IRREDUCIBLE AFRICANNESS AND NIGERIAN POSTCOLONIALITY FROM DRAMA TO VIDEO

In the article by Biodun Jeyifo titled “Ideology and Tragic Epistemology: The Emergent Paradigms in African Drama” first presented in 1977 and published in 1985, he used the term “irreducible ‘Africanness’” to depict the African aesthetic matrix and to foreground a then prevalent critical perception of the requirement for authentic African aesthetic practice, particularly in the department of drama. The article represents one of the numerous points of intervention by Jeyifo in the debate around aesthetics, ideology and regionalism. The term was deployed almost immediately and with considerable affirmation after its publication (See Obisesan 1987, among others). But the application of the term was inherently problematic even back then and even within the cited context. Jeyifo himself proceeded in the article to relate the main illustrative text of this ‘African’ aesthetic matrix, namely Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, to western epistemological paradigms, particularly the ‘Aristotle-Hegel-Marx continuum,’ which impliedly cast a doubt even then on the possibility of attaining the essentiality inherent in the term ‘irreducible Africanness.’ While Death and the King’s Horseman is held up as a grand exemplar of the Africanness of African drama, the more so for its “cultural and metaphysical immersion” (“Ideology” 42), it nonetheless falls short of the demand of “irreducibility” given its incorporation of western notions, a fate that is common to many ‘African’ works of art:

Formalistic tell-tales of Western tragic performance in Death and the King’s Horseman include the five-act paradigm, the unities, especially of time and action, the rendition of historical material into tragedy,1 and to a certain extent a notion of unmitigated tragedy embodied in a larger than life protagonist as sole tragic vehicle within animist metaphysics. However, whether the presence of such ‘intrusive’ formal elements or indeed the resulting ‘hybridity’ (a term to which we will return shortly) sufficiently derogates from the Africanness of this and many other African cultural productions, or shoos them into a globalised no man’s cultural land then or now, is an important question that sits at the heart of the postcoloniality debate as it relates to Africa. If it does, then ‘irreducible Africanness’ becomes a mirage, potentially a tragic loss of a defining paradigm of an indigenous African aesthetic matrix and, more ominously, potentially a negation of the African self. ‘Africanness’ itself, let alone ‘irreducible Africanness,’ becomes an extinct category referring to a non-entity or at best a retrospective imaginary.

The flip side is the potential to extract redemptive paradigms from the undeniably tenuous cultural-historical situation of the once colonized. Egbo’s statement in the prefatory quote above is laden with ironic if unintended signification. It does seem intriguing that Egbo’s grandfather should deploy the canon, the very imperial instrument that sought to wipe out African lives and values, as a buoy to guard (read preserve) information of historical, cultural and, without doubt, emotional value. The parable challenges any insinuation that the once-raging storms of colonialism should completely wipe off the sense of having-been, and potential to continue to culturally be, of the once colonized, or that the waters of postcoloniality should blot out the various spots where an autonomous African aesthetic culture once lived and continues to live. Granting the implausibility of a nativist dream-return to a pristine cultural idyll, shattered long ago in the destructive explosiveness of colonial military and literary canons, the canon still emerges in Egbo’s affirmative statement in the prefatory quote above in dual signification of culture marker and prop.2 In this context, cultural products that continue to affirm the existence of an independent African aesthetics are the literary canons that our much disputed Africanness is endlessly buoyed by, and from which to draw paradigms of the matrix.

The sense of cultural loss accompanying the colonial experience has often been palliated by the modification of basic parameters of the African aesthetic matrix, most prominently under the rubric of postcoloniality, though much earlier within tagged or untagged identity debates of African and black aesthetics. Progressively within this configuration postcoloniality becomes a theory of loss minimisation or epistemology of the consolatory, a not really-nice-but-that’s-fine state of discontent which, to cite Gikandi’s recent paraphrase of Bhabha, “nevertheless enables the articulation of “a global or transnational imaginary and its ‘cosmopolitan subjectivities’” (“Globalisation” 630). Postcoloniality then can be seen as a matrix modulation construct, attempting to alter the way we perceive the aesthetics of once colonized cultures, but it also approaches now and again an implied vilification (as nativist, essentialist, fixated, etc) of any definitive view of culture indices. The question is persistent: Indeed how can you say anything is ‘African’ when so much has rubbed on it or been swept off by the waters of colonisation?

Hence the application of postcoloniality tenets to images and cultural phenomena present in or deriving from specific locales, in this case Africa, continues to provoke disputation as to frames of reference. Unlike the terms “commonwealth” or “colonized,” with tolerably precise space and time referents, “postcoloniality” and in particular the recent ‘globalism’ of postcolonial discourse, posits an ontology whose purport is the dissolution of temporal and spatial precision, and the substitution of once familiar cultural loci with the assumption of a ‘third space,’ a transitive and transitional locale that transcends national boundaries and cultural fixity. From Edward Said’s Orientalism to Ashcroft et al (Empire Writes Back), Rutherford (1990) and the climactic postulations of Bhabha (Location of Culture; 1996) on the concept of ‘the third space,’ postcoloniality basically describes the emergence of new cultural productions as a direct result of colonised-coloniser relations. Orientalism had condemned static views of the orient, or for that matter the occident, declaring neither an ‘inert fact of nature’ (Orientalism 132) but both in a constant state of flux, with the two entities supporting and ‘to an extent’ reflecting each other. Ashcroft et al deployed the term postcolonial to cover ‘all cultures affected by the imperial process’ (Empire Writes Back 2) and posit the postcolonial process as a reactive measure of the ‘native,’ the once colonized striking back – culturally a Caliban deploying the Master language in ‘curses’ against the master. In Bhabha’s formulation, colonisation does not necessarily annihilate indigenous cultures but instead produces a hybrid, something of a mulatto, not wholly resembling either (or any) of its input cultural genes. The new cultural products thus constitute a negation of cultural essentialism, “primordial unity or fixity” (Location of Culture). What is created is a difference, which is neither colonial nor colonized but occupies a ‘third space’ that is transitional and transnational, “all forms of culture [being] continually in a process of hybridity” (Rutherford, “The Third Space” 211).

However, in the crusade against ‘essentialism,’ globalisation discourse tends to uproot the colonial from accustomed spatial loci and place him nowhere at all – even though, again, the ‘third space’ is romanticised as “a kind of superior cultural intelligence owing to the advantage of in-betweenness, the straddling of two cultures and the consequent ability to negotiate the difference” (Hoogvelt, “Globalisation” 158). In contrast to this romantic view is the glaring fact that the globalisation traffic is skewed and is virtually unidirectional, not only in terms of the location of the multinational corporations that control the global traffic and towards which the rest of the world gravitates, but also in terms of transit morbidity rate as thousands of culturally ‘empowered’ youths tumble jeans and all in their scramble to cross physical and psychological barriers erected on their path as they attempt to flee to the west. Their quest frequently terminates betimes along ‘global’ nation-state borders, and notwithstanding any protestation to the bewildered immigration official that: “Oh, I am not really African, I am – er – Globan”!

