" . . . 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.
" . . . 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.
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Overview
" . . . 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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253028075 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Drama and Performance Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 310 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Karin Barber, Senior Lecturer at the Centre of West African Studies, the University of Birmingham, has published extensively on Yorùbá oral literature, religion, and popular culture. She worked and traveled with a Yorùbá theatre group in the early 1980s. John Collins is Head of Bokoor Recording Studio, Ghana, and Technical Director of a joint German/Ghanaian music archive redocumentation project at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. His writings on African popular entertainment include Music Makers of West Africa and West African Pop Roots. Alain Ricard is Research Professor with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) of the African Studies Center of the University of Bordeaux, specializing in African languages and literatures, including drama and popular literature. He has written a number of books on African literature and has produced two films on concert parties.
Read an Excerpt
West African Popular
By Karin Barber, John Collins, Alain Ricard
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1997 Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain RicardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02807-5
CHAPTER 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 party, the earliest of these theatre forms, was exported to Togo. Yoruba popular theatre did not spread beyond the Yoruba-speaking population of Nigeria, but this area was so large and heterogeneous that it could sustain, in the theatre's heyday, more than a hundred fully professional theatre companies.
This popular theatre was a hybrid form, attuned to novelty and fashion. It emerged from areas where ancient trading cultures had operated long-distance routes crisscrossing West Africa and leading north across the Sahara before turning, with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, to face the coast. Such cultures, Collins and Richards have suggested, were innovative and adept at the "social navigation" required to foster extensive commercial networks; with this went an open and accommodating attitude toward foreign, imported cultural elements and a willingness to invest in entertainment (Collins and Richards 1982).
The Portuguese built Elmina, a trading fort, on the Gold Coast in 1482; a string of other forts followed as Portuguese interests were displaced, in the seventeenth century, by Dutch and then British and Danish interests. The product of this long interaction under the shadow of the slave trade was a highly localized hybrid culture in the immediate surroundings of the forts in what is now Ghana. Lagos, in what is now Nigeria, became an important slaving center in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the abolition of the slave trade made the more accessible ports further west too risky to use for that purpose. Lagos expanded and flourished on the back of the illegal slave trade and then, in the later nineteenth century, on the palm oil trade that increasingly replaced it.
When the slave trade gave way to the "legitimate" trade in cash crops, the same parts of the coast, with their hinterlands, remained commercially dominant; and in the colonial era, the Gold Coast and Nigeria continued to monopolize the trade with Europe, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the total external trade of West Africa. These two regions, then, were points of concentration of the cash economy, where exchanges with Europe were most intense.
Britain imposed a commercial colonialism on British West Africa which continued the import-export relations established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in which primary products — mainly agricultural products grown for the purpose — were exported, and manufactured goods — mainly textiles, liquor, and utensils — were imported. But in the colonial period the volume of trade increased dramatically, and the colonial administrations laid down structures, designed to facilitate this exchange to Europe's benefit, which transformed West African society and created the new culture from which concert party and Yorùbà popular theatre arose. These structures included the administrative hierarchy, located in large towns and employing educated Africans as lower civil servants; public works, notably railway and road building, which involved the recruitment of large numbers of wage laborers, and greatly increased the speed and volume of movement in and out of the newly expanding cities; and the education system, based upon existing mission schools, which the colonial governments undertook to regulate, thus creating a national grid of institutions offering standardized curricula and qualifications. This played a major part in the enlargement of the tiny, acculturated educated élite that had dominated the social life of nineteenth-century coastal cities like Lagos and Cape Coast. As most of the schools continued to be owned and run by the churches, missionization intensified and conversion to Christianity came to be associated not only with literacy but with paid employment and the modern sector.
Colonialism thus accelerated the formation of new classes: the class of cash-cropping farmers; the small, highly educated African bureaucratic élite; and between them, an amorphous, urban "intermediate class," made up of wage laborers, artisans, traders, providers of services of all kinds, low-paid civil servants, employees of big trading companies: the domain where the formal sector dissolves into the informal sector and everyone is hustling to survive, combining two or three occupations, over-occupied yet "underemployed." It was from this intermediate sector that modern West African popular culture emerged. Popular art, popular music, and popular fiction as well as popular theatre were all products of it.
It was only in the later stages of the colonial period, however — in the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s — that the concert party and popular theatre succeeded in establishing themselves as genuinely popular forms. Four interrelated factors help to account for this moment of expansion and takeoff: the postwar economic boom, which expanded the sector of paid employees and put cash into the pockets of farmers, waged workers, and entrepreneurs alike; the enormous expansion of the cities; the remarkable growth of the education system, especially at primary level; and the wave of anticolonial popular nationalism that led up to independence for Ghana in 1957, and for Nigeria and Togo in 1960.
