West African Popular Theatre

By Karin Barber, John Collins and Alain Ricard

" . . . a ground-breaking contribution to the field of African literature . . . " —Research in African Literatures

"Anyone with the slightest interest in West African cultures, performance or theatre should immediately rush out and buy this book." —Leeds African Studies Bulletin

"A seminal contribution to the fields of performance studies, cultural studies, and popular culture. " —Margaret Drewal

"A fine book. The play texts are treasures." —Richard Bauman

African popular culture is an arena where the tensions and transformations of colonial and post-colonial society are played out, offering us a glimpse of the view from below in Africa. This book offers a comparative overview of the history, social context, and style of three major West African popular theatre genres: the concert party of Ghana, the concert party of Togo, and the traveling popular theatre of western Nigeria.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 22, 1997
• ISBN: 9780253028075

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

KARIN BARBER

    The three contributors to this volume—John Collins, Alain Ricard, and I—came to be interested and involved in West African popular theatre groups in different ways.

John Collins lived in Ghana for some years as a child and returned there in 1969 to do a degree in sociology at the University of Ghana at Legon. He has remained resident in Ghana ever since, teaching, running his own music recording studio, playing guitar, harmonica, and percussion in a number of popular bands, and leading his own Bokoor Band. He met Mr. Bampoe, the leader of the Jaguar Jokers concert party, by chance at his stepmother’s house when he was still a student at the University of Ghana. When Mr. Bampoe invited him to join them as a bandsman on one of their treks, Collins accepted eagerly. He wanted to learn more about Ghanaian styles of playing, having been a guitarist in several jazz bands, a blues group, and a rock band in England. He went with them several times, and it was on the third trek that he decided to write a book about the J.J.s—a project Mr. Bampoe supported—for the local Ghanaian audience.¹ He stresses the accidental nature of his meeting with the J.J.s. He did not initially set out to do a research project on the concert party, nor would anyone have suggested such a thing in those days, for the concert party was not recognized as a topic worthy of academic inquiry. However, the encounter with the J.J.s proved to be a stage in a lifelong involvement with African popular music and with highlife in particular, as a musician and as a writer, researcher, archivist, and lecturer.

Alain Ricard went to Togo as an academic. He was a research fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in the field of African languages and literatures, when he embarked on a project of filming the concert parties of Togo in the early 1970s. His first short film, Agbeno Xevi, was completed in 1972; a second, longer documentary, Principe d’Asihu, in 1982. He taught at the University of Togo and was later seconded from his institution to ORSTOM in Lomé to be a researcher in residence with the Togolese National Theatre Ensemble. He is now a research professor at CNRS. Unlike John Collins, then, his project was conceived and carried out within a well-defined and well-funded academic framework. Nonetheless, it involved him in the life and activities of the concert party in ways which exceeded and outlasted his immediate project.

I went to Nigeria in 1973 as a graduate student at the University of Ife, and stayed on. I completed my Ph.D., on oral poetry in a Yorùbá town, in 1979, and was teaching in the Department of African Languages and Literatures at Ife when I started a research project on the popular traveling theatre, which in the early eighties was a conspicuously successful dramatic form that had received almost no attention from the academic world. I became attached to one of these companies on a part-time basis, traveling with them and performing in a number of their stage plays as well as in two popular television series. I did this for three years, until I left Nigeria in 1984.

Although Collins, Ricard, and I became involved in different capacities—playing in the band; making a film; acting—and within different institutional frameworks—as a locally based student and musician; as a visiting research fellow; as a locally based university teacher—one experience that we had in common was the readiness with which we were admitted into the theatre groups and the extent to which we were invited to participate in practical ways—ways which actually changed the spectacle that the theatre groups offered, in however small a way.

Ricard’s experience of filming Togolese concert party was one of constructive intervention. It was an intervention that affected the mode of operation of the actors. It led to a real engagement at the level of production, and brought insight into the nature of the group’s relationship to the text of the plays. The actors made their own use of the outcome of the project—notably by showing Ricard’s first film about them, Agbeno Xevi, as promotional material and even as a kind of curtain-raiser in actual performances. The second period of filming, in 1977, had the effect of temporarily reviving the group, which was losing its impetus. They were disappointed that his involvement stopped at filmmaking, arguing that since he had commissioned the shows that were filmed, he should go on to take full responsibility for the group on their next tour, in a managerial or directorial capacity. However, he was not able to do this, and the group did thereafter cease operations.