The question remains whether and to what degree the principle of in-betweenness, no doubt appropriate to migrant discourse, can or should be applied to resident and resilient cultural products of Africa. If to be colonized is to be removed from history as Walter Rodney insisted, then to be post-colonized in terms that suggest the absence or irrelevance of an original or authentic cultural identity is to be removed from cultural geography, and from redemptive cultural founts.

Against such doom’s prognosis, and this is the crux of this paper, irreducible Africanness in cultural products continues even now to be a project consciously embarked upon by hordes of culture workers on the African continent both as aesthetic praxis and continued reactive procedure against racial negation and or cultural annihilation. The evidence of this continuity is tangible, to wit the resilience and dominance of essentially African features of the drama in Nigeria (the example here) through various stages of its development. Crucially, this resilience occurs notwithstanding competing demands of ‘globalisation,’ nor for that matter the pulverising postulation of hybridity or non-essentiality as components of postcoloniality. Hence, a ‘hybrid’ view, appropriately from bifocal diasporic lenses, may often be no more that a distant in-vitro observation of an aesthetic state of affairs in some once-colonized entities. The in-situ reality often differs from the smug assumptions of globally referred discourse. It is interesting to re-examine the debate and also to locate contemporary in situ cultural productions and cultural conflicts within, but ultimately outside the reach of, postcolonial or globalist questioning of Africanness or Africanity.

II: Language and Irreducible Africanness

One problem is that the very ‘props’ or paradigms required to maintain the basic outlines of an African aesthetic matrix have all but been removed from under our feet over time. The death knell of a definitive Africanness, culturally defined, has been sounded repeatedly from within Africa itself and often by weighty if sometimes unwitting voices on the continent. In a related context, Achebe’s treatment of the traditional gods and related observances in Arrow of God was once isolated by Soyinka as one of those apparently oblivious creative moments when an important African writer lays “fissures” in the mould of traditional perceptions (Myth 89), often an unintended consequence. More to the present context, Achebe’s depiction of terms such as “African Personality”, “Negritude” “and so on” as no more than convenient “props [. . . ] fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again,” after which, “once we are up, we shan’t need them anymore” (Morning Yet 44) is fraught with uncertain prognosis for Africanity. Though cited approvingly in Olaniyan’s recent article on black aesthetics and afrocentricism (“From Black Aesthetics to Afrocentrism”), it nonetheless provides a perspective from which to re-contemplate some of the ironies and ambiguities that have characterized the debate on the African aesthetic matrix.

Within its context Negritude as ‘prop’ was one of the canons Africanness used to be buoyed by, its twin aim being to repel the denigration of the African personality by the West, demolish in particular Europe’s patronising attitude towards African literature as one tied to the umbilical chord of European writing, and simultaneously establish a framework for an independent appreciation of African aesthetics by determining what Mphalele called the "common elements" or "complete ensemble" of values in African culture (African Image 49). Nonetheless, Achebe’s “[when] we shan’t need [such props as Negritude] anymore” recalled above posited an ambivalent prognosis for African culture, literature and aesthetics. Does the statement for example presage a future of universal or jungle oneness in which there would no longer exist such a thing as an ‘African’ tiger, let alone a tigritude to proclaim, or a moment of well defined cultural diversity in which Africanness has become so sufficiently established as to require no buttressing attestation? Forty-two years on, that is, so long after Morning Yet on Creation Day, Achebe himself confesses to a resolve to “translate Things Fall Apart into my mother tongue of Igbo” (“Conversation [with Barbara Ellington]”). This promises an interesting dialogue and perhaps yet another prop or canon to buoy an indigenous Africanness in the face of a threatening globalisation discourse. The point here however is that indigenous African language, a factor often waved aside, is indeed crucial to a determination of authentic African aesthetic practice and to the concept of irreducible Africanness.

Another weighty African voice that seemed to have struck unwittingly at a cultural ‘race-retrieval’3 in the form of a formalised proclamation of an African aesthetic matrix is, ironically, Wole Soyinka’s. The sense of irony, and ambiguity, is heightened by the fact that Soyinka’s own theatrical practice, no less than his theoretical formulations (for which Art Dialogue and Outrage introduced by Biodun Jeyifo provides an incredible anthology), is exemplary in its approximation, explication and defence of an African aesthetic matrix. Indeed, Oyin Ogunba, one of the earlier indigenous commentators on Soyinka was to describe African/Yoruba culture as “Soyinka’s literary playground” (Movement of Transition 2). Sometimes it is the phrasing that beguiles the intendment: Soyinka’s dictum that the tiger need not proclaim its tigritude was only a declamation of (cultural) gorilla chest beating, but was often mistaken for a denial of authentic Africanness. His more fundamental grouse was against aspects of negritude formulation, including the assumed and un-clarified ‘functionalism’ and other “convenient ism[s]” of African art (“Aesthetic Illusions” 94, 107); assumed intuitiveness, and emotiveness of African personality, a faulty Manichean imposition (Myth 127), narrow interpretation of “spiritual serenity” as “the philosophy of the African” (“Fourth Stage” 30), etc), all of which tend to deny Africanness of a more profound appreciation. Not that Soyinka is himself averse to occasionally proclaiming his tigritude;4 however, owing to extensive induction in his different cultures, native and global, his self evident and self-proclaimed Africanist aesthetic leaning (“I take most of my metaphors from the African worldview”) is often set against a fierce liberal humanism that brooks no absolutes and an inclination to situate his own writing within a universalist frame (“I don’t think of any audience in particular when I write,” cited in Nasiru “Communication” 161), an inclination he would also somehow attribute to the Yoruba writer Amos Tutuola (“Common Back Cloth” 11) whose rendition in English drew a symptomatic amount of ire and praise. Somewhere in between these potentially ambivalent tempers is where the African aesthetic matrix presumably lies.

Beyond the relatively minor tigritudinal skirmishes over terminology lie the more substantive of issues of language and culture as major stops within the African aesthetic matrix debate. Instructively, Jeyifo’s article cited above did not go as far as to problematise the language of Death and the King’s Horseman (or perhaps more correctly the language in which the play is written and is frequently performed),5 as a possible controversial feature of authentic ‘African’ aesthetic practice, or as an “emergent paradigm” of African tragic epistemology. The article does eulogise Soyinka’s ‘lyrical brilliance’ in the play as “perhaps unsurpassed by any of his plays” (“Ideology” 32), but the absence of any comment on the play’s rendition in English is the more instructive since language is a fundamental feature of the African aesthetic matrix and the associated debate. Jeyifo’s awareness and deep understanding of the language question is not in doubt of course; he has himself in another article outlined aspects of the language question, which he aptly described as “battleground of contention and acrimony” (“Language Factor” 68); however, the language question is allowed to ‘pass’ without further comment in this crucial article on African tragic epistemology.

Presumably, then, such theoretical complication as the language question is assumed to have been satisfactorily dealt with by the ecclecticist school of African writing - archetypally represented by Achebe, Mphalele and Soyinka - for which colonial languages had become fait accompli and the accomplished African writer would simply bend them to indigenous usage. The term ‘appropriation’ was to later become the standard vocabulary for this process in postcolonial lexicon.

