Editorial

When considering theatre in the African context it is tempting to trace the similarities and differences in approach, expectations and reception compared with wider western or European contexts. But in focusing closely upon African theatre, what emerges is an extraordinary range of diverse traditions, from the socio-religious in ritual activity, still evident in the masquerade traditions of west Africa, to the mobilisation of the theatrical to provoke debate in specific communities — often in public, open spaces; and such theatrical phenomena may take place alongside, or even be incorporated into, European-style scripted dramas performed in purpose-built spaces, often comparable to contemporary western physical theatre.1 This eclecticism has resulted in the production of theatre that is rich and innovative, while incorporating, as often as not, student or amateur work, which is not necessarily distinguished from the professional theatre familiar to western audiences.

Central to an understanding of African theatre-making is the fact of colonialism, and its many histories. Colonial cultural forms and values were communicated through schools and churches, and, in anglophone countries, BBC radio. It is thus not surprising that these are also the fora in which theatre has been most productive in intercultural theatrical innovation. Schools, colleges and, indeed, particularly universities in Africa have played a vital role in facilitating new creative work as well as in leading responses to that work; these are the venues where the intellectual elite and grassroots communities can meet and work collaboratively on drama projects, and from which new theatre-makers have emerged. The richness of this interaction has already been amply demonstrated by the output of such familiar, mainstream African playwrights as Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, and, more recently, Femi Osofisan, all of whose theatre activities began at University College, Ibadan. Similarly in Kenya, the Schools Drama Festival, which incorporated the teacher training colleges in 1975, has for some time revealed both remarkable acting talent as well as playwrights such as Francis Imbuga and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. The University of Nairobi, and later the Kenyatta University, have provided alternative spaces to that of the Kenyan National Theatre, where the slavish reproduction of European plays has been the norm. This has facilitated the emergence of vibrant new work, not only by Kenyans like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, but by Ghanaian Joe de Graft, and Uganda's John Ruganda and Austin Bukenya. The development of alternative venues has also been evident in South Africa: festivals like the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, which originated at Rhodes University, have become central to theatre in the country. There are now more than forty annual theatre festivals in South Africa alone. It is striking how much new theatre emerges from companies attached to universities on the continent. The articles in this issue reflect this - for instance, in Mark Fleishman's discussion of Cargo, a production by Magnet Theatre Company, based at the University of Cape Town; Hazel Barnes discusses a production created at the University of Pietermaritzburg; and Awo Asiedu, Sarah Dorbgadzi and Ekua Ekumah discuss the theatrical innovations and critical engagement with contemporary theatre at the School of Performing Arts in the University of Ghana. These are just three examples of how African university drama departments have led the way in theatre on the continent, both in theory and in practice.

The articles collected in this special issue suggest the significance and potential of contemporary theatre on the African continent. They reflect a continuing, profound involvement with intercultural activity, looking for new ways of making theatre while exploring issues of memory, identity, the place of women, and the role of new generations of practitioners in challenging issues of the past in relation to the present. The articles also demonstrate that often the theatre-makers are also the critics, and also that much of the new scholarship is coming from the same group of people who are engaged with creating the new work. This is enriching for new theatre-making: while encouraging a critical engagement with practice, this creates a very real awareness of the practical aspects that impact on theoretical formulations. An issue of particular significance is the way in which theatre-makers and critics in Africa expand the debates between old and new approaches to tradition and the body, operating in a spirit of non-definitive questioning and possibility. These articles open a small window onto some of the ways in which theatre in the African context is alive and adapting to new contexts and challenges, including those of globalisation.

Editing this collection of articles on theatre in Africa has been both exciting and challenging: how might it be possible to reflect the theatre of a continent so vast, with between 1000 and 2000 languages, and as many, if not more, traditions and cultures? The varied histories of the continent have also manifested themselves in terms of a multiplicity of theatrical forms. Any attempt to look at theatre in Africa is bound to be partial - both in how much it can cover, as well as in perspective. This introduction is, however, an attempt to suggest some of the issues, approaches and concerns of the continent's theatre as they are demonstrated by the contributions that follow.2

It is striking how far Africa is marked, and divided, by language: by both multiple indigenous languages as well as by imported or inherited colonial lingua francas. This is part of its richness; but it also contributes to the difficulty of achieving anything like a full picture. The articles collected here reflect a small portion of the anglophone African world, and in part are also a reflection of the limited resources available to African scholars to research and write critically and reflectively on practice. South Africa's relative wealth and the resources of its cultural infrastructure suggest why it is that the majority of submissions, and indeed more than half of the final contributions, have either been written from within a South African context or are about South Africa. It may also have to do with how South Africa has placed itself historically, and with how it now seeks to reposition itself in relation to the rest of the continent. Until the 1990s South Africa looked towards international scholarship for intellectual engagement; however, since the end of apartheid, and buttressed by former President Mbeki's African Renaissance project, South Africa has increasingly sought to define itself in terms of a prominent, if not leading, role in the continent as a whole.3

The focus of this collection of articles is the exploration of what provokes and underpins contemporary theatre-making - including wider theoretical, conceptual and thematic issues of current concern to theatre-makers and researchers - in African contexts. Given the troubled histories of colonisation and oppression that have beset the continent, it is perhaps no surprise to find in much contemporary African theatre a strong sense of the ongoing need to engage with issues of memory and reconstruction, both personal and collective. Mark Fleishman underscores this when he remarks that his work Cargo‘is about remembering in the postcolony’ (p. 08)— alluding to Achille Mbembe's sense of the ‘postcolony’ as the multiple, contradictory moments of everyday life in Africa read against the persistent accretions of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and neo-liberal forms of democracy.4 Fleishman explores this definition of the postcolony in the context of the discovery of a mass grave in Cape Town in 2003, where the past almost literally re-emerged to challenge the present. The processes and implications of recovering Cape slave history, about which little remains in documented form, offered an original theatrical event, and a new approach to dramaturgy.

