English-Language African Drama

Overview

English-language countries in sub-Saharan Africa include Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Liberia in the west; Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania in the east; Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in the center; and Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho in the south. Several of these countries have produced a considerable body of drama and can serve as representatives of the activity that is taking place in Anglophone countries throughout Africa.

In all these countries, scripted drama in English developed even later than other written forms, perhaps because, as Cosmo Pieterse—one of the most prominent figures in the African theater—and others have suggested, traditional community life still satisfied the dramatic instinct through rituals involving music and dance and through oral narrative—both forms in which the audience was not only spectator but also participant. The potential of African drama, once established, stemmed from its ritual character and became evident soon after independence (mostly around 1960). African plays, in capitalizing on the ritual element, usually go beyond the need for mere entertainment in the search for cultural identity and social cohesion.

African plays fall generally into two categories: those that are immediately accessible to Western audiences because they rely primarily on dialogue and a tightly knit structure, with personal conflict, rising action, climax, and denouement, and those that show the influence of such structures but return to forms of community ritual. The first group seems intended partially for audiences beyond Africa, with an eye on publication by foreign presses. One effect, if not motive, of such drama is to make Africa a part of the international community. The other group often disparages such concerns and focuses attention solely on an African audience, on the education, self-awareness, and cohesion of the African community. Many such plays therefore use the local idiom and unless translated are inaccessible not only to the outside world but also to other Africans. Still, a large body of drama, even in the second group, relies on English—with only scattered uses of local language for song or intimate dialogue—because dramatists need English to reach beyond their own ethnic groups. One must insist, however, that no English-language play has the integrative quality of traditional drama, religious or secular. Cut off from the ceremonial, ritual life of the people, it is not “African” in that fundamental sense.

Some permanent theater sites exist, most notably at large universities in urban areas, but traveling companies attempt to reach the people directly. One alternative has been to encourage high schools to establish acting groups. A popular form of contemporary drama is the radio play. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s African Theatre Series has sponsored competitions, the second one in 1971-1972, to encourage the writing and production of plays by Africans. Such plays, written for radio, were necessarily short, designed as thirty-minute programs. Brevity has been characteristic of other African plays as well. They are frequently one-acts, simple in outline and action, often using between two and five characters. The plays can be subtle, even ambiguous, in their statements. A play of simple dialogue can have far-reaching symbolic overtones. What appears to be a direct statement about a social or political situation contains nuances that one should perhaps expect from a culture accustomed to proverbial and ritualistic speech. The brevity of the plays may have something to do with their appeal to a broad audience, but it does not imply any absence of subtlety or sophistication in dealing with personal or social issues. Further, even in the short, well-made plays, the characters are not so much individuals as “ritual” representations. They invite the audience to be participants rather than spectators. African plays, at their best, have suggestions of communal experience.

East Africa: Uganda

In East Africa, Kenya and Uganda have been the most active dramatically. Makerere University in Uganda, with its own traveling theater company, has had a tremendous impact. The plays that have come out of this region, despite considerable diversity, have common, identifiable features. For the most part, they are well made. With the exception of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (who wrote as James T. Ngugi until 1970), the dramatists rely on simple, intimate situations, choosing to reveal the larger social setting within the microcosm of a small group. Even when the setting is a traditional village, either in the past or in contemporary times, with one or two exceptions the complicating features of song, dance, and ritual are absent. In addition, a pervasive motif preoccupies dramatists, whether they are speaking of the traditional life of the people or the modern conflict between African and non-African, both European and otherwise: On the most basic level, the motif is self-aggrandizement, an imposition of the self on others. In Ugandan plays, especially, self-aggrandizement frequently leads to self-destruction as well.

Nuwa Sentongo ’s The Invisible Bond (pb. 1975) is a paradigm of this theme. Kibaate murders his wife’s beloved only to have the corpse return to haunt him. While he slowly becomes a slave to this dead master, his wife is killed and joins her lover, Damulira, in death. In the background of the personal conflict, night-walkers (cannibals), acting as a chorus of dancers, stalk the dead, first calling up Damulira, then Kibaate’s wife, as food for their tables. The feeding of one on another attains a level of ritual condemnation. Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu in Family Spear (pr. 1972; radio play) and Tom Omara in The Exodus (pr. 1965) call into question the role of tradition in sanctioning such behavior. In both plays, the ancestral spear, the symbol of authority, signifies the continuing power of tradition to prevent a sensitive response to the human needs of the present.

Several Ugandan and Kenyan dramatists are of Asian (Indian or Pakistani) ancestry. Their special situation within the African setting raises issues of race, belonging, and patriotism. Significantly, however, the theme of self-aggrandizement remains the key concern. Jagjit Singh ’s Sweet Scum of Freedom (pr. 1972; radio play) ennobles the “scum,” or victims, of society (the heroine is a prostitute) and suggests strongly a desire for self-destruction in those who exploit them. Ganesh Bagchi shows, in Of Malice and Men (pb. 1968), the difficulty an Indian, Sudhin, and an Englishman, Michael Knight, have in getting outside their ideologies to establish a personal relationship with a young Indian woman, Sona. One sees them both impose their ideologies on themselves and on her. What constitutes a modern African state; what responsibilities individuals have to themselves and to their country; what race, ideology, and tradition have to do with identity within the state; and most specifically, what happens to individuals who fail to acknowledge the rights of others within the society—these were the concerns of Ugandan drama of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The years of the dictatorship of Idi Amin (1971-1979) and the following civil war-like atmosphere until the reestablishment of a stable democracy in 1986 effected their toll on the theater. Prominent playwright Byron Kawadwa, who wrote like many Ugandan dramatists in the Luganda language, was murdered for his satire Oluimba Iwa Wankoko (pr. 1971; The Song of Mr. Cock, 1971), which criticized unlawful government actions. As a result of this repression, others like the influential playwright and producer Robert Serumaga chose exile during the final years of Amin’s terror-inflicting rule. Serumaga founded the popular Abafumi Players , who had come to him from other theater venues, and formed a closely knit group of actors and theater workers. Serumaga fled Uganda for Kenya from 1977 to 1979, taking his Abafumi Players with him, and died in Nairobi in 1980 after a brief return to post-Amin Uganda.

Since 1986, peace has brought a renewed flourishing of Ugandan theater. Audience appetite for drama, dance, and musicals is very high. In the capital of Kampala, the national theater is an insufficient outlet to satisfy demand, and theater companies are often forced to perform in cinemas, in large halls, and outdoors. Traveling troupes always find sold-out audiences in the countryside, where moderate weather and gentle running hills provide good conditions for the many open-air performances.

Social criticism has become possible again in plays such as those by Cliff Lubwa p’Chong . His Kinsmen and Kinswomen (pr. 1986) focuses on often intricate family relationships, which can be both source of progress or barriers of social change. From 1988 until his departure for the United States in the 1990’s, Jimmy Katumba ’s troupe, the Ebonies , were very active in performing detective plays with a strong social message. Typically improvising heavily, the Ebonies staged John W. Katunde ’s plays The Dollar (pr. 1988) and The Inspector (pr. 1990) in an abandoned school in Kampala. The plays, which criticize greed, corruption, and mismanagement, derived a substantial amount of their popularity from the musical numbers they incorporated. Although the Ebonies have become less active without Katumba, other producers have followed the successful model of combining music, satire, and criticism.

Ugandan audiences savor theater as entertainment. The appetite for farce, comedy, and dance drama runs high, often satisfied by touring theater groups who use movement, dance, and music to overcome barriers posed by local languages and dialects. Their performances are very popular, but critics in the capital frown at their somewhat amateurish standards. Playwrights such as Alex Mukulu, who started as an actor himself, try to raise the professional standards for scripting and performance. His Wounds of Africa (pr. 1990) and Thirty Years of Bananas (pr. 1993) have a satirical message about Uganda’s problems. The production values of their music, mime, and dialogue are high, and Mukulu likes to use his own star performance to set the standards for the rest of the talent.

As elsewhere in Africa, in Uganda theater has also been used as an educational tool. Under the leadership of academic playwrights such as Rose Mbowa, brief plays are performed, aimed at coating their serious message with entertaining songs, dance, and witty dialogue. Mbowa’s Mother Ugandaand Her Children (pr. 1987) strove to reunify the country. In 2002, the Global Lutheran World Federation Campaign against HIV/AIDS enlisted the creative services of Uganda’s TASO drama group to disseminate information about the disease through mini-plays performed at hospitals and community centers in Uganda.

Kenya

Kenya ’s dramatists Kuldip Sondhi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o face a situation similar to that of the Ugandan dramatists. Although he was educated in Kenya, Sondhi was born in West Pakistan and thus is sensitive to the social ostracism that characterizes the modern African state. In his plays, this emerges as an imposition of one’s culture or personal values or prejudices on another. In The Magic Pool (pb. 1972), it is the social rejection of a hunchback; in the radio play Sunil’s Dilemma (pr. 1970), it is the invasion of an Asian’s home by Africans identified as both thieves and police. With Strings (pb. 1968) warns of the imposition of the past on the present. When a wealthy uncle, who, for whatever motive, uses a promise of money to influence critical decisions in the lives of the younger generation, suddenly dies of a heart attack, the hand of the past releases its grip. The young Indian man and African woman who are the play’s focus can make their decision about marriage without prejudice, and, it would seem, the two races can merge, albeit with some difficulty.

In Undesignated (pb. 1968), Sondhi explores what appears to be a personal dilemma (he is both engineer and writer). The main character, an African named Solomon, is tempted to become the head of a department in an engineering firm so that he can have wealth and influence, motives that are ultimately self-destructive. Because another is chosen for the position, however, he is forced to use his talents as an artist instead, to the benefit of both himself and his country. Sondhi’s play Encounter (pb. 1968) not only reiterates this theme but also does so in a context that is more common to the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Two encounters, one between a British lieutenant and a fellow officer, the other between the lieutenant and a rebel, General Nyati, reveal the power of ideology and cultural loyalties. Both the lieutenant and the general are idealists, but the force of the general’s personality prevails because it is ultimately in the service of freedom and not of exploitation. In the early twenty-first century, to survive financially, Sondhi increasingly concentrated his energies on the Mombasa and Coast Tourist Association, winning an award in June of 2002 for his efforts on behalf of Kenya’s tourism industry.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o , as the most prominent figure in East African literature, is mainly known as a novelist and a critic of Western exploitation. His plays are not as powerful as his novels, but they explore the same themes and allow him to speak his political views directly to the people. Ngugi combines in a more complex way than the other East African dramatists the three common elements in African drama: the sociopolitical context, traditional modes of performance (song, dance, and oral narrative), and personal dialogue that captures with intimacy the consequences of forces at work in contemporary Africa. This Time Tomorrow: Three Plays (pb. 1970) contrasts a narrator-journalist, whose view of the slums in Nairobi is rhetorical, insensitive, and exploitive, and a stranger, who enters the slums just before their removal in order to incite the people against the government. When the stranger is arrested, the people fail to support him. The play ends with a young woman leaving her homeless mother to marry into wealth. This pattern of the seduced woman recurs in Ngugi’s work. In I Will Marry When I Want (pr. 1982; with Ngugi wa Mirii), first produced in the Gikuyu language in 1977, the beautiful daughter of a poor, exploited family is seduced by the son of the family’s exploiter. The family sees its condition deteriorate, partly through its own lapse of will, as even the one piece of land left to it is cleverly bargained away.

The most powerful and innovative of Ngugi’s plays is The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (pr. 1974; with Micere Githae-Mugo). Using a variety of juxtaposed scenes, it captures the trial of this famous rebel leader, the children who grow up amid the injustices of the British system, and the seduced young woman who has recovered her identity and become a part of the rebel movement. The final act is a positive, courageous gesture of the two children, motivated by the woman’s persuasive presence, to attempt to save Kimathi during the sentencing. Ngugi applies the theme of exploitation to a cultural attack against the exploiter. His concern, evident in the theme and in the form, is not primarily the self-destructiveness of the victimizer but rather the effects on the victims and the need for revolutionary change in the social structure: a return to communal values and traditional attitudes toward property and personal worth .

After his exile from Kenya in 1978, Ngugi settled in London, later moving to the United States for a professorship in the department of comparative literature at New York University. Although he became less active in the theater, his novels Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini (1980; Devil on the Cross, 1982) and Matigari ma Njiruungi (1986; Matigari, 1989) and his political commentary Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) have kept him in the public eye. Since his 1986 book, Ngugi has returned to write literary criticism in English. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998), the collection of his Clarendon Lectures in England, also focuses on dramatic issues.

During the 1990’s, drama in Kenya suffered from political repression. Prominent playwrights such as Ngugi and Mugo had gone into exile. To get a permit to produce a play, whether by a Kenyan or an international playwright, the theater company had to submit the script to a government agency for approval. The production companies, such as Sarasaki Limited or the Miujiza Players of the Phoenix Players repertory company, were subjected to intense political checks. Nairobi’s National Theatre has tried with varying success to run a middle course between standard, inoffensive fare and more politically challenging productions, some of which were at least diluted by government intervention.

Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia

Because of the ideological commitment to Swahili as the official language of Tanzania by its first post-independence ruler, Julius Nyerere, Kenya’s neighboring country to the south has not experienced much dramatic output in English. In the early twenty-first century, foreign plays were performed in English by two companies in the capital, the Dar es Salaam Players and the Arusha Little Theatre . Some works by Tanzania’s playwrights such as Ebrahim Hussein have been translated into English.

Most of Malawi ’s dramatic output is in the local language of Chichewa. The 1990’s saw a continuous rise in the popularity of the radio programs featuring English-language plays that were broadcast on Saturday evenings, such as Theatre on the Air by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation. The end of that decade saw the publication of many of Du Chisiza, Jr.’s plays, such as De Summer Blow . . . And Other Plays (1998) and Democracy Boulevard and Other Plays (1998), which focus on the daily struggles of the Malawi people in the cities and the countryside.

In the early twenty-first century, Zambia ’s capital of Lusaka possessed two major theatrical venues, the Lusaka Playhouse and the Tikwiza Theatre , which staged impressive production schedules based on Zambian and international plays in English. At the Lusaka Playhouse during this period, Zambia’s first privately organized theater festival combined performances with special workshops aimed at improving artistic standards; more than 120 performers from Zambia and southern Africa participated. Zambian playwrights working in English often focus on the issues of the urban society and other local problems. The country also had a tradition of traveling theater groups, one that had begun in 1971 when the Chikwakwa Theater started to tour the country, and remained in groups such as the Zhaninge Travelling Theatre Group , founded in 1984.

Zimbabwe

Theater got off to a successful start when Zimbabwe became a new nation in 1980. The government was interested in supporting community-based theater movements and embraced the idea of theater-for-development, using short plays and dramatic performances to highlight the need for positive changes. Under the guidance of playwright Stephen Chifunyise , who became a minister of education, sport, and culture, many performance groups were founded and theater was widely supported. In 1984, the University of Zimbabwe began offering classes in dramatic arts and staged local plays.

By 1996, more than one hundred theater troupes existed in Zimbabwe, and the National Theatre Organisation, located in Harare, had been invigorated by the influx of local playwrights writing for its production schedule. Zimbabwe offered a flourishing patronage for theater, as well as excellent theaters for successful productions. International theater festivals were organized and brought global talent in touch with Zimbabwean playwrights, producers, and performers. Zimbabwean, British, and African dramatic heritages started to fuse to create an exciting new national theater. Amakhosi Productions of Bulawayo drew its material from the popular concerns of the urban and rural people and invigorated traditional folk theater. International and domestic organizations sought to ameliorate the issue of homeless teenagers by integrating them in well-funded production companies.

Yet, by 2002, the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe hit the world of theater as well. The Harare International Festival of the Arts, which had been a great success since its start in 1999, was cancelled by the government. Scheduled to run just before the March, 2002, elections—which saw an arguably fraudulent reelection of Robert Mugabe, who had ruled the country since independence—the government felt unable to ensure a safe stage. Playwrights, actors, and producers, however, refused to be intimidated by increasingly violent government repression. Daves Guzha ’s Rooftop Promotions completed its production of Dare/Enkundleni (pr. 2001), which saw actors from all of Zimbabwe’s provinces in the country’s largest theatrical production to date. The play attacked government regulations, including its monopoly on the sale of maize, a stable crop, which forces farmers to sell their products to the government at an economic loss to themselves. This arrangement jeopardizes the farmers’ ability to feed an increasingly hungry nation because they lack the funds to buy new seed. During several productions of Dare/Enkundleni, radicals voicing support for the government ran on the stage and beat actors.

In Zimbabwe’s cultural capital of Bulawayo, also a stronghold of anti-Mugabe opposition, Collin Sibanda ’s theater organization, Artists Against Violence International (AAVI), has been threatened with physical violence. Government-supported radicals, unhappy with the group’s dramatic readings of poetry that are critical of the ruling party, unsuccessfully tried to interrupt performances in schools. Chifunyise was one of the few dramatists who, after the events of early 2002, still defended the repressive government. Artists such as Guzha feared that Mugabe’s power to forbid any unapproved public gathering could be used to forbid the staging of critical plays.

Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland

Theater in the southern African nations of Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland is often based on traditional African forms and performed in local languages. Local dramatists who write in English generally produce plays that are appreciated mostly by an urban audience. Local playwrights commonly work together with theater-for-development projects funded in part by the United Nations and write scripts for educational plays performed by traveling troupes or amateur actors.

In Namibia , the National Theatre in the capital of Windhoek offers formal drama, musicals, and ballet based on Western models and revivals of Western plays. The Warehouse Theatre in Windhoek, to the contrary, focuses on informal theater, experimental theater, and one-person shows. Drama has also taken an active role in combating one of southern Africa’s most pressing health problems. For example, two drama groups, Puppets Against AIDS (PAAN) and Yatala, offered Dramas For Health workshops on a nationwide tour. The presentations highlighted the health and social implications of HIV/AIDS and offered clear HIV-prevention messages. For performance in the countryside, the Caprivi Drama Group has put together educational theater such as its Fire Drama Play, which transmits through its drama strategies for fire prevention and fire fighting techniques.

Although traditional African drama and dance forms were flourishing in Botswana by 2002, the capital Gaborone lacked a formal theater but could claim the Okava Theatre Production company supported by the Alliance Francaise de Gaborone. On President’s Day (July 16), traditional dances are performed in the capital. Most people in Botswana prefer traditional, informal theater, which often draws its actors directly from the audience, and state support for theater is rather limited.