Hence part of the matrix modulation process of postcoloniality referred to above is also the decentering of any ‘original’ language in the ascription of authenticity values to postcolonial literature or aesthetics. In other words, since hybridity is a mixture resulting from, in Bakhtinian terms, “an encounter [. . . ] between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor” (Dialogic Imagination 358), language is typically decentered or de-specified in the definition of a regional aesthetics, a principle foreshadowed in the hotly contested positioning of language within the African aesthetic matrix. Achebe’s pragmatic phrasing of the potential of colonial languages to “carry the weight of my African experience” (Morning Yet 93) is by far the most popular, but is matched in sheer weight of expressiveness by Soyinka’s prescription:

When we borrow an alien tongue to sculpt or paint in, we must begin by coopting the entire properties in our matrix of thought and expression. We must stress such a language, stretch it, impact and compact it, fragment and reassemble it with no apology, as is required to bear the burden of experiencing and of experiences, be such experiences formulated or not in the conceptual idioms of that language (“Aesthetic Illusions” 107).

Soyinka would also insist that the employment of colonial nomenclatures among other colonial vestiges does not constitute “a betrayal of my African resources” and also pursue the postcolonial theme of appropriation, abrogation and ultimate advantage, in characteristic poetic style in terms of “twist[ing] the linguistic blade in the hands of the traditional cultural castrator and carv[ing] new concepts on to the flesh of white supremacy.” In the process, the “enslaving role of language” gives way to “the possibility of creating a synthetic revolutionary culture in place of the bastardised or eradicated indigenous culture of the colonized.”

It is a measure of the undeniably wide appeal of this ‘final solution’ to the language problem in African literature and aesthetic matrix that even the ‘extreme nativism’ of Chinweizu et al allows for the expression of this literature in ANY language at all. More crucially, for the troika, “language is not a crucial factor in determining the national or regional literature to which a particular work belongs’ (Decolonisation 99). Given the overall acerbic tone of the troika’s “decolonisation” postulation, this accommodation of any language at all within the African aesthetic matrix is comparatively so benign that their critics must be chided for being rather too unsporting to acknowledge it. For good measure, finding any theoretical point of convergence between Soyinka and the troika does call for celebration of some sort.

But some of these weighty interventions, pursued to their theoretical possibilities, may lead to the almost sacrilegious insinuation that owners and users of indigenous African languages for communication and literature should abandon them altogether to take full possession of this new “synthetic” “advantage” offered by colonial languages. Africa “the jungle” of course is always game for outlandish theorizing, as we hardly hear of such suggestions about Hindi, Standard Mandarin or Japanese, or, in the case of religion, of a global preachment to abandon Hinduism (or even the less populous Judaism), on account of the global reach of Christianity and other global religions. In culture, the question how best to characterize the ‘hybrid’ has continued to be subject of contention between a view of hybridity as a manifestation of the colonized turning the cultural table on the colonizer and wringing advantage from disadvantage, abrogating some, appropriating some but ultimately thwarting the original colonial design of annihilating the colonized indigenous cultures, and a ‘nativist’ view of hybridity as a debilitating erosion, however euphemistically characterized, of authentic cultural values and the infinite communicative and development possibilities inherent in the use of the mother tongue.

The oppositional proposition that indigenous African languages are or should be the cornerstone of African literary culture and aesthetics has been as equally well stated, and is quintessentially enunciated in such highly expressive texts as Obi Wali’s (1963) “The Dead End of African Literature?” Ngugi wa Thiong’O’s (1982) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature and Niyi Osundare (1982/1997) “Caliban’s Gamble: Stylistics Repercussion of African Literature in English,” among others. The dictum of this opposing temper was equally uncompromising. To recall Ngugi:

But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages? (Decolonising the mind 26)

Without doubt we are in the realm of politics, culture and emotions. The African continent continues to be suffused with catalytic incidents, sometimes titanic, sometimes miniscule, that continue to activate a reactive race- or self-retrieval. As an example of the latter, the resilient ‘riddle’ about “three missionaries and three cannibals” (how they would cross a river in a small canoe built for only two, without a missionary being left alone with more than one cannibal at any crossing); this ‘riddle’ to date activates more than mathematical jugglery in African junior classrooms: Who were the missionaries and who were the cannibals? Could the personages in the riddle by any chance have really been three western slave raiders and three innocent natives on the Africans coast, etc etc! More prominent manifestations of this struggle include the widespread dumping of colonial names and appellations on the continent (James-Ngugi; Jeyifous-Jeyifo, etc), even if such gestures are counterbalanced by a reverse tendency by neo-Pentecostals and neo-Islamists especially in Nigeria to dump ‘heathenish’ indigenous names.

Within the Nigerian polity the persistent relegation of indigenous languages has also been a major concern to policy makers, language being not just an artefact of culture but also an instrument of communication and development. Recently the United Nations raised an alarm about the imminent extinction of Igbo language, one of the major indigenous languages of Nigeria, and as noted earlier the mother tongue of world-renowned novelist Chinua Achebe. Recently too a number of concerned voices have begun to lament the corresponding decline in the film in Igbo. The role of the colonial languages in the distortion of child language acquisition and thought development processes (resulting not only in hundreds of thousands of ruined career prospects but also failure of national development) has also been pointed out by linguists and style analysts (Bamgbose 1983; Ikara 1982, Oloruntoba-Oju 1993). The imperious status of the English language continues to wreak havoc as much on personal as on social levels. Not long ago, Sir Shina Peters, Nigerian musician and founder of Afro-Juju, a brand of Yoruba music, used the occasion of a star-studded night to wish a fellow musician who had fallen ill ‘soonest recover.’ The press harangued him no end for this grammatical slip, and to date he remains a butt of web jokes on. It may have been no more than a performance slip; nonetheless a glittering career in Yoruba music was about to be smashed on the altar of the English language. Initially subdued, the musician soon lashed back at his critics in his next musical record, with a song in pidgin:

By ‘grammar,’ he meant the English language, the only language that apparently qualified for that appellation, apparently by rights of colonial subjugation.

History, race, language and culture are thus recurrent and concurrent sites of contestation on the African continent. The problem is that the colonial language especially English is by far the most visible and most enduring imperial symbol in Africa, but this creates an unending problematic not only for politics and ideology but also for communication and culture. Where the insistence on an irreducible Africanness in the language of African literature had ideological-political undertones in Ngugi, the cultural-aesthetic concern is foregrounded in the intervention by Obi Wali (“Dead End”) and Osundare (“Caliban’s Gamble”). Osundare’s conclusion is based on stylistic data and analysis:

Biodun Jeyifo would draw attention to the general perception of the “anomalous prominence of English language as a literary language of Nigeria and Africa’ (“Language Factor” 69). He then proceeds to posit what may be regarded as a use paradigm, which would entail an examination of “the choices being worked out by writers and critics in the actual field of creative practice,” which may differ radically from positions emerging from “ideologically inspired debates” (70). However, this route is potentially circuitous, returning us to the starting point or raison detre of the debate, the historical circumstance that constrained these choices in the first place and whether it sufficiently justifies a relegation of indigenous languages in the proposition of African aesthetic matrix.

