Contemporary Francophone African Plays: An Anthology

By Judith G. Miller and Sylvie Chalaye

Bringing together in English translation eleven Francophone African plays dating from 1970 to 2021, this essential collection includes satirical portraits of colonizers and their collaborators (Bernard Dadié’s Béatrice du Congo; Sony Labou Tansi’s I, Undersigned, Cardiac Case; Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou’s We’re Just Playing) alongside contemporary works questioning diasporic identity and cultural connections (Koffi Kwahulé’s SAMO: A Tribute to Basquiat and Penda Diouf’s Tracks, Trails, and Traces…). The anthology memorializes the Rwandan genocide (Yolande Mukagasana’s testimony from Rwanda 94), questions the status of women in entrenched patriarchy (Werewere Liking’s Singuè Mura: Given That a Woman…), and follows the life of Elizabeth Nietzsche, who perverted her brother’s thought to colonize Paraguay (José Pliya’s The Sister of Zarathustra). Gustave Akakpo’s The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood and Kossi Efoui’s The Conference of the Dogs offer parables about what makes life livable, while Kangni Alem’s The Landing shows the dangers of believing in a better life, through migration, outside of Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: May 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9781684485147

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Preface

I FIRST ENVISAGED doing this project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, when I was not only teaching Francophone African theater but also producing plays from the Francophone repertory with my intrepid students. When, working at New York University in France, I met Professor Sylvie Chalaye and eventually joined her research team SéféA (Scènes Francophones et Écritures de l’Altérité) at the University of Paris III, our first thought was to produce a bilingual anthology of plays for English- and French-speaking students, both of us recognizing how difficult it had become to pull together material for our courses. It was, indeed, Chalaye who inspired the selection of texts translated here, and whose unparalleled expertise in the domain of Francophone African theater has guided this work. Chalaye has published prolifically on the history of the Black presence on French stages. She has theorized the question of race and representation in France and has defined the aesthetic that marks especially postindependence Francophone African theater from the 1990s on.

Chalaye and I collaborated on the introductory essay to this collection, an essay indebted in great part to her research. It follows the development of Francophone African theater from its early and richly conceived history plays of the 1960s and 1970s to the lyrical and allegorical spoken word texts that tend to dominate current production. The texts selected for inclusion in the anthology, as varied as they are, all tap into an energy for living that stems from the decolonization movement and from the subsequent decolonial ethos. They resist through humor and penetrating honesty oppressive stereotypes and historical falsification. The laughter provoked (sometimes outrageously farcical and sardonic, sometimes gently enigmatic) helps query the human condition at the end of official colonialism, placing the experience of African peoples at the center of the query.

While Chalaye has been crucial to this anthology, there are many others who have contributed to its realization. I wish to acknowledge first of all the authors who have enthusiastically allowed me, as translator, and in some instances as friend, into their universes: Gustave Akakpo, Kangni Alem, Kossi Efoui, Penda Diouf, Koffi Kwahulé, Werewere Liking, Yolande Mukagasana, José Pliya, and Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou. I would also like to thank the publishing houses Hachette and Présence Africaine, who made possible the inclusion of works by Sony Labou Tansi and Bernard Dadié. Éditions Théâtrales, publisher of Rwanda 94, facilitated my connection with Yolande Mukagasana. I met Penda Diouf in one of SéFéA’s seminars in Paris in 2021; and, thanks to Florent Masse and his annual festival of French-language theater at Princeton University, contacted her translator Amelia Parenteau, who agreed to contribute her sensitive translation to this volume. I am also immensely grateful to Subha Xavier and Ninon Vessier of Emory University for joining this project with their astute translation of Sony Labou Tansi’s work, Labou Tansi being a key figure in the reimagining of French language through his stunningly subversive theater. Xavier and Vessier have also graced this volume with an illuminating presentation of his play.

