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African Literature, Theater, and Performance

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African Studies Review

Electronic Anthology of Past Articles

African Literature, Theater and Performance

Introduction

            The African Studies Review began its life as the African Studies Bulletin in 1956, taking its current title in 1970.  It was then and remains the flagship journal of the African Studies Association.  As such, it has reflected the generally broad interests of the mission, editorial boards and membership of the ASA.  As someone who works in African literatures (written, oral and cinema), I’ve published articles and reviews in ASR since the early 1980s.  Over several decades ASR has published some very fine articles on African humanities including a special issue in 1986.[1]  The nine outstanding works featured in this anthology further testify to the ASR’s ongoing efforts to present quality scholarship in these related fields. 

            As I read them, some for the second time, I was struck by the range of the subject matter and diversity of approaches.  There was also a kind of time capsule feel to them, due in part to the fact that the most recent of the pieces was published in 1994.  A quick perusal of the titles, not counting the several actual “reviews” of the field, also reflects the comfort with which scholars seemingly took on very broad topics.  Obviously, ASR has published articles on African humanities since then but it’s worth noting that scholarship in African literature and related genres has moved into many new areas of theory and understanding in the last twenty or so years.  This in no way diminishes the validity of the work, but it does remind us, and the editors of ASR, that there is a lot of timely and relevant material still out there to be mined for publication.

            Briefly considering each article chronologically, F. Odun Balogun’s discussion of absurdist literature as it applies to a collection of Taban lo Liyong’s short stories[2] looks to not only identify certain traits in the texts but also to put forth a comparison and contrast of European notions of the absurd and those of African writers.  “Thus, whereas the European absurdist sees life as being absurd and meaningless...” the African absurdist writer exposes the absurdity in the “conditions, the instances, the personalities, and the attitudes that deprive life of this meaning which he values so much…” He suggests African writers use the absurd mode similarly to satire, as “a way of correction.”  I have some reservations about such all-encompassing statements, but Balogun does a fine job of arguing his case in the context of lo Liyong’s marvelously engaging tales, drawing on scholarship from western and African sources.  The time capsule effect, again, reminds us of how recent scholarship has become skeptical of generic absolutes, and how these are now often framed in carefully limited claims.

            Harold Scheub’s ASA-commissioned “Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature,”[3] is a very different kind of study.  He takes on a scholarly task which is, in retrospect, more than daunting.  A renowned scholar of African oral traditions, Scheub is well-placed to take on the project, and he reveals where his thinking will take him in the first two sentences of the review: 

             There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art forms, from interacting

              oral genres to such literary productions as the novel and poetry. The strength of

              the oral tradition seems not to have abated; through three literary periods, a

              reciprocal linkage has worked these media into a unique art form against which

              potent influences from East and West have proved unequal.

The ten pages of footnotes and fifteen pages of reference texts suggest the range and ambition of the review.  It reflects the expertise, wide-ranging intellect and, let’s face it, iconoclasm that has characterized Scheub’s scholarship over the years.  At its worst it is a fascinating exercise and at its best it offers moments of dazzling insights and stimulating ideas on its vast subject matter.

            Chidi Amuta notes the changes in Wole Soyinka’s post-Nigerian Civil War literature compared to his earlier work.[4]  He covers critiques that Soyinka was not socially engaged in his work, amid standard accusations of being preoccupied with an “art for art’s sake,” submerged in the at times esoteric properties of Yoruba mythology and religion, rather than focusing on the obvious needs of a recently independent nation as it battles corruption, inequality and political chicanery.  “With the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), however, his historical consciousness intensifies and acquires a more overt political edge while his artistic philosophy and social ideology become progressively secular.”  Amuta illustrates a definite thematic and rhetorical shift in post-war works such as:  Madmen and Specialists, A Shuttle in the Crypt, Season of Anomy and his prison memoir The Man Died.  This discussion of the Nobel laureate’s amazing production soon after his release from nearly three years of detention by the Federal Government is vital for understanding the arch of Soyinka’s themes and interests as his oeuvre develops over the years.