The inevitability of the use of colonial languages by writers whose training or competence is in the language, or who are otherwise concerned about a “national” (i.e. anglo-national) or “global” (i.e. anglo-global) reach must be acknowledged, so must the relative advantage of being able to operate bi- or multi-lingually within required contexts. As Bamgbose pointed out recently, prior to the advent western colonialism and imposition of English, “nothing was more natural than Africans to speak several languages and to learn the language of a neighbouring group when out-group interaction so demands” (“Language as Resource”). Still, it does not seem appropriate that the position of African languages should thereby be jettisoned as prime aesthetic paradigm in a hierarchy of representations. In other words, those respective African languages remain aesthetic primus inter pares amongst the languages in which the ‘African’ in literature and aesthetics is expressed. This accords the necessary theoretical due to their aesthetic status even where historical reality persistently permits the dominance of Anglo-African literature or African literature in English. The problem has been that only the “hunters” have been privileged to tell the history of this “hunt” within the “post-hunt” (read postcolonial) debates, to wit only African agents of the English language have been privileged to participate in the formulation of the African aesthetic paradigm. Hence the insinuation always lurks that this general privileging of colonial languages within the African aesthetic matrix merely indexes the self-preservation instinct of the African literati, for whom English had afterall become, as Achebe recently intones, a tool, a way of life and a means of livelihood.6

One of the ironies of the language debate therefore is that indigenous or non-Western languages are largely left out of the debate, same for the real African dramatists, for example Yoruba Theatre practitioners whose first choice and sometimes the only choice of language of expression is an indigenous African language. The “dialogue” to fashion out the imperatives of the matrix excludes major stakeholders in the aesthetics discourses, their heads irreverently shaved behind their backs.7 Again we are confronted with an irony. The African language which, much like the African drum in musical contexts, should by rights be a basic cornerstone of ‘African’ aesthetics, for example in a discussion of African aesthetics in respect of Yoruba dramatists, is precisely what the paradigm throws aboard. The conduct of the debate may well be a betrayal of Bakhtinian postulates since it has occurred solely within a mono-logic, the anglo-logic. A derivative irony is the constant holding up of decidedly Anglo-African works of Soyinka, Achebe and so on as the exemplary ‘African’ works, almost always to the exclusion of works in indigenous languages. In this, aren’t we all guilty?

III: Uncoupling the Hybrid

What the use of English or other colonial languages assures then is the ‘hybridity’ status of an ‘African’ text, but not necessarily the Africanness. The hybridity construct notoriously lacks analytical paradigms to assign hierarchical or chronological positionality to input genes of the hybrid. As a ‘bat’ construct of cultures it allots an indeterminate status to the species, but often with an assumption of an egalitarian amalgam of components of the hybrid or some notion of superiority or advantage of hybridity. From such assumption follows a gamut of illegitimate inferences, for example in the case of the migrant, transnational or diaspora element who, simply by virtue of being uprooted from his or her traditional milieu, is typically constructed as if completely divested of any original or native orientation or inclination, or that this divestment is an advantage. By contrast, reunion tales - whether in the form of a Kamau Braithwaite’s “sense of identification” and linking of “Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland” in Ghana (“Timeiri” 31), or a Soyinka’s reenactment voyage to Bekuta in Jamaica, which “encounter with descendants from my own hometown” and “centuries-wide reunion with my own history” “sent a tingle down my vertebrae” (“You Must Set Forth at Dawn”), or yet an Achebe’s most recent exhortation to the African Caribbean, that “Africa is your home and you must not allow anyone to make you feel any sense of not being one of us. A good mother does not disown her children” (“Conversation”) - always show that not even centuries of absence dissolves that sense of oneness with home or blunts the long customised palate for both cultural and culinary “dishes whose recipes had been carefully preserved from the vanished home” (“You Must Set Forth”). As Simon Gikandi recently observes,

Or for that matter, when the recommended “verbal equivalents” (Clark, “Aspects of Nigerian Drama” 74) or “efficient manipulation” (Chukwukere, “Problem of Language” 17) of culture idioms still occurs in a language whose enunciation codes are unintelligible to the recipient in the first place, rendering indigenous nuances accessible only to the compound bilingual: What do we do when the African ‘native’ demands a re-classification of the ‘African’ canon in order to re-position roundly accessible cultural products, with language as primary parameter, as first in the hierarchy of representation, and as primary point of reference for “African” aesthetics.

It does seem that the nature and quantum of specific inputs must count towards the characterization of the ‘hybrid’, again with language as a basic parameter, particularly in cultural products in which spoken language constitutes a sizable input. Verbal communication afterall, as Soyinka would insist in one of his more ambivalent moments, “is the most penetrating means of identity in a community” (“Language as Boundary” 134).

It cannot be the suggestion here that distinguishing or separating the “quantum” of respective cultural inputs within a hybrid product as a way of assigning regional specificity is always easy or possible. Still the configuration provides a basis for the recognition that African works in colonial languages constitute an obvious representational cline, ranging from those that boast a few indigenous loan words and scattered incidents of code-mixing, to those that evince an indigenous “cultural immersion” in terms of usage, setting, treatment or realisation. The latter certainly approach a high degree of regional authenticity. But the highest level of representation must still be reserved for those works whose cultural immersion includes, first and foremost, an African language as both primary (idiomatic) and secondary (linguistic) levels of expression.

IV: Idiosyncrasy, Communality, Heterogeneity, Literary Orthodoxy

Such resolution of the status of language in the emergence of the African aesthetic matrix (as if an absolute consensus were indeed possible!) does not dissolve other important questions of the African aesthetic paradigm. The assignment of constituent features (other than language) of the alleged Africanness, and the amount of representativeness or homogeneity that these features can guarantee, will continue to be in issue. Apart from the scourge of indeterminacy associated with hybridity, any distinctiveness associated with an ‘African’ aesthetic matrix is also up against certain universals of culture and aesthetics, among other potential identity landmines such as, idiosyncrasy, communality, internal heterogeneity and literary orthodoxy.

The closeness of elements of Greek and Yoruba pantheon, to take a related example, had resulted in what Soyinka described as the ‘scholarly nerve’ of certain intellectuals to locate the ‘source’ of Yoruba religion in Greece (Myth 13-14). Conversely, in the heydays of negritude/tigritude exchange, the ascription of the cultural fount of works of Nigerian novelists like Achebe and Tutuola to traditional African sources was seriously challenged with suggestions of universal parallels (“From a Common Back Cloth” 10 - 11). Overlapping features of culture and aesthetics do constitute a nagging if legitimate challenge to any proprietary claims on cultural products.

A related challenge is posed by the issue of stylistic idiosyncrasy or individuality, which frequently raises the question of authorial ascription. Notwithstanding Elliot’s time-tested contribution on the indebtedness of individual talent to tradition, it seems inevitable that critics would scoff at any idea that aesthetic output from Africa was always entirely communal. I was amused myself to find in recent web ‘information’ that “a tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, it pounces” was: an African proverb!8 Such eminent error of attribution is no doubt characteristic of the proverbial ọ̀rọ̀ òkéré (a matter heard or reported from a distance); in Yoruba phraseology, if nothing is added, then something most likely would be subtracted from it. However, it is also true that such errors of attribution do fossilize with the efflux of time when communal memory is unable to distinguish individual cultural performance from communal cultural competence anymore.