In Collins’s case, a real exchange took place at the level of musical expertise. Collins learned more highlife, which he had already begun to play, while the Jaguar Jokers bandsmen were able to find out more about the blues and rock he had been playing in England. He was also included in the tours because he was a novelty, a crowd-puller. When the bandsmen went on their campaign around the town advertising the evening’s performance, I was usually taken along as I was a great attraction, taking over the guitar from Doku and introduced as an Oboroni [European] playing at that night’s show. Coming right in the middle of a working day, we had an amazing effect in the villages, for people would simply stop what they were doing and start to dance: women, carrying baskets on their heads and babies on their backs, toddlers, old people, farmers; everyone within hearing distance of the speaker would gyrate.

When I went to see Mr. Adéjọbí, leader of the Oyin Adéjọbí Theatre Company, I tentatively explained that I was interested in their type of drama and would like to hang around with the company, watch their plays, record some of them, talk to the actors, and so on. Mr. Adéjọbí immediately invited me to play a part in a TV serial to be filmed the following week. Soon afterward I was trying to overcome my panic as I prepared to step onto the stage—erected at one end of the Olúbàdàn Stadium, Ìbàdàn—as a female chief in one of their live plays, Fọlájiyo. The parts I played were always small ones, but the theatre company put considerable thought into composing the lines I was to speak and organizing my appearance to extract the maximum surprise value from it. Several times they sent for me unexpectedly because a performance had been scheduled and my participation in it had already been publicly announced. This openness and incorporativeness, experienced by all three of us, in itself gives much food for thought.

When we did these projects, performance theory was not yet considered to be at the cutting edge of humanities research. Even though ideas about participatory and dialogic research were beginning to be aired, they did not at that time seem to be fully crystalized. None of us really went into our interaction with the theatre companies with a worked-out theory which we could carry through into the analysis of what we experienced. Ricard recalls:

The main theoretical reference for my film work was Jean Rouch: he helped me and supported my project within CNRS. I think in particular that his papers on ethnographic film, and especially his piece on anthropologie partagée [shared anthropology] in the book on La Notion de Personne en Afrique Noire, have been seminal to me. He speaks of a permanent ethno-dialogue, and asserts that Knowledge is no longer a secret that is stolen to be devoured in Western temples of knowledge; it is the end product of an endless quest where ethnographed and ethnographers go along the path that some of us are already calling ‘shared anthropology.’ [Rouch 1973] … But I was too much of a positivist to let myself be led by the show. I wanted to put my Proppian functions on the screen. Structuralism does not go along very well with Rouchian anthropology. I had a phenomenological view of a phenomenon which I tried to describe with structuralist tools. Very unfortunate, indeed!

The line of exploration adumbrated by Jean Rouch has recently been reinforced by a strong current of theory within U.S. ethnography and performance studies. Clifford and Marcus (1986) argued that the ethnographic encounter should not just be participatory but should engage the ethnographer in a collaborative, open-ended, and dialogic relationship with his or her interlocutors. Margaret Drewal (1991) has enriched this argument by placing the notion of performance at the center of the study of culture. Cultural phenomena previously described in terms of rule, norm, and structure could be better understood in terms of improvisation, restored behavior, and process, for performance is pervasive, continual, and fundamental to cultural production: Performance is a means by which people reflect on their current conditions, define and/or re-invent themselves and their social world, and either reinforce, resist or subvert prevailing social orders (1991:2). At the same time, fieldwork can be understood as a kind of performance itself: Treating fieldwork as performance means placing the emphasis on the participant side of the participant/observer paradigm; breaking down the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity; and engaging in a more truly dialogical relationship with our subjects of study so that both researcher and researched are coeval participants in performance discourse (1991:33).

