobi? Some of the company went back to their home villages and arranged to travel that way. We found out later that our families had been threatened when it was learned we had escaped. Many family members also went into hiding.

Charles was one of those who went to his home village, and he crossed from there into Rwanda. Others took buses right to the Kenya border and simply walked across. Serumaga himself actually chartered a private plane. Ultimately, as it turned out, only nine of the twelve actors made it. Three of them were captured by the police, tortured, and killed.11 Charles and another member of the group with whom he travelled12 were arrested in Rwanda on suspicion of being spies. Jailed there and kept under horrific conditions, Charles begged his captors to call the Ford Foundation in Nairobi. One guard – he was promised money – made that call. When Ford was notified, suddenly everything moved quickly. A Ford official soon arrived in Rwanda on a chartered plane, bailed or bribed the two actors out of the prison, and within hours they found themselves at the Nairobi Airport. Waiting for them in Kenya 10

From Kampala, Nairobi is a ninety-minute plane ride; an eight-hour ride by car; a two- or three-day walk. 11 The three who died trying to escape were Sara Kibirige, Wilson Lubowa, and Peter Sendi. 12 Friday Kimbombo.

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were Serumaga and those members of the company who had managed to make it out. For the record, Charles eventually wound up in Canada, where I met him while doing work on the Uganda entry in the Africa volume of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. As for Serumaga, the custodian of the Abafumi vision, he continued to work with the company off and on for another year or so, first in Nairobi and then in Rome, where he managed to get them all settled again thanks to support from (no surprise) the Ford Foundation. But while the company was performing in Rome, as Charles tells it, Serumaga, the custodian of the Abafumi vision, left Italy without our knowledge. Not even his family saw or heard from him for the next seven months. Rumour had it that he had decided to go and continue to wage armed war against Amin. Indeed, it did turn out to be true. When Kampala fell in 1979, Robert emerged as one of the field commanders. His soldiers were among several exile groups which fought alongside the Tanzanian army to liberate his beloved country.13

Now both a political hero as well as a trained economist, Serumaga was invited to work in the new government as Minister of Trade and Commerce. But sixty-eight days later, that government fell, and the artist and visionary put his combat uniform on again. . . . He would never see his country again. Arrested in Tanzania but freed after two days because of political pressure by the cultural community in the U K , he was shortly thereafter poisoned (allegedly by a woman he picked up in a bar in Nairobi, who was apparently a spy paid to do the job). He died in hospital, telling those around him as he lapsed in and out of a coma that “they poisoned me, they killed me.” His wife and his children were with him at the end. He told them that they would all be okay and ultimately they were. Money was never an issue. It was early 1980. Robert Serumaga was forty-one. Several of Serumaga’s children later went to private schools and some of them also studied in Europe. His son, Robert Jr., became the managing director of the National Theatre in Kampala and a respected broadcaster there. In the last national election, it was he who chaired the television debates between the two presidential candidates. The young Serumaga’s first production as director at the National Theatre was, interestingly and perhaps fittingly, his father’s breakthrough play Majangwa, staged in the fall of 1998. 13

Interview with Charles Tumwisigye in Toronto, October 2001.

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In 1996, at a gathering of theatre scholars in Cameroon, Abafumi Company member Charles Tumwisigye, on his first trip back to Africa in twenty years, spoke emotionally of Serumaga, saying the following words of his guru, his leader, his teacher, his director, and they also seem somehow appropriate to end with here: “Robert, in the name of Africa, our ancestors, and the theatre: I salute you before this rare gathering. We are still trying to pick up the pieces. May your soul rest in peace.”14 And may Serumaga’s reputation – as one of modern Africa’s theatrical founding fathers – be restored.

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Charles Tumwisigye, from a paper given in Yaounde, Cameroon, in May 1996 at the University of Yaounde I I I on the occasion of the launching of the Africa volume of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (London: Routledge). A copy in my possession.

Afrika Cultural Centre Phoenix under Apartheid and Burnt Ember under Democracy?

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from colonial rule by African countries was often signified as marking processes that were analogous to symbolic and political forms of rebirth.1 Implicit in such acts of representation were intimations that oppression was synonymous with barrenness (and even death) and that freedom was the necessary catalyst for many forms of renewal. In South Africa, the inauguration of the first democratically elected government in 1994 was accompanied by the dissemination of social and political imaginaries – such as the ‘rainbow nation’ and the ‘African Renaissance’ – which were meant to encapsulate moves away from the divisions, alienation, and destruction associated with apartheid, to the desired new collective and life-affirming possibilities that democracy offered. At the provincial and local levels, a similar disposition is apparent in the attempts by the Greater Metropolitan Council of Johannesburg to remake the city’s history of racial and social exclusion, halt its decay and associations with crime and being unsafe, and rejuvenate and ‘rebrand’ it as a ‘world-class city’ with ‘world-class facilities’. Arguably, one of the terrains where both the national and provincial projects aimed at creating a sense of national unity 1

HE ACHIEVEMENT OF INDEPENDENCE

Following the closure of the first Dhlomo Theatre, newspaper reports tended to evoke the myth of the sacred firebird when reporting about its subsequent incarnations: “But the Theatre ka Dhlomo’s opening will rekindle memories, as it rises phoenix-like on the western periphery of the city centre. It is a second coming”; Z.B. Molefe, “Theatre kaDhlomo Rises from the Ashes,” Sunday Times Extra (Johannesburg; 11 June 1988): 9.

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and global belonging has been in the hosting of mega-events such as the 2010 F I F A World Cup.

While the broad schemas of rebirth and renaissance can be useful in mapping change diachronically, they often fail to take into full account the synchronic layers and complexities that often underscore, and sometimes call into question, the seemingly uncomplicated forward-moving sense of temporality and social transformation. The latter possibility is sharply captured in the thorny status and histories of community art centres in South Africa. Since their emergence in the early twentieth century in urban areas, in the aftermath of the industrial revolution across the country following the discoveries of diamonds and gold, community art centres have been compelled to negotiate the contending interests and visions of the many social groups that have sought to develop and use them. Whether faced initially with the needs of migrants and workers or, later on, the wants of settled urban communities, community art centres were saddled with many-layered and complicated creative and social objectives, primarily organized around the need to provide education and recreation. Underlying such objectives, however, were significant socio-political imperatives and projects as well. Whether articulated by philanthropists, social workers, artists, or representatives of communities or government, a number of common concerns can be discerned. These included the wish to promote ‘wholesome’ values and conduct as an antidote to the alienation and crime associated with urbanization. Alternatively, the arts were championed as a crucial component of the rehearsal and performance of a black public sphere, facilitating and embedding progressive forms of consciousness and resistance in response to the marginalization and subjugation produced by oppression and exploitation. Lastly, community art centres provided much-needed training and imparted skills across a range of artistic forms, and they also served as crucial catalytic sites for the circulation of ideas and the fostering of local and group identities. This essay is an attempt to reflect on the complicated experiences of community art centres in South Africa between 1975 and the present as encapsulated in the rise and demise of the Afrika Cultural Centre (A C C ). The impulse behind the essay is to acknowledge the important cultural and political role performed by community art centres in South Africa in the period 1970– 94.The singular import and achievements of community art centres are not always acknowledged, and, if recognized, it is seldom with a deep appreciation of the various levels and interventions of radical possibilities that community

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cultural centres made possible during the period of apartheid.2 Community art centres often developed and articulated alternate epistemologies, aesthetics, and pedagogies that, it was hoped, would serve a foundational role in the changes that were envisaged in a post-apartheid South Africa. The fact that, both as institutions and as embodiments of cultural and intellectual resources, community art centres have battled to survive in the post-1994 dispensation informs my attempt to recuperate their significance, through the example of the Afrika Cultural Centre, and to provide an implicit critique of their current battles with and neglect by officialdom. The first part of the essay teases out the racial and class disparities that typified and continue to characterize the stark inequalities and inequities between mainstream theatre venues and community art centres. It suggests that theatres, as performance spaces or the built environment, often served as cultural monuments of the white oligarchy. Furthermore, it argues that the physical sites are not only an indication of racial and class disparities but that their designs and architecture also encode differing aesthetic assumptions and senses of performance. The second section charts the origins of the A C C and discusses the political, cultural, aesthetic, and pedagogic interpolations (in both the disruptive and creative senses) that its emergence denoted. The discussion then concludes with a consideration of the contradictions that typify the notion of the ‘culture industries’ and the ways in which, because of their articulation with strategies for urban renewal, they are largely responsible for the demise of community art centres. The end of the A C C is symptomatic of numerous community art centres that did pioneering and sterling creative work during apartheid but, paradoxically, have struggled to survive and finally met their expiry after 1994. Here, the metaphors of rebirth and death attain 2

Important community art centres include the Katlehong Arts Centre (1977) on the East Rand; the Community Arts Project (1977) and Nyanga Arts Centre (1979) in Cape Town; the Community Arts Workshop (1983) in Durban; the Federated Union of Black Artists (1978) in Johannesburg; the Funda Centre (1983) and Mofolo Arts Centre (1986) in Soweto; and the Alexandra Arts Centre (1986) in Alexandra. For a discussion of community arts centres and the role they played in the struggle against apartheid, see my “The Arts in the Eighties: Between States of Emergency and Transcendence,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 4: 1980–1990 (African Democracy Education Trust; Pretoria: U N I S A Press, 2010): 943–73, and “ ‘ The Arts in the Aftermath of Democracy’: Old Bottles, New Wine and the Discontents of the Nation,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 5 (South African Democracy Education Trust. Pretoria: U N I S A Press, 2013): 1286–1308.

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their meanings and efficacies in a backward or sideways glance rather than from a forward-looking one.

Spaces of Political and Aesthetic Descent and Dissent: Theatre and Building Projects Let us commence by examining the legacy of apartheid as enshrined in theatre buildings across the country, spaces that occupy a very ambiguous and paradoxical genealogy and status in the history and practice of performance. There was not a single theatre in any of the townships across the country. Groups such as the A C C , as we will see later, were forced to cope with a precarious and itinerant existence. Artists in the townships had to make do, at best, with so-called ‘all-purpose’ community halls that must cater for all local needs ranging from the arts, to sports, weddings, religious occasions, and funerals. In Soweto, the main spaces were the D O C C and Uncle Toms Hall [sic] in Orlando, Y M C A in Dube, Entokhozweni in Tladi, the Diepkloof and Naledi Halls. In addition to community halls, other possible venues included those owned by churches (such as Ipelegeng Centre in Moletsane) or by individuals (such the Eyethu Cinema that was built by the businessman and past mayor of Soweto, Mr Ephraim Tshabalala). There were rumours in 1969 of the building of a Will Carr Theatre in Jabulani, Soweto (named after Mr W.J.P. Carr – a former manager of the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department).3 The rumours seem to have materialized forty years later, thanks to the F I F A World Cup’s coming to South Africa. In 2007, the building of the Soweto Theatre to the tune of R60 million was announced as one of seven legacy projects of the 2010 F I F A World Cup. The mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Masondo, led the sod-turning ceremony on 10 February 2009 in Jabulani Theatre. At the occasion, Masondo noted that “today we gather here to talk about a world class theatre in Soweto.”4 Pallo Jordan, the then Minister of Culture, made the following observations in his address, worth citing in length because they encapsulate tensions that will be later elaborated: This theatre building in Soweto is long, long overdue. It is indeed unfortunate that many people in the performing arts are unaware of the 3

Bhekizizwe Peterson, “Apartheid and the Political Imagination in Black South African Theatre,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16.2 (1990): 233. 4 Noughty [sic] Maluleke, “Sod Turned for Soweto Theatre,” 2, www.joburg.org.za /index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3478&Itemid=114 (accessed 16 October 2013).

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existence of a rich theatre history and tradition in Soweto. The absence of a physical building, housing a theatre does not mean that there was no theatre among Sowetans. Given the not too recent history of our country, colonialism, white domination, apartheid, conflict and national oppression, typically the resilience of African creative artists have been ignored, as has been the determination of African creative intellectuals who gave their all to establish a theatrical tradition in Soweto. Throughout the latter part of the 19th century and all of the 20th, artists in the black communities have sought to employ especially the theatre as a creative platform to reflect on Africa and Asia’s encounter with modernity and with Europe as expressed in the fusion of cultures that is so expressive of the South African experience. We have gathered here today in the shadow of that history and denial of such developments to turn the sod as a first step towards building a state of the art theatre complex in Soweto. This might be a very small step in the government’s efforts to create facilities in previously disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but this could become a giant leap forward in promoting and nurturing an indigenous theatre tradition that has struggled for decades for recognition [. . . ]. Despite the constraints imposed by passed policies, theatre in the urban African communities thrived [. . . ].There was no formal theatre, yet the quality of the productions defied the paucity of theatre props, stages and lighting systems [. . . ]. It is our hope that what we are doing today is the commencement of a comprehensive programme of renewal and initiatives that will see us create and open up more and more spaces for cultural activity and creativity in the townships [. . . ]. But [. . . ] this theatre’s success will depend on the community within which it is located. And that will in large measure rely on the relevance this theatre has to the lives of the people of Soweto.5

Once complete, the theatre will comprise a 420-seat main venue with an end stage, furnished with wings and buttress; two smaller venues of 180 and 90 seats, respectively; an indoor foyer serving all three venues; multilevel change rooms; storage rooms; and a greenroom, where the performers will be able to rest or have visitors.

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“Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr. Z. Pallo Jordan’s Speech on the First Theatre Building in Jabulani, Soweto,” 1–3, www.info.gov.za/speeches/2009/090211164 51001.htm (accessed 16 October 2013.

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The anticipated completion date was November 2011, and it was hoped that the venue would officially be opened in 2012. The Council felt that the theatre would “provide [an] opportunity to the many theatre groups and individuals living and working in Soweto” and that it would also “provide residents with entertainment on a regular basis and will include opportunities for education and training.”6 The theatre, indeed opened in 2012, is located in a precinct of Jabulani including residential cluster homes, a shopping mall, Technicon, and fire station. The history of the at least forty-nine mainstream theatres across South Africa is equally fascinating, as are the ways in which it signifies how theatres were seen and continue to be regarded as symbolic and aesthetic projects in their own right. All forty-nine theatres are located in areas that were previously designated as white and that prohibited ‘mixed audiences’ from 1965 until theatres were desegregated in 1978. Interestingly, segregation was often justified under the pretext of respecting the need for all racial groups to develop “along their own lines,” independence and initiative. This is evident in the following statement by the then Administrator of the Transvaal, Mr S.G.J. van Niekerk, on why blacks should not be allowed to attend the Civic Theatre: It was only recently and after many years that the Whites had obtained a Civic Theatre or Aula. Why then should the Blacks start at a point which had taken the Whites centuries to reach [. . . ]. He said that Blacks should create their own performing arts organization so that they could be participants as well as spectators. To work and plan was a challenge which lent spice to life. Why deny them this and make them passengers with the White organization in control? Pact was a White organization. Should we work in the direction where Whites and Blacks compete for the Civic Theatre or Aula for specific evenings? To avoid disturbing relationships, separate facilities and opportunities had to be developed for every group, Mr. Van Niekerk said.7

It is no wonder, then, that as political and cultural mnemonics, mainstream theatres signified the trajectories of discrimination and exploitation. The openings of the Nico Malan, in Cape Town, and the Pretoria State Theatre corresponded to the tenth- and twentieth-anniversary celebrations of the Re-

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See “Minister of Arts and Culture.” “Non-White Patrons Barred,” Pretoria News (6 June 1973): 8.

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public.8 The Johannesburg Civic Theatre was built as a reminder of forty years of Union (that is, the formation of the unified South African state in 1910, amalgamating the previously existing four provinces).9 Sasol, the energy parastatal, built the Etienne Rousseau Theatre as a gift to the city’s on its twenty-fifth anniversary.10 The Windybrow Theatre in Hillbrow was inaugurated as part of Johannesburg’s centenary celebrations.11 Some of the tributes paid to the spaces include the following. The Johannesburg Civic Theatre was hailed as “a monument to those gallant men who believed that the performing arts form an essential part of a civilized way of life,” followed by the declaration: “The Civic Theatre does not contribute financially to the running of the city; it must be judged by spiritual and not material standards.”12 With reference to the Sand du Plessis Theatre in Bloemfontein, it was observed that “our descendants should be proud to look back and say, ‘Thank you! Thank you for this heritage from the drought-stricken eighties’.”13 As befitting its name, the Pretoria State Theatre was, in the 1980s before the emergence of Sun City, the pinnacle of material and technical sophistication or decadence.14 Officially opened on Saturday, 30 May 1981, the massive complex occupies 1.8 hectares of land and extends 14 m underground and 42 m above ground. It was completed at an estimated cost of R46.5 million, even though the original contract was for R25.3 million. The auditoria include an Opera House (with a seating capacity of 1,362 and projected to host about five productions per year, with each staging six to eight shows 8

“Theatres of South Africa No. 4: Nico Malan Theatre Center,” Scenaria (January 1979): 12; “The History of the State Theatre Pretoria,” Scenaria (Special Issue 1981): 4. 9

Michal Grobbelaar, “Theatres of South Africa No. 3: The Johannesburg Civic Theatre,” Scenaria (October–November 1977): 12. 10 “Theatres of South Africa No. 11: Etienne Rousseau Theatre,” Scenaria (January 1979): 26. 11 “Windybrow P A C T ’s New Home in Johannesburg,” speech made by the Honorable W.A. Cruywagen at Windybrow, Johannesburg, on 4 March 1985, Scenaria 50 (April 1985): 4. 12 Grobbelaar, “Theatres of South Africa No. 3,” 12–13. 13 “Speech Made by the Administrator Mr. I.J. Botha during the Inauguration of The Sand du Plessis Theatre on 1 August 1985,” Scenaria 50 (August 1985): 22. 14 “Our Opera House is the most spectacular and yet intimate venue for lyrical performances. It ranks with any of the modern European Houses – Cologne, Hamburg – and is immensely superior to much-vaunted venues such as the Sydney Opera House”; “The Unique State Theatre,” Scenaria (Special Issue 1981): 8.

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per run), Drama Theatre (712 seats), The Arena (200 seats), a Studio Theatre (100 seats), and the Transvalia (100 seats). The Studio Theatre was also envisaged to be used for rehearsals, lectures, and symposia, and as a recording studio. The Transvalia was marketed as a multipurpose space that was equipped to cater for public or business meetings, lectures, private recitals, rehearsals, and receptions. In anticipation of possible criticism of what may be seen as the questionable duplication of venues, the following justification was proffered: The complex has two auditoria for general public performance and, whilst this may appear wasteful, there is a sound (sic) technical reason behind it. Such an arrangement is necessary because of the widely different acoustic problems experienced between orchestral and speech (drama) productions. For opera and orchestral work, the design is dictated by the optimum acoustic requirements, which necessitate a relatively long reverberation time, approximately 1,8 seconds for the sufficient blending of musical sounds, although a reverberation time of 1,2 is needed for the proper understanding of speech. Since these totally different harmonic requirements dictate different design criteria, with regard to the volume of the auditoria, the placement of reflective or sound absorbing material and architectural design of the buildings elements within the area, it is necessary to have two completely different auditoria for the varying demands of opera and drama.15

Spaces earmarked for the private and personal use of artists include nine rehearsal rooms, one fitted with an entire orchestra pit, and eighty-eight “wellappointed” dressing rooms. Dressing rooms set aside for “star performers” include an enclosed shower and carpeted room apart from the standard makeup and wardrobe facilities. The rehearsal rooms are “unusual and well conceived” because “they all have windows: artists are therefore aware of the time of the day and weather conditions, which has obvious psychological advantages.”16 Supplementing the theatres is an administrative section, various technical and production workshops, and a wardrobe department. The administration complex is a six-storey building with eighty-five offices and a cafeteria. Workshops include areas for carpentry, steel, electrical work and plastic, a properties paint shop, a décor-mounting hall, and warehouses for timber, mechanical, and electrical equipment. The wardrobe department has facilities

15 16

“The Pretoria State Theatre: An International House,” Scenaria 13 (May 1979): 14. “The Pretoria State Theatre,” 24.

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for the manufacturing of costumes, fitting rooms and washing, and ironing and laundry installations. Other “interesting features” include: an à la carte public restaurant, the Encore, a “luxurious lounge” for entertaining guests during intervals and after performances, a coffee bar, one hundred forty-five toilet blocks, a special dressing room with changing and freshening-up facilities for out-of-town patrons, a souvenir shop, special garderobe facilities, a décor lift that has the capacity of sixteen tons and is able to transport five minibuses at once. The complex used twelve thousand household electrical globes and contained nine stage lifts, sixteen passenger lifts, parking for a thousand cars, and some 350 telephone installations. Not surprisingly, it was claimed that the electrical installations at the State Theatre provided the same amount of power, when all circuits were in use, as it would take to light the whole of a medium-sized city such as Potchefstroom.17 Let us not forget that, supposedly, at the core of such over-indulgence is the concern with the audience’s experience of art. We are told that in order to appreciate the performances, we first need to experience “the comfort and luxury which sets an evening’s theatre.”18 Hence, the designs of the theatres are ostensibly aesthetically intentional rather than indulgent: Implicit in the brief given to the architect was the instruction to imbue the complex [the Sand du Plessis Theatre] with certain definite qualities: warmth, stateliness and serenity; it should draw the public to it by its bright welcoming aspect, while creating an atmosphere in its foyers conducive to the anticipation and enjoyment of stage performances or other events. To fulfill these parameters, a variety of material was chosen, giving a wide range of textures to create appropriate moods: these include the dignity and luxury of blue-veined marble and glass, the warmth of copper, bronze carpeting and wood, the strength of concrete and aluminium.19

At the Nico Malan Theatre, For the audience a feeling of anticipation on approaching the Theatre Centre, combined with a sense of occasion when within the Complex, have been striven for. This is achieved with such items as the five magnificent chandeliers in the opera foyer, the two huge glowing 17

“The History of the State Theatre Pretoria,” 1–27. “The Unique State Theatre,” 8. 19 “The Sand du Plessis Theatre,” 5–6. 18

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tapestries and the travertine marble halls, all emphasising the ambience of the Centre.20

Pallo Jordan’s speech identifies the tension between the repressive history of segregation and apartheid in South Africa and the denial to blacks of social amenities because of racial discrimination, poverty, and their perceived status as “temporary sojourners” in white South Africa. At the same time, he is unequivocal in emphasizing that such deprivation did not amount to any significant erasure of the creativity and resilience of black artists. Consequently, there is no straightforward correlation between the absence of theatre buildings and the existence of a long and, in some ways, thriving local black theatre tradition and history. The crucial question, then, is how does one unmake (or redress) inequities in ways that do not simply correct the past but also validate and empower the constituencies that, then and now, have had to create art against great personal and social odds? His caution that the Soweto Theatre’s “success will depend on the community within which it is located. And that will in large measure rely on the relevance this theatre has to the lives of the people of Soweto” is an apt observation.21 The problem is that the intended users and local community, as is the case in many so-called development projects, are rarely consulted, never mind involved in the planning of such projects. Who designed the Soweto Theatre? What performance traditions and repertoires are its design and architecture intended to primarily cater for? To cite a few concerns, what informed the design and future use of the venue in terms of senses of movement, performance, the relationship between performers, and performers and audiences? For, if there are pre-existing lineages of performance that have thrived outside of buildings or proscenium-arch stages, how are those histories and practices inscribed into the shape, size, and flexibility of the space? Or is the operative factor the desire to create a ‘world-class theatre’? As we know, world-class cities and theatres have less to do with the needs and wants of those who inhabit them and more to do with prescriptive delusions of city ‘fathers’ and their predatory consultants and business partners. The end-result is likely to be a theatre that, like those built by the oligarchs of apartheid, is mesmerized more by its technical decadence than reflecting any useful sub-

20 21

“Theatres of South Africa No. 4,” 12. “Minister of Arts and Culture.”

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servience to the needs of performance and performers.22 Of course, the costs of maintaining such ventures is soon found to be costly and such pressures inevitably result in calls for artists and communities to find ways of being “self-sustaining” by “generating their own income” and not “rely on public funding.”23 Or, as one observer noted with regard to the State Theatre: “The State Theatre finds itself in the invidious position of, having been given a Rolls Royce, now having to beg for petrol money.”24 The choice, then, is between producing more commercially oriented work (aimed, for instance, at the ‘tourist’ markets or corporations) as part of the culture industries strategy and the gradual descent of the venue into a state of disrepair and, ultimately, a white elephant.25 A number of the above-cited tensions are implicit in a newspaper report on the sod-turning ceremony. Despite its heading, “At Last, Soweto Takes Centre Stage,” the article bemoans the absence of local artists, asking, “Were they not invited? Or did they boycott this event?” After cautionary comments such as “The artists sketch made the R110 million complex look like a factory rather than an artistic mecca” and “Let it not be a white theatre in the township. Why is it going to be managed by the Pro Arte Theatre in Roodepoort? There’s a world of difference between Roodepoort and Soweto,” the article concludes with the following statement: “The ceremony was corporate, autocratic and clinical with the exception of the Soweto Gospel

22

Many major directors – such as Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook, to mention a few – have deliberately turned away from what they regarded as the extraneous ornamentals of theatre and instead foregrounded the centrality of the actor and audience in performance. 23 A recent article reports on the “architectural decay” at the Johannesburg Art Gallery that threatens the holdings of the gallery. Apparently, the “lighting and electrics alone in the J A G will cost in the region of R 30 million to replace and the budget allocated by Johannesburg City Council across all Johannesburg galleries and museums is R 1 million a year.” See Sam Swaine, “Fixing Art’s Frame,” The Times (Johannesburg; 25 August 2011): 16. 24 Julius Eichbaum, “Bloemfontein’s New Theatre Complex: The Sand du Plessis,” Scenaria 53 (June 1985): 10. 25 In 1985, it was reputed that the State Theatre “manage[d] to stage five operas per year and then only six or eight performances apiece” (Eichbaum, “Bloemfontein’s New Theatre Complex,” 9).

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Choir [...]. A Christian minister did the soil blessing ceremony. Where were the imbongi’s?”26

iBlues Train: Riding Turbulence The Afrika Cultural Centre was founded in 1980. The name that was initially preferred was the Afrika Cultural Cooperative, but the Registrar of Companies rejected the proposed name because, supposedly, cooperatives were agricultural rather than cultural enterprises. Its main objective, as listed in its memorandum of association, was to promote and produce, to research and develop cultural and artistic activities by establishing training and performing arts centres, theatres, galleries and studios and enhancing community interests in various cultural and artistic activities.27

The A C C grew out of a previous initiative, Action Centre, which incorporated the Centre for Research and Training in African Theatre. Benjy Francis and a group of actors and students drawn from the townships across the Witwatersrand formed Action Centre in 1978.28 This followed Francis’s short stints at the Market Theatre in the mid-1970s and at the Federated Union of Black Artists (F U B A ) in the late 1970s. The majority of members came from Soweto, but others were from the Pretoria region, Springs and Alexandra Townships. The founding members of Action Centre, who became the core of the A C C ’s collective, consisted of Benjy Francis, Ramadan Suleman, Angifi Dladla, Maropodi Mapalakanye, Mavuso Tsabalala, Mopholosi Morokong, Jake Chika, Styles Mvula, Vincent Phillips, and Bhekizizwe Peterson. Since the group consisted of members who were employed, unemployed, and students, they could only meet in the early evenings and on weekends for their training and rehearsals. Another obstacle was the lack of a base, so, as an itinerant troupe, they worked wherever they could find space, but mainly in empty derelict buildings in Newtown and on the railway tracks between the Market Theatre and the Potato Sheds, which was later to become the last 26

Adrienne Sichel, “At Last, Soweto Takes Centre Stage,” Star Tonight (12 February 2009): 1, www.sowetogospelfans.com/2009/02/12at-last-soweto-takes-centrestage/ (accessed 16 October 2013). 27 Memorandum of the Association of the Afrika Cultural Centre, Pretoria, 1984. 28 Francis was born in Durban, where he was a prominent personality in the cultural and theatre scene in the 1960s and 1970s, working with the Natal Drama Foundation. He studied at the Drama Centre London, where he specialized in directing.

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premises of the A C C . These challenges partly account for the fact that the first incarnation of the A C C was entirely male. In the approximately three decades of its existence, the A C C occupied numerous premises after graduating from railway tracks and dilapidated buildings. The first base was a disused abattoir at 66 Pim Street in Newtown. It took the collective a year to renovate the space, occupied in December 1981, before launching the hundred-seater Dhlomo Theatre (then touted as the first “black run and owned theatre” in the country) in1983.29 Apart from the Dhlomo Theatre, the premises housed administrative offices, a full-time actor’s studio, a research unit-cum-library, and an open-air theatre space. The premises had to be vacated nearly a year later in February 1984 after the Johannesburg Fire Department declared the Dhlomo Theatre (which opened on Sharpeville Day, 21 March 1983) a fire hazard. In 1985, the A C C moved to Mint Road in Fordsburg, where it remained until 1991 when the Johannesburg City Council approved the Centre’s bid to lease the Potato Sheds in Newtown, immediately adjacent to the railway tracks where the group used to meet and rehearse. It is worth noting that the shutting-down of the Dhlomo Theatre and the leasing of the Potato Sheds to the A C C were not without their own drama. As far as the A C C was concerned, subsequent to the intimidation, surveillance, and detention of members of the Centre, the only fire hazard that the Dhlomo Theatre presented was a political one. As Francis observed on a number of occasions, the decision to shut down the Dhlomo Theatre as a “fire hazard” was a “shrewd political move”:30 “At the time of the creation of the Dhlomo Theatre in 1983, I went on record as saying that its birth was a political act and that its closure too will be an act of politics.”31 Similarly, the decision to approve the A C C ’s lease was preceded by public revelations that the Centre and its Trustees were subject to secret investigations in 1989 by Johannesburg’s Council’s Security Unit.32 Paradoxically, despite the fact that the A C C battled to secure the funding necessary to implement its infrastructural plans (even from the Johannesburg City Council), the Greater Johannes29

The theatre was named after Herbert Dhlomo, a pioneering playwright, journalist, and Renaissance man who was a colossal figure in cultural and political affairs between 1930 and 1950. 30 “Francis Takes His Dream to the Townships,” New Nation (September 1988): 8. 31 Benjy Francis, “Theatre: People’s Voice,” Sowetan (9 June 1988): 9. 32 Martin Welz, “Millionaire Spy Targets,” Sunday Times (Johannesburg; 17 March 1991): 1–2.

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burg Metropolitan Council started to renege on the A C C ’s ninety-nine-year lease on the premises because of plans to create a cultural precinct in Newtown. It is striking, in retrospect, how the group and the press symbolically described each location at the time, in metaphors that simultaneously evoked the desire for a home while alluding to the group’s fugitive status and history. The headings of press releases range from “The Long Road Home on Pim Street,”33 “Co-op Provides Hope among the Desolation,”34 and “The Birth of an African Theatre”35 to “The Soul of the Afrika Cultural Centre Is Already in Place: Space and Energy Are a Good Enough Start”36 and “A New Home at Last for Afrika Cultural Centre.”37 Francis was equally adamant that “what you see here [.. . ] is the result of the collective labour and decision of men and women who are seeking an alternative lifestyle and political statement. The centre has become a beacon in terms of consciousness and action” and that “our work here is more than just the building which is the outer casket. We are busy striving towards creating a total person with inner strength that would not be measured in terms of money and commercial value.”38 During its more than two decades of existence, the core projects of the A C C included: the Centre for Research and Training in African Theatre; the Dhlomo Theatre (1983–84); Adopt-A-Group; Theatre for Development; Artists-in-the-Schools; the Media Unit; the Centre for Early Childhood Development; the Children’s Museum and Science Centre; the Young People’s Creative Workshop; and Timbuktu: A Journal of Students at the Centre for Research and Training in African Theatre. Whatever the genre or medium, the creative work and training conducted at the Centre was deeply informed by an African provenance – one that was not insular but actively interested in

33

Rina Minervini, “The Long Road to Home on Pim Street,” Rand Daily Mail (18 April 1983): 18. 34 Don Mattera, “Co-op Provides Hope among the Desolation,” The Star (Johannesburg; 20 April 1983): 34. 35 “The Birth of an African Theatre,” Pace Magazine (May 1983): 20–21. 36 Rina Minervini, “The Soul of the Afrika Cultural Centre Is Already in Place: Space and Energy Are a Good Enough Start,” Sunday Star Timeout (8 March 1987): 7. 37 Victor Metsoamere, “A New Home at Last for Africa Cultural Centre,” Sowetan (27 June 1991): 23. 38 Mattera, “Co-op Provides Hope,” 34.

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and receptive to “the different forms in which theatre manifests in different countries and cultures”: As a performing arts space developed, controlled and directed by Blacks, the theatre is an important growth point for ‘consciousness raising’. The Dhlomo Theatre functions as a promotional / performance space for indigenous Black theatre and other African, Third World, East / West art that gives insight into our (and humanity’s) historical predicament. Research into play creation and performance, into the mythological source point of early African Theatre and developing trends in Southern African contemporary theatre forms are an important feature of the work.39

In the same vein, the following description of the curriculum pursued is instructive: The course is designed to develop students’ understanding and command of all the creative, imaginative, intellectual, physical and technical resources demanded by the medium of theatre in African and Third World countries. Students will be led to a thorough acquisition of basic theatre skills and a sound understanding of theatre as an art medium that can be used for community development. The different forms in which theatre manifests itself (in different countries and cultures) and the influence of the environment on the theatrical form (climatic, economic, religious, social, political) will be analysed in arriving at a deeper understanding of African theatre and culture. The entire course will be workshop-orientated with a balanced emphasis or division between theory and practice, teacher and student. The aim is to lead the students to an appreciation of the totality of his or her mind, voice, and body, the community and the craft.40

The Creative Act, a weekly twenty-part “series on community play-making for everyone” published in the Sowetan from 5 June 1990 and written by Francis and myself, provides the most extensive elaboration, in print, of the ideas and aesthetic that informed the work of the Centre at the time. iBlues Train is the first full-length play produced by Action Centre, the precursor to the A C C . The play explored the lives of homeless people that the group became friends with between 1978 and 1980. The title of the play refers to the 39

Dhlomo Theatre, programme brochure for Night of the Long Wake (Johannesburg, March 1983). 40 Kazier Ngwenya, “Action for Drama Pupils,” Sowetan (3 April 1984): 16. See also “Aiming to Fill the Gap in African Drama,” New Dawn (July 1983): 32.

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slang term for methylated spirits used by the homeless. Drawn to the Johannesburg by the mirages of gold and promise that the City of Gold epitomizes, the homeless and downtrodden attempt to wrestle with their blues by consuming the toxic spirits. Similar to the stark differences in ‘theatres’, there is, however, then and now, another train with a similar name in South Africa, the Blue Train, which is regarded as the epitome of luxurious travel and style. June 1982 saw the performance at the Laager, Market Theatre, under the auspices of the A C C and directed by Francis, of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi by Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo, and, in August 1982, A New Song by Zakes Mofokeng. After its opening, the Dhlomo Theatre’s first event was the staging of Night of the Long Wake by Dukuza ka Macu (then in exile in Lesotho).41 From 11 to 21 May, a specially designed programme in tribute to Bob Marley and reggae music was held at the Dhlomo; this was followed by a week-long poetry festival that started on 23 May 1983. In January 1984, the Dhlomo hosted a week-long film festival of South African films, including Awake from Mourning (Chris Austen); If God Be for Us and This We Can Do for Justice and for Peace (both Kevin Harris); and adaptations of Nadine Gordimer’s short stories, City Lovers (Barney Simon), Country Lovers (Manie Van Rensburg), Six Feet of the Country (Lynton Stephenson), Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants (Lynton Stephenson), and Praise (Richard Green). Excluded from the festival was A Chip of Glass Ruby (then banned in South Africa). On 25 January 1984, there was a performance of A Walk in the Night (directed by Peterson). Following on as a late-night session starting in 6 February 1984 was An Evening with George Mathiba, featuring the virtuoso guitarist, who moved from ethereal jazz to classical music in the same song. This was followed by a ten-day concert season, starting 26 February 1984, by Sophie Mgcina that celebrated her music and was billed as Sounds of the Township, featuring Sylvia Floris on piano, Coundry Ziqcubo on lead guitar, and Tony Mothibi on drums. As previously noted, the Dhlomo Theatre was 41

Critical responses to the Dhlomo’s first production were unanimously positive. Ian Steadman wrote that “Night of the Long Wake succeeds in presenting the Johannesburg theatre-goer with an alternative vision” and “The play is important. More significantly [. . . ] it is brilliantly performed” (“Night of the Long Wake,” Scenaria 36 [March 1983]: 29). Under the headline “Black Theatre’s Impressive Start,” Ralph Draper noted that the play “gives more than a hint of the powerful wave of theatre the Dhlomo is likely to spawn and the quality of the people creating and acting in it” (Draper, “Black Theatre’s Impressive Start,” Rand Daily Mail [11 May 1983]: 22).

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shut down in early March 1984 halfway through the intended season of A Walk in the Night and Mgcina’s season. To Walk a Whiplash and Images of the Struggle were devised for and performed during 1984 on cultural occasions and at commemorations of the death in detention of Steven Bantu Biko. The year 1985 saw the performance of A Mountain of Volcano, based on the poetry of Essop Patel with a performance script by Patel, Francis, and Peterson that was premiered at the Lyric Cinema in Fordsburg and at the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in London. In May-June 1985, the A C C presented three plays at the Market Theatre, Burning Embers, Mountain of Volcano (both directed by Francis), and Caesar (directed by Peterson). Jika Jika Jive (1987), directed by Peterson, was premiered in Windhoek as part of the first independence celebrations of Namibia. September 1988 saw performances of When the Locusts Come. The A C C also maintained a constant presence on the continental and international scene. The Centre also participated in the Culture and Resistance Conference in 1982 in Botswana, the Theatre for Development Workshop in Zimbabwe in 1983, a Cultural Studies Workshop in Botswana in 1983, and the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in London in 1985, in addition to undertaking tours in Southern Africa and Europe.

Community Art Centres and the Culture Industries Following the inauguration of the first democratically elected government in South Africa in 1994,the new government set up the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (D A C S T ) – which became the Department of Art and Culture in 2003 – to support, promote, and develop the culture, arts, and heritage in the country. Its vision is to develop and preserve South African culture to ensure social cohesion and nation building” and its mission is to “develop and promote arts and culture in South Africa and mainstream its role in social development.”42 Yet it became apparent even in its early interventions that the policies and strategies of the D A C S T would be marked and even paralyzed by the contending and contradictory views on whether the State should assume an enabling or an interventionist role and the tensions between the socio-cultural and commercial imperatives that inform the production, distribution, and consumption of the arts in the country. The latter problem is apparent in its commissioned White Paper on Arts, Culture and 42

Department of Arts and Culture, Strategic Plan 2011–2016 (Pretoria, 2010): 14, www.info.gov.za (accessed 19 October 2013).

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Heritage (June 1996) and the report Cultural Industries Growth Strategy (C I G S ),43 which was released in November 1998. Since limitations of space preclude a substantial elaboration of policies after 1994, I will confine myself to the White Paper and C I G S , also because, in my view, they provided the knotted template that continues to powerfully influence attitudes in government and society towards the arts in South Africa. In his message that serves as a prologue to (and useful summary of) the White Paper, the then Minister of Culture Dr Ben S. Ngubane noted: the arts, culture and heritage cannot be an exception in this transformation process, since they too were overtly affected by the maldistribution of skills, resources and infrastructure during apartheid.

Furthermore, given that the arts are premised on freedom of expression and critical thought, transformation in this area is crucial to empowering creative voices throughout the country, and is integral to the success of the democratic project.44

After stating that government needs to “promote the arts, culture, heritage and literature in their own right, as significant and valuable areas of social and human endeavour in themselves,” Ngubane acknowledged that “the role of the State in funding arts, culture and heritage is a complex one. In some countries, no State support is forthcoming; in others the State plays a decisive role.” He suggested that the appropriate relationship is one where the state supports the arts but maintains an “‘arm’s length’ relationship that is fundamental to freedom of expression”: At the same time, all funding from the public purse carries certain obligations with it, and these obligations of accountability must be applied with due responsibility and creativity. Promotion without undue promulgation would be our ideal.45

It is already clear from the Minister’s pronouncements that policy would try to walk a tightrope between support and promotion, but “within the reality 43

Cultural Industries Growth Strategy. Report commissioned by the Department of Arts, Culture and Technology (Pretoria, November, 1988).http://www.saccd.org.za /objects/CIGS_musicreport.doc (accessed 16 October 2013). 44 Departments of Arts, Culture and Technology [D A C T ], White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (Pretoria, 4 June 1996), http://dac/gov/za/white_paper.htm (accessed 16 October 2013). 45 Department of Arts, Culture and Technology, White Paper, 1.

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of existing budgets and the requirements of fiscal discipline,” an appreciation of the arts in and for themselves while also drawing attention to “arts and culture” as “important industries.” Lastly, despite the usual paeans to healing and diversity, the politically contested nature of the arts, language, and identity is acknowledged, or what the White Paper refers to as “one of the most emotive matters to face the new government.”46 While the brief for the C I G S was informed by the then government policy of Reconstruction and Development (R D P ), by the time the C I G S strategy was released, the R D P had been jettisoned. There is a strong instrumentalist and commercial slant in the C I G S perspective on the role of the arts, compounded by the attempt to align cultural practices in general with the government’s neoliberal macroeconomic policy, Growth, Employment and Redistribution (G E A R ) and the “politics of the ‘New Economy’ ” (with the latter referring to global “new industries” driven by innovations and convergence in new media and technologies). Because the C I G S is unashamedly “an industrial strategy”47 it recasts the “craft industry, publishing industry and the film and television industry,” performing arts and music as “cultural industries” that “all have commercial organization as their prime motivating force.” The cultural industries are also praised for being “potentially internationally competitive” and for having the potential to create an “export market and employment” and to “offer opportunities for rural and urban job creation.”48 Running somewhat parallel, if not way behind this view, are allusions to the social and cultural role that the arts can play. Interestingly, possibly as a further manifestation of G E A R , it is stressed that “the cultural industries can play an important role in the African Renaissance.” Of even more interest is the externally oriented rather than internally focused appreciation of the arts, namely: Encouraging the cultural industries in South Africa is one of the most powerful means of enhancing the country’s identity and distinctiveness, while simultaneously creating employment, developing human skills and generating social capital and cohesion. In a globalizing world where every place begins to feel and look the same, it is cultural

46

Department of Arts, Culture and Technology, White Paper 3. Cultural Industries Growth Strategy. Emphasis in the original. 48 Creative South Africa: A Strategy for Realizing the Potential of the Cultural Industries (A Report to the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology by the Cultural Strategy Group, Pretoria, November 1988): 4, 9. 47

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products and activities that mark one place from the next – difference in this sense creates competitive advantage.49

Elsewhere, there are passing references such as “the cultural industries thus provide an avenue for creating a South African identity that is essential for nation-building and transformation.” Not surprisingly, given the technocratic and instrumentalist mapping of the nature, challenges, and needs of the cultural sphere, the suggested growth strategies revolve around setting up organizational and management capacity and public-private partnerships. In short, in contrast to the past, where “culture has traditionally been viewed by governments as a cost to the fiscus and has been associated with subsidies and tax incentives aimed at promoting national cultural policies,” the aim of the C I G S was to foreground the cultural sector “as a productive sector of the economy.”50 Indeed, the personal, cultural, educational, and social developmental aspects (or capital) of the arts were relegated to the distant background in favour of moneymaking ones in the C I G S . The C I G S , in many ways, preferred to turn a blind eye to the many challenges that faced D A C S T concerning the replacement of the race- and ethnicity-based policies, frameworks, and institutions that informed the thinking, practice, and unequal promotion of the arts under apartheid. There are gestures to organizational and geographical differences and fragmentation (such as in “the equitable distribution of resources and access to these” and “the need to redress imbalances of the past – economically, socially, politically and spatially”51), but there is no substantive reflection on how to address and try to ameliorate the divisions and inequalities that are the “legacies of the past.” Another silence concerns the Cinderella status that the arts have because, the argument goes, of the many and more pressing demands on the fiscus from sectors such as education, housing, and health. Underlying the ambivalences regarding an appreciation of the socio-cultural value of the arts, and especially for an internal audience, is the expectation that the arts have the responsibility – as offered in the opportunities highlighted in the cultural industries – to generate their own funding and sustainability. Such expectations were compounded by other internal and external pressures, each with its own complex dynamics.

49

Creative South Africa, 6 Creative South Africa, 10–11. 51 Creative South Africa, 43. 50

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The demise of apartheid also led to a number of unexpected and unintended outcomes. For instance, South Africa’s re-integration in the international community meant that the country and its artists had to manage, for better or worse, the pros and cons of globalization. With regard to funding, the new era also witnessed a sharp decrease in support and sponsorship from donors. International patrons of the arts either channelled their contributions through state institutions or turned their attention to elsewhere in the world where more need was perceived or felt. In either case, artists and community arts centres had to learn to negotiate the new landscape and powerbrokers who often preferred to marginalize independent-minded artists and organizations. Many practitioners and activists, whether out of strategic judgment or a survival instinct, left community organizations and joined parastatal institutions such as the State Theatre, the Windybrow Theatre, and other provincial mainstream theatres. On the local level, the Johannesburg City and its replacement in 1995, the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, pursued a number of changing policies and strategies in attempts to ‘re-invent’ and ‘re-image’ the city. Johannesburg was variously imagined as a ‘world city’ and as a ‘gateway to Africa’. One of the significant developments undertaken by the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council in the late 1990s was to declare the Newtown area a cultural zone. Organizations such as the Market Theatre, F U B A , and the A C C , among others, had already been operative in Newtown since the mid-1970s and had proposed the creation of a cultural node of some sorts among themselves and to the city council. The Newtown Cultural Precinct was the city’s response to initiatives from arts institutions and to the flight of business and residents to the northern suburbs in the 1990s and the large-scale settlement of Africans (from the rest of the country and the continent) in the inner city. The Council struggled to effectively and creatively manage these contending pressures on its vision of a culture-driven regeneration of Newtown. Its hot-shot directors behaved like tsars who were not only deeply sceptical of the managerial and commercial credentials of the existing arts organizations but also regarded most as nothing more than a parasitical drain on the resources of the city. Instead of assisting in building the logistical and financial capacities of arts organizations to improve their abilities to deepen and broaden their creative work, the decision was taken to support a few flagship projects – such as the Market Theatre and Museum Africa. The rest were left to the vagaries of the Council, the economy, landowners, and property speculators. The pressure soon resulted in their anticipated demise or relocation. As

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Gwen Ansell observed, “The first years of democracy [. . . ] were years of discontinuity between the vibrant, radical 1980s and the market focused late 1990s.”52 In the face of all these complex forces, it is no wonder that, paradoxically, many of the stellar community arts centres that flew the banner of alternative and independent cultural practice between the 1970s and the 1990s met their demise in the first decade of democracy. A recent study details that forty community art centres were developed in townships between 1996 and 2000 under the direction of D A C S T through its Culture in Community (C I C ) programme. These centres were distinct from those run by non-governmental organizations before 1994. The study concludes: what was planned as a leading cultural redress and democratization exercise has largely fallen apart, while at the same time state control over international donor funding undermined the sustainability of the N G O centres.

Some of the key reasons behind the failure include “several ideological, political, institutional and organizational disjunctures and shifts . .. [that] resulted in an ambiguous role of government in community arts in society”; the shift in the State’s orientation from “participatory democratic principles” to “the centralization of public decision-making” as well as the “postcolonial centralized practice” that preferred the involvement of “specialist consultants rather than civil society”. The marginalization of independent community arts centres meant that “a vast body of knowledge, years of experience and opportunities for real democratization of culture were ignored.”53 The A C C , unfortunately, constitutes one such example. During its existence it developed epistemologies, pedagogies, and cultural practices that foregrounded indigenous cultural and performance repertoires. This is a predisposition that is still resisted or to which lip service is paid by many cultural and tertiary institutions in the country. The A C C was also, in retrospect, a remarkable hothouse of talent. The following is a selected list of black artists who passed through the Centre as young aspiring artists. There are academics such as myself, Angifi Dladla (teacher and poet), and Professor Mufunanji 52

Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa (New York: Continuum International, 2005): 265. 53 Gerard Hagg, “The State and Community Arts Centres in a Society in Transformation: The South African Case,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13.2 (March 2010): 164, 167–68, 169.

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Magalasi (dramatist and current Dean of the Arts Faculty at the University of Malawi). Writers, performers, and theatre directors include Mavuso Tshabalala (cast in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata), Maropodi Mapalakanye (poet, playwright, and stalwart of the African Writers Association), Thulani Sifeni (playwright and director), Zachariah Rapola (winner of the premier prize for writing in Africa, the Noma Award), the filmmakers Ramadan Suleman, Khalo Mathabane, and Tebogo Mahlatsi, and the visual artist Clifford Charles. This list indicates the important incubatory role that community art centres perform and the reason why they should not be treated in patronizing and condescending terms by mainstream institutions and government. Community art centres are not peripheral add-ons to professional cultural spaces or activities. They are essential initiatives and spaces that (when treated and infused with the necessary respect, dynamism, and creative and democratic ethos) can serve as catalysts for the promotion and use of the arts in a diverse range of cultural, creative, personal, and developmental ways.

Conclusion One of the challenges that face contemporary South Africa is the disjuncture between the government’s social and development initiatives and the effective amelioration of the poverty and alienation of the majority of its citizenry and, on the other hand, their participation in state-funded initiatives. This tension also plays itself out in the unresolved understanding of the relationship between the provision of essential social amenities and their role in attempts to improve the quality of life of ordinary citizens. In the sphere of culture and the arts, the state’s drive to broaden access to or provide facilities and to halt the deterioration of existing ones seems to be accompanied by the folding of key organizations in civil society along with their invaluable institutional cultures, capacities, and histories. The issue is compounded by the fact that government, whatever its good intentions, is essentially swimming upstream because of, among other factors, its lack of transparency and accountability, the inefficiency and corruption that is rampant in the public sector, and what seems to be a distrust of critical and independent citizenry and social movements. Matters are further exacerbated by the contradictory visions that often inform the government’s endeavours. The policies and strategies pursued by D A C S T and the D A C were unable to resolve key questions such as: whether the State should assume an enabling or interventionist role in the redress and

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transformation of the cultural sphere; the extent and degree of state support and subsidies for the arts and how these could be coupled with an ‘arm’slength policy’ that do not infringe on the creative and ideological independence of artists; and, lastly, how to productively manage the tensions between the socio-cultural and commercial imperatives that inform the production, distribution, and consumption of the arts in the country. Furthermore, while governmental projects are underpinned by the imperatives of redress and transformation, they are equally shot through with neoliberal macroeconomic policies that, in crucial ways, undercut the possibilities of improving the basic needs, interests, and lives of ordinary citizens. In essence, the drive towards liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, in order to attract foreign investment and motivation for local ‘public–private’ partnerships, curtails the abilities of government, on the national and local levels, to concomitantly pursue social and cultural developmental projects. Then there is the further complication that arises because of the pursuit of mirages such as creating ‘world-class cities’ with their ‘world-class’ infrastructure and facilities, all, of course, prerequisites for anyone hoping to host mega-events such as the F I F A World Cup and all the other jamborees to which South Africa seems to be addicted. Two consequences concern us here. The first is that attempts at urban renewal rather than transformation tend to result in the gentrification and fortification of the city, which further require the policing and displacement of the poor and the erosion of their human rights.54 Secondly, the creation of middle- and upper-class business and residential nodes, ostensibly free of crime and grime, also requires (apart from increased security) their own cultural and leisure correlatives, often resulting in the commodification of the arts and entertainment. The latter comes with its own forms of cultural and creative dislocation: the disenchantment with art and artists that are regarded as risqué and unable to attract paying foreign or local audiences. In short, the privatization and commodification of culture (under the rubric of the culture and media industries) more often than not result in a dangerous cocktail in which, amidst the fleeting instances of human development and social and cultural revitalization, there is the concomitant reproduction of different forms of social and racial exclusion and inequalities, especially with regard to the 54

Bhekizizwe Peterson, “ Dignity, Memory, Truth and the Future under Siege: Nation-Building and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn, ed. Michael J. Shapiro & Samson Opondo (London: Routledge, 2012): 214–33.

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urban poor and constituencies that reveal the fault-lines of post-apartheid South Africa.

WORKS CITED Anon. “Aiming to Fill the Gap in African Drama,” New Dawn (July 1983): 32. Anon. “The Birth of an African Theatre,” Pace Magazine (May 1983): 20–21. Anon. “Francis Takes his Dream to the Townships,” New Nation (Sept. 1988: 8. Anon. “The History of the State Theatre Pretoria,” Scenaria (Special Issue 1981): 1– 27. Anon. “Non-White Patrons Barred,” The Pretoria News (6 June 1973): 8. Anon. “The Pretoria State Theatre: An International House,” Scenaria 13 (May 1979): 13–16. Anon. “The Sand du PlessisTheatre,” Scenaria 55 (August 1985): 5–11. Anon. “Theatres of South Africa No. 4: Nico Malan Theatre Centre,” Scenaria (December 1977–January 1978): 12–14. Anon. “Theatres of South Africa No. 11: Etienne Rousseau Theatre,” Scenaria (January 1979): 26–27. Anon. “The Unique State Theatre,” Scenaria (Special Issue 1981: 1–27. Anon. “Windybrow P A C T ’s New Home in Johannesburg,” speech made by the Honourable W.A. Cruywagen at Windybrow, Johannesburg, on 4 March 1985, Scenaria 50 (April 1985): 4–5. Ansell, Gwen. Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa (New York: Continuum International, 2005). Association of the Afrika Cultural Centre. Unpublished Memorandum (Pretoria, 1984). Cultural Strategy Group. Creative South Africa: A Strategy for Realizing the Potential of the Cultural Industries (A Report to the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology by the Cultural Strategy Group, Pretoria, November 1988). Department of Arts and Culture. Strategic Plan 2011–2016 (Pretoria, 2010), www.info.gov.za (accessed 19 October 2013). Departments of Arts, Culture and Technology [D A C T ]. White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (Pretoria, 4 June 1996), http://dac.gov.za/white_paper.htm (accessed 16 October 2013). Dhlomo Theatre. Programme brochure for Night of the Long Wake (Johannesburg, March 1983). Draper, Ralph. “Black Theatre’s Impressive Start,” Rand Daily Mail (11 May 1983): 22. Eichbaum, Julius. “Bloemfontein’s New Theatre Complex: The Sand du Plessis,” Scenaria 53 (June 1985): 9–10. Francis, Benjy. “Theatre: People’s Voice,” Sowetan (9 June 1988): 9.

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Grobbelaar, Michal. “Theatres of South Africa No. 3: The Johannesburg Civic Theatre,” Scenaria (October–November 1977): 11–13. Hagg, Gerard. “The State and Community Arts Centres in a Society in Transformation: The South African Case,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13.2 (March 2010): 163–84. Maluleke, Noughty [sic]. “Sod Turned for Soweto Theatre,” www.joburg.org.za/index .php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3478&Itemid=114 (accessed 16 October 2013). Mattera, Don. “Co-op Provides Hope among the Desolation,” The Star (Johannesburg; 20 April 1983): 34. Metsoamere, Victor. “A New Home at Last for Africa Cultural Centre,” Sowetan (27 June 1991): 23. Minervini, Rina. “The Long Road to Home on Pim Street,” Rand Daily Mail (18 April 1983): 18. ——. “The Soul of the Afrika Cultural Centre Is Already in Place: Space and Energy Are a Good Enough Start,” Sunday Star Timeout (8 March 1987): 7. “Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr. Z Pallo Jordan’s Speech on the First Theatre Building in Jabulani, Soweto,” www.info.gov.za/speeches/2009/09021116451001 .htm (accessed 16 October 2013). Molefe, Z.B.. “Theatre kaDhlomo Rises from the Ashes,” Sunday Times Extra (Johannesburg; 11 June 1988): 9. Ngwenya, Kaizer. “Action for Drama Pupils,” Sowetan (3 April 1984): 16. Peterson, Bhekizizwe. “Apartheid and the Political Imagination in Black South African Theatre,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16.2 (1990): 229–45. ——. “ ‘ The Arts in the Aftermath of Democracy’: Old Bottles, New Wine and the Discontents of the Nation,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 5 (South African Democracy Education Trust. Pretoria: U N I S A Press, 2013): 1286– 1308. ——. “‘The Arts in the Eighties’: Between States of Emergency and Transcendence?” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 4: 1980–1990 (African Democracy Education Trust. Pretoria: U N I S A Press, 2010): 943–73. ——. “Dignity, Memory, Truth and the Future under Siege: Nation-Building and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn, ed. Michael J. Shapiro & Samson Opondo (London: Routledge, 2012): 214–33. “Speech Made by The Administrator Mr. L.J. Botha during the Inauguration of The Sand du Plessis Theatre on 1 August 1985,” Scenaria 50 (August 1985): 22. Sichel, Adrienne. “At Last, Soweto Takes Centre Stage,” Star Tonight (12 February 2009: 1–2, www.sowetogospelfans.com/2009/02/12at-last-soweto-takes-centrestage/ (accessed 16 October 2013). Steadman, Ian. “Night of the Long Wake,” Scenaria 36 (March 1983): 9.

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Swaine, Sam. “Fixing Art’s Frame,” The Times (Johannesburg; 25 August 2011: 16. Welz, Martin. “Millionaire Spy Targets,” Sunday Times (Johannesburg; 17 March 1991): 1–2.

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The Anxiety of Class in Kenyan Drama A Reading of Boy’s Benta and Sibi-Okumu’s Role Play

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of two Kenyan plays written and produced in the late 1990s and mid-2000. The play-texts Cajetan Boy’s Benta (1999) and John Sibi-Okumu’s Role Play (2005) are interesting because they take a new thematic trajectory not only in the Kenyan dramascape in particular but in Africa in general. They differ significantly from earlier dramatic texts, especially those created in the immediate postindependence period up till the early 1990s, which seem to explore mainly postcolonial disillusionment and betrayal of the masses by the founding fathers of the new nation-states as dramatized in the plays of Wole Soyinka, Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o, John Ruganda, Robert Serumaga, Francis Imbuga, Joe de Graft, and Alex Mukulu, among others. These early dramas, when not engaged with the exposition of post-independence disillusionment, revealed the disturbing consequences of capitalist modernity in various ways: endemic corruption leading to the near-total collapse of national infrastructure, urban– rural migration resulting in unemployment, individual alienation, social and moral decadence, and cultural and generational conflicts. However, these two play-texts are profound mainly because of the ways in which they use the materiality of the everyday to lampoon the emergent middle class in Kenya, but which in many ways can be a referent to any postcolonial nation in Africa. It is perhaps instructive to point out at this juncture that these two plays in no way participate in the dramatization of the classical Marxist class struggle: i.e. the conflict between the haves and the have-nots, as is characteristic of such plays by Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o as This Time Tomorrow, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, and I Will Marry When I Want. Reading the HIS ESSAY IS A CRITICAL READING

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two plays, one feels that Boy and Sibi-Okumu are not interested in the dialectic of class but are more concerned with the exposition of the anxieties that seem to have become an obsession of this middle class, in a sense echoing the concerns of Fanon in the “Pitfall of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized.1 The new Kenyan middle class, as a group obviously, is both materially and discursively tied to the history of colonialism, economic liberalization, and globalization. It is in this regard that it can be argued that this class is a socioeconomic construct that is fundamentally fluid as a category, its existence largely dependent on exclusive access to education and government jobs as well as on exploitation of the less privileged classes. Owing to this fluidity and a haunting, underprivileged past, this postcolonial middle class not only feels insecure but suffers significantly from anxiety leading to an extreme obsession with the protection of status and privilege. As such, members of this social class are always engaged in acts that affirm these advantages. As Sembène Ousmane observes in Xala: “their anxiety to constitute a social class of their own had increased their combativety, tingeing it with xenophobia.”2 It is this anxiety and its dramatic imagination in the two plays that are the focus of this essay. The two plays, interestingly, have their settings in domestic spaces and the characters are generally involved in the drama of everyday life. However, what is striking about the two plays is the centrality of housemaids in the organization of their dramatic structures and emplotment. It is through the presence of these housemaids that the anxieties of the middle class are played out. The housemaid, the domestic worker, is indeed the trope of difference that defines the middle class as privileged. It is the housemaid as the Other, the underprivileged, that legitimates her employers’ status and privilege. Thus, the binary opposition of privileged/underprivileged is represented in the relational representation of master/mistress and maid in the two plays. It can be argued that it is the presence of the domestic servant/housemaid that defines and characterizes the middle class in postcolonial Kenya. This class can 1

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenberg, intro Jean–Paul Sartre (Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait du colonisateur, 1957; tr. 1965; Boston M A : Beacon, 1967). 2 Ousmane Sembène, Xala, tr. Clive Wake (1965; London: Heinemann, 1976): 60.

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only express and perform its privilege and status in relation to the way in which they (mis)treat their housemaids. In fact, it appears that the only way that this middle class can affirm and assert itself as a category is through its performance of power and authority over the maid as Other. Thus, the presence of the housemaid becomes a kind of ‘boundary marker’ of the middle class. It is through the presence of the maid that the identity of the middle class as a socio-economic category is projected, its fluidity and vulnerability realized. Class in this essay is simply defined as ‘taste cultures’ or what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as ‘habitus’,3 defined not only by traditional class markers such as individual family wealth, education, and occupation but also by preferences for particular cultural objects. Anxiety is here based on Alan Hunt’s conception of a “psychic condition of heightened sensitivity to some perceived threat, risk, peril or danger.”4 The two play-texts under scrutiny in various ways reveal, through performance of anxieties, how class identities are expressed, imagined, performed, affirmed, and confirmed in postcolonial Kenya. The detailed description of the setting of the play Benta, for instance, clearly lays bare this obsession with the performance and exhibition of middle-class identity. But perhaps more profound is the ironical undercutting that the playwright deploys to show the artificiality of this new middle class. This is creatively delineated in the following stage directions: Scene opens in the living room of a house in affluent Muthaiga, Nairobi. Expensively though distastefully furnished . . . On the desk is a Music Centre (C D ), Cassette etc.), a telephone and a Standard Lamp . . . The fourth chair is a book-shelf, and its various drinks (Whisky, Vodka) and glasses. D S L is a French Window with heavy drapes covering the entire window.5

3

Pierre Bourdieu, “The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles,” in Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979; London, Routledge, 1984): 169–25. 4 Alan Hunt, “Anxiety and Social Explanation: Some Anxieties About Anxiety,” Journal of Social History 32.3 (Spring 1999): 509, quoted in Sandra Swart, “The ‘Five Shilling Rebellion’: Rural White Anxiety and the 1914 Boer Rebellion,” South African Historical Journal 56 (2006): 90. 5 Cajetan Boy, Benta (Nairobi: Jacaranda, 1999): 1. Further page references are in the main text.

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This description is a mockery of this middle-class family that owns this home in affluent Muthaiga. The “expensive though distasteful furnishing” of the house shows that these are new arrivants into this middle-class category and have not yet fully acquired the culture and style that are consistent with the tastes of this class. This shows the kind of effort that the new members of the middle class in the postcolony must make in order to be seen to belong. As an imagined construct, therefore, the middle-class-ness must be performed for the gaze of others. It is the fear of not being seen to actually belong to the class that causes anxiety. This is in line with Fanon’s argument that the national middle class that takes power at the end of the colonial regime is an underdeveloped class. Thus, their anxiety is a result of fear of the unknown and lack of absolute certainties. In the two plays one discovers that members of this middle class are obsessed with the acts of patrolling and protecting imagined and material boundaries of the class and its privileged status. Because those occupying the middle class are newly graduated, their real fear is of sliding back into the lower social strata, a fact that they are forever reminded of by the presence of the maid in their households, the very symbol of the subaltern class in society. Before delving into the detailed analysis of middle-class anxieties as dramatized in the two play-texts, I offer a brief summary of the plays. Benta is framed around the everyday life of a middle-class Kenyan family. But the very first encounter with the play reveals less family-internal behaviour per se than how Mrs. Fulani, the mistress of the house, relates to her housemaid, Benta. Indeed, the central character in this play is, ironically, this eponymous subaltern. The play in a sense turns on the way that she is treated as well as how different members of this family relate to and associate with her. Mrs. Fulani, a supposedly staunch Christian woman, for instance, treats Benda with vicious hostility and works her like a slave. However, the man of the house, Mr. Fulani, seems to be sympathetic to her plight,coming to her defence any time she is under threat from Mrs. Fulani. Later on in the play, however, it is revealed that Mr. Fulani has been sexually abusing Benta and ends up impregnating her. The other member of the family is the employers’ son, Dedan, who is the only one who expresses genuine sympathy for the housemaid. This creates conflict and tension between him and his parents. Later on in the play, we discover that he in fact harbours strong romantic feelings towards Benta and, indeed, declares his desire to marry her when the time is ripe. The climax of the play occurs when it is revealed that both father and son have been having different kinds of relationship with Benta. Whereas,

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for the son, it is still at the level of romantic feelings, the father has had sexual intercourse with her already. The revelation of the relationships of father and son to the housemaid provides an ironic plot-twist, as this is the point where Mrs. Fulani discovers that Benta is pregnant and assumes that it must be the son, Dedan, who is responsible. She insists on paying her to terminate the pregnancy and also to leave her house and job. However, the plot gets more complicated when Dedan comes home and declares that he has won the Green Card lottery to relocate to America. He shocks his parents by announcing that he has included Benta’s name as his fiancée and that he intends to travel with her to the U S A . It is at this point that the mother discloses that Benta is pregnant. This revelation takes Dedan by surprise because so far his relationship with Benta has been chaste. His insistence that Benta must reveal the identity of whoever is responsible creates further familial tension and crisis. Finally, Benta reveals that it is in fact Mr. Fulani who has been sneaking into her room at night after Mrs. Fulani took her sleeping pills. This is the turning point in the play. Mrs. Fulani announces that she is divorcing Mr. Fulani, while Dedan leaves with Benta. The other character in the play is the Fulanis’ daughter, Sheeana, a spoilt brat. Her relationship to Benta is ambiguous. She mistreats her much as her mother does, but pretends to be good to her when she wants her to keep quiet about her moral transgressions, such as smoking, partaking of alcohol when the parents are away, and sneaking out of the house at night. Unlike Dedan, who receives sympathy from the mother, Sheeana seems to be favoured by her father. At the end of the play she is in hospital, having been involved in a car crash during a night escapade. The play ends with this middle-class family finding itself in total disorder. Role Play, by contrast, is a drama of introspection through the interrogation of characters’ consciences. It brings to the fore the experiences of several characters from different racial, gender, and class backgrounds. The play is an exposé of the pasts of these characters as well as their anxieties in the present and for the future. The main character is Mr. Jonathan Edgar Juma, fondly referred to as Mzee (Kiswahili for ‘old man’ but with connotations of respect and dignity). He is a man who has seen the best of life. He loves to quote from Latin to signify his sophisticated educational background and its attendant culture and mannerisms. His educational achievement, propelling him into positions of high status and social privilege, finally enables him to become a politician. In the present of the play, his children have brought him back from the village to which he has retired to the city in order that he may receive proper medical attention. The play begins with a flashback framed

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within the role-play mode. Here we meet Mzee as a child being reprimanded, admonished, and advised by his mother. The play is cyclical in structure; the beginning is also the end. The play is structured around the experiences of three different families from different racial backgrounds but all of the upper social class. As indicated above, it turns on familial, gender, racial, and class relationships. There are African, Asian, and European families. All of the main characters are haunted by their pasts, and all apart from Mzee are women whose husbands are absent from the action but who are often referred to. All these marriages are faced with problems. Mzee, by contrast, is a widower, carrying with him his own moral baggage from the past. The three families from different racial backgrounds are brought together because they belong to the same upper social class. Like the play Benta, Role Play is dominated by the presence of maids; each household has one. The most vocal and visible maid is Teresia, who works for the Jumas. She is well-educated, is very perceptive about life, and expresses her thoughts and views about society through poetry. The other two maids, who work for the Asian and European families, are typically passive. Unlike Benta in Boy’s play, these maids do not suffer from overt hostility and abuse on the part of their employers. However, they have been deployed by the playwright as the trope that characterizes and defines the middle upper-class setting in postcolonial Africa. It is their presence that seems to legitimize middle class-ness. They are used to create the binary opposition of otherness in regard to their masters/mistresses. Because of their obsession with the performance of this received ‘middleand upper class-ness’ as a distinct identity, the characters that we encounter in the two plays end up as paranoids and neurotics. The best example is Mrs. Fulani, who is always scared about what people will say about her and her family. She cultivates a phrase that has become motivic: “Can you imagine what people would think of us?” Her repetition of the phrase is so predictable that it becomes a source of humour, at the same time as it reveals her anxiety at possibly losing class status and privilege. Fuelled by this fear, she deploys a number of strategies to perform her middle-class identity: one is punctual attendance at church services every Sunday. Indeed, churchgoing takes on a ritualistic dimension, with the congregation becoming a site for her to exhibit and perform her middle-class identity. In an exchange with her husband, she declares: “But you know that my religion is something that I take seriously, and I do not like it when people make fun of it” (3). But her obsession with religion and, more specifically, with adherence to the strict code of attending Sunday church service is captured more succinctly by her son, Dedan, who

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declares his revulsion at this middle-class lifestyle in the following conversation with his parents: DEDAN: MRS. F: DEDAN: MR. F: DEDAN: MRS F: MR. F: DEDAN:

Sorry Mom, but I’m not coming to church today. not for some time. Philip, can’t you get some sense into your son’s head? It’s no good Dad. I’m not going to church and that’s final. May I ask why? Various reasons but to give some, I don’t like most of the congregation. That’s unchristian thing. Why? Because most are either hypocrites, there to show their wealth, their families and piety or Sunday Christians who only remember God and Christian values on Sunday. (7)

The greatest anxiety of the middle class hitherto is expressed in the horror at and fear of social transgression and adulteration. In the play Benta, this transgression is explicitly dramatized, the first instance involving Dedan’s association with friends from lower social strata. That their son Dedan is socializing with someone from a lower class shocks and horrifies his parents. A detailed replay in the form of a flashback to how his parents reacted when he brought a friend from the slum to the house is indicative of how middle-class anxiety has made his parents neurotic and paranoiac: DEDAN:

BENTA: DEDAN: BENTA: DEDAN:

BENTA:

Yes – basically it has to do with the problems I have with my folks. My problems with my folks began when I was at high school. When I was in 2nd form or was it 3rd form. I am really not sure. Anyway I brought home a close friend and a classmate. His name was Michael. Well, my parents were totally won over by Michael. They were impressed with his intelligence, his sense of humour, his grasp of general affairs, you name it. So what happened? I am not sure how to . . . Come on, you’re the one who started this. Well, sometime over lunch, the question of where he lived and what his parents did for a living came up. After he replied that he lived in the slums of Kibera . . . and that his mother was a single parent who worked in a bar, the atmosphere in the room changed completely. What do you mean – how?

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All of a sudden there was tension in the room . . . Mom suddenly became fidgety. Dad, who had been quite talkative, quietened down, quickly finished his meal and left. Now Michael was supposed to spend the weekend at our place. Sometime around 4.00 pm. Dad calls me to his study and with a straight face informs me that Michael can’t stay for the weekend “because you just can’t trust these people from the slums”. – He said “Slums are breeding grounds for criminals”. (13–14)

This conversation exemplifies the unsettled nature of the new middle class in the postcolony. As Dedan later reveals, the tension generated in middle-class people when they encounter those from the lower class is more psychological, as the presence of such individuals reminds them of where they have recently come from, but the fear is more horrifying, as there are indeed very real possibilities that they might slide back into that underprivileged status. This horror is once again exhibited when Dedan attempts to sneak Jim, Benta’s brother, into the house. The following dialogue once again aptly captures this: MR.:

MRS.: MR. F:

MRS. F: MR. F:

Look at him. One would think this was his house. Who does he think he is? Bringing strangers into this . . . house . . . the audacity. What is wrong with that? Sheeana was here with a friend of hers a few minutes ago. That’s different. We know Beryl and her family. This fellow, Dedan, has come with, I don’t trust . . . did you notice the way he was dressed? You noticed? Amazing – you couldn’t notice the way your own daughter was dressed? It’s not the same thing. This Jim – I don’t like the look of him – reminds me of that boy – Michael or whatever his name was. (38)

It is obvious that Mr Fulani does not want his son to associate with Jim, because this kind of association constitutes a major social transgression bordering on the adulteration of middle class-ness. From the way Jim dresses, it is obvious that he is from a lower-class background. Mr. Fulani does not have any problem with friends the daughter brings home, however, because they are, in his estimation, from the same class. This class anxiety is also demonstrated in the way members of this class perceive the value of education. Because most of them were catapulted into this social class through educational achievement, they regard education as the key to opportunity. In Benta, for

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instance, Mr. Fulani transcended his humble background of rural peasantry by sheer hard work in school, eventually obtaining the higher education that provided him with an employment and a good salary that enabled him to occupy the middle class. This is why he is extremely disillusioned and disappointed with his son Dedan, who seems not to value education as much and aspires to become a musician, an occupation that the father thinks is not befitting of someone of his class. Dedan reveals this to Benta: Benta, look at me; son to a wealthy businessman and a career woman. I went to the best schools in the Republic . . . but only advanced because my father could afford the fees of those schools, and the special “donations” that the head teachers required. Despite all that, I did not manage to come up to my Dad’s expectations. As you’ve no doubt heard my father say time and time again, I’m useless. You at least are found to be of some use . . . some people not like me. (11)

The greatest horror of social transgression, however, is the fear of middleclass people that their children might actually marry someone from a lower class. However, there is an ironic twist to this in the play. Mr. Fulani does not find it horrifying to have sexual intercourse with the maid Benta, but it is difficult for him to fathom why his son should want to marry the same girl. In fact, the fear of class contamination is explored most dramatically in this play when Dedan announces to his parents his desire to relocate with Benta after winning the Green Card lottery enabling him to take American citizenship. This is the moment at which class anxiety becomes most explicit. It is now quite evident that members of this social class are ready to do anything to patrol protective margins and boundaries. A few examples from the play should suffice. The first is when Mrs. Fulani finds out that Benta is pregnant. Though she does not openly express it, it is implied that she suspects either her husband or her son. Her first reaction is to suggest abortion, for which she is ready to pay any amount to get rid of the foetus. But the horror of social transgression becomes more explicit in the dialogue that ensues between Dedan and his parents when he declares his intention to marry Benta. The shocked parents cannot bring themselves to understand how their son can even imagine marrying someone they consider (without empathy) the ‘wretched of the earth’. The dialogue below clearly brings out the neurosis attitude of this middle class: MRS. F:

How do you think it looks? Our son having an affair with a mere house girl. What will people say? Oh my! Oh my!

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Mom, I don’t care what people think or say. As far as I am concerned being a house girl is only a job . . . she’s a person first. Dedan consider your social standing, consider hers. Social classes do not mix, and when they do, the higher one gets soiled; it loses out on friends, connections – (Cutting in) Mom, do you think I or many other people my age care about this class thing? No we don’t, this class thing and social standing business is all in your heads . . . yours. (67)

In Role Play, Sibi-Okumu explores class anxiety mainly through the use of the titular role play, revealing the inner thoughts, fears, and fantasies of the upper-middle class. Such anxieties are shown to cross boundaries of race and gender. The main action of the play turns on the main character “Mzee” Jonathan Juma, now a retiree. He exemplifies the construction of the uppermiddle class in the postcolony. Because of his privileged class, he easily relates to and mingles with persons from other races, European and Asian. Mzee, like Mr. Fulani in Benta, is of humble peasant origin. His membership away from this class, just like that of Mr Fulani, is thanks to his educational achievement. He was initially schooled locally but eventually got an opportunity to travel abroad, where he studied law and also acquired the culture and style of the middle-upper-class English. He worked in high government position before entering politics and becoming a member of parliament before retiring as a barrister in private practice. Through the use of role play that allows for fantasy played out as the thoughts of Mzee, Sibi-Okumu brings out the obsessive anxieties of this upper-middle-class family in highly satirical ways, sometimes bordering on the absurd and the ridiculous. For instance, Mzee imagines his own death and how his children will use the occasion to perform and re-affirm their uppermiddle-class identity. The following dialogue based on Mzee’s fantasy through role play on his death and funeral shows how obsession with the performance of class identity has become such a critical issue: MZEE 2:

[…] MZEE 3:

Yes. The Funeral Committee will insist that money be no object for a man of stature. It will be in the obituary pages of all the papers: “Death and Funeral Announcement”. [pause] Ah! There’s my picture. About thirty years out of date. And in full colour, of course. Yes. “It is in humble acceptance of God’s will that we announce the death of Jonathan Erastus Juma, former Permanent

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MZEE 3:

MZEE 2: MZEE: […] MZEE 3: MZEE 2: MZEE 3:

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Secretary and Member of Parliament, which occurred on the 6th of July, two thousand and something, after a long and courageous battle with cancer.” That’s the way I seem to be headed but, if in doubt, they could always settle for the all purpose “after long illness, bravely borne.” “Father to Nathan [U S A ]; John [Juma and Juma Advocates], Jennifer [Barrister U K ]. Husband to the late Zipporah Juma; Father-in-law to Betty Hunter–Juma [U S A ].” Hmm! A white daughter-in-law. Now that’s an achievement. “And to Sister-in-Christ, Linda Juma.” “Grandfather to Jonathan Jnr, Justin, Brad and Susanne, among others.” [Mzee chuckles at the thought.] Yes, among others. It’s a bit like in Animal Farm, Some relations are more equal than others. “Friends and relatives are meeting daily from 5.00 pm at his son’s house in Lavington and at Village Square for prayers and funeral arrangements. The cortege leaves Aloha Funeral Home on Friday, 12th July at 7pm for a funeral service at the All Saints Church, Makutano, at 12 noon.6

It is instructive that, according to Mzee, it is only those with status who are mentioned in the funeral notice. Those who do not have any significant status or position are simply lumped together as “among others.” Thus, the death and funeral announcement becomes a site where class identities are performed. Indeed, the notice is not supposed to simply announce the death but, more importantly, to give information regarding the details of the funeral it becomes a project of affirming social class – all the names of people and places they hail from must signify their class. As witnessed in Benta, in Role Play, there is great anxiety involved in patrolling the margins of the middle class to lock out those from the lower classes. To avoid class contamination, parents arrange marriages between and among the members of their own class. Let us see how this works out in the conversation that the character Linda has with her inner self through role play: L I N D A 2 : [as herself in a past conversation]: John. We can make it work, if we want to.

6

John Sibi–Okumu, Role Play (Nairobi: Mvule, 2005): 8–9. Further page references are in the main text.

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L I N D A 3 : [as the voice of J O H N J U M A ]: How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want to. You were dumped on me, Linda: rich man’s son forced to marry a rich man’s daughter. We should leave arranged marriages to Indians. It was a mistake marrying you and everyday, I live to regret it! (24)

There is a very interesting dimension in these plays regarding the exposition of class anxiety. This is the rebellion by the younger generation, who do not believe in the preservation of class purity. In Role Play, John Juma rebels against forced marriage, while in Benta, Dedan also rebels against his parents and insists on marrying the housemaid. Both Dedan and John Juma apparently do not share the class anxiety that so much obsesses their parents. Though the male progenies seem to be intent on defeating their parents’ expectations of them as members of the middle/upper class, the female progeny are portrayed as anxious to perform the identities befitting their class. In Benta, for instance, Sheeana enjoys performing her middle-class identity through rituals (albeit transgressive) such as smoking, drinking, and partying. She also enjoys exercising power over the housemaid. In Role Play, the desire to remain within the upper class seems to be so important to the women that they get entrapped in abusive marriages. This is the case with all the upper-class married women encountered in this play. The women’s obsession with class in spite of the suffering that they go through cuts across the races. Amandla, one of the most liberally thinking women in the play, has this to say about women who are ready to suffer and stay in their marriages because of the status and privilege associated with their class: Meaning that that’s all you and other women like you seem to have in this world. Don’t you think that there’s more to life than being defined by your property and biology? Yes. How nice to be living in the lap of luxury, courtesy of my brother. In exchange you are prepared to put with indignity as long as you can live in this beautiful house, courtesy of my brother as “Mama Junior.” [pause.] I know that being married to my brother you are all these “things.” But you don’t have a life. The bottom line is that you are miserable, and you know it. [pause.] Instead of getting a job worthy of the education you’ve, you go around starting and stopping all these so called “business ventures”: It’s catering, one minute. Selling flowers the next. Or stationery. Or import–export. I can’t keep up with it. (23)

An interesting angle to class anxiety in the postcolony, according to Mzee in Role Play, is corruption. The members of this new middle/upper class have

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only recently emerged from the lower-class stratum. As such, the fear of losing their status privilege as members of the middle class drives them into corruption: DUDU: MZEE:

And what about the dread “C” word, Mzee. Do you think we are going to get rid of corruption? No. [pause.] Absolutely not. Although we do not have a monopoly on corruption, it is also true to say that we have created a society that neither respects nor rewards honesty. I suppose it’s been too gigantic a leap from the mud hut to the marble mansion. Now, we have needs that require funding and, simply put, corruption provides easy funding. Corruption feeds a small oasis of luxury amidst a huge desert of misery. As Virgil so aptly put it: “quid non mortalis pectora cogis. Auri sacra fames”. “To what do you not drive hearts, caused by craving for gold.” (18)

Although both plays seem to be more interested in laughing at the follies of middle-class individuals in postcolonial Africa, there is a sense in which they portray the maids as conscious of their exploitation. Benta is aware that she is being exploited, but works hard to change the social position of her family by educating her brother. She is in fact aware that this will lead to social mobility. Jennifer in Role Play is also aware of her exploitation and reveals this through her writing and reading poetry, which lays bare the plight of the underprivileged in the society. The other two maids in Role Play, however, show no sign that they are aware of their exploitation. In conclusion, the two plays dramatize how class identity and the quest to belong cause anxiety among members of the middle class in postcolonial Africa. Privilege does not bring security, and they are haunted by the desire to enjoy the same status possessed by the now long-departed colonizers. Though there is no direct class struggle in the two plays, there is a sense in which the maids seem to be conscious of class dialectic and might eventually provide some intervention against their exploitation (indeed, ‘colonization’) by the middle class.

WORKS CITED Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles,” in Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, 1979; London, Routledge, 1984): 169–25.

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Boy, Cajetan. Benta (Nairobi: Jacaranda, 1999). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Hunt, Alan. “Anxiety and Social Explanation: Some Anxieties About Anxiety,” Journal of Social History 32.3 (Spring 1999): 509–28. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, tr. Howard Greenberg, intro. Jean– Paul Sartre (Portrait du Colonisé précédé du Portrait du Colonisateur, 1957; tr. 1965; Boston M A : Beacon, 1967). Sembène, Ousmane. Xala, tr. Clive Wake (1965; London: Heinemann, 1976). Sibi–Okumu, John. Role Play (Nairobi: Mvule, 2005). Swart, Sandra. “The ‘Five Shilling Rebellion’: Rural White Anxiety and the 1914 Boer Rebellion,” South African Historical Journal 56 (2006): 88–102.

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A Heritage of Violence Paradoxes of Freedom and Memory in Recent South African Play-Texts

A NTON K RUEGER

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I would like to touch on a few recent play-texts that enter into a debate about South Africa’s troubled past, and that contribute to a discussion of current struggles to be free. In particular, I would like to centre this discussion on a publication called At This Stage – Plays from PostApartheid South Africa (edited by Greg Homann, 2009). This anthology includes four texts considered as being representative of new playwrighting in South Africa (Reach, Shwele Bawo!, Some Mothers’ Sons, and Dream of the Dog). It should be mentioned that very few plays are published in South Africa. The majority of significant productions in the countryare devised, or choreographed, as physical theatre and contemporary performance pieces. South Africa does not have a very strong tradition of publishing play-texts. One of the reasons for this is that there is a relatively small play-reading public, and the pervasiveness of the idea that plays should be seen rather than read has been supported by an emphasis on drama as performance, rather than on drama as literature. Still, there remains a place for published plays that can be re-read and, better still, re-performed. Of the plays that have been published since 1994, however, I would hazard a guess that there are not that many that could weather a re-staging. Many notable works have been published since apartheid, such as William Kentridge and Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998) and Brett Bailey’s trilogy Plays of Miracle and Wonder (2003). These are wonderful keepsakes of particular productions, packaged memories of specific perforN THIS ESSAY,

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mances. But since, as Greg Homann points out in his insightful introduction to this new anthology, these are the works of auteurs, the play-texts are unlikely ever to be produced again by other theatre-makers.1 There are other published plays, such as Zakes Mda’s The Bells of Amersvoort (2002) and Greig Coetzee’s Happy Natives (2003), which might be easier to re-stage; and yet these also bear the imprint of their writers’ role in staging the original production. In many ways, South African theatre today is still largely a D I Y industry – if one doesn’t perform, direct, or in other ways get involved in producing one’s own work, it’s rare that somebody else will. Nevertheless, what the four plays in this volume have in common is that they can stand on their own as works of literature, and they could all quite possibly be re-staged in the future by new directors and performers. In some way, then, these plays contribute to the preservation of heritage in South Africa. In their performance they become part of a living heritage, and in published format part of a tangible heritage that might be archived and preserved. Before I get to the plays themselves, I would like to take a brief excursion in the form of a tangent discussing some of the paradoxes inherent in ideals of heritage, freedom, and transformation in South Africa. I would like to consider some of the tensions between trying to remember and restore a past, and trying to be free to live in the present.