            In her “Commentaries” article, Mary Jo Arnoldi, responding to a keynote presentation at the 1986 ASA meeting in Madison, Wisconsin by Karin Barber,  looks to resituate generally accepted claims of what constitutes “popular arts” in Africa, making a case for going beyond what she sees as a limiting and somewhat narrow set of accepted characteristics.[5]  Citing a number of other scholars’ view that African popular arts are consistently “topical, new, innovative and modern,” Arnoldi also notes that they are seen as only existing in “the urban colonial and post-colonial world.”  She asserts a case for traits of popular arts also being found in rural and “traditional” African societies.  Among others, she considers the rural arts of the Bamana people of Mali, the Iteso of Uganda and her own work with Malian rural youth practitioners of puppet theater.  “Like Yoruba popular theatre and Ghanaian highlife which Barber describes, Malian puppet drama creates a ‘world inside out’ within which expectations about everyday social relationships are altered and new relationships and identities are constructed.”  Her overall paralleling of rural expressive forms with those identified as “popular” in urban and contemporary settings relies on the key notion that scholars must prioritize process over product, while avoiding simple ongoing assumptions of fixed or static traditional expressive arts.

            Gaurav Desai’s exploration of African Popular Theater is particularly innovative and relevant to a consideration of what constitutes a truly socially engaged theater practice.[6]  Again, evoking, at least for me, a time capsule referent of one of the great icons of 1970s educational theory, Desai incorporates the thinking and methods of the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose ideas on “Pedagogy for the Oppressed” inspired many social projects throughout the “Third World” in that and subsequent decades.  The article moves from earlier, well-intentioned efforts to bring socially relevant but often western-centered notions of theater to African venues, to a progression of more radical experiments to give local constituents more say in the very conception of what theater ought to be.  “Freire proposes an alternative strategy…a dialogic practice in which there is no given message X. The message takes form in the process of communication between the educators and the learning subjects.”  Desai fleshes out his claims with excellent examples of how theater practice has been evolving in a context of collaboration between local constituents and outside and local educators.  His, example of truly engaged theater recounts the now legendary activities of the Kamirithu cultural center in a rural Kenyan community, as a fruitful partnership between several University of Nairobi scholars, most famously Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and local residents.

            Margaret Thompson Drewal provides us with what is probably the gem of this anthology, sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.[7]  Her report on “the state of research on performance in Africa,” is careful to delimit the amount of material that she can realistically cover in this kind of endeavor.  Even working within the parameters she sets, there is an impressive amount of material that is carefully, evocatively synthesized here.  Drewal warns that the conceptions of performance are varied and vast: “Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept…”  The piece is clear, provocative and impressively learned in its use of a large number of theoretical and methodological sources.

            Tanure Ojaide takes on another broad topic as he seeks to identify and exemplify the many cultural elements found in “Modern African Literature.”[8]  His approach moves across the works of many writers and literary genres, though he might have more accurately titled his lengthy article “Modern Anglophone African Literature and Cultural Identity,” since there are pretty much no references to African literatures in French or Portuguese, to name only two.  Nevertheless, Ojaide is thorough in listing the many cultural dimensions that characterize the literature he singles out.  In this sense there is an echoing—there goes that time capsule again—of earlier attempts to point out what scholars felt were unique qualities:  “Ethical and Moral Nature of African Civilization,” “Utilitarian Function of African Literature,” “Social Cohesion,” “Defense of African Culture,” “African Mystical Life,” etc.  There are helpful nuggets for readers new to the history of critical writing about this large body of texts, particularly as they seek for a comparison with other world literatures.  However, as I’ve been suggesting, the focus and tone of contemporary scholarship has tended to move away from broad brush strokes in favor of the smaller, more delimited sketching of objects of study.

            Ode S. Ogede takes a smaller bite of the corpus of African literature, as he focuses on a single novel by Ayi Kwei Armah, and frames it with an exploration of its “rhetoric of revolution.”[9]  This historically-based novel about the fall of Kumasi is seen by Ogede as a distinct shift in Armah’s thematic and stylistic approaches:  “The ideology of revolution that Armah expresses in The Healers indicates that the thrust of his thinking has moved away from abstract moral notions of culture which occupied his three early novels…In The Healers Armah has developed into full scale his rhetoric of the primacy of resistance to physical conquest as an antidote to colonization…”  Ogede goes on to suggest that the novel also moves towards a guarded optimism about Africa’s, at least his part of the continent’s, future as opposed to his earlier, pretty much unrelenting pessimism.  Like Amuta’s discussion of a turning point in Soyinka’s writing, this study notes a similar evolution in another of West Africa’s canonical artists.