Participation in performance yields forms of understanding that cannot always be reduced to verbal representation or analysis. Johannes Fabian, on a parallel tack (Fabian 1990), advocates moving from informative to performative ethnography This reorientation, he suggests, gives access in a new way to the constitution of cultural knowledge, because certain kinds of cultural knowledge are produced in and by means of performance. He describes in detail the production of a play by a Zairean popular theatre company—a play whose theme was sparked off by a question of his own, and whose emergence into a performed work he understands as an ongoing debate among the participants.²

The contributors to this volume, however, became participatory and dialogic without really thinking about it: out of interest, common sense (given the object of our interest), the sheer desire to be involved in something that fascinated us, an incipient sense that here was an opportunity to get to know people and culture in a productive and rewarding way … and with strong encouragement from the theatre companies themselves. But looking back, certain theoretical suggestions do emerge from our experience of participation in performance, which may make some contribution to the field of African cultural ethnography.

(1) The first question which our experiences raised—a question which is perhaps not often enough asked by ethnographers—is the one already suggested above: why are some cultural activities—like the activities of these popular theatre groups—so much more welcoming and accommodating of outsiders’ eccentric desire to participate than others? It should not be assumed that all performance activities are equally accessible, equally welcoming, to outside participants: as if all the researcher has to do is to go along and get involved—whether in dancing, cooking, weeding, or carving—and that a steady flow of insights will automatically ensue. On the contrary, it would seem that in some cases you might be there on sufferance, while in others your presence might be actively solicited. In some, you might be allowed only to pretend to be participating; in others, your participation might actually contribute something new and sought after to the activity in hand. A truly coeval and dialogic approach might start by asking, What’s in it for our interlocutors? In what way is this ‘dialogue’ of interest to them? Why are we being allowed, or encouraged, to participate? In what capacity? On what terms?

I experienced a strong contrast between two different Yorùbá genres that I studied in two different fieldwork situations. My first research was on oríkì, a long-established genre of oral poetry, in Òkukù, a small town in what is now Oṣun State. I lived there for more than three years, learned many oríkì, and often had occasion to recite them, jokingly or seriously, in conversations. But though occasions for more formal public performance were constantly arising—at weddings, festivals, funerals, house-openings, household ceremonies of all kinds—and though many people played good-humoredly along with my honorary, fictional membership in an Òkukù lineage, no one ever suggested that I should take part in these performances. My principal role was that of researcher. This was a recognized and well-defined role which granted certain privileges (e.g., on the occasion of the ancestral masquerade festival: "Only men can enter the sacred egúngún grove—well, only men and researchers"). My main responsibility was to stand by with the tape recorder, and afterwards play back the results many times over. When, eight years later, I began the project on popular theatre, I introduced myself explicitly as a university staff member whose interest was research and whose purpose was to write a book. Nonetheless, I was immediately incorporated as an actress in the way that has already been mentioned. I was delighted at this opportunity, but it was the theatre company who took the lead in assessing my potential contribution and testing the limits of my professed eagerness to participate. In the hotly competitive world of Yorùbá popular theatre, I was a novelty which other theatre companies did not have—a selling point, as Collins was with the Jaguar Jokers.

The contrast between these two experiences may tell us something about the whole field of creativity commonly labeled modern popular culture.³ The role assigned to me as researcher, rather than performer, in Òkukù does not indicate that oríkì-chanting is a closed, traditional, exclusively specialist activity or that the chants themselves are fixed, inaccessible, or strongly bounded. On the contrary, oríkì-chanting crops up in all kinds of guises and the chants are characterized by their openness and fluidity, the porousness of their boundaries, their readiness to incorporate materials from other oral genres (see Barber 1991). There are strong aesthetic continuities between genres like this and the popular theatre. But the difference in these two experiences suggests a difference in orientation and in the function and meaning of incorporation and innovation. It is not just that the theatre company was a business, bent on attracting new customers and getting the edge over its rivals. What oríkì chants tend to incorporate is other traditional oral genres. The popular theatre, by contrast (along with popular music such as jùjú and, even more markedly, fújì: see Waterman 1990, Barber and Waterman 1995), incorporates innovations introduced in, and emblematic of, the colonial and post-independence eras. It incorporates the texts and forms associated with Western education and the media; representations of modern life and current experience; and personalities whose aspirations were formed at least partially by colonialism—aspirations to literacy, to modernity, to the acquisition of imported goods.

