African Studies Review

Electronic Anthology of Past Articles

African Literature, Theater and Performance

Introduction

            The African Studies Review began its life as the African Studies Bulletin in 1956, taking its current title in 1970.  It was then and remains the flagship journal of the African Studies Association.  As such, it has reflected the generally broad interests of the mission, editorial boards and membership of the ASA.  As someone who works in African literatures (written, oral and cinema), I’ve published articles and reviews in ASR since the early 1980s.  Over several decades ASR has published some very fine articles on African humanities including a special issue in 1986.[1]  The nine outstanding works featured in this anthology further testify to the ASR’s ongoing efforts to present quality scholarship in these related fields. 

            As I read them, some for the second time, I was struck by the range of the subject matter and diversity of approaches.  There was also a kind of time capsule feel to them, due in part to the fact that the most recent of the pieces was published in 1994.  A quick perusal of the titles, not counting the several actual “reviews” of the field, also reflects the comfort with which scholars seemingly took on very broad topics.  Obviously, ASR has published articles on African humanities since then but it’s worth noting that scholarship in African literature and related genres has moved into many new areas of theory and understanding in the last twenty or so years.  This in no way diminishes the validity of the work, but it does remind us, and the editors of ASR, that there is a lot of timely and relevant material still out there to be mined for publication.

            Briefly considering each article chronologically, F. Odun Balogun’s discussion of absurdist literature as it applies to a collection of Taban lo Liyong’s short stories[2] looks to not only identify certain traits in the texts but also to put forth a comparison and contrast of European notions of the absurd and those of African writers.  “Thus, whereas the European absurdist sees life as being absurd and meaningless...” the African absurdist writer exposes the absurdity in the “conditions, the instances, the personalities, and the attitudes that deprive life of this meaning which he values so much…” He suggests African writers use the absurd mode similarly to satire, as “a way of correction.”  I have some reservations about such all-encompassing statements, but Balogun does a fine job of arguing his case in the context of lo Liyong’s marvelously engaging tales, drawing on scholarship from western and African sources.  The time capsule effect, again, reminds us of how recent scholarship has become skeptical of generic absolutes, and how these are now often framed in carefully limited claims.

            Harold Scheub’s ASA-commissioned “Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature,”[3] is a very different kind of study.  He takes on a scholarly task which is, in retrospect, more than daunting.  A renowned scholar of African oral traditions, Scheub is well-placed to take on the project, and he reveals where his thinking will take him in the first two sentences of the review: 

             There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art forms, from interacting

              oral genres to such literary productions as the novel and poetry. The strength of

              the oral tradition seems not to have abated; through three literary periods, a

              reciprocal linkage has worked these media into a unique art form against which

              potent influences from East and West have proved unequal.

The ten pages of footnotes and fifteen pages of reference texts suggest the range and ambition of the review.  It reflects the expertise, wide-ranging intellect and, let’s face it, iconoclasm that has characterized Scheub’s scholarship over the years.  At its worst it is a fascinating exercise and at its best it offers moments of dazzling insights and stimulating ideas on its vast subject matter.

            Chidi Amuta notes the changes in Wole Soyinka’s post-Nigerian Civil War literature compared to his earlier work.[4]  He covers critiques that Soyinka was not socially engaged in his work, amid standard accusations of being preoccupied with an “art for art’s sake,” submerged in the at times esoteric properties of Yoruba mythology and religion, rather than focusing on the obvious needs of a recently independent nation as it battles corruption, inequality and political chicanery.  “With the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), however, his historical consciousness intensifies and acquires a more overt political edge while his artistic philosophy and social ideology become progressively secular.”  Amuta illustrates a definite thematic and rhetorical shift in post-war works such as:  Madmen and Specialists, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Season of Anomy and his prison memoir The Man Died.  This discussion of the Nobel laureate’s amazing production soon after his release from nearly three years of detention by the Federal Government is vital for understanding the arch of Soyinka’s themes and interests as his oeuvre develops over the years.