            Working from a group of poems in a recently published anthology, Colleen O’Brien examines the role of black South African women in their nation’s struggles against apartheid and the search for equality in the “Rainbow Nation.”[10]  Drawing liberally from the anthology, O’Brien looks to identify what women consider to be liberation as opposed to the thinking of men.  “There is an important distinction to be made between the black male author's portrayal of the mythological Mother Africa and the verisimilitude of the South African mother who appears in women's writing.”  She notes that contemporary black women look to control the “spheres of influence, such as agriculture and family, that they have been responsible for traditionally.”  Along these lines, O’Brien holds these observations together with a recurring comparison of western feminism and the specific case of women’s struggles, needs and strategies in South Africa, from at least the late 19th Century on.  Poems of mostly black and some white women writers are employed to explore a number of related themes and issues.  The article serves as a solid and compelling prelude to Cecily Lockett’s anthology, Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women’s Verse.

             Over the years, I and numerous colleagues have had the ongoing impression that both the ASA, in the way it accepted paper proposals and organized its conference panels, and the ASR, in the papers it published, were skewed towards the social sciences, with the main humanities emphasis being history.  I do not have, nor have I sought, a specific list of numbers of papers by discipline published by ASR—maybe that’s the statistically disinterested humanist in me—but the fact that this impression still prevails for many of us is significant.  To be fair, many potential contributors to the journal usually look to publish in specialist journals in their respective fields:  Research in African Literatures, Journal of African History, Journal of the American Folklore Society, and even the ASA’s own History in Africa, to name a few. My observation is not meant to in any way question the motivations of conference organizers or the ASR editorial boards.  Their duties are perpetually onerous and staggeringly complicated, given such a large, broadly-focused organization and the many interests it seeks to represent.

I am, in any event, heartened by the video recorded remarks of the journal’s new editor, Benjamin N. Lawrance, on the ASR website, wherein he both explains the editorial process when it comes to evaluating submissions and encourages young scholars doing cutting edge work as well as more established Africanists to contribute to the journal:

We are interested in receiving paper submissions that are new, original and exciting creative scholarship.  I’m very excited by first authors, people who are doing new research straight out of their dissertation.

While that kind of statement can be found on the inside covers of a numerous academic journals, it’s encouraging to have it affirmed with a face and voice behind it.  I also applaud recent efforts by ASR and ASA to hold workshops in Africa to assist local scholars in writing up their research using the kinds of formats and ideas that are sought by American journals.  Increasing the representation of perspectives of our African colleagues in our all too often American/Euro-centered academic culture and publications is a necessary and laudable goal.

Having had to think about the ideas and conclusions elicited by this group of articles, it strikes me that maybe one of the ASR editors’ preoccupations that do tend to draw many of the pieces together were to publish studies that ranged as far as possible in the world of African letters.  The desire for breadth and synthesis must have been very tempting indeed.  My modest proposal here, then, is to go forward with attracting and publishing the more innovative approaches to this, really, unmanageable body of creative works.  I noticed that even the now-contested, at this point somewhat dated, critical paradigms of post-colonial theory, which were certainly in vogue in the 1980s and 90s, were not represented in these articles; not to mention more recent conceptions of the “Global”, questions of the “location” of African literatures, and related notions such as “Afropolitanism”.  (I’ve been infected by the need to put terms in quotes, something not required in our time capsule days.)  Please do enjoy the notable articles in this anthology, then go out and write something of your own and submit it to ASR.

 

Robert Cancel

UC San Diego


[1] “Special Issue on African Humanities,” Bennetta Jules-Rosette and Robert Cancel, editors.  African Studies Review, Vol. 29, no. 1 (March) 1986.

[2] “Characteristics of Absurdist African Literature:  Taban lo Liyong’s Fixions—A Study in the Absurd.”  ASR, Vol. 27, no. 1 (March) 1984.

[3] “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature.”  ASR, Vol. 28, nos. 2/3 (June) 1985

[4] “The Ideological Content of Soyinka’s War Writings.”  ASR Vol. 29, no. 3 (Sept.) 1983

[5] “Rethinking Definitions of African and Traditional Popular Arts.”  ASR, Vol.30, no. 3 (Sept.) 1987.

[6] “Theater as Praxis:  Discursive Strategies in African Popular Theater.”  ASR, Vol. 33, no. 1 (April) 1990.