The plays of Ghanaian and Togolese concert party share this characteristic with the Yorùbá popular theatre. All three simultaneously confront and sell modernity. All three take up a self-conscious and selective relationship to tradition while operating, in many respects, within the parameters of long-standing indigenous art forms. They are conscious of this problematic, and propose solutions—mixed, varied, and often contradictory ones, but ones which at some level are comfortable to both performers and audience. They have produced an innovative, hybrid, opportunistic mode of expression in which the incorporation and containment of novelty is a constitutive feature. As Ricard puts it, The way I was warmly welcomed and the way in which a new medium—film—was used showed the tremendous adaptive capacities of the concert as a communicative medium. At sonne level, all the plays produced by concert parties and popular theatres in Ghana, Togo, and Nigeria are about the transformation of society wrought under colonialism (though only rarely do they represent actual European/African encounters: The African Girl from Paris is, as Ricard argues, a limit case in this respect). Thus, though the foreigner acting on stage, or playing in the band, was at one level accidental, an irrelevant and dispensable embellishment, there was a sense in which this gimmick was particularly significant to the popular theatres’ projects—at least as central as Bàbá Sàlá’s life-sized teddy bears and his inserted film screenings (Barber 1987). It signified the acquisition of exogenously produced novelty in an exemplary form.

Thus, the very fact of outsiders’ participation may be seen as symptomatic of some general characteristics of modern popular culture in West Africa. The openness and novelty-seeking of modern popular genres can be understood as a specific, but perpetually repeated, conversation with the conditions of colonial and post-colonial modernity.

(2) A second observation that arose from our experience of working with these theatre groups concerns the idea of text. The concert party and popular theatres of Ghana, Togo, and western Nigeria are improvised forms. No script usually exists, and each performance emerges through a collective, collaborative effort by the cast, all of whom bear some responsibility for generating, adapting, and embellishing their parts as they go along. Nonetheless, it became clear to us in the course of participating in performances that the actors themselves worked with a kind of virtual script. In the Yorùbá company that I worked with, the manager appeared to have the entire play mapped out in his head. He referred to it as to a mental blueprint, correcting and instructing the other actors as they went along. In the case of Togolese concert party, the status of the dramatic text became clear to Ricard in the process of working with the Happy Star concert to make the second film. The loose-jointed improvised stage action had to be captured in a limited number of six-minute film reels. The exercise encouraged the actors to adapt their normal operational habits. Using the concept of a text as a working tool, Ricard found that performances are texts, even though they are not written. Once written down, this becomes clear, and I decided to work from the written texts of the performance which had already been transcribed from recordings made on his earlier trip. He found it possible to use these written texts to select and focus on key episodes without turning the production into a performance of a pre-given script with him as director. This was possible because the actors too sensed and recognized the essential structure of the action, which preceded and outlasted particular variations. They responded by spontaneously shortening, focusing, and tightening the scenes to match the six-minute limitation of each reel of film. I was not filming ritual or fluidity, but potential theatre, arguing for the reconstruction of a textual object.

These concert and theatre actors’ understanding of dramatic process as text must be seen in the light of the social context in which popular drama emerged, a context informed by schooling and by literacy, even when many of the actors themselves had only minimal formal education. Having gotten rid of an exclusively scriptocentric, rigidly text-oriented view of these plays, we need to avoid merely replacing it with an exclusive emphasis on their immediate, emergent, provisional, and improvisational character. This would be to fall back on a sentimental valorization of orality which the theatre companies themselves would not recognize and which would fail to account for central features of their practice. It was only by getting on stage, and hanging around behind the stage, and continuing to do so over long periods and through different phases or aspects of the process of staging a play, that we were able to get some tentative sense of the distinctive character of the improvised text in these theatres.

(3) Text, however, does not mean only words, dialogue which can be transcribed and translated. Both concert party and Yorùbá popular theatre were constituted around music and still retain a strong musical component. Collins’s understanding of the musical form of highlife helped to open up, in a preliminary way, the crucial question of the relationship between verbal and musical texts in concert party. By traveling with the band, seeing the same plays over and over again in different venues from his vantage point at the side of the stage, he was able to arrive at some sense of the combinatory logic, the alchemy that fuses action, dialogue, and song. In his own words:

Unlike many western pop bands, such as the rock band I had played with in Bristol, there was no obvious superstar, and the so-called rhythm guitarist for the local songs usually played a tenor or counter-melody to that of the lead one. Likewise the percussionists formed a tightly integrated percussion unit that did not feature long drum solos…. I had this point driven home to me by another concert party band, the leader of whom I stayed with for one year in Madina near Accra in 1972. This was Francis Kenya’s Riches Big Sound. Any time I jammed with them in the compound of the house and I took off on an unnecessary or narcissistic guitar solo, my amplifier lead would be quietly removed behind my back. The J.J.s probably allowed me to get away with the self-indulgent solos that I simply smeared over the local dance-rhythms when I first joined them because I was such a good crowd-puller.