            In her “Commentaries” article, Mary Jo Arnoldi, responding to a keynote presentation at the 1986 ASA meeting in Madison, Wisconsin by Karin Barber,  looks to resituate generally accepted claims of what constitutes “popular arts” in Africa, making a case for going beyond what she sees as a limiting and somewhat narrow set of accepted characteristics.[5]  Citing a number of other scholars’ view that African popular arts are consistently “topical, new, innovative and modern,” Arnoldi also notes that they are seen as only existing in “the urban colonial and post-colonial world.”  She asserts a case for traits of popular arts also being found in rural and “traditional” African societies.  Among others, she considers the rural arts of the Bamana people of Mali, the Iteso of Uganda and her own work with Malian rural youth practitioners of puppet theater.  “Like Yoruba popular theatre and Ghanaian highlife which Barber describes, Malian puppet drama creates a ‘world inside out’ within which expectations about everyday social relationships are altered and new relationships and identities are constructed.”  Her overall paralleling of rural expressive forms with those identified as “popular” in urban and contemporary settings relies on the key notion that scholars must prioritize process over product, while avoiding simple ongoing assumptions of fixed or static traditional expressive arts.

            Gaurav Desai’s exploration of African Popular Theater is particularly innovative and relevant to a consideration of what constitutes a truly socially engaged theater practice.[6]  Again, evoking, at least for me, a time capsule referent of one of the great icons of 1970s educational theory, Desai incorporates the thinking and methods of the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose ideas on “Pedagogy for the Oppressed” inspired many social projects throughout the “Third World” in that and subsequent decades.  The article moves from earlier, well-intentioned efforts to bring socially relevant but often western-centered notions of theater to African venues, to a progression of more radical experiments to give local constituents more say in the very conception of what theater ought to be.  “Freire proposes an alternative strategy…a dialogic practice in which there is no given message X. The message takes form in the process of communication between the educators and the learning subjects.”  Desai fleshes out his claims with excellent examples of how theater practice has been evolving in a context of collaboration between local constituents and outside and local educators.  His, example of truly engaged theater recounts the now legendary activities of the Kamirithu cultural center in a rural Kenyan community, as a fruitful partnership between several University of Nairobi scholars, most famously Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and local residents.

            Margaret Thompson Drewal provides us with what is probably the gem of this anthology, sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.[7]  Her report on “the state of research on performance in Africa,” is careful to delimit the amount of material that she can realistically cover in this kind of endeavor.  Even working within the parameters she sets, there is an impressive amount of material that is carefully, evocatively synthesized here.  Drewal warns that the conceptions of performance are varied and vast: “Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept…”  The piece is clear, provocative and impressively learned in its use of a large number of theoretical and methodological sources.

            Tanure Ojaide takes on another broad topic as he seeks to identify and exemplify the many cultural elements found in “Modern African Literature.”[8]  His approach moves across the works of many writers and literary genres, though he might have more accurately titled his lengthy article “Modern Anglophone African Literature and Cultural Identity,” since there are pretty much no references to African literatures in French or Portuguese, to name only two.  Nevertheless, Ojaide is thorough in listing the many cultural dimensions that characterize the literature he singles out.  In this sense there is an echoing—there goes that time capsule again—of earlier attempts to point out what scholars felt were unique qualities:  “Ethical and Moral Nature of African Civilization,” “Utilitarian Function of African Literature,” “Social Cohesion,” “Defense of African Culture,” “African Mystical Life,” etc.  There are helpful nuggets for readers new to the history of critical writing about this large body of texts, particularly as they seek for a comparison with other world literatures.  However, as I’ve been suggesting, the focus and tone of contemporary scholarship has tended to move away from broad brush strokes in favor of the smaller, more delimited sketching of objects of study.

            Ode S. Ogede takes a smaller bite of the corpus of African literature, as he focuses on a single novel by Ayi Kwei Armah, and frames it with an exploration of its “rhetoric of revolution.”[9]  This historically-based novel about the fall of Kumasi is seen by Ogede as a distinct shift in Armah’s thematic and stylistic approaches:  “The ideology of revolution that Armah expresses in The Healers indicates that the thrust of his thinking has moved away from abstract moral notions of culture which occupied his three early novels…In The Healers Armah has developed into full scale his rhetoric of the primacy of resistance to physical conquest as an antidote to colonization…”  Ogede goes on to suggest that the novel also moves towards a guarded optimism about Africa’s, at least his part of the continent’s, future as opposed to his earlier, pretty much unrelenting pessimism.  Like Amuta’s discussion of a turning point in Soyinka’s writing, this study notes a similar evolution in another of West Africa’s canonical artists.