Still, the attempt to deny the communality of cultural products on the basis of ‘individuality’ of production or authorship is somewhat flawed, based as it seems on the unlikely premise that communal excludes individual, or individual precludes communal. Communality afterall is only an aggregate of individual contributions over time, and individuality (a concept famously queried by Barthes) is indeed an expression of communal possibilities and aggregations, by any Lagbaja in the community in whom the flint of creativity periodically takes residence?9 Aside from Elliot’s dictum that individual talent appeals most, precisely in those aspects that approximate traditional aesthetic orientation, aspiration or, one would add, acceptability limits, how else would we characterize “a stitch in time saves nine” but as, at least in coinage, a proverb of English, irrespective of who the original coiner was, or “Muthelezi” but as an African name irrespective of the giver was or bearer is? Individuals in society are celebrated, but only in accordance with communal matrices of excellence, by which token communities by right appropriate individual excellences.

The internal heterogeneity argument also appears seductive but only just. True, within Africa are so many different sub-cultures (Nigeria alone boasts some 250 mostly mutually unintelligible languages and dialects and almost as many ethnicities) that it would appear impossible to come up with a groupment of cultural or aesthetic features sufficiently distinct or homogenous to satisfactorily characterize them as a collectivity. Indeed the generic term ‘Africa’ or ‘African’ accommodates considerable cultural variety, but always with palimpsest pointers to pervasive commonalities. The fact that Africa’s cultural plurality does not preclude cultural unity has been variously stressed in the literature of Africanity. As I have also observed elsewhere while reviewing the debate (Oloruntoba-Oju, “African or Hybridan”), the category ‘African’ (names, language, culture, music, drama and so on) draws validity from simple facts of semiotic affinity.

Hence, to return to inter-communal (inter-ethnic) challenges, it should be re-emphasised that a paradigm of ‘irreducible Africanness’ in cultural products does not necessarily conflict with the notion that all cultures are relentlessly hybridised - this is not to be disputed save for matter of detail - but with any formulation that an essential Africanness is thereby inconceivable. A confusion of cadences often resulted in the condescending ascription of colonial or western literary value to cultural products from Africa, such as Moore’s interpretation of emerging African aesthetics as exhibiting "a new feeling for English rhythms" (Seven African Writers xviii). Indeed, paradigms with universal parallels are apt to mingle. To cite a minor but interesting example, Soyinka himself was to in his Orisunitis Odyssey (“From Ghetto to Garrison” 2003) ascribe the compelling urge of young Nigerian actors to “the Thespian bug”, notwithstanding that Soyinka’s own patron god, Ogun, had been positioned in the mystical realm as “first actor” among other pioneering attributions in his explication of African Yoruba tragic epistemology (Myth 28-30)! Textual resemblances do trigger endless possibilities for the ascription of conceptual fount or at least for an endless intertextualising. Is Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel simply Beauty and the Beast in reverse titular sequence, and does it contain some conceptual flint from the European text? Within literary orthodoxy, adaptations are perpetually a contested site of cultural/literary ascription, sometimes involving abrogation of original text claims on latter day “variants.” Examples of such abrogation have been drawn recently with African texts, including those whose relationship with certain western originals is usually taken for granted (Oloruntoba-Oju, “Adaptation and Intertextuality”).

Examples of potential landmines on the way to ascertaining an irreducible Africanness in culture and aesthetics can be multiplied, not least the possible charge of essentialism and the insinuation that any insistence on a pristine essence in regional cultural representation encourages essentialising acts and perspectives. Indeed, fabrication of essentiality at various levels of society to promote self-profiting and less than noble objectives is rampant.10 The various acts that provoke the Movement against essentialism, for example racism and sexism, occupy a class of their own and must certainly be confronted on their respective turfs. Still all distinguishing acts are invariably essentialising acts, nor can essentialising acts thereby be extinguished so long distinctions do exist or are deemed to exist. For, again as the Yoruba, phrased it, and in a manner specifically relevant to the quest for distinctive matrices of African culture and aesthetics, it cannot belong so uniformly to father and son as to have absolutely no demarcation.

V: Drama to Video: Irreducible Africanness from the Beginning to the Unending

If a good mother does not disown her children, neither do good children their mother! Evaluation of the very artefacts of once colonized culture (for example masks, stories, songs and sayings) requires a constant cultural and historical retrospection to assess the nature and extent of their survival into contemporary times. It is difficult to imagine any respectable assessment of contemporary African art, drama in particular (being more indigenous than other art forms, say, the novel) without a consideration of its fountain, and in particular those images, tropes and usages which continue to run through every stage and subsequent development of the drama - from the traditional and trado-modern theatre through the literary theatre (especially drama of English expression or Anglo-African drama), to the Community theatre, the Cinema and its now ubiquitous successor, the ‘Home’ Video Film, sometimes contentiously referred to as “Nollywood.” It is these archetypal tropes deriving from traditional modes of theatrical expression that also continue to provide the mark of authenticity in contemporary African drama. This authenticity includes but also transcends the question of language or verbal deployment, to encompass the gamut of theatricality. What we find in contemporary African drama is a continual projection of the past into the future at every level of theatrical expression.

The emergence of the drama in Africa through the agency of the numinous is well established. Anthropomorphic representatives of ancestral spirits – egungun in Yoruba, egwugwu in Igbo, masquerade in English – emerge during funeral rites or other rituals around which festivals and myths have been constructed in the indigenous communities. Theatre emerged from the imitation of the egungun display and the appropriation of the ritual motifs for popular cultural ends. Total theatre in the African Nigerian contexts is defined in terms of the relative degree of approximation of these motifs of the egungun festival - mask, dance, drumming and singing, drama, audience participation. In contemporary Nigerian theatre output from stage and literary theatre to video film we find a continued quest to represent the cultural nuances of traditional Africa in the drama. It is expedient to cite Brian Crow’s relatively recent recap of long established projections of the African theatre aesthetic matrix:

A short recap of the various stages is always useful for a proper grounding of the continuities in indigenous expression and its irrepressibility despite the onslaught of globalisation and its culture rhetoric.

From Egungun to Traditional Theatre

Alarinjo, the traditional Yoruba theatre so well espoused by Adedeji (“Alarinjo”) is direct ancestor of the Yoruba Travelling Theatre which flourished from the late forties well into the late eighties before its practitioners and their descendants dispersed into television, film and video productions. At its zenith, the Yoruba travelling theatre assemblage had some two hundred different theatre groups criss-crossing the length and breath of the country Nigeria (Jeyifo, Popular Nigerian Travelling Theatre). The major personages of the Yoruba travelling theatre in its formative years were the acknowledged “father of Nigerian theatre,” Hubert Ogunde, and his contemporaries Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola. They constituted the ‘trinity’ of the indigenous mask idiom in the Nigerian theatre, the defining mark of their vocation being the representation of an irreducible Africanness in language and histrionics. Performances were always preceded by the ‘opening glee’ which comprised traditional drumming, dancing and invocation of the metaphysical realm and pertinent deities. (See Ebun Clark, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre). Duro Ladipo’s forte was the ritualised stage in which Yoruba deities such as Sango, Oya and Moremi thundered back to life and electrified stages across the globe. Ladipo was singularly responsible, with the collaboration of transnational culture worker Uli Beier, for bringing the myths of Sango and some other Yoruba deities to the international stage. The theatres of the trio were mutually reinforcing.11