[7] “Review of the State of Research on Performance in Africa.”  ASR, Vol. 34, no. 3 (Dec.) 1991.

[8] “Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity.”  ASR, Vol. 35, no. 3 (Dec.) 1992.

[9] “The Rhetoric of Revolution in Armah’s The Healers”:  Form and Experience.”  ASR, Vol.36, no. 1 (April) 1993.

[10] “The Search for Mother Africa:  Poetry Revises Women’s Struggle for Freedom.”  ASR, Vol. 37, no. 2 (Sept.) 1994.


Contents

Social Science Research Council Paper

Articles

  • The State of Research on Performance in Africa

  • Margaret Thompson Drewal
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 34 / Issue 3 / December 1991
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 1-64

  • Performance raises fundamental issues about bodily praxis, human agency, temporality, and discursive knowledge and calls into question conventional understandings of tradition, repetition, mechanical reproduction, and ontological definitions of social order and reality. Across academic disciplines and across modes of production, however, performance is a contested concept, “meaning that its very existence is bound up in disagreement about what it is, and that disagreement over its essence is itself part of that essence” (Strine, Long, and HopKins, 1989: 183). In other words, performance has no precisely agreed upon definition. Rather it varies in scope and import from one academic discipline to another and from one practitioner, or human agent, to another.

    In the emerging field of performance studies, performance is open-ended, but it privileges process, the temporally or processually constructed nature of human realities, and the agency of knowledgeable performers who have embodied particular techniques and styles to accomplish it (M. Drewal, 1989b; Conquergood, 1989). In the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of taking action. Performance is thus a fundamental dimension of culture as well as the production of knowledge about culture. It might include anything from individual agents' negotiations of everyday life, to the stories people tell each other, popular entertainments, political oratory, guerrilla warfare, to bounded events such as theater, ritual, festivals, parades, and more.

Articles

  • A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature

  • Harold Scheub
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 28 / Issue 2-3 / 1985
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 1-72

  • There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art forms, from interacting oral genres to such literary productions as the novel and poetry. The strength of the oral tradition seems not to have abated; through three literary periods, a reciprocal linkage has worked these media into a unique art form against which potent influences from East and West have proved unequal. Vital to African literature is the relationship between the oral and written word; in seemingly insignificant interstices have flourished such shadowy literary figures as Egyptian scribes, Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas, all playing crucial transitional roles in their respective literatures. The oral tale is not “the childhood of fiction” (Macculloch, 1905), but the early literary traditions were beneficiaries of the oral genres, and there is no doubt that the epic and its hero are the predecessors of the African novel and its central characters.

    The African oral tradition distills the essences of human experiences, shaping them into rememberable, readily retrievable images of broad applicability with an extraordinary potential for eliciting emotional responses. These are removed from their historical contexts so that performers may recontextualize them in artistic forms. The oral arts, containing this sensory residue of past cultural life and the wisdom so engendered, constitute a medium for organizing, examining, and interpreting an audience's experiences of the images of the present. The tradition is a venerable one.

  • Characteristics of Absurdist African Literature: Taban lo Liyong's Fixions—A Study in the Absurd

  • F. Odun Balogun
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 27 / Issue 1 / March 1984
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 41-55
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  • The absurd, both as an element of satire and as a style in its own right, has always been manifest in African literature both oral and written. However, in an effort to redirect the focus of African literature and criticism from eurocentricism to a literature and criticism informed by African aesthetics, vocal African critics like Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike have persistently condemned the encouragement of modernist tendencies in African writing (1980: 239): “If African literature is not to become a transplanted fossil of European literature, it needs to burst out of the straightjacket of anglomodernist poetry and of the ‘well made novel’.” Their advice to African critics is that the latter must “liberate themselves from their mesmerization with Europe and its critical canons” (p. 302) and must stop encouraging “the manufacture of a still, pale, anemic, academic poetry, slavishly imitative of 20th-century European modernism, with its weak preciosity, ostentatious erudition, and dunghill piles of esoterica and obscure allusions, all totally cut off from the vital nourishment of our African traditions ” (p. 3).

    The antagonism of these critics toward modernism appears to be based on a seemingly incontrovertible evidence (Chinweizu, 1973: 8):

    There was a specific burden of tradition that Western modernism reacted against in its revolt. But however familiar we may be with all that; however familiar we may be with that tradition or with the various modernist against it (Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, etc.) they are not part of our history. They do not belong to our past….