Until after World War II, colonialism had been run on a shoestring. The Depression, combined with a deliberate policy of financial nonintervention, had prevented major development investment in the colonies. In the ten years after the war, however, the selling price of primary products rose spectacularly, increasing the value of exports sixfold. The volume of imports increased correspondingly. People had cash to spend. Government had the means, and also the will — with the advent of postwar socialist regimes in Europe — to plan development policies and to provide services. They undertook extensive public works, notably the building of railways and roads. Cash-crop farmers and commercial firms, as well as government, greatly increased their workforce of wage laborers. As the availability of paid work and urban amenities exerted a stronger attraction, West African urbanization accelerated, and in the 1950s and 1960s was the fastest in the world. Between 1948 and 1960, the population of Accra increased from 124,000 to 388,000; that of Lagos, in roughly the same period (1952-1963), from 333,000 to over a million (Gugler and Flanagan 1978:41). In a little over ten years, then, both these cities trebled in size.
The city, however, was not cut off from the rural hinterland. The Yorúbá-speaking area of Nigeria had been urbanized since long before colonization; and while the cities grew enormously in the colonial period, they retained their web of relationships with smaller towns, villages, and farm hamlets. Even salaried workers in the city tended to keep a farm in the background, and interaction between urban-based and rural-based people was seamless and continuous. In Ghana, although urban workers were less involved in farming, there was continual movement between rural and urban areas, with extensive transmission of money, goods, and ideas (Caldwell 1969). As the cities exploded in the 1940s and 1950s, then, they influenced the whole population: everyone was to some degree urban-oriented, increasing numbers of rural people had close relatives living in the cities, and most people had visited or stayed there.
One reason for migration to the city was the search for the kind of work appropriate to a school-leaver. Although most migrants did not in the end manage to secure white-collar jobs, education was seen as the key to progress and to a better life. The belief in and demand for education was one of the most powerful forces of the period. One of the principal planks in the programs of both the Action Group in the Western Region of Nigeria and the Convention People's Party in the Gold Coast was the expansion of education. The 1950s saw a phenomenal increase in the numbers of children attending primary school. In Western Nigeria, the proportion of children aged 5-14 attending primary school increased from 35 percent in 1954 to 90 percent in 1960, almost reaching the proclaimed goal of universal primary education in the space of six years (Fafunwa 1974). The demand for education was so avid — in Ghana as well as Nigeria — that, when the government did not move fast enough, thousands of do-it-yourself schools were established by local communities to fill the gap (Fafunwa 1974; McWilliam 1959).
The combination of the anger and resentment of the Depression years and the soaring expectations of the postwar boom years created an active, popular, anticolonial nationalism, based on the urgent demand for self-rule and a share of the good things of life. In most of West Africa, the 1940s was a period of political unrest, the 1950s a period of swift political mobilization, formation of political parties, elections, local and regional self-government, and preparation for independence. In Nigeria, the 1950s also saw the rapid ethnicization of politics — which had previously been national and to some extent pan-African — in response to the Richards and Macpherson Constitutions of 1946 and 1951, which set up the Nigerian state on regional and ethnic lines. With this ethnicization of political identities came a strong ethnic cultural nationalism, which in western Nigeria has fueled and informed the Yorübá popular theatre throughout its history.
Economic boom, urbanization, education, and nationalism created the conditions in which commercial popular theatres could take off; they also imprinted these theatres' outlook through and through.
The expanding cities provided both the practical base for theatre companies' activities and an ideological landscape. They were cities of migrants, heterogeneous and polyglot populations, with a bias toward youth and toward males. They were sites of entrepreneurship and innovation, the locus of new kinds of work, the only place where people with education could realize their potential. In colonial cities cash had to be spent, and people got used to paying for what had once been taken for granted: food, housing, even water on occasion. They also got used to paying for entertainment, and this was what made the professional concert party and popular theatre possible. Modern popular theatre, unlike the oral performances and masquerade theatres of tradition, sold tickets at the door. It was a commercial enterprise, bringing together crowds of people most of whom did not know each other, and who shared a common space only by virtue of being willing to pay for admission. In the hotel courtyards, community halls, open-air cinemas, and football stadiums that were the sites of this colonial popular culture, strangers collectively experienced a staging of their common preoccupations: preoccupations with modernity, money, the city, gender relations, and how to live a good life in a changed world. When Ghanaian concert shows were taken on tour to rural areas, the performers and audiences often remembered each other: the bandsmen sometimes had relationships with local women, the leader might know the proprietor of the hall, and the "pioneer" man would do research on local gossip so as to be able to include topical references in the play. Nonetheless, part of their appeal was that they were not part of the local community: they came from outside, brought news and fashions from the city, and addressed their audiences as a paying public rather than as neighbors and kinspeople.