From Egungun to Literary Theatre

The literary theatre in Nigeria in Nigeria, “pre-dominantly anglophone, largely university-based and elitist” and observing a “liberal-conservative” ethos (Ogunba, “Nigerian Drama”) was to render the question of authentic representation of indigenous theatre aesthetics more prominent. Still the drama of frontline representatives Soyinka, John Bekerdemo-Clark and Sofola acquitted themselves well in their deep-structure representation of the African worldview and aesthetics. Soyinka proved also to be consistently master translator of the indigenous ritual stage, with metaphysical confrontation deployed as metaphor for the understanding of life’s critical moments in his major works from Dance of the Forest (1960) to Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). His plays are drawn into the arc of postcoloniality not on account of being post-independence per se but also because of the debates and issues they deliberate set up in opposition to colonial experience and European postulation of epistemological and cultural superiority. Confrontation is usually achieved at two structural levels of drama and dialogue, first by pitching the African Yoruba metaphysical world-view in direct confrontation with western/colonial epistemic or ontological systems, and second through telling, reality invoking dialogue. For example in Death and the King’s Horseman, the ritual sacrifice by Elesin Oba as a means of communal restitution is favourably compared with the sacrifices that the colony expects of and compels its soldiers to make on the war front. A direct debate is fused into the dramatic moments and the colonial authority’s lack of understanding of the ontological depth of African cultural religious practices is berated: “Ah, great is the wisdom of the white man” Iyaloja thrusts sarcastically towards the colonial officer, Mr Pilkings, in the play. In his answer to critics, Soyinka explained that he was not prepared to subordinate the African ethical factor to the colonial (“Who is Afraid of Elesin Oba?” 128).

The late matriarch of the literary stage of English expression in Nigeria, Zulu Sofola, herself a theorist of the African stage (See Sofola 1979, among others), explores the realm of the tragic and ritual as representational idiom in both her Wedlock of the Gods and King Emene (The tragedy of a Rebellion). In her work, tragic conflict consists on the one hand in a confrontation with temporal and super-temporal powers beyond one’s full understanding and grasp, and on the other hand in her immersion in her dual African Igbo (Isele Ukwu) and Yoruba traditional heritage. Dapo Adelugba was to credit Sofola’s major works with “a consistency of authentic imagery” (“Three Dramatists” 209), and this despite the presence, too, of the occasional indices of hybridity, especially the often discordant, western-like, versification sequences in Wedlock. Although Adelugba does not so clearly state, the illustrative texts he used in his article under reference indicate that he takes authenticity in the generally accepted sense of verbal immersion in traditional culture milieu.

Egungun to Marxism

The succeeding generations of dramatists of English, for which Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande remain frontline representatives were not as tired of the gods as they had proclaimed, even if they do seem occasionally wary of their ‘inviolability’. Also literary in orientation, their work is however marked by ideological departures, a Marxian aesthetic bent, and a toning down of sacred idioms of the numinous in favour a more secular verbal engagement. The gods continue to appear in the plays of Osofisan, allegedly only as ‘metaphor’ rather than in their full mystical significance as potent, real or functional personages of the metaphysical world. The distinction between the deployment of the numinous as myth or as metaphor had been subject of scholarly exchange (cf Osofisan, “Ritual and the Revolutionary Ethos” and Soyinka, “Who is Afraid of Elesin Oba?”). What is crucial to the current engagement however is the continued appropriation of tropes of the traditional theatre for contemporary dramaturgy in their works. The appropriation is conscious, deliberate and occurs almost to the point of pointification. Consider such pointification in this short stage direction in Sowande’s Farewell to Babylon, arguably his most representative dramatic work:

Traditional drama aesthetics thus survives the grip of ideology and propagates itself into the very stronghold of African Marxism and its Brechtian histrionic derivative. From first hand experience audiences have tended to take note of Osofisan’s alienation techniques but have also been rather enamoured of the cultural immersions that propel and energise plot and episode. A comparative look at Soyinka and Osofisan often led to the declaration that the contemporary African aesthetic matrix in the emergent (post-Soyinka, Clark, etc) drama consists precisely in such appropriation of traditional theatre motifs rather than in any ideological extrapolation in scholarly essays. The matrix consists, “not in the end of myth, but in the use of myth.”12

What was more difficult to survive was the grip of multinational political economy and its aftermath, which has proved an even greater test for the resilience of the tenets of traditional drama aesthetics. The downturn in the Nigerian economy from about the early eighties had a direct impact on the literary theatre as on various other intellectual sectors. The departments of English and theatre across the country, which had been the nursery of the important dramas, began to suffer severe brain drain and creativity fatigue. Promising playwrights had their attention divided by the sheer need to survive economically and began to turn their creativity into other, occasionally not so noble, spheres. The commitment of students who were the mainstay of the literary theatre productions (as cast and crew members and as consumers) could no longer be guaranteed. Many outstanding students could not secure graduate assistantship in university departments where they could have honed their talents. The relative economic security and political stability that produced the great literary works of the first and second generation playwrights had suddenly vanished. Related to this was the problem of dictatorship, the clamp-down on the Nigerian intelligentsia from where came the most vociferous opposition to untoward government policies including the so called structural adjustment prescriptions (SAP) of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Academics like Biodun Jeyifo, again, left the university in droves for either the private sector or the intellectual pastures in Europe, America and even some more favourable climes in Africa such as South Africa where the radical dramatist Kola Omotoso, and more recently the poet and literary critic Harry Garuba reside.

From the third generation on, the Anglo-Nigerian drama scene became more diffused and correspondingly less distinct. The literary theatre began to suffer a decline. We enter an era of cultural interregnum in the department of drama. The fall of the Soviet Union right in the heydays of emergent revolutionary drama in Nigeria left many disciples of the revolutionary theatre disillusioned and rudderless. The second generation writers had made their literary mark partly by setting the Marxist-Socialist alternative in opposition to the liberal humanism of the preceding generation, but by the late 80s some of the leading lights had all but denounced the revolutionary zeal. Suddenly the Soviet power bloc whose structures provided both political model and ideological/material sustenance faltered and by 1991 had been dissolved.

A parallel development from about the middle eighties was the rise of English theatre professionalism had begun to take the theatre of English expression out of the University. Before then, theatre outside the university and school system had been the main preserve of the indigenous language theatre, with the major Nigerian example being the Yoruba Travelling Theatre which had been referred to earlier. (See, however, a possible exception in the explication of Soyinka’s Orisunitis Odyssey referred to earlier). By the early 80s some teachers and students of theatre had begun to seek outlet outside the walls of the university. Notable examples were John Pepper Clark who set up his PEC Repertory theatre in Lagos in 1982 and Bode Sowande who retired from the University of Ibadan at a fairly early age to concentrate on his Odu Themes Meridian Productions. The heydays of the rise of professionalism of drama of English expression in Nigerian was in the mid-eighties. Writing in a different context, Adesokan (2002) noted some of the high points in the rise of the professional/commercial theatre of English expression.