  • The Ideological Content of Soyinka's War Writings

  • Chidi Amuta
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 29 / Issue 3 / 1986
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 43-54

  • Wole Soyinka's controversial stature as an African writer and intellectual derives from certain contradictions inherent in both his stance on important socio-political questions as well as in his artistic mediation of contemporary African experience. At the level of social action and thought, Soyinka could conveniently be regarded as a progressive idealist in the sense that his involvements in and utterances on specific social problems indicate a fervent preoccupation with social justice and an aversion to oppressive institutions. As a literary artist, however, much of his significant writing displays an unrelenting obsession with myth and its complex reenactments through ritual. Consequently, while his consciousness is ultimately historical, his imagination and idiom of creative expression derive from a fundamentally mythic source and a religious sentiment Says Stanley Macebuh (1976:79):

    Soyinka is, first and foremost, a mythopoeist; his imagination is, in a quite fundamental sense, a mythic imagination.

    Biodun Jeyifo (1984:4) puts the matter even more devastatingly: “Soyinka has a deep, abiding penchant for mythology, metaphysics and mysticism.” Soyinka has complicated this ambiguity in his reputation by striving, in his earlier works at least, to proffer mythic “explanations” and resolutions for social problems which ordinarily belong in the realm of historical reality and empirical human experience. An important evidence of this feature of his art is the tendency to create human characters whose actions are circumscribed by the cosmic attributes of specific Yoruba deities.

  • Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity

  • Tanure Ojaide
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 35 / Issue 3 / 1992
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 43-57
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  • Modern African literature has gained recognition worldwide with such classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Weep Not Child, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. This recognition was reinforced by Soyinka's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Modern African literature is written in indigenous African languages and in European languages used in Africa. Written African literature is very new compared to the indigenous oral tradition of literature which has been there and is still very much alive. While there are literary works in Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu and Sotho, among others, this literature in African indigenous languages is hardly known outside its specific linguistic frontiers. Writers such as Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiongo and the late Okot p'Bitek first wrote some of their works in African languages before translating them into English. Most African writers, however, write in English, French, and Portuguese. There is the Eurocentric temptation to see modern African literature written in these European languages as an extension of European literature. However, after modern imperialism, language alone cannot be the sole definer of a people's literature.

  • The Rhetoric of Revolution in Armah's The Healers: Form as Experience*

  • Ode S. Ogede
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 36 / Issue 1 / April 1993
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 43-58

  • The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah's most recent novel (1978), has received less critical attention than it deserves given the importance of its theme—the sociopolitical liberation of Africa—and the compelling textual strategies it deploys towards that end. What scanty criticism it has attracted has concentrated only on the novelist's social vision, with the debates centering on the degree of faithfulness to the historical materials on which he bases his novel. Nevertheless, without due attention paid to the rhetoric, the peculiar idea of revolution that Armah advocates cannot be grasped fully. By rhetoric is meant the linguistic strategies employed by the writer to put his ideas forward-his style, the use of aesthetic means for achieving desired effects on the reader. This essay attempts to redress the picture and demonstrate the aesthetic elements that give Armah's novel its special stridency.

    While it is true, as many critics have pointed out (Lindfors 1980, 91; Fraser 1980, 83-86; Wright 1989, 244-47), that The Healers uses the fall of the Ashanti empire in the 19th century as a paradigm of how other African societies were undermined during the period of Western imperialist incursions into the continent, fidelity to that history itself should never be at issue. Rather, since Armah is a novelist (and not a historian), of greater significance should be the quality of his imaginative use of the past for the purpose of furthering present sociopolitical objectives. If, as he has stated, “the human value of literature, after all, lies primarily in the interactions it makes possible between the way we live and the way we think-between our existence and the reflections we make of and on that existence,” it would not be inapposite to demand of the critics that they use “a high level of knowledge about technique, a craft, an art” (Armah 1985,356) to bring out the writer's total vision, his textual strategies, through aesthetic evaluations.

