RETHINKING
AFRICAN ARTS
AND
CU LTU RE/
Edited by
DELE LAYIWOLA
t The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS)
CASAS BOOK SERIES NO 4
RETH INKIN G 
AFRICAN ARTS
AND ^
CULTURE
Edited by
DELE LAYIWOLA
Centre for Advanced Studies o f African Society 
CASAS Book Series 4
Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society
P.O. Box 352
7800 Plumstead
Cape Town
South Africa
©2000 Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS)
First published 2000
ISBN 1-919799-35-4
All rights reserved. No /part of this publication may be reproduced, stored 
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, 
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without 
prior permission of the copyright holder.
Typesetting by Sue Sandrock Design 
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS V ll
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS viii
INTRODUCTION 
Dele Layiwola
£
PART ONE: TH E SEARCH FOR THEORY
1. The ‘Otherness’ Syndrome and the Study of
African Visual Art 5
Cornelius O. Adepegba
2. Beyond ‘Protest’: 23
New Directions in South African Literature 
Njabulo Ndebele
3. African Studies and the African Identity: 37
An Essay on the Theory of Culture 
Dele Layiwola
PART TW O: M E TH O D O LO G Y AND APPROACH
4. Recording and Dissemination 55
of Traditional Music 
J.H . Kwabena Nketia
5. The Fired Image: 69
Literary Beginnings from Cultural Ends 
Dan Izevbaye
6. Africana Choreo-Musical Productions 85
Methodology and Critical Approaches 
Esi Kinni-Olusanyin
PART THREE: OF HISTORY AND PEDAGOGY
Literature and the African Public 101
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin
8. African Literature 113
and the Crises of Post-Structuralist Theorising 
Niyi Osundare
9. Yoruba Tragic Drama: <P129
A Note on the Origins of Nigerian Theatre 
Dele Layiwola
10. African Theatre: 137
The Issue of an Historical Approach
Joel Adedeji
CONSOLIDATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 147
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the co-operation of 
the French Institute (Ibadan) in the production of this 
work. Special thanks go to Grace Naidoo, Silindiwe 
Sibanda, Jo  Sandrock and Sue Sandrock for the work 
they have variously put in towards the realisation of 
this book.
Other acknowledgements have been ir 
the Introduction.
Profes sor K.iK. Prah 
Director of CASAS
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Joel Adedeji was formerly a Professor and the Head of the Theatre Arts 
Department and the Director of the School of Drama at the University of 
Ibadan in Nigeria. His works on the Traditional Travelling Theatres of the 
Yoruba have remained authoritative references on the subject.
Cornelius Adepegba is a Professor of Art History and Directo<r oPf African 
Studies at Ibadan University in Nigeria. He was recently the curator of an 
exhibition of African sculpture for the Trout Gallery in Carlisle. He has 
authored numerous books on this subject and is easily one of the foremost
scholars on African Art History.
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin is Ethiopia’s foremost dramatist and was Director 
of the National Theatre of Ethiopia for many years.
Dan Izevbaye is Professor of English and former Chair, later Provost of School, 
at Ibadan. He has been in the front line of African literary criticism for more 
than two decades. -
The late Esi Kinni-Olusanyin was Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Ibadan 
University in Nigeria. She was previously known and published as Sylvia 
Kinney, and had numerous publications to her credit on the subject of music 
and ritual performances in West Africa.
Dele Layiwola is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies, 
University of Ibadan, where he teaches Theatre Studies and Dance Research. 
He was a visiting scholar at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern 
Ireland.
Njabulo Ndebele, writer, university lecturer and administrator, was Vice­
Rector at the University of the Western Cape, and Vice-Chancellor at the 
University of the North, both in South Africa. He has recently been appointed 
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town. He won the Noma Book 
Award for his collection of short stories, Fools and Other Stories, in 1984.
J.H. Kwabena Nketia is Professor and Director of the International Centre 
for African Music and Dance situated at the University of Legon, Ghana. 
Professor Nketia, eminent scholar and teacher, is Africa’s leading ethno- 
musicologist and has published widely on the subject.
Niyi Osundare, poet and critic, held the Chair of English at Ibadan. He won 
the Noma Book award for poetry in 1990 and was a Fulbright Scholar at 
Madison in 1991 and 1992.
P A R T  O N Ea
The Search for Theory
TP
INTRODUCTION
Dele Layiwola
The issue of theory and approach is almost always parallel with such concepts 
as tradition, canon and history. This seems to be the reason for its having 
assumed such fundamental dimensions in intellectual and cultural study. 
Because it is so basic to the understanding of social and political rubric, 
scholars often find it as exciting and liberating as it is contentious and vexing. 
But fundamental assumptions are not often as objective as they would appear 
to be, and can be overly tendentious even when this is not what the researcher 
intends. Whilst, for instance, Claude Levi-Strauss began his monumental 
work on the structural study of societies, he probably did not envisage that 
he was establishing the basis of structuralism in language, literature and 
philosophy. Profound as his works could be, they are not free of assumptions 
or tendencies which he could not have seen himself because he observed 
those societies from the standpoint of an outsider. At times, beliefs and notions 
-  mere suppositions -  then turned themselves into gospel truths and facts 
though he did not mean them to be so.
Secondly, theory and methodology can be curiously tied to matters of 
identity as much as the understanding of a particular tongue holds the key to 
the philosophy and culture of its society. We are hard put to see language as 
a structure or scaffolding on to which communication and communal 
exchanges are hung or after which they are patterned. It is therefore 
understandable why certain complex issues are predicated on linguistic motifs, 
particularly in those societies where language is tonal and inflexional and 
oscillates between metaphoric and metonymic usage. Within such groups of 
language communities, a particular word, depending on its musical variance, 
could relate to three or four sense paradigms. It is not unusual to find that 
certain African societies with complex linguistic formations often possess 
complex political and urban structures to go along with them. Ideologues 
may wish to argue conversely that it is the complex political structures which 
actually gave rise to such complex linguistic adaptations, but it should be
1
2 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
easy to insist otherwise given that the development of language predates 
political institutions.
Dated as Gabre-Medhin’s paper might appear -  it was originally presented 
to a writers’ conference in 1970 — some of these insights in linguistic or 
expressional identity often recur on what the role of literature should be 
between the writer-elite and his or her rearguard public. This is subtly 
reinforced in Dan Izevbaye’s exploratory article on the same subject looked 
at in the light of new linguistic and stylistic impositions of colonialism and 
cultural hegemony. The counterbalancing of a modus vivendi between an 
artist and an historian is examined in both Joel Adedeji’s piece and that of 
Izevbaye. Adedeji takes particular care to elucidate what might be the problems 
of method in pre-literate societies. This would seem to re-echo in Adepegba’s 
paper on art history as he highlights the dangers of fieldwork and field methods, 
the role of informants, and the latent prejudices of a participant or a passive 
observer. But the distinction between points of reference and method of 
definition is the forte of Adepegba’s analysis. He illuminates his work with 
his own experience both as an art historian and as a curator. The subtle 
distinction between art history and anthropology will continue to be a bone 
of contention in these matters.
The area of ethno-musicology and dance, with all its elusive attributes, is 
tackled from the perspectives of both practice and theory in Kwabena Nketia’s 
and Kinni-Olusanyin’s papers. Kinni-Olusanyin’s article is nuanced by a certain 
polyphony that derives from her having been an African-American who felt 
at home within the mystic depths of African religious productions. She held 
recitals and divination sessions with traditionalists, with audiences in 
attendance, and travelled around to every village festival. This basic approach 
by a researcher who felt earthed in the performance medium gives her analysis 
its often arcane overtones and immediacy. Kwabena Nketia, a dark horse in 
the study of African music and dance, is well known for his telescopic 
understanding of issues in the documentation and teaching of that subject.
If Osundare’s study anticipates the need for a more expansive, broadly 
based reconstruction of Western theories, Ndebele initiates a new direction in 
which theory would establish a post-apartheid society where theories would 
dwell on the idea of the Other, thus conceptually leading apartheid or other 
forms of oppression into desuetude. This, in the end, becomes a psycho­
affective means of purging society of its inertia, even rage, once an evil system 
is defeated and dismantled. Ndebele’s is the bedrock of praxis in a new cultural 
and political context.
INTRODUCTION 3
My own papers in the collection have focused on the need for consistency 
within tradition and canons drawing on the origins of a theatre tradition in 
an African society; and discussing comparative issues in identity and cultural 
studies. Apart from the fact that African literatures are often expressed in 
foreign -  albeit more cosmopolitan -  tongues, in a parallel manner museums 
in the metropoles now regale and celebrate themselves through the medium 
of African plastic arts and crafts. There is an obvious sense in which 
transmigration through varying spatial media cause a loss or bastardisation 
of identity. A skewed application of less than home-grown theories to 
Africanist writings and art as lamented by Adepegba and Osundare, or their 
lack of documentation in the context of their own cultures as implied by 
Nketia, creates a monumental problem for contemporary scholarship in this 
field. This applies even more so for posterity in Africa and in newly cultivated 
lands where those works are presently domiciled or exiled. Those communal 
artefacts, communally authored, have often been bastardised and referenced 
as ‘tribal art’. The sacrilege done to their memory is enough in chloroformed 
plexiglas cases of museums and art repositories; their immortality only truly 
lies in the life-filled arena of dances and festivals. Even greater attacks are 
made upon their dignity by turning them away from their initial functions 
into commercialised objects and mementoes. It is hoped that these curious 
works with which Africa spreads itself into new worlds in far away places 
will eventually, like a new-age computer, serve to explain the impact of the 
art of a continent on modern civilisation and productivity.
A certain basic misunderstanding, occasionally deliberate mis­
representation, of African literature and art abounds. It is even more 
dangerous when such postulations, bereft of truth and light, assume the cloak 
of theories and canons. The dangers they pose to the future of scholarship in 
Africanist-derived studies are better imagined than described. It is hoped 
that this modest effort will complement the work of others across the globe 
to place the creativity of and about a continent and its diverse -  multi-ethnic
and multi-racial -  cultures in true perspective.
The division into the three parts as exemplified here is not meant to be 
a surgically precise one since knowledge, facts and analyses often dovetail 
across experiences, disciplines, backgrounds and perspectives. This shows 
from the sketchy discussion of some of the basic ideas in this collection. T e 
medium is an expansive, elastic mesh and there are bound to be ripples across 
it most of the time. Certainly, the last word is far from being uttered on the 
matters discussed in these papers; this is just the beginning. I am confident
4 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
that many other colleagues and friends who could have contributed to this 
volume, and who have demonstrated genuine enthusiasm, will find 
appropriate space in a future edition if and whenever the need arises.
In editing and compiling this book, I have fallen into the debt, not only 
of all the contributors who enthusiastically gave me their manuscripts with 
words of encouragement; I am also in the debt of several institutions. The 
Nordic Africa Institute, for instance, granted me permission to reprint Njabulo 
Ndebele’s paper; and the Danish International Development Agency gave 
me licence to reprint Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin’s seminal paper. I am grateful, 
also, to Professor Mosunmola Omibiyi-Obidike for conveying Professor 
Nketia’s paper from Legon. I must not forget to mention the helpful comments 
of Professor Mohammed Bamyeh of New York University. In like manner, 
immense thanks are due to Dr Yann Lebeau, Director of the French Institute 
for Research in Africa (IFRA) at Ibadan, and to Professor Kwesi Prah, Director 
of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society in Cape Town, who 
both ably facilitated the process of publication. My unending gratitude is 
due also to all other sisters and brothers involved in the various stages of this 
project, including those great friends who are too modest to allow me to pay 
tribute to them. O
1 THE ‘OTHERNESS’ 
SYNDROME 
AND THE STUDY OF 
AFRICAN VISUAL ART
Cornelius O. Adepegba
As in the arts of other erstwhile non-literate societies, academic interest in 
African art is not left only to traditional art scholars: anthropologists and 
culture-related social scientists (ethnographers and sociologists as well as 
specialists in African traditional religions), foreign visitors and sojourners in 
the societies of origin of some of the art objects are specialists or accorded 
recognition as experts in the study of the art. The publications on the art, 
mostly catalogues of exhibitions and holdings of collections, sometimes 
owner-sponsored and publicity-orientated, are found on the shelves of 
bookstores throughout the Western world. However, differing in their interests 
and traditional focuses as the various disciplines associated with the art are, 
their approaches to it as a field of knowledge are neither individually defined 
nor different from one another. Nor do any of the disciplines seem satisfied 
with how the study of the art has so far been developed. The traditional 
focuses of anthropology and art history -  the two disciplines most associated 
with the subject -  are not the same. While anthropology focuses on culture 
and sees art objects as illustrations of its symbolic and extra-aesthetic aspects, 
art history focuses on art forms which it may or may not care to see in the 
light of other aspects of culture, and neither of the two disciplines has adhered 
strictly to its traditional methodology in its study of the art.
No consensual theoretical approach exists for the anthropological study 
of the arts of non-Western and non-Asiatic societies to which anthropological 
interest in art is limited. The anthropological study of the arts is only inspired 
by this, but not in the mainstream of anthropology; it is only marginal to the 
mainstream, and the relationship between it and the rest of anthropology is 
asymmetrical (Coote and Shelton 1992). Whether anthropology should be
5
6 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
studying art or not is even a bone of contention among anthropologists, the 
unscientific nature of art having been considered discordant with that 
discipline’s scientific bent by some social anthropologists. As William Fagg 
observes,
Many social anthropologists have tried so hard to make an 
exact science out of what must always remain at bottom a hu­
manity ... that they have been led into a materialistic approach 
which in effect excludes the more spiritual aspects of culture, 
such as art, from their field of study. For whatever reason, the 
modern school of social anthropology in Great Britain, justly 
famous though it is for its extensive field-work, has almost 
uniformly ignored art. (Fagg et al. 1982:7)
It was just such a controversy that prompted a series of seminars to be 
published as an up-to-date anthropological account and assessment of 
anthropology in the study of the arts (Coote and Shelton 1992).
In the study of African art, the focus of art history, the Western traditional 
discipline of art, is yet to be identified. Initially, there was a divide between 
its classic approach of looking at art objects only from their immanent or 
formal qualities and those of anthropology and related humanistic social 
sciences which place a premium on cultural contexts. The earliest and the 
only two publications on African art before 1930, Einstein, Negerplastik 
(1915), and Guillaume and Monroe, Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926), 
inspired by the artistic recognition of the sculptural objects of Africa and 
other non-European non-literate societies by the European avant-garde artists 
of the first decade of this century, focused only on the formal attributes of 
the art objects. The culture-related social sciences, on the other hand, following 
the findings from the field investigations of Griaule and his students in the 
1930s, served as the bases for subsequent advocacy of emphases on the 
cultural significance of the art objects. It is not unusual to see the art-historical 
and anthropological study of the arts of non-Westem and non-Asiatic societies 
as two extremes in the study of art. Fagg, a foremost anthropologist in the 
study of African art in the late 1950s, regarded verbal comments on the 
forms or immanent qualities of African sculptures as ‘irrelevant verbiage’; 
he therefore preferred only to provide his readers with photographs of the 
objects instead of discussing their formal qualities, thereby leaving the formal 
appreciation of the objects to his readers’ individual perceptibilities (1958).
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 7
As recently as the 1980s some scholars still continued to castigate studies 
that failed to see African art objects from their cultural significance as art- 
historical. ‘It is therefore a strange fact that many writers and art historians 
when they come to “primitive art” imagine that it is possible to appreciate it 
without any knowledge of the social background and the world of ideas 
which [it] reflects[s]’, commented Robert Brain (1980). The art-historical 
concern with form and spatio-temporal provenance, and the anthropological 
concern with socio-cultural context, are often seen as poles between which 
researchers oscillate as they try to understand art (Coote and Shelton 1992).
But the dichotomy between the approaches of social sciences and art 
history in their study of African art has not remained unchanged. With 
continuous advocacy, the anthropological cultural context approach became 
noticeably popular among most disciplines interested in the study, and by 
the early 1970s Willett had observed that differences were hard to see between 
the works of the anthropologists and of the art historians studying African 
art (1971:42). The influence of the cultural context approach on art history 
has even spread to the study of European art and the pervading spread of 
this approach to the study of art has generated position-taking discussions 
among philosophers. Monroe (1982) and Margolis (1980), separately 
disapproving the cultural context approach, have pleaded that there should 
be a difference between art and its embodiment or cultural ambience. The 
rightness or wrongness of their entreaties, however, is not the issue here; 
their pleas are only to show how well known the spread of the approach 
from anthropology to art history has been: cardinal before passing judgements 
or making any suggestions is the proponents’ justification for the approach
vis-a-vis their successes and failures in its use.
The approach is often referred to as anthropological but the words, 
‘holistic’, ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘multidisciplinary’ have become its other 
epithets. Initially in the study of African art, the cultural context approach 
appeared reactionary, aimed only to correct the earlier notion that the art 
objects could be viewed purely as art in the same way as Modern Western 
art, on the back of which it rode to recognition, is usually seen. The tone of 
the advocacy of the approach by culture-related social scientists studying the 
art is mostly jubilant, somehow suggestive of a feeling of a welcome comeback 
of the art to its original custodians, the social science institutions which had 
preserved the objects for centuries before they were recognised as art.
Although the extolling of this approach suggests the persistence of the 
need to correct the early notion of the objects as Vart pour l art, the epithets,
8 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
‘holistic’, ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘multidisciplinary’ imply that the approach 
is aimed at seeing the objects in their totality as objects; to show at least how 
they are seen not only as art but also from other angles within their cultures 
of origin. The goal is most desirable, but the implication of the approach 
advocated is that all the values of an object are to be seen only in the light of 
its culture of origin. African art specialists, led by the strong advocacy of the 
cultural significance approach, have even ventured into querying the terms 
of aesthetic appraisal of some individual societies. Sample responses to their 
traditional art forms were taken from members of such societies to systematise 
their terms of aesthetic appraisal (Thompson 1973).
But all the values of an art object, especially its aesthetic values, cannot 
be confined to the object’s culture of origin, and neither is every member of 
the producer or user society born with artistic perceptibility. Hardly, therefore, 
can aesthetic valuations in a given society be reduced to strict communal 
codes. Art objects of a particular period or society may display common 
features by which they are identified as belonging to their era or society; this 
does not mean that only the people of the era or society can perceive those 
features by which the objects are identified either as art or as belonging to 
their time or society. If the artistic perception of African sculptures were 
culture-bound, the European avant-garde artists of the early decades of this 
century would not have been able to see and popularise their artistic values. 
Thus the methodology as advocated is certainly circumscriptive of the 
researcher’s aesthetic perceptibility of the objects.
The anthropologists with whom the approach is commonly associated 
do not claim to be interested in the artistic aspects of the objects in their 
study: the goal of the anthropological study of art is obviously not to study 
cultures of origin to understand art, but to study art to further understand 
its culture of origin. This is reflected in the usual justification for 
anthropological involvement in art -  that art objects can at least throw light 
on their cultures of origin -  often adduced by interested anthropologists to 
fellow anthropologists who are not interested, and are opposed to art being 
part of their discipline. ‘And yet as the researches of Griaule and his 
collaborators have shown, successful studies of tribal art may throw more 
light on tribal life and society than anything else’, says Fagg, pleading with 
the British social anthropologists not to ignore art (Fagg et al. 1982). The art 
historians studying the art, who are supposed to focus on the artistic aspects 
of the objects have been either cowed or carried away by the persistence and 
vociferous advocacy of the anthropological or social sciences approach. They
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 9
forget that what is done in the anthropological study of art is nothing special 
that art historians or scholars from other disciplines cannot easily do or follow 
-  at best, a descriptive or narrative analysis of culture which mainly involves 
human activities which are easier to narrate or describe than artistic forms 
which in African art are mostly abstract, normally perceptible, yet hard to 
put into words.
In fact, the two disciplines, anthropology and art history, do not appear 
to truly understand each other’s methodology. Art historians know next to 
nothing about mainstream methodology of anthropology, while anthro­
pologists only know that art historians emphasise forms; they forget that art 
history is not totally opposed to the use of culture to explain forms. What 
else could have explained the adoption of easel paintings in seventeenth-century 
Holland better than the republican and Calvinistic backgrounds to which the 
paintings belonged, and why would the study of European culture still be 
emphasised in the study of European art today when European culture has 
been well documented and is well known to the European audience of the 
European art historians ? o 3 r
ACHIEVEM ENTS, LIMITATIONS AND SHO RTCO M INGS
The most notable achievement of the methodology in the study of African art 
is the unrelenting emphasis on field investigation of individual cultures. 
Although Leo Frobenius had carried out field research in Africa at the end of 
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his investigation was not limited 
to individual cultures as has been the case after the achievements of Griaule 
and his followers. Individual art-producing peoples of sub-Saharan Africa 
are individually focused on as research areas, and researchers’ field 
investigations have resulted in dissertations and publications which provide 
valuable information on the individual ethnic groups as well as on their arts. 
Such materials are useful as a comprehensive data bank for the general study 
of the art of the entire sub-Saharan region. The study of African art has been 
established in many institutions, especially in Europe and America; journals 
specifically devoted to the study have been established and scholars have 
bound themselves together as disciplinary bodies to promote the subject further 
through publications as well as in the organisation of conferences and seminars.
The cultural significance approach is, however; not without its limitations. 
‘Those who accept sociology as simply one means towards more perfect 
knowledge have no reason to minimise either its undeniable limitations of a
10 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
sociology of art’, says Hauser about the corresponding cultural context 
approach for Western art (1985:17). The same applies to scholars whose 
interests are in the arts of non-Western societies, and the most obvious of the 
limitations is how to codify the information gathered by scholars in dealing 
with their subject. How do they suppress and balance their individual 
disciplinary interests with those of others? Seeing all the sides of the object, 
therefore, cannot but present some difficulties, hence there are some noticeable 
problems and weak points, regardless of the disciplines involved in the study 
of the art.
Both anthropologists and art historians have problems in the relationship 
between field information and theories: theories are mostly taken as the 
starting points from which information seems to be doctored. Fagg, speaking 
on the state of African art studies in the early 1980s, observed that the studies 
were overloaded with speculative theories largely unsupported by evidence. 
According to him, ‘all of us will be better employed clearing away the 
premature syntheses than erecting new ones’ and such ‘demolition is not of 
course the end in itself but a preliminary to the reinstatement of a truly 
inductive method of study’ in which ‘theories will be formed directly from 
objects and facts and not imposed on them’ (Fagg et al. 1980). A leading 
figure in African art history, Roy Sieber, suspecting the relationship between 
field information and theories, also has this to say, ‘I am suspicious of field 
studies that attempt to prove (or disprove) theories’ (1986:76-77). Other 
lapses that he observed in the art-historical study of the art are in the study 
of forms, specifically style studies, with an emphasis on change over time -  
history, morphological studies relating again to history and ‘iconography, 
the penetrating study of symbols’. These are very pertinent as African 
sculptural objects are said to be art, regardless of the disciplines studying 
them, and what determines whether any object is art or an artefact is its 
form, which in African art has not been given serious attention.
Anthropologists are just not interested in it; the socio-cultural contexts 
rather than the stylistic or formal aspects of the art objects are their main 
concern, and their discipline has to date focused only on the functions and 
symbolic meanings of the art objects rather than on the objects’ essential 
powers as artistic objects (Coote and Shelton 1992). Art historians, who by 
their traditional concern are supposed to focus on forms, are in their own 
case faced with the problem of the nature of forms in the arts. Their forms, 
mostly schematised, are non-narrative, non-descriptive or non-representative 
of activities and events as in Western art. As Vogel rightly observed,
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 11
in the context of Western art history, a striking feature of African 
art is that it is not normally narrative, does not depict movement 
or groups of figures interacting, and is not pictorial; it does not 
seek to create any illusion of motion, of perspective or 
verisimilitude. If an artist wants hair on his figure or mask that 
exactly resembles hair, he will not hesitate to attach some of 
the real thing. If movement was wanted, the mask or figure 
could be worn or carried in dance. (Thompson and Vogel
1990:80)
In their different poses, African images are or no change
over times. In sub-Saharan African sculpture, only Benin metal art tradition 
shows stylistic change over time and these works, too, are typological 
according to their periods. The same thing is true of Ife heads and figures 
which can be said to be most naturalistic. In places where African images are 
depicted engaged in specific activities such as in an Esie stone image depicted 
eating, they are made after their types and are very rigid in form.
Up to the 1980s, stylistic studies of African art were done according to 
their ethnic origins and types of objects, the only exception being the stylistic 
periodisation of Benin art just mentioned. But from the mid-1980s, efforts 
have been made to discuss the form of individual objects, particularly in 
catalogues of exhibitions or collections. Although such remarks about form 
were limited to ‘praiseful descriptions’ (ibid.:7), and not addressed to historical 
questions, they are nevertheless useful in focusing readers’ attention on the 
peculiarity of forms in individual pieces and go a long way to promote the 
artistic appreciation of the objects.
Historical study of African sculpture can hardly be said to have begun. 
Although efforts have been made to have historical overviews of the arts of 
some ethnic groups such as the Akan in Ghana and the Yoruba in Nigeria, 
up to 1984 only two attempts were made at looking at a general history of 
African art. In that year, two publications appeared: Jan Vansina’s Art History 
in Africa which examines the problem of how the history of the art of the 
continent should be written, highlighting the areas to be included as well as 
sources and uses of data, and Werner Gillon’s A Short History of African 
Art, the first attempt to write the history of the art of the continent.
Since then the only other attempt was the catalogue of an exhibition of 
the African sculpture in the collection of the Trout Gallery of Dickinson 
College, Carlisle in Pennsylvania, of which I was the curator, in late 1994
12 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
(Adepegba 1994a). But none of these can be said to be a definitive general 
historical study of the art. While Vansina only focuses on how to write the 
history, Gillon, whose book is the actual history, succumbed to the traditional 
way of studying the art according to its geographical spread and, as such, is 
not chronological. Mine, which is somewhat chronological, is based on the 
very few societies represented in the collection, and is still to be tested with 
material from many more societies. The fact that there are only three attempts 
made so far among the numerous publications on African art is a clear 
indication of the lack of interest in, and indifference to, the history of the art 
by scholars.
Generally, the study of the objects as art is yet to be realised and a close 
examination of the excuses often given for the way it has been studied shows 
that the art has not been considered as ‘artistic’ as Western art. ‘Even so 
there are many Western people, even those who have no racial prejudices, 
for whom African art remains marginal. To them the very idea of comparing 
a fetish with an Apollo or a medieval Virgin or even an Egyptian god or a 
Buddha, is repugnant’, observe Leiris and Fry (1986:33). If the objects were 
ever seen as art, they were art of a different rating and there has always been 
an undercurrent of feeling about the ‘otherness’ to which all or most of the 
lapses in its study can be traced.
Certainly, it is to Europe that credit should go for the collection, 
preservation and the bulk of the eventual study of the objects, especially as 
many of the societies to which the objects originally belonged were not in 
the habit of preserving them for an indefinite future, and, indeed, the climate, 
as well as other factors, does not favour their doing so. Nevertheless, it should 
not be forgotten that the sculptural objects being studied as art had been in 
Europe, locked up in private homes or stores of ethnographic collections for 
centuries before they were recognised as art. In the early seventeenth century, 
when the first African sculpture ever to be documented in a museum collection 
was entered into the record of the Wieckmann Collection of the Ulm museum 
in Germany, naturalism reigned supreme in the artistic judgement of Europe 
and nobody could see any artistic quality in the commonly abstracted African 
sculptures. This was true even up to the nineteenth century when items of 
Benin art, which are among the most naturalistic and now most highly prized 
of African sculpture, were taken to Europe.
To regard such objects as art was inconceivable as up to the early 
twentieth century naturalism was the hallmark of art in Europe. Hence the 
works of the European avant garde artists of the first decade of the twentieth
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 13
century, whose activities eventually led to the recognition of the sculptures 
as art — similarly abstracted — were not accepted as art without reluctance in 
their own society. Therefore, what the cultural context approach has been 
saying all along is that if the objects are art -  which certainly they are -  they 
are not as ‘artistic’ as Western art.
Any available information regarding the cultural background of the 
sculptural objects that can help to sustain this outlook is usually given 
prominence, while common sense is sometimes ignored in the interpretation 
of the object. The most frequently referred to of such cultural phenomena is 
the functional role of the objects within their cultures, always portrayed as 
absent in Western art. As invariably emphasised, there is no ‘art for art’s 
sake’ in Africa. But is ‘art for art’s sake’ truly absent in all types and periods 
of Western art? What about architecture, a major Western art form, which, 
regardless of period, is basically functional? If what makes an object art is 
the freedom of its form from practical functions, how appropriate is it to use 
what basically negates the ‘artness’ of any art forms to interpret African art 
objects as art? Functions and meanings are often interwoven in interpreting 
art and, understandably, African sculptural pieces, mostly religious symbols, 
have religious meanings in addition to their practical functions, in the same 
way as Christian icons do. But are forms similarly ignored in art historical 
study of Christian icons? Truly African sculptures are abstracted in one way 
or the other and they could be difficult to interpret because of the 
aforementioned hard-to-describe nature of their form. But how have art 
historians been able to interpret the various abstractions of twentieth-century 
European art that similarly does not suggest nature? What these questions 
imply is that art historians studying African art, too, are either unaware of 
the scope of their own discipline in Western art or are yet to exhaust the 
options at their disposal in their study of African art.
An aspect of African culture that is often pointed to in support of a 
segregationist view of African art is the absence of distinctive words for 
beauty and goodness in African languages, which, as Leiris and Fry have 
pointed out, should not be mistaken for lack of aesthetic judgement among 
Africans (ibid.:25-56). They have made reference to various African societies 
in which researchers have observed that Africans are capable of artistic 
judgement, and the fact that the same word is used for more than one idea 
does not mean that the word means the same thing in all its contexts. This 
argument is not just persuasive, but so exhaustive that one would expect it 
to have put paid to the use of the linguistic claim for point-scoring in
14 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
arguments on the methodology for the study of the art. But scholars of African 
art have, from time to time, recalled the claim to sustain their idiosyncratic 
outlook towards the art. In fact, I did not know of Delange’s argument against 
the claim when I first came across it in a coffee-table European-authored 
publication, that by Atmore and Stacey, Black Kingdoms, Black Peoples 
(1979), which for credibility seems to have been intentionally given to a 
Nigerian publisher to publish. The intention of the authors -  to portray 
West African peoples, their political institutions, religions and arts as 
unscientific, uncivilised, superstitious and (perhaps unvoiced) less human -  
runs through the book from cover to cover. In my review of the book 
(Adepegba 1982), I, too, observed that the fact that some known languages 
of West Africa do not have different words for beautiful and good does not 
mean their words for the ideas mean the same thing when used in different 
contexts, and I cited the case of Yoruba, which has different words for beauty 
and goodness to finally challenge the claim on the grounds that it was 
presumptuous as many West African languages were yet to be written, much 
less analysed for their aesthetic terminologies. But interestingly, a similar use 
of the claim was made seven years later, citing a dozen African languages 
still emphasising the view that the art objects should be seen differently from 
other arts as they have more than aesthetic values within their cultures of 
origin (Vogel 1986:xii-xvii).
Whether the claim is adduced to support or deny the existence of aesthetic 
judgement in Africa, even this is not the question. More important seems to 
be the relevance of beauty itself in the valuation of art, especially, as beauty 
implied in these arguments is taken to be the only criterion for accepting 
objects as art. It is true that certain ancient artistic traditions, in their different 
ways, idealised forms to show their subjects as sublime and without blemish. 
Notable among such traditions are the ancient Egyptian, the Greek classical 
period and even the ancient Ife arts from Africa. In ancient Egyptian tradition 
the subjects, especially royalty, represented in their prime of life, were depicted 
to look faultless: the arts celebrate god kings. As for the Greek classical 
figures, they were not depictions of particularly handsome individuals, but 
those possessing the best human physical attributes. In the Ife terracotta and 
cast metal tradition, human heads and figures are especially idealised in their 
representation at the prime of life, as well as in their prominent and well 
defined eyeballs (eyinju ege) and their spiralled or ringed necks (wiwe lorun 
bi okoto) which are local attributes of human beauty (Adepegba 1994b). 
The differing ways in which beauty has been portrayed in these artistic
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 15
traditions clearly indicate that beauty, not only in art but in almost all things, 
depends on the people and the times, and, in fact, even depends on individuals 
in the same place and at the same time. As a Yoruba proverb has it, Eyi to 
wu mi ko wu e ni ko i je ka pa ’wo po fe obinrin (What appeals to me may 
not appeal to you hence men do not jointly marry the same woman). Many 
objects that appear ugly and grotesque to many individuals have found their 
ways into museums as masterpieces, highly valued for attributes other than 
beauty. ‘Aesthetic’, which has commonly been taken to mean ‘beauty in 
discussing artistic value, is not even as specific as it is often used. It is usually 
not clear whether it refers to beauty or artistic quality. Thus efforts made by 
scholars to codify attributes of African art or Africans’ terms of artistic 
perception virtually amount to segregating the art because it does not belong 
to most of its researchers’ societies.
The ways some other aspects of culture are used for interpreting forms 
in African art are so ridiculous that African readers are lost as to what the 
writers are trying to do; they hardly understand whether it is the arts they 
are explaining or whether they simply want to amuse their readers by 
explaining the art forms in terms of the exotic aspects of African life that 
appear to them odd or bizarre. Because African sculptures are used mostly 
in religious contexts, the notion of Africans as peoples with animistic views 
is made prominent in such interpretations and explanations of forms. Very 
surprising also is the way unprovable religious interpretations are preferred 
to obvious, plausible and commonsense alternatives. In some instances, such 
explanations are personal interpretations made by individual scholars, while 
in others they are said to have been directly derived from field investigations. 
But how much of such information was freely given to researchers (and not 
put in the informant’s mouth) is hard to determine, as neither all the 
researchers nor the native informants appear to be entirely honest. The 
researcher, before going into the field, has got his or her set of oddities to 
reinforce with field information, and the native informants, too, understand 
what to say to satisfy researchers, especially rich ones from the developed 
countries. Indeed, their financial rewards to the informants have made 
research information unaffordable to poorer African researchers.
Here are some instances of such interpretations from Nigeria. For a 
long time before the kind of skin used as the cover for the Ekoi or Ejargam 
skin-covered mask was verified as being that of an animal, the skin cover 
was always said to be that of a human being, used for providing the masks 
with human attributes. Any second thought was not even suggested by the
16 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
fact that the masks are in both human and animal forms and that the skin 
might have been employed to conceal possible cracking of the wet wood, 
traditionally carved into masks and figures in Africa. The general carving 
of the wood when wet, which must have facilitated carving with limited 
carving tools, is, to date, explained as a means of harnessing the life force 
from the wood carved into the images. It is also not unlikely that it is in the 
same vein that the propitiation before the felling of the trees to obtain the 
wood for carving and the involvement of rituals in the process of carving 
often alluded to, have been newly brought into being. Every aspect of the 
art, the artistic production and the uses to which the art objects were put 
seems to have been hung on animistic views of the world in which inanimate 
objects are ascribed supernatural power. No room is even given to the 
expediency of production. The carver himself is mystified or sometimes led 
into surrounding himself with self-ordained mystery or supernatural aura. 
A Kalahari carver observed by Robin Horton claimed that when he was 
called upon to replace the old carving in a sanctuary, he was not only chosen 
as the carver for the new carving by the deity to which the sanctuary 
belonged, but he completely took over the priesthood of the deity for the 
entire period of the carving, even though his name, Tom, obviously suggests 
a previous European connection (Horton 1965:17). Worth mentioning also 
is an explanation that the theme of mother and child common in Yoruba 
sculpture is commonly represented for purity because nursing mothers, like 
pregnant women, do not menstruate (Vogel 1986:xvi). Whether it is only 
among the Yoruba that nursing mothers do not menstruate, or whether it is 
a general female characteristic, is not indicated. But as the claim is biologically 
incorrect, it ought to have been avoided -  except that it was made only to 
portray African ways of thinking as strange and odd.
For some researchers, African art, specifically sculpture, is still a living 
art and should be seen as still being produced and used as it was before 
outside influences on African ways of life became apparent during this 
century. The art, as well as its traditional milieu, is presented as if unaffected 
by the forces of internationalism consequent upon the increasing exposure 
of the continent to outside religions, trade and alien forms of government, 
whereas in actual fact the art, in its authentic traditional setting has ceased 
to exist, having persistently bowed to the forces of change which have 
occurred in the last hundred years. Such a situation in which newly collected 
data on the cultural context of the art are fixed to a single time frame -  the 
past -  and are not mindful of possible changes over time, cannot but raise
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 17
credibility and relevance problems. The form may still be copied to conform 
to tradition, but it is hardly higher than the pieces intended for the tourist
trade. . . .  ,
Certainly, the sources of data from field investigation have been
tremendously expanded. Initially, only a few individuals, or even a single 
individual, in the society were the source of the claims made about African 
societies and their art. But more people are now being interviewed to obtain 
more commonly accepted meanings about different aspects of African 
culture. However, the continual desire to entertain readers has tended to 
make most publications on art more artistic than the art itself, and the 
emphasis on cultural context is as full of inappropriate description as the 
initial formal approach to the art.
Even now, researchers continue to harp on the same phenomena in 
their interpretations of the objects, and there is no indication that any serious 
progress is being made in the study of the art. It is noteworthy, however, 
that there is an array of new vernacular names and terminology often used 
as proof of the researchers’ knowledge of the subject. The form of the art 
object is still not given due attention. In many publications and other write­
ups on African art it is only in the titles that the objects are described as art.
However, scholars are not insensitive to the need for progress in the 
study of the art. William Fagg observed that much study remained to be 
done in museum and private art collections, and that the documentation 
available on the art in Europe is very limited. He has also pointed out the 
need for field research among Africans themselves because, in fact, many 
African scholars have shown no interest in the study of the art of their own 
people (Fagg et al. 1982). But even such involvement cannot substantially 
change the picture. African scholars, like their Western counterparts, want 
recognition in their fields, and such recognition is highly prized and exciting 
when it is from Europe and America where most of these scholars, especially 
the earlier ones, have been educated. Their Western counterparts, upon 
whom such recognition depends, would naturally not tolerate opposing 
views. At present African scholars are strikingly disadvantaged, their only 
advantage over their Western counterparts being their mother tongue with 
which they can interact better when investigating their own culture. Even 
with this, however, it should not be forgotten that they and most of their 
informants are not the same as their ancestors. It may therefore apply only 
in aspects of their language that are handed down from generation to 
generation, such as in old maxims and proverbs, where the past can be
18 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
seen, but in this, too, it is not uncommon for the speakers to know only their 
contextual uses rather than their original sources.
The case of Supo Koseemani, a Yoruba elder so revered that he was 
given a regular programme on explanations and meanings of Yoruba proverbs 
and sayings on a local radio station in Ibadan, is a good example. His 
explanations of different Yoruba proverbs and maxims were preceded and 
followed by Yoruba lineage praise songs, oriki, which were always chanted 
to show him as belonging to all the Oyo lineages among whom such praise 
songs are common. The programme in question used to be on the local radio 
every evening just before six o’clock in the programme, Owe l’ esin oro. But 
on one particular evening his explanation was inadequate as he only indicated 
the contextual use of the proverb he was asked to explain rather than its 
raison d’etre. The proverb, a dialogue, Orisa b’oo le gbe mi, se mi b’oo ti ba 
mi, means ‘Orisa’ -  the Yoruba god of creation -  ‘if you cannot help or 
profit me, leave me as I am.’ Ordinarily, it simply means ‘If I cannot gain in 
any deal or venture, I should not lose’, and that was the only explanation he 
gave as the meaning of the proverb. But the raison d ’etre is clear from a local 
song which I heard from Bandaru of Okebola village near Ikoyi when I was 
a young village schoolteacher in the early 1960s. The song, Arigbede, b’oo 
fe mi mo o, orisa ma b’aale le mi. Oroajoso, b’o ba ye, k’oo wi o, literally 
means ‘Arigbede, if you do not love me any more, do not de-pigment me’. It 
refers to a common Yoruba religious practice. Various Yoruba gods are 
associated with powers of affliction, especially upon erring worshippers. 
Sango is known for killing with thunder -  hence he is referred to as the god 
of thunder -  while Orisa, the god of creation is associated with de­
pigmentation of the skin to patches of white. The de-pigmentation is believed 
to be either an affliction from Orisa priests or an after-effect of syphilis, and 
both the de-pigmentation and syphilis are known as aale, as in the song. 
Thus it is obvious that the proverb originated from the religious practice, 
and means that if worshippers could not be blessed by the deity, they should 
be allowed to go free or stop worshipping him without punishment.
If such an inadequacy could occur in a situation where every recipient 
of the explanation could at least be credited with the basic understanding of 
his or her culture, how much less dependable could such information be 
collected by researchers that are non-natives, especially when collected from 
one or a few individuals, as in the early days of field investigation on African 
art. The implication is that field investigations may not provide truer 
information on the objects than the authentic objects themselves. We will
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 19
remain as blind in our vision of the art as the old Dogon, Ogotemmeli, who 
never saw the Dogon couple figures that were interpreted with the information 
he gave to Griaule. If we link our understanding of the art mainly to the 
same kind of cultural context information, we would be as far from the 
truth as ever.
STEPS FORWARD
For meaningful progress to be made in the study of African art, the study 
should be more reflective, especially on forms hitherto neglected. If the cultural 
context approach is truly multi-disciplinary, forms and cultural context should 
be balanced. The persistent advice that African art should be approached 
differently from other art because it is from another society should be de­
emphasised, and more attention should be given to factual data and plausible 
reflection, rather than myth, fable or even fabrication. Researchers should 
be free to come up with their individual, objective and unbiased interpretation 
of forms. As the object is being referred to as art by all the disciplines involved 
in its study, the starting point of its future study should be the object itself, 
and not the culture. Fortunately, authentic objects abound for such a venture, 
in museums and private collections in Europe and America. It is only in the 
countries of origin of the objects, which are now poor in both the authentic 
art objects and the economic resources to collect, keep and study them, that 
the venture may pose a problem.
Although changes are minimal between typological pieces of the art 
works, thereby limiting the possibility of perceiving the art forms historically, 
research can start anew with comparative analyses of forms in the individual 
types of the objects already amassed in museums and private collections. 
Possibilities of the focus on form is infinite, and understanding the formal 
variations in each of the typological objects enriches the appreciation and 
perception of forms. Comparative analyses of styles in individual types of 
objects can be followed by comparative study of all the typological objects 
from the same individual producer or user of ethnic origin. Although a lot 
has been done on the stylistic variations between the art-producing ethnic 
groups of the continent, an effort towards closer study of styles, if combined 
with increased attention to scientific dating of the objects, will go a long way 
towards determining the historicity of forms either within ethnic confines or 
in the entire sculpture-producing region. If much is not forthcoming on the 
symbolism of forms from such an exercise, more light will certainly be thrown
20 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
on the technical and artistic expediency of formal compositions. Common 
sense and universal aspects of life, rather than ridiculous idiosyncrasies 
hitherto employed only to amuse audiences, should be the researchers’ goal 
in interpreting the art objects. To be different as peoples is not the same 
thing as to be ridiculous and laughable.
Willett, in reacting to the complaint from a senior figure in the study of 
African art, said that one of his colleagues would prefer his students 
specialising in African art to be anthropologists rather than art historians 
(1971:42). He was of the view that it is from both anthropology and art 
history that the study of African art should continue to draw expertise. This 
is especially pertinent as the ultimate goal of an holistic approach is to have 
an overall knowledge of the subjects being studied and neither of the two 
disciplines, anthropology or art history, denies the fact that the objects being 
studied are artistic. If the artistic angle of the study of the object has hitherto 
been neglected, it stands to reason that the study should first correct this 
imbalance. However, the possibility of this cannot but sound remote, especially 
as the already trained scholars in the field have so far not seen any need 
seriously to understand each other’s methodology in order to forge a uniform 
focus for the study of the art. It is for this reason that I would urge fellow 
scholars of African art to agree with Suzanne Blier (1987) who, on recounting 
how students of African art were isolated in her student days, says that it is 
at the training stage and not after qualifying that specialists in the study of 
the art should be more exposed to (and therefore interact better with) students 
of Western art history. As the objects being studied are accepted as art, their 
‘artness’ should not be limited to the titles of publications on them; it should 
be seen clearly in the contents of the publications. The artistic aspect of the 
study should not be subsumed in the cultural context which, to no small 
extent, has blinded interested scholars to the universally accepted attributes 
of their subject.
Unintentionally, the cultural context approach has stifled the study of 
contemporary African art which, like Western art, is more about formal 
values than cultural uses and meanings. While publications have appeared 
in their hundreds, or even thousands, on traditional African art, there are 
scarcely ten internationally known publications on the contemporary art of 
the continent. African art scholars, having been tied strictly to explaining 
the art objects only from their cultural significance point of view, are lost as 
to what to do when confronted with the contemporary art of the continent. 
The strict adherence of the specialists to the cultural context approach has
THE ‘OTHERNESS’ SYNDROME 21
confined them only to the traditional objects, and to most of them, in the 
words of William Fagg, anything that is not tribal is not African, and 
contemporary African art, like skyscrapers, are extensions of Europe in Africa
(1963a:121).
But denying the existence of a contemporary art that comes from the 
continent is not the issue: African art does not end with traditional art objects.
A suitably uniform approach for both the traditional and contemporary arts 
of the continent will have to be sought. Since the difficulty about 
contemporary African art is caused by its detachment from its culture of 
origin, the focus of African art will have to be directed towards form. When 
Western art is being looked at sociologically, the goal is still to understand 
form. But when African art is looked at ‘anthropologically’, attention to 
form is hardly considered necessary. For the art to be truly studied as art, the
emphasis needs to change.
2 BEYOND ‘PROTEST’
New Directions in 
South African Literature
Njabulo Ndebele
Recently I have suggested that what has been called ‘protest literature’ may 
have run its own course in South Africa (Ndebele 1986). It is my intention 
here to probe further into this evaluation by attempting to bring out clearly 
its theoretical foundations. Basically, the problem is that ‘protest literature’ 
appears to have lost its objective basis. The fact that much of the writing 
produced in the townships of South Africa since 1976 still reproduces this 
protest tradition with little modification, reveals what seems to me to be the 
characteristics of a socially entrenched manner of thinking about the South 
African reality; a manner of thinking which, over the years, has gathered its 
own momentum and now reproduces itself uncritically. It is like a train whose 
driver has lost control; it runs dangerously on its fixed rails, passing, with 
great speed, where it is supposed to stop. The difference might be that in the 
case of the train, its driver will know almost immediately that he is in trouble. 
He is, after all, not the train. In the case of the writer of ‘protest literature’, 
on the other hand, it may not be so easy for him to separate himself 
momentarily from his mind.
The problem is to be located in the nature of South African oppression 
and how its unabating pervasiveness has induced, almost universally in the 
country, a distinctive manner of thinking about the socio-political realities 
in the country. It has induced a socio-political epistemology that conceives 
of reality purely in terms of a total polarity of absolutes. Such an epistemology 
is, of course, entirely understandable: South African society is a highly
This paper was written before the unbanning of the African National Congress in 1990 and the first 
democratic elections in 1994 and is included for the importance it has in the historical context. -  Ed.
23
24 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
polarised society. It is understandable that its constituent polarities should 
dominate the thinking of its citizens. This is even more so when we realise 
that one major characteristic of the South African social formation is how 
the racist rulers have done very little to hide the polarities produced by their 
iniquitous domination. On the contrary, these polarities have been and 
continue to be fully displayed. There can be no doubt, for example, about 
who is in power and who is not; no doubt about who commands vast 
resources of wealth, and who lives in abject poverty. There is no doubt also, 
in general terms, why things are the way they are.
In general, this situation has resulted in two ways of perceiving the South 
African reality. For the oppressed, political knowledge came to be equated 
with the recognition of the blatant injustice which occurs in various forms 
throughout the country. To know has been to know how badly one has been 
treated. Every other thing is irrelevant if it is perceived as not contributing to 
the extension of this knowledge. Beyond that, having this knowledge implied 
that one either gives in to the bleak reality revealed, or commits oneself to 
removing this general condition of injustice. How this is actually carried out 
will depend on what means are available to the oppressed at any particular 
moment.
On the other hand, for the ruling white racists, knowledge has been 
equated with the quest for mastery over the political and economic means of 
maintaining privilege and domination. To know has been to find ways of 
maintaining dominance. As a result, the white racists have, over the years, 
built, and now have access to a complex structure of government and its 
related institutions, as well as an array of other social and economic 
institutions, all of which have diversified the sources as well as the means of 
acquiring information and knowledge for the preservation of political and 
economic domination.
In order for us to get a practical sense of this situation, I thought it 
useful that we examine a recent drama between African miners and the white 
mine managers of the Impala Platinum Mine in that part of South Africa 
called Bophuthatswana. This particular drama seems to play out for me 
some important aspects of the history of the African struggle for freedom in 
South Africa.
Recently in South Africa some 23 000 African miners were summarily 
dismissed from their jobs. This figure is immense, but the real figure is much 
larger, when we consider the fact that the dismissed men came from families 
who depended on them for a livelihood. So there is a real sense in which it
BEYOND ‘PROTEST’ 25
was not just the miners who were dismissed, but also at least 100 000 other 
people. But the drama of South African oppression is such that it has become 
customary for its observers, both those involved and those on the sidelines, 
to focus on its most observable aberrations. We concentrate on the 23 000 
men, the most observable proof of injustice, and consequently, the most 
immediate in terms of the imperatives of political activism. The other 
100 000 maintain a blurred presence, seldom becoming a serious factor of 
analysis and reflection. They were not there at the scene of the action. This 
point I shall come back to later.
The two parties involved in this labour dispute reveal their perceptions 
of the problems before them in the following manner. Following their 
dismissal, a representative of the striking miners observed: ‘Management 
does not have sympathy for people. They don’t listen to what we have to say. 
They regard us as animals. That is why it is possible for them to do this 
(Weekly Mail, Johannesburg, 10-16 Jan. 1986). On the other hand, a 
representative of the mine management observed: ‘You run into a point where 
they get completely unreasonable. The alternative is to get rid of the whole 
labour force and replace them. There is a condition of massive unemployment 
in the country and that encourages us to take this kind of action (ibid.).
Firstly, at the most immediate pre-critical level, we cannot fail to recognise 
the them-us polarity. There is no need to even state that the management is 
white and the miners are black. The them-us polarity already exists within 
that other larger polarity. Secondly, the miners seem to be almost completely 
powerless against the massive power of the management. The management 
controls the means of livelihood. It controls a complex organisation which is 
itself firmly placed within the even more complex structure of exploitation 
characteristic of the South African social formation. Furthermore, the habit 
of working within a complex system develops the manipulative capacity of 
those in control of the system to take advantage of the laws of that system to 
their own benefit.
Against all this, the miners, having been effectively denied the opportunity 
to create comparable adversary systems of their own, have had no opportunity 
to develop their own manipulative capacity.1 They have nothing of comparable 
organisational status to set in motion in order to defend and project their 
interests. Indeed, all they have is their voice, and the capacity of that voice, 
under the circumstances, is limited largely to articulating grievance, drawing 
its strength and validity from the moral law: ‘Management does not have 
sympathy for people.’ But, as it is clear, the moral law can be tragically
26 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 6c CULTURE
impotent in the face of economic laws that do not recognise its intrinsic validity.
It seems clear that in this situation, the structural position of the miners 
(the aggrieved) permits them, in their response to their terrible ordeal, very 
few options besides the mere articulation of grievance. This structural position 
of the miners in this case, is identical, it seems to me, to the structural position 
of the oppressed majority in South Africa during that time in that country’s 
history when protest literature flourished: the period between 1948 and 1961. 
It was a period characterised by a greater institutionalisation of repression. 
There was much organised resistance, but it was often brutally crushed. This 
increased repression created a charged atmosphere for protest such that the 
resulting articulation of grievance, at both organisational and personal levels, 
became the very index of powerlessness.
The result of this situation was that increasingly, the material dimensions 
of oppression soon assumed a rhetorical form in which the three chief 
components were: first, the identification and highlighting of instances of 
general oppression; second, the drawing of appropriate moral conclusions 
from the revealed evidence, and lastly, the implicit belief in the inherent 
persuasiveness of the moral position. The identified outward evidence of 
oppression prompted a rhetoric which emphasised the moral embitterment 
of the oppressed. It is this kind of rhetoric that began to dominate the 
consciousness of the oppressed in such a way that the oppressed could easily 
lose the sense of the actual mechanisms of their own oppression. This condition 
can have devastating effects on the capacity of the oppressed to develop a 
creatively analytical approach to their predicament.
For example, the pervasive images of wealth and poverty, of power and 
powerlessness, of knowledge and ignorance, of form and formlessness, may 
easily lead to the simplification and trivialisation of moral perception. The 
oppressed need only cast their eyes around and they see a universal 
confirmation of their status. Evil abounds. There is no need for further analysis. 
The mere pointing of a finger provides proof. In this situation, the rhetorical 
identification of social and political evil may easily become coincident with 
political and intellectual insight. The recognition of a source of grievance 
does not necessarily imply an understanding of a possible range of political 
implications which that recognition may entail. This problem, as has been 
hinted above, might give us some understanding of the effect of oppression 
on the general intellectual development of the oppressed.
It needs to be stated that the moral position, when we consider the overall 
circumstances in which recourse to it was taken, was, of course, entirely valid
BEYOND ‘PROTEST’ 27
and correct. What one is attempting to do here is hint at its possible limitations. 
This task is essential when a particular way of viewing reality gathers its 
own momentum over a period of time and becomes a predominant mode of 
perception even when the conditions justifying its existence have passed. At 
that point the mode of perception, by failing to transcend its own limitations, 
can become part of the oppression it sought to understand and undermine. 
It does not do so intentionally, of course: it simply becomes trapped. Such a 
trap may even lead to the development of a dangerous predisposition to 
reform rather than to radical change.
Indeed, the trapping of resistance in an unreflective rhetoric of protest 
could easily be one of the sources of reactionary politics even among the 
oppressed. Where the dialectic between good and evil has been simplified, 
the predisposition on the part of the powerful to satisfy the oppressed’s moral 
sense with minimum concessions asserts itself. This happens at those moments 
when the oppressors feel that it is in their own interests to make concessions. 
Such concessions, if they can be perceived as significant gains, particularly 
by the oppressed, can lead to the politics of reform. Reform easily appeals to 
the moral sentiment, whereas radical change relies on continuous critical 
engagement with reality such that not only nothing is taken for granted, but 
also that the reformist manipulations of the oppressor can even be anticipated 
and neutralised. However, that the moral sentiment can be compromised in 
this manner does not invalidate it; it is simply that the conditions in which it 
can continue to inspire confidence ought to be brought into being, for they 
do not as yet exist.
I have so far devoted much of this paper to a discussion of the general 
situation in order to suggest the unenviably onerous position of the writer in 
this situation; to indicate how writers can themselves be encapsulated by the 
material and intellectual culture of oppression, and how difficult it can be 
for them to achieve a transcendence. For example, it became the responsibility 
of the writers to codify the predominant modes of political perception by 
transforming those perceptions into literary figures. This led to the 
predominance of certain themes, characters, and situations which were welded 
into a recognisable grammar of protest. We were shown the predictable drama 
between the merciless oppressors and their pitiful victims: ruthless policeman 
and their cowed, bewildered prisoners, brutal farmers and their exploited 
farm hands, cruel administrative officials and the bewildered residents of the 
townships, crowded trains and the terrible violence that goes on in them 
among the oppressed, and a variety of similar situations. Of course, what we
28 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 6c CULTURE
are looking at here is a trend. There were other writings that handled the 
issues very differently.
For the bulk of the writings, however, their characteristics, as has been 
suggested above, are entirely understandable when we consider not only the 
structural position of the oppressed African population as a whole in the 
South African social formation, but also the social position of the writers 
within the oppressed population. The bulk of them were either teachers or 
journalists or both, more often than not with an Anglican educational or 
religious background. It is understandable that they should express the 
predicament of the oppressed not in terms of what structurally produced it, 
but in terms of its implied opposite; white political and economic power and 
privilege. There lay the moral problem. The writing sharpened the moral 
sense which, under the circumstances, may have been the only effective way 
to validate and maintain the sense of legitimate political opposition. From 
this perspective, moral opposition should properly be regarded as both 
historically and politically apt.
If protest writing in the 1950s was in tune with protest politics, protest 
writing in the 1960s and 1970s was not entirely in tune with political 
developments. Protest politics effectively ends in 1968 with the establishment 
of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), and the Black 
Consciousness Movement (BCM).2 But protest writing, significantly, did not 
end with the end of protest politics. It simply assumed a different form of 
protest. Certainly, it reflected the militancy and confrontational attitude of 
the new movement, but while the new movement represented a decisively 
new political orientation, the writing that it inspired represented no 
remarkable contribution to literary figuration. The new writing did not 
appropriate the analytical sophistication of the BCM into its own handling 
of literary form.
The reason for this situation is not hard to find. The political analysis of 
the role of literature in the struggle for liberation did not go beyond the 
general agreement that literature must be committed. A rhetorical attitude 
toward literature was adopted which did not analytically spell out how 
literature could express its commitment. What we have, as a result, is protest 
literature that merely changed emphasis: from the moral evil of apartheid to 
the existential and moral worth of blackness, from moral indignation to 
anger, from relatively self-composed reasonableness to uncompromising 
bitterness, from the exterior manifestations of oppression to the interior 
psychology of that oppression. That may be why the bulk of the writing was
BEYOND ‘PROTEST’ 29
poetry. But while the poetry turns its attention towards the self, it is still very 
much conscious of the white ‘Other’. Although the new writing has begun to 
make a move away from that preoccupation with the Other, it is still rooted 
in the emotional and intellectual polarities of South African oppression as 
discussed above. And this is the point at which protest literature turns into a 
pathology: when the objective conditions no longer justify or support an
entirely emotional or moral attitude.
There is much to indicate that the structural position of the oppressed 
in South Africa had altered significantly, particularly from the time of the 
labour strikes that shook the country from 1973 onwards. The phenomena 
growth of the economy up to that time is clearly responsible for a significant 
change in relations of power between the oppressed and the oppressor. 
Increased industrialisation had enhanced the capacity of working people to 
assert their collective power. The intensity of the labour disputes, for example 
led eventually to the capitulation of the state to the demands for the lega 
unionisation of labour. Meanwhile the events of June 1976 also helped to 
consolidate the new relations of power. Clearly the structural position of the 
oppressed now was such that they could no longer be cowed into the kind of 
submission reminiscent of the 1950s. The inevitable growth and consolidation 
of this new power would definitely lead to the new general perceptions of 
what was possible. While the range of what was possible had been severely 
limited by the condition of powerlessness, now the newly found power could 
extend that range considerably in all kinds of directions. Suddenly, the 
possibilities are immense.
The rest of this essay is premised on the belief that the greatest challenge 
of the South African revolution is in the search for ways of thinking, ways of 
perception, that will help to break down the closed epistemological structures 
of South African oppression, structures which can severely compromise 
resistance by domination thinking itself. The challenge is to free the entire 
social imagination of the oppressed from the laws of perception that have 
characterised apartheid society. For writers this means freeing the creative 
process itself from those very laws. It means extending the writer’s perception 
of what can be written about, and the means and methods of writing.
It seems to me that we begin to formulate a redemptive approach when 
we as writers ask the question: where is the struggle in South Africa at the 
moment? Many events have led to that question. For example, the prolonged 
school boycott that began in 1976 has finally led to similar questions with 
regard to education: where do we go from here? What kind of education do
30 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
we want for the future? It is the momentum of events that has led inevitably 
to these questions. Such questions already suggest that the closed structures 
of thought under oppression have been cracked. Anything is now possible. 
Indeed, the possibilities of answering the questions are themselves 
infinitely vast.
It seems to me these are the most important questions that have been 
asked by our people in recent times, and they are questions that can only be 
fully answered from a full understanding of the position from which they are 
asked. They suggest that as far as education is concerned, the oppressed have 
reached a position at which an aspect of the structure of domination has, 
through their own actions, been rendered completely inoperative. A point 
has been reached, therefore, whereby the oppressed have now to ask themselves 
fundamental questions about their own future. In this case, the issue is no 
longer the moral condemnation of Bantu Education; rather, it is the creation 
of a new kind of education.
The significance of these questions is that they indicate the freeing of the 
social imagination from the constraints of attempting to envision the future 
under the limitations of oppression. The future is, at this point, a clean slate; 
a clean sheet of paper waiting to be written upon. It is a challenging yet 
daunting task, amenable to no easy answers, for it represents the very 
beginnings of a new society. The task of an alternative ideology, therefore, is 
to provide, among other things, new ways of thinking about the future of 
South Africa.
The starting point is the need and demand of the oppressed for liberation. 
The political imperatives of that demand are the positing of an alternative 
future followed by the seizure of state power. For the political activist, the 
task seems clear. For the producer of cultural artefacts, on the other hand, the 
situation may not be so clear because his role as well as that of his work, has 
not been so clearly defined. The South African writer, in particular, appears 
not to have begun to ask fundamental questions about his role, as well as 
that of his artistic practice. By and large, he appears not to have handed over 
this task to the political activist, who may not himself have articulated a 
comprehensively analytical position about the role of the arts in the struggle. 
This situation, it seems to me, has been responsible for much of the slow 
growth of South African literature.
The problem has been that questions about art and society have been 
easily settled after a general consensus about commitment. This has led to the 
prescription of solutions even before all the problems have been discovered
BEYOND ‘PROTEST’ 31
and analysed. The writer, as a result, has tended to plunge into the task of 
writing without fully grappling with the theoretical demands of that task in 
all its dimensions. Armed with notions of artistic commitment still constrained 
by outmoded protest-bound perceptions of the role of art and of what 
constitutes political relevance in art, the writer set about reproducing a dead 
end. Consequently, the limited range of explorable experience characteristic 
of writing under the protest ethos has continued to plague South African 
writing. We can perhaps begin to edge away from the situation by addressing 
the issue of the nature of art as well as the question of what constitutes relevance 
under a situation of radical flux.
One accusation that has often been levelled at writers, particularly in 
those countries hungry for radical change, is that many of them have not 
offered solutions to the problems they may have graphically described. It 
seems to me that this accusation has always revealed a certain confusion, on 
the part of the accusers, on what the nature of the relationship between art 
and society really is. More often than not, the accusation has been premised 
on the demand that artists produce works that will incite people to political 
action. That, we will all agree, is strictly speaking the task of the professional 
propagandist. The aims of the propagandist are immediate action: 
propagandist intentions are entirely practical.
The artist, on the other hand, although desiring action, often with as 
much passion as the propagandist, can never be free from the rules of irony. 
Irony is the literary manifestation of the principle of contradiction. Its 
fundamental property, for the literary arts in particular, is that everything 
involving human society is in a constant state of flux; that the dialectic between 
appearance and reality in the conduct of human affairs is always operative 
and constantly problematic, and that consequently, in the representation of 
human reality, nothing can be taken for granted. If writers have an ideological 
goal, and they always do, they have to reach that goal through a serious and 
inevitable confrontation with irony. They must earn their conclusions through 
the resulting sweat. And when they have won that battle, they will most likely 
leave us, the readers, more committed, but only on the necessary condition 
that we have been made to reflect deeply on the nature and implications of 
their commitment. The relationship between politics and art is by definition 
always mediated by reflection. We distinguish only between immediate action, 
on the one hand, and delayed action, on the other. We do not choose between 
politics and art; rather, we participate in the dialectic between them. To 
understand this is to understand the creative possibilities of both.
32 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
The way seems clear now for us to deal with the question of relevance. 
The more limited understanding of the relationship between politics and 
literature would define relevance as any subject or act that is perceived to 
contribute dramatically to the struggle for liberation. The operative word 
here is dramatic. What is dramatic is often defined according to the 
imperatives of realpolitik. The dramatic can easily be determined: strike 
action, demonstrations; alternatively, the brutality of the oppressive system. 
It should not be difficult to realise that the range of what is traditionally 
regarded as relevant is tragically limited in comparison to the complex 
structure of oppression itself. The system does not only send tanks into the 
townships. It does a lot more. It works at subtle co-optation; it tries to produce 
a middle class; it sets up a series of diplomatic initiatives; it seeks to create 
normality by insidiously spreading a hegemony that the oppressed are 
designed to accept willingly. It mobilises its own range of extra-governmental 
institutions in an attempt to impose and propagate its hegemony. For example, 
it will open up private schools to Africans where they can absorb a wide 
range of hegemonic practices that may ultimately not be in their own interest. 
In other words, the system responds as a total system.
Clearly, if it is the entire society that has to be re-created, then no aspect 
of society can be deemed irrelevant to the progress of liberation. Clearly, the 
broader the focus, the more inclusive, then the more multifold and more 
complex the attack. In this context, relevance, for the post-protest South 
African writer, begins, as it should, with the need for the seizure of state 
power, but this need, during the process of struggle, necessarily fragments 
into a concern with an infinite number of specific social details which 
constitute the primary reason why the struggle occurs in the first place, and 
why state power ought to be seized eventually.
However, and most paradoxically, for writers, the immediate problem, 
just at the point at which they sit down to write their novels, is not the 
seizure of power. Far from it. It is the single-minded focusing on a range of 
social conditions, most of which are left out of the purview of populist politics, 
which are the major ingredients of social consciousness. Otherwise, exclusion 
on the grounds of dramatic political statement will limit the possibilities of 
any revolution, by limiting its imagination.
What are the practical implications of all this? We have already seen 
how the structural status of the oppressed within the South African social 
formation has altered radically. The implications of this newly found power 
are the writer’s starting point. That power is clearly aware of itself, and that
BEYOND ‘PROTEST’ 33
self-consciousness seems destined to grow. But, judging from the fundamental 
questions being asked, that power is still not fully aware of what can actually 
be achieved with it. Details still have to be worked out. And this is where the 
writers’ role becomes crucial. It is their task to contribute effectively to the 
consolidation of that power by consolidating consciousness of it at all levels 
of society. They can do so in a number of ways.
To start with, there must be a freeing of the imagination in which what 
constitutes the field of relevance is extended considerably. What is relevant 
is the entire community of the oppressed. Politics is not only the seizure of 
state power, it is also the seizure of power in a women’s burial society in the 
township; it is the seizure of family power by children, thus altering drastically 
the nature of the family, something that might have tremendous implications 
for the new society to be born.
This issue is so important that a few more examples should be given. 
Firstly, for a highly industrialised society such as South Africa, there is a 
tragic paucity of imaginative re-creations of the confrontations between the 
oppressed and the tools of science. Supposing a character wants to study 
science, what goes on in his mind when he makes that decision? What is his 
vision of the social role of scientific endeavour? Turgenev, for example, in 
Fathers and Sons provides a compelling view of the impact of the scientific 
method on human behaviour. Alternatively, what kind of relationships are 
created between a worker in a factory and his machine? The answer to this 
question is not necessarily obvious. Will he necessarily feel oppressed and 
alienated, as traditional wisdom would assume? There is much to suggest 
that this confrontation is much more problematic than is traditionally thought.
Secondly, we have, for better or for worse, a group of politicians in the 
so-called independent countries of South Africa. Stooges, no doubt. But what 
are the intricacies of their flawed diplomatic practice? We have no literature 
of diplomacy which can reveal the human dimension to the barrenness of 
this kind of politics. It behoves an artist to help the reader bury the stooges 
while understanding something of their motivations. That way the reader 
learns something about the psychology of the co-opted. The aesthetics of 
protest would be content to kill off the stooge, thus enacting what might be 
necessary, but leaving us with no knowledge.
Thirdly, the pressures of modern life on family life have been immense. 
We know the causes: migrant labour, influx control laws and a variety of 
others. Protest literature has done a commendable job in keeping these causes 
in our minds. But what has happened to the family itself? If the ethical codes
34 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
that governed family relationships have been changed, what have they become, 
and how have the new codes helped to bring about either relief or more 
misery?
Fourthly, the energetic and creative world of sport and fashion has seldom 
been treated beyond the sensationalism of the popular press. Since Mphahlele’s 
‘Grieg on a Stolen Piano’, that particular theme has not received much 
imaginative attention. Lastly, I have commented in the past about the lack of 
compelling imaginative re-creations of rural life in our literature (1984). All 
we know about are dejected peasants, suffering pathetically under a tyrannical 
Boer farmer. Alternatively, the peasants are the focus of Christian evangelism. 
Beyond these two examples, the settings as well as the themes are infinite.
One other way the South African writer can move effectively into the 
post-protest era is, in certain circumstances, by working towards a radical 
displacement of the white oppressor as an active, dominant player in the 
imagination of the oppressed. This tactical absence will mean that the writer 
can consolidate the sense of a viable, psychologically self-sufficient community 
among the oppressed. This attitude can only work, though, if the writer 
genuinely believes in the oppressed, in the first instance, as makers of the 
future. This implies a radical rearrangement of the dialectical poles. Where 
the thesis was the oppressor, it is now the oppressed confidently introducing 
new definitions of the future to which the oppressor will have of necessity to 
respond. The latter, no longer having the power nor the intellectual capability 
to initiate necessary redemptive action, has to be relegated to the reactive 
pole of the dialectic. He is no longer in possession of the initiative.
Finally, there must be an accompanying change of discourse from the 
rhetoric of oppression to that of process and exploration. This would imply 
an open-endedness in the use of language, a search for originality of expression 
and a sensitivity to dialogue. The complexity of the day-to-day problems of 
living in fact coincides with the demands of creativity. As the writers begin 
working on that story, they may not know where it is going, and how it is 
going to get somewhere, but they have to find a way. That means a search 
for appropriate form and technique, which would enable them to grasp the 
complexity and render it understandable.
Earlier, in my discussion of the mine dispute, I made reference to the 
fact that at least 100 000 people were dismissed by the mine management. It 
is the silent 100 000 that our writers must also turn their attention to. I use 
this issue analogically, of course. The operative principle of composition in 
post-protest literature is that it should probe beyond the observable facts, to
BEYOND ‘PROTEST’ 35
reveal new worlds where it was thought they did not exist, and to reveal 
process and movement where they were hidden. This way, the social 
imagination of the oppressed can be extended considerably and made ready 
in concrete terms to deal with the demands of a complex future. The aim is 
to extend the range of personal and social experience as far as possible in 
order to contribute to bringing about a highly conscious, sensitive new person 
in a new society. This, it seems to me, is the function of art in, and its 
contribution to, the ongoing revolution in South Africa. It means that writers 
have to develop a range of artistic techniques that will enable them to grasp 
the complexity and render it understandable. All this would appear to indicate 
that probably the novel, because of its ability to explore any chosen human 
perspective fully and comprehensively, is the only art form that can encompass 
the range of problems before us, organising them into a comprehensible
totality.
These suggestions, it should be stated, are put forward not as laws, but 
as possible guidelines by which our writers can conduct a debate and bring 
to bear further analysis on the tasks of writers and the role of their art in the 
unfolding revolution in South Africa. The tasks themselves are immense and 
challenging, and vigorous discussion of them will, in itself, I believe, be a 
significant act of freedom.
NOTES
1. Although miners outside the Bantustans have access to trade union 
organisations, those working in Bophuthatswana still cannot legally 
form unions.
2. Of course, the major liberation movements, the ANC and the PAC, in 
opting for the armed struggle immediately following their banning in 
1961, declared the end of the politics of protest. But, at the time, that 
new approach did not have a lasting impact in the country.
3 AFRICAN STUDIES AND 
THE AFRICAN IDENTITY
An Essay on the Theory o f Culture
Dele Layiwola
The inauguration of African Studies Associations, the proliferation of 
Africanist institutes and centres is a sine qua non for the study and appreciation 
of African history, literature, art, music, anthropology, archaeology, drama 
or dance. This is because the existence of institutions is necessary to foster the 
development of knowledge in particular, as well as, in diverse disciplines. It is 
particularly noteworthy to observe that decades after the formation of African 
studies forums in Britain and America, institutions are responding to their 
activities by establishing African programmes within their frameworks and 
curricula. What we should therefore tackle at the present time is the problem 
of theory and methodology. When disciplines are established and studied 
outside their home bases, there exists the possibility that such disciplines may 
be studied askew. This possibility is more apparent when indigenous languages 
and traditions are crucial elements of culture. My preoccupation in this paper, 
therefore, will be to highlight ingredients of culture, especially as disciplines 
of knowledge, and conceptualise them as identity-specific materials. In this 
way I hope to be able to show how learning and culture are ways of life 
indicative of specific identities. This can then serve as a beginning, a foundation 
for ascribing methods and theories to indices of culture. Studies of this kind 
are necessary now that much of African artefacts and skills are being gradually 
domesticated in cultures other than theirs.
SCHOLARSHIP AS H EGEM ONY
What indeed is African studies in relation to the idea of an African identity? 
In other words what is the raison d’etre for the development of African studies
37
38 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
and identity? In my view, the need to establish an African identity within the 
melange begs for no justification. It is obvious because it is its own reason. 
Therefore instead of seeking to define the already obvious, we can identify 
issues, problematise them and either rationalise or solve them. One of the 
most popular and profitable backdrops against which the analysis of African 
affairs are often predicated is colonialism. As Afigbo and others have affirmed: 
‘It was not one of the aims of colonialism to preserve the cultural identity of 
subject peoples. In fact the opposite was the case’ (Afigbo 1981:384; Awe 
1991:5-6). Worse still, where colonialism has undermined or destroyed the 
basis of African traditions, economy and identity, it has produced no reliable 
substitute for the stability of the social and political life of Africans.
Earlier in the last century, about 1915, one of those who felt that new 
studies must begin on the Africanist question so that we can re-establish a 
new identity was W.E.B. Du Bois. Though he realised that he was incapacitated 
by field work and data, he nevertheless wrote in the preface to his monograph, 
The Negro:
_  . , .
The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro
peoples. Archaeological research in Africa has just begun, and
many sources of information in Arabian, Portuguese and other
tongues are not fully at our command; and, too, it must frankly
be confessed, racial prejudice against darker peoples is still too
strong in so-called civilised centres for judicial appraisement of
the peoples of Africa. Much intensive monographic work in
history and science is needed to clear mooted points and quiet
the controversialist who mistakes present personal desire for
scientific proof. (1970:3)
The passage I have just quoted is of historical interest since Du Bois wrote 
this nearly a century ago, at a time when it was fashionable to say whether 
research and knowledge was adequate or not on Africa. In those days, Du 
Bois and his fellows were the pioneers.
However, today the reality is still as grim as ever. Africa remains a 
continent of sharp contrasts and myths; of inspiration and tragic events; of 
drought and plenty; of facts and fiction. Today, there is sufficient research 
on Africa, there are enough resources and knowledge to illuminate its dark 
areas but the prejudices have also increased tenfold. In spite of the amount 
of research and knowledge that there is on Africa and its peoples there are
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 39
many who write about universal theories and histories and exclude Africa 
from the records. There are those who are still avidly in search of the dark 
continent and the ‘typical negro’. But how can one discount the heritage of 
Carthage and Ethiopia, the civilisation of Egypt and Zimbabwe? The fact 
that this is a continuous possibility makes ‘Africa at once the most romantic 
and at the same time the most tragic of continents’ (ibid.:5). As a factual 
digression, it is interesting to note that as late as the 1970s some of the most 
prominent writers of Africa discovered that established institutions or key 
individuals in England and America ‘did not believe in any such mythical 
beast as “African Literature’”  (Soyinka 1976:vii). Is there any surprise, 
therefore, that the existence of an African civilisation is vaguely denied? Let 
us assume that we have moved slightly beyond this. But the foregoing is 
indicative of two facts:
i. That research and scholarship in culture are highly necessary for the 
advancement of particular civilisations.
ii. That each cultural area needs the support of sympathetic, unbiased 
researchers as well as the environment for its own advancement.
In an attempt to define these claims, I should like to cite the extent to which 
scholarship and research could wield a hegemony. In the summer of 1954 
Mallory Wober recorded that a collaborative research began between Dr 
R.F.A.Dean and Dr (Ms) Geber at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. 
Mulago had been one of the research centres where research was focused on 
kwashiorkor in infants. Dr Dean, the Director of the Medical Research 
Council’s Infantile Malnutrition Unit, contacted the World Health 
Organisation to ask for someone who could carry out a study on the 
psychological effects of kwashiorkor on children. Dr Dean, from Britain, 
organised the appointment of Dr Gebei; from France, who had been the 
Director of the Child Guidance Clinics at Aisne, near Paris.
When Dr Geber arrived in Kampala, she decided that to understand the 
problems of kwashiorkor, it might be necessary to first study the development 
of normal African infants from birth. From the first 37 infants Geber tested, 
she writes that ‘it was immediately obvious that the distribution of muscle 
tone in the African child differed from that of the European’ (Wober 1975:3). 
In European children, the ‘Moro reflex’ in response to shock was a little 
more pronounced that in the African child. The Kampala children often ha 
wide open eyes, and a ‘lively look’. An unusually precocious action was seen
40 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
in a day-old child who, at birth, had received a slight scalp wound; it 
continually fingered the bandage over the wound. In all, Geber tested 107 
Ugandan children and discovered precocity in all of them.
The first hypothesis for explaining this was tentatively to attribute it 
either to altitude (since Kampala was about 1 200 metres above sea level) or 
to climate. It was thereby thought that European or Indian children born in 
Kampala would also give similar evidence of precocity. When, however, they 
were tested, the ‘European children gave the same results that were found in 
Europe and the Indian children gave almost similar results’ (ibid.:4). This 
ruled out altitude and climate as factors responsible for precocity in African 
infants. Attention was then turned to other factors of material diet, attitudes 
and other unresearched factors.
All these factors were tested to no avail, and attention had to be directed 
to the social class and background of the babies, and the attitude of mothers 
to their pregnancies.
Geber and Dean expanded the scope of their research to 183 infants, 
having realised that the children tested better in their natural social 
environments than when they were artificially isolated for the process of 
experiment. Wober further notes: N X
From this testing ‘Gesell quotients’ [analogous to intelligence 
quotients in the way they are calculated, but based on what 
Gesell found to be normal standards for American whites in 
the 1930s] were calculated. For 33 infants aged six months or 
less, quotients ranged from 100 to 345 (for motor development) 
and 300 (for verbal or vocal development). By a year old the 
highest quotients were around 150; between two and three years 
old, among 36 children, motor activity quotients up to 137, 
language development quotients up to 130, and none less than 
100 were reported. (Ibid.:5)
Though the research samples were in no way representative of all African, 
nor even of all Ugandans, the striking element was that the experiments 
were confirmed in parallel experiments carried out in Senegal. When Geber 
and Dean could not find a proven explanation for the precocity of African 
infants, they concluded that it probably had a genetic basis. A lot of 
controversy has since attended Geber’s thesis. It is probably wise to say that 
genetically or racially determined values are not always fashionable. It might
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 41
be that the advantage that African infants have is determined by cultural or 
attitudinal values which are yet to be discovered. But now we have come to 
the crux of the matter. Would there have been much controversy if the 
experiments had discovered the same values in favour of white infants? 
Probably not; because in 1969 something happened. Some Western 
researchers had become uneasy over scientific, clinical experiments that had 
found that black children get a better ‘head start’ in life than white children. 
Worse still, the thesis was confirmed by white researchers themselves. Instead 
of those researchers proposing a requisite, equally scientific, explanation 
based on Geber’s findings, they resorted to racist insinuations. I shall quote 
Mallory Wober for the last time:
For in 1969 a widespread controversy arose in Western countries 
following an article by Professor Arthur Jensen of Berkeley 
University, California. It was pointed out by some protagonists 
that it was characteristic of subhuman primates that their 
offspring matured more rapidly than among humans; and the 
insinuation was made, using reference to Geber’s results, that 
because their infants were precocious, Africans were genetically 
substandard compared with other types of humans. It is 
important to note that Madame Geber herself denies this 
interpretation of her results, which only arose at third hand 
following a phrase which inadvertently appeared in this one 
only of her many publications. (Ibid:5-6)
There is absolutely no doubt that humanistic research and scholarship are 
often generally not the impersonal medium that they are supposed to be. 
Arthur Jensen is among those Du Bois referred to as ‘the controversialist 
who mistakes present personal desire for scientific proof’. Even in the so- 
called ‘progressive’ or left-wing literatures of Western thought, there are 
abundant occasions of embarrassing racist references which will tell the 
Africanist that he needs his own forum. Karl Marx once described the black 
people of Algeria thus:
... out of all the inhabitants, it is most likely the Moors who 
least deserve any respect. As city-dwellers they are more inclined 
to luxury than the Arabs and the Kabyles and, on account of 
the constant oppression of the Turkish governors, they are a
42 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 6c CULTURE
timid race which has, notwithstanding, preserved its cruel and 
vindictive character while being of a very low moral level. 
(Quoted in Ladimeji 1974:40)
Friedrich Engels, M arx’s right-hand man, is no better. He believes the brutal 
victory of the French over the Algerians, was a progressive event:
The conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact of 
the progress of civilisation ... And, after all, the modern 
bourgeois, with civilisation, industry, order, and at least relative 
enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord 
or the marauding robber with the barf ’ of society to
which they belong. (Quoted in ibid.)
If Engels defended brutal colonisation and colonialism in Algeria, there is 
every reason to believe that he would defend the same in Nigeria, Ghana, 
Zimbabwe or any other colony. He even went further to say that highly
developed forms of thought such as mathematical axioms could only be for
Europeans, and certainly not for Bushmen and Australian Negroes (ibid.:40). 
I make bold to say that if Engels had the chance, he would say the same 
thing for other intellectual forms of thought such as history, literature, 
geography, art or philosophy. I must however admit that their racist gibes 
apart, much of their work illuminates the understanding of historical 
development.
THE NEED FOR A NATIO NAL CULTURE
All that I have concluded so far is that Africanists at the present time do not 
only need an association; they need a forum as well as a frontier to articulate 
a world view. This will help to fashion a national culture, and if possible, a 
continental lingua franca. A heterogeneous but uniform culture and a shared 
linguistic medium, as we know from experience, helps solidarity and the 
idea of a common destiny. Let us quickly admit that as Africans we are 
inheritors of a great civilisation, but today the civilisations of Mali and Songhai 
lie buried under the sands of the Sahara, and much of what we now have to 
show for them consists in war, famine, hunger and drought. Lest we forget, 
these matters have been complicated by the lack of any purposeful leadership 
before the end of the twentieth century. In this respect if we recount our past
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 43
achievements, it is also well to record our present lack of achievements. One 
can affirm, without fear of contradiction, that the present-day intelligentsia 
realise that something is lost to the past which they must go back to re­
discover. There is an African history somewhere which we have not been 
able to find but in which lies the key to the future.
I do not need to re-emphasise here the disillusionment of our people 
with Structural Adjustment Programmes and the rest of them -  monetised 
economy, modernisation of poverty, and so on. The truth to all this is that 
colonialism, whether in the earlier forms or in its new attempts, can only 
foist on its outposts an artificially structured economy. In itself, it is a violent 
phenomenon capable of a growth which is outwardly directed, but lacking 
in genuine development. There will be more money in circulation but more 
poverty because the currencies in circulation carry little value. Echoes of this 
kind of situation are found in theories of the Martiniquan thinker and culture 
enthusiast, Frantz Fanon, and he writes:
I admit that all the proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilisation 
will not change the fact that today the Songhais are underfed 
and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads 
and empty eyes. But it has been remarked several times that 
this passionate search for a national culture which existed before 
the colonial era finds its legitimate reason in the anxiety shared 
by native intellectuals to shrink away from that Western culture 
in which they all risk being swamped. (1978:168)
By its very nature, colonialism does not only enslave people in a new way of 
life, it also seeks to convince them that they have no past worthy of exhibition. 
Once it has misrepresented that past, the neo-colonial state is cut off from 
that fountain of history and its citizens are set adrift in a disembodied era. 
Once there is no past, and the present unstable, institutions can hardly thrive 
or develop. Indeed colonial domination sets out to discredit a culture in such 
a way as to convince its owners that their whole history has been one dark 
patch on the world from which they must seek redemption. Fet me illustrate 
with one concrete example. At the inception of the colonial adventure, African 
artists were great carvers of wood and stone, and smelters of bronze for 
upwards of ten centuries. The skill had reached such a stage of perfection 
that explorers and missionaries were astounded by the civilisation they met. 
Because these works had a high degree of consistency, it could no longer be
44 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
denied that the art was indigenous (Eyo 1977:100). Besides, it proved that a 
great civilisation had indeed flourished before colonisation began. Countless 
works of wood were committed to bonfires by ‘missionaries’ sometimes in 
an attempt to destroy the material evidence of such a civilisation. But because 
the skill and the tradition had become entrenched, the more they burned, 
the more were produced. Nearly a century after these events, and long 
convinced that the evidence of those civilisations could not be destroyed, 
the colonists now began the avid acquisition of these works.
Today the best of African art works lie in European and American 
museums, and the ones left in private hands have become the target of 
speculators and quacks whose only appreciation of art lies in how much 
money it can yield. No sooner had African plastic arts rivalled the best in 
Hellenic and Roman civilisations than the likes of Arthur Jensen of Berkeley 
began to liken precocity to primitivity and to tribality. The British art collector 
and critic, William Fagg, began a subtly racist campaign against the precocity 
of African Art (ibid.:38; Fagg 1963a). He began to call them names, referring 
to them as ‘images’, and further desecrated them by referring to them as '  
‘tribal art’. To Fagg, anything he could not understand in the tradition of 
European Art tradition did not qualify as modern art; rather it was tribal 
art. Well, the only thing humble critics like ourselves could have asked our 
Eurocentric critic was why he continued to acquire more of such art he 
gleefully called ‘tribal’ for the British Museum. Why would he not continue 
to acquire the art of his own environment in the same proportions? We have 
suffered for too long at the hands of prejudiced critics of African studies to 
allow them exclusive control of the field. The recent formation of an African 
Studies Association in Nigeria is as necessary as it was a little over three 
decades ago; Fanon noted of the African Cultural Society:
This Society had been created by African intellectuals who 
wished to get to know each other and to compare their 
experiences and the results of their respective research work. 
The aim of this Society was therefore to affirm the existence of 
an African Culture, to evaluate this culture on the plane of 
distinct nations and to reveal the internal motive forces of each 
of their national cultures. But at the same time, this Society 
fulfilled another need: the need to exist side by side with the 
European Cultural Society, which threatened to transform itself 
into a universal cultural society. There was therefore at the
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 45
bottom of this decision the anxiety to be present at the universal 
trysting place fully armed, with a culture springing from the 
very heart of the African continent...
If it is not accomplished there will be serious psycho­
affective injuries and the result will be individuals without an 
anchor, without a horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless -  a 
race of angels. (1978:172-75)
THE LANGUAGE QUESTION
There are some intellectuals who believe that the determination of a true 
national culture depends on whether or not Africa could achieve a lingua 
franca, and make a clean break from the languages of Europe. Even if this 
desire were considered extreme, there was a point to be made nevertheless. 
Soon after the Second World Wai; the University of London set up overseas 
colleges in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Sierra Leone. 
The various departments of English taught the history of English Literature 
and the great traditions of the English language. Naturally, the literatures 
of the ‘native’ countries were considered inferior, especially as they were 
largely oral and bereft of a written tradition. The great dilemma for the 
African student, therefore, was to trace approximations in his own literature 
from the dominant mainstream literature of the West. Apart from a cultural 
alienation of the African elite being reared in such contexts, there was also 
the problem of what Fanon had earlier described as the ‘serious psycho­
affective injuries’ which the ‘native’ might suffer from the assault of an 
alien culture.
Of course, we must not lose sight of the positive possibilities that this 
might equally engender through the medium of positive action. In this respect, 
a number of innovative students and scholars are likely to write their own 
literatures in the accepted or given traditions of the dominant literatures. 
Whilst we have suffered from the disadvantages of a colonial education, we 
have been able to wring some positive consequences from it as well.
Once this problem was highlighted, reactions to it have been in two 
forms, generally speaking. The first had been to advocate the teaching and 
writing of African literatures in the indigenous languages of Africa rather 
than in the metropolitan languages of Europe. The first salvo came from 
David Diop, in 1956, and he writes:
46 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
The African creator, deprived of the use of his language and cut 
off from his people, might turn out to be only the representative 
of a literary trend and that is not necessarily the least gratuitous 
of the conquering nation. His works, having become a perfect 
illustration of the assimilationist policy through imagination and 
style, will doubtless rouse the warm applause of a certain group 
of critics. In fact, these praises will go mostly to colonialism which, 
when it can no longer keep its subjects in slavery, transforms them 
into docile intellectuals patterned after Western literary fashions 
which, besides, is another more subtle form of bastardisation. 
(Quoted in Ngugi 1987:25)
In an article in Transition in 1963, Obi Wali declared that the uncritical 
acceptance of English and French as the medium of educated writing in Africa 
is largely misdirected and that it will not advance the cause of African literature 
and culture. He further affirms that until African literatures are written in 
African languages, African writers are merely pursuing a dead end (ibid.).
If one realises that language and religious ideology (or faith) are two 
great cultural routes to the soul of any ethnic group or race, then one would 
realise the gravity of what those gentlemen are advocating. It is not an 
exaggeration to say that language and faith (whether as religion or ideology) 
have remained at the fountain-springs of the colonialist onslaught. In response 
to this call, the Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o decided from about 1980 
or so that he would no longer write in any other than the Kikuyu language, 
his mother tongue, and the one indigenous language he knows very well. 
Accordingly, he called on all other African writers to do the same so that the 
English, French, Portuguese or Spanish versions of those works would be 
translations. This is crucial because, for him:
Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through 
orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come 
to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people 
perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their 
politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire 
relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus 
inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with 
a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific 
relationship to the world. (Ibid.:16)
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 47
He further observes that in order to control a people’s economic and political 
life, colonialism mentally alienated them from their language and culture.
The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: 
what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was 
distributed, to control, in other words, the entire realm of the 
language of real life ... But its most important area of domination 
was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through 
culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship 
to the world ... To control a people’s culture is to control their 
tools of self-definition in relationship to others. (Ibid.)
The second form of reaction to the language and culture question was 
somewhat more variegated. It consisted largely in the founding of various 
departments of African languages and literatures which would, in turn, 
intensify the intellectual study and analyses of African languages and oral 
literature, as well as new forms of literary writings. The names of African 
writers and philosophers now appeared on the college curricula and a new 
historiography complemented what used to be ‘imported’ forms of African 
history. Along with this new awareness came the formation of the Institutes 
of African Studies, Centres of Cultural Studies and other research and 
documentation centres on African culture and tradition. The Institutes of 
African Studies were supposed to focus on field research, collect new data 
and preserve various forms of African culture for documentation as well as 
for analysis. It was realised at the time that knowledge in the conventional 
departments within the humanities was too Eurocentric to make a lasting 
model of an African personality and identity. We are all witnesses to the little 
that those efforts have been able to achieve so far. For me, the language 
question goes beyond a mere lingua franca; the furthest implications of what 
Ngugi advocates will be the invention of a mode of discourse in speech, 
writing and cultural communication.
PHILOSOPHY AND NATURAL SCIENCE
I feel inclined to make a few clarifications and remarks on the relevance of 
philosophy and natural science to the development or evolution of culture. 
It will be recalled that I earlier quoted Friedrich Engels where he writes that 
Bushmen, that is Africans, and other black peoples are incapable of highly
48 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
developed forms of thought such as mathematical axioms, and by implication, 
science. Such racist views have been used in the past as a subtle but potent 
form of mental conditioning to discourage developing nations from aspiring 
to scientific research and advanced technology. The tragedy of this kind of 
mental conditioning is that it has actually dissuaded many African leaders 
from pursuing an independent policy on scientific development. Hence they 
rely on the West to transfer technology and science to them. So we are used 
to hearing such phrases as ‘the transfer of technology’.
There certainly can be no such thing as the transfer of technology. No 
nation will gladly give up her hard-earned ideas of science and development 
gratis. Technology is never given out; it is either built or derived according 
to the peculiarities of one’s own culture. Let it also be affirmed that science 
and technology, like civilisation, is not the exclusive preserve of any one 
race or culture; it is the heritage of the whole of humanity. There is always, 
however, a flourishing culture of art, architecture, drama, music and literature 
that precedes the evolution of science and a flourishing technology. Without 
the art and culture of the Greek and Romans, there would have been no 
Western science and technology as we know it today.
It will also be found that those who discount African races as incapable 
of technological development often foist the mystery of magic and fetish on 
the black man. We must here affirm, without equivocation, that all human 
cultures possess a history of magic, fetish or witchcraft, and the practice of 
religion and soothsaying. What other advanced (particularly Western) 
cultures have done is to advance the rudiments of magic into science. Here 
is a convincing example: it was generally believed in medieval times that 
witches flew like aeroplanes, or on broomsticks. It was also believed that 
they had inimical powers against human beings and other natural elements. 
The Church and the state therefore legislated against witchcraft, the most 
important ecclesiastical directive being granted by Pope Innocent VII in 1484. 
The use of torture to extract confessions was legitimised, providing what 
was taken to be convincing evidence of guilt; these confessions confirmed 
the superstitions of the ignorant. At times witch-hunting became a mania, 
and the climax came in England, Scotland and America in the seventeenth 
century. Great numbers of people were cruelly put to death, commonly by 
burning. It was reported, however, that by the early eighteenth century people 
had become sceptical. In 1736, therefore, all legislation against witches was 
repealed in England and Scotland (Longman Encyclopaedic Dictionary 
1980).
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 49
If the imagination of people could invent flying witches even when they did 
not see them, and would tie them to the stake and burn them so long as they 
confessed what nobody witnessed or confirmed; then why could machines 
not be invented to fly as aeroplanes? Where such great ideas are treated as 
myth and metaphysics, they remain in the human imagination and in dreams. 
But where they are reduced to technological principles and material science, 
they manifest as machines in flight. Science explains the world in principles; 
myth and magic rationalise it. In both instances, however, the material medium 
is culture. I would have liked to take up here in more lengthy disquisition the 
arrogant, racist abuse of Hume and Hegel that Africans are inferior to whites 
Hegel 1956:91-99; Ngugi 1987:18) but in the face of a balanced 
philosophical position by Placide Tempels, I beg to be allowed to quote
Tempels at length (1959:40-41):
For the Bantu there is interaction of being with being, that 
is to say of force with force. Transcending the mechanical, 
chemical and psychological interactions, they see a 
relationship of forces which we should call ontological. In 
the created force (a contingent being) the Bantu sees a causal 
action emanating from the very nature of that created force 
and influencing other forces. One force will reinforce or 
weaken another. This causality is in no way supernatural 
in the sense of going beyond the proper attributes of created 
nature. It is, on the contrary, a metaphysical action which 
flows out of the very nature of a created being. General 
knowledge of these activities belongs to the realm of natural 
knowledge and constitutes philosophy properly so called. 
The observation of the action of these forces in their specific 
concrete applications would constitute Bantu Natural 
Science.
This interaction of beings has been denoted by the word 
‘magic’. If it is desired to keep the term, it must be modified 
so that it is understood in conformity with the content of 
Bantu thought. In what Europeans call ‘primitive magic’ 
there is, to primitive eyes, no operation of supernatural, 
indeterminate forces, but simply the interaction between 
natural forces, as they were created by God and as they 
were put by him at the disposal of men.
50 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
In their studies of magic, authors distinguish ‘imitative 
magic’, ‘sympathetic magic’, ‘contagious magic’, ‘magic of 
expressed desire’, etc. Whatever the resemblance, contact, or 
the expression of desire, does not arise out of the essence of 
what is indicated by magic, that is to say, the interaction of 
creatures. The very fact that there should have been recourse to 
different terms to distinguish the ‘kinds’ of magic, proves that 
any attempt to penetrate to the real nature of magic has been 
given up in favour of a classification in terms of secondary 
characters only.
The child, even the adult, remains always for the Bantu a 
man, a force, in causal dependence and ontological 
subordination to the forces which are his father and mother.
The older force ever dominates the younger. It continues to 
exercise its living influence over it. This is said to give a first 
example of the Bantu conception in accordance with which the 
‘beings-forces’ of the universe are not a multitude of independent 
forces placed in juxtaposition from being to being ... Nothing 
moves in this universe of forces without influencing other forces 
by its movement. The world of forces is held like a spider’s web 
of which no single thread can be caused to vibrate without 
shaking the whole network.
It has been maintained that ‘beings’ only acquire ‘power’ 
to act upon other beings or forces through the intervention of 
spirits and manes. This contention emanates from European 
observers; it does not exist in the minds of Africans. The dead 
intervene on occasion to make known to the living the nature 
and quality of certain forces, but they do not thereby change 
that nature at those qualities which are preordained as belonging 
to that force. Africans expressly say that creatures are forces, 
created by God as such; and that the intervention of spirits or 
manes changes nothing: such changes are a white man’s idea.
That another philosopher from the same cultural milieu as Hume and Hegel 
has done so much advocacy in the explication of African philosophy and 
science leaves us only to excuse the ignorance of those racist philosophical 
exponents who have chosen to pervert their talents and substitute personal 
sentiments for scientific facts.
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE AFRICAN IDENTITY 51
TOWARDS AN AFRICANIST RENAISSANCE
The fact that African studies have taken root in alien cultures which have 
hitherto remained hostile is a mark of the fact that it has something to 
contribute to world civilisation. The test of its lasting value is borne out by 
the endurance it has shown in the African diaspora and the New World. 
There is therefore little doubt that scholars and artists will continue to take 
African Studies very seriously, even at the risk of stretching their point. I 
believe that much of African thought and traditions are still waiting to be 
collected, documented and analysed in the field. The real need to derive the 
genuine interpretation of available data will therefore attract more and more 
indigenous scholars who know the culture first hand. It will also attract 
genuine, honest researchers, whatever their circumstances of birth or 
nationality. My feeling here is fairly well captured by another Africanist of
the present generation. He writes:
I believe that in the years to come, African art will take on new 
dimensions that no one has yet imagined -  discussions that will 
not only connect it more fully and effectively with cognate 
academic disciplines but will also fulfil many of the yearnings 
and aspirations of distinguished scholars in the field. Present 
interest in the exploration of African art through ‘sight’ and 
‘sound’ will include the element of ‘soul’. By this I mean that 
the current conventional anthropological and art-historical 
approaches -  which emphasise direct representational reaction 
and formal analysis to the detriment of culturally based studies 
in aesthetics and art criticism -  will make full use of the 
philosophies of African peoples.
There will be renewed interest in field research, but this 
time around, the role and involvement of African scholars will 
be much greater. The goal will be to interpret African art from 
inside the culture that gave it birth rather than from outside. In 
a bid to allow the culture to speak for itself, scholars will give 
more credibility and importance to primary sources, which 
consist mainly of oral traditions, than to secondary sources, 
which may have become authoritative simply because they were 
in print. Oral traditions will become a highly efficient means of 
studying culture, retrieving history, and reconstructing artistic
52 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
values. Used properly, oral traditions will reveal forgotten 
meanings that would be hard or even impossible to obtain from 
the most co-operative informant. The recognition of how 
important African languages and literatures are to the 
understanding of African art will lead to a reconsideration of 
many ‘closed’ issues, theoretical frameworks, and artistic 
concepts, a redefinition of much terminology; and a reappraisal 
of the present style and techniques of displaying African art 
objects in museums and exhibition halls. I believe that these 
changes will mark the beginning of a truly interdisciplinary study 
and lay the foundation of a joint search for those values and 
concepts which lie behind the creation of African art. (Abiodun 
1990:64)
All we need do is substitute the word ‘art’ with the word ‘studies’ in the 
above quotation, and the message and the vision remains the same. It is my 
fervent belief that the inauguration of African Studies Associations and allied 
institutions is a healthy development. It is the beginning of a new Africanist 
advance in this field.
NOTE
This paper was first delivered as a Keynote Address at the Inaugural Meeting 
of the African Studies Association of Nigeria (ASAN), Institute of African 
Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 30 October 1992.
p a r t  T W O a
--------------------
s .
Methodology and Approach
4 RECORDING AND 
DISSEMINATION OF 
TRADITIONAL 
MUSIC
J.H. Kwabena Nketia
The initiative taken by the Western world to re cord, preserve, promote and
disseminate knowledge of traditional music, cultivated in various parts of 
the world, is a remarkable achievement of the twentieth century. It has brought 
new challenges not only to the music public but also to creative musicians, 
performers, educators and administrators, while the modern recording 
technology, field methodology, approaches to documentation and archiving 
that have facilitated the growth and development of this initiative now make 
it possible for this task to be undertaken by competent members of the societies 
whose musical cultures have long been the object of field expeditions by 
Western researchers and collectors. With the growing consciousness of non­
Western peoples in the treasures of their cultural heritage and their eagerness 
to safeguard them, one can look forward to a time when recordings of 
traditional music will increasingly become a local or regional initiative within 
the framework of national policies for education, culture and development 
that take into account local needs and goals, as well as the challenges of 
inter-cultural communication and international cultural exchange.
This progression can be accelerated by new modes of collaboration and 
the adoption of a number of transitional measures that can facilitate the 
launching of new initiatives, the provision of technical and cultural assistance 
in programme planning and implementation, reciprocity in acquisition and 
dissemination of materials, and the establishment of individual and 
institutional networks, as well as strategies of co-ordination on national, 
regional and international levels in order to ensure optimum utilisation of 
resources and the successful outcome of field research.
55
56 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
RESEARCHERS AND CO LLECTO RS
The making of field recordings of traditional music on a systematic basis has 
never been the monopoly of any one group of field workers, although this is 
not always readily conceded by researchers. Shortly after ethno-musicology 
emerged as a successor to comparative musicology, some of our French 
colleagues stated that they preferred to be identified as scholars engaged in 
musical folklore rather than ethno-musicology. This was because at the height 
of the new folk-song movement, many folk-song enthusiasts and 
entrepreneurs were going around the countryside with tape recorders and 
calling themselves ethno-musicologists. It seemed critical to the scholars to 
keep to the old-fashioned term ‘musical folklore’ in order to emphasise that 
their goals were scholarly. To them and, indeed, to other scholars, field 
recordings were first and foremost musicological documents or sources of 
ethnological data, while for the new folk-song enthusiasts they served only 
as performance and creative models and sources of listening pleasure.
Western colleagues in African area studies who held a similar view of 
recordings as musicological or ethnological documents did not always see 
eye to eye with collectors like Hugh Tracey, the great pioneer in the recording 
and dissemination of the music of Africa. They criticised his ‘White Knight’ 
approach, his field methodology and sometimes the kind of items he selected 
for dissemination, for it seemed to many that his objective was the sampling 
of African music for broadcasting and listening pleasure rather than the 
creating of ethnological documents, although he himself was sure that he 
was doing both.
Hugh Tracey in turn took a dim view of the so-called scholars, and now 
and then made sly digs at them in his editorials and commentaries (1963,1966/ 
67, 1972). Inspired by the example of Cecil Sharp and encouraged by the 
enthusiasm of Gustav Holst and Vaughan Williams, he strongly believed 
that priority must be given to the building of libraries of recordings that 
would make the music of Africa accessible to those who could not experience 
it at first hand. Having traversed many territories and recorded many 
musicians, most of them for the first time, he believed that sensitive awareness 
of the wide range of musical experience offered by African music was a 
necessary prerequisite for its proper study. No one should abrogate to himself 
the right to theorise about African music in general until he has experienced 
it. Naturally researchers and collectors follow a different order of priority, 
and this was evident in the early history of African musicology (see Nketia
RECORDING TRADITIONAL MUSIC 57
1980). While researchers concentrated on specific ethnic groups or themes 
they wished to study, Hugh Tracey’s primary objective was not unlike that 
of Laura Boulton, ‘the music hunter’ who set out ‘to capture, absorb and 
bring back the music of the people - their expressions in songs of sadness 
and joy, their outpourings in times of tragedy and in times of exhilaration’ 
(Tracey 1963:5). With the rapid changes taking place in Africa, Hugh Tracey 
felt that the immediate thrust must be on preservation, with special emphasis 
on field recordings (1948,1950,1952,1957,1960). Accordingly, when he 
visited Ghana in the late 1950s to see what we were doing, he was insistent 
that transcription and analysis of African music could wait. To him field 
collectors, broadcasters, producers and promoters of African music, and 
performers and their audiences were the key people in any movement towards 
cultural renaissance in Africa and inter-cultural communication in music, 
and not those who study some aspects of African music in order to achieve 
academic merit. ......................................... * ................................
There was also a difference in his approach and that of the scholars to 
dissemination. To the academics it meant producing scholarly papers with 
illustrative recordings or the occasional record, while the systematic 
publication of gramophone records was Hugh Tracey’s primary 
preoccupation. Keeping the general public in mind, he limited background 
documentation to the bare essentials that the private individual or a radio 
producer flipping records and information cards could handle. Where he 
believed the occasional anecdote or explanation would be of interest, he 
would put this on the recording rather than in the liner notes or presentation 
cards, a practice that did not escape criticism, especially from those who 
preferred to listen to the voices of the music makers rather than that of the 
producer.
To Hugh Tracey dissemination also meant dealing with practical issues 
that could contribute or impede acceptance of the musical culture or specific 
items presented by a producer; these would include combating widely held 
prejudices against the integrity of African music, promoting awareness and 
appreciation of the artistic merits and cultural values of this music through 
broadcasting and the print media (including journals and magazines), as 
well as through the creation of a network of friends and supporters of the 
musical tradition. Accordingly, he published his field reports and a few 
monographs, and also whipped up enthusiasm through the formation of the 
African Music Society. As the membership of the Society was unfortunately 
limited by the colonial and apartheid environment in which it was set up, he
58 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
tried to counteract this by encouraging, without much success, the formation 
of African music clubs in neighbouring territories. Thus, unlike scholars who 
tend to communicate among themselves, he was more interested in the music 
public than in learned societies, in meeting collectors and promoters of 
traditional music who patronised the International Folk Music Council from 
whom he appears to have sought personal recognition at their conference 
held in Biarritz in 1953 as the chief spokesman for Africa. He states in his
paper:
It is only because we have found that the African is pa illy 
incapable of defending his own culture and indeed is largely
indifferent to its fate that we, who subscribe wholeheartedly to 
the ideals of our international council, are attempting to ride 
over the period during which irreparable damage can be done, 
until Africans, themselves, will be capable of appearing at our 
conferences as well-informed representatives of their own 
people. (Tracey 1954:8)
Tracey’s attitude again contrasted with that of scholars like Wachsmann
(1966a,b), who took an interest in African scholars and teachers in Uganda, 
such as Kygamibiddiwa and Sempebbwa, and were aware of Africans 
elsewhere who could speak for ‘their own people’. But the point I wish to 
stress here is not so much Tracey’s paternalism as his effort to find a group 
with whom he could identify, for in the past collectors, folk song enthusiasts 
and scholars belonged to different fraternities:
1. The fraternity that values music primarily as an object of aesthetic interest 
or listening pleasure
2. The fraternity of creative musicians and performers who approach music 
in a similar manner and also as sources of creative and performance 
models
3. The fraternity of scholars who look at gramophone records as materials 
for study and who may produce ten or twenty-page booklets of 
ethnographic and musicological information for each of their recordings
These fraternities have certainly influenced one another, for scholars are 
paying more and more attention to the quality and scope of what they record 
and select to publish, while collectors try to do more in the field than just act 
as music hunters. This in fact can also be attributed to the few leading scholars
RECORDING TRADITIONAL MUSIC 59
who find a place in all the different fraternities and who exert their scholarly 
influence on folk music associations and remind learned music associations 
now and then of the relevance of the musical experience.
The cleavage between collectors and scholars has not become serious 
among Africans: most African scholars are also collectors. Independent 
professional collectors like Tracey have not emerged. However, because of 
the fear which has haunted us for almost a hundred years that traditional 
African music will disappear from the face of the earth, and the incessant cry 
to ‘safeguard’ or ‘preserve it for posterity’, some of our Western colleagues 
seem to think that what Africa needs in the short term are people trained in 
recording techniques who, armed with detailed interview forms, can bring 
back recordings from the field along with sheets of meticulously classified 
information they can file with each recording.
In this connection the forms devised by Herbert Pepper for this purpose 
when he was invited by President Senghor to set up a Music Archive in 
Dakar were extremely detailed and systematic. He seemed to have done all 
the thinking for his field assistants, the primary collectors, for he left nothing 
to chance. As far as models of repositories were concerned, there was the 
example of OSTROM (Organisme de Recherche Scientifique des Terntoires 
d’Outre-Mer) while SORAFOM (Societe de Rediffusion de la France d’Outre- 
Mer) founded in 1956 and its successor OCORA (Office de Co-operation 
Radiophonique) established in 1962, have given abundant demonstration of 
what can be achieved by a team of dedicated collectors, though it is clear 
from the writings of some of them, such as Charles Duvelle and Tolia 
Nikiprowetsky, that some of them aspired to be more than collectors and 
believed that they were also musicologists or ethnomusicologists of a sort.
One suspects that the same sort of approach underlies the operation of 
the regional Documentation Centres set up by UNESCO at the request of 
member states as far as the collection of music and oral literature is concerned, 
but I may be wrong. Projects based on the same collectors concept, such as 
ERPAMO(£tude et Recherche sur le Patrimoine Musicale de l’Afrique de 
l’Ouest), a Francophone West African project, which selected and assembled 
‘collectors’ from each of the countries to plan and implement an agreed field 
collection program m e, and CERD O TO LA (Centre Regional de 
Documentation en Traditions Orales et Langues Africaines) in Central Africa, 
began with a great burst of enthusiasm and faded out just as quickly because 
they were based on the short-term model. Most Africans, unlike Western 
people, do not have the mania for collecting, an impulse that drives people
60 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
to collect not only antiques, curios and works of art of all kinds, but also 
postage stamps.
What Africa needs at this period in her history are not only collectors 
but researchers who will combine collecting with scholarly studies; researchers 
who can see the implications of what they collect for culture and development, 
education and creativity, or for scholarly investigation into traditional and 
contemporary problems in their particular field of African studies -  Africans 
in full command of the materials they collect. Of course not every one may 
turn out to be a scholar. But by the same token, we cannot put the lid on 
those with scholarly potential.
LOCAL ARCHIVES OF SOUND RECO RDINGS
The development of archives of sound recordings in Africa has lagged behind 
research and recording of traditional music in spite of the testimony of Alan 
Lomax that ‘Africa is the best recorded of the continents’ (1968:xvi), for 
except in South Africa where Hugh Tracey’s International Library of African 
Music is housed, the bulk of the recordings made in the colonial period can 
only be found in archives in the Western hemisphere. There is nevertheless a 
growing accumulation of field recordings in Africa itself that could form the 
nucleus of archives in individual African countries. They include private 
collections, recordings at broadcasting and television stations, Ministries of 
Tourism, Culture and Information, museums and academic institutions.
There is at present very little information about how much or what is 
held in these collections, and whether they are managed as archives with 
properly documented card catalogues and so on. The first step might be to 
collate this information, create a general consciousness of the need for proper 
archiving, follow this with seminars on archival management, and identify 
training needs, so that common policies regarding acquisitions, use, 
exchanges, and so forth can be worked out. The creation of national policies 
on sound archives might facilitate the grouping of these materials for 
developing:
1. Private Archives. Archives not normally open to the general public, such 
as the archives of corporations (broadcasting, television and film 
corporations).
2. Institutional Archives. Archives administered as units within research 
institutions, arts centres and museums and which may grow out of the
RECORDING TRADITIONAL MUSIC 61
work of a scholar or a collector associated with the institution and the 
contributions of other scholars and field collectors who share a collective 
vision.
3. Public Archives. Archives that emerge through an administrative 
mechanism for bringing together scattered collections in private custody 
that are donated or acquired, holdings in Ministries and Departments, 
as well as in other public institutions.
A
Given the present economic condition of African countries, the development 
of Public Archives of Sound Recordings may be premature and perhaps also 
unrealistic in terms of how much they will be used by the public. In the 
Western hemisphere where there is a long tradition of libraries and archives 
which are constantly used by scholars and the general public, the creation 
and development of public archives of recordings makes sense, particularly 
where the laws of a country make it compulsory for copies of published 
recordings to be placed in a designated depository. The situation in many 
African countries does not warrant the creation of this kind of facility at the 
moment.
Materials in private and institutional archives, on the other hand, are 
constantly used as reference and programme materials and their proper 
development and management need to be given attention.
RESEARCH AND DISSEMINATION
Since there is an important relationship between field research and archival 
development (including collection policy and dissemination), the planning 
of research in institutional settings must be carefully considered to ensure a 
steady but meaningful growth in the field recordings that are brought back 
to an archive. Much depends on whether one is starting from scratch or 
joining an established programme. The strategy I followed when I embarked 
on my research in 1952 was guided by both a number of research objectives 
and a collection policy. Since the music I had to study did not exist in written 
form and could only be reached through performances, I decided, as I planned 
my work, that my objective and strategy would be as follows:
1. The focus of my field research would be on musical events, including 
any event that incorporated music. Accordingly my primary data would 
be drawn from observation and documentation (including recording of
62 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 8c CULTURE
the music) of such events in selected societies. The variety of the events 
defined in part the scope of the musical culture with particular reference 
to the genres and the selected items performed.
2. The research programme would be based on the study of selected topics 
that would allow for particular formal and contextual problems or 
themes to be investigated in the field and not on the detailed study of 
the cultures of individual societies in their totality. In this respect my 
approach would be different from that of my anthropological colleagues 
in the Department of Sociology where I was based.
3. The research programme would document oral traditions about music 
and musical instruments. This would be related to musical events or 
specific topics being investigated or to unsolicited topics raised by those
I talked to.
4. To ensure that varying scope was given to research and collection as the 
occasion or the situation demanded, a distinction would be maintained 
between ‘studies’ and ‘documentation’. The former would be intensive, 
while the latter would be extensive, involving recordings of the repertoire 
of individual societies or events for archival purpose rather than for 
immediate analysis and study, since the building of such an archive of 
sound recordings would be a major part of the programme.
5. The documentation would also include transcriptions of song texts and 
drum language since these are created and used by musicians. Textual 
studies had to be part of my concept of African musicology not only 
because of what texts revealed about a culture but also because of what 
they revealed about the creative process and about larger issues of 
communication in music.
6. The programme would explore other sources of data, particularly from 
published accounts as well as unpublished materials at the national radio 
station, and the information department. The latter often maintains an 
archive of photographs that includes photographs of musical events, 
performing groups, and musical instruments encountered by press 
photographers. In a situation in which research in certain areas had to 
start from scratch, every available source had to be utilised.
7. The programme would build a collection of musical instruments and 
would explore the possibility of establishing performing groups or 
extension courses on the university campus, for my objective was not 
just collecting music to build an archive but developing a programme of 
music research and performance that would be served by an archive.
RECORDING TRADITIONAL MUSIC 63
This incidentally was also part of my concept of dissemination.
The archival holdings were gradually enlarged with early commercial 
recordings of music retrieved from local record companies in Ghana, 
recordings from other parts of Africa, and field recordings that scholars 
donated. The growth of the archive was halted by the economic depression 
that gripped Ghana from the 1970s and which made field work on the old 
basis impossible. Some of the earlier reel-to-reel tapes of the 1950s showed 
signs of deterioration, but lack of resources held up action. The restoration 
of these tapes, expansion of the archival holdings and plans for local 
dissemination of some of the materials in the archive are under active 
consideration.
In the 1960s the research and archival programme outlined above 
branched out to other important areas of dissemination. A School of Music, 
Dance and Drama, and a National Dance Company were established on the 
campus of the University of Legon under the aegis of the Institute of African 
Studies. A two-year diploma course was also established in the Institute of 
African Studies for retraining those who had diplomas in Western music, 
while those with first degrees could do graduate courses in African Studies 
with music as a field of specialisation. Students and lecturers who joined the 
School and the Institute could thus participate in the performance, 
instructional and research programmes in African music and dance.
Another aspect of the dissemination programme was the preparation of 
annotated texts of songs, drum language and poetic recitations for use as 
readers and literature in elementary and secondary schools. Some of the 
more sophisticated texts published in this period are now studied at the degree 
level from the perspective of literature and textual criticism in Ghanaian 
languages.
Attempts were made to share the results of our research with the general 
public through the medium of broadcasting and television and also through 
the dance programme directed by my colleague, Albert Mawere Opoku, with 
whom I worked closely. Articles on music and dance appeared in local 
newspapers and magazines at the request of various editors, while the outside 
readership of academics was reached through monographs, articles and papers 
read at conferences.
Thus in many ways I shared a similar practical approach to dissemination 
with Hugh Tracey except that I followed a different course; first, because for 
me scholarship, applied research and creativity were not incompatible, and 
second, because while Hugh Tracey acted as a spokesman for cultures he did
64 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
not belong to, I spoke for cultures with which I identified and which I was in 
the process of rediscovering and reinterpreting. I was a ‘participant-observer’ 
of my own culture and those of my neighbours. To me research was not only 
a process of discovery but also a learning process which enabled me to acquire 
new knowledge of the arts and cultures of Ghanaians and other African 
peoples, knowledge I tried to systematise and share in diverse ways at home 
and abroad.
The only thing I withheld was the publication of discs of my field 
recordings which, at that time, I could only have done in Europe and the 
United States. I did not want to do this without first publishing some of 
them locally in much the same manner as I did for my early monographs like 
Funeral Dirges of the Akan People, Drumming in Akan Communities, African 
Music in Ghana, and so forth, some of which found co-publishers abroad. 
All my artists performed virtually free of charge because they understood 
that I was recording for research and educational purposes and for posterity. 
Hence all along my hope has been that they can be issued some day under a 
national label for instructional and cultural programmes that contribute to 
culture and development as well as in some appropriate format for the world 
of music.
Recent developments in the recording and marketing of local pop and 
religious music show that something can now be done to promote and 
disseminate cassettes of traditional music locally. There are also indications 
from radio listeners’ choice programmes that attractive selections of 
traditional music can be marketed locally. To me, keeping abreast of the 
latest developments in recording technology -  digital cassettes, CD-rom -  is 
not as much a priority when it comes to dissemination in Africa as finding 
ways of producing limited editions of materials on regular cassettes for 
targeted audiences, including educational institutions and non-literate listeners 
who have little or no use for liner notes. It is my hope, therefore, that this 
phase of our programme which needs support and collaboration will 
materialise.
CULTURAL POLICY
It is evident that such developments cannot take place without a cultural 
policy that encourages commitments on the part of both government and 
institutions of higher learning. The idea of a university as a centre for the 
creative arts had to be accepted by my University, while the philosophy of
RECORDING TRADITIONAL MUSIC 65
the African Personality which guided Ghana’s national cultural policy for 
the preservation of the cultural heritage and the promotion of consciousness 
of identity in the post-colonial period facilitated implementation of the 
development plan I had conceived. In that period, preservation meant not 
only recording and archiving but also promoting performances of traditional 
music through national festivals and special programmes as well as a national 
theatre movement. All these, together with the air time given to Ghanaian 
languages and cultures every day which kept traditional music alive, brought 
a new national consciousness of the arts and created a public that was ready 
not only to watch performances of the music and dance of different ethnic 
groups in the country but also to read about them.
A similar trend occurred in other African countries though not in the 
integrated form it took in Ghana. As the 1960s was a period of political 
transition in which the assertion of cultural identity became a primary mode 
of behaviour, Institutes of African Studies, Cultural Studies Centres, and 
Institutes of Fine Arts sprang up in a number of African countries. National 
dance companies and theatre groups also emerged, the former outside 
universities and formal institutions, and the latter partly at universities that
had drama and theatre departments.
The idea of developing archives of sound recordings was not vigorously 
pursued everywhere as part of institutional research objectives even though 
field recordings were accumulated at the time. A few countries like Senegal, 
Burkina Faso, Zaire and Gabon embarked on the creation of national 
repositories with the help of Western specialists who provided on-the-job 
training for their local assistants. A similar initiative was taken by UNESCO 
to create a few regional documentation centres in Africa at the request of 
member states.
In the light of these developments and the increased role that traditional 
music played in national festivals and other programmes, UNESCO was 
requested by the Intergovernmental Conference on National Cultural Policies 
-  held under its auspices in Accra in 1975 -  and the Organisation of African 
Unity to initiate action on a ten-year development plan for the performing 
arts of Africa, for it became evident that there was a need for new initiatives 
as well as some co-ordination of programmes and the sharing of ideas and 
experiences both within individual countries and the region as a whole.
The period of institutional change also brought a new factor into the 
pursuit of field research in African countries by foreign scholars. Some 
governments drew up regulations that required field researchers to deposit
6 6 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
copies of their materials in the country in which they worked, while 
regulations for monitoring the work of the field collector also came into 
force. Such was the impact of the change that Hugh Tracey expressed grave 
concern in an editorial in his journal African Music, because he apparently 
began to experience ‘considerable difficulty ... in obtaining an adequate 
amount of original research matter for publication’ owing to what he 
described as ‘the increasingly disturbed political situation throughout the 
continent’ which, in many territories, had ‘militated against the possibility 
of field work in musical subjects’ (1963:5). y T
The issue of the legal protection of folklore, including traditional music, 
has now complicated the matter even further since traditional music has 
become a marketable commodity. While this is likely to restrict commercial 
reproductions of field recordings abroad, it may also lead in a positive way 
to a new era of international co-operation in research -  in the creation of 
new forms of partnership with producers and publishers on behalf of artists 
whose performances are recorded.
o T
OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE
It will be evident that there is much that can be done to carry existing 
programmes forward if goals and strategies are redefined in relation to the 
development needs of Africa, as well as the need for collaboration and 
reciprocity both within and outside the continent. It is in the light of these 
and other considerations that we have taken another step forward to establish, 
with Foundation assistance, the International Centre for African Music and 
Dance, to provide, among other things, a forum for the identification and 
examination of issues such as the foregoing, the planning of concerted 
programmes, exchange of field recordings, co-operation in the development 
of a central archive and study centre, and a regional database for different 
categories of information. International linkages are being established with 
other archives to facilitate not only the acquisition of early recordings of 
African music and other materials of interest but also the training of music 
archivists and the organisation of periodic seminars in archival management.
The Centre will maintain a close relationship with the music and dance 
units of African Studies Centres and similar institutions through its 
subregional representatives as well as with the Regional Documentation 
Centres set up by UNESCO and the Programme Exchange Centre of URTNA 
(Union des Radios et Televisions Nationales Africaines) in Nairobi and, of
RECORDING TRADITIONAL MUSIC 67
course, with the international community of researchers, collectors and 
producers of African music and dance.
It is my fervent hope that this collaboration will be pursued by the 
younger generation of scholars and artists and that it will lead to the growth 
of both a Central Archive and a network of local and national archives that 
will facilitate and promote the preservation, cultivation and study of Africa’s 
heritage of music and dance.
5 THE FIRED IMAGE
Literary Beginnings from Cultural Ends
Dan Izevbaye
The literary history of Nigeria as a method of structuring and interpreting 
the movement of creative activity in that country has drawn mainly on the 
English language tradition and its development. The other literary traditions 
-  all of them indigenous and antecedent to English -  tend to be treated mainly 
as tributaries: as influences on the new English material, as generic models 
and sources of creative inspiration for writing in English, and even as 
derivations from the English language tradition. This is ironical because 
English is the only literary tradition in Nigeria without roots in a local culture. 
But in spite of being contingent on relatively recent culture contacts, English 
has remained remarkably successful, partly because its hegemony depends 
on institutions that have survived their colonial origins, and partly because 
of its internationality. This historical advantage is complemented by the 
adoption of English at the social levels which matter most -  the educational 
and the bureaucratic. In addition, English has been an effective medium of 
national integration because of its adaptability and because it is considered 
the most politically neutral among the languages competing for national 
acceptance in Nigeria. The contemporary dominance of English and the 
subordination of vernacular traditions is only one stage in the historical 
evolution of a multicultural national tradition. We cannot begin to understand 
the concept of literature and the national experience without an analysis of 
the historical and contemporary interplay of the cultural traditions which at 
present provide the only viable basis for the making of Nigerian literature.
Two kinds of relations immediately suggest themselves here: the 
evolution of Nigerian literature in time, as distinct from its distribution in 
space. This division of literature by temporal development and spatial 
distribution may at first seem a rather artificial way to begin to talk about a
69
70 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
national literature. It may be true, to some extent, that the present 
geographical pattern of literary production is a result of its history. But as I 
will try to show presently, the main types of literary culture in Nigeria that 
can be accounted for in terms of, originally, the indigenous cultures whose 
literary conventions developed from the accumulation of literary practices 
over a long period. Superimposed on these are new cultures from which new 
traditions of literary practice were diligently cultivated according to a pattern 
which reflected the correspondence of geographical factors and literary policy. 
In other words, the literary map of Nigeria consists of two basic kinds of 
literary culture. First, there are groups of visible overgrowths nurtured 
according to Islamic and European ideas that have been carried here from 
great distances across deserts and seas. Second, beneath these flourishing 
growths are the much older, if less visible, undergrowths of the oral literatures 
in the different languages. Sometimes the existing cultures were nourished 
side by side with the new transplants; but sometimes they were simply weeded 
out in order to create aesthetic space for the cultivation of new literary 
practices.
It should be obvious from this summary that the beginning of a new 
literature is linked with the end of an existing culture: one makes the other 
possible. A new literary culture is often a means of propagating and sustaining 
the goals of a new social culture. The old forms are superseded or displaced 
if they cannot be adapted to the ends of the new culture. In moments of 
culture change the creative resources of literature are necessary for making 
the new reality possible, even if these resources do not appear in an explicitly 
literary form. I do not think it is extravagant to argue that no other human 
activity is quite capable of producing the same power and scope of 
representation which we have come to expect in literature. Because we are 
consistently under the influence of that imaginative activity which we most 
closely identify with literature, we are able to approach the past, not as 
something that is dead, but as an area of true experience that we can revive 
and re-enter.
At different periods in society, the strong faith in the reality of those 
characters and events that are described as historical hardly ever depends on 
the strength of available evidence or facts but on the imaginative power with 
which this past is evoked. What we often accept as historical truth is what is 
made credible by the creative power of imagination, unless there is a level of 
consciousness which can resist its fabrication. In other words, the past has 
no meaning outside our present consciousness which recreates and sometimes
THE FIRED IMAGE 71
endows it with the only real significance that it has. The literary imagination 
is thus an important key to the process by which the texts about reality are 
created, including the retrieval of past events, since its creative play is mainly 
the source of our knowledge of the idols who sustain our historical and 
political faiths.
Let me illustrate. The pre-colonial past of many Nigerian communities 
is recreated through the myths and legends which remain politically important 
in spite of their cautious use by historians and their occurrence in diverse, 
sometimes conflicting, versions. It will be enough for me to illustrate with 
two of the best known and politically influential examples of such myths 
and legends -  those of Bayajidda and Oduduwa, who are accepted as the 
culture heroes of the Hausa and the Yoruba respectively.
Oduduwa emerges as three distinct personalities from the cluster of 
narratives about him. In one version, he is the creative aspect of the godhead, 
for he is literally the assistant of the supreme deity from whom each Yoruba 
oba derives his titular attributes as the deputy of the divinities and the 
possessor of earth and well-being. But in other versions, Oduduwa is either 
the hero who led the Yoruba into their present land from the Middle East, or 
he is the political genius who wrested power from his predecessor, Obatala. 
But, we may ask, could the real Oduduwa have been any of these mythical 
personalities who at different times have supplanted each other in the 
consciousness of different communities according to the spiritual or political 
need of the times? The historical Oduduwa is shrouded in the mists of time. 
The Oduduwa that we know is the revived personage who functions as the 
unifying focus for the consciousness of the descendants of Oduduwa.
There is greater consistency among the various legends of Bayajidda, 
whose other name was Abu Yazid, the fugitive from royal treachery at the 
Bornu court, liberator of Daura and husband of Daura,1 founder of the seven 
Hausa states whose descendants include Bauwo the father of Bagauda, the 
first Sarkin Kano who began his reign in the year 389 according to the Islamic 
calendar. You would think, from the chronicling of these facts and figures, 
that, unlike Oduduwa, there can be no question of the historicity of Bayajidda. 
Apart from the force of its unifying ideology, this impression arises mainly 
from the stability which writing gives to traditional narratives and from the 
techniques of the historical chronicle by which the legend is clarified and 
reduced to manageable form. However, the chronicle depends on the motif 
of the serpent-slayer, a widespread folktale formula that recurs in hero myths, 
but is alien to historical narratives.
72 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
Historians do not believe that historical events behave literally in this 
stereotyped manner. Consequently, the Bayajidda legend, like the Oduduwa 
myth, has been treated as an allegorical tale and rationalised by a critical 
interpretation which reduces the heroic narrative to a human scale. Even as 
early as 1928, one historian had, by his interpretation, transformed it from 
an heroic monomyth to an allegory of the early social and political history 
of the Central Sudan. Thus Palmer interprets the Daura legend in the 
following manner:
An invasion by a more highly civilised people overcame the 
primitive aborigines, seized the power, and taught the new 
arts to a grateful people while at the same time adopting many 
of the tribal customs of the conquered. (1928:136; see also 
Hallam 1966; on Oduduwa, see Willett 1967:196; Atanda 
1980:4-7)
When events get more distant from us, and history tails into myth, and 
mythical heroes are admitted into king lists and chronicles where they hardly 
belong, historians are forced to adopt the techniques of interpretation that 
are borrowed from the criticism of allegorical poetry and the scriptures. 
The reason is to be found in Afigbo’s explanation of the problem with myth 
as history. The social and political contributions of many generations are 
reduced to the heroic achievements of a single golden age. This contradicts 
‘the proper conception of history as change (for good or ill) over time’ 
(Afigbo 1977:84).
This need for a rational understanding makes an allegorical reading of 
myths attractive to historians. But an allegorical interpretation of such 
traditional texts is initially handicapped by the way it sets out to produce a 
formally coherent meaning which reconciles the contradictions surviving 
from the source materials into the traditional story, even when it is not 
certain that parts of the text are not pure fiction. One problem is the 
occurrence of anachronisms and the tendency for stories belonging to 
different time scales to be telescoped into a single time channel.2 Particularly 
problematic is the attempt to incorporate those events that occurred before 
the arrival or ascendancy of the ruling class into myths in which origins are 
dated from the standpoint of the patrons served by the myths. That these 
inconsistencies exist in such a hidden form is evidence that a traditional 
narrative can be appropriated for use in transmitting the political and
THE FIRED IMAGE 73
religious ideology imposed by a new culture. But because the form itself 
transmits an existing convention for communicating the values of the 
superseded culture, it may be under the threat of being itself displaced by 
new forms.
The creative imagination is necessary for the existence of human reality. 
Certainly, the past cannot exist if consciousness does not create it. The social 
world begins only when this level of human consciousness is willing to let it 
begin. It fixes dates for the beginning of human institutions and groups. But 
it is part of the process of continuity and change, for the existing sense of 
history and reality needs to be revised and enlarged because of the emergence 
of a new social order. For example, a mythic history is not likely to be upset 
by the appearance of material evidence which challenges the existing view of 
the world, as may happen with archaeological findings. The new item is 
merely re-interpreted and incorporated in existing myths, as probably 
happened in the case of the opa oranyan at Ife. The time frame may not even 
need to be adjusted to accomplish this incorporation.
There is a stage, however, when the challenge to the existing order is 
more than revisionist, and the ideological differences are irreconcilable. The 
new interests to be served are not merely political -  like the legitimacy of a 
new dynasty -  they entail a radically different view of the world. These 
differences are often so fundamental in exposing sharp contradictions when 
existing concepts and personages are taken over and incorporated into new 
myths,3 that new means of transmitting them have to be created. At different 
times during this stage of historical development in Nigeria, the traditional 
cultures became all but submerged by the deluge of two new traditions, the 
Arabic-Islamic and the Christian-European cultures. Both these impositions 
on the age-old strata of local traditions have brought along their own 
legitimising narratives with their own conceptions of beginnings.4 Following 
on the heels of the traditional culture, heroes are the new agents of 
transformation whose religious activities helped to undermine the earlier 
heritage, and who helped to map out the new territorial configuration of the 
culture -  as Shehu dan Fodio did after Bayajidda, and Bishop Crowther after 
Oduduwa. These recent transformations can be seen in the spatial 
differentiation of cultural traditions, and in the ensuing conflict of world 
views. Islamic and Christian explanatory myths of origins and migration 
have been superimposed on local myths.
It is this contradiction that gave rise to the cultural nationalism of the 
period just before independence. The story of that period is now quite familiar.
74 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
The world began anew for writers like Achebe, Clark, Okigbo and Soyinka, 
who initiated a literary resistance to Christian ends and partially revived and
made relevant the memories of the old literary culture by the new educated 
elite. That legacy has been transmitted through the work of a younger group
of inheritors which includes Osofisan, Osundare and Ojaide. It is an historical 
irony that some of these younger authors feel distant from, if not directly 
hostile to, the new tradition whose conventions and values they help to sustain 
and transmit.
There is a remarkably close relationship between the post-literacy threat 
to traditional Nigerian literatures and their survival and transmission. I will 
now examine this age-old process which, because it never really results in 
the complete annihilation of an artistic culture, should be seen as an 
interconnected process of destruction and renewal, of a new culture growing 
out of an old, of something durable salvaged from the fires of destruction. 
This two-sided process is what I refer to in my title as ‘the fired image’; it 
involves a chain-like succession of traditions of figuration or iconography, 
periodically disrupted by acts of iconoclasm. I choose my illustrations of this 
process from three separate descriptions or representations of cultural or 
historical activities which took place in different parts of Nigeria in the distant 
past, the recent past and the present.
My first example comes from a traditional technique of figuration used 
by Bini artists (as brassworkers at Igbo-Ukwu, Tada, Ife, Owo, must have 
done in the past). Philip Dark describes this method, surviving since the 
fourteenth century, in the following words: when the artists have moulded 
the images to be cast in bronze,
the moulds, which have been air-dried, are placed in a fire and 
heated so that the wax can be melted and poured off and the 
clay mould heated to the point where it is sufficiently fired to 
permit molten brass to be poured in without collapsing. 
(1973:49)
In this process, the fired image retains the basic lineament of the original
model and gives it permanent form. A rich artistic heritage is conserved and 
accumulated in this way. But the necessary material waste is also to be noted. 
The wax which initially fills the mould and surrounds the core is melted and 
poured away in the process. The actual and symbolic significance of this 
process for power relations within the culture is that it formalises and
THE FIRED IMAGE 75
concretises the ruling ideas which create particular forms of social institutions 
and authorises the subject to be commemorated. By this means, it helps to 
recreate, in material form, the particular conception of reality sanctioned by 
the ruling social order. A similar process of fashioning an acceptable reality 
through the agency of art was at work in traditional literature, except that 
literature is more independent of wealth by which alone the materials of art 
can be obtained. Thus verbal art is less dependent on patronage than figural 
art, and therefore less amenable to coercion. In other words, as a form that 
is not so dependent on the material resources of culture, literature can operate 
in a more flexible way through a wide range of forms, from expressive lyrics 
and satirical songs to king lists and ritual chants. It can thus be authorised as 
much by the least socially important individual as by a ruling class. But, as 
with iconography, form in literature is a means of selecting and transmitting 
those cultural ideas that are most highly regarded in each epoch. It is a means 
of preserving and enhancing the value of material resources and the formal 
conventions that artists have created. ....................
My second illustration is a more recent literary account of the radical 
solution that each culture adopts when a tradition that began with 
conservation declines into conservatism: that is, when the forms show a 
tendency towards the static and decadent. Here, too, fire is the key agent. 
But in this case fire is not used to refine and preserve; it consumes. But the 
cultural memory transcends it, and the inherited forms which the images 
transmit are salvaged and adapted for use in new ways. This stage in the 
transformation of culture is basically revisionist. The situation is made familiar 
to us by the action of the villagers in Arrow o f God whose deity was 
discredited and set on fire because its once vital and socially relevant spiritual 
essence had become exhausted. This is precisely the same political gesture 
enacted at a personal level in Soyinka’s poem, ‘Cremation of a Wormy 
Caryatid’ (1989:63-70). The action of the poem consists in setting fire to a 
carved image. The image is a typical Yoruba wood carving, a horseman with 
a retinue -  a superstructure reflecting the social order. This ‘caryatid’ has 
been made porous by the infestation of wood-worms identified as ‘enemies 
within, / gnawing entrails of strict hierarchies’.
The poet resists the temptation to salvage something for a ‘Second,/ 
Third or Fourth idolatry’, even though the necessity to burn an object that 
was once a valuable possession is a bitter pill for him to swallow. His mixed 
feelings are captured by an implied pun on ‘wormwood’ conjured up by the 
various images of wood and worms and the tension between temptation and
76 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 6c CULTURE
resolution. The burning seems on the surface to be ‘a sacrilege with match 
and kerosene’; in reality it is
a mercy death.
To save the grave, we isolate the tree;
Beyond all cure, uproot, incinerate.
This, then, is not an iconoclastic act. It is in a sense an act of cultural 
transmission. The creative tradition survives not only in the aesthetic memory 
which the poet evokes through the ironic but colourful interplay of blazing 
flames and stubborn form, but also in the commemorative fact of the poem 
as a memorial to the image and its tradition. A regenerative process is evident 
in this bush-burning approach to the cultivation of tradition. Yoruba elegies 
routinely include the truism that when fire dies it veils itself with ash, just as 
the young plantain shoot takes the place of the dying parent plant.
This sentiment was not, however, relevant to the new activities of the 
invading cultures whose radical fires ravaged and consumed completely those 
traditional images that were likely to obstruct their missionary goals. My 
third example comes from the radical Islamic movement which swept like a 
harmattan fire across the Central Sudan in the nineteenth century: but 
examples can be multiplied from the proselytising activities of Christian 
missionaries in the forest regions of southern Nigeria, not the least notable 
being the incident in Nembe (Brass). According to Ade Ajayi, at Nembe, ‘the 
missionaries got the chiefs ... to alter the national custom to the point of 
abolishing, destroying and desecrating objects formerly held sacred ... In 
1899, after a short devotional service, “Juju House” was pulled down and 
burnt’ with all its images (1965:226-27). This account is not unique. It faintly 
echoes the account, in the Kano Chronicle, of the burning down of the house 
of the snake cult at different times in Kano in the fourteenth century (Palmer 
1908:98,103, 108, 122).
The story is similar in other areas. One notable example, among many 
others, is that of Abd-al-Salam who ‘ruthlessly destroyed Nupe idols during 
his conquest of this area’ (Bravmann 1974:14). But iconoclasm is not the 
real issue here. The main issue is the forcible creation of new cultural 
conditions for literature; and it is important to examine the philosophical 
and ideological support for these conditions.
A rewarding starting point will be the profound concern of Islamic leaders 
with certain forms of learning and literature in the nineteenth century. These
THE FIRED IMAGE 77
leaders were not only theologians and politicians, but also poets (Bello 
1922:87,114). Shehu dan Fodio, Waziri Abdullahi, Sultan Bello and Aminu 
el-Kanemi all composed poems either to commemorate the battles they fought, 
or as personal expressions and responses to the political controversies in 
which they were engaged.5
Part of the evidence cited as an example of the religious persecution 
which led to the Hijra of Usman dan Fodio in 1804 was the provocative 
vandalisation of books. Under Yunfa, who became Sarkin Gobir in 1802, 
the enemy had entered the houses of the Muslims in the month of Ramadan, 
‘and scattered their books and burnt their wooden writing tables’ (ibid.:48; 
cf.105). Ironically, the same offence was later attributed to the followers of 
Shehu dan Fodio himself by Aminu el-Kanemi, in a letter to Muhammed 
Bello in which he alleged: ‘You are destroying books; you are scattering 
them in the roads; you are throwing them in the dirt’ (ibid.:l03). To fully 
comprehend the emotional significance of this image of cultural barbarism, 
we should refer to the cultural status of books in nineteenth-century Islamic 
society in the Sudanese states, especially their manual product and their 
religious and political significance and use. The war poems composed by 
Sultan Bello and his uncle Waziri Abdullahi (ibid.:84, 89-90, 57-60), are not 
to be read as poems in the epic or heroic mode, but as versified historical 
accounts imbued with personal religious fervour, and inserted in the texts as 
milestones in the stages of the advance of the Jihad, and as expressions of 
personal elation at the accomplishment of a spiritual purpose. For only a 
thin line separated poetry from words of worship. Books were carefully 
scripted as records, as well as repositories of religious knowledge. And they 
were the preferred means of the transmission of knowledge. Muhammed 
Bello once accused el-Kanemi of ignorance because el-Kanemi based his 
allegations on information received ‘from those people who could not read 
or write’ (ibid.:104). Books were not used as sources of entertainment. Literary 
pleasure was primarily a by-product of knowledge (ibid.:2). A nineteenth- 
century account included ‘passion for amusement, song and dance’ in the 
list of shameful customs which undermined the foundations of religion.6
The deeply felt vexation and frustration of Muhammed Bello soon after 
the capture of one of the towns of Katsina in 1807, is to be understood in 
this context:
I climbed a hill to see what was being done in the town. Then I
saw papers being blown about by the wind. They were falling
78 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
into the dirt. I endeavoured to pick them up, till I was weary 
for they were very many. So I returned and was vexed all day.
(Ibid.: 107)
In Islamic culture then and now, books are to be treated with reverence, 
because they share in the material essence of the sacred Qur’an, which is 
accepted as an incarnation of the divine word, and the only way in which the 
word is made directly manifest. In his letter to Bello, el-Kanemi wrote that 
‘the name of God is on these books and you know that he who throws the 
name of God in the dirt is a heathen’ (ibid.:103).
According to the idealist ideology which sustains this attitude, the 
material world is a direct product of divine creativity. Islam is therefore hostile 
to mimetic art, especially all forms of realistic representations that are made 
in three dimensions. The classical exemplar for Islamic action against icons 
is the Prophet’s destruction of idols in the Ka’abah on his victorious entry 
into Makkah. Subsequent acts of iconoclasm in the name of Islam are re­
enactments of the original object lesson. Contemporary examples of 
iconoclasm are not too hard to come by,7 though most establishments avoid 
directly using it to consolidate their cultural gains. From the Islamic point of 
view, a more orthodox approach is reflected in the recent banning of a set of 
images by a panel of Islamic jurists. While this did not involve the actual 
burning of images, it was a pre-emptive pronouncement which had the same 
effect as firing images. Furthermore, it clarifies the limits of iconoclasm by 
distinguishing between sculptural art and fine art. I would like to quote my 
source at length:
Based on the Islamic teaching on idols, the Fatwa Committee 
[Committee of Jurists] of the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs 
recommended the rejection of the request of Messrs Carpas 
AG of Switzerland for clearance to bring in to Nigeria replicas 
(in miniature) of the Holy Ka’abah situated in Makkah and the 
distribution of same to Muslims in the country. The main 
argument (among others) of the committee was that the replica 
is a physical image of the Ka’abah casting a shadow of its own 
when placed in light (as distinct from a picture or sketch); it is 
therefore forbidden. Moreover, it is most probable that some 
Muslims may develop the attitude of regarding the replica as 
standing for the Ka’abah itself and therefore becoming inclined
THE FIRED IMAGE 79
to accord it the sacredness that is due only to the true Ka’abah.
(Noibi 1990)
This familiar distinction between the object and its copy, reality and its illusion, 
the true and the false, has a direct bearing not only on the production of art 
works and their reception, but also on the aesthetics emerging from, or giving 
support to, the development of certain kinds of literary culture. The underlying 
attitude to mimetic art is that the artist has, by his work, set himself up in 
competition with God the only creator. He thus tempts people away from 
the worship of God to idolatry. Thus, orthodox Islam is not merely aniconic 
-  that is, prone to tolerate images though it would not itself encourage 
figuration, as some researchers have discovered in certain areas (e.g. Bravmann 
1 9 7 4 ) _ it has often been intolerant of icons when it has not been directly 
iconoclastic. One can deduce from this with what horror the austere, 
savannah-based nineteenth-century Islamic scholar must have regarded the 
widespread creative simulation of the fecundity and plenitude of natural 
forms by traditional African artists in richly forested regions.8
Art historians have generally agreed that African visual art is more 
conceptual than naturalistic. Representational or even mimetic art is by no 
means alien to its traditions, as is clearly evident in the bronzes of Ife and 
Benin; but conventions for depicting the marvellous and the fantastic are far 
more universal in Africa. These formal conventions are reflected in the 
dominance of oral narrative traditions by the spirit of the marvellous that is 
in striking contrast to the newer realism introduced in the novel tradition. 
Traditional art did not aspire towards a faithful or pictorial representation 
of the subject. In response to the physical environment, its tendency has 
been towards a reproduction or regeneration of forms, and this sometimes 
involves the decay or degeneration of an earlier work through neglect or, as 
in Soyinka’s poem, by a deliberate destruction of the art object in order to 
create aesthetic space for a new work of art.9
The perishable nature of the medium, wood, which facilitated the 
creation and use of such aesthetic space, also encouraged the colonial 
intervention in such space as if it were an aesthetic vacuum. It also encouraged 
the introduction of the concept of mimesis into modern African literary 
cultures. This concept developed from the belief in the ideal and formal 
perfection of nature and the practice of art as an attempt at copying or 
reproducing this perfection. Thus the artist imitates God. The history of 
European literature and art has produced a set of artistic techniques for
80 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
reproducing reality as accurately as possible, verbally or visually. The 
European form of the novel is the most felicitous literary expression of this 
concept. It represents the pinnacle of realistic representation in literature, 
and was regularly held up as a mirror for aspiring African fiction writers. 
This explains the difficulty that R.M. East had with his experiment in the 
development of the novel among the Hausa who had recently been introduced 
to literacy in the Western script while remaining within their Islamic world 
(East 1936:354-57). That experiment is best understood as part of a generative 
programme for the emergence of an African literature that is aesthetically 
pleasing according to European taste.
Given the large material and professional investments in the programme, 
it might seem uncharitable at this point to argue that the European culture in 
Africa stood to gain by the eventual consolidation of the ideological basis of 
its aesthetic norms. To give one of the most important examples of such 
investments, in 1945 the budget of the colonial government included ‘a grant 
of £90,000 intended to expand the literature bureau at Zaria, and to convert 
Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo to a biweekly, and ultimately, into a daily’ (Swanzy 
1945:97).10
A less quantifiable but more enduring legacy of the colonial programme 
for African literature is to be seen in the origin of the group of texts that 
have formed the literary canon and have continued to provide an important 
reference point for the production and appreciation of literature in indigenous 
languages. In this respect, the present vernacular traditions of Nigerian writing 
are partly in the line of descent from the products of the experiment which 
began in the 1930s with the Africa-wide competitions organised by various 
colonial institutions, including the International African Institute and the 
regional education departments and literature bureaux. As a result of this 
development, the literacy programmes of the preceding decades had begun 
to bear rich fruit: Rrnvan Bagaja by Abubakar Imam, the editor of Gaskiya 
ta fi Kwabo, and Gandoki, by Imam’s brother, Bello Kagara, were described 
by R.M. East as the most promising of the manuscripts submitted in response 
to a 1933 scheme by the Director of Education in Nigeria to produce non­
educational books in Hausa (1936:351-56). D.O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode 
Ninu Igbo Irunmale was the winner of a Yoruba competition organised in 
1936 (Bamgbose 1974:3). In 1932 Pita Nwana’s Omenuko led a field of 
twenty-one Igbo language entries which included Bell Gam’s Odumodu. E.N. 
Amaku’s Abasi Ekpeyon topped a list of six entries in the Efik language 
in 1936.
THE FIRED IMAGE 81
The question of sources, models, roots inevitably surfaces in a discussion 
of the attempts to generate, or at least stimulate, literatures in the languages 
of the different Nigerian ethnic groups. There was no shortage of concern 
over the possible negative effect of English on indigenous forms of creative 
expression. So it is pertinent to draw attention to the nature of the academic 
foundation on which these writers often built. In 1957 an Education 
Department survey carried out by W.A. Perkins, the Principal of King’s 
College, Lagos, revealed that 80 per cent of the 109 secondary schools in 
Nigeria were still teaching Latin by 1954, while the vernaculars ‘occurred in 
more or less half the schools’. The report came to a conclusion that can 
hardly be considered startling. It was that ‘the curriculum of the Nigerian 
Secondary Schools taken as a whole was a reflection of the English grammar 
school’ (Perkins 1957:6). Given the themes and development of works like 
Gandoki and Tafawa Balcwa’s Shaihu Umar, a roughly similar conclusion -  
with respect to Islam -  may be reached about certain areas of the former 
Northern Nigeria. However, a separate carefully researched comparative study 
is still required. This should address the issues peculiar to the development 
of creative writing in the local languages, paying particular attention to the 
Roman and Arabic scripts, the history of literacy and the emergence of the 
present religious cultures.
Two key issues arise. The first is that of literature and the national 
question. Given our multilingual situation, it is not at all certain that we can, 
at present, speak of a Nigerian literature except in the not-too-precise manner 
that we usually speak of the loosely related literary productions that we 
describe as African literature. And it would be unwise to sacrifice this exciting 
profusion of literary cultures for the Utopian dream of a Nigerian literature 
in a dominant Nigerian lingua franca, the kind of monophonic dream that 
failed the Latin Middle Ages and the French colonial empire.
The second issue relates to the social responsibility of literature and 
criticism. If we ignore the largely informal manipulation of literary affairs 
by the media and the publishing houses, the social influence of literature is 
usually controlled through the policies and activities of three groups. 
Government arts councils or ministries of culture largely control policy 
formulation and direct patronage in matters relating to the arts in society. 
Writers’ associations are concerned with the development of creative writing 
and the welfare of the producers of literature. Learned societies are expected 
to consider matters directly connected with the study of literature and its 
relations, including the evaluation of its ontological and affective status. They
82 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
are the only group outside the realities of classroom prescription and practice 
that are effectively organised to influence the serious study of literature.
The Literary Society of Nigeria was inaugurated at a time when, as 
scholar-critics and teachers, we were not able to count on a single active 
learned society to perform functions that are comparable to those performed 
by the Modern Language Association of America, the African Literature 
Association and the Historical Society of Nigeria. The Nigeria English Studies 
Association has a strong language orientation and it caters as much for 
secondary as for tertiary institutions. The various other bodies that have 
emerged so far provide (admittedly very useful) forums for conferences and 
research communication. By its constitution, the Literary Society of Nigeria 
should ideally not limit its activities to the holding of conferences, the 
publication of learned papers and the dissemination of information to 
members. Its responsibility should now extend not only to university literature 
curricula and to various neglected areas of literary scholarship, but also to 
the various relations of literature, including the consequences of bureaucratic 
activities and policies. To make these commitments meaningful, the 
participation of teachers of literature and researchers in our higher institutions 
is necessary. Following on this professional involvement, the Literary Society 
should seek to be accepted as a key source of expert opinion to be consulted 
on matters relating to the academic study of literature, by the organs of the 
Federal and State governments entrusted with higher education matters. It is 
not too late in the day for the Literary Society to give thought to these issues, 
especially now that we seem to be taking a major turn in university education, 
with the formulation and execution of new policies aimed at standardising 
the content of tertiary literature curricula. A society like this should normally 
be in a position to take part in -  at least advise on -  the designing, vetting 
and revising of whatever proposals concerning the literature curricula may 
be officially proposed, in addition to the not-so-formal but more conventional 
responsibility for scholarly inquiry into the theory and practice of literary 
study.
THE FIRED IMAGE 83
NOTES
A slightly longer version of this paper was delivered as Keynote address at 
the meeting o f the Literary Society o f Nigeria, Jos, 4 June 1990. The 
conference theme was ‘Literature and the National Experience’.
1. Daura, the name of the Queen of Daura, is differentiated from the
name of the town by the pronunciation. . . ..
2. Willett is of the opinion that Egharevba made the mistake of regarding, 
as successive generations, a sequence of kings who were two groups 
of brothers, thus producing an error of about a century in his dates’ 
(1967:211, n.133).
3. A classic instance of such a problem is the identification of Esu, the 
Yoruba trickster divinity, as the Christian Devil. That this equation 
was not necessary is evident in the use of the Yoruba form of Satan, 
‘Satani’ (Abraham 1958:583). Idowu says of the equation: ‘He [Esu] 
is certainly not the devil of our New Testament acquaintance’ (1962:8).
4. Achebe’s conception of his career as writer is that of one beginning 
anew by challenging the new narratives that set out to legitimise the 
world view of the colonising powers.
5. For an account of the literary activity in Sokoto, see Last 1967:207­
22.
6. This may appear to reinforce East’s comment that ‘the influence of 
Islam on the Hamitic strain in Northern Nigeria produces an extremely 
serious-minded type of person’ (East 1940:351-52). However, it must 
not be allowed to leave the impression that the Hausa were completely 
averse to song and dance. The comment merely reflects a particular 
tradition at a period of serious social and political change, as well as 
the attitude of a particular class. In a more peaceful period, the 
comment of Last, reproduced below, would be more apposite. The 
impression of the renaissance ideal of a scholar-gentleman, which Last 
gives, reflects a cultural situation in which learning was largely 
dominated by a small class drawn from the aristocracy and the cleric: 
‘to write poetry in Arabic was the attainment of a cultured man, and 
the famous poems of the founders of the Sokoto caliphate became 
part of Sokoto culture’ (1967:222).
7. In the early hours of Monday 5 May 1986 a group of unknown people 
forced their way into the Chapel of the Resurrection at the University
84 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
of Ibadan. They set fire to the image of the Risen Christ carved in 
wood by the sculptor, Ben Enwonwu. The chapel committee decided 
not to replace, repair or renovate the damaged image. Contained in 
this one incident are two deliberately symbolic statements from 
different theological positions: iconoclasm on the one hand, suffering 
and martyrdom on the other.
8. The position of the Eastern Orthodox Church concerning iconography 
parallels the essential humanism of African sculptural traditions. While 
icons of God (the Supreme Deity, in Africa) are inconceivable because 
he is pure spirit, the icons of Christ (like those of minor African 
divinities) are not only permitted; they are considered essential because 
he is not divine only; he is also (half) human; and to refuse to fashion 
icons of him is to deny the humanity in him. (I am indebted here to a 
BBC talk on Eastern Orthodox iconography by the Reverend Maxfield 
of North Wales.)
9. Cf. Fagg: ‘In Africa wood carvings decay or are eaten by ants in a very 
few years. This perishability of the artist’s material has no doubt been 
one of the main conditioning factors in the growth of fine a rt ... