8/3/2019 African Drama

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/african-drama 1/5

African Drama, West and SouthAuthor(s): Robert E. McDowellReviewed work(s):Source: Africa Today, Vol. 15, No. 4, Realism and Romanticism in African Literature (Aug. -Sep., 1968), pp. 25-28Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184936 .

Accessed: 18/12/2011 09:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of 

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

 Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Africa Today.

http://www.jstor.org

8/3/2019 African Drama

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/african-drama 2/5

A f r i c a n D r a m a , W e s t a n d S o u t h

Robert E. McDowell

In "Toward a New African Theatre" (Homeand Exile, Longmans, 1965)Lewis Nkosi expresseshis bold views on the moribund state of moderntheatre. In theaters today ". . . a significantamount of talk is heard about insignificant banali-ties of existence." The stage has, above all, ceasedbeing theatrical; it has lost the old "magic," and". . . now aspires to nothing more than a smallplace in the mean grubby corner of a cheap real-ism . . ." It fails to involve the whole communityin "the large gesture."

For anyone who has seen African dramas per-formed, Nkosi's remarks serve as a forcefulapologia for the best of African theater, and for

the quality of imagination displayed by the bestplaywrights creating for Africa today. The sortof theatricality which satisfies Nkosi's demandsis most readily observed in the works of WoleSoyinka of Nigeria. Soyinka, who objects fiercelyto "anthropological data"-topless dancers, flashycostumes, a n d exotica-for-the-sake-of-exotica-does, nevertheless, make use of fascinating de-vices in his own expressionistic plays: dancing,singing, miming, speeches in verse, flashbacks(sometimes covering eons of time), and charactersfrom the spirit world. He employs techniquesfamiliar at Nigerian festivals, and utilizes anypoetic methods which enforce the emotional and

intellectual impact of his dramas; in short, he hasno slavish attachment to the merely naturalisticlevel of presentation.'

Soyinka-Beyond Negritude

Soyinka is a satiric playwright, not given tooptimism. He is resolutely irresolute, as MartinTucker argues in Africa in Modern Literature(Ungar, 1967), and seems always to be exploringa vast pattern of possibilities, knowing that thereare no facile answers. He opp-osesrural and urbanviews, traditional values and intellectualized"modern" attitudes, past modes of existence andpresent life; but his conflicts are not solely theproblems of Nigerians, for Soyinka is caught upin the infinite possibilities of the mind, and thushis writing touches the lives of all men.

In "The Strong Breed" (Soyinka, Five Plays,Oxford, 1964), we readily observe how master-fully Soyinka fuses these social concerns with adramatic technique. Eman, a not overly-welcomestranger, is serving as a teacher in a village.Ironically, by trying to save the grotesque boyIfada from becoming the unwilling tool of ascapegoat ritual, Eman himself ends as the "car-rier" of the community's sins. Other evils in theold system caused Eman earlier to turn his backon his home village; this we learn as Soyinka ex-plains through flashback action how Eman be-came too intellectualized to participate in therituals of his own community, and how twelve

years absence severed all understanding betweenEman and his father. A play-within-the-play re-

veals that Eman's father is one of the "strongbreed" who performs the awesome physical featof carrying the boat to the water for the tribe.Eman begins to understand his father's behavior(the flashback scenes are really comparable to arapid association of events in Eman's mind), and,caught in the cruelty of the carrier ceremony,Eman comes to understand what strength reallyis.

While Eman's father is a reasonably sympa-thetic figure, Jaguna and Oroge, who lead thehunt for the idiot boy, and end in using Emanin the ritual, are not: they represent a blind faithin the abstract value of superstitious ceremony.

The behavior of these men, along with the alienroles of the social misfits-Eman, Ifada, the Girl,and Sunma-are grounds for indictment of anysociety. But if the play attacks servile attendanceon unexamined rituals which lead to suffering, italso sugge6ts that man cannot ignore the past. AsEman's father declares,

Your own blood will betray you son, becauseyou cannot hold it back . . . You will use yourstrength among thieves . . . They will even lackthe knowledge to use it wisely.

Eman, indeed, lives out a cruel parody of theritual he refused earlier to take over from hisfather.

Ambivalent Respect for Thhigs PastWhat is the sum of the action? As usual, the

Soyinka play is marked by ambivalence; but un-questionably we learn of the complexity ofchoosing, of the great difficulty in aligning ourlives in relation to the past which impinges onour present, of the senseless waste in systemswhich find more benefit in theological abstrac-tions than in concrete demonstrations of humanebehavior.

In strong contrast to the gloom of this plavis the rich comedy of "The Lion and the Jewel."Yet several things in the action remind us that

we are once more dealing with Soyinka. Againthe present matters most. And the Prufrockianschoolmaster, Lakunle, reminds us of the intel-lectualized Eman. While Lakunle fiddles, oldBaroka the Bale burns for the pleasures of thebeautiful Sidi. In an ingenious ruse, Baroka tricksSidi into making love with him; when afterwards.Lakunle suggests that he will marry the "ruined"girl (his ultra-modern views on marriage), Sidireplies,

Why, did you think that after him,I could endure the touch of anotherman?I who have felt the strength,The perpetualyouthful zestOf the panther of the trees? . ..

Out of my way, book-nourished hrimp.Once again the over-cerebral mind has been

AFRICA TODAY 25

8/3/2019 African Drama

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/african-drama 3/5

denied a victory. Rather it is the more primitivemind, the vitality and the imagination of the oldrnan which has triumphed. (One has a nearlyidentical reaction to Baroka's wily charms thathe has to the cleverness of Soyinka's BrotherJero, the beach preacher in "The Trials of BrotherJero."

The interesting machinery of these two plays,such, for instance as the miming in "The, Lionand the Jewel" and the play-within-the play of"The Strong Breed," are much in evidence, alongwvithsong, dance, and other spectacle, in Soyinka'smost famous production, "A Dance of the Forests,"a complex and often puzzling play. Most interest-ing here is Soyinka's reaching back to the deadcourt of Mata Kharibu and the satire on the im-pulse men have toward stuffing their ancestors.As its mvriad characters develop, we are con-vinced that man is unchanged over the genera-tions. "A Dance of the Forests" attacks a blindreverence for things past, primarily through thedepiction of Adenebi the political figure, Rola thewhore, and Demoke the artist-carver. Instead ofa grandeur called to mind by the name Chaka,

or greatness suggested by the old nations ofSonghai and Mali, the play exposes the samehideous sins demonstrated by the historical coun-terparts of these three contemporary figures. The"dead" characters, along with the living, displaypropensities toward violence, insensitivity, in-sincerity, cruelty, lust for power, hypocrisy, su-perstition. In light of the play's depraved action,the Forest Head, near the end, declares,

Nothing is ever altered. My secret is myeternal burden---to pierce the encrustations ofsoul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror ofor ginal nakedness-knowing full well, it is allfutilitV.

Little wonder that "A Dance of the Forests"created a furor when it was produced at the Ni-gerian independence celebration, for Soyinka here,as elsewhere, is anti-conservative, anti-N6gritude,anti-romantic. anti-"soul-deadening habit." Andvet, all this from a playwright who sometimesdepicts the old humanity as superior to the new,native cunning as superior to the "educated"mentalitv, and the fathers stronger and surer ofthemselves than their sons! Soyinka poses a nag-ging, quLestioni:what qualities will serve best forthe future? But the playwright does not answerthis directly-indeed, no man could. The sum ofhis mythologv, then, is a deliberate ambivalence,

a hig,hly-designed paradigm of possibilities.To say the least, Soyinka has managed to

transcend the well-worn themes of anti-colonial-ism---all of his dramas are set in the rural scenedevoid of white men. It is a curious paradox: hereis the Nigyerian writer most concerned with pure-ly African characters, yet the one who has mostconsistently escaped the limits of Negritude todeal with broad human values. Perhaps no otherAfrican writer succeeds so well in forcing theAfrican to look hard at himself.

Hutchinson-.Condemned Outsiders

Alfred Hutchinson's "The Rain-Killers"l (Univ.o)f London. 1964) is a brilliant drama, reminiscentof the movring action of Soyinka's "The StrongBreed" (and, interestingly enough, of Wtilliam

Faulkner's "Dry September"). Like Soyinka,Hutchinson commands a rich array of theatricaldevices which are integral to the meaning of hisplay: lamentations, prayer meetings, animisticdivining rituals, a chous, drumming, and dancing.Like all of Soyinka's plays, Hutchinson's has arural setting-a village on a Swazi reserve--andrevolves around primitive belief in the efficacyof a scapegoat ceremony.

Mapule, a Mosotho girl visiting the commun-ity, and Mfundisi, a preacher who has residedonly five years among the Swazi, are the twooutsiders. While the most hysterical in the com-munity hold that Mapule is responsible for be-witching them (and for killing the little boy andand the rain), Mfundisi comes to believe that hisspiritual dryness, symbolized for him in his at-traction to the beautiful Mapule (he is a greatdeal like the over-religious evangelist in Somer-set Maugham's "Rain"), is tied up with theparched condition of the blasted land:

The drought persists and it is evil deeds likemine that have brought God's wrath on us. Iam a rain-killer.

