Book Reviews

African Popular Theatre:
From Precolonial Times to the Present Day

When People Play People:
Development Communication Through Theatre

When People Play People: Development Communication Through Theatre. Zakes Mda. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press; London, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1993; pp. x + 250. $55.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

David Kerr's book gives a much needed overview of the wide range of different African theatre forms that can be deemed "popular." It covers phenomena such as "Pre-colonial African Popular Theatre" (chapter 1), "The Reactions of Indigenous African Theatre to Colonialism" (chapter 3), "Syncretic Popular Theatre: Concert Parties & Yoruba Opera" (chapter 5), "Theatre for Development" (chapter 8), "Populist Theatre & National Ideology in Modern Africa" (chapter 10), and "Towards a Theatre of Popular Struggle" (chapter 12). Kerr deliberately refrains from narrowly defining what "popular art" should be like, using instead Gramsci's suggestion that the "popular" mainly plays and appeals to the "subaltern classes" (x). On the one hand, this includes critical productions done by contemporary peasants, workers and plebeian urban strata to understand better their specific historical situation ("theatre for conscientisation") or to foster the struggle for fundamental political (South African theatre under apartheid) and societal change. Kerr clearly sides with the latter movements. The Kamiriithu project in Kenya of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which Ngugi wa Thiongo actively participated, is presented as a "genuine popular theatre movement" (240) or as a "Theatre of Popular Struggle," as Kerr titles his last chapter.

On the other hand Kerr also describes how national or local cultural troupes use elements of "traditional" African performance (dancing, singing, masquerading) to cater to tourists and to propagate governmental or party policies. Repressive and exploitative regimes often stage these shows in order to pass as the true guardians of their nation's cultural heritage. The ideological thrust of such performances easily stifles the critical and political awareness of the public, thus betraying the very interests of the "subaltern classes" that the political operators pretend to serve. Kerr differentiates, with good reason, this type of "populist" theatre from other popular forms.

Popular African performances are not usually considered dramatic literature; only a few are documented in books and on film or videotape. Kerr's first-hand knowledge of "non-literary" theatre in sub-Saharan Africa is therefore a valuable resource. He has been one of the outstanding observers and practitioners of theatre in Eastern and Southern Africa since the 1970s, but he makes some errors when locating or interpreting those phenomena he apparently cannot check out first-hand. For instance, Ebrahim Hussein's dissertation on theatre in Eastern Africa, which gives Kerr some insight into non-literary theatrical activities in Tanzania, was written at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1975 and not in Dar es Salaam in 1971. Kerr's views on Concert Parties are in some respects debatable. He attributes "interest in class-consciousness" (81) to the satire Francis le Parisien, performed by the Togolese group Happy Stars, and he suggests that such an interest is "typical of post-independent Concert Party" (81). The implicit social critique of the Francis production, however, did not depict anything like "class-consciousness." Noble Akam and Alain Ricard's excellent documentation of one performance in 1973 (published in French in 1981) and their corresponding film of the Happy Stars bear this out. On the whole, the Concert Parties' perspectives on social relations and attitudes are [End Page 83] too ambiguous to be described as class-consciousness. Also, the Concert Parties' performances, rhythmically organized by music and punctuated by songs, represent musical, not "semi-musical" theatre (81) as Kerr calls it. A Concert Party performance is unthinkable without at least one band "acting out" music up to four hours before the "proper" play starts. Equally contestable are Kerr's comments on the Yoruba Travelling Theatre, which Kerr prefers to call "Folk Opera." This is a rather misleading term that tries to capture the essential role of music in these performances by comparing them to the European opera. Biodun Jeyifo's term, "Popular Travelling Theatre," used in his ground-breaking work on the respective Yoruba forms of Nigeria, is much more appropriate.

Approaching his subject with a rather rigid conception of what the ideology of a given theatre production can or should be like, Kerr has difficulty assessing the highly ambivalent philosophical and ideological stances of these works. Thus he retracts his judgment on the "more typical" class-consciousness of Concert Parties (81) by stating on their "unwillingness to condemn capitalism" (102). He points to the "ideological narrowness" of Concert Parties and the Travelling Theatre, apparently comparing them without further elaboration to a theatre with a "didactic" anti-capitalist attitude. To understand the very intricate ideologies and artistic structures of popular forms such as the West African travelling theatres, one should turn rather to the works of Jeyifo and Karen Barber, another eminent scholar on the Yoruba Travelling Theatre. Kerr has fewer problems evaluating complex phenomena with a clear-cut emancipatory function such as Bira, a traditional Shona spirit possession ritual that took on political connotations during the struggle for liberation in Zimbabwe.

Zakes Mda's book considers specific ways of communication in the African developing countries "on the periphery" of the international flow of messages. In his two first chapters, "Development Communication in Africa" and "Perspectives," he discusses various modes of communication appropriate to non-literary popular theatre or theatre-for-development, which has evolved since the 1970s. Theatre-for-development

must, first and foremost, help people to identify the sources of poverty and underdevelopment, and, secondly, explore ways and means of how such causes may be eradicated. Follow-up action should be the actual application of strategies to eradicate such causes. Theatre should stimulate a continuing dialogue towards solving the problems of the community.

[23]

Mda focuses on the activities of the Marotholi Travelling Theatre in Lesotho in the 1980s, with which he was associated. He elaborates on social and political problems and on the traditional and popular media of the country in which the theatre had to operate. He distinguishes five kinds of productions--agitprop, participatory agitprop, simultaneous dramaturgy, forum theatre, and participatory or "comgen" (community-generated) theatre--by their different ways of communicating or engendering and conveying their messages. An appendix documents five performances of the non-scripted plays.

The publication is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive, precise, and easily available account of plays and/or productions of theatre-for-development. Mda attended the respective performances, taped most of them himself and functioned in at least one of them as an actor or "catalyst," as he calls the professional theatre-for-development activists. His analyses and documentation of productions and performances are by far the most valuable parts of his work, rendering it a veritable source-book. Mda not only describes the environment in which the performances took place; he also records the different, often opposing, reactions of audiences to particular problems raised by the sketched out stories, and shows how spectators switched roles and became actors in the "forum-form," bringing home their points of view. His documentation of the "Trade Union Play," for example, proves that theatre-for-development can induce workers and peasants to deal creatively with social dilemmas that touch on their daily existence.

In contrast to the vivid presentation of concrete instances of theatre work, the author's academic objective, to categorize African theatre-for-development as a major tool of social communication, is of lesser interest. There can hardly be much disagreement with points such as that popular theatre can help support national development only if it helps to conscientize the social groups whose problems are being represented. Mda writes that "critical analysis, and therefore conscientisation, happens only when the periphery is able to produce and distribute its own messages" (179). And there is no disputing that these ends can be best achieved when the people whose problems are depicted actively intervene in performances or, ideally, do the productions themselves. The author's purpose in highlighting these rather obvious points regarding "conscientisation," "a two-way communication process with inbuilt feedback," "community discussion, community decision-making," or "revitalisation of the people's own forms of cultural expression" (178-79) [End Page 84] is not to claim them as new discoveries, but to use them to confirm the work that had been done so far.

Thus, the book serves two ends. It provides the academic specialist and the theatre practitioner with a much needed documentation of specific productions, and introduces a wider readership to the historical contexts, social and artistic problems, and concrete examples of African theatre-for-development.

Joachim Fiebach
Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Berlin

[an error occurred while processing this directive].