            Working from a group of poems in a recently published anthology, Colleen O’Brien examines the role of black South African women in their nation’s struggles against apartheid and the search for equality in the “Rainbow Nation.”[10]  Drawing liberally from the anthology, O’Brien looks to identify what women consider to be liberation as opposed to the thinking of men.  “There is an important distinction to be made between the black male author's portrayal of the mythological Mother Africa and the verisimilitude of the South African mother who appears in women's writing.”  She notes that contemporary black women look to control the “spheres of influence, such as agriculture and family, that they have been responsible for traditionally.”  Along these lines, O’Brien holds these observations together with a recurring comparison of western feminism and the specific case of women’s struggles, needs and strategies in South Africa, from at least the late 19th Century on.  Poems of mostly black and some white women writers are employed to explore a number of related themes and issues.  The article serves as a solid and compelling prelude to Cecily Lockett’s anthology, Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women’s Verse.

             Over the years, I and numerous colleagues have had the ongoing impression that both the ASA, in the way it accepted paper proposals and organized its conference panels, and the ASR, in the papers it published, were skewed towards the social sciences, with the main humanities emphasis being history.  I do not have, nor have I sought, a specific list of numbers of papers by discipline published by ASR—maybe that’s the statistically disinterested humanist in me—but the fact that this impression still prevails for many of us is significant.  To be fair, many potential contributors to the journal usually look to publish in specialist journals in their respective fields:  Research in African Literatures, Journal of African History, Journal of the American Folklore Society, and even the ASA’s own History in Africa, to name a few. My observation is not meant to in any way question the motivations of conference organizers or the ASR editorial boards.  Their duties are perpetually onerous and staggeringly complicated, given such a large, broadly-focused organization and the many interests it seeks to represent.

I am, in any event, heartened by the video recorded remarks of the journal’s new editor, Benjamin N. Lawrance, on the ASR website, wherein he both explains the editorial process when it comes to evaluating submissions and encourages young scholars doing cutting edge work as well as more established Africanists to contribute to the journal:

We are interested in receiving paper submissions that are new, original and exciting creative scholarship.  I’m very excited by first authors, people who are doing new research straight out of their dissertation.

While that kind of statement can be found on the inside covers of a numerous academic journals, it’s encouraging to have it affirmed with a face and voice behind it.  I also applaud recent efforts by ASR and ASA to hold workshops in Africa to assist local scholars in writing up their research using the kinds of formats and ideas that are sought by American journals.  Increasing the representation of perspectives of our African colleagues in our all too often American/Euro-centered academic culture and publications is a necessary and laudable goal.

Having had to think about the ideas and conclusions elicited by this group of articles, it strikes me that maybe one of the ASR editors’ preoccupations that do tend to draw many of the pieces together were to publish studies that ranged as far as possible in the world of African letters.  The desire for breadth and synthesis must have been very tempting indeed.  My modest proposal here, then, is to go forward with attracting and publishing the more innovative approaches to this, really, unmanageable body of creative works.  I noticed that even the now-contested, at this point somewhat dated, critical paradigms of post-colonial theory, which were certainly in vogue in the 1980s and 90s, were not represented in these articles; not to mention more recent conceptions of the “Global”, questions of the “location” of African literatures, and related notions such as “Afropolitanism”.  (I’ve been infected by the need to put terms in quotes, something not required in our time capsule days.)  Please do enjoy the notable articles in this anthology, then go out and write something of your own and submit it to ASR.

Robert Cancel

UC San Diego

[1] “Special Issue on African Humanities,” Bennetta Jules-Rosette and Robert Cancel, editors.  African Studies Review, Vol. 29, no. 1 (March) 1986.

[2] “Characteristics of Absurdist African Literature:  Taban lo Liyong’s Fixions—A Study in the Absurd.”  ASR, Vol. 27, no. 1 (March) 1984.

[3] “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature.”  ASR, Vol. 28, nos. 2/3 (June) 1985

[4] “The Ideological Content of Soyinka’s War Writings.”  ASR Vol. 29, no. 3 (Sept.) 1983

[5] “Rethinking Definitions of African and Traditional Popular Arts.”  ASR, Vol.30, no. 3 (Sept.) 1987.

[6] “Theater as Praxis:  Discursive Strategies in African Popular Theater.”  ASR, Vol. 33, no. 1 (April) 1990.

[7] “Review of the State of Research on Performance in Africa.”  ASR, Vol. 34, no. 3 (Dec.) 1991.

[8] “Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity.”  ASR, Vol. 35, no. 3 (Dec.) 1992.

[9] “The Rhetoric of Revolution in Armah’s The Healers”:  Form and Experience.”  ASR, Vol.36, no. 1 (April) 1993.

[10] “The Search for Mother Africa:  Poetry Revises Women’s Struggle for Freedom.”  ASR, Vol. 37, no. 2 (Sept.) 1994.