As the play rises to i ts shrieking climax,Mfundisi thus takes the sins of the communityon himself, first engaging in a public confession,then hanging himself. The pressure of residualbelief in witchcraft, and in the power of the madwitch doctor, Maziya, causes even Mfundisi torevert to a superstitious outlook:

Perhaps I'm bewitched,for the drufs are playingat Maziya'sagain . . .

And later, "I'm the witch. Me!"Logically enough, for the evolution of events

in the play, rain does come. Except for the voiceof Gran Shongwe at the end, the drama termi-

nates in just one more crushing victory for ir-ration ality:

MA-HLOPEIt's Maziya'srain. He defeated therain-killers.

MA-NKOSI You're wro n g, Ma-Hlope. It'sMfundisi'srain. He prayedfor it.

MAPULE It's God's rain, Ma-Nkosi.GRAN What does it matter? It's raining.

Come, Mapule,we're getting wet.

The s i m i I a r i t y of "The Rain-Killers" toSoyinka's "The Strong Breed" is quite marked.It is the "intellectual" outsider who takes thebrunt of cruelty in the community; once again itis a man whose modern antipathy to the brutality

of ancient rituals actually draws him into partici-pation as the central figure of a scapegoat drama.And Gran Shongwe, exactly like Soyinka's ForestHead makes a sobering evaluation on the entireaction:

But nothing in the htumansoul dies. Thingschange but people are really always the same.

A great deal of talk about the white manbeing responsible for the black condition isbandied about in Hutchinson's play; further, theplight of these reserve dwellers is seen asexa<ggerated by the absentee fathers who workin the mines. All this talk is a part of Hutchin-son's attempt to turn the Africans to a mirror,j ust as Soyinka does. Mfundisi is most vocal inthis regard, as he harrangues the crowd abouttheir blind faith in the past, about their refusal

26

8/3/2019 African Drama

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/african-drama 4/5

to be rational about the reality of their condition:You are hunting out witches! You are back inthe past! . . . And why is this scape-goat Mapule?I'll tell you: because she's a foreigner.

He then turns to the Chorus; proclaiming thatthey and he are the real witches, the real corrupt-ers of their children. Hutchinson's play in gener-al, and this last scene in particular, show a rareinstance of a striking similarity between literaryconcerns in West and South Africa-the

condem-nation by playwrights of people who try to avoidpresent realities, present responsibilities. SouthAfricans have for the most part spent all theirliterary energies damning their white oppressorsand depicting blacks who are simply trying tojoin the march of the present.

Nkosi-The Large GestureIn connection with "The Rain-Killers" and

also in regard to Lewis Nkosi's criticism ofmodern drama, it is fitting to scrutinize Nkosi'sown work, "The Rhythm of Violence" (Oxford,1964). This second South African is as good as hisown critical dicta, for his play is everything that

sterile drawing-room drama is not. "The Rhythmof Violence" deals, admittedly, with the usualSouth African subject matter-racial hatred-butit hardly treats it in a stilted fashion. Most ofits scenes depict young liberal South Africans ofall races mingling intimately with one another,including some revolutionaries who have hiddena bomb in Johannesburg City Hall. A young blackboy, Tula, is killed by the explosion when herushes from the youth center to save the fatherof Sarie, a white girl. Uninhibited dialogue makesthis a vigorous play: we hear the brutal tonesof Afrikaner policemen, the debate of conscienceamong the revolutionaries over the efficacy ofviolence, and we hear the utter contempt of the

youngster for any aspect of the barnacled estab-lishment-political parties, the church, etc.

As with Hutchinson's and Soyinka's plays,there is great vitality in "The Rhythm of Vio-lence," and it has a resultant ability to captivatean audience. The quality of its appeal is largelyexplained in terms of Nkosi's technique (for theSouth African theme is familiar enough to us bynow). The frightful ticking of the bomb seems tohang over the action reminding the watchersthat time is all in a rush for South Africans.Throughout the drama, Nkosi utilizes j a z zrhythms to blend with or to pace the action-andthus the music becomes inevitably a part of theplay's meaning. Further,

the playwright incor-porates into his production a kind of chorus (themob at the African political rally), funeral drum-ming. dancing, a satire on a gospel meeting, sirens,flashing lights, sounds of explosions, and mostfascinating, some dream-like sequences, playedwith trance-like rhythmic movements, suggestingthat the-e people (even if in some cases subcon-sciouylv) all yearn for some other, better stateof reality. Nkosi succeeds in weaving all thistheatricality- eily into the rhythm of the youth-ful lives he is portraying, so that everythingblends into one total experience. His medium ishis message.

Clark-Unfair PunishmentA man more heralded as playwright than

either Hutchinson or Nkosi is Nigeria's J. P. Clark,well-known for his plays "Song of a Goat," "TheMasquerade," "The Raft" (Three Plays, Oxford,1964), and his long production, "Ozidi" (Oxford,1966), the latter based on the Ijaw saga of Ozidiand "told- in seven days to dance, music andmime." Of these works, the first two are Clark'sbest. They are pastorals of pathos in which thecentral characters die.

In "Song of a Goat" Tonye impregnates hisbrother's wife, Ebiere. This union comes aboutprimarily at the urging of the Masseur who playsthe role of "family doctor, the confessor andoracle" to Ebiere. Nearly all of the Masseur'sspeeches act to stir desire, as for instance thisspeech to the impotent husband:

She has waited too long already,Too long in harmattan.The rainsAre here once more and the forest gettingMoist. Soon the earth will put on her greenSkirt, the wind fanning her cheeks flushedFrom the new dawn. Will you let the womanWait still when all the world is astirWith seed and heady from flow of sap?

Such comments by the Masseur agitate all theprincipal characters, and consequently Ebiere'sdesire overpowers Tonye. After the act is known,Tonye hangs himself and Ebiere miscarries. Thegrief-stricken husband, Zifa, walks into the seaand drowns.

This same purging through death takes placein "The Masquerade," a sequel to "Song of aGoat." Tufa, a stranger in the village, has ar-ranged to marry the beautiful Titi. But when itbecomes known that Tufa is the offspring ofTonye and Ebiere (obviously Clark did not de-vise, these connecting plays at the same time, for

I~ ~~~t /s

AFRICA TODAY 27

8/3/2019 African Drama

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/african-drama 5/5

he has altered the original story, having a childresult from the union, rather than a miscarriage),Titi's father, Diribi, imediately assumes that hemust "cleanse the stream of corruption,"and pro-ceeds to murder the two young people. Ironically,Tufa himself has been ignorant of his parentageuntil the villagers inform him that he was

Born of womanto brother and for whom brotherDrove brotherto terrible death . . .

Like the three playwrights discussed above,Clark commands an impressive theatricality:verse, song, drums, musical instruments, fights, achorus, rituals, laments. Most of all, Clark isilyrical-he has verse to burn. And strangelyenough this is what seems to impede the effec-tiveness of his work as drama. His dramatic in-telligence seems not to match his poetic powers.(No matter what Clark writes, he seems alwaysto be the poet; on the other hand, no matter whatSoyinka writes, whether poems, novels, or plays,he is everything and always the playwright.) AsAnthony Astrachan has phrased it, Clark's ".

protagonists are victims of punishment without

cause, or punishment beyond their deserts,whether from society, gods or nature."2Especiallyin "The Masquerade" where Tufa is ignorant ofhis incestuous ancestry, where the deaths arethe result of his blood ties rather than anythingTufa does, one can only assume that Clark is at-tacking Tufa's destroyers. What, in short, these

two plays appear to represent is characters whodeviate from the societal code or who are ignorantof it. If they are read in this way, "Song of aGoat" certainly comes closer to a meaningful ex-perience than "The Masquerade" does-for in thefirst play the characters are not passive recipi-ents of a tragic end, but rather, they participatein their fate.

Clark actually c o m e s close in "Song

of a Goat" to having something in common withAfrica's best playwrights, in the universal con-cern with men struggling in their society. It isparticularly interesting that Clark's Tufa, Soyin-ka's Eman, and Hutchinson's Mfundisi are all"unitiated" outsiders and thus characters whowould understandably arouse the indignation ofthe conformists in a comunity. One should includein this Nkosi's urban young rebels who are alsooutside their society; they too conflict with thesocial code and suffer because of it. Perhaps themost noteworthy difference between the otherthree playwrights and Clark is his lack ofinterest in the change from older ways to modernones. Their explicit concern over the agony oftransition, involving as it does the "whole com-munity", lends an added dimension to the workof Soyinka, Nkosi, and Hutchinson.

1. See article by John Povey, "Wole Soyinka and the Niger-ian Drama" in Tri-Quarterly, No. 5.

2. Anthony Astrachan, "Three Plays by John Pepper Clark,"Black Orpheus, No. 16.

28

28