In fact it took me some years to appreciate the musical dialogue going on, to feel relaxed with local guitar playing and generally learn something about the traditional musical sensibility. From having played African American genres such as jazz and rhythm ‘n’ blues I was familiar with some African musical techniques: call and response, syncopation, the use of repeated melody-rhythmic cycles or riffs, and the high degree of improvisation not found in scored music.

However, there were two aspects of African music making that I was totally unfamiliar with. One was the employment of multiple cross-rhythms. The other was a sensitivity to the hidden or inside beat, as local music has a less strongly articulated main beat (or sometimes none at all) than western music, with its single emphatic on-beat that corresponds to the downstroke of the conductor’s baton.

The cross-rhythmic technique is in fact the very basis of the Ghanaian two finger style of guitar playing, where the thumb and forefinger are plucked in counterpoint to each other, and sometimes revolve around an unplayed rhythm that is only in the player’s head, or clucked by the tongue, or tapped by their feet. In fact it was only after years of patient coaching from the famous Ghanaian guitarist Kwaa Mensah who, when not singing, often clucked a rhythm at the back of his throat, that I finally mastered it…. [Eventually] the two sub-rhythms began to summate and knit together in my mind as a single gestalt pattern of sound that made the whole rhythmic structure easier to hold together. This subjective gestalt pattern which is not itself actually played but which helps anchor and orientate the cross rhythms is an example of what I mean by the hidden or inside rhythm. (Collins 1994:85–89)

The actors in concert party, like the bandsmen, seem to collaborate in an egalitarian way on stage. Their parts alternate and interdigitate, rather than revolving around a star. Turn-taking is a notable feature of their acting style: the whole cast will wait while an actor completes his riff, after which he quietly makes room for someone else. Even the villains may have their moments of pathos at the microphone. Facets of characterization also surface episodically, as if taking turns with each other, so that a figure who appears as a venal, comic, and garrulous old man in one episode may come to the fore as the voice of moral authority and wisdom in another. Sentimentality takes turns with buffoonery. These switches and alternations can be compared to the staggered, silent, and unplayed rhythms which are the key to the dynamics of the music and the invisible thread that holds disparate and cross-cutting polyrhythms together. Collins has suggested⁴ that many of the characters have silent aspects—things about them that appear contradictory and which are neither specified nor resolved—and that there are constant reversals and time jumps in the narrative, which is not reduced to a realistic impression of a single linear chronicity. This intersection of musical and narrative dynamics needs to be explored much further in future work.

(4) A fourth observation arising from our experiences concerns the audience. Clearly, our interaction was not only with the performers, but also with the public who came to see them. The reactions of concert party and popular theatre audiences are easy to assess at one level. The concert party audiences weep, jeer, sing, and mount the stage to give presents to the characters they sympathize with or to the performers they admire. Yorùbá popular theatre audiences are frequently so rowdily responsive that they have to be quelled with microphones attached to a powerful sound system. Their participation in the creation of the play—intervening to make suggestions, complete proverbs, pass comments, shout warnings—is hard to miss. They supply the oxygen of public approval to new improvisations; their responses encourage the actors to expand and elaborate certain passages and to condense or eliminate others. They can thus be seen actively participating in the shaping of the show. But audiences, like performers, say that the essential thing about the play is the moral or lesson encapsulated and enacted in the narrative. This text—the text of the play’s core philosophy—is also collaboratively and creatively co-constituted by the audience. They interpret it in their own way; use it in their own lives; fit it into other narratives, precepts, and experiences. But the question of how they do this is one that, as far as we know, has hardly been broached in studies of African popular cultural forms. Studies of African performance have been very good at building the audience into a conception of the performance-event, which includes the immediate context as well as the performer and the emergent text. But they have rarely followed audience members home afterwards. The texts people participate in during the performance event live on to resonate in their lives and in other texts they produce and recirculate from day to day—narratives, songs, reminiscences, nuggets of retold wisdom, exercises in exegesis. Their interpretations may differ radically from each other, the reasons for their approval or disapproval during the performance may arise from different sets of interests and assumptions. It might, then, be profitable for future students of African performance to take a leaf or two from the book of British cultural studies, which assigns a central role to audience use of popular texts (e.g., Willis 1990, Gray 1993).

