African Drama and Performance
288
African Drama and Performance
288Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253217011 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2004 |
| Series: | A Research in African Literatures Book |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
African Drama and Performance
By John Conteh-Morgan, Tejumola Olaniyan
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2004 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21701-1
CHAPTER 1
King Baabu and the Renaissance Vision
Wole Soyinka
Renaissance is today's mot courant trickling down the throat of most African leaders. Some of them — a handful, of course — are genuine visionaries. They are frustrated by the negation of what they recognize as the potential of a muchabused continent and see themselves as children of a unique history and agents of change. For the most, however, what is renaissance but just another word, except that they are vaguely conscious of the fact that it has a portly, historical texture to it, almost something you can chew — not savor — simply chew in the manner in which cows ruminate, giving off that air of profound contemplation as they lie recumbent in the village shade with a mouthful of grass. For millions below that leadership, however, renaissance is a genuine yearning. Even though they do not understand the word, they are convinced that it means some kind of ameliorating change, some form of social transformation that will lift them out of their accustomed condition of social torpor and the bitter rounds of survival desperation. But what, really, does a renaissance entail? We know what it means — in the literal sense, that is — but what it entails is far more important, because then it implicates some level of awareness, a sense of planning, and a precision of direction, a willingness to embrace and endure the pains of possible convulsion that ultimately make palpable the mere meaning of the word, which is simply — a rebirth.
When we speak of a renaissance within a slab of real estate, a piece of landed property that is not simply a void but one that is inhabited by palpable beings — in short, a nation, a people, or a society — we must think for a start of such mundane issues as the structure that, in effect, defines the occupants of the terrain either as a series of microcommunities or as a single entity. This must be one of the reasons, I imagine, why the structure that politically promotes the singular entity of the African peoples, or at least its projection — the Organization of African Unity — is being given a face-lift. That, right now, is the current scaffolding of the African renaissance. We have killed off the OAU and now flaunt, in its place, the banner of the African Union. Now, the African Union is made up of what? Of independent nations, of course. And what are those nations? How did they come into being? Are they viable entities? Are they expressions of external commercial and industrial needs whose origins are now the plaything of amnesia? Or of internal power surrogates specially emplaced by the departing colonial powers, entities that need to be sustained under any circumstances so that they sometimes even constitute nothing but expressions of individual egos, some of which endure as such for decades — Congo-Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko, Guinea Conakry under Sékou Touré, Central African Republic under Emperor Bokassa, yes, even Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, etc., etc. There are enormous differences, of course, even among these cited instances. The exceptions — I need not point them out — were recognized by their leaders as potential manifestations of humane, self-regulating spaces. All others remained cynical expressions or resource pools of a past imperial dispensation, upheld with ideological rhetoric, or simply murderous passion by individual leaders within the continent.
And so the new body, the African Union, is as good a place as any to commence this self-interrogation. Does the Union intend, for instance, to beam its searchlight on the urgent task of terminating, as rapidly as possible, the cycle of wars that are waged so murderously over colonially awarded national boundaries — such as the recent Ethiopian-Eritrean bloodbath? If it does, it will have proved that the continent has indeed reached maturity and resolved not to perpetuate, as a mindless agent, the callous disregard, indeed contempt, for African peoples that motivated the cavalier manner in which the continent was carved up in the first place. It would mean that it recognizes, as a necessary credo of the would-be renaissance, that the primary wealth of a nation is its people. That it accepts that neither nation nor society is abstract, but concretely defined by the palpable existence of the humanity that animates and regenerates those swathes of developed or even pristine environment. Africa has an opportunity to radicalize her existence by embarking on a policy of resolving its internal boundary disputes through the humanistic test: ascertaining the wishes of the people who actually inhabit, develop, and produce their existence from such disputed areas. It would mean that the renaissance gospelers are truly transformed in the cause of African humanity to the extent that they accept that no piece of mere territorial holding, including its natural resources, is worth the life of one of our fellow men, women, or children. If the ultimate goal of the African continent is to create some form of rational — as supposed to merely sentimental — political union, the present boundaries, imposed on the continent by imperial powers, must be designated as negotiable wherever they remain costly sources of friction. In any case, they prove more and more meaningless every day to the people they enclose, and the loss of lives in their defense continues to indict a lack of visionary thinking and planning on the part of political leadership.