The neo-colonialist capitalist, market driven cultural production would take its toll on the literary drama scene in Nigeria. One fall-out of the rise of theatre professionalism was the need for scripts that can serve both literary and popular interests. Because of the need to appeal to a public outside the universities, many of the theatre groups resorted to the reproduction of time-tested and popular plays and to adaptations rather than the writing of new plays. Because the situation also generated some form of competition among the dramatists, this trend soon multiplied and became the norm.

Egungun to Video

The rise of the Home Video is perhaps the ‘last straw’ that broke the back of the literary theatre. In the early 80s Bode Sowande, had intoned in an article in the media that the live theatre in Nigeria was “under siege.” A few years later, Lanre Bamidele, theatre and communication teacher at the University of Ibadan Department of Theatre Arts talked of the “great take-over of cultural activity by the screen” and pronounced the death of stage drama, though Soyinka would describe the same scenario in less fatalistic terms as the live theatre falling into ‘a tropical ‘winter of discontent”’ (“Ghetto to Garrison”).

Initially the culprit had been television, followed by the indigenous cinema, with Hubert Ogunde (increasingly pondering posterity as he aged and from about the early 80s) moving the travelling theatre into the cinema mode. Before Ogunde’s productions, the cinema in Nigeria had been dominated by documentaries and the occasional film adaptation such as Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest, and the output of earlier Nigerian filmmakers such as Ola Balogun, Eddie Ugbomah and Ade Folayan (See Adesanya (“From Film to Video”). Other Yoruba travelling theatre gurus were to move their repertoire into cinema productions, the most prominent example being Moses Olaiya, the comedian popularly known as Baba Sala. Because of prohibitive production costs celluloid films came only in trickles. However, by the mid-nineties the phenomenon tagged the video boom had hit the Nigerian cultural strands. Today the Nigerian home video market is acknowledged second in growth rate only to Bollywood, the Indian version, nominally, of Hollywood. By my own recent reckoning, the video marketers now release some 30 new video productions every fortnight; the rate of production is about two per day!13 The effect on the live theatre and the literary theatre is stupendous. In fact, the national theatre in Lagos and most old theatre and cinema houses that survived the onslaught of prosperity gospellers have been turned largely into video viewing centres.

There are well-established catalysts for this stupendous growth. The most easily recognized is the economic one, which, ironically, has a neocolonial ring to it. The Structural Adjustment Programme dictated by global economic imperialism led by the IMF and World Bank took celluloid (cinema) production out of the reach of all but the stupendously rich, which theatre producers are not. The other generally recognized influence is that of TV producers who had worked with television stations and had either been laid-off due to the economic downturn or are dissatisfied with the conditions of service (Adesanya, “From Film to Video); the video boom provided an outlet for their services. Decades of production of humanities and theatre graduates who could not be absorbed into regular employments also contributed to the supply of a workforce for the video market. Former student script-writers whose talent had been showcased in the annual Nigerian University Theatre Arts Festival (NUTAF) and whose contributions provided a “forum for the assemblage of new play-writing input to the theatre which [. . . ] may save theatre reviews the embarrassment of recycling old information” and were “a possible pointer to future trends in the theatre” (Oloruntoba-Oju, “Codes of the University Theatre Festival” 155) also found outlet for their creative energies in the Video boom.

The themes of the Video Film productions are varied and sometimes jejune because of the pressure of demand. Indices of globalisation can be seen in sundry reproduction of Hollywood fare of crime, violence, romance and even pornography or its more moderate equivalents. However, there are other catalysts and other cultural representations. Indeed, the surge in popular cultural productions in the form of Video and CD is more directly proportional to a rising and insatiable appetite for indigenous “movie” representations of historical and contemporary socio-cultural perspectives. Even for productions in English, the inevitable and most predictable feature of screenplay, setting and atmosphere is the infusion of elements of traditional culture and aesthetics.

However, in tracking the resurgence of irreducible Africanness in drama of the Video Screen we return inevitably to the example of Yoruba theatre practitioners. Some of these practitioners had become tired from decades of plying the stage and were finding it difficult to “go on” - in view of new “global” economic and other realities. They have now since found a new lifeline in the new video production technique, and in the insatiable demand of the audience for the indigenous cultural representations for which the practitioners can claim authentic and continued agency.

About half of current Video Film productions, if not more, come from the Yoruba theatre stable. The language factor which had motivated non-Yoruba Nigerian producers like Eddie Ugbomah to adopt the Yoruba cinema genre from the late 70s and early 80s, the “acceptance and production of Yoruba language films [being then considered] the beginning of the commercial wisdom”(Adesanya “From Film to Video” 14) is equally implicated in the resurgence of Yoruba theatre through the Video from the mid-nineties. Language, simply, simply, is an inevitable factor in the propagation of African aesthetics, perhaps in the theatre more than other genres.

The Video film chapter of Yoruba travelling theatre is sometimes manned by direct descendants of Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola, Ishola Ogunsola, Akin Ogungbe and other legends of the theatre. Surviving practitioners of the old school such as Biodun Ladipo, widow of Duro Ladipo, Iyabo Ogunsola, widow of Ishola Ogunsola, Grace Adejobi (Iya Osogbo), widow of the late Oyin Adejobi, Lere Paimo co-actor with Duro Ladipo, Jimoh Aliu (who served pupillage under Akin Ogungbe), Charles Olumo (Agbako) proprietor of the then Olumo Theatre, among others, continue add colour and spectacle to the Video film experience. Frequently sought after by the younger producers for their authenticating company (Lere Paimọ’s starring appearances must be one of the most, if not the most, in a given year anywhere in the film world), their sheer presence in the films is usually sufficient to activate fond cultural reminiscences. In the process, younger elements though now educated in western ways are nonetheless being groomed to take over at that time “when the cock shall crow behind the valiant.”

Yet another factor that can be observed in the growth and resilience of indigenous cultural productions through the agency of video is the opportunity that the video provides for cultural dispersal through the adaptation of works earlier written or produced in Yoruba in video form. Two effects are achieved here. One is that indigenous literary works which had only limited accessibility now become generally accessible within the Yoruba cultural area through the agency of the Video. The most important personalities in this propagation are the Yoruba playwrights and culture workers Adebayo Faleti and Akinwumi Ishola and their technical collaborator, Tunde Kelani, Cinematographer and Film Director. Their Mainframe Productions stable has produced so far adaptations of Adebayo Faleti’s Bahorun Gaa and Akinwumi Ishola’s novel of the sixties O Le Ku. Also written by Akinwumi Ishola are the “community/artist-pact plays”, Saworoide and its sequel Agogo Eewo. Faleti has also written the Yoruba historical video, Afonja. The second effect is that the resulting video films use English sub-titles in order to bridge the linguistic divide, therefore making those works available to viewers nationally and internationally. English is, perhaps for the first time, banished to the periphery of ‘the big screen’, for the benefit of atohunrinwa comers from distant lands, who must still endure the throes of untranslatability (Oloruntoba-Oju 2005). Again, to cite Soyinka in one of his ambivalent moments in another context, English becomes,

More self-belonging indeed, these works in indigenous languages offer indispensable examples of continuities in the traditional theatrical forms in contemporary Nigerian Video Film. The Video may appear to have broken the back of literary theatre, but it is also increasingly the balm that smoothens the creases of ruptured indigenous theatricality. The continued deployment of the mask idiom in its multifaceted theatrical forms of dance, drumming, mimicry, story telling, visual display and audience participation is rendered more prominent and consistently so in these works. The deployment is both deliberate and consistent, with heightened effect and heightening of the consciousness of culture. In Mainframe productions from montage to closing credits you find a total commitment to the sustenance of indigenous African culture and theatre aesthetics. The opening montage in Agogo Eewo is a solo bata dance, presaging a film run replete with assemblage of traditional culture elements, including subtle didactic sessions: Ìyá (Abiọdun Ladipọ) instructing the children about pieces of traditional costume (gèlè wíwé) or ‘ewi dájúdánu (poetic tongue twisters).