Modern commercial entertainment was not only made possible by the growth of the cities with their wage-earning populations, it was also very often about the city, articulating ambivalent responses to the attractions and dangers of urban life.
The culture of progress through education was not confined to the classroom. Popular culture was permeated with notions of educational self-improvement. Onitsha pamphlets (which had their counterparts in Ibadan, Osogbo, and Accra) were often written by schoolboys, for a wider audience which included "the new literate class of elementary and grammar-school boys and girls, low-level white-collar workers, primary-school teachers, literate and semi-literate traders, mechanics, taxi-drivers and, above all, ... the numerous products of adult education classes and evening schools ..." (Obiechina 1972:10-11). The pamphlets contained a promise of useful factual knowledge and an expanded English vocabulary. Many Ghanaian and Nigerian popular actors first became interested in theatre through taking part in school plays and concerts; in Nigeria the connection persisted in their professional lives, for most theatre companies relied on schools to provide a large proportion of their audiences. Though concert party and Yoruba popular theatre were unscripted, improvised forms, they were yoked, ambiguously but vitally, with literacy, an orientation which had profound effects on the actors' notion of what a play is (see Barber 1995).
The concert parties of Ghana and Togo, and the popular theatre of western Nigeria, thus had their origins in the old coastal trading cultures with their long-standing flair for innovation and entertainment. But they did not spread their wings as great popular forms — accessible and magnetically attractive to large numbers of people — until they were lifted by the surging currents of urbanization, nationalism, and education in the cash-rich boom years of the 1950s. Formed by these forces, they also reflected upon them, spoke of them, gave voice to the urgent curiosity about, and the resilient will to get the better of, the drastic changes colonialism brought. In the 1960s and 70s they reached their peak of popularity and creativity. They articulated popular attitudes during the first independence regimes (which fell in 1963 in Togo, and in 1966 in both Ghana and Nigeria) and through a succession of phases of military and civilian rule. In Nigeria they were floated high on oil wealth in the 1970s and early 80s — a period when they enjoyed an extraordinary expansion, efflorescence, and diversification — only to be dropped with a crash by the collapsing economy around 1985. Those which survived put their efforts more and more into films and, recently, into videos. In Ghana and Togo, concert party has survived the economic crisis. Like other popular cultural forms (see Fabian 1978), they may dwindle as rapidly as they expanded, or they may undergo further transformations that render them unrecognizable. This volume presents one play from the heyday of each of the three theatre movements.
CONCERT PARTY IN GHANA
EARLY HISTORY: THE FORMATION OF A GENRE
Since World War II the concert party, a contemporary roving comic opera, has been one of the most vital and dynamic folk arts in Ghana. Like much in the country today this theatre can be considered a syncretic fusion of western and indigenous elements, in this case emerging out of the impact of western musical and dramatic influences mainly on the local Fanti culture of the coast in the first two decades of this century.
The "party" is a professional organization composed of a central core of founder members and an ever-changing periphery of "bandsmen." Until recently most of the groups were all-male, the female parts being played by men in drag. Now, however, many bands have begun to use actresses, and some a mixture of actresses and female impersonators. The concert play is basically a slapstick musical comedy, with a strong seam of pathos and a very prominent moral tone running through it. It is performed in indigenous languages and the drama is shot through with highlife music, which continually punctuates it. The lyrics of the songs are fitted to the needs of the plot, and the climax and moral of the show, which comes at the end, is usually in the form of a highlife song. The actors depict in a humorous and exaggerated way situations and stereotypes of "typical" contemporary Ghanaians, and the content of the plays relates to the everyday problems facing their audience. During the show there is a great deal of audience participation: it opens and closes with music to which the audience dances, and throughout the play itself the audience becomes extremely involved, with much weeping, jeering, and applauding. Often members of the audience will throw coins at an actor, and they may even go up to the stage with gifts of money and food, or stick coins on the moist foreheads of popular actors and musicians.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from West African Popular by Karin Barber, John Collins, Alain Ricard. Copyright © 1997 Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction/Karin Barber
1. Three West African Popular Theatre Forms: A Social History/Karin Barber, John Collins,
Alain Ricard
2. The Jaguar Jokers and Orphan Do Not Glance/John Collins
3. Text of Orphan Do Not Glance
4. Concert Party in Lome and The African Girl from Paris
5. Text of The African Girl from Paris
6. The Eda Theatre and The Secret Is Out
7. Text of The Secret Is Out
Bibliography
Index