Wole Soyinka
In one of his most important theoretical essays on drama and the-
atre, Soyinka has himself eloquently, though indirectly, acknowledged
his enormous debts to the traditions of drama and theatre in Africa.
This is the essay “Theatre in Traditional African Societies: Survival
Patterns,”an essay that is, at the very least, as important as the most
widely discussed of Soyinka’s theoretical essays, “The Fourth Stage.”
The essay is an authoritative, sweeping exploration of the African the-
atrical heritage, particularly under the interdiction of Christianity and
Islam, and against the pervasive dislocations of colonialism in general.
What is particularly noteworthy about the essay is the way in which it
departs from the conventional “cultural nationalist” tactic of merely af-
firming the survival of traditional precolonial theatrical forms against
colonialist and Eurocentric denials of their validity or vitality. Rather
than this simple “indigenist” line, Soyinka adopts the far more challeng-
ing Cabralist approach of investigating the emergence and evolution of
modern West African theatre in the context of the complicated dialec-
tics of cultural repression and nationalist resistance under colonial rule.
In the process, the Nigerian playwright locates the areas of density of
theatrical expression in precolonial Africa – Africa’s “theatre belt,” so to
speak – and the ruses and disguises that the most significant theatrical
expressions in early to late colonial Africa had to assume in order to sur-
vive the onslaught of colonial cultural hegemony. Some of these expres-
sions which survived, Soyinka tells us, could only do so in rather bizarre
mutations:
West Africa in this decade (s) could boast of a repertoire of shows display-
ing the most bizarre products of eclectic art in the history of theatre. Even
cinema, an infant art, had by then left its mark on West African theatre. Some
of Bob Johnson’s acts were adaptations of Charlie Chaplin’s escapades, not
omitting his costume and celebrated shuffle. And the thought of Empire Day
celebration concerts at which songs like ‘Mimi the Moocher’ formed part of
the evening musical recitals, side by side with ‘God’s Gospel is our Heritage’
and vignettes from the life of a Liberian stevedore, stretches the contempo-
rary imagination, distanced from the historical realities of colonial West Africa
(ADO,)
It should of course be pointed out that the thrust of this essay is not
merely to identify and reject the bizarre hybridity of West African the-
atre forms under colonialism; rather, the essay’s main line of argument
is the identification and affirmation of the most durable forms which
evolved into what we could call a resisting, ebullient hybridity. This is the