New York University has supported my work with generous research funds and leaves since I joined the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture in 2003, and I am very grateful to the university and to my colleagues and students in French for their support, especially Terrence Cullen, Thom Murphy, and Rachel Watson, who have read and commented on several texts. I wish to thank, particularly, my friend Cécile Cotté, who gave me shelter in Paris during the last year of writing. I also thank my several pods, Kate Turley and Carl Adams, Una Chaudhuri and Catharine Stimpson, Sarah Kay, Anne Topham and Judy Borree, Edward Sullivan and Clayton Kirking, Michal Govrin, and Ruth Meisel and Sally Rosen, whose company (often through Zoom, often in the cold, but sometimes over a glass of very good wine) kept me going during the worst of COVID times. Thanks, too, to the professors Joseph Mwantuali and Guillaume Yoboué, who helped me work through terms in several African languages. The Brooklyn Rail has kindly allowed republication of The Sister of Zarathustra (Brooklyn Rail, February 2008). I thank them for this. I thank Bucknell University Press, its editor Suzanne Guiod, the series editor Logan Connors, the managing editor Pam Dailey, and the external readers, who believed in this project and helped bring it to fruition. Finally, I thank the excellent production team of Rutgers University Press.

Because the field of Francophone African theater is now so rich, I hope this translation project will lead to many more. Translating most of this dramatic material and working through the adept translations of Parenteau, Xavier, and Vessier have stretched me to think at once of the context in which each play was written as well as of the contemporary audiences to whom this anthology is destined. I have tried not to lose sight of what a staging might entail. In some instances, in an effort at clarity, I have added character lists and interpreted settings, or suggested where scene breaks might occur. Following contemporary usage in referencing racial categories, I have chosen to capitalize Black and mostly leave white without capital letters, recognizing how these terms can connote constructed categories but also how they can afford spaces for political action. I am humbly aware of the transformation that occurs when directors and actors take charge of and embody a translation, especially when the play in question speaks profoundly to their personal histories and concerns about representation. My wish, of course, is that many other imaginations besides my own will engage with these works, giving them voice and presence, as only live theater can do.

CONTEMPORARY FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN PLAYS

Introduction

Sylvie Chalaye and Judith G. Miller

If literature and anthropology have nourished our imaginations, it’s really theater arts that have forged and especially concretized certain images in our consciousness, and have, as a result, deeply structured mentalities.

—SYLVIE CHALAYE, RACE ET THÉÂTRE: UN IMPENSÉ POLITIQUE

THIS ANTHOLOGY PROPOSES a representative sampling in English translation of some of the most powerful plays written in French by eleven compelling African artists. We have selected theater pieces created from the early 1970s to the present: plays by Bernard Dadié (Côte d’Ivoire), Sony Labou Tansi (Congo-Brazzaville), Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou (Togo), Werewere Liking (Cameroon/ Côte d’Ivoire), José Pliya (Benin), Kangni Alem (Togo), Gustave Akakpo (Togo), Kossi Efoui (Togo), Koffi Kwahulé (Côte d’Ivoire), and Penda Diouf (Senegal/France), as well as a dramatized testimony by Yolande Mukagasana (Rwanda). These works cover the period immediately following decolonization to the contemporary moment, in which many Francophone African theater artists live between Africa, France, and other parts of the world. It is also a moment in which African-descended artists born and residing in France, as well as African-descended artists from overseas, are making strong claims to representation on the French stage.¹

Grasping why the authors of the texts selected are Francophone (that is, French-speaking) requires some delving into history and specifically into the long, complex, and painful relationship between European powers and the African continent.² Perceiving how each of the selected plays fits into the general field of Francophone African theater requires further contextualization of the history of the theatrical object itself. In what follows, we offer such a doubled history, cognizant of how much more work needs to be done to fully explore the richness of theatrical expression in Francophone Africa; aware, also, that the African theater represented in this anthology does not cover theatrical production from Francophone regions north of the Sahara Desert, nor does it do more than touch on theatrical productions from North or sub-Saharan Africa in African languages other than French.

A SHORT HISTORY OF FRENCH COLONIZATION IN AFRICA

In 1884, European powers met in Berlin to divide up Africa as though the continent were a pie. France and England received the lion’s share, France building on its conquest of Algeria in North Africa in 1830 and a centuries-long history of trading posts established elsewhere in Africa, notably in the north of what is now Senegal, in a settlement called Saint-Louis. After the Berlin Conference, the French possessions in sub-Saharan Africa consisted broadly of what today constitute the countries of Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Conakry, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Niger, Chad, Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville (the Republic of the Congo), Djibouti, and the island of Madagascar. Congo-Kinshasa, also called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, likewise French-speaking, had been owned and exploited by the King of Belgium for a number of years even before the Berlin division—the Belgian state eventually taking control of the Congo, as well as of Rwanda and Burundi. Currently, all these nations have French as one of their languages.

French and Belgian colonial annexations in the nineteenth century might well be considered extensions of the Atlantic slave trade dating from the sixteenth century, in which some fifteen million people³ were dispatched from Africa to the Americas as goods to be bought. Africa existed in many European minds as a land without history or culture, thus a land to be taken and repurposed for economic gain. Enslaved peoples sent to the Caribbean, for example, made Santo Domingo (now Haiti) one of the most lucrative colonies in the eighteenth century in the Americas, providing some 25 percent of France’s yearly income through slave labor on sugar plantations.

While the slave trade had been abolished in 1808 and slavery prohibited in French colonies in 1848, the exploitation of people dominated by the economic and political power of the colonizers never halted. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in order to move goods to Europe, the French conscripted Africans into forced labor to build railroads across the Sahel from Dakar, Senegal, to the Niger River and across the vast Congo region. Meanwhile, during the course of the twentieth century and until decolonization in the 1960s, Africans were drafted into service in the French army, educated in Western-oriented schools, or employed as bureaucrats in the colonial administration. Nevertheless, while their religious structures and economic and familial arrangements were often unsettled, Africans did not stop resisting the colonial presence. Even when participating in French institutions, they inflected the experience with their own cultural knowledge.

Paradoxically, even certain liberal thinkers brought ostensibly good intentions to bear on the rationale behind colonization. At the end of the nineteenth century, such thinkers agreed with the idea that France was offering enlightenment and progress to the African continent, a notion given the noxious title of a civilizing mission. As the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire notes in 1950 in his unsparingly critical Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism),⁴ this so-called mission primarily exposed for all to see, if they chose to look, the savagery of the colonizers and their lack of discernment toward cultures they could not or would not comprehend.

A HISTORY OF FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN THEATER

A prodigious theater country and one well aware of the benefits of cultural diplomacy, France unsurprisingly used theater in its African colonies as a tool for structuring thought and a means of bringing colonized people into France’s realm of values. In the centralizing colonial William Ponty School, located first in Saint-Louis and then on Gorée Island, French professors trained African boys selected from various regions of French-controlled territories to become colonial administrators. Among their training were workshops and competitions in dramatic writing. The first examples of Francophone African theater date from this period, the 1930s.⁵ These plays conformed more or less to European models, themselves based on what were understood as Aristotle’s doctrines, foregrounding a clear dramatic structure (exposition, development, resolution), recognizable characters, and dialogue (or a conversational back and forth between characters.)

Despite the hold of European models, when creating theater, Ponty students modulated their works with local history as well as with elements of African performance styles. Indeed, in 1938, the Ivorians Coffi Gadeau, Amon d’Aby, and Bernard Dadié, all William Ponty students, formed one of the first Francophone African theater companies, le Théâtre Indigène, with productions including African storytelling, dancing, and drumming. From the outset, then, Africans’ imaginations infused their theater-making with African cultural expressions.

After the Second World War, Francophone African playwrights began to free themselves from the themes favored by French mentors—themes foregrounding the ideology of progress and the notion that African traditions held the continent back from modernity. During the early 1960s, playwrights launched a new kind of theater, one embracing Black cultures. Following the lead of Aimé Césaire, who celebrated the tragic hero King Christophe in his immensely influential play about the Haitian revolution, La Tragédie du Roi Christophe, 1963 (The Tragedy of King Christophe),⁶ and heeding Césaire’s call and that of his colleagues, the intellectual activists Leopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon Damas of Guyana, to adhere to the principles of negritude,⁷ Francophone African playwrights sought to galvanize Africans and African-descended peoples by telling stories of consequential Africans. They notably dramatized Shaka Zulu, the military strategist and South African nation builder—as in La Mort de Chaka, 1957 (The Death of Shaka) by Malian Seydou Badian. They also celebrated Alboury, the king of the Djolof people who resisted the French takeover of Senegal—as in l’Exil d’Alboury, 1967 (The Exile of King Alboury) by Senegalese Cheikh N’Dao;⁸ and they acknowledged, as in Kondo le requin, 1966 (Kondo the Shark) by Beninese Jean Pliya, the significance of King Béhanzin, who defeated the colonial army in Dahomey at the end of the nineteenth century. In another of his great epics, Une Saison au Congo, 1966 (A Season in the Congo), Césaire focused on Patrice Lumumba, the most prominent political martyr of Congolese independence. Most of these early plays were published by Présence Africaine, a publishing house founded in 1947 to promote deep knowledge and appreciation of African cultures and values. Most of them, also, take the form of historical frescos, monumental productions inspired formally by the tragedies of Shakespeare, Racine, and Corneille and resonating with the dramatic tensions in classical Greek theater.

The 1970s saw again a change in theatrical orientation, one that reflected the disenchantment Africans were feeling with new governing structures, as more and more African nations, encumbered in large part by postcolonial interference and the continuing impact of colonization, succumbed to dictatorships and the curse of Presidents for Life. This period is characterized by trenchant political satires and social comedies. Such works make fun of the pretensions of Africans situated uncomfortably between cultures and mock those in power thirsting after greater and greater control and influence.

A plethora of young Africans, encouraged by the contest for best dramatic writing established by Radio France Internationale in 1966, turned to theater as a way of expressing their disgust with moral laxity, African collusion with European conglomerates, and the violence underlying political power. Cameroonian writers, in particular, produced mordant satires of compromised individuals in works such as Oyono-Mbia’s Trois Prétendants un mari, 1964 (Three Suitors, One Husband) or Protais Asseng’s Trop c’est trop, 1981 (Enough Is Enough). In Côte d’Ivoire, Zadi Zaourou created a comic mode that magnified ordinary people, giving the little guy, as in L’Oeil, 1975 (The Eye) the starring role in stories of illegal black-market dealings in tough neighborhoods of Abidjan. A set of skilled Congolese humorists took on dictatorship through caustic denunciations of their country’s chaotic and self-indulgent political world. Plays such as Maxime N’debeka’s Le Président, 1970 (The President), or Sylvain Bemba’s l’Homme qui tua le crocodile, 1972 (The Man Who Killed the Crocodile), or Tchicaya U Tamsi’s Le Destin Glorieux du Maréchal Nnikon Nniku, Prince qu’on sort, 1979 (The Glorious Destiny of Field Marshal Kantellhisassfromaholeintheground, the X-iting Prince) made abundantly clear the need for Africans to free themselves from systems inherited from colonialism.

While much Francophone African theater in the 1980s stayed true to the sense that theater should parallel social activism, several theater artists sought instead to reconnect with traditional African representational forms. The Togolese writer Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou turned to African storytelling for communicating his lessons. In his mischievous dramatic tale La Tortue qui chante (The Singing Turtle), written in the 1970s and eventually published in 1987, a wise turtle coaxes a dysfunctional African village back into hospitable shape. The Ivorian Niangoran Porquet created griotique works that integrated poetry, storytelling, dance, and music, taking his inspiration from traditional storytellers and oral historians—those griots still active in many West African cultures. Werewere Liking, moving from her home in Cameroon to Abidjan, where she established the Ki-Yi arts village, incorporated structures from the initiation and healing rituals of her people, the Bassa, into dramatic productions. In Héros d’eau, 1994 (Liquid Heroes), for example, a child must pass through the belly of a seven-headed beast in order to bring light back to her village, a community polluted by materialism. Liking advocated a Pan-African aesthetic, utilizing various drumming and vocal techniques from across Africa. Zadi Zaourou’s multidimensional theater language was based in the Didiga ritual formations of Bété hunters, while the Guinean Souleymane Koly brought the Kotèba ritual of the Mandingo people into his choreography, conducting a musical voyage through a crisis toward acceptance and cleansing. Often using humor, these traditionally inspired works chide ethical cowardice and reinforce community values.