However, it is not easy to talk to audiences about their inner responses to a play. During the show, they are engrossed. Afterwards, it is usually very late and they all rush home. So it helps to have friends and acquaintances in the audience, people you are likely to meet again the next day, and who know you well enough to talk freely about their responses, views, and experiences. This is unlikely to be the case when you are traveling from town to town with a theatre group and never staying more than one night anywhere. The Yorùbá play I chose to include in this volume was an exception to this rule, however. It was performed one night at the Palace Hotel, Òkukù—next door to the house I had lived in for more than three years when I did my doctoral fieldwork in that town. There were many people in the audience that I had known for years. Mr. and Mrs. Akíndélé, whose commentaries inform my discussion of the play, were my landlord and landlady John Agbéyẹyè was a senior man in a neighboring compound. Indeed, I knew the audience much better than I knew the Lérè Pàímo (Edá) theatre company who were putting on the play. These spectators’ detailed and impassioned discussions of the play seemed to offer interesting insights into how particular people assimilate and transform the lesson of the play from their own perspective. The kind of participation foregrounded in the essay on Yorùbá popular drama in this volume, then, is dialogue with fellow audience members rather than interaction with the actors on stage.⁵

In this volume, then, we have theatre experienced from three different perspectives: that of a performer (Collins); that of a co-director (Ricard); and that of a member of a local audience (myself). Our approaches were quite different, and this is reflected in the different styles of our respective essays in this volume. When we were doing these projects, we did not know about each others’ work, let alone plan any kind of collaborative publication. It was only after our most intensive periods of involvement with the theatre companies had ended that we got to know each other and discover each others’ work. I remember being entranced when I first saw Ricard’s film Principe d’Asihu—he brought it with him on an academic visit to Ife—and later, the absorbing experience of reading Collins’s manuscript on the Jaguar Jokers, slightly dog-eared after having languished for eleven years within the Ghana Publishing Corporation’s portals. Bringing our different contributions together and reworking them for publication in their present form took a long time and was surprisingly difficult. But discovering both what our projects had in common and how they diverged was stimulating for all three of us, opening up new ways of asking questions about what we had been working on, and suggesting a broad comparative perspective that none of us had really envisaged before. The possibility of placing popular cultural forms in a historical context which embraced a large stretch of coastal West Africa had already been anticipated in John Collins’s and Paul Richards’s seminal essay on popular music (1982). It seemed to us that the histories and practices of the theatre companies and concert parties, based on extensive personal testimony from the practitioners and exemplified by complete transcriptions of performances, in translation, would make it possible to develop and extend that comparativist understanding. There is a real sense in which colonial coastal West Africa was one cultural zone, in which local exchanges and parallel developments were at least as important as the relationship between any one colony and its metropolitan center. Popular theatres and musical groups from Ghana and Nigeria regularly toured each others’ countries since the first decades of the century. Togolese concert party, later on, was a definite product of Ghanaian influence. Yet the three theatres developed in distinctive ways in response to the immediate economic, cultural, and political circumstances in which they had to operate. The degree to which the state intervened in popular culture; the extent and the fluctuation of personal wealth among the people as a whole; the size and number of urban centers; the degree to which the church and the school exerted a formative influence on popular culture: all these factors, and others, can be adduced in interpreting the differences between Ghanaian concert party, Togolese concert party, and Yorùbá popular theatre. It is our hope that by putting together these different texts and histories—different in themselves and described from different experiential and theoretical standpoints—we may provide the means for other scholars to carry this kind of comparative cultural history much further than we have done.