Except for the subtitles, and although their settings are frequently trado-modern (with a film like Ó Le Kú even set largely within a modern university environment) not a word of English is spoken in the films Saworoide, Agogo Èèwọ and Ó le Kú, a deliberate statement of defiance and direct challenge to apostles of cultural linguistic hybridity as fait accompli, or put differently, of the inevitability of (fate(al) hybridity in the cultural linguistic product of the once colonized. While plumbing the ritual landscape, both Saworoidẹ and Agogo Èèwọ avoid criticism of the penchant in Yoruba films to resort to ritual and magic in its generation and resolution of conflicts, such criticism being an independent theme by itself.14

The theatrical assemblage in Ogun Àjàkáyé (2006), which once again stars Lere Paimọ, referred to earlier as one of the very few surviving members of the old Yoruba Travelling Theatre, recalls the traditional features of the African theatre aesthetics, from ritual to festival (with incredible levels of audience participation, traditional drumming and dancing) to dialogue drama. Such works constitute the canons that continually buoy the concept of irreducible Africanness in contemporary aesthetics and culture. In numerous examples, African theatre returns to its own in the Yoruba Video film, complete with undeniable matrices of Africanness, from language, especially, to cultural aesthetics. The film is defiant to the staccato rhythms of globalisation even while deploying modern themes and characters, and appropriating global technology to service its own cultural insistence. The term irreducible Africanness comes home to roost in the Yoruba film whose Yoruba travelling theatre antecedents had also been elucidated by Biodun Jeyifo.

Conclusion

A construct romanticising the fate of ‘inbetweenness’ that has befallen once colonized African cultures straddles close to the very annihilation that they struggled so much against. Aesthetic and cultural globalism tends to ignore or attempts to suppress the perspective of a good number of culture workers whose avowed and ceaseless pre-occupation is with preservation of certain aspects of Africa aesthetic culture in their pristine form or as close to this as possible, or of the teeming audiences whose passionate reception sustain this zeal, thus constructing counter-narratives to the relegating propensities of globalisation discourse. Such workers, even when tagged ‘nativist’ in its stigmatising connotation, and even while availing themselves of the advantages of globalism (English, pidgin and all) within the appropriate contexts, reject any assumption of a unifying global aesthetics and insist on the existence of distinctive features of African aesthetic matrix which they continue to project in their works. Within this construct, cultural hybridity is incidental; it remains real and utilitarian but never neutralises nor for that matter assuages ‘nativist’ hunger for authentic representations from communal aesthetic memory.

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Notes and References

1 Jeyifo noted that rendition of historical events into tragedy or for that matter infusion of history in the drama, what Friedrich Schiller called “a strict observance of historical truth” is damaging to tragic lore in western epistemology (“Ideology” 28). On the other hand, Oyin Ogunba, while noting correctly that “the neo-classical unity of time is pursued rigorously in virtually all of Soyinka’s plays” (Movement of Transition 9) does not proceed to insinuate any paradigmatic consequence on the ‘African’ aesthetic matrix. Many a prominent indigenous African tragic drama – Oba Ko So, Moremi, Ajagunla, to cite some Nigerian examples from the dramatic repertoire of the late Duro Ladipo - actually derive from history, which places a question mark on the applicability of western notions of the tragic. But the problem of the appropriate theorizing of Africa’s own aesthetic output is not thereby resolved.

2 For completeness of record, Egbo himself, confronted with a choice between the “warlord of the [Eti Osa] creeks,” against the “dull file cabinet faces of the foreign office” (10), one a vote for traditional culture, an “exhumation of a better forgotten past” (9), the other a vote for modernity and its own inanities, opts ultimately to go “with the tide” (12), that is, away from the old times. Still he continually acknowledges and is constantly drawn to Eti Osa’s “dark vitality” (10), finally feeling a sense of anger, “resentment at his failure to bury the abortive quest finally, especially the promise it still held for him like a salvation” (13).

3 Soyinka’s preferred term, within the context of a search for “a literature of racial (national) self-retrieval” (“Aesthetic Illusions” 107)

4 In 1999 Anderson Tepper was to in an online review jokingly describe Soyinka as “a tiger parading his own stripes” more so “with a Nobel Prize under his belt”! But one refers more fundamentally to his frequent proclamation of his obvious enough literary predilection: “I take most of my metaphors from the African worldview” (“Why I am a Secular Humanist”).

5 The base idiom of much of the play is arguably Yoruba while the enunciation codes are English. When Akinwumi Isola produced a Yoruba version of the play, which he ambiguously titled Iku Olokun Esin, (Death of the Horseman/Death, the Horseman) the intriguing question emerged which of the versions is the ‘translation.’

6 Achebe in the article referred to above describes English as “the language we were given by colonisation and [. . . ] I have spent my life learning it” (“Conversation”)

7 The Yoruba proverb, “You cannot shave a man’s head behind his back,” was popularised by MKO Abiola, dispossessed winner of the June 12 1993 presidential elections in Nigeria. He was on brief exile running from the military usurper Abacha’s gunmen when journalists asked him if he thought his mandate would be taken away from him while he was in the US.

9 This seems to be the most appropriate interpretation of the anonymity gesture by the Nigerian musician Bisade Ologunde (Bisa-who?!). He takes the name Lagbaja (in Yoruba, “someone”) and further wears a mask to cloak his individuality and emphasise anonymity. Although his own formulation is to see his anonymity as representing the faceless “common man” (Wikipedia), in our context it is also suggestive of the anonymous source of communal aesthetics and ethos.

10 An ‘African’ essentiality has frequently been evoked not only in colonial discourse to justify racism but also in various aspects of contemporary African society, including sexuality, politics and the space between. Recent invocation of ‘African culture’ by Robert Zuma to stave off rape charges or by Olusegun Obasanjo to ‘explain’ an improbable electoral victory fits well into this scheme.

11 Soyinka notes that Ogunde, while generally blazing the trail in modern theatre performance in colonial Nigeria was equally “encouraged [. . . ] by the appearance of more tradition grounded groups such as Kola Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo” (“Theatre in African Traditional Culture” 202).

13I n 1996, the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board recorded 201 video productions in 1995 and 250 in 1996 (Ogunleye, “A Report from the Front” 82). By 1998 video films were being produced ‘at the rate of one per day’ (Haynes, Nigerian Video Film 7).

Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju. “Irreducible Africanness and Nigerian Postcoloniality Ffrom Drama to Video” West Africa Review: Issue 11, 2007.

I: “Formal and Ideological Predilections”