The vast majority of plays written and performed in Lesotho exists in the Sesotho language. A prominent exception is the work of South Africa-born playwright Zakes Mda , who emigrated to Lesotho in 1963. Mda has written political plays in English, such as Dead End (pr. 1979), which deals with connections between prostitution and the former apartheid system, and The Road (pr. 1982), which focuses on labor issues. His characters are heavily influenced by the political situation in which they are forced to act, and Mda favors situational drama over straightforward political agitation. Moving into the field of criticism, he wrote When People Play People: Development Communication Through Theatre (1993) about his experience with theater-for-development projects, to which he was devoting most of his energy by the dawn of the twenty-first century. His Marotholi Travelling Theater company’s goal is to bring educational theater to all levels of Lesotho’s primarily rural and migrant labor society, and it also has toured abroad. Launched in 1999, the Morija Arts and Culture Festival includes local drama performances, one of Lesotho’s relatively few formally organized outlets for theatrical performances.

Indigenous theater in Swaziland remained underdeveloped in the early twenty-first century. Swazi audiences typically prefer South African productions and have been known to throw beer cans at their own local talent, driving them off stage in favor of South African performers. The Siyavuka! Swaziland National Arts Festival was started in December of 2000 to change this situation by featuring and promoting local drama productions. The organizers welcomed all local talent to perform on its stage, and the event proved successful.

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa offers a variety of plays written in English. The least compelling of them seem carbon copies of plays from other countries in Africa. They are not uninteresting, but they do not seem to arise from the particular complex of issues in the South African setting. Alfred Hutchinson ’s Fusane’s Trial (pb. 1968), for example, deals with a typical conflict between the old and new cultures. A young girl, Fusane, refuses to become the fourth wife of an old man. Before the actual marriage ceremony, he forces himself on her. In defending herself against rape, she kills him. When the court finds her innocent, her family is both penitent and joyous. New concepts of love and marriage win over the old. Arthur Maimane ’s The Opportunity (pb. 1968) deals with the ironies of a domestic situation in which a former leader in the rebel cause must divorce his wife and marry an educated woman in order to be eligible for a post as ambassador to the United Nations. The authority he wields according to custom makes it easy to take this symbolic step into the modern world.

In other plays, technical experimentation is at least as important as the conflict itself. Namibian-born Cosmo Pieterse, an editor of numerous texts and an actor as well as a dramatist, has attempted poetic drama in his Ballad of the Cells (pb. 1972). In Credo V. Mutwa ’s intriguing uNosilimela (pb. 1981), the “experimentation”—if that is what it should be called—is an incorporation of traditional modes. uNosilimela is an epic tracing of uNosilimela’s journey from mythical origins to her experiences in modern South African settings—her fall from grace, sufferings, abuse, and eventual return to the family. The final act is accompanied by the Apocalypse: the end of the white regime, the end of apartheid, and the attainment of Eden for South African blacks. The play uses allegory, myth, dream, music, dance, and ritual. It is not a well-made play, nor does it appeal primarily to an international audience. It is an indigenous play written for the people. Though the predominant language is English, some conversation and the songs and ritual portions are conducted in local languages.

The one playwright who has most clearly spoken for the creative potential of South Africa and the entire African experience is Athol Fugard, considered South Africa’s premier and most contentious playwright. Fugard, who has directed and appeared in several of his own works, has built his reputation on four seminal but highly theatrical works: The Blood Knot (pr. 1961), Boesman and Lena (pr. 1969), A Lesson from Aloes (pr. 1978), and “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys (pr. 1982). His dramatic output of the late twentieth century includes A Place with the Pigs (pr. 1987), My Children! My Africa! (pr. 1990), My Life (pr. 1994), and The Captain’s Tiger (pr. 1997). Playland (pr. 1992) anticipates the end of the apartheid system, which happened in 1994, with its careful exploration of a productive dialogue between white and black South Africans.

Valley Song (pr. 1995) is Fugard’s postmodern play about the role of intergenerational conflict. It contains a strong vision to sustain the new, democratic and multiracial South Africa. In the South African production of his play, Fugard starred himself in the double role of Author and Buks, a “colored” (mixed-race) farmer trying to hand down his rural values to his city-bent granddaughter Veronica. The character of the Author introduces the play by sowing his field, which the stage has become, talking of spring and rebirth, two themes the local audience readily perceived as metaphors for the politics of their nation. Fugard then assumed the role of Buks, occasionally slipping back into his Author character, and reflected on a former harsh, but meaningful, life as farmer. His spunky granddaughter, who dances and swirls around the stage, tells Buks of her plans for a sparkling city life. She is modeled as a representative of South Africa’s youth, yet she also shares some quiet, tender moments with her grandfather, whom she clearly loves.