Impacted, also, by the rituals of his community (the Kongo people), the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi fashioned a terrifyingly sardonic vision of the world of African dictators. Bridging the generations between the satirists of the 1970s and the searchers of hybrid forms of the 1980s, Labou Tansi also foresaw the aesthetic experimentation of the 1990s. Moreover, he established an electrifying company, the Rocado Zulu, and an inspirational theater practice in Brazzaville. His work exploded French conventions and raised expectations of what a self-determining African theater practice could be. He created startling stage metaphors and twisted the syntax of French in such a way as to place onstage a surreal world in which life feels like a bloody and absurd parenthesis.

At the same time that Labou Tansi was producing raucous works in Brazzaville, other theatrical companies started up across West and Central French-speaking Africa. In Ouagadougou, Jean-Pierre Guingané founded le Théâtre de la Fraternité (the Theater of Brotherhood) while, in the same city, Prosper Kompaoré mounted a theater for development company, l’Atélier Théâtre Burkinabé. As is the case of theater for development in general, Kompaoré’s productions brought audiences directly into debates about the conflicts presented in his sketches.⁹ In Kinshasa, Zaire, l’Écurie Maloba and Israël Tshipamba’s Le Tarmac des Auteurs began promoting new authors. To the same end, Vincent Mambachaka, in the Central African Republic, created l’Espace Linga Téré.

The creation of the International Francophone Festival in Limoges in 1984, the establishment of the UBU Repertory Theater in New York City in 1982 and the Festival of the Americas (now the Festival TransAmérique) in Montreal in 1985, and the funding of the TILF (International Theater of French Language) in Paris in 1985 all helped bring Francophone African theater to the attention of audiences outside Africa. This crucial international interest made it possible to secure more funds for creating and touring.¹⁰ Such touring productions often emphasized music, drumming, and dancing, foregrounding a stunning physicality.

A new generation of Francophone African playwrights, however, agonized over this portrayal of African identity, which, they felt, pigeonholed Africans as highly physical and musically focused. Concerned about another oversimplification of Africa—with the continent being represented solely by portraits of village life or by productions accentuating orality, physicality, and percussive music—these playwrights embraced (and continue to embrace) the sense of theater as a creole endeavor, to borrow the term from Édouard Glissant.¹¹ Playwrights hailing from all over the continent (for example, Kossi Efoui from Togo, Koulsy Lamko from Chad, Koffi Kwahulé from Côte d’Ivoire, Caya Makhélé from Congo-Brazzaville, and Michèle Rakotoson from Madagascar) made their claims known in the beginning of the 1990s in a manifesto published by Makhélé.¹² They committed to putting into conversation influences from many sources, including the African diaspora. They wished to detonate the idea of a fixed identity, understanding themselves and all human beings as the products of local and global influences—as, they reckoned, no person remains untouched by the global flow of information, cultural expressions, goods, and political manipulation. Rather than affirming roots, these artists chose to establish in their theater pieces a feeling of identities in motion.

At the same time, they could not and do not ignore the ravaging histories of slavery and colonization, nor the racism to which people of color are subjected, nor the impact of economic globalization on developing countries. Often oblique and metaphorical, these concerns establish in their plays a mood of febrility and threat, as well as layers of meaning. In Koffi Kwahulé’s play Jaz, 1998, for example, a polyphonic voice dialogues with a musical instrument to try to put back together a sense of self after a rape. This terrible story of a woman’s victimization might also be seen as a metaphor for the situation of Africa after slavery and colonization. In Kossi Efoui’s Le Carrefour, 1989 (The Crossroads), only imagination can save the protagonists imprisoned in a reality they do not understand. This portrait of the human condition at the end of the twentieth century also offers the suggestion that thinking out of the box is the best solution for dealing with the pervasive tyranny dominating Africa. In José Pliya’s Le Complexe de Thénardier, 2004 (The Thénardier Complex), a maid and her employer speak the same language but cannot understand each other. The employer only knows how to give orders, expect trouble, and refuse comradeship. The resulting stalemate might just be an allegory of the relationship between the Global North and Global South. In a similar vein, Sony Labou Tansi’s La Parenthèse de Sang, 1981 (Parentheses of Blood) uses the fifteen million pairs of handcuffs sold by France to the dictator, fueling the violence in the play, to underscore that the abuse of the Global South by the North is never really a finished part of Africa’s past. Bondage haunts the present; it is a constant colonial revenant.

In terms of poetics, Francophone African playwriting from the 1990s to the present stresses heightened language and musicality—tempo and rhythmic patterns being central to the creation of meaning. Like spoken word, dramatic texts use refrains and riffs to weave together different levels of reality, mixing what feels surreal with the harsh materiality of everyday life. Souleymane Bachir Diagne calls this active appeal to listeners the vital energy of the possible.¹³ This form of cosmic optimism can be found, for example, in the dragon’s breath in Dieudonné Niangouna’s Kung fu, 2014, and in the constellation that pulls Penda Diouf’s protagonist of La Grande Ourse, 2019 (The Big Dipper) into the safety of the night sky.

Understood as works of marronnage, or a form of escape from political and psychological constraints, recent Francophone African theater attempts to create beauty over the gaping holes left by slavery and colonialism, an effort often marked by techniques of collage and seeming improvisation. Not flinching from the instability of life, authors find ways to circumvent life’s awfulness—sometimes ritualistically or ceremonially. In Gustave Akakpo’s dreamlike and eerie Même les chevaliers tombent dans l’oubli, 2014 (Skins and Bones), for example, Black and white children cannibalize the skinless protagonist. But then they share their own skins, birthing new persons undefined by color. Akakpo’s parable, like many recent works, digs up internalized colonial prejudices in order to expose and cast them out.

Placing the experience of Africans at the center of the human condition, African Francophone authors situate the causes and burdens of genocide, slavery, exile, and marginalization as the lot and responsibility of all human beings. Confirming Diagne’s observation that humanity’s big questions should revolve around the richness of plurality,¹⁴ these authors seek to create passageways between confronting difference and incorporating it, thus enlarging the self. They reject the old universal, in which only Europe or European-descended people stand in for humanity. The children who freeze to death trying to stow away on an airplane to Europe in Kangni Alem’s Atterrissage, 2002 (The Landing) and Yolande Mukagasana’s testimony in Rwanda 94, 2000, of watching her family be massacred by the neighbors touch the unimaginable. Yet productions of these works make such horrors felt and apprehended as what all human beings might one day experience or carry out.

Today, Francophone African theater anchors itself solidly in Africa, thanks to the continental festivals that began to proliferate in the 1990s and have matured since 2000. Les Récréatrales in Ouagadougou, founded in 2002 by Etienne Minoungou, is particularly telling in this regard. Every other year, alternating with the Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO), the director, in 2023 the playwright Aristide Tarnagda, invites artists from all over Africa to perform, attend workshops, and get to know each other. Since its founding, some one-thousand artists, including from Europe and the Caribbean, have participated. The festival promotes Pan-Africanism, changing the center and periphery model by expecting people from the Global North to come to Africa to see avant-garde work. The citizens of Ouagadougou, participating in the festival, open up their courtyards to performances, thereby bringing spectators and artists into their home spaces to experience together audacious and politically relevant theater pieces. Other major festivals take place in Brazzaville (Mantsina Onstage) and Abidjan (MASA, The Market for African Performing Arts). These festivals provide fertile ground for sharing technical innovations, introducing various works and playwrights, discussing actor training, and widening the purchase of Francophone African theater.

ON THE ANTHOLOGIZED THEATER PIECES

The works included in this anthology possess an imaginative scope and aesthetic range that represent the phases and modes of African theater discussed above. The first three plays, historically inflected, spotlight an African revolutionary heroine, contemporary extractivism and global greed, and historical trauma, respectively. Bernard Dadié’s Béatrice du Congo, 1970 (Béatrice of the Congo), puts on stage Kimpa Vita (Béatrice), a woman warrior and religious leader who cunningly resisted European powers in central Africa. The play mocks both naive and avaricious African rulers and European empire builders. Sony Labou Tansi’s Je, soussigné cardiac, 1981 (I, the Undersigned, Cardiac Case) serves up a potent trouncing of antidemocratic governance in Africa in collusion with big oil. The twitching and shaking protagonist Mallot attempts to find his footing in a world in which oil has more value than human life. Yolande Mukagasana’s testimony of what she experienced during the Rwandan genocide, excerpted from Groupov’s production Rwanda 94, 2000, launches a theatrical action aimed at keeping the disappeared alive.