Now we come close to the sobering currency of the King Baabu archetype as the most enduring obstacle to the dreamt-up resumption of the renaissance march, one that appears to have eluded us since the independence of African nations. Try offering any of those foregoing propositions to a reigning King Baabu and his silent partners in power and a wall of resistance goes up immediately. Why should this be surprising, since they recognize only too well that it may lead to a questioning of the very validity of that territorial space that defines their being, indeed, validates their very existence? Ask yourselves, why was it that one of the very first articles of understanding at the inception of the Organization of African Unity was the sacrosanctity of the colonial boundaries that had been imposed on the African peoples? That, more than any other protocol of the OAU charter — including even the clause that imposes on each member a policy of noninterference in the affairs of other nations — has been responsible for the proliferation of the personalization of political spaces since the era of African independence and the succession of one King Baabu afteranother on the political landscape of the continent.
But the matter goes beyond the palpable space over which King Baabu presides. It implicates the very form of governance, since we know that very often the questioning of the national space and the threat of, or agitations toward, a rearrangement of those spaces often takes its roots from a feeling of rejection or exclusion, stemming from the marginalization of a part by the entirety or the internal domination of a part by another part. The worst scenario is encountered when the phenomenon of domination is not even a collective but a personalized one, a brutal manifestation of power that we call, very simply, tyranny. The African renaissance remains a chimera as long as one King Baabu remains among us, his existence rationalized, indeed condoned and consolidated through silence — thus enshrining the cynicism of power either in the management of resources or of political alienation.
What are the remedies most readily applied by King Baabu whenever he feels threatened? We are all familiar with them. He resorts to religious, ethnic, or racial incitement, mouthing a rhetorical commitment to the goals of social transformation. I invite you to look closely at where we find ourselves today in the dismal scenario that is being played out in Zimbabwe, led by our once-revered liberation fighter and national leader, now the latest aspirant to the crown of King Baabu. Do you sometimes feel, as I do, that we appear to be especially cursed? Is it really difficult to insist that the elected leader of a nation must be seen as the principal custodian of its laws? Regard this spectacle, then, where a leader, sworn to uphold the law of the nation, evokes racial animosities simply in order incite his followers to take the law into their own hands over any issues, especially such emotive ones as land ownership. Let us pause awhile and take a keen look at the claims of the Zimbabwean renaissance and the reality that it obscures.
To begin with, let us be careful that Mugabe's opportunism does not cause us to lose sight of some fundamental issues that must be held pertinent to a once–settler-colony like Zimbabwe, where a grossly disproportionate few own and exploit the largest and richest swathes of farmland in the nation. Abdul Nasser in his time was compelled to tackle such a situation head on, dispossessing the feudal oligarchy and reinvesting the land among the fellahin. The struggle of the Sandinista in Nicaragua against a landowning monopoly composed of a few select families is equally pertinent. Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land, even right down to contemporary times, with the revolt of the neo-Zapatistas of that land, a revolt that was rooted in the history that goes back all the way to the Mexican experience of the ruthless appropriation of indigenous land by foreigners. There is therefore nothing extraordinary or blameworthy in any moves to execute a policy that aims for a more egalitarian apportionment of land and its resources. Indeed, any true leader must remain permanently aware of the need to redress any glaring imbalance in the ownership of such a resource as land, since human population, despite even the most radical national policies in birth control, remains infinite while land is finite.
The question that must be put to Robert Mugabe, however, is this: Just what have you been doing as head of a virtual one-party government for nearly a quarter of a century? Is there no orderly, structured alternative to the unleashing of so-called war veterans on farm owners, their families, and — a majority of the affected who are, however, mostly neglected in Western and so-called radical reporting on this continent — African managers, farmhands, and other employees? Those last especially, the farm workers and ancillary population that earns a livelihood from the industry of the land. In the history of takeover of factories, I have yet to learn of armies of peasants or university lecturers being instigated to take over the ownership and operations of such factories — no, it is logically the workers themselves. They may be expected to lock out the owners and turn the factory into a cooperative, sometimes retaining the former operatives in management or technical positions in order to ensure continuity in efficiency and productivity. Even Stalin in his mad race to collectivize land and eliminate all those conveniently designated kulaks did not send veterans of Russia's revolutionary wars to take over the land. Not that his results were much better, but he appeared at least to have given some thought to structural transfers, which is something totally absent from Mugabe's methodology — if one could call it that, being a violent, chaotic process in response to an ancient history of dispossession and for the declared intent for the restoration land justice.