Our respective experiences and observations, however, obviously only represent a very small and tentative step in the direction of understanding what is going on when popular plays are performed in Ghanaian, Togolese, lese, and Nigerian towns. This volume is intended only as an introduction to a field which invites much deeper and more extensive attention in future work. Nor are these written, translated representations intended to stand in for the entire experience of a concert party or a popular play. The iconic or charismatic bodily presence of the actors; their stylized or effervescent physical movement; the dance; the music; the constant interventions of the audience; the incredibly highly charged, excited atmosphere—so intense you feel the auditorium is going to explode—can only be indicated, not evoked. Nonetheless, we do think there is some value in presenting these partial texts. The plays are about something, they are not just performances. They are about matters of deep common concern and interest to the people who participate in them. Even bare, translated verbal texts do give some sense of what these concerns are, and how people propose to come to terms with them.

NOTES

1. That book was submitted to the Ghana Publishing Corporation in 1974 but because of lack of paper was never published. The essay in this volume is a condensed version of the substance of the book; much additional material may be found in John Collins’s 1994 doctoral thesis.

2. Scholars of African popular culture have long been aware of the peculiar benefits of participation in performance. Much of the best work on popular music, in particular, has been done by researchers who are also dedicated performers. Their experience of learning to play, and of actually playing, African music has deeply informed their understanding of their subject matter. A fine account of the experience is given by Chernoff (1979). Participation in popular drama is rarer, but Kavanagh (1985), Etherton (1982), Mlama (1992), and Mda (1993) write illuminatingly from the point of view of participants in one particular form of popular drama —theatre for development or conscientization theatre.

3. Popular is of course a much-contested and polysemic term. In this volume we are working with a broad and inclusive sense of popular defined in social (class) terms: popular is what is produced and/or consumed by the people as opposed to the wealthy and well-educated élite. But we recognize that styles of cultural production and consumption overlap and interpenetrate, and that in any case the social division between élite and people is extremely blurred, shifts according to context, and is impossible to define in a consistent and categorical manner. The Ghanaian and Yorùbá popular theatres both began as élite forms, patronized by well-to-do acculturated urbanites (Ghana) or enlightened, often salaried, churchgoers (Western Nigeria). Their history is one of expansion and democratization. More useful than a model of rigid cultural stratification is Roger Chartier’s model of the circulation and appropriation of cultural products within and across classes and other social divisions (Chartier 1989) —as long as one still remains alert to the emergence of a distinctive social ethos, such as the ethos of solidarity with the poor in Ghanaian concert party. That, however, does not solve the problem of what to do with the distinction popular/traditional. This is a distinction which on the face of it is untenable. On the one hand, it is too vague: traditional covers everything and anything, and is more a valorizing than an analytic term. On the other, it has a spurious air of referential precision: whether to categories of cultural production/producers—suggesting that there is a demographically identifiable traditional sector distinct from the popular—or to the forms of cultural products, irrespective of who produced them. No such discrete categories or sectors can be identified on the ground. But if one does away with this distinction, one still needs a way of representing the people’s own perceptions of their cultural production: their own sense that forms like concert party, popular theatre, highlife, jùjú, Onitsha market literature, etc., are qualitatively new and modern; and that there endures something different and older, recognized by them as our traditional heritage. See Fabian (1978); Hannerz (1987); Barber (1987), together with the four responses in the same volume, by Arnoldi, Cooper, Cosentino, and Jules-Rosette, for discussion of these conceptual headaches; see also Barber (1997).

4. In a personal communication, June 1994.

5. In a forthcoming monograph, I intend to fill out the other side of the picture, in a history and interpretation of the work of the Oyin Adéjọbí Theatre Company, drawing in part on my experience of traveling and performing with them. For introductory information on the practices and dynamics of play production in this theatre company, see Barber and Ògúndíjọ (1994) and Barber (1995).

West African Popular Theatre

1

Three West African Popular Theatre Forms

A Social History

KARIN BARBER, JOHN COLLINS, ALAIN RICARD

THE CONTEXT OF WEST AFRICAN POPULAR THEATRE

The colonial period in West Africa saw the creation of a new kind of theatre: a popular, modern, commercial, traveling, musical theatre which combined elements of indigenous and imported culture in a creative and innovative fusion. The roots of this theatre were in the coastal cities where contact with Europeans had long been established: Accra and the Fanti ports of the Gold Coast, and the port of Lagos in Nigeria. But these theatres were highly mobile, traveling on itineraries that stretched far inland and sometimes into neighboring West African countries. The Gold Coast concert