Freedom and Memory Since the dark days of apartheid, South African theatre-makers have responded in many different ways to their new-found freedom. For example, a number of plays have been staged since 1994 that explore private experiences, such as autobiographical reflections on sexuality, abuse, drugs, and marginality, as opposed to communal concerns involving resistance to social injustice. This was one of the things that Temple Hauptfleisch and André Brink predicted might happen – that there would be a turn towards the expression of personal experience, rather than collective concerns; that authors might write more about themselves, instead of the group they represented under apartheid.2 As Miki Flockemann has said,

1

Greg Homann, “Introduction” to At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 8. 2 Temple Haupfleisch, Theatre and Society in South Africa: Some Reflections in a Fractured Mirror (Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik, 1997): 161–62; André Brink, “Challenge

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with the shift in the 1990s it seemed as if there would now be a greater emphasis on the individual voice, and voices exploring and articulating personal, subjective experiences, not speaking as representatives of a group.3

This shift towards the “individual voice” was precipitated by Albie Sachs’s seminal speech at an A N C conference in Lusaka in 1989, called “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom.” In this address he asked for a moratorium on the use of “culture as a weapon of struggle,” emphasizing that, since the A N C would soon become the ruling party, it was no longer necessary for artists to marshal their creativity for purely political purposes, saying that it was time, rather, for writers to look inwards to more personal and idiosyncratic themes. In particular, he called for an autonomous artistic expression that “bypasses, overwhelms, ignores apartheid, [and] establishes its own space.”4 This was a highly contentious speech, and those familiar with South African letters will recall that it created a good deal of debate. I do not wish to unearth the many arguments supporting or opposing Albie Sachs’s thesis, and I present it here simply as a means of indicating a theme that emerged soon after the end of apartheid, which emphasized the freedom to express oneself, instead of being beholden to a cause – the freedom to celebrate oneself, instead of using art as a weapon with which to wrestle with an enemy. Plays endeavouring to celebrate individual experience have indeed found a foothold at festivals; on the other hand, there have also been plays since 1994 that have sought to revive and restore the cultures and traditions of particular ethnic groups marginalized during the apartheid years, plays like Mbongeni Ngema’s The Zulu (1999 and 2013) and House of Shaka (2005), Heinrich Reisenhofer and Kevin Athol Ehrenreich’s plays on coloured identity, and Rajesh Gopie’s plays on Indic culture. Plays focusing on a particular ethnic group also include a range of new works on Afrikaner identity, such as Deon Opperman’s Kaburu (2007) and Ons vir Jou (2008). The Afrikaners were certainly not marginalized during apartheid, but there is a growing perception and Response: The Changing Face of Theatre in South Africa,” Twentieth Century Literature 43.2 (Winter 1997): 172. 3 Quoted in Rolf Solberg, South African Theatre in the Melting Pot: Trends and Developments at the Turn of the Millennium (Grahamstown: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 2003): 32. 4 Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” in Writing South Africa, ed. Derek Attridge & Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 241.

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among some of them that their culture may be under threat in the current dispensation, a perception which has given rise to a great number of Afrikaans literary and theatrical festivals. Now, considering these two different uses of freedom, it seems that there may at times be an impasse between encouraging the exploration of personal experience and the ideals of preserving the lineage of a tradition (which one might refer to as a ‘heritage’). Perhaps there is a certain irony in being ‘free to be traditional’, since many traditions are stultifying, entrenching a past from which one may wish to be liberated, begging the question of whether one could ever truly by considered free if one has made a commitment to preserving the past. It seems, then, that there is sometimes an uneasy fit between ideals of heritage and those of freedom. One of the National Heritage Council’s most ambitious initiatives has been an “‘Ubuntu for Nation Building’ campaign”5 that has sought to create unity between different races and cultures.6 Also, according to the South African Government, the National Arts Council was created in order to promote “the free and creative expression of South Africa’s cultures.”7 And yet, this is not a complete freedom, because the same document states that this is to be accomplished “with a view to redressing the iniquities of the past.”8 These seem to be somewhat different aims – can one be free to be creative if one is set on redressing iniquities?9 5

H.C. Bredekamp, The Cultural Heritage of Democratic South Africa: An Overview (Cape Town: Iziko Museums, 2001): 10. 6 Curiously, one of the conditions of the 1957 Publications Control Board in South Africa that entrenched draconian powers of censorship in the board, also emphasized that publications which harmed “relations between inhabitants of the nation” should be censored. Both old and new governments have stressed the idea of not fomenting divisiveness between races, even if the tactics for creating peaceful coexistence have changed from separation to integration. 7 Bredekamp, Cultural Heritage of Democratic South Africa, 8. 8 Cultural Heritage of Democratic South Africa, 8. 9 Even if literature is not policed today as strictly as it used to be, there are certainly still official government opinions that have an influence on what is deemed desirable. One example of this is the A N C submission in April of 2000 to the Human Rights Commission about J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), in which it accused Coetzee of being a purveyor of an “ideology of racism,” claiming that he sustained stereotypes in the “collective psyche of white South Africa.” Some have argued that the A N C ’s attack on Coetzee contributed to his emigration to Australia. When Coetzee won the

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Similarly, the South African Heritage Resource Agency (S A H R A )10 states as part of its mission the redressing of “past inequities,” with a view to facilitating “healing and material and symbolic restitution.” These are laudable aims, yet when it comes to drama – which relies on conflict, which is premised on tension – the reconciliation of differences is the last thing likely to create a successful play. If the end of reconciliation is already in mind at the start of a piece, then, surely, one is not dealing with drama, but with advertising or proselytizing – performances where the outcome is already known. These are what David Mamet refers to as “problem plays” which operate in terms of arousing the indignation of the spectator: “I see the options presented and I decide (with the author) which is correct.”11 These plays give one a false sense of control over the world, as if one might be able to grasp its totality and to engineer society towards a desirable outcome. For Mamet, this arises from “a mistaken belief in one’s own powers,” whereas “the province of theatre and religion” is “the awesome.”12 For Mamet, religious rituals, among which he includes theatre, are premised on “a confession of powerlessness.”13 So, for Mamet, trying to present a play as the solution to a social problem is not the province of art.

Emerging Themes In terms of Mamet’s definition, the four plays in At This Stage might still, to an extent, be described as moral pieces, in that they try to grapple with ‘issues’ facing contemporary South African society, such as violence, crime, and justice. Three out of the four plays highlight encounters between white and black and deal with conflict between races, while the other (Shwele Bawo!) concerns the issue of the abuse of women. Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later, the government of Thabo Mbeki was very quick to claim him as a son of the South African soil, but by then the damage had been done. It seems, then, that there is certainly still a degree of censure regarding what is deemed acceptable writing. Of course, in a free society one is free to critique any art or ideas of which one does not approve, but perhaps there is a difference when this critique comes from an individual or from a government. 10 Established in 1999 under the National Heritage Resources Act No. 25 (http: //www.sahra.org.za/). 11 David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife (London: Methuen, 2007): 13. 12 Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife, 59. 13 Three Uses of the Knife, 60.

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How are we to situate these ostensibly ‘moral’ plays within a trajectory of work since apartheid? In his introduction to the collection, Homann divides post-apartheid into three phases. He defines the first as stretching from 1990 to 1996, which he calls “pre-post-apartheid.” This is theatre that was at first still dominated by the concerns of the 1970s and 1980s, before it fell into a morass of passivity when liberation officially came in 1994. During what he calls the “early-post-apartheid period” of 1996–2002, the main preoccupation was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which tried to deal with the murky half-truths arising from the trauma of the past. Homann sees the T R C as leading to the emergence of plays that “offered multiple points of view.”14 Only the third period in Homann’s taxonomy (2002–2008) is described as being truly ‘post-apartheid’. When Dream of the Dog was first staged, Craig Higginson told me in an interview that, for him, “the task of theatre is to facilitate dialogue rather than to try to be celebratory and to try to make people unified.”15 And all of these plays are divisive. They unsettle expectations and needle out sometimes uncomfortable nuances of emergent identities. Homann says: For many years South African theatre was dominated by plays that offered a united front against an oppressive enemy. The result was a theatre subjugated by a monological mode.16

He claims that these new plays are “dialogic” rather than “monologic,” but he also describes them as part of the process of forging a new national identity that has shifted since the days of apartheid. It seems very difficult, however, to reconcile the creation of a national identity with a dialogic mode, since the very concept of a ‘nation’ is surely monologic to its very core. Nevertheless, much has been made of the fact that in post-apartheid literature the stakes are less clear than they used to be. At the start of the current political dispensation, Liz Gunner prophesied a shift in South African theatre from a “crisis of legitimacy” to a “crisis of identity,”17 and in these four new play-texts one can find new modes of being, new definitions of selves attempting to negotiate the contexts in which they have located themselves. 14

Homan, “Introduction,” 10. Craig Higginson & Anton Krueger, “Wagging about the Dog: Interview,” Cue 2 (July 2007): 16. 16 Homan, “Introduction,” 2. 17 Liz Gunner, Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa, ed. Gunner (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 1994): 1. 15

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Each of these plays is an indication of new identities emerging: mothers grieving for surrogate sons, wives rising up against their husbands, sons hoping to make sense of the confusion of unfamiliar cultures, and daughters seeking solace from older generations. All of the four plays ask for new interpretations of relationships and new configurations of South African identities. Elie Wiesel famously said that every work of literature is about finding what has been lost, and in a sense these are plays concerned with the restoration of memory. And yet, in another way, they are not about the past. They do not ask for a tradition to be revived, they do not ask for restoration – they risk, rather, the creation of something new. Here are not only new plots, but new kinds of characters. For example, Marion Banning (in Lara Foot– Newton’s Reach) is a new kind of white woman, representing an older generation who have lost their children to immigration and violence. In Motshabi Tyelele’s Shwele Bawo! there is a new kind of black woman, Dikeledi, who stands up against a new kind of black elite (in the form of her violent, black Economically Empowered husband, who is protected by the media and the law). In Mike van Graan’s Some Mothers’ Sons, roles are reversed and the former struggle against an oppressive government has become a struggle for justice in the new dispensation. And in Craig Higginson’s Dream of the Dog, characters have to come to terms with different versions of the truth, with multiple points of view about a tragedy that occurred during a shared past.

Violence and Patriarchy Another thing that links these plays is the presence of violence in South African societies. In Reach, Marion says, “If we can’t distribute the wealth, then at least we have succeeded in the equal distribution of violence.”18 In a sense, these plays are also all about fear, and about trying to come to terms with the vagaries of justice while finding ways of living without becoming numbed by brutality. Perhaps one of the strongest themes that runs through each of these plays is that they are all quite deliberately anti-patriarchal. Of these, Dream of the Dog offers the harshest critique of a white patriarchal figure. Higginson explains the play’s title: At the centre of the play there’s a dog attack which happened in the past, and the characters confront each other and try to come to terms with the memory of this painful, violent experience. The play is then 18

Lara Foot–Newton, “Reach,” in At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 63.

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about the different interpretations of events, about how we all recall things in different ways.19

More important, Higginson feels that a lot of that unresolved suffering related to apartheid is now manifesting in crime. So the idea of Dream of the Dog has got to do with the damage from the past which people haven’t dealt with [. . . ] about people who are still victims of those wounds.20

He also emphasized that he’s “not trying to write a redemptive play, but [a play . . . ] that disturbs our complacency and gets us to take a fresh look at each other.”21 And yet, with regard to the narrative development of this play, even though there are different versions of how things happened – how the Master’s dog that killed Look Smart’s fiancée was freed – every one of the different versions implicates the old colonial white farmer as the perpetrator of rape and murder. Yes, there is the sense that memory can be deceptive; but still, Look Smart wants to convince Patricia of the truth. He wants her to understand the pain of his past, the memory he carries with him every day. And even though, right at the end, we discover that he was also deceived by his fiancée, the guilt of the white patriarch remains irrefutable, from whichever one of the character’s perspectives one sees it. Some Mothers’ Sons is split between two worlds. One is set in the apartheid past, where Braam, a young Afrikaans lawyer, is trying to help Vusi, who is being detained and tortured by the security police. The other takes place in the new South Africa, where Vusi is now trying to help Braam, who is awaiting trial for having killed the men who murdered his wife. Again, we have men involved in a man’s war while the mothers are crying. BRAAM:

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[. . . ] You know the statistics, Vusi! Twenty thousand murders a year, and less than fifteen percent convictions. Thousands of children and women raped every year, and less than ten percent of the perpetrators are brought to book. We’ve got a great constitution! Fantastic laws to protect everyone. Just no fucking justice!22

Higginson, “Dream of the Dog,” 16. “Dream of the Dog,” 16. 21 “Dream of the Dog,” 16. 22 Mike Van Graan, “Some Mothers’ Sons,” in At This Stage: Plays from PostApartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 88. 20

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Without entirely conflating the war against apartheid with the present struggle against crime, there are certainly parallels to be drawn in terms of experiences of victimization, and human responses to fear. In Reach, Marion learns the truth about what happened to her son when he was murdered after a hijacking. She says: This country has been breeding murderers for the past century . . . There doesn’t need to be a reason. Anger, despair! That’s the reason! That’s the motivation. Isn’t it obvious?23

And Shwele Bawo! is one lengthy, tortured cry against Dikeledi’s abuse first by her father and then by her husband, and the way in which her mother was complicit in covering up this ill-treatment. It is a fervently, militantly antipatriarchal piece through and through. Each of these plays features a murder, and in every one of them, violence is perpetrated by men. Each play is permeated by a sense of South African society as hostile and aggressive, and in all cases, it is men who are indicted.

A Heritage of Violence Perhaps it is easy to create a conflict and a clear moral narrative direction out of violent crime, which divides characters into monsters or heroes. And yet, I wonder whether there may not be a connection between issues of heritage, nationalism, and aggression, because not only does South Africa have a heritage of violence, but the very idea of violent resistance has been crucial to the formation of virtually all statehood in Africa. Revolution premises the very concept of nationhood in almost all African states. Ivor Chipkin shows that the concept of ‘the people’ in the context of African nationalism is constructed in a very particular way. Whereas the ideals of nationhood are most often premised on shared cultural values, languages, or religions (among other possible factors), African independence has most often been formulated in terms of its resistance to colonialism. In other words, ‘the people’ are defined as those who resist and fight oppression.24 In his book, Chipkin develops a theory of N D R (National Democratic Revolution) as a key marker for nationalist aspirations in African states. Instead of creating or preserving a culture, the interest here is in producing democratic 23

Foot–Newton, “Reach,” 62. Ivor Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of “The People” (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2007): 6. 24

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institutions and preserving them. So the theme of violence is not only the domain of the colonizers, because violence is also lauded when it leads to liberation. If one looks further, then perhaps the origins of this violence lie not only in the remnants of violent colonialism but also in the institution of patriarchy, which seeks to dominate by means of force. The main point I’d like to make in this essay, then, is that holding on to heritage may also imply sustaining traditions of patriarchy. If this is true, then to become free would mean liberation not only from European domination but also, perhaps, from a patriarchy that subscribes, albeit unwittingly, to a tradition of violence. Ironically, the attack against patriarchy delivered by Dikeledi in Shwele Bawo! still participates in the masculine notion of power and outrage in terms of an angry, self-righteous struggle. The irony is that, in her struggle to rid herself of the overbearing influence of her male ancestors, Dikeledi employs the same aggressive stance signalled by patriarchal demands when she murders her husband. Before we can have ‘freedom to’, we need a ‘freedom from’, and, judging by these new plays, South Africans are very far from being free from their past, from their traumatic history. Many South Africans are still staking their identity as selves, and as a nation, on a struggle, on a fight. ‘The Struggle’ (a term used to describe the fight against apartheid) is an expression that is often invoked by the government today in a variety of contexts, such as “The Struggle against Aids” (Jacob Zuma) or “The Struggle against poverty” (Neo Masithela). Identity is still being premised on opposition. At the time of writing, the leader of the A N C Youth League, Julius Malema, is on trial for alleged hate speech, in encouraging the singing of a Struggle anthem, Ayesab’amagwala, which contains the lyrics “dubul’ibhunu” (shoot the Boer [i.e., the Afrikaner]). One of the country’s foremost poets, Wally Mongane Serote, has supported Malema in court, claiming that this song is part of the country’s “heritage.”25 But if the South African heritage is based on brutality, on violence, on the physical subjugation of one’s enemies, then it’s no wonder that 25

Serote compares the song to the Voortrekker Monument, which is an enormous monolith erected by the Afrikaners to celebrate their victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River, pointing out that this is surely also a celebration of violent destruction, of the death of the other. See Maureen Isaacson, “Liberation Songs Deserve Own Monument,” Sunday Independent (28 April 2011), http://www.iol.co.za/sunday independent/liberation-songs-deserve-own-monument-1.1062001 (accessed 9 May 2011).

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South Africa is one of the most violent societies in the world. One wonders what it is, exactly, that is being preserved and celebrated. Perhaps freedom must remain an unattainable ideal, since one is never entirely free from one’s situatedness in language, culture, and the consensus of meanings in which one finds oneself. In this sense, any dream of freedom must be tempered by what Homi Bhabha refers to as our task to be both “human and historical.”26 But what if ‘being human’ means trying to dominate in a perpetual Will to Power? Perhaps the transformation that needs to happen is beyond either being human or historical, but in being prepared to relinquish our heritage of anger and violence.

Conclusion Much is made of the word ‘transformation’ in South Africa today. It generally seems to imply the transformation from a nationalistic, racist society towards one that is egalitarian and democratic; and by implication also the elevation of those held back by an inadequate standard of living. But perhaps what we need to transform most urgently is our deep-set patriarchal heritage, and the blood-lust that has been brewing in our bones for so many thousands of years, a long time before the more recent colonialisms and wars of the last centuries. Perhaps we need to transform our humanity. When Carl Jung met a client, he used to say that he tried to find a connection between them based not on their current contexts but in terms of the context of both analyst and client being ancient creatures, millennia old, having evolved ceaselessly over vast tracts of time. This was a being he personified as a “two million year old self.”27 Perhaps that is the sort of connection theatre-makers could attempt to make, trying to relate to audience members as ancient beings caught up in a quandary of violence, instead of insisting on reflecting the news of the day. This has been a somewhat itinerant essay, wandering between a range of different subjects; however, the main point I would like to make is that I suspect that in almost all instances it would be better to be free from our heritage, rather than attempting to restore it. If the evidence of these four new plays is anything to go by, then it might be time to reconsider our attempts at cap26

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 256. This concept is explored further in Anthony Stevens’s book The Two MillionYear-Old Self, foreword by David H. Rosen (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology 3; College Station: Texas A&M U P , 1993). 27

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turing and stabilizing or preserving the past. Perhaps we should, for the most part, let it go. Perhaps, along with David Mamet, we should forget about looking for the ideal “problem play” that might dissect our national identity. Instead, we could make the attempt to try to face our humanity, our frail powerlessness in the face of our own impermanence. Personally, I feel that there is very little worth preserving in most ideals of national identity. Perhaps we should, rather, come up with something new, something other than the struggle. Irreverence for a national identity may be the very sort of impertinence that Esiaba Irobi might have appreciated.

WORKS CITED Bailey, Brett. Plays of Miracle and Wonder (Claremont, South Africa: Juta, 2003). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bredekamp, H.C. The Cultural Heritage of Democratic South Africa: An Overview (Cape Town: Iziko Museums, 2001). Brink, André. “Challenge and Response: The Changing Face of Theatre in South Africa,” Twentieth Century Literature 43.2 (Winter 1997): 162–76. Chipkin, Ivor. Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of “The People” (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2007). Coetzee, Greig. Happy Natives: A Play (Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P , 2003). Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace (London: Vintage, 1999). Foot–Newton, Lara. “Reach,” in At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 31–67. Gunner, Liz, ed. Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 1994). Hauptfleisch, Temple. Theatre and Society in South Africa: Some Reflections in a Fractured Mirror (Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik, 1997). Higginson, Craig. “Dream of the Dog,” in At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 141–76. ——, & Anton Krueger. “Wagging about the Dog: Interview,” Cue 2 (July 2007): 16. Homann, Greg, ed. “Introduction” to At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 17–29. Isaacson, Maureen. “Liberation Songs Deserve Own Monument,” Sunday Independent (28 April 2011), http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/liberation-songs-deserveown-monument-1.1062001 (accessed 9 May 2011). Kentridge, William, & Jane Taylor. Ubu and the Truth Commission (Cape Town: U of Cape Town P , 2007). Mamet, David. Three Uses of the Knife (London: Methuen, 2007).

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Mda, Zakes. “The Bells of Amersvoort,” in Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2002): 111–61. Sachs, Albie. “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” in Writing South Africa, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998): 239–48. Solberg, Rolf. South African Theatre in the Melting Pot: Trends and Developments at the Turn of the Millennium (Grahamstown: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 2003). Stevens, Anthony. The Two Million-Year-Old Self, foreword by David H. Rosen (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology 3; College Station: Texas A&M U P , 1993). Tyelele, Mtshabi. “Shwele Bawo!” in At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 239–48. Van Graan, Mike. “Some Mothers’ Sons,” in At This Stage: Plays from Post-Apartheid South Africa, ed. Greg Homann (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2009): 69–110.

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African Drama and the Construction of an Indigenous Cultural Identity An Examination of Four Major Nigerian Plays

K ENE I GWEONU

Introduction On the modern stage in Nigeria one notices that even the vendors of “dry” theatre do, intentionally or by instinct, implicate elements, if not “chunks,” of music and dance into productions of play scripts modelled slavishly on Euro-American literary stage practice.1

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four canonical Nigerian plays to explore their potential for constructing an identity that is essentially African through their use of indigenous oral materials and dance. In it, I contend that the four plays, Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, and Duro Ladipo’s Moremi, offer ample representations of contemporary African – in this case Nigerian – drama. The article argues that the plays’ mode of interaction with language, idiomatic expressions, and dance is indicative of the expectation of a drama that can be as socially functional as the indigenous African model while retaining relevance in a westernized world. This transcultural practice is amply noted in Seiza Aliu’s assessment of Wole Soyinka’s major plays:

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HIS ARTICLE CONSIDERS

Meki Nzewi, “Music, Dance, Drama and the Stage in Nigeria,” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigerian Magazine, 1981): 433.

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An evaluation of Soyinka’s major plays reveals that traditional Yoruba belief, mythology, history and folkways constitute the source and background of these plays. The traditional elements are artistically blended with his knowledge of the literary drama of the classical and modern European writers.2

Aliu’s account of Soyinka’s major works captures the context in which I use the term ‘transcultural practice’ in this article. The term is used here to describe the system by which a society absorbs aspects of another’s culture, and in the process assumes ownership of these ‘foreign elements’ by building them into its own popular traditions. Consequently, the article concludes that the four plays offer a vision of African drama that not only derives from Europe and its imperial agenda of civilization, but one that relies heavily on indigenous African dance, rhetorical structures, and other aesthetic devices to convey performances that are both accessible and acceptable to the indigenous African mind. The choice of these four plays reveals the limitation of my study, which is perhaps difficult to overcome without creating others in its place. Apparently, all the plays are by Yorùbá authors. This choice is deliberate and is to some extent due to their reputation as canonical texts in Nigeria, coupled with my subjective interest in these playwrights. ™ Of the four plays discussed in this article, three – The Lion and the Jewel, The Gods Are Not to Blame, and Moremi – can be classified as first-generation African plays, while Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers is a secondgeneration African play. First-generation plays, most of which were written in the periods before and immediately after the attainment of independence and self-governance by most African nations, like Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960, can be described as being nationalistic in outlook but ethnic in orientation. This is even so considering that the period in which most of them were written marked the peak of the nationalist movements that were sweeping across the African continent.3 As one would expect, an African identity was 2

Seiza M. Aliu, “Critical Dimensions in Nigerian Drama: Beyond Year 2000,” African Symposium: An Online Journal of African Education Research Network 2.4 (December 2002): online (accessed 9 October 2005). 3 African nationalism or pan-Africanism is a political movement and a form of cultural nationalism aimed at unifying the continent culturally and politically. The movement was made popular by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of independent Ghana.

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indeed a major expectancy in the postcolonial African drama that evolved, championed by the likes of the four playwrights discussed in this article, by J.P. Clark, and by practitioners such as Hubert Ogunde. However, the nationalistic or pan-Africanist vision of first-generation playwrights and their fixation on ethnicity meant that a colonially conceived nation-state known as Nigeria was not often engaged with as a unified entity. This is implied in Éliane Saint-André Utudjian’s explication of the difference between first- and second-generation African playwrights: The difference between the first and recent decades of West African dramatists is a matter of the writers’ concerns – focusing on such priorities as the growing complexity and prevailing anomie of political, social and economic life in post-independent Nigeria and Ghana. The playwrights’ attention is increasingly drawn to national issues and national audiences, perhaps to the detriment of a wider, more international outlook.4

First-generation African playwrights often focused their works on the exploration of the intricacies of their tribal cultures rather than on the nationstate they share with other ethnic nationalities. Even though these playwrights were at the forefront of African nationalist struggles, they did not take kindly to any criticism of their works that might suggest non-engagement with colonially conceived nation-states. According to Kole Omotoso, they argue, instead, that such “criticism has not usually paid attention to the African languages and cultures which have influenced the works of the African writers being considered.”5 The implication of this stance has been damning for African politics – Nigerian politics in particular – since emphasis is placed on the playwright’s ethnic nationality to the detriment of colonially conceived nation-states. Soyinka acknowledges the difficulty of the first-generation playwrights in transcending ethnic limitations and re/focusing their writing on the nationstate shared with other ethnic nationalities: Well, it’s obvious that I’m not an Igbo writer! The “Nigerian” writer is a creature in formation. Obviously we’re bound to end up as a hybrid4

Éliane Saint-André Utudjian, “Ghana and Nigeria,” in Post-Colonial English Drama: Commonwealth Drama since 1960, ed. Bruce King (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 191. 5 Kole Omotoso, Achebe or Soyinka? A Study in Contrasts (London: Hans Zell, 1996): 107.

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ization. Well, I’m not a Hausa writer. There is the Hausa culture, the Tiv culture – we have several cultures in Nigeria – so that makes me primarily a Yoruba writer. There’s no question at all about it in my mind, I’m primarily a Yoruba writer.6

The matter is further complicated by the fact that, among the Yorùbá, as with other ethnic groups mentioned by Soyinka, there are in existence slight cultural divergences from one community to another. Ironically, Soyinka’s declaration that he is a Yorùbá writer is predicated on the fact that he adopts a universalistic approach to Yorùbá cultures in his plays. In fact, it has not been uncommon for similar language communities to engage in conflicts that are often violent in nature whenever there is a lack of mutual respect and tolerance. The damning implication of ethnic or communal intolerance is constantly being re/enacted in the numerous ethnic /communal clashes, often between communities with related histories and close ancestral ties. An example is the perennial bloody skirmishes between neighbouring Umuleri and Aguleri in Anambra state, Nigeria.7 The persistent and often escalating level of ethnic and communal clashes in Nigerian is indicative of the risk of not exploiting the universal dynamics of Nigerian cultures by firstgeneration playwrights and politicians alike. Ola Rotimi captures the intolerant disposition accruing from an over-exploitation of ethnic rather than universal dynamics in the Nigerian nation in his depiction of the deadly confrontation between Odewale and the Old Man (King Adetusa) in The Gods Are Not to Blame: The elders of my tribe have a proverb: ‘because the farm-owner is slow to catch the thief, the thief calls the farm-owner thief!’ OLD MAN: [bursting with laughter]. So . . . I am the thief! O D E W A L E ’ S V O I C E : [over loudspeaker].This man is indeed funny. Listen to him laugh. For a while, I too couldn’t help laughing. ODEWALE:

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Soyinka, in Jane Wilkinson, Talking with African Writers (London: James Currey,

1992): 96. 7

For background information on the Umuleri/Aguleri conflict, see Raphael Chima Ekeh, “Nigeria: Aguleri–Umuleri Conflict – The Theatre of Fratricidal War,” in Searching for Peace in Africa: An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Management Activities, ed. European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation in cooperation with the African Centre for the Constructive Resoltuion of Disputes (Utrecht: European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation, 1999): 359–63.

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[Both laughing together but O D E W A L E with some restraint.] No . . . no use fighting with him. Now I will talk to him, softly. And maybe I will take him to the home of Kakalu, son of Atiki, in Ede, the man who sold this land to me. This way, we shall understand one another without a fight. OLD MAN: [stops laughing]. You from the bush tribe, come to these parts and boldly call me ‘T H I E F ’? ODEWALE: Where am I from? OLD MAN: [calling his men]. Gbonka . . . Olojo – come, come, come quickly – come and listen to this man’s tongue. [Two men run over with their hoes.] O D E W A L E ’ S V O I C E : That is the end. I can bear insults to myself, brother, but to call my tribe bush, and then summon riff-raff to mock my mother tongue! I will die first.8

Here, Rotimi explores the issue of land dispute, a very common theme in Nigeria, to illustrate the manifestation and escalation of communal violence. In Art, Dialogue and Outrage, Soyinka identifies the Ibadan dialect as one Yorùbá accent that is considered as an uncanny version by other Yorùbá clans: “The Ibadan accent is, I know, to many Yoruba the butt of many linguistic jokes. It is certainly an accent and a dialect that you notice.”9 As a result, even though Odewale and the Old Man are Yorùbá, their positions on the Yorùbá dialectic continuum differ. Consequently, they speak the same language, but with different tonal emphasis. It is this variation in language that Rotimi uses to draw attention to the Old Man that rouses Odewale’s murderous temper. The emergence, in Nigeria, of second-generation playwrights such as Femi Osofisan, Sulu Sofola, Olu Obafemi, and Esiaba Irobi has inadvertently led to the development of the sort of hybridization that Soyinka anticipated. Secondgeneration playwrights are dealing with a broader and more inclusive cultural universe in which other ethnic nationalities are not only re/presented but also join forces in the struggle for a better society. By using their plays to engage with the common people and thrust them into prominence, the second-generation playwrights show that they have a different outlook from that of firstgeneration playwrights. The engagement with the ethnic diversity of the Nigerian nation-state is evident in Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers, which is 8 9

Ola Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1971): 46. Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage (London: Methuen, 1993): 84.

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ostensibly set in Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria, and a melting pot of cultures, as people from the over 250 ethnic nationalities reside there. Even though other places are mentioned in passing, the setting is clear from Hasan’s statement regarding the Bar Beach: MAJOR:

HASAN: ALHAJA: HASAN:

Listen, Angola, Hasan, Alhaja! Listen to me, this is the end. The guns will get us too in our turn, unless we quit. But for what? Where do we go? Nowhere. They’ve trapped us with their guns and decrees. All we have left is the Bar Beach. And then six feet in the ground.10

Bar Beach in Lagos was the notorious site for the public execution of convicted armed robbers. At the end of the Biafra war in 1970,11 with growing unemployment and with guns still in the possession of individuals, incidents of armed robbery escalated in the country. This prompted the then military head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, to promulgate the Armed Robbery and Firearms (Special Provisions) Decree 1970. It was this decree that made armed robbery an offence punishable by the death penalty. The importance of the play’s setting is augmented by Osofisan’s choice of names for his characters. The four major characters /robbers, Angola, Major, Hasan, and Alhaja, all bearing names that undermine ethnic affinities. Furthermore, the neutral identity of the soldiers in the play is indicative of Osofisan’s attempt to emphasize the primacy of the nation-state over ethnic nationalities in the quest for a new Nigeria. Second-generation playwrights write mainly out of the need to service the sometimes acrimonious entities conceived by European colonialists as countries in Africa. Even so, both the first- and second-generation playwrights address their works to audiences beyond their ethnicity by adopting the use of European and/or Europeanderived languages. Consequently, these playwrights present characters that speak various Englishes which often serve as markers of their socio-economic background and status. Omotoso sums up the rationale for the continued use 10

Femi Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1991): 15. The Nigerian civil war, popularly known as the Biafran War, grew out of a political / tribal conflict between the Hausa tribe and the Igbos in the northern and eastern regions of Nigeria, respectively. The war, which started on 6 July 1967, lasted for about three years, and ended only with the surrender of the Igbos on 13 January 1970. 11

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of colonially obligated but nonetheless often subverted languages in Africa’s colonially conceived nation-states: Should the nation-state lose its validity and be rejected as a platform for the collective action of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multicultural populations of these nation-states, perhaps then there would be no longer any use for the European languages of colonisation.12

Contrary to proposals made by Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o supporting the adoption of indigenous African languages in literature and the arts, European languages of colonization are useful in whatever variety they are retained. They serve to bridge gaps created by colonial ‘nation-creating’ experiments that saw diverse and sometimes hostile tribes amalgamated into single national entities. Soyinka’s representation of Africa, colonialism, and westernization subverts the perception of contemporary African theatre derived wholly from eurocentric ideals. He draws effectively on indigenous Yorùbá theatrical forms, while deliberately presenting a contemporary theatre aesthetic that not only challenges subversive colonial conventions but ultimately creates a compelling link between African and Western theatrical conventions. This link is further implied in Soyinka’s observation that the differences between indigenous African and European approaches to drama cannot be found in the variance between individual and communal creativity in Europe and Africa respectively, “nor in the level of noise from the audience – this being the supposed gauge of audience-participation – at any given performance,”13 but, rather, on what he describes as the essential differences between the two world-views, a difference between one culture whose very artefacts are evidence of a cohesive understanding of irreducible truths and another, whose creative impulses are directed by period dialectics. […] Of far greater importance is the fact that Western dramatic criticism habitually reflects the abandonment of a belief in culture as defined within man’s knowledge of fundamental, unchanging relationships between himself and society and within the larger context of the observable universe.14

The above elucidation also debunks speculations on contemporary African theatre aesthetics which have as their prerequisite the rejection of Euro-American theatrical conventions such as the proscenium stage. Joachim Fiebach 12

Omotoso, Achebe or Soyinka?, 122. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 37. 14 Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 38. 13

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supports the argument for repudiating the proscenium stage – what he conceives of as the “tyranny of the proscenium arch and its curtains”15 and its ability to frustrate audience participation by creating a dividing line between spectator and performance. Fiebach’s representation of the proscenium as tyrannical is overstated because it creates the impression that its use should be discontinued in contemporary African theatre practice. One can imagine that Fiebach’s opposition to the proscenium is based on the assumption that, with its removal, audiences are automatically transformed into active participants to reflect indigenous performance situations in Africa where there is often no clear-cut separation between performers and audience. While it is possible to imagine how the adoption of this Western stage technique can affect and perhaps alter the audience /performer relationship, one must be aware of the Western origin of the tradition of literary drama in Africa that permitted this convention. It is vital to note that it is not the absence of the proscenium stage that situates a performance as African; instead, identity is reflected in the performers’ embodiment of the symbols and artefacts of African culture, as Soyinka puts it.16 Second-generation African plays are easily identified by their Marxistcum-radical ideological underpinning. Unlike first-generation plays such as Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), which derive from Aristotle’s concept of the nobility or elitism of tragic heroes, second-generation plays offer a new and radical vision of a society in which the common people – as a collective rather than as individuals – take upon themselves the task of society-building. They question the suitability of established religious and socio-political institutions as effective agents of change, and as a result, they view plays that suggest ritual sacrifice as a means to an end as being too simplistic and escapist. This ideological position means that, like Osofisan, most second-generation playwrights do not acknowledge the relevance to contemporary African society of the works of the first-generation playwrights. This disposition is reinforced by the description of first-generation works as “having little or no relevance to the immediate and mundane needs of their contemporary society.”17 Second-generation playwrights base their argument 15

Joachim Fiebach, “Ebrahim Hussein’s Dramaturgy: A Swahili Multiculturalist’s Journey in Drama and Theater,” Research in African Literatures 28.4 (Winter 1997): 23. 16 Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 37–38. 17 Biodun Jeyifo, quoted in Aderemi Bamikunle, “The Revolutionary Vision of Olu Obafemi’s Theatre,” in Larger Than His Frame: Critical Studies and Reflections on

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mainly on the need to subvert ancient myths and beliefs in order to expose their oppressiveness and stop the political elite from using them as instruments for suppressing and exploiting the masses. According to Tess Onwueme, Osofisan’s plays reinforce the vision of second-generation playwrights about the need to project myths in forms that do not unduly privilege the political elite over the masses: Osofisan’s revolutionary vision implies that the apparent inability of people to alter their social conditions arises from the lack of that consciousness necessary to challenge conventional traditional views and to see values anew.18

By projecting myths as unchanging, first-generation playwrights invariably reaffirm the status quo, which enables the ruling elite to retain power. By contrast, in demystifying some of the long-held beliefs about myths, secondgeneration playwrights are able to empower the masses by promoting the level of consciousness needed to challenge and revise the unhealthy balance of power in society. No More the Wasted Breed (1982) and Morountodun (1982) are two other plays by Osofisan that exemplify and highlight his commitment to masses-centred action. In both plays, Osofisan reassesses the relationship between myth and contemporary society from the point of view of the masses. The ideological divide on the use of myth that exists between first- and second-generation playwrights is evidenced in Osofisan’s No More the Wasted Breed, which was written as a response to Wole Soyinka’s The Strong Breed (1969). Osofisan offers his play as a counter-narrative to The Strong Breed by projecting mass-oriented action in stark contrast to Soyinka’s reliance on mythic messiahs. He questions the role of established religion and ritual in the exploitation of the people in the guise of offering them freedom from social injustices. Osofisan then concludes that freedom can only be achieved by the masses themselves and that freedom cannot be obtained through religion. In Morountodun, Osofisan presents a different reading of the myth of MÖremí, the ancient queen of Ilé-IfÁ who saved the city from invaders. He does this by drawing on the character of Titubi, the over-indulged daughter of Alhaja Kabirat. Titubi assumes the legendary role of MÖremí in order to help Olu Obafemi, ed. Duro Oni & Sunday E. Ododo (Lagos: C B A A C , 2000): 104. 18 Tess A. Onwueme, “Visions of Myth in Nigerian Drama: Femi Osofisan versus Wole Soyinka,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 25.1 (1991): 63.

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quell the peasant uprising threatening the stability of her social class. Midway through her mission, Titubi discovers that the peasants have feelings, too, and that, by assuming the role of MÖremí, she is helping to sustain the injustices of the elite. Consequently, unlike MÖremí, Titubi changes her allegiance to fight on the side of the peasants in order to defeat the overbearing elites. By presenting this inverted reading of the MÖremí myth, Osofisan exposes the oppressiveness of social constructions that help to perpetuate social inequality. He compels his audience to re-think long-held beliefs about myth, arguing that myth is not relevant for addressing the multitude of social issues. Osofisan views drama as a form that has potential for the attainment of revolution. He draws on indigenous Yorùbá performance forms in order to create a theatre that is accessible to the grassroots, often emphasizing myths by deconstructing them in an active experiment aimed at breaking the spell of complacency that they hold over the masses, thus releasing them to act. This experimental subversion of myth and legend, according to Osofisan, is a radical response to their debilitating influence that makes it impossible for those under their spell to act contrary to their canons, especially when they support oppression: Faced with menace therefore, the theatre has responded by being even more thematically and structurally adventurous. Playwrights, such as Obafemi or Ukala, have raided the extant repertory of myth and legend, but only in order to radicalize it, and subvert its customary function of legitimizing political and religious orthodoxy.19

This is also the focus of a critique of Osofisan’s dramatic techniques by Muyiwa Awodiya, in which he identifies “suspension of beliefs” as the primary goal of Femi Osofisan’s dramaturgy, especially his subversive reading of mythology in order to elicit some form of action from his audience: The purpose is to engage the interest and belief of the audience and then to break the spell on them by urging them to evaluate the meaning and implications of what they see.20

19

Femi Osofisan, “Reflections on Theatre Practice in Contemporary Nigeria,” in African Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 295–98. 20 Muyiwa Awodiya, “Celebrating Osofisan at Sixty,” in Portraits of an Eagle: Essays in Honour of Femi Osofisan, ed. Sola Adeyemi (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 50.

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The predominant theme of Osofisan’s major plays, as well as of most secondgeneration playwrights, is unquestionably that of the oppression of the masses by the political and economic elite, framed by a clear indication that the ordinary person is also capable of overcoming this oppression. This is the unambiguous message of Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers, which identifies Nigeria’s political elite as being responsible for increasing cases of armed robbery in the country. In the play, Osofisan also tests the will of the masses, setting them against the oppressive political system by allowing his audiences to decide the fate of the robbers at the end of the play.

Thematic Preoccupations The four plays, The Lion and the Jewel, The Gods Are Not to Blame, Once Upon Four Robbers, and Moremi, are revolutionary in their adoption of Western theatrical conventions superimposed on an indigenous Nigerian model. They all seem to agree on the adoption of an approach to contemporary African theatre in which a blend of indigenous elements is infused with the conventions of European drama. It should, however, be noted that whereas The Lion and the Jewel and Once Upon Four Robbers deal directly with a postcolonial African society in terms of setting, The Gods Are Not to Blame and Moremi are set in pre-colonial African societies. Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, which is set in fifteenth-century Africa – in what is today known as Nigeria – is unique in the sense that it is actually an ingenious adaptation of Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles (495 B C E –406 B C E ). As a consequence of a resurgence of interest in African arts in the West, two of the four plays discussed in this article have been recently revived in London, where they received widespread acceptance by the theatre-going public and in the media. The Lion and the Jewel, arguably Soyinka’s first masterpiece, received its first major revival in the U K since 1990.21 Written when Soyinka was twenty-three, The Lion and the Jewel was first performed in the U K in 1958 at the Royal Court, where Soyinka was writer-in-residence. Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame was first staged in London by Yvonne Brewster at the Riverside Studios in 1989 and revived by Femi Elufowoju Jr. in a production by Tiata Fahodzi as part of the Africa 05 celebration in July 21

Co-produced by Collective Artists, the Young Vic, and Bite: 05, Barbican as part of Young Genius at The Pit, Barbican Centre from 28 September–8 October 2005; directed by Chuck Mike and choreographed by Koffi Koko, The Lion and the Jewel was first published by Oxford University Press in 1963.

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2005.22 Thematically The Lion and the Jewel and Once Upon Four Robbers

explore the value of traditional African ways against European innovations. By contrast, The Gods Are Not to Blame and Moremi are set in precolonial Africa but address contemporary issues surrounding oppression and injustice. They both suggest that the problems of wars and deprivation in the society are a result of human injustices, and that these maladies can only be redressed if people act respectfully and honourably towards others. Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel is a ribald comedy testing the boundaries between Yorùbá folk traditions and postcolonial European derivatives. Set in the Yorùbá village of Ilunjinle, the play centres around events in the life of Sidi, the village beauty, who is relentlessly wooed by Lakunle, a europeanized school-teacher. Lakunle seems to be on the verge of winning Sidi’s love until a chance appearance in a photo magazine makes Sidi popular. This is facilitated by a chance encounter with a photographer from Lagos23 who captures exquisite images of Sidi for the photo magazine, thus bringing her beauty to everyone’s attention. A combination of Sidi’s fame, pride, and vanity thrusts Baroka, the cunning, aged village headman, into the race to win her hand in marriage. Spiced with fantastic indigenous dances and songs, the play presents Sidi in the dilemma of having to negotiate her destiny in the struggle between the old and the new, the modern and the traditional. This leads her to pit her wits against those of the time-tested Baroka, who is also known as the Lion of Ilujinle; at the end, the sly Baroka wins the battle with a combination of wit and brute force, snatching away Sidi’s virginity in the process. Baroka’s action exposes the play’s dark heart, which is the rape of a young woman, an act that ironically transpires simultaneously with the celebration of women’s triumph over men. The celebration was instigated by Baroka’s eldest wife, Sadiku, to mock her husband, who she believes had lost his manhood. Sidi 22

Produced by Talawa Theatre Company at the Riverside Studios, 1–25 November 1989; directed by Yvonne Brewster; produced by Tiata Fahodzi at the Arcola Theatre London, 8 June–2 July 2005; directed by Femi Elufowoju Jr. and choreographed by Kayode Idris. — Africa 05 is acclaimed to be the biggest celebration of African culture ever organized in Britain to celebrate the best of African and diasporic arts. The celebration, which took place between February and October 2005 at various centres in London, featured many community arts organizations in the capital. Information from http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcafrica/africa05 (accessed 8 December 2006). 23 Lagos was the colonial and independence capital of Nigeria until the capital was moved to Abuja in central Nigeria by the General Ibrahim Babangida regime in 1991.

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had gone to taunt Baroka with the news of his impotence based on information she obtained from a deliberately misinformed Sadiku: SIDI: BAROKA:

SIDI: BAROKA:

SIDI:

[bent almost over them. Genuinely worried.]: Oh! Does it hurt? Not yet . . . but, as I was saying I change my wrestlers when I have learnt to throw them. I also change my wives when I have learnt to tire them. And is this another . . . changing time for the Bale? Who knows? Until the finger nails have scarped the dust, no one can tell which insect released his bowels. [Sidi grimaces in disgust and walks away. Returns as she thinks up a new idea.] A woman spoke to me this afternoon.24

This exchange reveals Sidi’s dogged determination to expose Baroka’s supposed impotence and bring him public scorn. Despite his objectionable allegories, she persists in pressing herself on him, supposing that he woul want to conceal his sexual incapacity by declining to consent. Unbeknownst to her, Sadiku had been intentionally misled by Baroka into thinking that he had become impotent; Sidi falls into his trap and loses her virginity to him. Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers also explores issues surrounding the adoption of European way of life against the backdrop of the indigenous African system. Although the dominant theme of this play is human oppression and the ability of mankind to rise above it, the play makes veiled reference to the evils of Western civilization against the backdrop of indigenous African civilization. One such reference is found in verse four of the song of the market: The lure of profit has conquered our souls and changed us into cannibals: oh praise the selfless British who with the joyous sound of minted coins and gold brought us civilisation!25

The play tackles the increasing problem of armed robbery in Africa, focusing specifically on Nigeria. It focuses particularly on the enactment of the above24 25

Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1963): 39. Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 45–47.

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mentioned decree issued by the Federal Military regime of General Yakubu Gowon that made armed robbery an offence punishable by the death penalty through public execution, colloquially referred to as ‘firing squad’. In the play, Osofisan seems to suggest that the bane of armed robbery in Nigeria is a direct result of oppression engendered by the adoption of the European way of life, which consequently forced young people away from the farms in the quest for white-collar jobs and other conveniences of city life. The song of the market quoted from above concentrates its criticism on the monetary system introduced to Nigeria by the British, blaming it for the the greed of the traders and the violence and death meted out by armed robbers and. The song also expresses nostalgia for the indigenous barter system, which encourages hard work and industry, while expressing the fear that the “four robbers” will continue to haunt Nigeria’s monetized society. Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame centres on Odewale, the supposed stranger who saves the people of Kutuje from destruction by helping to conquer their enemies in battle. As a reward he is crowned king of Kutuje, inheriting the former king’s queen. In his new responsibility as king, Odewale undertakes to identify those who murdered the late King Adetusa in order to avert the curse that has brought so much suffering to his kingdom. In the process, Odewale finds out that the man he killed in a fit of anger on his journey to Kutuje was in fact King Adetusa and also his father. He had thus inadvertently fulfilled the prophecy he was running away from – that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Rotimi clearly suggests that tragedy stems from individual action rather than divine destiny and that it could be averted if people were to act respectfully and honourably towards one another. In his review of the play’s 1989 London production, Carl Miller notes that “it is in this emphasis upon human action that the Nigerian writer Ola Rotimi’s version of the Oedipus story, written some 20 years ago, differs from the theme of the original.”26 The play’s title, The Gods Are Not to Blame, clearly proclaims Rotimi’s departure from the theme of Oedipus Tyrannus. Rather than laying the blame for Odewale’s misfortunes on the gods, as in Sophocles’s masterpiece, Rotimi suggests that they were brought on by Odewale’s choices. The gods are thus absolved of any blame in human tragedies, which come as a result of the choices that we make. 26

Carl Miller, review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, dir. Yvonne Brewster, City Limits (9 November 1989), repr. In London Theatre Record (22 October–4 November 1989): 1494.

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Michael Billington’s review of the 2005 London performance of The Gods Are Not to Blame suggests that the play is about avoidable human errors that leave the audience with the feeling of “a shared experience rather than a remote tragedy.”27 The implication of Billington’s supposition is twofold. On the one hand, the shared experience of the audience can be traced to empathy, as the audience recognize themselves in Odewale’s internal struggles and apparent imperfections. On the other hand, the familiarity it evokes in African and Western audiences can be found in the supposed similarity between Greek and African (particularly Yorùbá) rituals that made it possible for Rotimi and Soyinka to adapt Greek tragedies to Yorùbá settings.28 This thesis is amply explored in Kevin Wetmore’s The Athenian Sun in an African Sky. Wetmore explores this idea about the closeness of Greek and African rituals that renders Greek tragedies adaptable to African settings.29 This affinity is reinforced by afrocentric assumptions such as that expressed in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, in which Greek culture and, by extension, Western civilization, is represented as deriving from Africa – ancient Egypt, to be precise.30 Moremi takes a different approach to the issue of oppression by suggesting that bravery and the ritual sacrifice of human blood can be used to avert disaster, and in this case maintain the power of the oppressor over the oppressed. The play is based on the ancient legend of MÖremí, who was the wife of an ancient king of Ilé-IfÁ known as Oranmiyan, and her only son, Oluorogbo. The legend goes that with the city of Ilé-IfÁ under constant and repeated attacks by warriors from the Igbo tribe, MÖremí undertakes to be captured by the Igbos in order to discover the secret of their invincibility. To 27

Michael Billington, review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, dir. Femi Elufowoju Jr., The Guardian (11 June 2005): np. 28 On the question of such adaptation more generally, see, for example, Astrid Van Weyenberg, The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy (Cross/Cultures 165; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013). 29 Kevin J. Wetmore, The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy (Jefferson N C : McFarland, 2002): 2. 30 Bernal’s afrocentric theory, which links Western civilization to Africa, has been contested by Mary Lefkowitz in Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996) and by a collection of voices in Black Athena Revisited, ed. Mary Lefkowitz & Guy MacLean Rogers (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 1996). This led, in 2001, to Bernal’s response in the form of another book on the topic, Black Athena Writes Back, ed. David Chioni Moore (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001).

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this end, MÖremí makes a vow to Esinmerin, the river goddess, that she would offer her only son as a sacrifice if she returned triumphant to Ilé-IfÁ. On the successful completion of her mission and the defeat of the Igbos, MÖremí sacrifices her son to Esinmerin in fulfilment of her vows. That the theme of oppression is at the heart of the play is evident from an exchange between MÖremí and one of the Chiefs during a meeting at the king’s palace to determine a course of action to stem the tide of invasion from the Igbos: .

CHIEF:

MOREMI:

CHIEF:

The Igbos are the owners of the land on which Oduduwa built this town. Let us propitiate them with presents or else the spirits of the soil will eternally work against us. Did you speak of propitiation in Oranmiyan’s time? Did you think about The ownership of the land when you had power to wield a sword? No human enemy is too strong for us. But the Igbos invade our town with the spirits of their ancestors, fearfully dancing in their midst. We do not bow to human might but to the sacred owners of the soil.31

Choosing not to pursue dialogue and compromise with the Igbos places the responsibility on MÖremí to find alternative means of resolving the problem. Her recourse to Esinmerin, the river goddess, for help in stemming the tide of Igbo invasions, once again echoes the play’s theme of oppression. Here, Ladipo introduces human sacrifice as a way of keeping the aggrieved party, the Igbos, out of the land of their ancestors: ESINMERIN:

MOREMI:

31

Oduduwa seized the land on which your city stands from the owners of the soil; with the power of his sword he drove the Igbos into the forest; with the power of his sword he installed his four hundred and one gods to rule in Ife. He disregarded us the spirits of the place. Without atonement your city shall not thrive. Esinmerin, mother of the world. If you can help me, you shall be honoured in Ife as long as an Oni wields the sceptre of Oduduwa. Esinmerin, mother of the world – name your price!

Duro Ladipo, “Moremi,” in Three Nigerian Plays, ed. Ulli Beier (London: Longmans, 1967): 9–10.

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Only blood can atone for the offence of Oduduwa. Give me your child, Oluorogbo, and Ife will be saved.32

As I noted earlier, one thing the four plays have in common and which has come to be a feature of the European-derived literary tradition as opposed to the classical oral traditions of Africa is the revolutionary blend of European and indigenous African theatrical models. The result is an African theatre in which a blend of indigenous elements is fused with conventions derived from European drama.

Indexing the African Identity: Fundamental Levels Manifestations of African identity are numerous in the four plays; in order to interrogate this, I will proceed with an examination of the use of dance in the plays. This will be done by adapting Felix Akinsipe’s recognition of fundamental levels in which dance can be explored in dramatic productions. Akinsipe proposes three fundamental levels in which dance can be used in a play, but in my view there are basically two levels of incorporation necessary. Akinsipe argues that these levels involve featuring dance along with music and drama in keeping with the total-theatre concept. In the first instance, Akinsipe emphasizes that dance and drama are placed on equal pedestals with music to produce a total performance that relies on a combination of these genres to communicate effectively: Dance can still be used as a total theatre without being on an equal plane with drama or other arts of the theatre but it is built into the plot structure in such a way that […] it becomes inseparable from the work […]. The third level is the use of dance as supportive/embellishment to dramatic work in such a way that its removal, for whatever reason, may not have any particular effect on the understanding or appraisal of the dramatic work.33

Pragmatically, the first two levels are basically the same, leaving us with two fundamental levels. Akinsipe argues that, in the first instance, all the performative genres are carved up proportionally within a work to create a total 32

Ladipo, “Moremi,” 11–12. Felix A. Akinsipe, “The Communicative Indices of Dance in Drama Production: A Choreographic Approach to Olu Obafemi’s Plays,” in Larger Than His Frame: Critical Studies and Reflections on Olu Obafemi, ed. Duro Oni & Sunday E. Ododo (Lagos: C B A A C , 2000): 197. 33

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performance that relies on their combination to communicate. In essence, this is, as I suggested above. no different from his second example, which depends on the three performance arts to convey meaning despite an unequal composition. Looking closely at the two instances, one can see that, in both, meaning is dependent on the interlacing presence of the three performative genres. Hence, it is not the ratio of incorporation of the various genres that situates the resulting work as a total performance; rather, it is the functionality of these genres within the performance that establishes the product as total theatre. Two levels on which dance can be integrated with drama are clearly identified with regard to its levels of functionality within a given work. On the first level, integration is such that dance serves to advance the action, whereas on the second level it is grafted into a performance mainly for aesthetic purposes, and as such does not have a direct impact on the plot in terms of its progression. The first level is true of indigenous African performance, which is usually a functional synthesis of artforms ranging from the performative to the illustrative. In essence, indigenous African theatre and performance incorporate both embodied or performing arts such as dance, drama, and music, and representational or graphic arts such as sculpture, paintings, and costume. With regards to drama, it is essential to note that, apart from considering the thematic preoccupations of a play, the determination of its Africanness rests on a combination of culturally significant imagery, symbols, and conventions. As I noted earlier, the second-generation African playwrights, which include Femi Osofisan, are essentially Marxist in leaning. Borrowing Awam Amkpa’s label for this group, Osofisan and his “fellow Marxists”34 are persistent in advocating a popular-theatre aesthetic that not only highlights the frustration of the ordinary people at the corrupt excesses of the bourgeois, but tackles the problem head-on in an attempt to undermine the status quo. The second generation of African playwrights have contributed immensely to the africanization of drama, most especially through their adoption of what Akinwale describes as the “holistic total theatre technique,” as seen in “their concerted efforts to use songs, dances and folklore mixed with dialogue.”35 Ac34

Awam Amkpa, Theatre and Postcolonial Desires (London: Routledge, 2004):

49. 35

Ayo O. Akinwale, “A Critical Appraisal of the Contributions of Olu Obafemi to Theatre Development in the University of Ilorin,” in Larger Than His Frame: Critical Studies and Reflections on Olu Obafemi, ed. Druo Oni & Sunday E. Ododo (Lagos: C B A A C , 2000): 232.

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cording to Paul Brians, this practice is ostensibly derived from indigenous African performance, where “current events are often depicted and commented upon in dances involving costumes and pantomime.”36 Although this approach is also employed by some of the first-generation playwrights, the second-generation African playwrights brought an unspoken consensus to it. For instance, in The Lion and the Jewel, Wole Soyinka draws on this often spontaneous play-acting tradition to comment on recent events in Ilujinle, as seen in the dance of the lost traveller, which dance is so elaborate in performance that it can exist on its own outside the original play. It smoothly tells the story of the stranger’s unplanned visit to Ilujinle and his chance meeting with Sidi, recounting the events that led up to the publication of Sidi’s images in the photo magazine that were to bring her both fame and trouble. A terrific shout and a clap of drums. Lakunle enters into the spirit of the dance with enthusiasm. He takes over from Sidi, stations his cast all over the stage as the jungle, leaves the right topstage clear for the four girls who are to dance the motor-car. A mime follows of the visitor’s entry into Ilujinle, and his short stay among the villagers. The four girls crouch on the floor, as four wheels of a car. Lakunle directs their spacing, then takes his place in the middle, and sits on air. He alone does not dance. He does realistic miming. Soft throbbing drums, gradually swelling in volume, and the four ‘wheels’ begin to rotate the upper halves of their bodies in perpendicular circles . . . .37

Brians notes: it is this sort of ‘street theatre’ which Soyinka sees as providing fertile ground for the development of drama in Africa [. . . ] imagine this ‘dance’ taking quite a long time and having much more dramatic impact than anything that has gone before.38

Soyinka draws on this story-within-a-story format to fill his audience/reader in on events that are not otherwise depicted in the play. It is instructive to note that the episodic nature of this play lends it to storytelling traditions in indigenous African societies. Later, I will offer an analysis of the enactment of this dance of the lost traveller in Chuck Mike’s 2005 production of the play.

36

Paul Brians, A Wole Soyinka Study Guide, http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/anglo phone/soyinka.html (accessed 25 January 2014). 37 Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 14–15. 38 Brians, A Wole Soyinka Study Guide, np.

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In Once Upon Four Robbers, Femi Osofisan uses this spontaneous storytelling technique to express criticism of the colonialists as his contribution to the name-calling by radical afrocentrics, although Osofisan is not known to be one: CORPORAL:

CORPORAL: SOLDIER: CORPORAL: SOLDIER: CORPORAL:

Ah, you should have seen me, Serg! Once, when I thought I heard a song – (He leaps forward suddenly, grabs one of his mates by the neck, forcing him down with a “gun” to his ribs. They begin to play-act:) Caught you, you scoundrel(Stammering with fear) So-so-so . . . ja! Soja! “Do-re-mi,” is it? I will “do-re-mi” you with bullets today! Robber! Bu-u-u-ut, soja . . . ! Quiet! You can’t even sing a healthy, masculine song! ‘Do-re-mi-fa-soh’! Disgusting! Are you one of these wall geckos from England?39

Persistent attempts to africanize drama and make it as socially functional as possible means that African playwrights and drama directors go out of their way to introduce music and dance into their works. In such cases, popular folk music and dances are used effectively to enhance the message of a play, but do not necessarily influence its plot. The result is a prevalence of plays that fall within the category of those occupying the second level of dance integration, in which dances are embedded for aesthetic rather than functional purposes. Of the four plays under consideration, only The Lion and the Jewel comes into the first category where music and dance are congruent with the performance in its entirety. The other three are examples of plays in the second category, where music and dance are deliberately grafted in to make them agreeable to indigenous African theatrical sensibilities. Cases in point are the two London productions of Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, by the Talawa Theatre Company in 1989 and, fifteen years later, by Tiata Fahodzi in 2005. For the 1989 production by Talawa, Yvonne Brewster apparently paid a visit to Ola Rotimi in Nigeria, from where she was referred back to the London-based choreographer Peter Badejo, who she then appointed consultant for the production.40 Rotimi obviously directed her to 39

Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 39. Peter Badejo played the Royal Bard in the premier production of the play at the Ife Festival of the Arts, Nigeria. That performance was produced by the Ori Olokun Acting Company in 1968. He also stepped in at the last moment to double as the blind 40

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Badejo because of the fact that he performed in the premier production and happened to be based in London with Brewster. Her visit to Nigeria, which culminated in the appointment of Badejo as consultant, was doubtless connected with her desire to authenticate the performance with as much of the original Yorùbá music and dance as she could. Despite Brewster’s acclaimed use of traditional Yorùbá songs and dances, it was still noted that the production “is a fraction Westernised – song and dance playing their part, but the cast whittled down to 12 (from as many as 60) and the African drumming absent.”41 The criticism suggests that, since Brewster’s production made use of a substantially reduced cast and did not make use of drumming, it cannot be described as completely African. This is misleading in itself, because the number of performers has nothing to do with a production’s being African. The issue of the absence of drumming is not entirely accurate, as one cannot assume that all African choral music must be backed up with drumming. Moreover, the play was staged on a raised circular platform that reminds one of the tray used for Ifà divination, but which in performance also becomes a makeshift drum that the townsfolk in the play use to punctuate their songs, owing to its close resemblance to a drum with its stretched leather surface. For its 2005 showing at the Arcola Theatre in London, the director of The Gods Are Not to Blame, Femi Elufowoju Jr, also concedes that he had to travel to Nigeria to meet surviving members of the play’s 1975 cast so that he could, as he puts it to Charlotte Cripps, get help with “certain rhythms of movement that go with the songs – that are not in the text.”42 This quest, according to him, was necessitated by the fact that Africans in the U K were “coming to check for authenticity” and his adherence to the “African theatre tradition.”43 From the foregoing it is possible to anticipate Elufowoju’s production of this African classic and to conclude that, apart from an obvious use of authentic African costumes for the performance, music and dance as embellishments undertake the more definitive task of creating essential Africanness. Elufowoju’s comment also gives the impression that his production of seer Baba Fakunle and Odewale’s childhood friend Alaka in the 1989 production by Talawa. 41 Yvonne Brewster, What’s On (8 November 1989). 42 Charlotte Cripps, “Authentic Rhythms of Africa,” Independent Onine Editions (26 May 2005) (accessed 3 June 2005). 43 Cripps, “Authentic Rhythms of Africa.”

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The Gods Are Not to Blame was specifically conceived for an African audience. The cultural universe of a black person who grew up in Europe is essentially different from that of a black person who grew up in Africa. Unlike Yvonne Brewster, Elufowoju had spent a goodly number of his early years in Africa and this has left him with a deep-seated knowledge of the culture. He actually attributes his interest in theatre to his experience of performance in Africa, particularly the 1975 production of The Gods Are Not to Blame, which he saw when he was eleven years old at the then University of IfÁ (now Obafemi Awolowo University). Elufowoju was able to draw on this experience of Africa in the production. The Lion and the Jewel presents us with explicit illustrations that grant us insight into the workings of indigenous African theatre, thanks to Soyinka’s success in syncretizing music and dance within the play. The play is typical of a well-articulated approach to African drama because of the deliberate and functional interaction of songs and dances it presents. The dance of the lost traveller derives from a Yorùbá tradition in which contemporary events are customarily represented in songs and dances, often involving role play. This dance is effectively built into the plot structure in such a way that it not only helps to intensify the action of the play but, more importantly, advances the action, telling a part of the story that would not otherwise be captured in the drama. The dance not only chronicles recent events in the village of Ilujinle, but is actually a parody of the same situations. The dance of the lost traveller was one of the highlights of the 2005 London production at the Barbican. The director and choreographer, Chuck Mike and Femi Koko respectively, made ample use of the opportunity provided by the dance to showcase their creative ingenuity. One of the most challenging aspects is the dancing of the “motor-car.” There is always a strong temptation to mime the movement of the four wheels, but in Chuck Mike’s production, the four girls who danced the wheels performed a very interesting dance involving the upper halves of the bodies in movements reminiscent of the sort of dances found among some communities in Nigeria, such as the swange of the Tiv and the egwu amala of the Delta people in northern and southern Nigeria, respectively. Soyinka also draws on the play-within-a-play format to signify a very vital moment in the play, where the dance of the mummers ironically symbolizes the victory of women over the Bale, just as he prevails over Sidi in his palace. The practice of paying masked characters to satirize eminent personages is an established tradition in Yorùbá society; in most cases the mask is used in

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order to give the mummers anonymity and protect them from reprisals, by virtue of the sacredness attached to masks in ancestral worship: [wheedling.]: Come on, school teacher. They’ll expect it of you…The man of learning . . . the young sprig of foreign wisdom . . . You must not demean yourself in their eyes . . . you must give them money to perform for your lordship. . . . [Re-enter the mummers, dancing straight through (more centrally this time) as before. Male dancer enters first, pursued by a number of young women and other choral idlers. The man dances in tortured movements . . . Now begins the dance of virility which is of course none other than the Baroka story. Very athletic movements. Even in his prime, ‘Baroka’ is made a comic figure, held in a kind of tolerant respect by his women. At his decline and final downfall, they are most unsparing in their taunts and tantalizing motions . . . ].44 SADIKU:

The enactment of a play-within-a-play is often dependent on the use of pantomime, particularly when such dances are motivated by vocal rather than instrumental music. Although Soyinka employs this dance of the mummers to parody Baroka, he places emphasis on the dancing itself by drawing on African communal dance paradigms with his reference to the dance as a “dance of virility.”45 Thus, Chuck Mike engaged Koffi Koko’s choreographic talent by making use of what can be described as a courtship dance, such as the walanga of the Lugbara people of northwestern Uganda. Similar courtship dances can also be found in various African societies, making it possible for any choreographer /director to draw on them in realizing a play. The male dancer performs a dance that is suggestive of Baroka’s sexual escapades, surrounded by female dancers who take turns to dance seductively with him until he eventually becomes exhausted. The male dancer stands at the centre of the circle with his feet planted firmly on the ground. His legs are slightly spread apart and bent at the knees to give him some balance as he wriggles his waist excitedly from side to side. His arms thrash about in apparent ecstasy as the girls take turns standing in front and behind him. Their movements are similar to his, except that the movement of their buttocks is more prominent. In fact, they jerk their waists back and forth, causing their buttocks to vibrate vigorously. This suggestive dance continues until the male dancer starts to get 44 45

Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 51. The Lion and the Jewel, 51.

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fatigued and collapses in apparent submission to the sexual prowess of the ladies. An example of a dance motivated by vocal music can be found in the prelude to the dance of the lost traveller in The Lion and the Jewel: [bending down over Lakunle who has been seated forcibly on the platform.]: You are dressed like him You look like him You speak his tongue You think like him You’re just as clumsy In your Lagos ways – You’ll do for him! [This chant is taken up by all and they begin to dance round Lakunle, speaking the words in a fast rhythm. The drummers join in after the first time, keeping up a steady beat as the others whirl round their victim. They go faster and faster and chant faster and faster with each round. By the sixth or seventh, Lakunle has obviously had enough.]46 SIDI:

Chuck Mike’s production of The Lion and the Jewel once again brings to light the difficulty associated with dances motivated by vocal rather than instrumental music. For the prelude to the dance of the lost traveller cited above, the difficulty for the choreographer, Koffi Koko, was to evolve dance movements that would not distract from the chants as the dancers swirl round Lakunle. The result was a dance that is best described as a pantomime, an attempt to capture in gestures the connotations of the chant. That the play, however, is not just pantomime is noted in a review by Lyn Gardner: “The Lion and the Jewel is not just a panto [. . . ] offering up instead a raucous African song and dance spectacular.”47 As such, Mike’s production also goes beyond pantomime, making use of elaborate dances adapted from the indigenous African repertoire, and brilliantly re-created by Koffi Koko’s contemporary choreography. Whereas vocally motivated dances tend to be expressed through pantomimic action, dances inspired by instrumental music permit the director/choreographer to think outside of the box, in terms of opening up a much wider range of possibilities for movement-creation. It is only by seeing the play in performance that one begins to appreciate these 46

Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 14. Lyn Gardner, review of The Lion and the Jewel, dir. Chuck Mike, The Guardian (30 September 2005), np. 47

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remarkable high points, which have a tendency to be lost in the reading of the text. As I suggested earlier, the artistry with which the dances are woven into the fabric of the plot in The Lion and the Jewel is reminiscent of indigenous African performance and, as such, endorses the play’s Africanness. The other three plays, Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, and Duro Ladipo’s Moremi, also present manifestations of Africanness through their use of dance. Unlike Wole Soyinka in The Lion and the Jewel, these playwrights offer a drama that does not necessarily rely on dance for plot advancement, but in which music and dance feature prominently as an embellishment to the dramatic piece. Most playwrights within the category of those represented by the three under consideration approach the use of music and dance in two ways. The first approach is to use music and dance to denote intervals in drama; in the second, music and dance are brought in as a means of intensifying dramatic action or establishing mood. In his prologue to Once Upon Four Robbers, Osofisan makes use of music and dance to suggest an intermission, and to put the audience in the right frame of mind for the story. The latter intention is no doubt derived from the indigenous storytelling technique that utilizes uncomplicated call and response to draw the attention of an audience to the beginning of a story: (Lights begin to fall off in the auditorium, gradually leaving behind a pool of light which should be suggestive of moonlight. Commanding this spotlight is the S T O R Y - T E L L E R , with a set of castanets or a sekere. He shouts out the traditional introductory formula: A L O O ! As usual everybody replies: A A A L O ! He repeats this, gets the same response, and playing his instrument, starts his song. The audience picks up the simple retrain – A L U G B I N R I N G B I N R I N ! after each line. As the song gathers momentum, the musicians and the actors, hitherto lost within the audience, begin to assemble on the stage).48

Although Osofisan makes no direct suggestion for a dance in his stage direction, it is common practice for directors to incorporate dancing in this opening sequence. This is perhaps not unconnected with the prevalent notion that in Africa music inspires dancing whenever it is played and that the two are inseparable. The centrality of this technique in Once Upon Four Robbers can be seen in Aafa’s comment about the magical formula handed down to the four robbers: 48

Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 1.

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Yes, sing and dance. It’s an irresistible power. Once you begin to sing, anyone within hearing distance stops whatever he is doing and joins. He will sing and dance and then head for his home to sleep. And he won’t wake till the next morning.49

Finally, in Moremi, Duro Ladipo engages with music and dance mainly as intermediary between intervals in the play as well as a means of intensifying dramatic action or establishing mood. For instance, Ladipo starts and ends most of the scenes in Moremi with terse allusions to dance performances; Scene One ends with “Triumphant war dance of the Igbos before they exit with their captives.”50 Scene Four starts with “Moremi enters with market women. They sing and dance.”51 Ladipo ends Scene Five in a similar manner: “there is a dance of victory and rejoicing.” The ultimate scene is also not left out, as the play ends with the “Ifes and Igbos rejoic[ing] in a final dance in which their two sets of drums play side by side.”52 However, in performance, these seemingly abrupt dances can be stretched to accommodate the time it requires for the next scene to commence, which in a performance involving realistic settings takes a much longer time than with symbolic setting. Realistic stage settings are used to reinforce the impression of realism in play productions, while symbolic stage settings emphasize the disruption of that realism. Ladipo’s guidelines for dance put the director in the advantageous position of being able to appropriate indigenous dance forms in the production without the limitations of vocal interpretation. Ladipo closes most of the scenes in Moremi by introducing dances, especially where an unfolding scene requires a different setting from the preceding one. This technique creates the impression that he conceived the play to be performed with a realistic set, as has been the case with most productions of the play. Consequently, the dance would need to be done in such a way that it takes up just enough time for the set to be adjusted for a subsequent scene. Conversely, in Mike’s production of The Lion and the Jewel, despite the realistic use of costumes, the various uses to which the benches are subjected, including being used as classroom seats for Lakunle’s pupils in the opening and being joined together to create 49

Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 31. Ladipo, Moremi, 6. 51 Moremi, 14. 52 Moremi, 32. 50

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Baroka’s bed, help boost the play’s disruption of realism. The implication of this disruption is that performers are able to move fluidly between scenes without dance intermissions, thus reducing the need for scene changes. Despite the prevalent use of dance as a supportive rather than progressive device in most postcolonial drama, its potential for indexing Africanness has not diminished. This is because of the position that dance occupies in Africa as an embodiment of culture and societal values. Ben Halm recognizes the primacy of dance in African performance tradition: the choice of dance as the quintessential and/or exemplary form of African theatre was based in a cross-factional belief in the ‘fundamentality’ of the dance idiom in Africa.53

By extension, it is this fundamental nature of African dance that positions it as a viable agent for engendering Africanness.

Oral Aesthetics in African Drama Ideas relating to the adoption of indigenous African languages in literature date as far back as the mid-1960s and the 1970s, marking the peak of the nationalist struggles that swept across the African continent. In fact, although he acknowledged that he was “still engaged in examining the candidature of other languages,”54 Soyinka had advocated the adoption of KiSwahili, which to him is the “sanest choice”55 for a continental African language.56 Today, one of its leading advocates is Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o, the eminent Kenyan scholar and author of the novel Weep Not, Child,57 who insists that African literature should be written in indigenous African languages. This view, in my view, is an overt romanticization of the African past, which does not take into 53

Ben B. Halm, Theatre and Ideology (London: A U P , 1995), 181. Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 92. 55 Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 92. 56 Wole Soyinka had first made the case at the inaugural meeting of the Union of the Writers of African Peoples held in Accra, Ghana in 1975, for the adoption of Kiswahili as the mutual language of the African continent. He also repeated the call at a press conference held after the festival of arts and culture, FESTAC ’77. 57 Weep Not, Childi, Ng×g´’s first novel, was published in London by Heinemann in 1964. Ng×g´ later started writing in his native Gikuyu language and has a novel in Gikuyu titled Murogi wa Kagoogo (Wizard of the Crow). With assistance from New York University, Ng×g´ has also founded a journal in the Gikuyu language in the hope that it will inspire more journals in African languages. 54

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account the fact of colonization, choosing instead to pretend that it never took place in the first case. Ng×g´’s stance on the language of African literature is obviously premised on postcolonial hypotheses such as that expounded by Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins: when a playwright chooses an indigenous language over English, s/he refuses to submit to the dominance of the imposed standard language and to subscribe to the ‘reality’ it sustains.58

The problem with this notion, especially in a multilingual country like Nigeria with over two hundred and fifty languages, is that the work of such playwrights would be rendered marginal and shrouded in relative obscurity. The “reality” sustained by the “imposed standard language,” as Gilbert and Tompkins put it, is more or less a representation of the colonially conceived nationstate. By choosing not to submit to its reality, the playwright undermines the viability of the nation-state one way or another. Even where this sort of romanticism fulfils a need for the recognition and sustenance of indigenous African languages, some of which might be facing the risk of extinction, it is still an extreme reaction to the question of Africanness. The implication of Ng×g´’s approach for Africans and non-Africans alike – who may not be able to speak or read the playwright’s indigenous language – would be to preclude them from being able to produce or take part in African theatre of the sort that recognizes only indigenous languages. The imperious nature of colonial rule in Africa as well as in other parts of the world has meant that, after independence, former colonies are immediately confronted with a near-sudden realization that “the linguistic authority arrogated by English for centuries no longer prevails automatically.”59 Such realizations are central to debates on the adoption of precolonial indigenous languages in literature and theatre. Gilbert and Tompkins argue that the deliberate adoption of a precolonial language functions in postcolonial theatre as part of a cultural heritage and, simultaneously, as a living language, a medium through which contemporary indigenous characters express solidarity, reclaim the past, and establish a linguistic location that is closed to non-speakers.60

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Helen Gilbert & Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996): 169. 59 Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 172. 60 Post-Colonial Drama, 171.

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A major failing of this approach, as I noted previously, is that it precludes nonspeakers, some of who may also be ‘natives’, from participating in the experience. After all, it is a relatively well-known fact that the building of the Empire among colonized peoples often required the creation of new cultural elites among the natives. This invariably opened the way to the gradual decline in the use of indigenous languages among this category of natives, who saw the learning and propagating of colonial languages as a means of maintaining their privileged status with the colonial authorities. Gilbert and Tompkins contend that in the production of some indigenous language plays, aspects are often refined to make them comprehensible to nonspeakers and/or predominantly non-native audiences without necessarily providing the full range of meaning.61 The implication of this is that performers embody the language they speak, in the sense that, when used, indigenous languages are reconceptualized using gesture and other bodily expressions. This places the language used within the scope of understanding of foreign audiences who decode the meaning of the words used by reading the performer’s body. Another device that is often used by Nigerian playwrights, and which underscores Gilbert and Tompkins’s view, involves reiterating key phrases in indigenous and English languages. In “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain,” Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o argues that inherent in the structure of all known languages is the cultural beliefs of the peoples and that by adopting a colonial language in African literature, the African person is consequently deprived of the means of perceiving, articulating, and thus developing a vision and strategy for selfemancipation.62 This runs contrary to the view expressed by Frantz Fanon: “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”63 By implication, Fanon suggest that “mastery of language affords remarkable power,”64 which can be used to the advantage of the colonized. Issues of language in contemporary African theatre are manifest in the debate on African – mainly black African aesthetics – but constantly find 61

Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 172. Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o, “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship,” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (Spring 2000): 1–11. 63 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann, foreword by Homi Bhabha (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1986): 18. 64 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 18. 62

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expression in the choice of language employed by various playwrights to convey the African experience. Most contemporary African playwrights index African identity in their work by creating characters that speak ‘native’ varieties of the colonial language, popularly referred to as Pidgin. The creation of native varieties of colonial languages in Africa is no doubt connected to the need to ‘domesticate’ and find meaning by subverting the cultural ‘otherness’ of these foreign languages. In the more apparent cases, subversion is so complete that it poses a challenge to the credibility of the standard colonial languages, owing to the emergence of popular indigenous postcolonial languages or creoles such as Nigerian ‘Pidgin English’. In an approach typical of most contemporary African playwrights, this overt subversion is traded for a more subtle form, where indigenous African rhetorical expressions are directly obligated to the ‘orthodox’ colonial language. The result is a language that is described by Ng×g´ as being “Europhonic,” a composite term ostensibly derived from such words as ‘anglophone’ (Englishspeaking) and ‘francophone’ (French-speaking). Ng×g´, despite his argument for the adoption of African languages in African literature, inadvertently opens a commendable perspective for steering clear of sheer romanticism and thus opening African literature up to critical and realistic appraisal by his submission that African literature in colonial languages is Europhonic. According to him, “Europhonic” literature derives its identity “in the market place of all writings in European tongues by all the reservoir of images in African life and languages.”65 It is therefore the acknowledgment that Europhonism derives from Africa that underscores its authenticity and ability to represent Africa. Europhonism subverts the notion of contemporary African theatre as an essentially black theatre, endorsing instead a drama that is, according to the trio of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa, and Ihechukwu, conveyed “with traditional terms of rhetoric”66 and which expresses, in the English language, African speech patterns, proverbs, and idiomatic expressions. Europhonism therefore becomes a major factor in the evaluation of identity in contemporary African theatre practice, leading to what Chinweizu et al. describe as “a modernism

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Ng×g´, “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain,” 7. O.J. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie & Ihechukwu Madubuike, “Decolonizing African Literature,” in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, ed Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 287. 66

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that has emerged from a clearly African poetic tradition.”67 In the framework of “Europhonism,” plays such as Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, Femi Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, and Duro Ladipo’s Moremi undoubtedly indicate Africanness on various levels.68 Most African playwrights create characters who speak orthodox English but with the capacity to revert to colloquialisms or Pidgin English at a moment’s notice. Carl Miller notes this in his review of Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame when he observes that “the play has a sweep which moves from domestic to epic, managing linguistic shifts from colloquial to poetic to sacred, even in single speeches.”69 Take, for instance, two of the soldiers in Part Three of Once Upon Four Robbers, who have been ordered at a moment’s notice to construct a platform for the execution of the captured robbers. They drift effortlessly in and out of colloquialism/Pidgin and orthodox English as they vent their frustration on the Sergeant through spontaneous role-playing. SOLDIER 1:

SOLDIER SOLDIER SOLDIER SOLDIER SOLDIER SOLDIER SOLDIER

2: 1: 2: 1: 2: 1: 2:

SOLDIER 1: SOLDIER 2: 67

Well, I am tired of these last-minute orders. I can just picture the Sergeant calling his wife one day: ‘Darring! . . . Answer! now.’ ‘Yessaaah!’ ‘Darrring mi!’ ‘Yes, di’yah! I’m here’ ‘How many pickin we get?’ ‘Pardon?’ ‘Pickin, we pickin. How many we get now?’ ‘Hm, which kin’ question be that? Why you dey axe me? You know say na two I born’. ‘Na this tax form here. E say that if we get three children, we go qualify for rebate’. ‘I no tell you before? You see yourself now!’

Chinweizu, Jemie & Madubuike, “Decolonizing African Literature,” 287. Even though very few plays are performed entirely in Pidgin English, exceptions can be found in theatre-for-development projects across Africa where the emphasis is on empowering local communities on socio-political issues rather than on drama as art. Examples of plays written entirely in Pidgin English are Oga na Tief-man (1986) and Water No Get Enemy (1989) by Tunde Fatunde, and Segun Oyekunle’s Katakata for Sofahead (1983). 69 Miller, review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, np. 68

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‘Shurrup! By this time tomorrow, you hear?’ ‘Hen-hen?’ ‘By this time tomorrow, I order you to born another pickin!’ (They laugh.) Believe me, it’s no laughing matter! This platform we are just building for the execution this morning, suffering in the cold, tell me, how many days now since the sentence was passed on the armed robber?70

This style of speaking in which characters oscillate between pidgin and standard English is also evident in the exchange between Baroka and the teacher Lakunle in The Lion and the Jewel: BAROKA: Akowe. Teacher wa. Misita Lakunle. [As the others take up the cry ‘Misita Lakunle’ he is forced to stop. He returns and bows deeply from the waist.] LAKUNLE: A good morning to you sir. BAROKA: Guru morin guru morin, ngh-hn! That is all we get from ‘alakowe’. You call at his house hoping he sends for beer, but all you get is guru morin. Will guru morin wet my throat? Well, well our man of knowledge, I hope you have no query for an old man today. LAKUNLE: No complaints.71

Apart from characters who speak Pidgin English, this example brings us to another scenario, in which characters intersperse their English with slivers of indigenous African languages, such as Baroka’s use of the words akowe and wa to refer to Lakunle. Translated directly, akowe is a Yorùbá word meaning ‘teacher’, while wa, when placed in the context above, where it is preceded by the word “teacher,” simply translates as ‘our teacher’. Evidence of the currency of this approach can be seen in the continued exploitation of this technique in African theatre. As Gilbert and Tompkins observe, while some post-colonial dramatists eschew the imperial language altogether, many more use it as a basic linguistic code which is necessarily modified, subverted, or decentred when indigenous languages are incorporated into the text.72

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Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 58–59. Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 16. 72 Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 170. 71

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In most cases, such interjections are immediately echoed in English as is also the case with Alhaja’s lines in Once Upon Four Robbers: (Above their laughter comes the call of a woman hawking corn. She enters, a covered basin on her head. It is Alhaja disguised.) A L H A J A : (calling) – Lagbe jino o! Hot steaming corn! Eager bride for hungry stomachs! Eat my corn and kick like a thoroughbred! Langbe re o!73

In his introduction to Three Nigerian Plays, Ulli Beier observes that Duro Ladipo often writes in English laced with Yorùbá words.74 In performance, however, emphasis is not always placed on the audience’s ability to understand these words, especially non-native speakers, but, rather, on their aptitude for infusing an African sensibility in that performance. Proverbs and idiomatic expressions also play a vital role in the Africanness of drama because of the importance attached to them in traditional African societies. In his seminal novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which explores the cultural milieu of the Igbo-speaking people of eastern Nigeria, Chinua Achebe enthuses that proverbs in African culture “are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” thus underlining its importance.75 The contexts in which proverbs and idiomatic expressions are used clearly indicate a deliberate engagement with indigenous oral traditions. African playwrights make use of the written text to present oral culture, indicating that their plays are meant not only to be read but also to be performed. In performance contexts, proverbs and idiomatic expressions come alive, giving a full account of the tradition they represent. The four plays reflect this importance with their deliberate use of proverbs and idiomatic expressions to underscore vital messages. Examples abound in The Gods Are Not to Blame of Ola Rotimi’s use of proverbs to highlight crucial moments. For instance, Odewale employs a proverb to signify his intention to investigate King Adetusa’s death, starting with obvious clues: ODEWALE:

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Now my people – when trees fall on trees, first the topmost must be removed. First, tell me – when was King Adetusa slain?76

Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 64. Ulli Beier, Three Nigerian Plays (London: Longmans, 1967): xviii. 75 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1958): 13. 76 Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame, 22. 74

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Rotimi again makes use of this technique at the point when Odewale feels that his citizenship is in question. Odewale, who was beginning to feel insecure at what he presumes to be Aderopo’s tribal antics to depose him as king, fumes: “the mangrove tree dwells in the river, but does that make it a crocodile?”77 Interestingly, Rotimi ends the play with Odewale conceding to bear his own misfortune in language that has come to characterize the play, “when the wood-insect gathers sticks, on its own head it carries them.”78 Osofisan’s Once Upon Four Robbers also draws on this characteristic exploitation of wise sayings to reinforce its African identity. Osofisan, in introducing Aafa, makes use of these sayings in a chant-like form that is reminiscent of the Yorùbá ewi tradition: (looking at them) – The bat has no eyes, but it roams with ease in the dark. They think the chameleon is a dandy, but if he were to talk what strategies of dissimulation he’d teach our cleverest spies (seems to calm down) Bisimilahi ar-rahmani rahim! Sit down, it is time for prayers. (A N G O L A and H A S A N cease their fighting and take praying postures. They begin to knock their foreheads on the mat in a slowly growing rhythm. A A F A who has shut his eyes suddenly cries out).79 AAFA:

Even Soyinka’s Lakunle, the school-teacher in The Lion and the Jewel who is identified in the play by his narcissistic and assumed European way of life, introduces himself flirtatiously with the sort of wittiness that is typical of courtship in most African societies: SIDI: LAKUNLE:

(delighted):There. Wet for your pains. Have you no shame? That is what the stewpot said to the fire. Have you no shame – at your age licking my bottom? But she was tickled just the same.80

What these instances suggest is that proverbs and idiomatic expressions are central to the aspiration of African playwrights to produce a drama that conveys African rhetorical structures in English.

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Rotimi, The Gods Are Not to Blame, 51. The Gods Are Not to Blame, 72. 79 Osofisan, Once Upon Four Robbers, 17. 80 Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel, 3. 78

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African Identity on a Global Stage Going forward, this article seeks to explore recent London performances of The Gods Are Not to Blame and The Lion and the Jewel, particularly how issues of identity are addressed in these diaspora productions of African plays. One vital question that any reasonable producer must answer before embarking on the production of an African play on a global stage such as in London would be what audience the production is going to be conceived for. Should it be created as African theatre for a predominantly Western audience, for African/African-Caribbean audiences, or for both? This type of assessment is usually helpful in making decisions about the production in terms of the use of language and function allocated to dance within the performance. For instance, if a performance is directed at an audience that includes non-Africans, the tendency will be to use dance as embellishment rather than to advance major aspects of the plot. In this way, the audience will not lose track of the story, especially where specific indigenous dances are used in a similar context to what obtains in indigenous African society. However, by creating or adapting dance movement from indigenous forms and re-interpreting these to suit events in the play, the director or choreographer is able to bypass the difficulty of transmitting appropriate messages to the audience. This typifies the approach used by Mike in his presentation of the dance of the lost traveller in The Lion and the Jewel. Mike uses this dance as a vehicle for plot progression by creating movements derived from mime actions. These elaborate mimetic actions were then fused with African dance features such as the bentknee position, the isolated use of the shoulders and pelvis, and the flat-footed shuffling of the feet to achieve a spectacular creative dance. One of the things that the two plays have in common is that they were performed before an eclectic audience made up of Londoners of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. What’s On, in a 1989 review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, notes, for instance, that “some of the allusions used to help West African audiences can leave Europeans bemused, though not altogether lost.”81 As I noted earlier, allusions such as we find in Duro Ladipo’s use of English fused with Yorùbá words do not place emphasis on the ability of the nonnative speakers of Yorùbá to understand; instead, emphasis is placed on its capacity to act as an endorsement of Africanness. Nonetheless, as reviews of the two London performances under consideration reveal, the didactic and recreational disposition of the plays was not lost on their London audiences. 81

Yvonne Brewster, What’s On (8 November 1989).

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This ability to have an impact on a non-African audience is also noted by Carl Miller in his review of Talawa’s production of The Gods Are Not to Blame: This great story is mesmerisingly told in Rotimi’s expanded adaptation using Yoruba dance and song, and humour. Talawa, a Black British company, with the aid of their Nigerian consultant and choreographer Peter Badejo, have produced a self-confident ritual drama, rendering the myth with a bold gestural power, convincing beyond its home ground.82

Femi Elufowoju, who directed the 2005 production by Tiata Fahodzi, explains that he had an African audience in mind while conceiving the production. In his interview with Cripps, he concedes that Africans in the U K were “coming to check for authenticity” and his adherence to the “African theatre tradition.”83 Perhaps this is what informed the stage designer’s decision to cover Arcola’s low ceiling in foil, thus reflecting the stage lighting in a manner evocative of tropical African sunlight. However, the company’s general manager, Susan Marnell, opines that the production was aimed at a much wider audience through linking with the Africa 05 venture.84 Mike’s production of The Lion and the Jewel at the Barbican also played to an impressive audience mix. The set, a circular platform strewn with dry leaves, is reminiscent of a village square/performance arena in a typical African village, which the production invites the audience to experience: A sense of African theatre, African-ness and specifically – Nigerianness; a feeling that they were part of the show – fully immersed in the village [. . . ] a sense of communal celebration – a great sense of communication between the actors and the audience and coming out full of life, celebrating what they’ve seen on stage.85

82

Miller, review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, 1494. Cripps, “Authentic Rhythms of Africa,” np. 84 She made this comment during a personal interview I had with her on 18 November 2005. The meeting took place at the company office at 22–24 Highbury Grove, London. She also stated that, as part of the drive to open their productions up to new audiences, plans had been concluded which would see Tiata Fahodzi at the Soho theatre with a new play, The Estate, in June 2006. This play, written by Oladipo Agboluaje and directed by Femi Elufowoju, Jr., was performed at the Soho Theatre from 6 to 17 June 2006. 85 Mike, cited in the programme notes to The Lion and the Jewel, 7–8. 83

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If Mike’s comments give the impression that the production breached the audience /performer boundary, this was not the case in the performance. The boundary between the audience and performers was reinforced by his directing style, which did not permit the performers to relate directly to the audience. The performers were in a world of their own and gave the impression that they were conscious of a fourth wall between them and the audience. Instead of being a reference to dissolution of the audience /performer boundary, Mike’s comments point to something quite different, which is concerned with the nature of his audience. Unlike Femi Elufowoju’s production of The Gods Are Not to Blame, Mike’s production of The Lion and the Jewel was not conceived with just an African audience in mind. Instead, Mike talks about giving his audience “a sense of” what obtains in indigenous African performance.86 Inherent in Mike’s idea of demystifying African culture to give his audience a sense of what obtains in indigenous Africa performance is an allusion to the “other.” In this case, the “other” signifies his non-African audience for the play. Taking for granted that his core African audience will turn up for the performance, Mike focuses attention on ensuring that the production is readily accessible to his non-African audience. Thus, he presents a performance that he describes thus: a demystified view of Africa and African cultures; the infinite possibilities of collaboration across cultures and across art forms, and actually nothing less than the complete re-invigoration of British theatre.87

Despite Mike’s concern about producing a theatre that would appeal to London’s non-African audience, the performance of The Lion and the Jewel was not conceived specifically for Westerners; instead, it harnesses Mike’s knowledge of both African–Nigerian and Western–British cultures towards the making of a truly African epic targeted at London’s local theatre-goers.

Conclusion The playwrights whose works are discussed in this article are obviously aware of trends in contemporary African theatre practice that tend to look at performance in terms of its contribution to notions of identity. They are unilateral 86 87

Mike, cited in the programme notes to The Lion and the Jewel, 7–8. Mike, programme notes, 7–8.

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in rejecting the judgment of African drama by European standards, which often has trivial outcomes. Instead, they write with the vision of a drama that not only addresses African issues but also borrows extensively from indigenous theatrical convention to create an African drama that is both pragmatic and authentic. Although most contemporary African plays are written for and performed in predominantly European-style theatres using European and Europeanderived languages, they are undeniably afrocentric thanks to the incorporation of indigenous theatrical elements such as I have endeavoured to survey here. However, like the dynamic culture that African drama has come to represent, performing within the matrix created by the prevailing miscellany of world cultures portends the assimilation and retention of some ‘foreign’ elements. Consequently, these foreign elements are often incorporated in order to guarantee a representation of Africa that not only appeals to Africans but does not completely alienate its non-African audiences.

WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1958). Akinsipe, Felix A. “The Communicative Indices of Dance in Drama Production: A Choreographic Approach to Olu Obafemi’s Plays,” in Larger Than His Frame: Critical Studies and Reflections on Olu Obafemi, ed. Duro Oni & Sunday E. Ododo (Lagos: C B A A C , 2000): 197–205. Akinwale, Ayo O. “A Critical Appraisal of the Contributions of Olu Obafemi to Theatre Development in the University of Ilorin,” in Larger Than His Frame: Critical Studies and Reflections on Olu Obafemi, ed. Duro Oni & Sunday E. Ododo (Lagos: C B A A C , 2000): 231–37. Aliu, Seiza M. “Critical Dimensions in Nigerian Drama: Beyond Year 2000,” African Symposium: An Online Journal of African Educational Research Network 2.4 (December 2002): online (accessed 9 October 2005). Amkpa, Awam. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires (London: Routledge, 2004). Awodiya, Muyiwa. “Celebrating Osofisan at Sixty,” in Portraits of an Eagle: Essays in Honour of Femi Osofisan, ed. Sola Adeyemi (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 49–52. Bamikunle, Aderemi. “The Revolutionary Vision of Olu Obafemi’s Theatre,” in Larger Than His Frame: Critical Studies and Reflections on Olu Obafemi, ed. Duro Oni & Sunday E. Ododo (Lagos: C B A A C , 2000): 103–14. Beier, Ulli. Three Nigerian Plays (London: Longmans, 1967).

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Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1987). ——. Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics, ed. David Chioni Moore (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2001). Billington, Michael. Review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, dir. Femi Elufowoju Jr., The Guardian (11 June 2005). Brians, Paul. A Wole Soyinka Study Guide, http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone /soyinka.html (accessed 25 January 2014). Chinweizu, O.J., Onwuchekwa Jemie & Ihechukwu Madubuike. “Decolonizing African Literature,” in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 279–88. Cripps, Charlotte. “Authentic Rhythms of Africa,” Independent Online Edition (26 May 2005) (accessed 3 June 2005). Ekeh, Raphael Chima. “Nigeria: Aguleri–Umuleri Conflict – The Theatre of Fratricidal War,” in Searching for Peace in Africa: An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Management Activities, ed. Monique Mekenkamp et al. (Utrecht: European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation, 1999): 359–63. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann, foreword by Homi Bhabha (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952; tr. 1967; London: Pluto, 1986). Fatunde, Tunde. Oga na Tief-man (Benin City: Adena, 1986). ——. Water No Get Enemy (Benin City: Adena, 1989). Fiebach, Joachim. “Ebrahim Hussein’s Dramaturgy: A Swahili Multiculturalist’s Journey in Drama and Theater,” Research in African Literatures 28.4 (Winter 1997): 19–37. Gardner, Lyn. Review of The Lion and the Jewel, dir. Chuck Mike, The Guardian (30 September 2005). Gilbert, Helen, ed. (Post)Colonial Stages: Critical and Creative Views on Drama, Theatre and Performance (Hebden Bridge, Sussex: Dangaroo, 1999). ——, & Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996). Halm, Ben B. Theatre and Ideology (London: A U P , 1995). Ladipo, Duro. “Moremi,” in Three Nigerian Plays, ed. Ulli Beier (London: Longmans, 1967): 1–34. Lefkowitz, Mary. Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996). ——, & Guy MacLean Rogers, ed. Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 1996). Miller, Carl. Review of The Gods Are Not to Blame, dir. Yvonne Brewster, City Limits (9 November 1989), repr. in London Theatre Record (22 October–4 November 1989): 1494–95.

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Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o. “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship,” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (Spring 2000): 1–11. ——. Weep Not, Child (Oxford: Heinemann, 1964). ——. Wizard of the Crow (London: Harvill Secker, 2006). Nzewi, Meki. “Music, Dance, Drama and the Stage in Nigeria,” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigerian Magazine, 1981): 433–56. Omotoso, Kole. Achebe or Soyinka? A Study in Contrasts (London: Hans Zell, 1996). Onwueme, Tess A. “Visions of Myth in Nigerian Drama: Femi Osofisan versus Wole Soyinka,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 25.1 (1991): 58–69. Osofisan, Femi. “Reflections on Theatre Practice in Contemporary Nigeria,” in African Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 295–98. ——. Once Upon Four Robbers (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1991). Oyekunle, Segun. Katakata for Sofahead (London: Macmillan Education, 1983). Rotimi, Ola. The Gods Are Not Blame (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1971). Soyinka, Wole. Art, Dialogue and Outrage (London: Methuen, 1993). ——. “Drama and the African World-View,” Literature in the Modern World: Affairs 97.386 (January 1998): 81–89. ——. The Lion and the Jewel (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1963). ——. Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976). Utudjian, Éliane Saint-André. “Ghana and Nigeria,” in Post-Colonial English Drama: Commonwealth Drama since 1960, ed. Bruce King (New York: Palgrave, 2001. 186–99. Wetmore, Kevin J. The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy (Jefferson N C : McFarland, 2002). Van Weyenberg, Astrid. The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy (Cross/Cultures 165; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013). Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers (London: James Currey, 1992).

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responsible for Duro Ladipo’s exploration of the subject of Ÿba Kò So (1963), the implications of his role as Œango in the play, and the way the performance developed. In addition, it contextualizes the production history of the play both nationally and internationally, the importance of staging the play, and the philosophies associated with its dramaturgy. Duro Ladipo was one of the practitioners of the Yoruba Professional Travelling Theatre of Nigeria, founded by Hubert Ogunde, the doyen of modern Yorùbá theatre.1 Born into a Yorùbá family in O‹ogbo, southwestern Nigeria, on 18 December 1926,2 he was interested in theatre from childhood. Joseph Oni Ladipo, Ladipo’s father, was an Anglican reverend (Catechist) who had been converted to Christianity, refusing to follow in his family’s ancestral religious worship of Œango and Ÿya, the Yorùbá demiurge of thunder and lightning and the goddess of departed souls, respectively. Ladipo’s grandfather was a devoted Œango worshipper and a popular drummer and drum-maker who loved his grandson, Ladipo, and spent a great deal of time with him. Therefore, living in his father’s household with all the Christian rituals and spending time with his grandfather, who taught him the

1

HIS ESSAY HIGHLIGHTS THE FACTORS

See Biodun Jeyifo, The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1984). 2 See Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 3.

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art of drumming and singing, Ladipo had a fascinating childhood.3 He was very interested in the Yorùbá traditions and was a regular spectator at the performances of egungun4 festivals and other ceremonies surrounding the worship of traditional deities. Ladipo researched the egungun festival and Ifá rituals (Aworo Ose) at Ila-Òràngún, near O‹ogbo, as well as the Olua, Ÿbàtálá, Œango, and Otin festivals at Otan Aiyegbaju, in the company of his grandfather, who was either a drummer at or consultant to these festivals.5 This was in contradiction to the wishes of Oni Ladipo, Ladipo’s father, who wanted the young Duro to follow in his footsteps and become a preacher and a teacher, and who had inducted Ladipo as a lay preacher in his church, All Saints Anglican Church, O‹ogbo, in the early 1940s.6 Ladipo’s first opportunity to display his dramatic and musical abilities to an audience came when he was teaching at St. Philips Primary School, Otan-Aiyegbaju, between 1943 and 1947. His headmaster, Mr A.O. Odunsi, had written the play “Suuru Baba Iwa in which Duro Ladipo displayed his acting potential to an appreciative audience.”7 As a playwright, composer, and actor, Ladipo was a pioneering member of the Yorùbá operatic theatrical tradition8 who scripted their plays in the indigenous Yorùbá language. He was preoccupied with exploring the narratives of Yorùbá history and mythology in his thematic considerations.9 As part of his 3

Yemi Elebuibon, interview with author, O‹ogbo, 2007. Egungun is used only in reference to the Yorùbá mask performance tradition. The practice is deeply rooted in the cult. But its origin has different narratives. This is because of the theories – mythological, historical, and inheritance – associated with its origin. The egungun are known as Ará Orún (the inhabitants of heaven) by the Yorùbá people. The belief is that the mask performer who wears the sacred regalia of the egungun transforms into the spirit of an ancestor, an inhabitant of heaven, visiting the community of his living relatives to heal and protect them from harm. Therefore, during the annual egungun festivals in Yorubaland, rituals are performed to evoke the spirit of the deceased as an integral part of the performance preparation. Egungun is used here in singular and plural terms. 5 Peter Fatomilola, interview with with author, Ilé-IfÁ, 2007. 6 See Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 4–5. 7 Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 4. 8 In the operatic theatrical tradition, dialogues are conveyed in musical form with a combination of lyrical and instrumental language. 9 The context of his theatrical practice and the mystery of his life and death have been documented in Duro Ladipo, Three Yoruba Plays (Ibadan: Mbari, 1964); Wole 4

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trilogy on the historical narratives of the Ÿyº Yorùbá kings, Ÿba Kò So, his most popular play, was first staged in 1963 at the Mbari Mbayo Club in O‹ogbo for the anniversary celebration of the opening of the arts centre. Ÿba Moro, his first historical play, had premiered there on the opening of the centre on 21 March 1962. Ladipo had established the centre with the support of Ulli Beier, his close friend, Susanne Wenger–Alarape (the Austrian-born visual artist who later became a high priestess of the goddess Ÿsún), and Georgina Beier, Ulli Beier’s wife.10 In Beier’s documentation of Ladipo’s initial preparation for the staging of Ÿba Kò So, he revealed that he, Beier, had “introduced him to Sango priests in Oshogbo, Ede and Otan Aiyegbaju.”11 Beier’s review of the performance confirmed that the explosive nature of the play was unusual for the audience, who were amazed and overpowered by what they had witnessed; they had never seen such a performance in Yorubaland. They were completely captivated by Ladipo’s breathtaking characterization of Œango and Ademola Onibonokuta’s incantations in his role as Gbonka.12 Ladipo’s national and international recognition originated in 1963, the year that Nigeria was declared a republic. This was also the year in which the German Cultural Centre in Lagos hosted the staging of Ÿba Kò So. The idea of staging the play there came from Beier. It was such a great success that it prompted Count Posadowski Wehner, the West German ambassador, to suggest the staging of the play for the 1964 Berliner Festwochen.13 Thus, this became part of the subsequent production of Ÿba Kò So, which grew in complexity over time. While in Berlin, the company were well looked after and

Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976; The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994), Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre; Duro Ladipo, Ÿba Kò So (Ibadan: Macmillan Nigeria, 1970); Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981); Olu Obafemi, Contemporary Nigerian Theatre: Cultural Heritage and Social Vision (Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 1996); Wole Ogundele, Omoluabi: Ulli Beier, Yoruba Society and Culture (Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2003); and Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo. 10 See Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 6-8. 11 Ulli Beier, in The Return of Shango, ed. Beier, 26. 12 Beier, in The Return of Shango, 26. 13 See Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 10.

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their performance was thoroughly enjoyed by the audience. According to Beier, Theatre audiences in Berlin were the best we ever experienced; their intelligent concentration and their enthusiastic participation carried Duro’s performance to new heights. The hall was small and the platform low. The utter simplicity of the stage encouraged interaction between actors and audience. After the performance, people climbed on stage, shook hands with the performers and talked to them. Often an hour went before the company could leave the theatre. Among the audience were distinguished actors and musicians. The Director of the Berlin Opera, Rudolph Sellner, was so enthusiastic that he invited the entire company to the dress rehearsal of Zauberflöte conducted by Karl Böhm.14

The reviews of the performances were highly complimentary. The play “was rated as one of the great highlights of the festival, on par with the Stravinsky concert.”15 The festival also brought Ladipo immense popularity in Nigeria, for Dr Karl Wand, the zealous Cultural Attaché of the German Embassy, managed to place seventy mentions and reviews of Ÿba Kò So in the Nigerian press.16

The Berlin festival prepared Ladipo for more international tours. Unknown to him, during his company’s performance in Berlin, the Commonwealth Arts Festival organizers who were present were assessing his company. “The suggestion of an invitation was made but then a formal notice had to be sent.”17 After all the formalities involved, Ladipo’s company was selected for the Commonwealth tour. The Nigerian government carried out the selection process after their Berlin tour. It began in April, shortly after the third anniversary of the Mbari Mbayo Club and ended in May of 1965.18 Ladipo’s troupe started preparing for the Commonwealth Festival and a subsequent tour of other parts of Europe in the early part of September 1965. He had finalized arrangements with the promoter of the extended tour to perform in West Germany, The Netherlands, and Austria; however, the play designated 14

Beier, Return of Shango, 33. Return of Shango, 35. 16 Return of Shango, 35. 17 Raji-Oyelade, Olorunymo Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 13. 18 Duro Ladipo, 13–14. 15

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for the post-Commonwealth tour was not Ÿba Kò So, but Eda, which was first staged on 13 March 1965 for the Mbari Mbayo’s third anniversary.19 Ladipo’s troupe embarked on their journey on 17 September 1965. The festival lasted three weeks. Ÿba Kò So was staged in London, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Glasgow, with outstanding success. The performance at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool could be regarded as the most successful show; but equally groundbreaking were those of the Scala Theatre, London, and the King’s Theatre, Glasgow.20 They were received with affection by the mayor of Liverpool and they later performed at the Royal Court Theatre in the city, where their performance was highly praised.21 They became an instant attraction with the production technicians and the artists they came in contact with. Before they left Liverpool, they were contacted by the B B C office in Cardiff. The B B C was interested in filming Ÿba Kò So, but they wanted Ladipo to condense the play to thirty minutes. Ladipo’s ability to adapt creatively to situations was evident in his rewriting of the script to suit the B B C ’s requirement. The Commonwealth Festival tour came to an end with a performance at the Scala Theatre in London. Ladipo’s troupe was invited to Buckingham Palace, where they were awarded a medal for their excellent performances. Something else came to light: The impressive mark of Ÿba Ko So became highlighted when an old woman fainted as King Sango emitted fire from his mouth; on recovery, the woman expressed delight for witnessing that show in her lifetime!22

The troupe’s extended tour of Europe covered Brussels, Liège, Bonn, Stuttgart, Cologne, Vienna, Salzburg, and Frankfurt.23 They first travelled to Amsterdam, where they rested for nine days,24 before travelling to Brussels, where the first performance of their post-Commonwealth tour was staged. In 1973, Ladipo’s troupe was invited to Nancy, France, for the Mondial du Théâtre Festival, where Ÿba Kò So was presented. The troupe’s performance 19

Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 14. See Raji-Oyelade, Olorumyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 15. 21 See Beier, Return of Shango, 40. 22 Raji-Olyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 15. 23 See Muraina Oyelami, “My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre,” in The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994): 90. 24 Muraina Oyelami, “My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre,” 88. 20

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was very rewarding in serving as a networking period for them and led to many positive recommendations. The festival organizers and the families who hosted the different members of the troupe were very generous to them; the former took care of their fares back to Nigeria and they were individually presented with gifts by their hosts in appreciation of their performances. The trip became a springboard for other international performance invitations that would extend to 1977, the year in which Nigeria hosted the Festival of Black Arts and Culture (F E S T A C ). As the first troupe from Nigeria to have successfully staged plays before international audiences in Europe, at the end of the later part of 1974, Ladipo had reached a threshold in his career. He had the burning desire to extend his international tours to America and other parts of the diaspora. He therefore recruited the services of an agent in America, Mel Howard. While preparing for an American tour in 1975, another opportunity came for Ladipo to tour Brazil with his troupe. That tour was organized by Mr Lola Martins, who at the time was Managing Director of Afro Beat Nigerian Magazine.25 The troupe embarked on the journey to Brazil on 14 September 1974. They were hosted by Dr José Mendes Ferreira, a Latin American doctor of African origin. He took on the responsibility of accommodating and feeding them for the three months of their tour in Brazil. The tour was successful. They were received with great respect and enthusiasm in such places as São Paulo, Salvador, Bahia, Curitiba, Brasília, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, and Rio de Janeiro. In some of these places, Duro Ladipo was widely admired and with especial reverence, almost deified. He was to many the modern reincarnation of Sango, the legend whom he re-created on stage and upon whom his own fame crystallized.26

These responses were not just a coincidence, but something deeply rooted in the identity of this people. They could identify with their roots through Ladipo’s characterization of Œango. Many Brazilians are devotees of the Yorùbá gods who have been able to trace their roots to Nigeria. In Brazil and other parts of the Caribbean, this form of religion is known as Santería and

25 26

See Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 18–20. Duro Ladipo, 21.

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has come about as a result of the syncretism of the Catholic Christian religion with Ifá and the ancient Yorùbá religion.27 According to Beier, In Brazil Oba Koso was more than an interesting foreign play: it was a powerful interpretation of the living religion in Brazil. In 1975 Yoruba religion was far more alive in Brazil than in Nigeria, and there were no signs of it fading away, on the contrary: it was growing with an increasing number of white worshippers joining candomblé. Yoruba had changed, of course, in the diaspora. It had adapted itself to its Latin American surroundings, but it was this very flexibility that gave it its vitality.28

In appreciation of Ladipo’s tour in Brazil, the mayor of São Paulo awarded the troupe a ‘Grand Medal’ before they left Brazil for the pre-arranged tour of America. There were two major reasons why Ladipo preferred to go straight to America from Brazil. The first was that he was being mindful of the travelling expenses. The other reason was that he was certain that some of his troupe members might take advantage of the return to take some time off from their busy rehearsal schedules. They embarked on the tour (which lasted from February to April 1975), and they took part in the Third World Theatre Festival, performing in Boston, Chicago, Washington, and New York. The promoter, Mr Howard, was a highly reliable professional who made sure that the troupe enjoyed comfortable accommodation and were fed properly. He additionally arranged a performance that took the troupe to Victoria Island in Canada. In March 1975, Ÿba Kò So was staged in the following theatres, venues, and locations in America: the Marjorie Young Bell Convocation Hall in Sackville, New Brunswick; the Harvard Loeb Drama Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Mechanics Theatre in Baltimore; the New York City Community College Festival of the Arts; and the Westport Playhouse in Connecticut. An award was given to the troupe by the mayor of Washington, D C , when the tour came to an end, in appreciation for staging Ÿba Kò So. For the American audience, Ladipo produced a more compact and revised version of Ÿba Kò So. He was assisted in the process by the promoter to ensure that it was suitable for the international audience in America.29 27

See Philip John Neimark, The Way of the Orisa: Empowering Your Life Through the Ancient African Religion of Ifa (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), xii; see also Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 1. 28 Beier, Return of Shango, 216. 29 See Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 21–22.

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In relation to the impact of Ladipo’s national and international staging of Ÿba Kò So, the performance “in the palace of the Alàáfin of Ÿyø, where the descendants of the three protagonists, Shango, Timi and Gbonka actually sat in the audience!” was of great importance.30 We have no recorded date for the performance, but it may have taken place in 1970, since the performance was featured to accompany Ladipo’s television documentary.31 Ladipo’s excitement about their presence was reflected in the documentary. He acknowledged the importance of their presence and commented that a “new era” had started in the history of the Yorùbá, since it was the first time that such a play had been staged in Yorubaland in the presence of the descendants and titleholders of the characters concerned. According to Yemi Ogunbiyi, the play was “performed some 2,000 other times at home before Duro Ladipo’s death,” including performances in schools, in traditional ceremonial festivals of Œango, in university venues, in market squares, and in the “palaces of Ÿbas, and in particular, before two successive reigning Alafins of Ÿyº,” and in fifteen different countries.32 The huge success of Ÿba Kò So, Ladipo’s most popular play, can be attributed to a number of factors: the first is the creative vision of Ladipo in staging a play that explores the duality of Œango as a human being and a god, the historical Alàáfin and the mythological Œango. In comparison to his previous play, he was presenting something new about the Yorùbá world to his audience, an exposition of the characteristics of the Yorùbá gods through the image of Œango; a ritual re-enactment of the rite of passage of the Yorùbá gods. He was educating his audience about the Yorùbá deity while also presenting the story of a king’s life. According to Chief Segun Olusola, There can never be another Duro Ladipo and when you see him on stage, for me his role in Ÿba Kò So was unique. There can never be another ‘Sango’ the way Duro Ladipo would play it.33

30

Beier, Return of Shango, 27. Henry Dore, The Creative Person: Duro Ladipo (Lagos: National Education Network [N E T ] Film Unit, 1970). 32 Ogunbiyi, Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, 345. 33 Segun Olusola, “Ijuba: Words on the Marble: ‘The Stage was his Home’,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 40–41. 31

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Œango’s image was introduced to the audience through the iconographies displayed. The “sight” of Ladipo emitting “fire” in his characterization of Œango was definitely something new to his audience and the Yorùbá folk operatic theatrical tradition.34 Ladipo’s characterization of the god was so powerful that for the rest of his life he was linked in the popular imagination with Œango. As Yemi Elebuibon explains, Ladipo came to be seen as a vehicle for the spirit of Œango to dwell in; he confirmed that, apart from his stage presence, he carried the aura of Œango’s awesomeness with him anywhere he went, and this continued to the day he died.35 As with Ÿba Moro, Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas led Ladipo to the story of Œango as the subject of his second major play.36 The staging of the play was a great challenge for him – first, because the story combined the attributes of a god and a king in his characterization of Œango; and, secondly, because no other dramatist in Nigeria had explored the story of a deity in a play before. Furthermore, his church missionary education had not encouraged him or any Yorùbá Christian to learn about the Yorùbá deities. Hence, as Beier asserted, “The decision to produce Ÿba Kò So challenged Duro’s entire education” and “became the turning point in his life.”37 Johnson’s text was just a starting point for Ladipo. He embarked on research that included consultation with Yorùbá kings and custodians of Yorùbá tradition. Ladipo also used the materials he gathered and engaged actors who were rooted in the knowledge of Œango and Yorùbá cosmology. For instance, we are informed by Wole Ogundele that Ladipo consulted with the Layiokun family, the Œango-worshipping family he had engaged during the staging of Ÿba Moro, “for more insight into the character of the deified King as well as for more of the chants.”38 The kings he consulted with included the Alàáfin of Ÿyº, the Ataoja of O‹ogbo, the Timi of Ede, the Ooni of Ilé-IfÁ, the Olowo of Owo, and the Alake of Abeokuta.39 The information he gathered, combined with his own knowledge and research into Ifa and Yorùbá cosmology, was crucial to his 34

See Ogunbiyi, Drama and Theatre in Nigeria, 348. Yemi Elebuibon, interview with author, O‹ogbo, 2007. 36 Beier, Return of Shango, 26. 37 Return of Shango, 26. 38 Ogundele, Omoluabi, 163. 39 See Dore, The Creative Person; Raji-Oyelade, Olorunyomi & Duro-Ladipo, Duro Ladipo, 7; Beier, Return of Shango, 51, 80. 35

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characterization of Œango as the main protagonist of the play, the dramaturgies he employed, and the structure of the play. For instance, since Œango was known to be the patron saint of musicians and a performing artist whose name was synonymous with the use of the bàtá drums as his sacred musical instrument, Ladipo employed these drums to convey the true essence of Œango. As a result of Ladipo’s portrayal of Œango and his investigations about the nature of the deity, “the dignitaries of the Anglican Church accused Duro of being a worshipper of idols.”40 Unfortunately, this type of derogatory reference was not unusual; it was a term designed to humiliate anyone who was thought to be associated with óri‹á worship. Ladipo, however, was not prepared to be distracted by their abuse, and “the more time he spent with Shango priests in Oshogbo, the more he began to identify with his role”41 as Œango. At this point, Ladipo became more observant and conscious of his daily experiences, as demonstrated in one account: One day, as he was cycling from Ilobu to Oshogbo, he was attacked by a swarm of bees which settled on his head. Later he was found unconscious and taken to hospital. To Duro it was a clear sign that he had offended Shango. Accordingly, he went to the shrine to make a sacrifice and ask the orisha’s permission to represent him on stage.42

It was as a result of this incident that Ladipo made it mandatory for a cock to be sacrificed as a form of ritual whenever he was going to perform Ÿba Kò So.43 Ladipo’s actors were also heavily involved in the research; they were responsible for developing some of their own characters for the play, and this was encouraged by Ladipo. According to Muraina Oyelami, a one-time member of Ladipo’s troupe, Most of his plays were not written; after a story had been told and the characters chosen, it was usually the duty of each actor to create his own part.44

Although Ÿba Kò So was eventually scripted and published, this is a clear example of actors’ involvement, as seen in the case of Tijani Mayakiri and Ademola Onibonokuta in their respective roles as Timi and Gbonka. They

40

Beier, Return of Shango, 27. Return of Shango, 27. 42 Return of Shango, 28. 43 See Return of Shango, 28. 44 Oyelami, “My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre,” 82. 41

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were reported to have not just “created their own incantations, but also made their own costumes.”45 In conveying the story to the audience, Ladipo continued to develop the play, especially after the first staging. The highlighted concern that Œango’s suicide had not been “cathartic” during the first performance because of how he was portrayed as a tyrant was rectified. Ladipo sought to bring to light the good qualities of Œango. He was reported to have changed “the mood of the music wherever Shango’s oriki spoke of his generosity and his humour,” so as to “emphasize these qualities in his character.”46 He also introduced other characters and stories not associated with the historical Œango. In the original historical account, war was not the reason Œango abdicated his throne, even though he engaged in many wars because of his fiery nature and his ambition to expand his territory. In the historical account, it was the decision of Biri and Omiran, his loyal slaves, not to escort him to Nupeland that was the humiliation that compelled him to hang himself in a shea butter tree (Aayan).47 However, in Ladipo’s Ÿba Kò So, Ÿya was the only one who accompanied him and decided to return, and she played a major part as a character. This also applied to the roles of Timi and Gbonka; in fact, the events with Gbonka and Timi did not take place during the reign of Œango but, rather, much later on. Their fight was reported to have taken place long after the death of Œango, during the second reign of Ajaka and the reign of Aganju, Ajaka’s son.48 It is also important to note that Gbonka is a title (the Gbonkaa) and not a name.49 This is significant because Ladipo’s rearrangement was not just confined to names; he also used important Yorùbá titles as names for his characters, as is evident in his use of Oluode (head of the hunters) in Ÿba Moro. I believe that Ladipo’s decision to change some aspects of the story was born out of his genuine concern to represent the mythological and historical Œango as well as to present the Yorùbá matrix in accordance with their narratives. His empirical research into the Yorùbá oral tradition and his consultation with custodians of Yorùbá tradition were crucial to the changes he made. The records of Ifá about the primordial mythological Œango also provided Ladipo 45

Oyelami, “My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre,” 82. Beier, Return of Shango, 27. 47 See Rev. S. Johnson, “Origin and Early History,” in The History of the Yorubas, ed. Dr O. Johnson (Lagos: C S S , 1921): 152. 48 See Johnson, “Origin and Early History,” 155–58. 49 “Origin and Early History,” 157. 46

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with a firm basis for changing some aspects of the historical record so as to explore the characteristics of the deity, which he fused with the historical account of Œango. In Thomas Willis’s and Bob Garrett’s reviews of Ÿba Kò So, they both saw a similarity between some aspects of the play and Greek tragedy. For instance, the latter compared the “story” to the Greek stories,50 while the former compared the women’s “chorus” to that found in the Greek theatre because of the “sometimes wailing haunting melodic supplications” of their songs.51 Ladipo’s Ÿba Kò So was not only instrumental as an avenue to learn more about the Yorùbá gods and their attributes, it also provides us with a platform for a comparative study of the Greek and Yorùbá gods. For example, some of the attributes of Œango as the Yorùbá god of thunder and lightning are found in Zeus, the Greek god of the sky, who uses the lightning “thunderbolt”52 as a weapon in the same way that Œango does. Apart from being the Greek god of “thunder and lightning,” Zeus is visually represented “as a long-haired (sometimes plaited up), mature and somewhat imposing figure,”53 an aspect that is directly related to Œango in terms of his physique, the way he plaits his hair, and even the way he was represented by Ladipo in Ÿba Kò So. Ladipo’s exploration of the story of Œango was instrumental to the direction of the postcolonial theatrical subjects because he inspired other Nigerian dramatists to consider the exploration of historical and mythological stories in their thematic considerations. As stated by Ogundele: The phenomenal success of Oba Koso would start a trend of historical drama in the Yoruba travelling theatre which literary dramatists in English and Yoruba would later take up. Yoruba audiences also began to be better educated about their arts of poetry, music and dancing.54

50

Thomas Willis, “Nigerians Blend Skill with Power,” in Duro Ladipo: ThunderGod on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 84. 51 Bob Garrett, “Many Dimensioned Nigerian Troupe,” in Duro Ladipo: ThunderGod on Stage, ed. Remi Raji Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 85. 52 Richard Woff, Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses (London: British Museum, 2003): 5. 53 Encyclopedia of Ancient Myths and Cultures (Eagle Editions; Ryston: Quantum, 2003): 35. 54 Ogundele, Omoluabi, 165.

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Three good examples of such dramatists are Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, and Femi Osofisan, as evident in their Death and the King’s Horseman, The Gods Are Not to Blame, and Many Colours Make the Thunder-King, respectively. Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder-King is an adaptation of Ÿba Kò So and was first staged in 1997. Osofisan confirmed that his decision to adapt the play was mainly due to the desire he had to answer some “old questions” that had been “stirred up in” him by Ladipo’s Ÿba Kò So, “which were still unanswered.”55 According to Osofisan, “the spirit of Duro Ladipo breathes through every page of” Many Colours Make the Thunder-King: His Ÿba Kò So was my starting point. Or rather, if you wish, it was the scaffolding around which my story constructed its own beingness. Such is the seminal impact of Ladipo that no re-reading of Sango’s legend can be possible any more without reference to his Ÿba Kò So. Thus the arteries along which my story grew its branches were those old questions which Ladipo’s play had raised.56

With regard to Ladipo’s influence on Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, some aspects of Ÿba Kò So were also reflected, even though the play is an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The main reasons for this attribution is that the play also explores the characters of Yorùbá gods, their rituals, their socio-political structures, myths and legends, and their cosmology. Gbonka is also the name of a character in the play. But, fundamentally, the play brought to bear the tendencies of Ogún, the Yorùbá demiurge of war, and his ritualistic attributes, as noted in the character of King Odewale, who killed his father and unknowingly married his mother in the same way as Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In the case of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, the play in fact treats the same subject as Ladipo’s Ÿba Waja (‘the King is dead’ or ‘the King has gone aloft’) (1964), the last of his historical trilogy about Ÿyº Yorùbá kings. As the subject of a real incident that occurred in Ÿyº in 1946, Ÿba Waja was first staged in O‹ogbo in 1964 to mark Mbari Mbayo’s second anniversary.57 According to the narratives of the incident, during the funeral obsequies of the Alàáfin of Ÿyº, Olori Elesin, his horseman, was prevented 55

Femi Osofisan, “Sleep Softly Big Brother,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 56. 56 Osofisan, “Sleep Softly Big Brother,” 56. 57 Beier, Return of Shango, 44.

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from committing ritual suicide by the British colonial district officer, who condemned the act as barbaric. Beier argued that Ladipo, in a play that partly explores the negative effects of the colonial enterprise on the culture of the Yorùbá people, “attempted something quite difficult – he presented a historical event seen through the opposing views of two cultures” with a “great lyrical beauty,” but he thought that the play “lacks the subtleties and ironies of the King’s Horseman,”58 Soyinka’s version of the story. In Soyinka’s note on his play, he warned that it must not be tagged with a “prejudicial label” of the “clash of cultures,”59 a label that fails to take into consideration the true complexities of the play’s dramaturgy and the philosophies explored: The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links all: transition. 60

The story of Ÿba Waja came to life through Pierre Verger II,61 who narrated the story to Beier. Then, Beier gave Ladipo the synopsis of the story in 1964, but explained that he had earlier summarized “the episode to Wole Soyinka; suggesting he use it for a play,”62 three years before Ÿba Waja was written by Ladipo. In accordance with the original story, the actual Olori Elesin remained alive, but in Ladipo’s Ÿba Waja, he “kept fairly closely to the facts, except that he makes the Olori Elesin kill himself in the end,”63 a tragedy that also unfolded in Soyinka’s King’s Horseman, where, towards the end of the play, Elesin “strangles himself”64 soon after he realizes that Olunde, his son, has committed suicide to protect the honour of his family and his people. Chronologically, the historical order of the periods in which the stories of Ladipo’s trilogy unfolded starts with Ÿba Kò So, the story of Œango, which is 58

Beier, Return of Shango, 44. Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Methuen, 1971): 6. 60 Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman, 7. 61 See postscript in Ladipo, Three Yoruba Plays, 74. We are told that M. Verger was in direct contact with the District Officer concerned and was able to verify the story from him. 62 Beier, Return of Shango, 44. 63 Ladipo, Three Yoruba Plays, 74. 64 Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman, 75. 59

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set around the fourteenth century.65 The second story in order is Ÿba Moro, which takes place in the sixteenth century,66 while the latest, Ÿba Waja, is set in the twentieth century. In 1946, when the incident of Ÿba Waja was unfolding, Ladipo had already been teaching and was also already involved with theatre; therefore, it is the only historical incident of the trilogy that occurred in his lifetime. In Ogundele’s review of the impact of Ladipo’s Ÿba Moro and Ÿba Kò So on the Yorùbá people, he stated: If these two plays brought about the education of Duro Ladipo himself, they also started the re-education of the Yoruba people as a whole – through drama. Ignorant of their own history, educated Yoruba audiences in Nigeria suddenly began to know that Sango was not just a dreadful god whose priests are to be avoided, but the name of a historical king in an important period of history.67

According to Beier, Duro will always be remembered as the playwright whose insight into Yoruba history and religion caused a whole generation to perceive their tradition in a different way.68

As the creator of the first historical play of a Yorùbá king who became deified and a story that brings to life the ritualistic and metaphysical dimensions of the Yorùbá from a different perspective, Ladipo was extending the scope of his theatrical subjects in order to challenge and seriously engage with his audience about the reality of the world they inhabit. The effects of the European colonial enterprise on the education and religious mind-set of the West African people had been a hindrance to the exposition and understanding of their history, cultural traditions, cosmological dimensions, rituals, and belief system. Ladipo’s continued theatrical exposition of Yorùbá historical narratives is not only reclaiming the history of his people, but also bringing to light the importance of their arts, cultural heritage, and values. As is evident in a

65

See I.A. Akinjogbin, Milestones and Social Systems in Yoruba History and Culture (Ibadan: Olu-Akin, 2002): 31–32. 66 See J.A. Adedeji, “Alarinjo: The Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre,” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981): 221. 67 Ogundele, Omoluabi, 165. 68 Beier, Return of Shango, 43.

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1964 television documentary by Francis Speed and Ulli Beier,69 the influence

of the Islamic and Christian missionary enterprise was reported to have been a major factor in the decline in the practice of some of the Yorùbá traditional artforms that are inspired by the Yorùbá cosmology. The main reason for this was that most of the renowned Yorùbá artists who had been preoccupied with the subjects of Yorùbá religion, myths, legends, and folktales had been converted to the new Christian and Islamic religions, whose philosophies and doctrines are opposed to the nature of the subjects they explored in their art. Scrutiny of the subjects of Ladipo’s theatrical preoccupation offers a clear illustration of Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical evaluation and analyses of the effects of the colonial enterprise and decolonization on the consciousness of the colonized people of Africa. According to Fanon, The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.70

This is not to imply that Ladipo was violent. The violence referred to by Fanon directly relates to how the colonial masters devalued African culture. It is this violence that Ladipo addressed with his theatrical activities and the subjects of his plays in order to enlighten his audience about the negative influences of the colonial enterprise. As part of his inspiration for Ÿba Kò So, Ladipo explained that, since Œango’s story is an ancient one that took place centuries before the coming of the Europeans and their constitutions, it was a suitable one for engaging the minds of youth and society at large. He blamed the influence of modern European life on the growing disinclination among the young to show respect for their elders.71 In contrast to an integral part of Yorùbá custom, where it is a sign of courtesy for the young to prostrate them69

See Francis Speed & Ulli Beier, dir. New Images: Art in a Changing Society, Oshogbo, Western Nigeria (Lagos: National Education Network (N E T ) film Unit, 1964). 70 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean–Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967): 131. 71 See Dore, The Creative Person.

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selves before their elders, he cited how some youths had embraced the European attitude of shaking hands with their elders, something that is directly against the tenets of Yorùbá tradition. Ladipo’s engagement with a story that depicts the rich heritage of the Yorùbá not only addresses this latter concern, but fundamentally brings into context the importance of Yorùbá history, religion, arts, politics, and socio-spiritual dimensions. Because of the philosophical and psychological implications of the morals of Œango’s story, Ladipo was concerned about the motive of Europeans in condemning the ancient Yorùbá religion of worshipping deities like Ÿbàtálá and Ogún and referring to their devotees as pagans. Hence, as part of his theatrical vision, he felt the need to counter this condemnation with the story of Ÿba Kò So. In fact, he drew upon his knowledge of the Bible to rationalize the story of Œango by comparing the experience of Jesus Christ with that of Œango; he saw a similarity between Jesus and Œango in the sense that the former is still being worshipped by his followers and the latter by his devotees after his deification, despite the fact that Jesus was rebuked and killed for coming to save the sinners in the same way as Œango was driven to commit suicide after abdicating his throne because of his betrayal by the same people who deified him.72 Ÿba KòSo is a ritualistic play that weaves together the historical and mythological narratives of Œango, the fourth Alàáfin of Ÿyº, who was deified after his death, and Œango, the Yorùbá god of thunder and lightning. Œango is a warrior king who engages in war with his neighbouring communities because of his ambition to enlarge his territory. His people, suffering from the loss of loved ones on the battlefield, they raise their voices in protest at the wars. Œango refuses to listen to the elders delegated by the people of Ÿyº to persuade him to stop the wars, but Ÿya, his favourite wife, manages to convince him to prevent his generals, Gbonka and Timi, from going back to war. Ÿya advises Œango to send Timi to Ede to become the guardian of his kingdom’s frontier, in the hope that he will die in the hands of the Ijesha warriors. Impressed with his credentials as a warrior, the people of Ede decide to make Timi their king. Œango becomes aware of Timi’s installation as king and orders Gbonka to go and capture Timi from Ede in the hope that one might kill the other. Gbonka uses his efficacious incantations in challenging Timi to a fight. Timi retaliates by shooting Gbonka with his mysterious arrows of fire, but they all miss their target. Gbonka then engages in an incantation that hypnotizes 72

See Dore, The Creative Person.

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Timi into a deep sleep, and he is able to capture him. Gbonka returns to Œango’s palace in Ÿyº with the sleeping Timi, and Œango is unhappy that the two generals have returned alive. Œango orders a second fight between the two generals at Akesan market, but Gbonka is unhappy with the news and leaves the palace in anger. The news prompts Gbonka to venture into the forest of the witches at night. Here, he pleads with the witches for support to overcome the conspiracy of Œango and the Ÿyº people. He then beheads Timi at Akesan market. The people scream in confusion and agony as they witness the scene. Gbonka proceeds to confront Œango in a rude, threatening, and disgraceful manner. He accuses Œango of betrayal and gives him an ultimatum to leave the town, challenging his authority, power, and ability to emit fire, and leaves the scene. Ÿyº elders intervene in fear, urging Œango to accept the situation and leave for Tapa, his mother’s place of origin. Gbonka returns and talks to Œango in a condescending way. Œango, unable to withstand the insults and humiliation, lashes out in uncontrollable anger and kills many of his people. Gbonka escapes with some others. Sober, tired, and lonely, Œango expresses remorse for his action. He decides to leave for Tapaland with his loyal wife. But when she decides to discontinue the journey and return to her homeland of Ira, Œango, feeling deserted and unable to bear the pain of loneliness and humiliation, resolves to hang himself in an Ayan tree. Ÿya tries in vain to prevent his suicide. News reaches the people of Ÿyº and the Magba, Œango’s intimate friends. But in protest and proclamation of his undying essence and power, Magba insists that Œango is not dead, that he will always speak with the sounding of the bàtá drums and dance to the tune of the dùndún drum. We then see the transformation of the heavens with lightning and thunder. Fear engages the hearts of the Ÿyº people as the earth trembles, before we hear Œango’s voice, which reassures them that he is still alive. He promises them happiness, love, wealth, and peace, if only they will pay homage to him. The Ÿyº people respond with reverence and praise for Œango, pronouncing his undying essence in “Ÿba kò so!” (The king did not hang!). The play is a ritual drama and the dialogue was conveyed in the Yorùbá operatic style. Ladipo’s dramaturgy in Ÿba Kò So embodies a continuum of visual display and musical languages reflected in the music of the drums and the accompanying songs, language, and dance that provide a powerful structure to the play, which is essentially structured with the same elements as that of Ÿba Moro. The backbone of Ÿba Kò So’s dramaturgy derives from the ritual order that prevails in Yorùbá society and their oral tradition through the various poetic genres. But there is a question of an ambiguity that stems from

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the title of the play. This is significant because the play derives one meaning of its title from the view that Ÿba Kò So means ‘the king did not commit suicide’ or, literarily, ‘the king did not hang’. The other meaning refers to Œango as Oluoso or Olu of Koso (an historical title of Œango as Ÿba Kò So, ‘King of Koso’). In the first verse of Ifá’s Odu of “Ogunda Meji,” reference was also made to Kò So, Œango, and his attributes, as evident in this passage from the text of the Odu: Bi o ba burin burin, bo o ba de Koso, ilee babaa re nko, bi nwon ba se gbegiri, bi nwon ba roka, Bi nwon ba fun o lorogbo atakuko adie kan nko. Sango ni bi mo ba ti yo tan, Ng o pada silee mi ni.73 For when you have walked and walked, when you reach Koso, where is your father’s home located; if they cooked bean soup, if they stirred yam flour, if they gave you bitter-kola and a cock? Sango said when I have eaten and I am nourished, I will surely go back to my home.74

Thus, in semiotic terms, the title of the play is significant to its plot because of the implication of the similarities between the attributes of the primordial Œango and the historical Œango. The ambiguity of the title also raises the question of a possible tragedy that may be a result of suicide by hanging. In examining the context of Ladipo’s theatrical framework from a performance perspective, my analysis is mainly based on the televised staging of Ÿba Kò So in the palace of the Alàáfin of Ÿyº, as documented in The Creative Person, but this analysis does not include the philosophical context of his iconography. The themes of the play include ambition, oppression, loyalty, betrayal, and love, but the most important theme highlights the need to take others into consideration, especially when making decisions that affect their lives. In Œango’s character, he displays the attributes of a dictator, refusing to listen to the genuine concerns of his people to stop his wars. The Ÿyº people are suffering because many of their children have died on the battlefield, but Œango, because of his ambition to expand his territory, will not order his generals, Gbonka and Timi, to stop the wars, and this leads to chaos in the kingdom. This is a universal theme that is reflected in today’s society, where leaders are concerned more about their own selfish desires and ambition. Those in positions of authority and power continue to oppress their own people and others, as 73

Wande Abimbola, Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa: Apa Kin-in-ni (Ibadan: Ibadan U P ,

2006): 92. 74

Author’s translation.

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reflected in the recent and continued uprisings in many parts of the world. As far as the abuse of power is concerned, the case of Œango is a good metaphor for modern society’s re-evaluation of itself. Loyalty and love come to bear in Ÿya’s honest advice to Œango to discontinue his wars and her ability to convince him to call back his warlords from the battlefield. It is also her loyalty and deep love for Œango that drive her to the decision to go into exile with him after he leaves his throne, before she ultimately decides to return. She embodies the strong, intelligent woman. Her influence on a personality like Œango demonstrates her power in the sociopolitical dynamics of the empire and brings to light the courage and power of women in African society. She recognizes the problems and effects of war on the general population and tries to do something positive to stop it. In terms of emotional expression and the tragedy of the play, betrayal is a strong theme. This is reflected in Gbonka’s reaction to the announcement of a second fight with Timi at Akesan market in Ÿyº. Gbonka becomes aware that Œango, Timi, and the people of Ÿyº are conspiring to get rid of him and decides to take action. He embarks on a journey to the forest at night to consult with the witches and ask for their help in defeating Timi. His deep sense of betrayal is shown in his incantatory song of lamentation which explores the context of the Yorùbá metaphysical world of the witches and the gods. In terms of characterization, the most formidable character of the play is Œango. Not only do we see him in his element as the Yorùbá demiurge of lightning, but we witness the metamorphosis of the historical Œango from a king to a deity. Œango is characterized as a powerful warrior-king through his oríkì praise poetry and the homage paid to him by his friends, his wives, his chiefs, his warlords, and the people of Ÿyº. The opening of the play with the symbolic ritualistic entrance of Œango’s wife, accompanied by the ululation and loud noise known as Ibaburuburu, marks the beginning of homage to him. The order that obtains in the courts of the Yorùbá kings comes to life whenever Œango appears. But apart from this, the awe associated with the mythological Œango is reflected in his physical presence: he is wearing the colourful sacred regalia of the deity, he plaits his hair, and he uses his paraphernalia. He also emits fire from his mouth, and his wives placate him whenever he is angry, for fear of his wrath. The magnitude of his anger becomes evident after the death of Timi. When Gbonka provokes him, he responds, “What? I Sango? – I Sango?”75 He then lashes out and kills many of his 75

Ladipo, Three Yoruba Plays, 27.

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people before committing suicide on his way to Tapaland. This attribute of anger is associated with both the mythological Œango and the historical Alàáfin Œango. In fact, it is sometimes used in praising or placating him, as is evident in the first scene of the play, where Timi refers to his attribute of anger when praising him: O ba baale jiyan gangan tan, o tun wa p omo re s iloro! Obenle-ja-wuukan! Jagunlabi – ja-nibi t o gbe-jeko-ana!76 You had a meal with the head of the family and killed his son on the porch! In the process of fighting with the house owner, you uprooted the pillars of his house! The born-fighter fights where he had a meal of corn-meal yesterday!77

Ÿya is also an important character in the play. Her position as the head of the Olori and her love for her husband is reflected throughout the play. She is portrayed as a loyal wife who is able to calm her husband’s anger and we see her beside him in most of the scenes of the play. She is also more elegant in her dress than the other wives. Her hairstyle and the colour of her costume are similar to those of Œango and she also holds a horsetail to confirm her royalty. Her reaction to the death of Œango reveals her passion for her husband, as she remains in adoration for him through her lamentation song. Ÿya’s reaction as goddess of departed souls can be understood in the context of her role as the guardian of the souls of the dead in Yorùbá mythology. Another remarkable character in the play is Gbonka, one of Œango’s warlords. He is portrayed as a highly decorated warrior whose powerful incantations are efficacious. When Œango orders him to go and capture Timi, the other general, from Ede, he uses the power of his incantation to capture him. Timi shoots Gbonka with his flying arrows of fire, but they all fail to hit the target and prove useless on Gbonka, who responds with his incantations, commanding Timi to sleep. The motion of Timi’s body, gradually responding and becoming weak until it lapses into stillness, conveys a powerful image of somebody being hypnotized. The power of Gbonka’s character is further intensified when Œango orders a repeat of the fight at Akesan market. Gbonka senses a conspiracy; he sees no rational reason for Œango to order renewed combat with Timi, knowing 76 77

Ladipo, Ÿba Kò So, 5. Author’s translation.

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full well that he had defeated Timi at Ede. His attributes as a brave warrior and hunter become more evident when he decides to venture into the forest at night to consult with the witches about the betrayal of Œango, the people of Ÿyº, and Timi, his comrade. His action is reflective not only of that of a brave hunter, but of a metaphysician who has a deep knowledge of Ifá and the occult. We see this in the outcome of his consultation: the witches promise to help him, he goes ahead and engages with Timi at Akesan market, which leads to the death of Timi. Music plays a major role in the structure of Ÿba Kò So. Just as in Ÿba Moro, the music comprises both the chanted and the instrumental. The powerful thundering music of the drum that follows the entrance of Œango’s last wife reinforces the sense of ritual homage and reflects the attributes of Œango as the Yorùbá god of thunder. The drums used include the bàtá and the dùndún, which are played throughout the drama to create moods and mark scene changes. A combination of the melodies of the drums and the chanted songs forms the music and dialogue of the play. The praise poetry of Œango that is combined with the language of the drums brings to bear the importance of oríkì (praise chants) in reverence to the Yorùbá archetypes and the rituals associated with them and the Yorùbá kings. As pointed out by Wole Soyinka in his discussion of these archetypes, To speak of space, music, poetry or material paraphernalia in the drama of the gods is to move directly from the apparent to deeper effects within the community whose drama (that is history, morality, affirmation, supplication, thanksgiving or simple calendrification) it also is.78

Soyinka’s statement is substantiated by the action of the palace poet Iwarefa from the start of the play when he enters the palace with some of Œango’s wives (Olori), accompanied by the sound of the bàtá drums. Using the calland-response performance style, Iwarefa leads the chanting of Œango’s oríkì, thereby establishing the responsibilities of his role in relation to Œango. He uses metaphoric expressions in describing the attributes of Œango as a powerful king, deity, and metaphysician. The whistle (toromagbe) and the bell (agogo) are also among the musical instruments used. For example, in the fourth scene, when Gbonka goes to Ede to capture Timi, who, it is reported, has made himself king of Ede, the rhythm of Gbonka’s powerful incantation accompanied by the musical sound of the toromagbe energizes the void and 78

Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, 5.

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the voices of Gbonka, Timi, and the people of Ede interacting in confrontation, sending a message of unpredictability. Music also plays an important role when Œango embarks on a journey back to Tapaland with his loyal wife, Ÿya, and commits suicide when Ÿya resolves not to continue on the journey. Ÿya’s piercing song in lamentation for her beloved husband confirms the death of Œango, and this is intensified by the piercing notes of the chorus. When sound fades off the scene, we hear the lonesome voice of Œango from the abode of the dead, calling on all the people of Ÿyº, and Yorubaland in general, to worship him, promising he will always be supportive of them. The reverence associated with this type of manifestation is divine and ritualistic in nature. Towards the end of the play, we also see a procession of drummers in action, playing the bàtá drums, in complement with the defiant song of the Olori and Œango’s friends, who are positioned strategically on the stage and singing “Ÿba kò So,” the King did not hang. In relation to importance of the bàtá drums in Ÿba Kò So, the instrumental musical components of the play would be incomplete without their use. This is mainly because of Œango’s link with the bàtá drums in Yorùbá mythology. As the patron saint of musicians, he is a renowned performing artist who loves and dances to the tune of these drums. We are told in the myth that the drum is named after Œango’s late close friend, a master-drummer who plays the bàtá drums. Dance is also structured into the play, but mostly in association with the music of the bàtá drums and chants. Whenever you hear the music of the bàtá drums in Yorubaland, it calls for a type of celebration, homage, and worship that are intricately linked with dance, particularly in relation to Œango and the egungun masquerades and especially among devotees, priests, and praisesingers. We see this in the character of Iwarefa, who dances to the tune of the bàtá drums as he sings the praises of Œango at the beginning of the play. When Gbonka captures Timi in Ede, we also see him dancing in jubilation and with increasing intensity to the sound of the bàtá drums and the song to celebrate his victory. Considering that Gbonka and the captured Timi are friends and comrades at arm, his jubilatory dance is not a good sign for Œango, who expects one of them to be dead, nor is it a good sign for the friendship of Gbonka and Timi. We see the hallmarks of enmity and conflict that may be the root of unfolding tragedy. The energy of dance also comes to prominence at the end of the play, where we see the Olori dancing intensely to the tune of the bàtá drums after the death of Œango.

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The language in Ÿba Kò So is associated with the different genres of Ifá Yorùbá oral tradition and closely resembles that of Ÿba Moro; the language of the characters is defined by their status in the socio-political and sociospiritual dynamics of the Kingdom. But the language also “operates on two levels,” as clarified by Olu Obafemi: i.e. the language of the “initiated” and the “uninitiated.”79 The status of Timi and Gbonka as highly decorated warriors and hunters who belong to the cult of Ogún means their language is potent and reverential in nature; accordingly, the incantations (Ofo) in the play are mostly delivered by them. The identity of Gbonka as a powerful metaphysician is further revealed from a different dimension through his language. This occurs in his dialogue with the witches in the nocturnal forest. They all have an understanding of each other’s language as a reflection of the relationship that exists between them. They are all members of esoteric bodies and there is a certain kind of familiarity in their address of each other. The other language comes in form of the praise chants (oríkì), which are used by the people of Ÿyº in the play, and this use is not restricted to the initiated. A combination of these elements, in line with Ladipo’s dramatic vision, provides the play with a successful dramatic distinction. The visual apparatus utilized and the poetic and drum languages all contribute to the ritual explosiveness of the play. In Soyinka’s review of the play, his summary of how the ritual in Ÿba Kò So was realized and the agents responsible was thus: If one may borrow a metaphor from the terminal motif of the play, we would perhaps speak of the effect of sheet lightning as opposed to the more common forked variety. Such was the summation of a parallel erasure of individuation even among the theatrical augmentations percussion, motion, chanting, even the costuming which so palpably derived from the formalized body rhythms of the ‘performers’: all these dissolved in the fluidity of the ritual emission.80

Soyinka’s symbolic definition of the impact of the play confirms how the effects of lightning – as something associated with Œango – was realized with light. The power of the characters’ performances as individuals comes to bear as corresponding in effect to one another, in producing a balanced effect of ritual enactment realized with spatial imagery and aided by the structural ele79

Obafemi, Contemporary Nigerian Theatre, 22. Soyinka, “Rites of the Theatre,” in The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994): 74. 80

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ments of play. In his critical examination of Ÿba Kò So’s structure, Obafemi argues: “The structure of Ÿba Kò So is not weak, nor are the episodes ‘amorphous’ as earlier claimed by critics.”81 He confirms that the repetitive nature of the drum and dialogic language, dance, and songs forms part of the structuring of the play in realizing a cohesive presentation.82 In conclusion, Ladipo’s position as the first Nigerian dramatist to stage historical plays, his unique creative approach – to synthesizing the languages of Yorùbá drums, their indigenous dance styles, their poetic genres of oríkì, ijala, and ofo with the Western conventional theatrical structural approach that presents us with a total theatre because of the elements of the plays – was fundamental in distinguishing him as a pioneer of this Yorùbá operatic style. He engaged the audience not only with the historical narratives of Ÿyº Yorùbá kings but also with the context of their metaphysical matrix through the Yorùbá dialogue and the visual implications of his plays. For instance, in relation to his audience’s responses to Ÿba Kò So during his international tour of America in 1975, David Richards explained that, despite the performance’s being “entirely in Yoruba tongue,” the audience were able to understand the story as result of the “synopsis” of the play they were “armed with.”83 Furthermore, we are told that the “Western audiences” were delighted with “the contagious pulsations that emanate from the stage,” confirming that even musicians set the pace with drums of assorted shapes and tones, to which the performers add their ritual chants, producing a mixture of sounds not unlike an atonal version of contemporary African Highlife music.84

Richards’s testimony reveals that the music generated as a result of Ladipo’s fusion of the Yorùbá poetic genres with the drum languages produced a type a music that could be compared to a version of Highlife, which is yet to be established. This confirms the unique nature of Ladipo’s theatrical composition and the structural approach he employed in presenting his plays. Ladipo led the way with this approach as a playwright, actor, composer, and cultural ambassador, in reflecting not only the Yorùbá mythology and legendary 81

Obafemi, Contemporary Nigerian Theatre, 21. See Contemporary Nigerian Theatre, 21. 83 David Richards, “Contagious Pulsations,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 91. 84 Richard, “Contagious Pulsations,” 91. 82

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stories through his theatre, but also their language. According to Philip Ogundeji, “Nobody that we know of today has surpassed Duro Ladipo in the exportation of Nigerian indigenous drama to the outside world.”85 In his assessment, There is no doubt that Ladipo lived a life totally dedicated to the dramatic and theatrical arts in particular and to the Yoruba and African culture in general. His marks on the dramatic map of Nigeria no doubt remain indelible.86

In preserving Yorùbá culture and philosophy through the context of his productions, he expressed his understanding of the Yorùbá world and the need to keep it alive for future generations. He used his theatrical subjects in addressing the problems associated with the imperial governance of West Africa, their missionary education, and religious influences on the natural dynamics of the culture. He pioneered a postcolonial type of theatre that highlighted the importance of Yorùbá history and culture, and the role played by the imperial power in devaluing them through their missionary and religious education. In relation to the nature of Ladipo’s visual languages – in terms, that is, of the iconographical importance of his theatre (stage properties, costumes, hand props), we are also presented with some of the narratives of the Yorùbá matrix in unspoken dialogue. This is by virtue of the implications of their semiotic interpretation as symbolic representations of the historical, mythological, socio-political, and metaphysical narratives of the Yorùbá. In bringing to light the factors responsible for Ladipo’s theatrical explorations, we have seen how his background, his experiences, and the nature of his personality contributed to his creative inspiration. His determination to use his creative talents was responsible for his growth and theatrical development; he explored the Yorùbá oral tradition and conducted research into Ifa, Yorùbá history, and Yorùbá metaphysics in order to convey them through his powerful dramaturgy.

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Philip Adedotun Ogundeji, “The Contributions of Duro Ladipo to Nigerian Drama and Theatre,” in Duro’Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 66. 86 Ogundeji, “The Contributions of Duro Ladipo,” 66–67.

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WORKS CITED Abimbola, Wande. Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa: Apa Kin-in-ni (Ibadan: Ibadan U P , 2006). Adedeji, J.A. “Alarinjo: The Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre,” in Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, ed. Yemi Ogunbiyi (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981): 221–47. Akinjogbin, I.A. Milestones and Social Systems in Yoruba History and Culture (Ibadan: Olu-Akin, 2002). Beier, Ulli, ed. The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994). Dore, Henry. The Creative Person: Duro Ladipo. Lagos: National Education Network (N E T ) Film Unit, 1970. Audiovisual documentary. Elebuibon, Yemi. Interview with the author, O‹ogbo, 2007. The Encyclopedia of Ancient Myths and Culture (Eagle Editions. Royston: Quantum, 2003). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean– Paul Sartre (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. 1965; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Fatomilola, Peter. Interview with Author, Ilé-IfÁ, 2007. Garrett, Bob. “Many Dimensioned Nigerian Troupe,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 85–86. Jeyifo, Biodun. The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1984). Johnson, Rev. S. “Origin and Early History,” in The History of the Yorubas, ed. Dr. O. Johnson (Lagos: C S S , 1921). Ladipo, Duro. Ÿba Kò So (Ibadan: Macmillan Nigeria, 1970). ——. Three Yoruba Plays: Ÿba Kò So, Ÿba Waja, Ÿba Moro by Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (English Adaptations; Ibadan: Mbari, 1964). Neimark, Philip John. The Way of the Orisa: Empowering Your Life Through the Ancient African Religion of Ifa (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). Obafemi, Olu. Contemporary Nigerian Theatre: Cultural Heritage and Social Vision (Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 1996). Ogunbiyi, Yemi, ed. Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book (Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981). Ogundeji, Philip Adedotun. “The Contributions of Duro Ladipo to Nigerian Drama and Theatre,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 59–68. Ogundele, Wole. Omoluabi: Ulli Beier, Yoruba Society and Culture (Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2003).

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Olusola, Segun. “Ijuba: Words on the Marble; ‘The Stage was his Home’,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 37–41. Osofisan, Femi. “Sleep Softly Big Brother,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 55–58. Oyelami, Muraina. “My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre,” in The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994): 81–91. Raji-Oyelade, Remi, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo, ed. Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003). Richards, David. “Contagious Pulsations,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 90–91. Rotimi, Ola. The Gods Are Not to Blame (Ibadan: Oxford U P , 1971). Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Methuen, 1975). ——. Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1976. ——. “Rites of the Theatre,” in The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994): 73–74. Speed, Francis, & Ulli Beier. New Images: Art in a Changing Society (Lagos: National Education Network (N E T ) film Unit, 1964). Audiovisual documentary. Willis, Thomas. “Nigerians Blend Skill with Power,” in Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 2003): 84–85. Woff, Richard. Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses (London: British Museum, 2003).

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Critical Responses The Evolution of the Theatre Critic in South Africa

T EMPLE H AUPTFLEISCH

[The Theatre . . . ] was opened for the first time a few days ago – a very pretty one indeed. We felt ourselves obliged to go and to pay a sum for our box, else we should have been call’d stingy and ill-humoured. The scenes were well done, some of them by young Cockburn. [. . . ] It opened with an address to Apollo, spoken by Dr Somers, and wrote by Mrs Somers. It was too fine for anyone to understand it, and seem’d rather an index to pretty learning than to any conversation which Apollo could have liked to listen to – however the scene was good and all was new. The piece was a dull one, the first part of Henry the 4th. The Doctor thought he shone in Falstaff, we did not agree with him. – Lady Anne Barnard, Cape Town, 1801

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considered by many to be the first formal and extant ‘review’ in South African theatre, Lady Anne Barnard, the influential socialite and hostess of Cape Town society, described her (reluctant) attendance of the opening performance in the newly built African Theatre at the start of the nineteenth century. Today she might have used an internet blog and written something much less circumspect. N HER DIARY ENTRY,

I would like to thank Robert Greig for his valuable advice, many subtle suggestions, and editorial insight when editing this article for me. The essay is based on a paper read at a conference of the International Association of Theatre Critics (I A T C ) in Toronto. The paper was subsequently published in the I A T C ’s online journal Critical Stages (www.criticalstages.org) under the title “Lady Anne’s Blog: Some Initial Thoughts on the Evolution of Theatrical Commentary in South Africa” (2010). This adapted and expanded version is published with the permission of the editors of Critical Stages.

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So much of what one talks about in the field of the humanities, and specifically so in arts criticism, is highly dependent on its use in a particular context and epoch. For example, the very notions of drama and theatre – even ideas about performance (and indeed criticism and scholarship) – are at best slippery in post-apartheid South Africa and the surrounding regions. Over the course of the first three hundred years after the arrival of the first Europeans on these shores in the seventeenth century, a particular mind-set about the new continent was imported, imposed, and entrenched. One effect was to overshadow and devalue local traditions and cultural practices. Only during the twentieth century, and more particularly its second half, were indigenous cultural expressions and practices, and the values underlying them, slowly recognized. Then writings about them became more than marginal commentaries on what appeared to be radical, oppositional, esoteric, or possibly even eccentric local practices. Today, of course, indigenous forms have become a much more serious area of study and contemplation and, for most of us today, experimentation and exploration with the forgotten forms and traditions are major driving forces in the arts. Yet, the process of re-interpreting the original histories has only begun and obviously still has far to go, as formerly hidden aspects of the history are unearthed, re-evaluated and integrated into the new thinking. This change has naturally been heavily influenced by the arrival of a spate of new paradigms for thinking about African and South African history in itself, especially during the transitional period (1987–94).1 A necessary, broader, and more flexible concept of theatre would include the products of an oral/kinetic or ‘performance’ culture, as David Coplan so aptly termed it.2 Today we tend to accept that theatre history, particularly in non-Western contexts, needs to be a study of the history of performance, rather than a literary study of (printed) texts – and this is markedly the case with contemporary theatre in Southern Africa. However, colonial thinking had long favoured a focus on the text, thus tending to exclude a comprehensive world of theatre, performance, and “theatrical playing”3 in the region. 1

See, for example, the writings of V.Y. Mudimbe (The Invention of Africa, 1988, and The Idea of Africa, 1994, among others). 2 David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg: Ravan & London: Longman, 1985). 3 Willmar Sauter, “Festivals as Theatrical Events: Building Theories,” in Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, ed. Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith

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Like so much of the early history of mankind, the history of this period in Southern Africa is still extremely tentative, and based on much theorizing and speculation. This also applies to ideas about the social life of indigenous communities and the function of art within them, which no doubt were as varied as the social, economic, and political conditions. There are certain indications, however, of widespread material culture in the region, notably represented by San rock art, and the pottery, beadwork, and other artifacts of the Nguni, Sotho, and other peoples. The salient point is that creative tendencies seem to have been integrated into communal life, and not separate entities with their own discrete existence beyond their communal function. Also, following the argument of Valentine Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa,4 one has to bear in mind that none of this history is static; it is as changing, as evolutionary, as open to the impact of social, cultural, economic, and political pressures as any period to follow, as any period about which we have more information. So, although one may speak of general tendencies, there must have been vast and constantly shifting differences between forms, themes, occasions, and the like. While there are many who may believe that indigenous practices changed as a result of European settlement, and that the reverse traffic is more recent – post-1994 in the eyes of some – I have come to believe that this is a slightly parochial point of view, blinkered precisely by the kind of thinking discussed here. In the 1960s, Guy Butler had already remarked: “The English are being Afrikanerized, the Afrikaners Anglicized, Africans Westernized and the whole lot Africanized.”5 Actually, the evolution of the Afrikaans language and Cape cuisine alone are testimony to a far more pervasive and interactive hybridization taking place, from the very first contacts between Africans and Europeans. And I certainly believe it happened in performance as well. It was simply not noticed, that’s all.

Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter & Henri Schoenmakers (Themes in Theatre: Collective Approaches to Theatre and Performance 3; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 17–25. 4 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988). 5 Guy Butler said this at a conference 1960 – and quoted himself in his essay “ ‘ On Being Present Where You Are’: Some Observations on South African Poetry 1930– 1960,” in Poetry South Africa: Selected Papers from Poetry ’74 (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1975): 82.

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But the more important factor, from a Western point of view, is that we are dealing with a set of oral cultures, where no orthography or any tradition of written history existed. We know less about the performance art in this period than about any other form, quite simply because of the ephemeral nature of the theatre as form and because no demonstrable examples have survived unmediated. Nor are there documented (written) critical responses available. Nevertheless, the few fragments we do have, plus the later records provided by incidental travellers and scribes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, do allow certain deductions concerning the kind of performance activities which existed in these societies – if not their origins, their functions, and/ or their meaning in specific historic societies. The oldest-known performances in the region are the shamanistic dances among the San, recorded in certain San rock-art paintings – some of them up to 25,000 years old, some dating back to the nineteenth century. Remnants of these dances still occur today in the Kalahari among the descendants of the San. In a similar vein, the arrival of the immigrants moving down from the north of Africa in pre-colonial times, who later crystallized out as the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and other peoples, brought a rich heritage of social, religious, and military performance and ritual to the region. These performance events, including wedding ceremonies, initiation ceremonies, harvest festivals, and the like, informed the daily lives of these peoples and seem to have been communal actions of a purposeful nature and participative in format, very formally structured and containing a strong mimetic content. Remarkable to us today is the sheer scale on which some of these events took place, involving large groups of dancers and thousands of spectators, and stretching over a period of days.6 While there is strong evidence that the performances themselves, being of a purposeful nature and participative in format, often offering social, cultural, ethical, and political comment, there is little evidence that there was ever a structured system of critical commentary on performances. The participative work, of course, was not ‘seen’ by outsiders, hence not ‘criticized’ and thus 6

Vast as this history is, the fact is we know precious little about it compared to what we know of, say, Afrikaans theatre of the 1920s–1940s or the British touring companies of the 1860s–90s. And one reason is the existence of a history of critical writing. The other is our attitudes about the Other or foreign cultural uses and products. See, for example, Peter Larlham, Black Theater, Dance, and Ritual in South Africa (Ann Arbor M I : U M I Research, 1985), and Coplan, In Township Tonight!.

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not recorded in any way. Also, while one has little doubt that performers and performances needed and received comment, even where there was an audience present, the feedback would have been informal, oral or gestural, one-on-one perhaps – and certainly not recorded for posterity. From the foregoing it is clear that it really only becomes possible to discuss critical commentary in the region when we reach the time of European settlement and the known history of written criticism, about which there have been substantially more records. While the odd descriptions appeared earlier, the formal arrival of critical comment was in the 1800s, when newspapers began to appear in Grahamstown and Cape Town, and the first formal theatre was being built. Early newspapers include Fairbairn and Pringle’s South African Journal (1824), the New Organ (1826), and the South African Commercial Advertiser, and they certainly contained commentary on the arts. However, as mentioned above, the popular version is that the first critic was Anne Barnard, wife of the colonial secretary at the Cape of Good Hope, who, interestingly enough, commented in her diaries on the performances of the soldier–amateurs of the garrison, but also on the Dutch amateurs of the town. And it was thus natural that she would be one of the first to comment on theatre in Cape Town’s new theatre. However, the first well-known critic in the formal sense was a British immigrant, William Layton Sammons (1801–82), an author, journalist, columnist, and editor best known by his nom de plume, Sam Sly. His weekly review – Sam Sly’s African Journal – was founded to promote culture and entertainment in general in the Cape. Gradually, as the various mining towns (Kimberley and Johannesburg in particular) and ports (Port Elizabeth and Durban) developed, this form of journalism and accompanying critical practice spread to all the major metropolitan centres. Some examples of early reviews tended to be little more than notices and announcements (i.e. advertising and reports) or commentary on social events (gossip or ‘news’, including comment on audiences), but by the 1860s more substantive reviews (comments about technical and theatrical matters, such as texts, performers, and productions themselves) began to appear and gradually became more frequent, more incisive, and more influential. These reviews also often contained some kind of evaluation of the experience. This was not yet what we would consider formal criticism today (i.e. in-depth discussion of the merits of play, performance, and so on, with reference to a wider cultural, political, and social sphere), but the theatre reviewer had arrived, and people like Peter Plymmer, Frederick York St. Leger, and later Vere Sent were feared for their attacks on poor acting and

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production values, and their opinions were respected. As can be gathered, the basic format and philosophy behind the writing was borrowed directly from British practice and the colonial versions thereof and was to last well into the first half of the twentieth century. The evolution from report to review accompanied the enormous increase in theatrical activity as well, as more and more companies and artistes – travelling through the various British colonies – visited the country, many settling down here. Among them were strong personalities from England and Australia, such as Sefton Parry (1857–62), Disney Roebuck (1873–85), the Wheeler brothers (Ben and Frank, 1886–1910), Luscombe Searelle (1887–96), the Holloway Company (1886–99), and particularly Leonard Rayne (1905–25). By the 1920s, these twin forces meant that there were increasing numbers of critics of substance, for by now a fully fledged professional theatre system had evolved in English, dominated by actor–directors such as Rayne and the actor–writer Stephen Black, while the newspaper business also flourished. The influences in this case were interesting – they were, as indicated above, largely based on the British model brought to the country through the British education system, as well as the many British journalists who over the years settled in South Africa, to work with South African papers – including Thomas William Mackenzie (The Friend in Bloemfontein), Hedley A. Chilvers, and Joseph Langley Levy (Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 1910–40). In the nineteenth century, however, another tradition had also been surfacing among the descendants of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch settlers. Regular debating and cultural clubs (‘Rederykerskamers’), the basis of a performance tradition, were slowly evolving in Dutch/Afrikaans society. In contrast to the primarily entertainment objectives of the Englishlanguage theatre and media, growing Afrikaans cultural nationalism was establishing a literary and cultural context for the new, emerging language of Afrikaans. This meant that more rigorous demands of cultural purpose were being placed on the arts and literature. Thus, part of the conscious drive to promote the cause of Afrikaans and Afrikaner nationalism – utilizing the educational system and the emergence of a powerful press and publishing industry – was also a desire to establish an indigenous cultural, literary, and theatrical tradition, one devoted to the nationalist cause. As far as theatre is concerned, the last-mentioned aim initially came into being via the widespread amateur movement, a direct descendant of the earlier Dutch organizations, with more and more farces and melodramas being written for performance by schools and societies. But there was also a more

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serious side to the movement, which slowly evolved in educational centres such as Stellenbosch, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria, spearheaded – not always effectively – by the literary heavyweights of the language struggle, such as the novelist D.F. Malherbe and the poet Eugene Marais. However, an even more significant thrust towards a full-fledged Afrikaans theatre came with the arrival in South Africa of a number of Dutch and Flemish performers, in particular a superb Dutch actor–manager named Paul de Groot, who brought professionalism and in-service training in Afrikaans to a host of versatile and creative performers. In 1925, the year Afrikaans was formally declared an official language of the country, De Groot himself went on to found the first professional Afrikaans theatre company, with two energetic amateurs, Hendrik and Mathilde Hanekom, following suit and taking to the road with a number of farces they wrote themselves. This coincided with the emergence of a second generation of playwrights, much more serious individuals who sought to emulate the European theatre and actually set the tone and style of Afrikaans theatre for the next three decades or more. In this context, we encounter the first Afrikaans critics of note and become particularly aware of two dominant strains in theatre reviewing and criticism that would dominate a large part of the mid-century: the pragmatic, journalistic writing in English newspapers, on the one hand, and the international, often more erudite writing by better-educated cultural figures in Afrikaans newspapers, on the other. Unlike their English-speaking counterparts, who did not come from an intellectual tradition (few had tertiary education till the 1970s), a number of the Dutch (and, later, Afrikaans) critics were universitytrained individuals who had gone to Holland and Germany for their postgraduate work, usually in philology, philosophy, or literature. As a result, they tended to be influenced by a more Germanic tradition, as well as a European view of theatre and the arts, and adopted a far more intellectual approach to their craft. This became particularly noticeable in the reviews of the first half of the twentieth century, when the Afrikaans community was trying to establish a formal literature and artistic identity, as noted above. A good case in point was one of the most prominent of later critics and arts editors, W.E.G. Louw, who claimed to have seen over a thousand European performances during his frequent visits to the Continent, and he would draw on those experiences when writing about South African plays. Similarly erudite critics of the time included Frederik Rompel, F.E.J. Malherbe, Geoff Cronje, Ignatius Mocke, H.A. Mulder, E.C. Pienaar, and A.M. van Schoor. They became the harbingers of the new language, its literature, and its asso-

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ciated performances – thus helping to shape and promote Afrikaans as a fullfledged cultural medium. And this tradition would remain for a very long time, for, once the drama departments were established in the 1960s and the formal training in what came to be known as ‘theatre studies’ began, a number of similarly trained people would become the leading figures, entrenching this tradition till late in the 1970s. It is from these academic sources that, increasingly, the more prominent English-speaking critics would also come. Thus, it appears that the Afrikaans approach even to the evolving field of ‘theatre studies’ included from the very start a strong interest in the role of the text-focused critic, researcher, and historian – perhaps because the departments were largely founded and/or partly run by academics or journalists rather than practitioners, and these were people who came from the Dutch/Belgian/German world of formal drama study. The most influential of these were Geoff Cronje, F.C.L. Bosman at the University of Pretoria (with the leading actress and director Anna Neethling–Pohl as the practical voice), the playwright Gerhard Beukes and the critic Louw Odendaal at the University of the Orange Free State (Bloemfontein), and Fred Le Roux, following the Belgian actor–director Fred Engelen as head at the University of Stellenbosch. However, the 1930s also saw the first stirrings of another cultural awakening, a formal theatre interest among the various black communities in urban areas – under the influence of missionary schools and the University of Fort Hare – and the significant appearance of the writer, practitioner, and teacher H.I.E. Dhlomo. Others writing at the time include W. Mbali and Walter Nhlapo (both of whom worked for the Bantu World, 1930s–40s). However, the eurocentric training supplied by the missionary schools and the University College at Fort Hare or the University of South Africa remained largely text-bound, as indeed it did at most other (‘white’) institutions till the mid-1970s. And, more alarmingly, for much of the century ‘criticism’ remained tied to the study of the nine indigenous African (Bantu) languages and was therefore immensely literary in approach (analysis of plot, characters, and so on, and moral issues in the plays) – again premised on the British or European model. Unfortunately, the legacy of this approach is still immensely powerful when one looks at theses and critical writings on African theatre texts – not only in South Africa, but across the continent of Africa. By the 1950s, this mix of influences was well entrenched, but was still largely European in style, although now increasingly affected by the exciting ‘new journalism’ from the U S A and the winds of political and cultural

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change sweeping though Africa. It is from a mix of these factors that some of the more powerful critics, writing for the daily and weekly newspapers, now emerged. These writers not only had substantial space and influence, but increasingly had academic training and something to write about in the flourishing professional and state-funded theatre of the country. They wrote in either English or Afrikaans (or, in some cases, both languages) and at times with great authority and impact. Names such as Oliver Walker, Phyllis Konya, W.E.G. Louw, Merwe Scholtz, Lewis Sowden, Percy Baneshik, and Terry Herbst soon became familiar and were considered formidable in arts circles. By the 1960s, a number of younger, even more politicized, critics would join them – including André P. Brink, Wilhelm Grütter, Philippa Breytenbach, Owen Williams, Johan van Rooyen, Michael Callenborne, Fiona Chisolm, Raeford Daniel, Michael Venables, William Pretorius, Derek Wilson, Cas van Rensburg, and Rykie van Reenen. By and large, these were professional critics, who not only responded to the arts, but in many ways shaped and influenced their direction. However, again there is possibly a rather important distinction to be made: In the golden years of the printed media critics in the U K , the U S A and Europe tended to be seen as ‘professional’, in that writing criticism was their full-time occupation; few of them were actually full-time newspaper employees. In South Africa, we only had a few such examples, some Afrikaans artists/critics (such as W.E.G. Louw and André P. Brink) perhaps falling into this category of professionals. Most of the other critics, however, were full-time professional journalists, entertainment reporters, and interviewers, covering the generality of the arts and entertainment, as well as writing reviews. They multitasked, with reviewing being only one of those tasks. Their ‘professionalism’ thus lay not so much in the nature of their employment as in the rigour they brought to their reviewing practice. It was at this time that a new brand of black journalism began to make its appearance. Often termed the Drum-magazine generation (after the most famous of the new magazines to appear), these young writers and activists found a vibrant and dangerous world to report on in the so-called ‘freehold’ areas of Sophiatown and District Six, places where all races could still mix and black citizens could own urban property, and in the multitude of performances, poetry readings, and theatrical events occurring there. Writers such as Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Nathaniel (Nat) Nasaka, William (Bloke) Modisane, Arthur Maimane, Bob Leshoai, Elliot Makhaya, Joseph Latakgomo, Aggrey Klaaste, T. Leshoai, Victor Metsoamere, and Sipho Sepamla

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began with journals such as Drum and later S’ketsh, and then moved on – some into exile, some on to the daily and weekly papers, like the Ilanga Lase Natal, the Post, the Sunday Post, World, Weekend World, and The Sowetan – even the Rand Daily Mail and the Weekly Mail – writing about township culture and the cultural struggle. Some went on to become significant literary and academic figures; others faded away or moved elsewhere. But their influence on the shape of the arts in the long run was enormous. What was intriguing were their attempts to create their own style, strongly based on American New-Journalistic principles, but also a little more aware of the African performance traditions that gradually invaded and have come to dominate theatre performances, particularly musical and dance works. With them, far more that with the formal (white) critics of the commercial newspapers and media, art truly became a weapon in the ongoing struggle for freedom and recognition. At the same time, many artists were beginning to reject the aesthetic considerations of Western theatre, in favour of a much less ‘finished’ and much more visceral form of confrontational theatre of immediate response. Somehow, out of this mix of cultural traditions would come what some may call the ‘pre-postcolonial’ theatre critic – someone initially schooled by the writers of the heyday of big professional theatre companies (1960–80), but also immersed in the day-to-day rough-and tumble Realpolitik of apartheid/anti-apartheid. Such critics were well equipped and able to respond to the major wave of experimentation and energy that washed over the country in the 1970s and early 1980s. The fact is that the appearance of the so-called ‘alternative’ (political) theatre spaces and processes (the Space Theatre, the Market Theatre) and the concomitant emergence of a substantive body of work by black playwrights, directors, and performers – as well as the many workshopped plays making their way into the theatres – left many of the older critics dumbfounded and floundering. With the immense range of styles, traditions, and forms on offer – drawing on many traditions, including 1960s experimental workshop processes and a variety of African performance forms – they at times found that their ‘traditional’ training was totally inappropriate for dealing with works such as We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, The Island, Woza Albert!, The Hungry Earth, and Sophiatown. Indeed, there was a built-in antipathy to the new work among many established critics. For example, Robert Greig recalls its being referred to by a prominent editor as “junior” theatre (an adjective that was apparently even applied to the first

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work done by Athol Fugard), and few dared to travel into Soweto and other areas to review the work.7 What made the situation worse in many ways for the traditionally trained critic was the surprising impact the cultural boycott (instituted in 1966) would have on the way the arts would develop in the country. One of the most positive effects of the boycott was that it (inadvertently) enforced a focus on local writing and the production of local plays – thus, ironically, liberating many of the new (English) writers and performers from competition with renowned international writers and the pressure to conform to dramatic models evolved in Europe and America. This in turn saw an increasing number of universitytrained actors, directors, and theatre writers emerging from the ‘liberal’ antiapartheid atmosphere of the 1970s, with a growing sense that the state arts councils were tainted. This then led to the establishment of the many alternative theatres where – thanks to the work of Fugard, Simon, and Mshengu in the 1970s – the notion of workshop theatre and experimental plays became central to, even emblematic of, so-called ‘struggle theatre’. And, as we now know, from these theatres would gradually emerge a number of wholly new, specifically South African theatrical forms and conventions, forms that – as I have mentioned – would challenge and stretch the new critics in a multitude of ways over the next few decades. By the 1980s, the competent critic found that s/he was again being challenged by a new phenomenon: the arts festival. The arrival of the Grahamstown Festival (National Arts Festival) in 1976, Kampustoneel (Campus Theatre) in 1981, and a rash of later festivals from 1990 onwards (notably a string of Afrikaans-language festivals in Oudtshoorn, Stellenbosch, Bloemfontein, Potchefstroom, and Cape Town) tested even more the critic’s ability to adapt to the new. There was just so much, of such varying and alarmingly diverse quality and style, on offer, it left one dizzy. It is this festival circuit that became the real training ground (and challenge) to the most outstanding critics of the alarmingly unfocused yet exciting pre- and post-apartheid periods (around 1984–98). Among them are such outstanding individuals as Adrienne Sichel, John Mitshikiza, Kaizer Ngwenya, Barry Ronge, Barry Hough, Paul Boekkooi, Robert Greig, and Gabriel Bothma, writers able to ‘read’ the radical new local work in performance and respond to it as South Africans. 7

E-mail correspondence with Temple Hauptfleisch, Stellenbosch, 16 February

2010.

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By the late 1990s, theatre and performance in South Africa was clearly part of a totally altered South African cultural landscape, one in which forty or more arts festivals were generally accepted as constituting the core of the theatre season, and the theatre system as a whole had not only moved to contemplate many new thematic issues but had also evolved a vast kaleidoscope of creative performance styles, spaces, and techniques. As a result, the new millenium became of necessity the domain of a new generation of professional critics, a category of individuals not only schooled in the new and evolving South African theatrical system but also equipped with a much greater awareness of, and willingness to discuss, the entire multicultural and multi-lingual context than ever before; writing and evaluating work across the old divisive lines of racial and cultural separation and conflict. In some cases, it may be said that we are now possibly talking about the first generation of truly postcolonial critics in South Africa. These, then, are some of the origins and key influences in critical debate now. However, it may be important to close by making a few comments about the technical aspects of the system, for these, too, have played a dominant role in shaping the kind of critic we have today. For much of the twentieth century, South African criticism was primarily a media- and economydriven system, governed by the growing influence of newspapers and radio (and, to a lesser extent, and later, T V ), with limitations on space and time. Over the years there have been many attempts to try to have an alternative, more substantive, system of reviewing – for example, by founding arts journals or magazines (e.g., Helikon, Scenaria, Theatre SA, S’ketsh, Teaterforum, Critical Arts, the South African Theatre Journal). Few of these have actually been able to sustain any kind of longer-term review response to the industry or to place the substantial reviews they hoped. This is because (a) they were not financially viable (with a remarkable exception in Julius Eichbaum’s Scenaria, funded out of his own pocket), (b) South African runs of plays are too short (on average a week or two) to have the luxury of time that someone writing in London, New York, or Paris might have, and (c) most critics are really general journalists or part-timers filling in as reviewers. Nevertheless, some of these reviews did offer us an alternative conspectus of less formal work in the townships and banned venues, notably in journals such as Drum Magazine and S’ketsh. Today (post–2000), this situation has become far worse, since there is now no real focus or system to theatre and performance anymore – it is largely driven by a relentless circuit of festivals (many of them with anything but

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cultural aims) and large-scale (imported and local) popular musicals and dance shows (Phantom of the Opera, Cats, The Lion King, Zulu, African Footprint, etc.). Some of the best critical writing in journals now tends to describe and analyse trends (e.g., about the nature of the festivals themselves as cultural events) rather than to review individual presentations, since this kind of summary review would have a better chance of publication (and does not necessarily even require in-depth knowledge of theatre). Thus, it appears the old English tradition of generalists, rather than critics, may be reasserting itself. There is perhaps some cause for concern amid this flood of work on offer, when one considers the kind of people who are now at times called upon to help out as additional reviewers, particularly for festival productions. The evolution of an almost overwhelming festival culture, and its need for instant ‘notices’, has thus led to the return of the amateur critic, the ‘public opinion poll’, and the student reviewer as solutions to the desperate need to respond to the enormous growth in number of performances (see festival newspapers such as CUE, Spat and Krit, as well as the many free newspapers, town and suburban newspapers, etc., which all have to respond to local work). An additional concern lately has been the advent of the digital media as a major force. For instance, the internet has made self-expression in public media generally available. Print media, the previous vehicles of informed opinion, have to compete more for advertising revenue and reflect advertisers’ target market – the young and affluent or potentially affluent. The ultimate effects of both have been to establish cyber-platforms for self-expression and to erode newspapers as sites for informed judgment. Theatre has tended to be recast as entertainment; the critical role replaced by entertaining readers. The theatre has been upstaged. Here and abroad, certain artistic genres no longer have space reserved for them in newspapers. Space formerly reserved for other genres – the fine arts or dance – has diminished. By eliminating the critic who, being a specialist, was costly to employ, newspapers have saved money and replaced critics with entertainment guides. This approach has the advantages of reducing newspapers’ overheads, rendering employees more easily replaceable, and assuring commercial advertisers that they have the advertisers’ interests at heart. This new development is certainly not all bad – the internet has much to offer as an ‘information highway’, and the blogs of certain more sophisticated theatre-goers and critics certainly offer entertaining and informative reading (if they are not swallowed up by the mass of uninformed writing produced and put out on the net in the same

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way). Fortunately, a number of more conscientious online publications (ArtsLink and LitNet, for example) have recently become indispensable for the serious theatre scholar and audience member. I think we will be debating these new developments for a while to come, for the digital revolution cannot be denied, yet I fear that, among the casualties of the sudden rush to embrace the digital revolution in its early stages, we may well find – for a while at least – those very qualities associated with criticism at its best: independence and informed dissent.8

WORKS CITED Butler, Guy. “ ‘ On Being Present Where You Are’: Some Observations on South African Poetry 1930–1960,” in Poetry South Africa: Selected Papers from Poetry ’74 (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1975): 81–96. Coplan, David B. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg: Ravan & London: Longman, 1985). Larlham, Peter. Black Theater, Dance, and Ritual in South Africa (Ann Arbor M I : U M I Research, 1985). Mudimbe, V.Y. The Idea of Africa (London: James Currey, 1994). ——. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988). Sauter, Willmar. “Festivals as Theatrical Events: Building Theories,” in Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, ed. Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith LevAladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter & Henri Schoenmakers (Themes in Theatre: Collective Approaches to Theatre and Performance 3; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007): 17–25.

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For this closing discussion of the impact of the digital media I am once more greatly indebted to comments made by Robert Greig (16 February 2010), as well as to some of the initial research undertaken by Hugo Theart for his M A thesis at the University of Stellenbosch.

“I want to dialogue” Chief Muraina Oyelami Talking O‹ogbo and Beyond

C HRISTINE M ATZKE

Suru baba iwa. Patience is the father of good character. – Yorùbá proverb As I lie on my bed and spread my bones for God to count… I say: There may be few of us left. Soon there may be none. But . . . the beautiful ones will continue to be born.1

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1988, U L L I B E I E R I N T R O D U C E D M U R A I N A O Y E L A M I by relating the Yorùbá concept of ori to his reading audience: the ‘head’, ‘spirit’, or ‘fate’ chosen by a person before coming into this life, and the individual’s responsibility to shape their own existence. There was general agreement, Beier writes, “that Muraina has a ‘good head,’ that he has chosen wisely.”2 Born in 1940 in Iragbiji in southwestern Nigeria, where he still lives today, Muraina Oyelami has excelled in many creative disciplines, and he has done so continuously for over five decades. Raised in an environment where he was simultaneously exposed to Yorùbá traditions and Islamic and Chris1

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Esiaba Irobi, “Elegy for Ezenwa–Ohaeto,” (7 July 2006), in Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The Legacy of Ezenwa-Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing, ed. Christine Matzke, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade & Geoffrey V. Davis (Matatu 33; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 34–36. 2 Ulli Beier, “Patience Is the Father of Good Character: The Artistic Career of Muraina Oyelami,” in Three Yoruba Artists (Bayreuth African Studies Series 12; Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 1988): 72.

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tian beliefs, which, it appears, engendered in him a very tolerant and pragmatic attitude towards life, Oyelami left a string of odd jobs when invited by Duro Ladipo to join his theatre company at the Mbari Mbayo Club, O‹ogbo, in the early 1960s. From there his artistic career took off, and it moved in many directions. Beginning as a musician and actor in the Ladipo troupe, he soon became a visual artist in the now famous Oshogbo School initiated by Ulli and Georgina Beier before following an invitation to teach music and theatre design at the University of IfÁ (today’s Obafemi Awolowo University) in the mid-1970s. Oyelami also performed traditional Yorùbá and fusion music all across the world (Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia); he had major group and individual exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the U K , and the U S A ; and he held various residencies in Europe and North America. His collaborations with other noted artists and scholars are too numerous to name, but they include work as composer and music director of the 1990 production of Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, U K , and a life-long connection to the pioneering academic and promoter of Nigerian (and Papua New Guinean) arts, Ulli Beier. In the early 1980s Oyelami rejoined Beier as guest professor at Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany, which had just been established as a research, documentation, and teaching centre for African cultures. In 1987, Oyelami opened his own heritage site, the Obatala Centre for Creative Arts, in his hometown, Iragbiji. The centre includes a museum and an art gallery and offers Yorùbá drumming and drum-making workshops to students from all over the world. In 1993, Muraina Oyelami was installed as Eesa (Chief) of Iragbiji. 3 Some twenty years later, in October 2013, Oyelami returned to Bayreuth as honoured guest of the international conference ‘From Mbari Mbayo Club to Iwalewahaus’.4 The conference was intended as both a retrospective of 3

Muraina Oyelami, ÀbÀfÁ: An Autobiography of Muraina Oyelami, ed. Ulli Beier from taped interviews with Muraina Oyelami (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1993), My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1982), “Obatala Centre,” http://www.oyelami.com/obatala.htm (accessed 11 November 2013), and “Welcome to the Site of Chief Muraina Oyelami,” http://murainaoyelami.com/index.html (accessed 11 November 2013). 4 Iwalewa-Haus is currently undergoing major changes, including the move to a new building in 2014. The different spelling, “Iwalewahaus,” indicates its new corporate identity, aimed at securing the significance of this unique institution for the future. See Chika Okeke-Agulu, “‘From Mbari Mbayo to Iwalewahaus’ Conference,” Ofodunka:

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Iwalewa-Haus up to now, and a projection of its transformation once relocation to a different, more prominent, building is completed in 2014. It was also an event to honour the legacy of Ulli Beier, who had died in 2011 aged eighty-eight. After his lecture on “Ulli – the Visionary,” Chief Oyelami agreed to talk to me about his own life and work. The following conversation took place on the evening of 20 October 2013, in Bayreuth, shortly before delegates were taken for dinner. I have transcribed the interview verbatim, with very little editorial intervention, to convey the pulse and effervescence of Oyelami’s replies. ™ C H R I S T I N E M A T Z K E : Thank you very much for granting me this interview, Chief Muraina. It is a very rare opportunity to speak to such a multitalented and widely experienced artist as you are. It would indeed be difficult to summarize your creative output, because you have worked as an actor, as a director, as a musician, and as a music teacher up to university level. You’ve also been a painter and visual artist. Is there a particular form of art you feel most drawn to? Or have they all been equally important at certain stages of your life? M U R A I N A O Y E L A M I : Thank you very much. I look at all of these arts as being one. I am not an expert in any of these areas. Why? Probably because my father, who died several years ago, was never an expert. He was a farmer. He can weave baskets, and he also knows how to weave other crafts, as well as being a good hunter. You see, in that kind of situation, if you are gifted, you are gifted. So I cannot say I prefer this artform to that. Of course, one of the areas [the visual arts] could be a bit more personal; you can do it all by yourself. This is unlike the performing arts, which are such a composite form of art. You need other people around too! Maybe, because of that, you want to Art.Life.Politics, http://chikaokeke-agulu.blogspot.de/2013/10/from-mbari-mbayo-toiwalewahaus.html (accessed 13 November 2013); cf. Iwalewa-Haus, “Iwalewa-Haus Archive Laboratory Utopia,” http://www.iwalewa.uni-bayreuth.de/en/index.html (accessed 11 November 2013). For the Mbari Mbayo Club, see New Images: Art in a Changing Society, Oshogbo, Western Nigeria, dir. Francis Speed & Ulli Beier (University of Ibadan, Nigeria, 1964), and Peter Probst, Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2011), esp. ch. 2 (32–56).

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say I am more at home with my visual arts. But I have done a lot of theatrical work. That was the time when I didn’t have so much responsibility. As you know, I am a chief; I hold a traditional title. Many people do not know the meaning of being a chief. It means you are committed to a community! Nowadays, unlike in the past when I travelled quite a lot, I like doing experimental music with different groups. If you want, you can call it World Music. I use my traditional instruments; I’ve performed, or maybe ‘dialogued’, with Indian percussionists, German jazz groups, and Australian didgeridoo players, just to mention a few. I find it very interesting. I don’t just play dance music. Back home, I am much more interested in traditional music, most especially the Yorùbá dùndún and bàtá traditions. I have done works on these two traditions. I’ve also published works on them. CM: Yes, I’ve got one of your publications with me: Yorùbá Bàtá Music: A New Notation with Basic Exercises and Ensemble Pieces.5 MO: I want to say thanks to Ulli Beier for these publications. Ulli could see things before you even realize it yourself. I was not going to write a book, but I had these challenges when I was teaching at the University of IfÁ, now Obafemi Awolowo University. I was confronted by these Yorùbá students who had never touched any Yorùbá instrument in their lives! I had Korean students, I had Igbo students, I had people from all over, but none of them knew the intricacies of this music. And I had no source book to fall back upon. At first I engaged a demonstrator to be able to explain to them while he was playing, but it wasn’t enough. So I developed what came to be known as Yorùbá music notation, which is 100% original from me. I never looked at any other book. I gave the scripts . . . I started with dùndún – it is not as detailed as bàtá – so I started off with dùndún, with Ulli’s encouragement. Ulli saw that I could do this. So he helped me by raising funds for me to come over here to Bayreuth and lock myself up and concentrate. That’s why I was able to publish this, and obviously it was published by Iwalewa. No commercial publisher was interested. If they think it is not commercially viable, they don’t want it. But it is for education. Few libraries have them today. That is about that. My earliest time was in the theatre. 5

Yorùbá Bàtá Music: A New Notation with Basic Exercises and Ensemble Pieces (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1991). Oyelami’s first publication on Yoruba drumming was Yoruba Dundun Music: A New Notation with Basic Exercises and Five Yoruba Drum Repertoires (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1989).

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CM: In your autobiography, ÀbÀfÁ (1993), you say that it was really through the theatre, through watching what was happening at the Mbari Mbayo Club in O‹ogbo, that you got first drawn into theatre, and then into all the other arts. MO: Exactly! CM: Could you please share some details? MO: Yeah! All along, even before the Mbari Mbayo Club was established, right at the school level, I was into music – inside and outside the school. In my hometown of Iragbiji, I used to play with local orchestras. I did not just play with one orchestra. They hired me to come and perform at traditional Yorùbá wedding ceremonies. I remember vividly that we had groups, which were called . . . funny names: Evanite Orchestra, High Glory Orchestra, New Jersey Orchestra! I didn’t know how they got these names, but these were names of the orchestras that were very popular in my hometown as of that time. I performed with all of them at different times. At that time, I also made pictures for local barbers, I was drawing signboards. And in the school, I was the bandmaster of the school. So, you can see that it didn’t just happen. When I moved from my hometown, which is about a twenty-minute drive from O‹ogbo, I did all kinds of odd jobs. When Mbari Mbayo was established – even before it was established – I was really interested in going to movies. There was this Ajax Cinema; I often go there. There was a particular film – you know, all these films were 99.9% Indian films [laughs]. It got to a point where I fell in love with one of the acting techniques of one of these Indians, Kamran; he played the lead role in Captain India [1960]. I adopted that name. My friends, up to this day, still remember me as ‘Kamran’. Some people say ‘Kamaran’ [laughs]. So with this background, I was working as a fuel attendant, right adjacent to the club that would be turned into Mbari Mbayo. So, when Mbari Mbayo was established, when they started the biblical story plays, I will be the first person to join. It was at the very beginning of the theatre. I was always the first to come, because I was interested. So one evening Duro Ladipo came up to me and said, “Why don’t you come and be part of this?” And this is how I left my ‘lucrative’ job as a petrol attendant for the theatre. The joy was that you were simply able to do this. There was no gain. For you to be able to be one of the theatre people doing it was the greatest gain of all. But I was more of a musician in the theatre than an actor.

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CM: I could see that in Ÿba Kò So,6 for example, you were part of the orchestra. MO: Yes, I was playing the supporting part on bàtá, the omele abo part. In other plays I play other instruments, drums, but in Moremi I played the lead role of the Igbo king. There was also television soap, if you like. CM: In your autobiography you mentioned that you were never given a script for these plays, but that you were given the part and then you improvised around it. You created the character yourself during the rehearsal process. MO: Yes, we created the character. CM: Can you explain it a bit in detail? MO: This happened not with major plays, such as Ÿba Kò So, where we make use of chants in Yorùbá, and those have a metric form. But with the moral plays – we had to do a play almost every week for television. There was never enough time to memorize lines. It was a challenge to the artists! We were told you can do this part, for example ‘a good man’. You don’t want to ask your boss how to play a good man on stage! Think of what is good about a good man. If you have to think about the role of a bad man you think of what makes him bad. So you make it up, you create your character. We had rehearsals, though. That’s when Duro’s master-touch came in. There was guidance here and there. CM: I knew that Duro Ladipo had done work for television, but in your autobiography you describe it as the major part of the work at one point. You created more plays for the television than you created for the stage. MO: That is true. Being a new station – it was the first television station in Africa. It was called W N T V , Western Nigerian Television. When they got to know about Duro, they gave him a contract to produce works. And later on we were also involved in producing for the radio station. Duro was busy. Every day we rehearse. If we are not rehearsing for television, we are rehearsing for radio. This period was really big. It was a very hectic period for Duro Ladipo, but he loved doing it. We, on our part, we also enjoyed it! 6

See Duro Ladipo, Ÿba Kò So (The King Did Not Hang): Opera by Duro Ladipo, transcribed & tr. R.G. Armstrong, Robert L. Awujoola & Val Olayemi, from a tape recording by R. Curt Wittig (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1972).

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CM: This is fascinating, because most of the critical material I’ve read about the Duro Ladipo theatre is on the big stage productions, Ÿba Kò So or Moremi. One needs more research on his television work.7 MO: Yes! Ÿba Kò So came later than the television work, also Ÿba Waja, Ÿba Moro. These play formed a trilogy, three works based on the history of one town, Òjó. The other big production, Moremi, was also historical, but it was based on IfÁ. That one also came later. The very last one that became popular, too, was Eda. It was also called Everyman. It was an adaptation of a play written by an Austrian. . . . CM: Hugo von Hofmannsthal. MO: Jedermann. CM: Yes. You can watch scenes from Eda on the 1964 film New Images by Ulli Beier [and Frank Speed], which was playing throughout the conference. MO: Duro was open to new ideas, and that’s why, I guess, he got on so well with Ulli Beier. For him to have succeeded with the Œango play, Ÿba Kò So – it wouldn’t have been possible if not for the fact that he believed so much in suggestions made to him by Ulli Beier. CM: One of the aspects of your talk that you gave at the conference was Ulli Beier’s association with local theatre groups and writers of the Mbari Mbayo Club, particularly with the Duro Ladipo troupe. It seems to me that this link between Beier and the Duro Ladipo theatre needs to be explored much more. I was not aware of this strong collaboration until recently. MO: Oh, yes. Come to think of it, if you go into the history of how Mbari Mbayo came into being you will realize that Ulli Beier travelled round, organizing extramural classes for pupils and teachers, secondary-school teachers. Each time he came to O‹ogbo, he will stop by. That Mbari Mbayo Club was formerly known as the ‘Popular Bar’. Ulli somehow liked Duro Ladipo. They talked mostly about performances. Before they met, Duro Ladipo was already involved in composing and performing biblical plays. So, when these two, Ulli and Duro, got together and got closer – I was not there, but later on I 7

For an initial record, see Segun Olusola & Ulli Beier, “Duro Ladipo and Television: A Conversation between Segun Olusola and Ulli Beier,” in The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994): 75–80.

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could put these things together and come to a conclusion that it was Ulli who advised him, who suggested to him to do historical plays. The Duro Ladipo style was not all that different from Ogunde style, but the use of trombone, accordion, guitar, sax in Ogunde’s plays did not appeal to someone like Ulli Beier. So he said to Duro, “You have all these materials, you can make use of it!” That was the turning point for Duro Ladipo. CM: Interesting that it was Ulli Beier who made Duro Ladipo turn to Yorùbá history and materials . . . But I would like to return to the television and the radio plays for the moment. As far as I understood, they came before the major plays, which were to a large extent based on Yorùbá history and mythology. The shorter television plays seemed to have been morality plays, though. Can you tell me a bit about their content? Were they linked to Ladipo’s biblical plays? MO: Morality plays don’t have to be Christian. The television plays were based on Yorùbá folktales, but there was never any historical play based on Yorùbá history. That came later. The morality plays were called, for example, “Patience Is the Father of Character.” That was one of the titles. Maybe I remember that title because it is part of my philosophy. I can’t remember the others. The radio programmes, on the other hand, were not plays but songs, and Duro Ladipo was the composer. CM: I am still intrigued by that fact that Ulli Beier influenced Duro Ladipo so much that he moved on to more historical subject-matter and Yorùbá mythology. In your autobiography you mention that he actually became like Œango at some point. MO: Yes, he did. CM: In Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage (2008), there is a quotation by Susanne Wenger, who criticized Ladipo for this. She said that he brought materials, rituals, and performances on stage which were meant for more sacred, spiritual contexts. Of Ÿba Kò So she says, and I quote: “Though it was a good showing, midway into the performance we [Wenger and her then

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husband, the master drummer Ayansola] had to leave because, steeped in ritual as it was, it came to us like a violation of taboo, a violation of privacy.”8 MO: She can say that from her own perspective. To start with all these materials, they have been made by hands and by human beings. So what are the Œango priests doing when they are having their festival? Are they not dancing? Are they not having their costumes? Are they not having their colours? There was no ridicule in what Duro did. But from her own perspective, I cannot condemn her. I have to respect her opinion. As for me, I couldn’t see anything wrong. The costume is not the essence. The costume is not Œango. This is a costume [points to his agbada]. Œango comes from inside. CM: From the Duro Ladipo theatre you moved to the visual arts, and moved in for a period of time with Ulli Beier and his wife, Georgina, in order to have some space for your paintings, both physically and figuratively. MO: That’s correct. CM: But then, in the 1970s you actually founded your own theatre group. I would like to know more about this. MO: Oh yes, after 1966, when I left the Duro Ladipo theatre, I was staying with Ulli and Georgina. They gave me a big space. I was not working for or with them. We were just living together. They liked me a lot and they offered me the space for free. So I don’t have to think of rent. I was concentrating on my artwork. I participated in different workshops. I was showing my works. People will come and ask for my works. Before Ulli left for Papua New Guinea – that was in 1968 or so – there was a time when he donated his collection. He asked me to look after the collection. I was the curator of that collection for some years. Later on I had to leave, to resign, in order to go to IfÁ to join a friend of Ulli, Prof. Akin Euba, a musicologist. He would eventually become a friend and associate of mine. I worked with him. I knew him through Ulli in 1967. We worked together with sketches that Segun Olusola did. We took them to Edinburgh; we travelled together . . . so, at that time, Akin Euba noted he could work with me. So when he left Lagos and came up to IfÁ, he said I should apply for a job in his department. That’s how I got 8

Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage, ed. Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies (I A S ), University of Ibadan & IFAnet Editions, 2nd ed. 2008).

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there [in 1976]. And later on [in 1983] I had my own group, Oyelami Performing Troupe. I was more interested in dance-drama. CM: I heard that the first drama you did was a play from New Guinea which you turned into a dance-drama. MO: Yes, that was Purakapali, “And They Never Return.” It was again suggested by Ulli. We performed that at IfÁ. CM: But that was before you had your own theatre troupe. MO: That was before. But then [in 1983] I had this group of mine consisting of professionals. I could not deal with mediocres. I could not start training like Duro Ladipo had done. I want to work with people who know their job already, so I can say “do this and do that.” That went on for some time. But you see, it is quite difficult to keep a group like that. I could not afford to pay them enough. We did not make enough money; we had trouble finding money for buying fuel to travel round. So it did not go that long. CM: I am still very interested in that part of your work, because it gets little mention in comparison to all the other things you have done as a musician, as a creator of a notation system or as a visual artist. Could I just ask which subjects you worked on in your dance-drama? MO: My main source of inspiration was from the Agbeijá or Ÿyº group. They are satirists, through their movement, their masks, and their music and lyrics. You must have seen one or two of these films where they show a fully masked object. We had stock characters. We had something like oyinbo, an oyinbo couple, that’s a European couple, with their long noses. CM: I’ve seen examples in Ulli Beier’s film. They are one of my favourites, and very funny! MO: These masks dialogue through their dance movements. They inspired me a lot. I did stories, my stories, and put them into that kind of concept. But again, I couldn’t do it for long, because I couldn’t keep a professional group, and I couldn’t work with mediocre people. But I did a lot of work around the Agbeijó masquerade. Regarding the music – I conducted a lot of workshops, even here in Europe, all over the place. Between the 1970s and ’80s I did a lot. It was the first time I met the guy from Mainz who is also here at the conference, Wolfgang Bender. He organized workshops with students, even with

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intermediate performers, based on the notation I’d developed. It worked very well. Now, presently, I work with kids between nine and fourteen. I am teaching them rhythms, the polyrhythms of our music. You will be surprised how quickly they learn! It’s a specific programme. CM: Talking of the here and now, most of the studies that cover your work end in the early 1990s. There is a twenty-year gap between then and now. Is there any possibility you can give us a brief summary of the past twenty years – an impossible task, I know. Again your work seems to have shifted, from music back to theatre and the visual arts. MO: I am still performing, you know! Not just performing in a stadium for a thousand people – no, no, no. Back home, I am forbidden from performing, due to my status as chief; so people come and drum for me. But I do many lecture-demonstrations. I use that medium to tell the story of my race. I talk about the language, the religion, the social aspects of our life. I still do that wherever I have the opportunity. That’s the kind of music I play. I don’t play for people, but I play to educate and teach. What I am doing right away is to catch the young. The idea of this workshop I was telling you about is to find out how interested these kids are in our own music. You will be surprised. It’s going to be a six-month programme, and then they will go back. I took them from different schools. They can then form different groups and share their experience with their colleagues who are interested. Who knows who will become the next master-drummer, who is the next Billy Cobham or Ayansola among them? But that’s not the main reason. The major reason is for them to recognize Yorùbá music as music that is good enough to compete with any music in this whole world. Number two: to appreciate the art of the Yorùbá race. Number three: to develop their language, because the talking drum speaks! The main function of the drum is to recite the oríkì, the appellation of the people! And these kids, they are catching up very fast. So that’s what I am doing now. I don’t have much time now to go to America or Europe conducting workshops like I used to do in the past. But if I can do that at home . .. I am also working on bàtá, a kind of interactive D V D . It is based on the book I wrote on bàtá. Everything is now being translated into visuals. It’s digitalized. CM: Like a self-tutorial? MO: Yes. It’s now the eleventh month I am working on that D V D . I have to re-do it to perfect it. It’s really a major work, but nobody seems to care about it. If I am able to finish it, I will be very happy.

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CM: I can imagine. You never felt a contradiction between playing, teaching, and passing on traditional Yorùbá music and the more experimental work that you have done. MO: Never, but you need to be at a certain height artistically. There was a time in Madras with one mridangam player, in the early 1980s. It was organized by the Goethe Institute in Bombay. My first stopover was in Bangalore. They knew I liked the fusion music, so they organized an event for me. When I play with people, I always use it like a dialogue. I want to dialogue. I want to see where we can finally meet when we are performing. So this Indian thought we were going to compete. So he started off with his mridangam, prmpmpm . . . . Then he stopped. I was just waiting, trying to feel harmonious as to know when to join and be in harmony together, but he thought we were having a competition. So after some minutes he stopped and said, “So, let’s hear what you have to say.” I said, “What does that mean? continue!” He missed the concept. And this was quite different from the guy I met in Singapore [at the Singapore Arts Festival in 1982]. He was playing the tabla, and I was playing my dùndún. It worked so very well! In fact, people were spellbound. There was complete silence in the audience. We communicated so well. At first we didn’t understand each other’s language. But as we go on, there is this confidence and this love to do it together. Suddenly we met and we were just joining. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. But not everybody can do that. CM: Before we close, let me just briefly come back to Iwalewa-Haus and your attendance of the conference. How was it for you to come back to Bayreuth, to this conference that was in memory of Ulli Beier? MO: I was actually looking forward to it when I was contacted by the organizers, for so many reasons. It afforded me the opportunity to revisit the Iwalewa-Haus that I built together with Ulli. I mean, he had the concept, but we were there together. We were the only two people then, before we turned it into something different than a museum. Ulli didn’t want that, a museum, he wanted a place for the exchange of the arts. If you like, you can say that Germany is like my second home. You know, my first time was 1964, when I went with Duro Ladipo to Berlin to the Festival of Art [Berliner Festwochen], and then 1965, 1967, 1981, and so on. I have worked with many people. I have done a lot of fusion music with many avant-garde orchestras, with many jazz combos. I did a lot of experimental music with many Europeans. Apart

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from that, I have my children here in Frankfurt, so I am happy to see them, and they are happy to see me. CM: Thank you very much for sharing your time and thoughts with me, Chief.

F I G U R E 1: Muraina Oyelami (second from left) playing the king of the Igbos in Duro Ladipo’s Moremi, O‹ogbo, 1966.9

WORKS CITED Beier, Ulli. “Patience Is the Father of Good Character: The Artistic Career of Muraina Oyelami,” in Three Yoruba Artists (Bayreuth African Studies 12; Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 1988): 69–90. Irobi, Esiaba. “Elegy for Ezenwa–Ohaeto,” in Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The Legacy of Ezenwa-Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing, ed. Christine Matzke, Aderemi Raji-Oyelade & Geoffrey V. Davis (Matatu 33; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006): 34– 36. 9

Courtesy of Iwalewa-Haus/ D E V A , University of Bayreuth. I wish to thank Sigrid Horsch–Albert, Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth, for her help with the picture.

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Iwalewa-Haus. “Iwalewa-Haus Archive Laboratory Utopia,” http://www.iwalewa.unibayreuth.de/en/index.html (accessed 11 November 2013). Ladipo, Duro. Ÿba Kò So (The King Did Not Hang): Opera by Duro Ladipo, transcribed & tr. R.G. Armstrong, Robert L. Awujoola & Val Olayemi, from a tape recording by R. Curt Wittig (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, 1972). Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “‘From Mbari Mbayo to Iwalewahaus’ Conference,” Ofodunka: Art.Life.Politics, http://chikaokeke-agulu.blogspot.de/2013/10/from-mbari-mbayoto-iwalewahaus.html (accessed 13 November 2013). Olusola, Segun, & Ulli Beier. “Duro Ladipo and Television: A Conversation between Segun Olusola and Ulli Beier,” in The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, ed. Ulli Beier (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1994): 75–80. Oyelami, Muraina. ÀbÀfÁ: An Autobiography of Muraina Oyelami, ed. Ulli Beier from taped interviews with Muraina Oyelami (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1993). ——. My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, 1982). ——. “Obatala Centre,” http://www.oyelami.com/obatala.htm (accessed 11 November 2013). ——. “Welcome to the Site of Chief Muraina Oyelami,” http://murainaoyelami .com/index.html (accessed 11 November 2013). ——. Yoràbá Bàtá Music: A New Notation with Basic Exercises and Ensemble Pieces (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1991). ——. Yoruba Dundun Music: A New Notation with Basic Exercises and Five Yoruba Drum Repertoires (Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1989). Probst, Peter. Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2011). Raji-Oyelade, Remi, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo, ed. Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage (Ibadan: Institute of African Studies (I A S ), University of Ibadan & IFAnet Editions, 2nd ed. 2008). Speed, Francis, & Ulli Beier. New Images: Art in a Changing Society, Oshogbo, Western Nigeria (Lagos: National Education Network (N E T ) film Unit, 1964). Audiovisual documentary.

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Notes on Contributors

H E N R Y O B I A J U M E Z E is currently a teaching assistant in the Department of Theatre Arts, School of Performing Arts, University of Ghana, Legon. Educated at the University of Calabar, Nigeria, and the University of Ghana, Legon, Ajumeze is the author of the poetry collection Dimples on the Sand (2009). Ajumeze’s Master’s research is located at the critical intersection between Esiaba Irobi’s drama and the semiology of Igbo masquerade theatre. G E O R G I N A A L A U K W U – E H U R I A H studied English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she met and forged an enduring friendship with Esiaba Irobi that lasted thirty years. She obtained a Master’s degree in Public Administration and a degree in Law from the University of Lagos. She is called to the Nigerian Bar and has held positions of various capacities in the Federal Civil Service of Nigeria, where she presently works. She holds the Nigerian National Honour of Member of the Order of the Niger (M O N ) in recognition of distinguished public service. She lives in Abuja. C H R I S T O P H E R B A L M E holds the chair in Theatre Studies at the University of Munich and is president of the International Federation for Theatre Research. His publications include: Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical syncretism and postcolonial drama (1999); Pacific Performances: Theatricality and CrossCultural Encounter in the South Seas (2007); and Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (2008). M A R T I N B A N H A M is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, U K . Publications as editor include The Cambridge Guide to Theatre and (with Errol Hill and George Woodyard), The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre, and A History of Theatre in Africa. He is a member of the editorial team of the annual journal African Theatre. I S I D O R E D I A L A is Professor of African literature in the Department of English and Literary Studies at Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria. His mono-

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graph Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance (2014) was written while he was a Humboldt Research Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of English, Westfälische Wilhelms University, Münster, Germany. E R I K A F I S C H E R – L I C H T E is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She is director of the International Research Centre for Advanced Studies on ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ (since 2008) and spokesperson of the International Doctoral School ‘InterArt’ (since 2006) at the Free University of Berlin. She has published widely in the fields of aesthetics, theory of literature, art, and theatre, particularly on semiotics and performativity, theatre history, and contemporary theatre. Among her publications are Global Ibsen: Performing Multiple Modernities (2010), The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008, German 2004), Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005), History of European Drama and Theatre (2002, German 1990), The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (1997), The Semiotics of Theatre (1992, German 1983), and The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign (1990). T E M P L E H A U P T F L E I S C H is a drama teacher, playwright, and theatre researcher. He is the former head of the national Centre for South African Theatre Research (C E S A T –1979–1987), chair of the University of Stellenbosch Drama Department (1995–2005), and director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies at Stellenbosch (1994–2009). He was also the founder-editor of the South African Theatre Journal (S A T J , 1987–) and member of a number of editorial boards of various academic journals (including Critical Stages, the I A T C e-journal; African Performance Review; and Shakespeare in Southern Africa) and of the book series ‘Themes in Theatre–Collective Approaches to Theatre and Performance’. He has produced more than eighty works on the history of South African theatre, research methodology, and the sociology of theatre, the latest being Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture (co-edited with Shulamith LevAladgem et al.). Though he retired from the University of Stellenbosch in 2010, he is still active as co-editor of S A T J , and his current project is the Companion to South African Theatre. K E N E I G W E O N U is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for B A (Hons) Drama at Canterbury Christ Church University. His interests cover African and African-diaspora theatre and performance, as well as cultural and perfor-

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mance theory. His current research and practice focus particularly on somatic procedures in performance training, issues of identity in performance, and cross-art practices. He is a member of the editorial boards of African Performance Review (A P R ) and South African Theatre Journal (S A T J ) and is the founding convener, and currently co-convener, of the African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (I F R T ). Among his latest works are Trends in TwentyFirst Century African Theatre and Performance (2011) and Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre (2013). B I O D U N J E Y I F O is Professor of Literature and Comparative Literature and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His book Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (2004) won the American Library Association’s outstanding academic text award for 2005. C H R I S T O P H E R O D H I A M B O J O S E P H , Professor of Literature and Applied Drama in the Department of Literature, Theatre and Film Studies at Moi University, Kenya, was Wits University Distinguished Professor in 2013. He has presented keynote lectures and papers in numerous workshops, seminars, conferences, and symposia locally and internationally, and has published widely in reputable journals and books on literature, theatre, film, and radio. A N T O N K R U E G E R teaches performance studies and creative writing at Rhodes University, South Africa. His research interests include questions of identity in contemporary South Africa and he has published numerous reviews, articles, and book chapters on post-apartheid theatre, as well as the book Experiments in Freedom: Issues of Identity in New South African Drama (2010). He has also published creative writing in a range of genres, including a novella, Sunnyside Sal (2010), Shaggy (comedy monologues, written with Pravasan Pillay, 2011), and Everyday Anomalies (poetry, 2011). His plays have been performed in eight countries and have been nominated for numerous awards nationally and abroad. Five of his plays have been published, by Playscripts (New York) and Stagescripts (London). Experiments in Freedom won the Rhodes Vice Chancellor’s Book award in 2010. C H R I S T I N E M A T Z K E teaches English and African literature at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her areas of academic specialism are African theatre, particularly drama and performance in Eritrea, and postcolonial crime fiction. Recent publications include contributions to African Theatre 12: Shakespeare in and out of Africa (2013), and the co-edited Life is a Thriller: Investigating African Crime Fiction (2012, with Anja Oed).