Stung and humiliated by the clear knowledge that the elections a year ago in Zimbabwe constituted a victory for the opposition — never mind that a vicious campaign of intimidation, murders, and other dismal forms of state terror, identical with the present campaign of land retrieval, had succeeded in providing his party a numerical majority — the ageing lion has resorted to the most blatant, time-dishonored methods of African dictators who fail to understand that a people must be led in dignity, not dragged on their knees and bellies on the pathway to social transformation. Resignations and dismissals of judges have been manipulated at a speed unprecedented in the history of Zimbabwe's judiciary, so that that institution is now packed with Mugabe's creatures, guaranteed to do his bidding and overturn constitutional modes of redress. Free expression has become hazardous, as writers and journalists skitter around increasingly ill-defined parameters of toleration that recall the darkest days of Idi Amin's Uganda. In vain his own peers, his brother heads of states in neighboring countries and with similar revolutionary credentials — including South Africa's at the early stages — attempt to call Führer Mugabe to order — no, he is far too gone on the route to self-apotheosis, indifferent to the price that African nations and peoples continue to pay when forced into one cul-de-sac after another. A messy endgame is in store for that unlucky nation — the enthronement of brute force as the force of law and even the possibility of a civil war.
Let us not delude ourselves; let us not allow our rational faculties to be so cheaply occluded by cheap racial emotionalism. We have been here before, and it would be to our eternal shame if we allowed ourselves to be led down this primrose path yet again by cheap appeal to African historical injustices, identity, or culture. We have been here before, not once, not twice, but several times over. Mobutu Sese Seko, the couturier of leopard-skin machismo in his heyday, flung the cult of the African authenticité in the face of his opponents whenever he ran out of productive ideas — which was all the time. Every act of Mobutu was trumpeted as being undertaken in the cause of the restoration of the African past, of the African value, in face of European negation, of an African authentic being and the dignity of the black race. Virtually single-handedly, however, Mobutu, while mouthing these laudable goals, methodically looted his nation's resources, pauperized the inordinately endowed nation of Congo/Zaire while turning himself into a multibillionaire with holdings in Switzerland and Belgium that beggared even the insatiable rapacity of his erstwhile colonial master, King Leopold of Belgium, whose private holdings in Africa were obscenely named the Congo Free State.
Have we forgotten so soon the manic antics of the erstwhile ruler of Uganda, the one and only Alhaji Dr. Field-Marshal Professor Emeritus Life-President etc., etc. Idi Amin Dada? Well, he was also committed to restoring Africa to Africa, and more specifically, Uganda to Ugandans. In the cause of that laudable ideal, he seized every opportunity to insult and humiliate any representative of the imperialist or colonial order that was unfortunate enough to come within his orbit — over which, let it be understood, no one shed any tears. The question is, just what benefits did this project bring to the Ugandans? Was the quality of existence for Ugandans noticeably enhanced by the antics of the genial, revolutionary, anti-imperialist giant? Well, the answer is best provided by Ugandans — we shall simply let it hang for now. My personal contribution to that forum is to reveal that I was myself in Uganda, my first ever visit to Eastern Africa, shortly after the completion of my studies abroad and return to my own piece of the African real estate. It was the first ever meeting on African soil of the sixties generation of writers, artistes, intellectuals, etc., and it took place in Makerere College, Uganda. That was where we first encountered our colleagues such as Okot p'Bitek; David Rubadiri; Rajat Neogy, founder of the magazine Transition; and the francophones such as Tamsir Niane, Mongo Beti, etc. I recall most distinctly — and we were very vocal about it — our astonishment at the monopoly of businesses by the Asian minority — from the middle to even lower economic levels of the Ugandan society. Virtually every shop — I repeat, every shop, hotel, restaurant, factory, etc. — was owned by Asians. The plantations belonged of course to the European settlers. When we were driven to the hillside residences, the choicest parts of Kampala, we found that the mansions that straddled some of the most lushly serene parts belonged to Asians. This struck us as downright anomalous, and we decried this second-tier internal colonialism that virtually cast the native Ugandans in the role of third-class citizens.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from African Drama and Performance by John Conteh-Morgan, Tejumola Olaniyan. Copyright © 2004 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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