Until the end of apartheid in 1994, plays that were most interesting to an international audience, perhaps, were those that dealt directly with the apartheid system. They were inevitably critical of the system, but with varying degrees of intensity and subtlety. The approach is generally that of most African writers, with the exception of Ngugi: a concentration on a particularized and limited situation that reflects the social setting rather than a broad social and political attack. Harold Kimmel ’s two-act play The Cell (pb. 1972) focuses on two prisoners in the same cell, a Boer extremist and a Jewish liberal. In act 1, Peter reduces Levine to the status of a black in an apartheid state; in the second act, Levine uses the leverage of truth about Peter’s activities and motives to create a socialist state. Richard Rive, in Resurrection (pb. 1972), attacks racism directly, and in his radio play Make Like Slaves (pb. 1972), he suggests more subtly the difficulty of crossing the racial line. An aggressive white woman and a “colored” man not only have some difficulty understanding each other but also find no way to enter a third world, that of the blacks. David Lytton ’s Episodes of an Easter Rising (pb. 1972) is a sensitive treatment of two older white women who take up residence in an isolated region because racial conflict takes up too much time from the act of living. They are thrown into the conflict, however, when they humanely and instinctively befriend a revolutionary leader, “the man,” and protect him from the police. They eventually realize their involvement and at the end confirm their commitment by taking in the family of a black man who has died in a seditious act. Lytton thus suggests that the line between the races is not an unsurmountable barrier.

After 1994, the postapartheid era saw an upswing in theatrical productions. New creative energies were bestowed on the writing and the production of plays that reflected the new, democratic South Africa. Civic and commercial theaters were integrated, with black, white, Indian, and mixed-race talent performing together for multiracial audiences. When Fugard, of white Afrikaaner origin, played the “colored” farmer Buks in Valley Song, many South Africans felt that an important creative barrier had been overcome. Black writers, directors, and producers have become very influential in shaping the artistic identity of formerly segregated cultural institutions and theater companies. Experimental theater enjoyed commercial success by the early twenty-first century, and South Africa’s university system aids in the development of a genuine South African theater that encompasses members of all races.

West Africa

The plays of West Africa are distinctly different from those of the east and south. Because Europeans did not settle there and take away the land, racial conflict and demands for the recovery of economic and political rights are not major themes. It is not the residual colonial presence, or ideology, or patriotism that primarily motivates West African drama. Plays from this region tend to be exposés of political, social, or economic chaos, or of the corruption among the high and low officials who have replaced the white bureaucracy. Some of the plays attempt to deal with the conflict of values between the old and new cultures; they often broach such topics with detachment and even with a comic spirit. These plays of West Africa are typically busier than their counterparts elsewhere on the continent, as though their purpose were to capture the fullness of life, especially in the modern urban centers and marketplaces, through local color, dialect, and a wide variety of characterization and mood.

Nigeria

Sanya Dosunmu ’s God’s Deputy (pb. 1972) is a Cinderella story set in Nigeria in the late nineteenth century. The divine right of a local king is enough to overcome all obstacles to permit him to marry the beautiful princess, the daughter of a village chief. The play incorporates the paraphernalia of traditional customs—children’s games, a festival, the Egungun dance, symbols of various gods such as Ogun and Esu—but it is, in the final analysis, a light piece of entertainment, a musical. Kofi Awoonor’s Ancestral Power (pb. 1972) is a dialogue between a proponent of the past and a man of the new age. The traditionalist claims to possess powers from his dead ancestors, only to be abruptly exposed as a braggart and coward. His exposure raises questions about the tradition itself and suggests the necessity of entering reasonably into the twentieth century, yet the twist at the end is more cleverness than dramatic peripeteia. Gordon Tialobi attempts Kafkaesque nightmare in his radio play Full-Cycle (pr. 1971). General Maga is arrested by revolutionaries, tried, sentenced, and executed. He wakes up to find that it was all a dream but then experiences the same thing again as either another nightmare or reality. The clever ambiguity and the surrealistic mode detach the audience from the psychological and political theme. Ngugi would not dissipate the force of his attack by such dramatic devices.

A popular vein in West African drama is the largely comic treatment of bribery, corruption, and business dealings in the modern city. Imme Ikiddeh in Blind Cyclos (pb. 1968) applies poetic justice to Olemu, the minister of housing, who uses his position to demand “kola” or bribery for his special favors. A local medicine man, also seen as a prophet, turns the tables by casting a spell on him. Not only does he charge him an enormous fee for his services, but he also puts into motion a series of events that lead to Olemu’s arrest and exposure. Femi Euba ’s The Game (pb. 1968) turns the old society upside down as a wealthy businessperson’s second wife takes a lover (polygamy reversed), and a beggar takes advantage of the situation through deceit, bribery, and the selling of information to enter the world of high finance. There is no difference between the beggar and the businessperson whom he is exploiting.

