African performance traditions entered the orbit of European discourse – which, by virtue of language, supplies the operative terms “festival,” “ritual,” and “drama” – primarily as negative examples. As a result, the origins of that entrance were marked in the main by condemnation, inferiorization, and general disregard. It was asserted or implied that blacks either had no traditions of drama indigenous to them, or had traditions that, in comparison with Europe and Asia, were merely “proto-dramatic” or “quasi-dramatic,” cretinous forms in a state of developmental arrest in terms of style, esthetic canons, formalization of technique, and mode of historical transmission. Wherever “properly dramatic” traditions were found, they were marked off as but products of the African encounter with Europe – a way of claiming that the “properly dramatic” traditions are nothing less than derivatives of western forms and traditions (Jeyifo 1990: 242–43). There is a larger context, of course, to these deeply ethnocentric claims. They were part and parcel of the implacable inferiorization of African corporeality and cultural forms that matured in Europe in the eighteenth century and remains a major constituent of Eurocentrism. In the operations of the discourse, the inferiorization of a cultural practice becomes a shorthand to the inferiorization of the bearers of that culture and practice.