The second set of works in the anthology participates in the efforts of Francophone African theater-makers to incorporate traditional African expressive forms into their dramaturgy. Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou’s On Joue la Comédie, 1975 (We’re Just Playing) adapts the well-loved concert party (a farcical performance that disguises a serious critique) in order to excoriate apartheid and white supremacy. Through a dizzying theater-in-the-theater structure, Zinsou derisively handles racism and racist representation. In less burlesque fashion, Werewere Liking’s Singuè Mura: Considérant que la femme … , 1990 (Singuè Mura: Given That a Woman …) seeks catharsis for her audiences. Through a healing ritual that queries communal responsibility and the need to look hypocrisy in the face, she grapples with patriarchal control and women’s lack of choice.

Representative of the formidable wave of innovative work from the 1990s to the present, the third group of plays commences with two different angles on immigration in dramatic texts that also differ significantly in terms of style. José Pliya’s La Soeur de Zarathustra, 2008 (The Sister of Zarathustra) offers smoldering confrontations that connect colonization and fascism, especially as mapped on the life of Elizabeth Nietzsche, who founded a German colony in Paraguay. Pliya shows how colonial desire and fascist thinking feed off each other. Kangni Alem’s Atterrissage, 2002 (The Landing), also based on a real-life story, dramatizes the tragicomedy of would-be African migrants. Two adolescents attempt to stow away on a plane destined for Europe but face insurmountable obstacles, including their own projections of a better life abroad.

A pair of timeless dramatized tales, their authors inspired by the storytelling they heard as children, follows these urgent calls to tackle immigration. Kossi Efoui’s La Conférence des chiens, 2015 (The Conference of the Dogs) and Gustave Akakpo’s La Véridique histoire du Petit Chaperon Rouge, 2015 (The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood) present quirky characters working through what it means to be sentient beings. Efoui crafts in puppet form an animal tale about war and remembrance: a child learns through the mentoring of philosophically inclined dogs that what is most important is giving shape to life. Akakpo repurposes the Little Red Riding Hood transnational fairy tale to castigate soul-limiting conformity and cultural consumerism. A very hip wolf, in lieu of her ogre-like parents, accompanies Little Red on her journey to self-realization.

Among the most challenging works that constitute African theater since 1990, Koffi Kwahulé’s SAMO: A Tribute to Basquiat, 2019, constructs a polyphonic hip-hop recital that captures through oral performance and movement the irreverent American artist’s painterly techniques. Kwahulé raps Jean-Michel Basquiat’s adolescence into existence, a boy straining to become a man and a Black artist striving to be recognized as a champion of the marginalized. The last play in the anthology, Penda Diouf’s Pistes … , 2021 (Tracks, Trails, and Traces …), also seeks connections across cultures and time. Diouf speaks to the difficulties of being Afro-French, with the young narrator of her monologue, based on Diouf’s own life, exploring her African-ness by traveling to Namibia, a pilgrimage that takes her back to her gut-wrenching childhood in France.

Differing in structure, in characterization, and in scenographic and choreographic demands, the anthologized works, with the exception of the Rwandan monologue, have in common a certain truculence. They understand laughing and poking acerbic fun as some of the best strategies for working through horror and oppression. They also all share a transgressive spirit: rewriting history, telling untold or hidden tales, and condemning the exploitative neoliberalism that continues to confront the so-called have-nots of the world with their wealthy, usually Global North oppressors—oppressors who might, nevertheless, also include unscrupulous and collaborationist Africans. Through this truculence and transgression, these works lambast attitudes and systems that reinforce racism and set up the other, however the other is constructed, as someone to be dominated. To return to the epigraph that frames this introduction, these are theater pieces that believe that new stories with new images can profoundly impact the way in which the world is felt and understood.

NOTES

Epigraph: Sylvie Chalaye, Race et Théâtre: Un impensé politique (Arles: Actes Sud, 2020), 28.

1. The French have largely shoved colonization under the carpet, wanting to think that racism and Negrophobia are especially Anglo-American problems. But today, it is estimated that one-third of the population of France is comprised of people whose ancestors knew slavery or colonization. Many of these are beginning to tell their stories on stage, the last bastion of representative arts to open up to them.

2. While Francophone may mean (and originally did mean) French-speaking, the term has come to signal a realm of connectivity and interest between France and former colonial possessions that is not always devoid of paternalism and economic pressure.

3. Although statistics about the number of enslaved people are only estimates, the immensity of the transatlantic slave trade is very clear, with some millions of other African peoples also displaced to various parts of the world over the long history of Indian Ocean slaving.

4. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

5. African theater existed long before the arrival of colonization; peoples across languages and cultures performed for each other in various forms of spectacle, including farces and masquerades.

6. See the bibliography at the end of this volume for full references to all plays mentioned in the introduction.

7. Negritude can be defined as a movement to champion Black consciousness and aesthetics. Undergirding the decolonization drive, the concept has been hotly debated as potentially essentializing. Negritude, however, can also be understood as a model of strategizing for place within a particular national or cultural context, thus recasting centers and margins.

8. Noted French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès named his African rebel Alboury in his 1989 decolonial play, Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs).

9. Theater for development is the dominant form of theater in West and Central Africa. Hired by NGOs to help spread information about vaccinations, birth control, voting rights, etc., theater for development troupes perform informational sketches, usually in local African languages.

10. African governments considerably slowed down their support for the arts in the 1980s. French money stepped in even more centrally to help promote cultural work. It is difficult to separate Francophone African theater from the impact of French money, cultural centers, and publishing houses on its development, not to mention the International Organization of la Francophonie.

11. Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

12. Caya Makhélé, Textes et dramaturgies du monde 93 (Carnières: Lansman and RFI, 1993).

13. Souleymane Bachir Diagne in conversation with Professor François Noudlemann at New York University’s Maison Française, the public-facing component of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture, November 18, 2020.

14. Diagne, November 18, 2020.

Béatrice of the Congo

Bernard Dadié

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY JUDITH G. MILLER

THE IVORIAN BERNARD DADIÉ (1916–2019) was one of the most prolific writers and successful statemen of the generation of intellectuals trained at the colonial William Ponty School. His barbed prose bridges the turbulent periods of colonialism, independence, and postcolonial quagmire. His play, Béatrice of the Congo, satirizes and condemns the early colonization of Africa, as well as lambasting current neocolonial attitudes and economic arrangements. Written in 1970, ten years after most African colonies had won their independence, Béatrice of the Congo traces what happens when, after having defeated the Moors in North Africa, the Bitandans (the author’s name for the Portuguese) pursue a self-interested plan to exploit as many parts of the world as they can. This is particularly ironic, as the Bitandans’ complaints against the Moors will be echoed in the play through the hideous ways they themselves treat the Congolese they eventually colonize.

The play highlights the fifteenth-century arrival of the Bitandans in the vast territories of the Congo, called Zaire in the play (a name temporarily imposed on the region by long-term dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, 1971–1997). It then sketches the ruthless corruption of the Mani Congo, head of the Congo Kingdom, by the Bitandan agents of King João, and recounts the destruction of Zaire through Bitandan incitements to civil war, internal rivalries, and the repugnant commerce in human beings. A dynasty of visionary women, Mama Kimpa Vita and Kimpa Vita (or Doña Béatrice), spurs on the growing Zairian resistance to the Bitandans and the brainwashed puppet the Mani Congo has become. Doña Béatrice’s immolation at the end of the play ignites a revolution. The epic trajectory of the action, then, tells a story of colonization that begins with discovery, morphs quickly into exploitation, and eventually explodes into a revolt by those exploited who refuse to continue to bend to colonial