Wole Soyinka, who gives an especially sensitive reading of Song of a Goat in his book Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976), is the one figure of West African drama who not only represents the qualities already mentioned but also, as an accomplished and gifted writer, has realized their potential. He has attempted practically every mode of drama, from farce to Swiftian satire and tragedy, sometimes mixing modes in one play. He has received criticism for not using his talent in more patriotic ways—for being too much the artist, not enough the social critic—but a Western reader is likely to view this “fault” as a virtue. Soyinka’s successful merger of psychological realism, dramatic form, and mythical substructure gives historical continuity to a specific situation and raises drama to a ritual level. Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, has moved away from the dramatic genre to concentrate on poetry and essays. His plays in the 1980’s included A Play of Giants (pr. 1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (pb. 1985).

Soyinka’s A Scourge of Hyacinths (pr. 1991) was a successful radio play aired by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). The Beautification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope (pr. 1996) was first performed in Leeds, England, because of the increasing political oppression under Nigeria’s former military dictatorship. In 1994, the former dictator Sani Abacha had sentenced Soyinka to death in Nigeria, and the playwright had to flee his country to save his life. In 1998, with democracy restored in Nigeria, Soyinka returned home. His fellow Nigerian playwright and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa , was not as fortunate. On November 10, 1995, Saro-Wiwa was hanged for his writings, which include Four Farcical Plays (pb. 1989), because they expressed political opposition to the oppression of his Ogoni people.

The dark years of the Abacha regime negatively affected Nigerian drama. Concern for personal safety discouraged audiences from attending plays. Many dramatists and performers left the country. Ola Rotimi stayed until 1995. The influential playwright had tried in vain to lead the African Cradle Theatre , a company dedicated to the development of professional standards and high artistic talent. When economic mismanagement at the hands of the military dictatorship destroyed all possible funding for the arts, even the huge success of his satirical play Man Talk, Woman Talk (pr. 1995) could not provide the resources he deemed necessary for professional theater. In 1995, Rotimi left for a professorship in the United States. Like Soyinka, Rotimi returned in 1998, but he died before fulfilling his final dream of a huge play with hundreds of extras.

The return to democracy ushered in a revival of Nigerian theater, yet playwrights, actors, and producers still face huge economic problems. By the early twenty-first century, ongoing civil strife among Nigeria’s many ethnic and religious groups threatened a peaceful and just coexistence, as envisioned by artists such as the executed Saro-Wiwa.

Ghana

Immediately after independence in 1957, Ghanaian playwrights were invited to play an active role in supporting the new government. Efua Sutherland established the Ghana Drama Studio in Accra in that year, and her plays fused Western and African ideas as well as mixed media. Ama Ata Aidoo built her pan-African fame with her play The Dilemma of a Ghost (pr. 1964), which tells of the conflicts between a Ghanaian husband and an African American wife. She was appointed minister of education in 1982, but disillusioned with Ghana’s continuing slide into economic depression during the 1980’s and 1990’s, she left for exile in Zimbabwe in 1983, focusing there on novel writing.

Economic decline saw the departure of many other Ghanaian dramatists. Formal and English language theater has become popular only among relatively small urban audiences. Traditional Ghanaian theater typically uses indigenous languages and is based on performance, dance, and music. It is performed during so-called concert parties along Ghana’s coast and is hugely popular with large local audiences. Yet, there also have been Ghanaian dramatists working in English, often enduring economic hardship and a persistent lack of public funding.

The Ghanaian dramatist Patience Henaku Addo, in a typical portrait of city life, Company Pot (pr. 1972; radio play), traces the education of a young girl in the ways of the city; she has to face seduction, con games, drugs, and prostitution, but survives a wiser woman.

This mixture of romance, comedy, and satire, however, is not the whole picture. In Derlene Clems ’s indictment of Ghanaian bureaucracy in The Prisoner, the Judge, and the Jailor, first broadcast in 1971, the ingratiating hand of friendship and fellow suffering quickly becomes the grip of the law. The artistry of the play reinforces rather than dissipates emotional effect. Jacob Hevi, in his play Amavi (pb. 1975), traces a Ghanaian peasant woman’s life to show how, for twenty years, she has been exploited. Among the most famous of the West African dramatists is John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo . His play Song of a Goat (pr., pb. 1961) makes sexual impotence a tragic event. It attempts to capture and preserve a way of life that modern audiences, even in regarding that particular play, find hard to appreciate.

In the late 1990’s, democratic reforms and a degree of economic relief fostered a resurgence of formal Ghanaian theater. Playwright Efo Kodjo Mawugbe wrote works dealing with family relationships and the conflict between traditional and modern, global ways of thinking. There was renewed interest in obtaining funding for theater to ensure the production of professionally staged plays.

Gambia

The small West African nation Gambia , along the Gambia River, has struggled to maintain a viable live theater. In the 1960’s, troupes such as the Dimbalanteh Company performed to enthusiastic audiences. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, plays about Gambia’s history and contemporary social issues still found spectators, and Gambia’s Association Dramatique Nationale represented the country at international theater festivals. By the late 1990’s, live theater experienced a steady decline in Gambia. Radio plays survived, but audience interest had waned. In the early twenty-first century, Gambia lacked a permanent theater.

Liberia and Sierra Leone

In Sierra Leone , plays in the local Krio language, which has its roots in English, were popular after independence in 1961. Dele Charley staged the popular dance-drama Fatmata (pr. 1977), which founded a new genre. Yulisa Amadu Maddy produced Big Berin in the early 1970’s, which was highly critical of the government’s attitudes toward the urban poor. Imprisoned and forced into exile by the late 1970’s, Maddy tried sporadically to return to Sierra Leone in the 1980’s and 1990’s to revive its theater. From 1978 to 1986, plays in Krio and English were performed in the capital’s new city hall, which could house one thousand spectators, before it was closed to theater. The lengthy and brutal civil war that began in 1992 effectively ended most organized performances, as the capital of Freetown was plagued by looting marauders who burned down many large structures suitable for theater, causing utter social fear and instability.

The situation in neighboring Liberia has been equally unfortunate for theater. Relatively calm until the 1980’s, a brutal civil war ravished the country and continued into the early years of the twenty-first century. Possible sites for theatrical productions were plundered and burned to the ground. A climate of violence and fear discouraged any large public gathering. However, on the village level, local and traveling theatrical companies managed to survive. The peace-promoting efforts of one of such group, the Flomo Theater Production Company, were praised by the American ambassador to Liberia in July, 2002.

Outlook

Scripted African drama in the English language, with the exception of the situation in South Africa, is still in its development phase, but dramatic activity is extensive. For various reasons—political, cultural, aesthetic—the commitment to the form is real. Where peace, stability, and democracy have been established, formal theater has flourished and traditional dramatic forms have reached large, widespread, and appreciative audiences. Political freedom also has encouraged playwrights, actors, and producers to give free rein to their remarkable creativity. The steady presence of African plays in English at international theater festivals is a positive indicator of the intense vitality and viability of the form.

Bibliography

Brown, Lloyd W. Women Writers in Black Africa. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Still a groundbreaking study of the development of African women writers, among whom the Ghanaian dramatists Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo are discussed in detailed chapters of their own. Notes, bibliography, and index.

Etherton, Michael. The Development of African Drama. New York: Africana, 1982. An excellent work on the origins and development of traditional and contemporary African drama. Unsurpassed in its cogent analysis of the roots of African drama and the effect of the European dramatic influence on modern African drama. In-depth analysis of three plays from Ghana and Wole Soyinka’s protest plays, among others. Illustrated glossary of dramatic terms and their applicability to the African context. Bibliography and index.

Kerr, David. African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present Day. London: James Currey, 1995. Accessible study of the roots and development of African theater as enjoyed by the majority of sub-Saharan Africans. Includes discussion of formal theater, folk rituals, and folk theater. Good overview of the coexistence between traditional and European-inspired forms. Bibliography.

Larlham, Peter. Black Theater, Dance, and Ritual in South Africa. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International Research Press, 1985. Although somewhat dated by the end of the apartheid system in 1994, the book still provides a useful, exemplary study of the interconnections between indigenous theatrical and dramatic traditions and their contact with European forms. Provides a good discussion of theater’s relationship to society and politics.

Muhando Mlama, Penina. Culture and Development: The Popular Theater Approach on Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1991. Persuasive study of the uses of popular African theater to aid the development of culture and society. Covers such aspects as the use of drama, occasionally by amateur performers, to transmit social messages.

Ndumbe Eyoh, Hansel. Beyond Theatre. Bonn, Germany: German Foundation for International Development, 1991. Interview of Africans involved in writing, production, and performance of popular theater. Excellent background on the ideas of people actively involved in shaping popular theater in Africa.

Wertheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Perceptive critical assessment of the work of one of Africa’s most recognized and internationally famous playwrights. Especially good for its discussion of Fugard’s use of specific African themes and his international reception. Bibliography and index.

Wright, Derek. Wole Soyinka Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Extensively revised, covers all aspects of Soyinka’s dramatic work, including his roots in the Yoruba folk theater traditions and his development of his dramatic theories. Thorough discussions of individual plays. Rich bibliography.