The theater of Tejumola Olaniyan: African performance and the possibilities of strangeness

Abstract

This essay traces the thematic of performance across Tejumola Olaniyan’s prolific scholarship. Even when Olaniyan is not writing about performance per se, his conceptualizations of the African state, which yield terms such as “enchanting,” “strangeness,” and the “postcolonial incredible,” blur distinctions between governance, theatricality, and affect. The lens of performance reveals tensions in Olaniyan’s thought as he works to not only affirm its visionary potential but also demystify the state forces that seek to efface that potential. I argue that Olaniyan’s conceptualizations of aporia and antinomy helps resolve these tensions as well as illuminate the dynamics of postcolonial creativity. I then turn to the theatricality of Ugandan poet and activist Stella Nyanzi, whose “radical rudeness” expands upon Olaniyan’s ideas of artistic dissent through her performance of sexuality and desire.

Keywords:

• Tejumola Olaniyan
• African theater and performance
• performing the postcolonial state
• Stella Nyanzi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, his works Arrest the Music!, “African Urban Garrison Architecture,” and “The Art of Bisi Ogunbadejo.”

2 Olaniyan elaborates on this mutual impact in this statement on the expressive arts: “It offers a wide spectrum of the catalytic impact of the state as experienced and creatively transmuted, as well as of the impact of the arts on the state—what the state has become in public consciousness, courtesy of the ways it is named and imaged in the circulated imaginative expressions” (“Introduction” 15).

3 The framework of enchanting, disenchanting, and re-enchanting resurfaces in Arrest the Music! (in which his article “The Cosmopolitan Nativist” was revised as chapter 8) as well as in his introduction to State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings; in accompanying footnotes, Olaniyan defers to his future work on a cultural biography of the postcolonial African state.

4 Olaniyan references Gramsci’s quotation in “On Post-Colonial Discourse” (1993), “Femi Osofisan” (1999). Arrest the Music! (2004), and “Africa: Varied Colonial Legacies” (2008); clearly, he found it to be generative for his thinking on the postcolony.

5 See Brecht 91–99 for a discussion of the Verfremdungseffekt, which is translated as alienation effect by John Willet.

6 “Radical rudeness” is a concept theorized by historian Carol Summers to describe the tactics cultivated by young Ugandan male radicals, predominantly of the Ganda ethnic group (Uganda’s largest and most dominant group) in the 1950s, who used insults and general disorderliness to protest British colonialism; as Summers explains, these radicals sought to “destabilize the ruling alliances, draw conflicts of interest into the public view, and shape essential preconditions for real change” (Summers 743). Nyanzi, herself a proud Gandan, has readily embraced the term to describe her approach to protest and opposition (see, for example, “My three pre-teen children”). Not only does the catchy phrase underscore her rejection of social norms, but it also locates her activism in indigenous traditions of resistance. But because this essay focuses on Olaniyan’s theories as a key to understanding Nyanzi’s acts of dissent, it will not address the many strategic ways that Nyanzi invokes her Bagandan ethnicity as inspiration for her activism.

7 See Nyanzi’s Facebook posts “Museveni Matako Nyo,” “They Say I Crossed the Line,” and “Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday.”

8 See my forthcoming article, “Labial Politics: The Poetry and Activism of Stella Nyanzi,” for an expanded discussion of Nyanzi’s acts of opposition, with a particular focus on her notorious “Birthday” poem.

9 Janet Museveni’s announcement, which was made on February 14, 2017, was widely covered in the Uganda press; see, for example, Namagembe.

10 See Nyanzi’s Facebook post, “I despise….” See Selnes and Orgeret for more information on the campaign.

11 See Nyanzi’s Facebook posts, “Part One: The Phone Call” and “My three pre-teen children.”

12 When Nyanzi was sentenced to imprisonment in April 2017 under the Computer Misuse Act of 2011, the court cited one of her insulting Facebook posts from late January 2017, in which she called Museveni “a pair of buttocks” that “shake, jiggle, shit and fart” (“Museveni Matako Nyo”). The timing of her arrest, though, suggests that her targeting of Janet Museveni was the actual reason for her arrest (Akumu; Mwesigere).

13 The first edition of Yoweri Museveni’s autobiography Sowing the Mustard Seed includes a reference to domestic abuse in his childhood home (7); this reference does not appear in the second edition published in 2016.

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Laura Edmondson

Laura Edmondson is Professor of Theater at Dartmouth College, where she is also a faculty affiliate of African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She writes on empire, humanitarianism, and state violence in eastern and central African performance. She is the author of Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage (Indiana University Press, 2007) and Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire (Indiana University Press, 2018). Her essays have appeared in the academic journals GLQ, TDR, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Theatre Topics, and Qualitative Inquiry, as well as in anthologies from Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Intellect Books. She is currently working on a manuscript on the medicalization of violence in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for which she has received a 2024–2025 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. She is the editor of Theatre Journal.