  • Theater as Praxis: Discursive Strategies in African Popular Theater

  • Gaurav Desai
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 33 / Issue 1 / 1990
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 65-92

  • Although over the last decade there has been a considerable growth in African theater research, the majority of such work has confined itself to the analysis of traditional theater practices or to that of contemporary literary theater. While acknowledging the functional dimensions of African theater, this research has focused on the aesthetics of African performance. When the social dimensions of theater have been evoked, they have been asserted mainly in terms of the propositional value of theatrical content. Playscripts have been analyzed for propositional claims and thematic concerns, and social critiques have then been constructed on such analyses.

    This essay presents an analysis distinct from that critical trend. It examines neither traditional theatrical practices nor contemporary literary theater but rather an ambiguous theatrical practice that can be labeled popular theater. The first section of the paper discusses the concept of the popular and suggests that it is best understood as a functional discourse which can legitimate or subvert the existing power structures of society. The second section focuses on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian adult educator whose work provides the theoretical basis for most popular theater projects in Africa. The essay then analyzes the discursive construction of popular theater in various African contexts including Botswana, Zambia, and Nigeria. Through the history of popular theater in Africa, the paper shows the growth of popular theater theory. The last section, on the Kamiriithu production of Ngaahika Ndeenda, illustrates some of these theoretical claims.

Commentaries

  • Rethinking Defintions of African Traditional and Popular Arts

  • Mary Jo Arnoldi
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 30 / Issue 3 / September 1987
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 79-84

  • Karin Barber's thoughtful and substantial overview of popular arts in Africa comes at a critical juncture in the development of this field of study. Only in the past decade has a dialogue been initiated among scholars in the various disciplines who study popular arts. Barber's essay stands as an important contribution to this dialogue. Her commentary reflects the richness and complexity of this potential field of study whose purview includes visual, literary, and performance arts.

    Studies of the popular arts consistently describe them as topical, new, innovative, and modern. Most scholars, Barber included, identify the emergence of an African popular art with one setting and one period, the urban colonial and post-colonial world.

    A plethora of new arts combining local African and Western forms have emerged and been documented precisely during this period. Barber identifies this syncretism as a characteristic feature of African popular art. She argues persuasively that many contemporary urban popular arts seem to derive their vitality and energy from the scale and tempo of this change and to be fundamentally about this change. Although this definition of popular arts in Africa is especially seductive to scholars because of the scale and tempo of change in the colonial and post-colonial urban setting, it risks too close an identification of African popular arts with one period and setting and denies them any history within the pre-colonial era and within non-urban settings.

    The ahistorical tendency of most studies of popular arts arises in part from scholars' retention of a Western model of art which categorizes the arts as folk/traditional, popular, and elite. Barber notes that the Western tripartite classification is still invoked with only minor modifications in most accounts of African popular arts. The paradigm which characterized African traditional society and its arts as closed, consensual and unchanging has been successfully challenged in the past decades by Africanists in history, anthropology, and art history. Few scholars would now assert that “traditional” societies or their arts were ever static or frozen. Yet, it is still tacitly held in studies of popular arts that African “traditional” arts are monolithic and undifferentiated in their local setting and thus they are all subject to the same rate of change.

Articles

  • The Search for Mother Africa: Poetry Revises Women's Struggle for Freedom

  • Colleen O'Brien
  • Journal:
    African Studies Review / Volume 37 / Issue 2 / 1994
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 May 2014, pp. 147-155
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  • There seems to be a myth surrounding the nature of South African women's participation in the struggle against apartheid. It is one which erroneously assumes that women, who must undertake almost complete responsibility for the welfare and survival of their families, are so limited by being passive, nurturing and motherly that they cannot at the same time be powerful, independent and politically active.

    Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women's Verse (Lockett 1991) forwards the cause of self-definition for the women and mothers of South Africa. The insight it provides into the political commitment and social orientation of women helps dispel the myth of Mother Africa, which, as editor Cecily Lockett describes it,

    seldom allows for any role other than those of wife and mother for the black woman, who continues to be a prisoner of gender, defined only in terms of black men. Similarly, the emphasis on courage, determination, and survival as positive qualities inherent in black women tends to glamorize their real suffering and oppression as, in many cases, sole breadwinner of single-parent families (1988, 35).

    Perhaps that underestimation of the power of South African women can be dispelled in light of their literary contributions, which are now surfacing with increasing momentum. The role of South African women in society, as seen in Cecily Lockett's anthology, Breaking the Silence, A Century of South African Women's Verse, is all encompassing and inherently proactive.