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B E N E D I C T U S C . N W A C H U K W U read English and Literary Studies at Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria, and also holds an M A degree in English (Literature) from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria (where he is also presently enrolled for a doctorate degree). He participated in the 2012 Fidelity Bank Creative Writing Workshop and is currently working on a collection of poems. O B I W U is a Nigerian American international scholar and writer who has published widely and taught at universities in Nigeria and the U S A . His second collection of poems, Tigress at Full Moon, was No. 12 on the Amazon 100 poetry bestseller list (February 2012). The poem in the present book, “Madding Crowd,” is taken from Obiwu’s unpublished fourth poetry volume, ‘Mad River’. Obiwu was a fellow of the Presidential Leadership Institute, Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio; a fellow of the International School of Theory in the Humanities; and multiple winner of the Faculty Excellence Award at Central State University (for 2013 and 2008). He teaches English and creative writing in the Department of Humanities at Central State University and has been honoured with the Resolution Recognition by the Greene County Board of Commissioners of Ohio. O L U O G U I B E is Professor of Art and African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. An artist and a poet, he was a close friend of Esiaba Irobi and, in conjunction with the Association of Nigerian Authors, has established a literary prize, the A N A / Esiaba Irobi Drama Prize, in Irobi’s memory. O L U S E Y I O G U N J O B I is a painter, textile artist, storyteller, musician, and theatre scholar. He was educated in Nigeria and the U K . He holds a postgraduate diploma (PgDip) in fashion and textiles and an M A in printed textiles from the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University). He also holds a PhD in theatre from the University of Leeds. Ogunjobi has taught and conducted residential workshops in several institutions. He has been producing and facilitating arts-education programmes for schools, colleges, and universities in the U K since 1990. He has been a seasonal lecturer in Art and Modernity at Leeds University since 2004. T A N U R E O J A I D E , a Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa, was educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English, and at Syracuse University, U S A , where he received both his M A in Creative Writing and his PhD in English. He has published seventeen collections of poetry, three collections of short stories, two memoirs, four

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novels, and scholarly works, including The Poetry of Wole Soyinka and Poetry, Art, and Performance: Udje Dance Songs of the Urhobo People. His literary awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the B B C Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, 2003, and 2011). He taught for many years at the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), and is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. F E M I O S O F I S A N , distinguished playwright, poet, actor, theatre director, and scholar, is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Author of numerous plays and poetry collections and the recipient of many literary awards, including the first Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for literature in 1983, Osofisan writes poetry under the pseudonym Okinba Launko. L E O N O S U is an English and Literature graduate of Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria, and holds an M A (African literature) degree from Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria. A doctoral degree candidate at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria, he has taught at Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education, Owerri, and the Federal Polytechnic Nekede, Owerri. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Imo State University, Owerri. B H E K I Z I Z W E P E T E R S O N is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on various editorial, statutory, and artistic committees, juries, and boards across the continent and has held invited fellowships at Yale University and Birmingham University (U K ). Peterson has published extensively on African literature, performance and cultural studies, and black intellectual traditions in South Africa. His books include Fragments in the Sun (1985, with Essop Patel and Benjy Francis), Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality (2000), and Zulu Love Letter: A Screenplay (2009). He is the writer and/or producer of internationally acclaimed films, including Fools, Zulu Love Letter, and Zwelidumile (all directed by Ramadan Suleman) and Born into Struggle and The Battle for Johannesburg (both directed by Rehad Desai). D O N R U B I N is the series editor of the six-volume World Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Theatre and Professor of Theatre at York University, Toronto, where he teaches courses on African theatre and drama. A co-founder and

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director of York’s graduate programme in Theatre and Performance Studies, he is president of the Canadian Theatre Critics’ Association, a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Theatre Critics, and a former president of the Canadian Centre of the International Theatre Institute. He is the founding editor of the Canadian Theatre Review and has lectured on theatre and drama at universities in Nigeria, South Africa, and Cameroon, as well as at universities across Europe and North America. H E I N W I L L E M S E has published widely on Afrikaans and South African writing. These texts include edited volumes such as More Than Brothers: James Matthews and Peter Clarke at 70 (2000) and Achmat Davids’s The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims (2011). Among his publications on black Afrikaans writing are Aan die ander kant: Swart Afrikaanse skrywers (On the other side: Black Afrikaans writers, 2007). He is the editor-in-chief of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (Journal for Literature, est. 1936), and the immediate past president of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (I S O L A ). He is presently Professor of Literature and former head of the Department of Afrikaans, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

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Index

Abafumi (Ugandan theatre company) 184, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194 Abiad, Georges 155, 156 Abimbola, Wande, Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa 309

Abiola, Adetokumbo 92, 93 Abonta, Kem 28 Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 148, 149, 151, 152 Academic Freedom, White Power and Black People (Small) 162, 173 Achebe, Chinua 9, 25, 26, 29, 30, 51, 74, 75, 80, 93, 105, 110, 115, 120, 124, 125, 130, 185, 187, 283; Anthills of the Savannah 114; Arrow of God 74, 75, 80, 114, 120, 124, 125; A Man of the People 114; No Longer at Ease 105, 114;, Things Fall Apart 105, 106, 114, 124, 283 “Adaeze” (Irobi) 126 Adedeji, J.A. 305 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 111, 112, 113, 114, 129; Half of a Yellow Sun 112, 114, 118 Adindu, Dick 103 Africa Abroad (B B C programme) 185 African playwrights, first- and secondgeneration 253

“African Poet in England Curses His English Head of Department, An” (Irobi) 9 African Theatre (Cape Town) 319 African Writers Association 217 africanization 268, 270 Afrika Cultural Centre (Johannesburg) xxiv, 195, 196, 197, 198, 206–11, 215, 216

Afrikaans language 321, 326 Afrikaans literature 159–81, 239 Afrikaans theatre 322, 325, 329 Agboluaje, Oladipo, The Estate 286 “Agemo” (Soyinka) 47 Ahiara Declaration 51 Aida (Verdi) 150, 151 Ailey, Alvin 36 Akinjogbin, I.A. 305 Akinsipe, Felix A. 267 Akinwale, Ayo O. 268 Aki-Uduma, Ngozi 28 Alaukwu–Ehuriah, Georgina 126 Alexandra Arts Centre (Alexandra, S.A.) 197

Alexandria 147, 153, 154 Aliu, Seiza M. 252 al-Naqqash, Marun 153 Amankulor, J.N. 77

354 Amankulor, Jas (J.A.S.) xx, xxvi, 3, 15, 17, 25, 31, 62, 76, 77, 85 Amas, Gbubemi 4 Amayirikiti (Serumaga) 184, 188 American University (Yola, Nigeria) 34 Amin, Idi 189, 190, 191 Amkpa, Awam 268 A N A (Association of Nigerian Authors) 5, 116 A N C 239, 240, 246 Anderson, Benedict 128, 152, 161, 162 Anglican Church 292, 300 Anike, Ndubuisi, Catalyst of the New Dawn 11 Ansell, Gwen 216 Anthill (literary cabaret, Nsukka) 4 Anthills of the Savannah (Achebe) 114 apartheid xxiv, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 195, 197, 198, 199, 204, 212, 214, 215, 219, 237, 238, 239, 242, 244, 245, 246, 328, 329

—See also: South Africa arabization 156 Arcola Theatre (London) 262, 271, 286 Arrow of God (Achebe) 74, 75, 80, 114, 120, 124, 125 art theatre 144, 199 Art, Dialogue and Outrage (Soyinka) 255, 277 Artaud, Antonin 187, 205 Arusha Declaration 51 Asomba, Domba 31 Association of Nigerian Authors 5, 116 Association of the Afrika Cultural Centre 206

Austen, Chris, dir. Awake from Mourning 210

Avoscani, Pietro 150 Awa, Ralph 30

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Awodiya, Muyiwa 260 Azuonye, Nnorom 25 Badawi, M.M. 155 Badejo, Peter 21, 270 Baedeker, Egypt 154 Bailey, Brett, Plays of Miracle and Wonder 237 Balme, Christopher 144 Bamikunle, Aderemi 258 Bandele–Thomas, Biyi 11, 12; Rain 11 Bandmann, Maurice 146 Baneshik, Percy 327 Banham, Martin 9, 41, 184 Barbican theatre (London) 261, 272, 286 Barnard, Lady Anne 319, 323 Barnes, Maureen 163 Bayley, Christopher 143 B B C (British Broadcasting Corporation) 83, 163, 181, 185, 295 Beier, Georgina 293 Beier, Ulli 283, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306, 333, 334, 335, 336, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344; influence on Ladipo xxiii Bells of Amersvoort, The (Mda) 238 Bender, Wolfgang 342 Benta (Boy) xxiii, xxiv, 223, 225–27, 228–32, 233, 234, 235 Berliner Festwochen 293, 344 Bernal, Martin 265 Beukes, Gerhard 326 Beverley, John 162 Bhabha, Homi K. 17, 18, 37, 247, 279 Biafra xix, 37, 50, 51, 114, 118, 256 Biko, Steve 211 Bilgrami, Akeel 37 Billington, Michael 265 Black Bronze and Beautiful (Small) 165 Black Hermit, The (Ng×g´) 189

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Index

Black, Stephen 324 Boekkooi, Paul 329 Bokassa, Jean Bedel 191 Bongo, Omar 191 Booker Prize 114 Bosman, F.C.L. 326 Bothma, Gabriel 329 Bourdieu, Pierre 225 Bowes Taylor, Gorry 163 Boy, Cajetan xxiv, 223–35; Benta xxiii, xxiv, 223, 225–27, 228–32, 233, 234, 235

Brazil, tour of Ladipo in 296, 297 Brecht, Bertolt 148, 205 Bredekamp, H.C. 240 Brewster, Yvonne 261, 264, 270, 271, 272

Breytenbach, Philippa 327 Brians, Paul 269 Brink, André xxiv, 239, 327 Brook, Peter 36, 205, 217; dir. Mahabharata, The 217 Brown Afrikaner Speaks, A (Small) 160, 165, 171, 178, 179 Buckingham Palace 295 Buganda ethnic community (Uganda) 185

Burning Embers (dir. Francis) 211 Butake, Bole 183 Butler, Guy 321 Cairo Opera House xxiii, 142, 147–56 Callenborne, Michael 327 Cape Corps 164 Carlson, Marvin 142 Carlyle, Thomas 36 Carr, W.J.P. 198 Caruth, Cathy 171 Catalyst of the New Dawn (Anike) 11 Cemetery Road (Irobi) 6, 11, 69, 73, 82, 83, 84, 131

355 Charles, Clifford 217 Chika, Jake 206 Chilvers, Hedley A. 324 Chin, Darl 18 Chinweizu, O.J. 123, 124, 280, 281 Chipkin, Ivor 245 Chisolm, Fiona 327 Christianity xxiii, 18, 52, 83, 85, 104, 107, 113, 120, 121, 153, 169, 170, 176, 206, 226, 229, 233, 291, 297, 299, 306, 307, 334, 340 C I A (Central Intelligence Agency) 109, 190

City Lovers (dir. Simon) 210 Clark, Ebun 30 Clark, J.P. [John Pepper] xvi, xxi, 91, 94, 100, 253; Song of a Goat 91, 94, 95, 96

Clifford, James xv, xxiii Clinton, Hillary 36 Coetzee, Greig 238, 319, 328; Happy Natives: A Play 238 Coetzee, J.M., Disgrace 240 colonialism xv, xix, xxii, xxiii, 4, 5, 23, 37, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76, 82, 90, 91, 113, 127, 142, 145, 146, 151, 152, 156, 159, 167, 189, 195, 199, 224, 226, 244, 245, 246, 257, 261, 262, 278, 279, 280, 282, 304, 305, 306, 320, 323, 324 Colour of Rusting Gold, The (Irobi) 30, 31, 69, 74, 75, 76, 103, 116 Coloured, in South Africa 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 239 commodification 218 Commonwealth Arts Festival 294 Community Arts Project (Cape Town) 197

Community Arts Workshop (Durban) 197

356 Conteh–Morgan, John xvi Coplan, David B. 320, 322 Cotyledons (Irobi) 7, 8, 70 Country Lovers (dir. Van Rensburg) 210 Creative Pursuit in Global Time, The” (Soyinka) xxi Cripps, Charlotte 271, 286 Cronje, Geoff 325, 326 Cultural Industries Growth Strategy (planning report, S.A.) 212, 213, 214 Cultural Strategy Group 213 Culture and Resistance Conference (Botswana) 211 Culture in Community programme (S.A.) 216

Dahlem Humanities Centre (Berlin) xv, 17, 36 dance, André Brink on xxiv; in Igbo culture 85; in Irobi 77, 81, 82; in Nigerian theatre 251, 252, 262, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 313; in Soyinka 274; in Ugandan theatre 186, 187, 188; Irobi on 62, 63, 64, 67 dance-drama, and Oyelami 342 Daniel, Raeford 327 Davis, Miles 16 Davis, Tracy C. 146 de Graft, Joe 223 de Groot, Paul 325 Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka) xxv, 4, 17, 21, 32, 37, 62, 64, 76, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 125, 258, 303, 304, 334 Department of Arts and Culture (Pretoria) 211

Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (S.A.) 211, 214, 216, 217 Departments of Arts, Culture and Technology (Pretoria) 212

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Descartes, René 123 Desert Encroaches, The (Onwueme) 116 Dhlomo, H.I.E. [Herbert] 207, 326 Dhlomo Theatre 195, 207, 208, 209, 210

Diagana, Moussa, Legend of Wagadu as Seen by Sia Yatabere 183 Diakhate, Ousmane 100 Diala, Isidore xvi, xx, xxi, 74, 76, 92, 93, 99, 116 diaspora, Igbo, in the USA 15 dictators, African 191 —See also: Idi Amin Diner, Dan 37 Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) 240 District Six 327 Dladla, Angifi 206, 216 Donizetti, Gaetano 153 Dore, Henry 298, 299, 306, 307, 309 Douin, Georges 152, 153 “Drama and the African World-View” (Soyinka) 22 Draper, Ralph 210 Dream of the Dog (Higginson) 237, 242, 243, 244 Drum generation 327 East African Publishing House 187 Echeruo, M.J.C. 81, 110 Eda (Ladipo) 295, 339 Edmonton (Canada) 97, 102, 188, 189 Edufa (Sutherland) 91 eerste steen?, Die (Small) 165 Egun, Tonnie 28, 30, 34 egungun festival 292, 313 Egypt, theatre in xxiii, 147–56 Ehrenreich, Kevin Athol 239 Eichbaum, Julius 205, 330 Ekeh, Raphael Chima 254 Ekpe festival performance 76, 77, 85, 96, 100, 101, 113, 121, 122

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Index

Elebuibon, Yemi 292, 299 “Elegy for Ezenwa–Ohaeto” (Irobi) 333 Elendu, Vic 28, 30 Elephants, The (Serumaga) 184, 186 Eliot, T.S. 7 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man 36 Elufowoju, Femi, Jr. 261, 271, 272, 286 Enekwe, Ossie 25, 31 English, in Nigeria (esp. Irobi) 92, 106, 108, 111, 113, 114, 115, 124, 127, 156, 279–80, 284–85; in South Africa (esp. Small) 160, 161, 162, 164–67, 176, 180, 324, 325, 327; Pidgin 281– 83as the language of the elite xix, 278

Esslin, Martin 92 Estate, The (Agboluaje) 286 Etienne Rousseau Theatre 201 Etim, Nancy 28, 31 Euba, Akin 341 eurocentrism 143, 257, 326 Evening with George Mathiba, An 210 Exposition Universelle (Paris) 148, 149 Eyethu Cinema (Soweto) 198 Ezbekiyah Gardens (Cairo) 149, 154 Fahodzi, Tiata 261, 262, 270, 286 Fairbairn, John, & Thomas Pringle (as publishers) 323 Fanon, Frantz 73, 110, 224, 226, 279, 306; The Wretched of the Earth 73, 224, 306 Farber, Yael 92 Fatomilola, Peter 292 Fatunde, Tunde, Oga na Tief-man 281; Water No Get Enemy 281 Federated Union of Black Artists 197, 206

Ferguson, Niall 143, 144

357 Ferreira, José Mendes 296 Fiebach, Joachim 91, 257, 258 F I F A World Cup 196, 198, 218 Flamengo (Sowande) 103 Fleishman, Mark 92 Flockemann, Miki 238 Floris, Sylvia 210 Foot–Newton, Lara 243, 245; Reach 237, 243, 245 “For You, Homeland” (Oguibe) 13 Foreplay (Irobi) 70 419 (Nigerian fraud) 112 Francis, Benjy 206, 207, 208, 210, 211; dir. Burning Embers 211; dir. A Mountain of Volcano 211 “Frankfurt” (Irobi) 6 Freie Universität (Berlin), Irobi at 16, 17, 61

Fronded Circle, The (Irobi) 69, 79, 80, 81, 82 “Frustrated African Poet Curses His Publishers, A” (Irobi) 14 Fugard, Athol xxv, 28, 62, 92, 183, 329; The Island 328; Sizwe Bansi Is Dead xxv, 28, 62 Funda Centre (Soweto) 197 Gainor, J. Ellen xxii, 142 Gardner, Lyn 274 Garrett, Bob 302 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 63 Gathering Fear, A (Oguibe) 13 gentrification 218 Geyer, Michael, & Charles Bright 143, 145

Gilbert, Helen xix, 66; & Joanne Tompkins 65, 66, 67, 77, 80, 278, 279, 282 global theatre history 35, 144, 145, 156 globalization 16, 115, 142, 143, 145, 146, 215, 224

358 Gods Are Not to Blame, The (Rotimi) 91, 100, 251, 252, 254, 255, 261, 262, 264, 265, 270, 271, 272, 275, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 303 Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh (Irobi) 41, 69, 70, 71, 72, 92, 93 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell) 36 Gopie, Rajesh 239 Gordimer, Nadine 210 Goree (Small) 160, 163, 164, 175, 176 Götrick, Kacke 80 Gowon, Yakubu 256, 264 Grahamstown Festival 329 Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council 195, 208, 215 Green, Richard, dir. Praise 210 Greig, Robert 329, 332 Grobbelaar, Michal 201 Grotowski, Jerzy 205 Growth, Employment and Redistribution Policy (S.A.) 213 Grütter, Wilhelm 327 Guardian, The (Nigerian newspaper) 9, 13

Gunner, Liz 242 Habermas, Jürgen 180 Hagg, Gerard 216 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie) 112, 114, 118

Halm, Ben B. 277 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 191 Hanekom, Hendrik & Mathilde 325 Hangmen Also Die (Irobi) 6, 69, 73, 74 Happy Natives: A Play (Greig Coetzee) 238

Harp, The (Irobi) 70, 117 Harris, Kevin, dir. If God Be for Us 210; dir. This We Can Do for Justice and for Peace 210 Harris, George 21

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Harry Potter (Rowling) 112 Harvard Graduate School 3 Hauptfleisch, Temple 238 Haussmann, Baron 148, 149, 150 Hegel, G.W.F. 143 Heinemann (publisher) 185 Henry IV Part I (Shakespeare) 319 Herbst, Terry 327 Higginson, Craig 242, 243, 244; Dream of the Dog 237, 242, 243, 244; & Anton Krueger 242 hip-hop, Irobi’s involvement in 11 Hoffmann, H.–C. 146 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Jedermann 339

Holloway Company 324 Homann, Greg 237, 238, 242 “Hope Place” (Irobi) 33 “Horizons” (Irobi) 33 Hough, Barry 329 House of Shaka (Ngema) 239 housemaid, as central figure in Kenyan plays 224, 228, 235 Howard, Mel 296 Humboldt University (Berlin) 39 Hume, David 36 Hungry Earth, The (Maponya) 328 Hunt, Alan 225 Hutchison, Yvette xvi hybridity xx, 65, 67 hybridization 254, 255, 321 I Am the Woodpecker that Terrifies the Trees (Irobi) 70 “I Shall Return” (Irobi) 33 I Will Marry When I Want (Ng×g´) 223 iBlues Train (Action Centre play) 209 Idanre (Soyinka) 123 Idris, Kayode 262 If God Be for Us (dir. Harris) 210 Ihiekweazu, Edith 107

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Index

Iji, M. Edde 91, 97 Ijinle Ohun Enu Ifa (Abimbola) 309 Images of the Struggle 211 Imbuga, Francis 223 imperialism xxii, xxv, 66, 142, 145, 146, 151, 152 Impieri, Pastor Bismarck 38 indigenous languages, in African artistic expression 113, 278, 279, 282 Inflorescence (Irobi) xxvi, 70, 88 International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books (London) 211 International Student Playscript Competition 6, 11 internationalization 146 Invisible Man (Ellison) 36 Ipelegeng Centre (Moletsane) 198 Irele, F. Abiola 75 Irobi, and African-American culture 109; and concept of photosynthesis 120; and criticism of Nigerian politics 73, 77, 99; and dance-drama 11; and distaste for academia 3; and early education 104, 108; and early family history 103, 105, 118; and egalitarianism 120, 121; and English/Igbo bilingualism 115, 127; and exile xvi, xix, xxvi, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 19, 33, 50, 51, 193, 210, 328; and experience of racism in the U K 9; and family life 40; and fierce defence of non-white theatre and performance 36; and frustrations of life in the U K 33, 126; and health problems 15, 16, 17, 34, 37, 40, 42, 129; and identity-politics 36; and Igbo culture xxv, 22, 61, 69, 70, 74, 81, 100, 101, 109, 110, 115, 117, 121, 123, 127; and Igbo metaphysics xxv; and Igbo–Yorùbá cultures xix, 110; and influence of Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark 91–101; and

359 introduction to storytelling tradition 106; and literary ambitions 17, 117; and marriage 126; and mentorship by Jas Amankulor 3, 15, 17; and orature 106, 110, 122; and scholarship 10, 12, 14, 16, 22, 35, 41; and self-identification as Igbo 37, 50; and teaching 11, 15, 37, 122, 129; as actor xxv, 4, 5, 6, 17, 28, 32, 62; as cabaret performer 4; as jazz aficionado 16; as perfectionist 4; as playwright 11, 12, 29, 32, 69, 255; as poet and playwright 6, 19; as secondary-school teacher 104; as Shakespearean actor 5; as theatre director 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 29, 62; con-

tempt of, for Nigerian literature institutions 6; criticism of Nigerian politics 85, 112, 128; diasporic aesthetic theory of 63–88; discrimination experienced in U S academia 15; efforts of to publish in the West 13; erudition of 7; in Berlin 35–38, 39, 41, 43; inability of to adapt creatively abroad 15; influence of Ladipo on xxiii; influence of Soyinka on xxi; marriage of 16, 18; on crucial importance of women 128–29; on deleterious effect of Nigerian military 131; on his revolutionary sensibility 118; on Igbo language 111; on impossible working conditions in Nigeria 130; on indigenous film industry 113; on language 113, 115–16; on Nigerian fiction 113– 15; passionate political views of 28; posthumous reputation of 18, 19, 34; writing habits of 6, 29 —Works: “Adaeze” 126 “An African Poet in England Curses His English Head of Department” 9

360 Cemetery Road 6, 11, 69, 73, 82, 83, 84, 131 The Colour of Rusting Gold 30, 31, 69, 74, 75, 76, 103, 116 Cotyledons 7, 8, 70 “Elegy for Ezenwa–Ohaeto” 333 Foreplay 70 “Frankfurt” 6 The Fronded Circle 69, 79, 80, 81, 82

“A Frustrated African Poet Curses His Publishers” 14 Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh 41, 69, 70, 71, 72, 92, 93 Hangmen Also Die 6, 69, 73, 74 The Harp 70, 117 “Hope Place” 33 “Horizons” 33 I Am the Woodpecker that Terrifies the Trees 70 “I Shall Return” 33 Inflorescence xxvi, 70, 88 Iyago 117 John Coltrane in Vienna 70 Juba 117 “Judy” 6 “Mabera” 6 “My Epitaph” xxvi The Other Side of the Mask 25, 69, 72, 73, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88, 116 “Pentheus” 107, 108 The Pope Lied 28 Rejection Slips 10, 14 “Soniya” 6 Sycorax 70, 84, 85, 117 “Taking the Bull by the Horns” 63, 64, 65, 67 “The Theory of À‹Æ” 63, 66, 67, 68, 77, 81 “There Is a Thief in All of Us” 35 “Treasure Island” 33

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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“The Wall” 8 What Songs Do Mosquitoes Sing 30, 70

Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin 7, 19, 21, 25, 33, 34, 70, 88 Zenzenina 70 Isaacson, Maureen 246 Island, The (Fugard) 328 Isma’il Pasha (Khedive of Egypt) 141, 142, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156 Iwalewa-Haus 334, 335, 344, 345 Iyago (Irobi) 117 Izevbaye, Dan xx Jabulani Theatre (Soweto) 198, 199, 200 Jack, Lionel 166, 167 Jedermann (Hofmannsthal) 339 Jeyifo, Biodun xvi, 41, 63, 97, 258, 291 Jika Jika Jive (dir. Peterson) 211 Johannesburg Civic Theatre 201 John Coltrane in Vienna (Irobi) 70 John Paul II, Pope 28 Johnson, Rev. Samuel 299, 301 Jones, Bill T. 36 Jongbloed, Zelda 172 Jordan, Z. Pallo 198, 199, 204 Juba (Irobi) 117 “Judy” (Irobi) 6 Junction Avenue Theatre Company, Sophiatown 328 Jung, Carl Gustav 247 ka Macu, Dukuza, Night of the Long Wake 209, 210 Kaburu (Opperman) 239 Kampala 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192, 193

Kanna, hy kô hystoe (Small) 160 Katakata for Sofahead (Oyekunle) 281 Katlehong Arts Centre (East Rand) 197 Keeble, Elizabeth 186

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Index

Kentridge, William, & Jane Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission 237 Kenya, theatre in xxiv, 223–35 Keynes, John Maynard 145, 146 Khedival Opera House (Cairo) 150, 154 KiSwahili as lingua franca (Soyinka) 277 Kitaar my kruis (Small) 160, 162 Klaaste, Aggrey 327 Koko, Koffi 274 Konya, Phyllis 327 Kruger, Loren xvi Kuku, E.F. 104 Kursaal theatre (Cairo) 154, 155 Labiche, Eugène 153 Lacan, Jacques 147, 148 Ladipo, Duro xxiii, 251, 266, 267, 275, 276, 281, 283, 285, 291–316, 334, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 345; Eda 295, 339; Moremi 42, 251, 252, 261, 262, 265, 266, 267, 275, 276, 281, 338, 339, 345; Ÿba Kò So xxiii, 291–315, 338, 339, 340; Ÿba Moro 293, 299, 305, 308; Ÿba Waja 303, 304, 305 language, indigenous, in African literature 277–84 Larkin, Philip 7 Larlham, Peter 322 Larsen, Charles 29 Latakgomo, Joseph 327 Lawson, Alan, & Chris Tiffin 65 Le Roux, Fred 326 Leeds University, Irobi at 9, 10, 12, 21, 22, 41, 61; Soyinka at 12 Lefkowitz, Mary 265 Legend of Wagadu as Seen by Sia Yatabere (Diagana) 183 Lemon, Ralph 36 Lepage, Robert 36 Leshoai, Bob 327

361 Leshoai, T. 327 Levy, Joseph Langley 324 Lima, Luiz Costa 37 Lion and the Jewel, The (Soyinka) 251, 252, 261, 262, 263, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287 Liverpool John Moores University, Irobi at 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 61 Lloyd, Phyllida 21 London, and Soyinka’s theatrical involvement 12; as missed opportunity for Irobi as playwright 12; theatre scene in 12 Louw, N.P. van Wyk 165, 179 Louw, W.E.G. 325, 327 Lugbara people (Uganda) 273 Luyt, Margot 163 Lyric Cinema (Fordsburg) 211 “Mabera” (Irobi) 6 Macbeth (Shakespeare) xxv, 62 Mackenzie, Thomas William 324 MacLennan, John 177, 178 Magalasi, Mufunanji 216 Mahabharata, The (dir. Brook) 217 Mahlatsi, Tebogo 217 Maimane, Arthur 327 Majangwa (Serumaga) 184, 186, 187, 193

Majoro, Jane 190 Makerere University 186, 187, 189 Makhaya, Elliot 327 Makonde Total Theatre Company 188 Malema, Julius 246 Malherbe, D.F. 165, 173, 182, 325 Maluleke, Noughty 198 Mameluke rule, in Egypt 147 Mamet, David 241, 248; Three Uses of the Knife 241 Man Died, The (Soyinka) 26

362 Man of the People, A (Achebe) 114 Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre 334

Many Colours Make the Thunder-King (Osofisan) 303 Mapalakanye, Maropodi 206, 217 Maponya, Maishe, Hungry Earth, The 328

Marais, Eugene 325 marginalization xxiv, 13, 120, 161, 176, 178, 180, 196, 216, 238, 239 Market Theatre 206, 210, 211, 215, 328 Marley, Bob 210 Marnell, Susan 286 Martins, Lola 296 Marxism 45, 71, 72, 73, 98, 120, 121, 223, 258, 268 Masithela, Neo 246 Masondo, Amos 198 masquerade culture 5, 64, 104, 118, 342 Mathabane, Khalo 217 Mathiba, George 210 Mattera, Don 208 Matthews, James 168 Mbali, W. 326 Mbari Mbayo Club 293, 294, 295, 303, 334, 335, 337, 339 Mbembe, Achille xvi Mbowa, Rose 186 Mda, Zakes, The Bells of Amersvoort 238; We Shall Sing for the Fatherland 328

Meiningen Theatre 144 Memmi, Albert 224 Metsoamere, Victor 208, 327 Mgcina, Sophie 210, 211 migrancy, African 13 Mike, Chuck 261, 272, 273, 274, 285, 286, 287 Miller, Arthur 130

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Minervini, Rina 208 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind 36

Mitshikiza, John 329 Mnouchkine, Ariane 36 Mobutu, Sese Seko 191 Mocke, Ignatius 325 modernity 65, 67, 144, 199, 223 modernization xxii, 142, 143, 144, 147, 151, 152, 156 Modisane, Bloke 327 Mofokeng, Zakes, New Song, A 210 Mofolo Arts Centre (Soweto) 197 Molefe, Z.B. 195 Molière, L’Avare 153 Mondial du Théâtre Festival 295 Moremi (Ladipo) 42, 251, 252, 261, 262, 265, 266, 267, 275, 276, 281, 338, 339, 345 Morokong, Mopholosi 206 Morountodun (Osofisan) 259 Morrison, Toni 36, 109 Mothibi, Tony 210 Mountain of Volcano, A (dir. Francis) 211

Mphahlele, Ezekiel 327 Mshengu, Robert 329 Mtwa, Percy, Mbongeni Ngema & Barney Simon, Woza Albert! 328 Mudimbe, V.Y. 320, 321 Mugo, Micere Githae 210 Mukulu, Alex 223 Mulder, H.A. 325 Munonye, John 110 Museum Africa 215 music, in Nigerian theatre 312 Mvula, Styles 206 “My Epitaph” (Irobi) xxvi Myth, Literature and the African World (Soyinka) 68, 69, 96, 257, 258, 293, 297, 312

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Index

Namanve (Serumaga) 188, 189 Naoko–Pilgrim, Anita xxii Napoleon III 152 Nasaka, Nathaniel (Nat) 327 Natal Drama Foundation 206 National Arts Council (S.A.) 240, 329 National Heritage Council (S.A.) 240 National Party (South Africa) 168, 174 national theatre 156 National Theatre (Kampala) 186, 193 nation-state 143, 223, 253, 255, 257, 278 Neethling–Pohl, Anna 326 Negritude 71 Neimark, Philip John 297 New Song, A (Mofokeng) 210 New York University, Irobi at 11, 15, 61 Newtown Cultural Precinct 215 Ngema, Mbongeni, House of Shaka 239; The Zulu 239 Ngubane, Ben S. 212 Ng×g´ wa Thiong’o 11, 103, 121, 189, 210, 223, 257, 277, 278, 279, 280; The Black Hermit 189; I Will Marry When I Want 223; This Time Tomorrow 223; The Trial of Dedan Kimathi 210, 223; Weep Not, Child 277; Wizard of the Crow 277 Ngwenya, Kaizer 209, 329 Nhlapo, Walter 326 Nicholls, Liz 189 Nico Malan Theatre (Cape Town) 200, 201, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich 68 Nigeria, theatre in 251–88, 291–316 Nigeria–Biafra war 114 Nigerian theatre, produced in London 285–87 Night of the Long Wake (ka Macu) 209, 210

Nkosi, Lewis 327 Nkrumah, Kwame 252

363 Nnoli, Okwudiba 168, 172 No Longer at Ease (Achebe) 105, 114 No More the Wasted Breed (Osofisan) 259

Nwobodo, Jim 28 Nwoga, Donatus 26, 121 Nwokedi (Irobi) xxi, 6, 11, 32, 69, 76, 77, 78, 79, 93–101, 107, 112, 118, 119, 130, 138 Nyanga Arts Centre (Cape Town) 197 Nyerere, Julius 51 Nzewi, Meki 25, 251 Nzimiro, Ikenna 26, 51 O’Brien, Flann, The Poor Mouth 52 Obafemi, Olu 255, 260, 267, 268, 272, 293, 314, 315 Obatala Centre for Creative Arts 334 Obiechina, Emmanuel 26, 30, 105 Obumselu, Ben xx, 75 Odendaal, Louw 326 Odunsi, A.O. 292 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 303 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles) 261, 264 Ofeimun, Odia 12 Offenbach, Jacques 149, 152, 153 Oga na Tief-man (Fatunde) 281 Ogbuagu, Uche (Igbo comedian) xxv Oguibe, Olu 93; and exile 13, 19; creative frustration of in the U K 14; “For You, Homeland” 13; A Gathering Fear 13 —See also: Irobi, and exile Ogun Abibiman (Soyinka) 123 Ogunba, Oyin 100 Ogunbiyi, Yemi 298, 299 Ogunde, Hubert 253, 291 Ogundeji, Philip Adedotun 316 Ogundele, Wole 293, 299, 302 Ohio University, Irobi at 15, 61, 100 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 334

364 Okigbo, Christopher xx, xxv, xxvi, 9, 93, 110

Okri, Ben 32 Olaniyan, Tejumola xvi, 69 Olusola, Segun 298, 339, 341 Omotoso, Kole 253, 256, 257 Once Upon Four Robbers (Osofisan) 251, 252, 255, 256, 261, 262, 263, 270, 275, 276, 281, 282, 283, 284 Onibonokuta, Ademola 293 Ons vir Jou (Opperman) 239 Onwueme, Tess A. 103, 116, 259; The Desert Encroaches 116; The Reign of Wazobia 103 operetta, in Alexandria 154; in Cairo 153 Opperman, Deon 182; Kaburu 239; Ons vir Jou 239 Orange Earth, The (Small) xxiv, 159, 161–81 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Theater 70 Orientalism 150 Orji, Dr (nemesis of Nsukka) 26 Osborne, Deirdre xxii Osofisan, Femi xvi, xxi, 11, 36, 71, 72, 91, 92, 97, 98, 101, 183, 251, 252, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 268, 270, 275, 276, 281, 282, 283, 284, 303; Many Colours Make the Thunder-King 303; Morountodun 259; No More the Wasted Breed 259; Once Upon Four Robbers 251, 252, 255, 256, 261, 262, 263, 270, 275, 276, 281, 282, 283, 284; Tegonni 40 Osterhammel, Jürgen 143 Osu, Leon 80 Othello (Shakespeare) 117 Other Side of the Mask, The (Irobi) 25, 69, 72, 73, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88, 116 Ottoman Empire 147, 153 Ÿba Kò So (Ladipo) xxiii, 291–315, 338, 339, 340

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Ÿba Moro (Ladipo) 293, 299, 305, 308 Ÿba Waja (Ladipo) 303, 304, 305 Oyekunle, Segun, Katakata for Sofahead 281

Oyelami, Muraina xxiii, 21, 295, 300, 301, 333–45 pan-Africanism 50, 252 Pannewick, Friedrike 154 Paris, modernization of 148 Parks, Rosa 128 Parry, Sefton 324 Patel, Essop 211 “Pentheus” (Irobi) 107, 108 performance culture, Igbo xx performance, as embodiment xxii, 64, 66, 72, 78, 88, 98, 258, 268, 277, 279

Petersen, S.V. 178, 179 Peterson, Bhekizizwe 197, 198, 206, 210, 211, 218; dir. Caesar 211; dir. Jika Jika Jive 211; dir. A Walk in the Night 210, 211 Philander, P.J. 178, 179 Phillips, Caryl 11, 12 Phillips, Vincent 206 Pienaar, E.C. 325 Pierre, DPC, Vernon God Little 114 Play, A (Serumaga) 184, 185, 186 Plays of Miracle and Wonder (Bailey) 237

Plymmer, Peter 323 Poor Mouth, The (O’Brien) 52 Pope Lied, The (Irobi) 28 Port Said 154 post-apartheid 320, 329 postcolonialism xv, xvi, xix, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 13, 23, 51, 65, 69, 70, 84, 88, 92, 96, 143, 151, 216, 223, 224, 225, 228, 235, 253, 261, 262, 277, 278, 280, 302, 316, 328, 330

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Index

Potato Sheds 206, 207 Pretoria State Theatre 200, 201, 202, 203, 205 Pretorius, William 327 Primoratz, Igor 180 Printania Theatre (Cairo) 154, 155 privatization 218 Probst, Peter 335 proscenium arch, as Western tyranny 258

Publications Control Board (S.A.) 240

365 Rossini, Gioachino 153 Rotimi, Ola 11, 91, 100, 183, 251, 254, 255, 261, 264, 265, 270, 275, 281, 283, 284, 286, 303; The Gods Are Not to Blame 91, 100, 251, 252, 254, 255, 261, 262, 264, 265, 270, 271, 272, 275, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 303 Rowling, J.K., Harry Potter 112 Royal Court Theatre 12, 70, 261, 295 Royal Exchange Theatre (Manchester) 21

Rabie, Jan 165, 167, 179 Rain (Bandele–Thomas) 11 Raji-Oyelade, Remi, Sola Olorunyomi & Abiodun Duro-Ladipo 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 299, 315, 316, 340, 341

Rapola, Zachariah 217 Rayne, Leonard 324 Reach (Foot–Newton) 237, 243, 245 Reconstruction and Development Policy (S.A.) 213 Reign of Wazobia, The (Onwueme) 103 Reisenhofer, Heinrich 239 Rejection Slips (Irobi) 10, 14 Renga Moi (Serumaga) 184, 187, 188, 190

Return to the Shadows (Serumaga) 185 Richards, David 315 Rigoletto (Verdi) 150 “Rites of the Theatre” (Soyinka) 314 Riverside Studios (London) 261, 262 Roach, Joseph 142 Road, The (Soyinka) 47 Robinson, Jo 142 Roebuck, Disney 324 Role Play (Sibi-Okumu) xxiii, 223, 227– 28, 232–35 Rompel, Frederik 325 Ronge, Barry 329

Rubadiri, David 189 Ruganda, John 223 Sachs, Albie 239 Sadgrove, Philip C. 150 Said, Edward W. 121, 150, 151, 162 Sam Sly’s African Journal 323 Sammons, William Layton 323 Sand du Plessis Theatre (Bloemfontein) 201, 203 Sanua, James 154 Sardou, Victorien 153 Sauter, Willmar 320, 321 Scholtz, Merwe 327 Scribe, Eugène 153 Sê Sjibbolet (Small) 160 Searelle, Luscombe 324 Sears, Djanet 63 Sembène, Ousmane, Xala 224 Sent, Vere 323 Sepamla, Sipho 327 Serote, Wally Mongane 246 Serumaga, Robert xxiv, 183–94, 223; Amayirikiti 184, 188; The Elephants 184, 186; Majangwa 184, 186, 187, 193; Namanve 188, 189; A Play 184, 185, 186; Renga Moi 184, 187, 188, 190; Return to the Shadows 185 Serumaga, Robert Jr. 193

366 sexuality, in Serumaga 186 Shagari, Shehu 28 Shakespeare, William xxv, 62, 70, 84, 85, 117, 319; Hamlet 191; Henry IV Part I 319; Macbeth xxv, 62; Othello 117; The Tempest 70, 84, 85, 117 Shange, Ntozake 63 Sheffield University, Irobi at 5, 9, 12, 61 Shwele Bawo! (Tyelele) 237, 241, 243, 245, 246 Sibi-Okumu, John xxiv, 223–35; Role Play xxiii, 223, 227–28, 232–35 Sichel, Adrienne 206, 329 Sifeni, Thulani 217 Simon, Barney 210, 329; dir. City Lovers 210 Singapore Arts Festival 344 Six Feet of the Country (dir. Stephenson) 210

Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (Fugard) xxv, 28, 62

slavery 67, 82, 113, 170, 176 Small, Adam xxiv, 159–81 Small, Academic Freedom, White Power and Black People 162, 173; Black Bronze and Beautiful 165; A Brown Afrikaner Speaks 160, 165, 171, 178, 179; Die eerste steen? 165; Goree 160, 163, 164, 175, 176; Kanna, hy kô hystoe 160; Kitaar my kruis 160, 162; The Orange Earth xxiv, 159, 161–81; Sê Sjibbolet 160; Verse van die liefde 160 Sofola, Sulu 255 Soho Theatre (London) 286 Solberg, Rolf 239 Some Mothers’ Sons (van Graan) 237, 243, 244 Song of a Goat (Clark) 91, 94, 95, 96 “Soniya” (Irobi) 6 Sophiatown 327

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Sophiatown (Junction Avenue Theatre Company) 328 Sophocles 261, 264, 303; Oedipus Rex 303; Oedipus Tyrannus 261, 264 Sounds of the Township 210 South Africa, community arts centres in 195–219; ethnic terminology in 159; literature in 159–81; post-apartheid xxiv, xxv, 175, 197, 242; pre-colonial performance traditions 322; theatre in xxv, 237–48; theatre reviewing in xxv, 319–32 —See also: Afrikaans language/literature/theatre; A N C ; apartheid; Coloured; District Six; Sophiatown: Soweto; theatre criticism; Truth and Reconciliation Commission South African Heritage Resource Agency 241

Sowande, Bode, Flamengo 103 Sowden, Lewis 327 Soweto 197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 329 Soweto Theatre 198, 204 Soyinka, Wole xv, xvi, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 4, 9, 11, 12, 21, 22, 26, 32, 36, 37, 47, 51, 62, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 80, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 110, 123, 125, 183, 184, 189, 223, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 265,269, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 281, 282, 284, 293, 297, 303, 304, 312, 314, 334; “Agemo” 47; Art, Dialogue and Outrage 255, 277; The Bacchae of Euripides 91; “The Creative Pursuit in Global Time” xxi; Death and the King’s Horseman xxv, 4, 17, 21, 32, 37, 62, 64, 76, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 125, 258, 303,

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Index

304, 334; “Drama and the African World-View” 22; Idanre 123; The Lion and the Jewel 251, 252, 261, 262, 263, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287; The Man Died 26; Myth, Literature and the African World 68, 69, 96, 257, 258, 293, 297, 312; Ogun Abibiman 123; “Rites of the Theatre” 314; The Road 47; The Strong Breed 76, 94, 95, 98, 259 Speed, Francis, & Ulli Beier, dir. 306, 335 St. Leger, Frederick York 323 Stanislavski, Konstantin 62, 187 Steadman, Ian 210

Stephenson, Lynton, dir. Six Feet of the Country 210 Stevens, Anthony 247 Strong Breed, The (Soyinka) 76, 94, 95, 98, 259 Suez Canal 149, 152 Suleman, Ramadan 206, 217 Sutherland, Efua, Edufa 91 Swaine, Sam 205 Swart, Sandra 225 Sycorax (Irobi) 70, 84, 85, 117 Sydney Opera House 201 syncretism, cultural, in Nigeria xx; in contemporary African performance xxiii; in drama of Ladipo xxiii; Yorùbá 51 Tahir, Ibrahim 28 “Taking the Bull by the Horns” (Irobi) 63, 64, 65, 67 Talawa Theatre Company 262, 270, 286 Tansi, Sony Labou 183 Taylor, Natalie 101 Taylor, Patrick 99 Tegonni (Osofisan) 40

367 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 70, 84, 85, 117

Théâtre de la Comédie (Cairo) 149, 153, 154

Theatre for Development Workshop (Zimbabwe) 211 Théâtre Khédivial de l’Opéra (Cairo) 150

Theatre Ltd. 185, 186, 187, 189 theatre reviews, in South Africa 319–32; of J.P. Clark 96; of Irobi 92, 96: of Ladipo 293, 294, 302; of Rotimi 264, 265, 281, 286; of Serumaga 188, 189; of Soyinka 274 theatre studies, at South African universities 326 theatre, and global modernization 141–56 theatre, in Kenya 223–35; in Nigeria 251–88, 291; in South Africa 237– 48; in Uganda 183–94 theatres, in Cairo, Franco-Italian administration of 153 “Theory of À‹Æ, The” (Irobi) 63, 66, 67, 68, 77, 81 “There Is a Thief in All of Us” (Irobi) 35 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 105, 106, 114, 124, 283 This Time Tomorrow (Ng×g´) 223 This We Can Do for Justice and for Peace (dir. Harris) 210 Three Uses of the Knife (Mamet) 241 Timbuktu: A Journal of Students at the Centre for Research and Training in African Theatre 208 To Walk a Whiplash 211 Tolbert, William, Jr. 191 Total Theatre, in Serumaga 187 Towson, Maryland, Irobi at 15 transnationalism xvi, 67, 68, 115, 141, 144, 152 “Treasure Island” (Irobi) 33

368 Treaty of Versailles 145 Trial of Dedan Kimathi, The (Ng×g´) 210, 223 Trinity College, Dublin 185 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 242

Tsabalala, Mavuso 206 Tshabalala, Ephraim 198, 217 Tumwisigye, Charles 187, 189, 190–94 Tyelele, Mtshabi, Shwele Bawo! 237, 241, 243, 245, 246 Ubu and the Truth Commission (Kentridge & Taylor) 237 Udechukwu, Obiora 25 Udenta, Udenta O. 103 Uganda Publishing House 186 Ugandan literature xxiv, 183–94 —See also: Robert Serumaga Ugor, Paul 97 Uka, Kalu 25 Umoko, Eni–Jones 61, 62 University of Bayreuth 43, 334, 345 University of Malawi 217 University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Irobi at 3, 6, 15, 25, 28, 32, 41, 61, 62, 74, 93, 101, 104, 105, 107, 113, 126 Utudjian, Éliane Sant-André 253 van Graan, Mike 243, 244 van Graan, Some Mothers’ Sons 237, 243, 244 van Niekerk, S.G.J. 200 van Reenen, Rykie 327 van Rensburg, Cas 327 Van Rensburg, dir. Country Lovers 210 van Rensburg, Manie 210 van Rooyen, Johan 327 van Schoor, A.M. 325 Van Weyenberg, Astrid 91, 92, 265 Venables, Michael 327

SYNCRETIC ARENAS

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Verdal, Garth 166, 167 Verdi, Giuseppi 150, 153; Aida 150, 151; Rigoletto 150 Verger, Pierre, II 304 Vernon God Little (Pierre) 114 Verse van die liefde (Small) 160 violence, according to Fanon 73, 306; according to Patrick Taylor 98; in Africa 245, 246; in Irobi 4, 69, 73, 76, 120; in Ladipo 306; in Nigerian drama 98; in Rotimi 255, 264; in Serumaga 185; in Small 161, 163, 164, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175, 180, 181; in South Africa xxiv, xxv, 247; in South African drama 241, 243, 246, 247

Walcott, Derek 7, 10, 36 Walk in the Night, A (dir. Peterson) 210, 211

Walker, Oliver 327 “Wall, The” (Irobi) 8 Water No Get Enemy (Fatunde) 281 We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (Mda) 328

Weep Not, Child (Ng×g´) 277 Wehner, Count Posadowski 293 Welz, Martin 207 Wenger, Susanne [Wenger–Alarape] 293, 340 Wetmore, Kevin J. 265 What Songs Do Mosquitoes Sing (Irobi) 30, 70 Wheeler, Ben & Frank 324 When the Locusts Come 211 White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (planning report, S.A.) 211, 212, 213 White, Bill 188 Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin (Irobi) 7, 19, 21, 25, 33, 34, 70, 88 Wiesel, Elie 243

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Index

Wilde, Oscar 185 Williams, Adebayo 100 Williams, Owen 327 Willis, Thomas 302 Wilson, August 10, 11, 63 Wilson, Derek 327 Wilson, Robert 36 Windybrow Theatre (Hillbrow, S.A.) 201, 215 Wizard of the Crow (Ng×g´) 277 Woff, Richard 302 Wordsworth, William 104 Woza Albert! (Mtwa, Ngema & Simon) 328

Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon) 73, 224, 306

369 Xala (Sembène) 224 Yoruba Professional Travelling Theatre of Nigeria 291 Zaghloul, Saad 156 Zaourou, Bernard Zadi 183 Zarrilli, Phillip, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams & Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei 143 Zenzenina (Irobi) 70 Ziqcubo, Coundry 210 Zulu, The (Ngema) 239 Zuma, Jacob 246