Fleishman's dramaturgy is informed by the question of how contemporary theatre in the post-colonial context approaches orality. Fleishman addresses this in his analysis of Cargo, in many ways the culmination of work begun in the 1990s with an exploration of the Bleek-Lloyd oral history of the San in his Vlam and Clanwilliam projects, and the displaced peoples of District Six in Onnest’ Bo. This is all part of a dramaturgy aimed at recovering and (re)presenting history, particularly oral history. The call to find an appropriate aesthetic for oral material is echoed in the final article, in which Kennedy Chinyowa calls for an aesthetic shift that acknowledges the specificity of orality in the African theatrical context. Indeed, reading these two articles together creates a sense of the similarities and differences within what is emerging as a growing discourse about what constitutes an appropriate aesthetic for theatre in Africa.

The significance of oral practices referred to by Fleishman and Chinyowa suggests how personal narrative and improvisation may produce something that goes beyond the individual narratives that characterised the workshop theatre of Barney Simon and Athol Fugard, in which personal story-telling was interwoven with critique to create the potential for socio-political intervention. In these post-1990s plays, South African theatre seems to be moving towards something new: play-making that is less coherent, more fragmented, revealing its own incoherence, its fault-lines, its constructedness; while simultaneously offering a theatrical narrative through which people are asked to recognise themselves, and others, without resorting to the simple binaries of the past.

Marcia Blumberg's article on Nadia Davids' At Her Feet demonstrates the breadth of issues that appear in African theatre-making today. As she shows, Davids' play engages with patriarchal religious fundamentalism and western anti-Islamicism, while carefully avoiding any easy ideological positioning in narrator or audience. Yet it too engages with the place of memory in contemporary theatre, while arguing that there is a sense in which the next generation might become ‘prisoners of their bodies’.5 Blumberg explores the play's engagement with the place of veiling for Muslim women, exploring the vexed question of representing Muslim women without making them either simple victims or symbolic of a single vision of Islam, or indeed of a simple identity reduced to religion, or race. Davids achieves this by juxtaposing place, space and identity against one another. She has one actress playing all six characters, all of whom live either in Jordan or in Cape Town; thus exploring the aesthetic of the one-person play, and the multiple influences that define identities and ideological positioning. There is no easy resolution; what is important is creating the space for asking questions.

Hazel Barnes' analysis of the process and production of Buchler's Remembering You Like Something I'd Forgotten complements the explorations of the first two articles, by highlighting a different process of theatre-making in South Africa, while focusing again on issues of memory and reconstruction. Her analysis also underlines the centrality of university drama for the development of theatre in Africa, touched on once more by Awo Mana Asiedu, Sarah Dorbgadzi and Ekua Ekumah, who focus on the role of language and the body in performance by examining a production by students at the University of Ghana. This article addresses the question of the extent to which performance skills are related to, and even defined by, the language of the text. The importance of this question becomes evident if we reflect on the fact that intercultural interaction is unavoidable in a world of increasing cultural globalisation. Contemporary Ghanaian youths are confidently blending western popular forms, like western musicals, with other intercultural forms of theatre, like the Ghanaian Concert Party, which had evolved from the meeting of colonial and indigenous performance forms in the early twentieth century, to create theatre that is both entertaining and engaged. The issue of values being embedded in the body, as Diana Taylor argues in her notion of the body as a repertoire of a culture,6 implies that these same values can be critically analysed and challenged in and through theatre, particularly in relation to issues of power. This article offers important insights into the role theatre may play in raising awareness of oppressive hegemonies — cultural, gendered and generational — going on to suggest how these hegemonies may be reconfigured in and through the body.

In making our selection, we have focused on some of the most significant areas of theatrical activity emerging from the continent today and the issues they provoke. If the contributions that follow lead to further work and engagement, not least by practitioners and scholars in and from Africa, then we will be well satisfied.

Notes

1. One thinks of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman as an obvious example of this eclectic mix of performance forms, allusions to diverse theatrical traditions and engagement with provocative thematic material.

2. For more detailed discussions, see Martin Banham's A History of Theatre in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), a useful collection of essays on the specific contexts of theatre on the continent. Biodun Jeyifo's Modern African Drama (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2002) was the first continentally representative anthology, including six plays with background notes and criticisms. It has subsequently been updated, with two more plays added. See also John Conteh-Morgan's Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

3. This was particularly evident in the opening ceremony of the World Cup in South Africa in July 2010, where the continent as a whole was invoked, and artists from six African nations performed.

4. Achille Mbembé, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

5. Nadia Davids, At Her Feet (Cape Town: Oshun Books, 2005), p. 64.

6. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007).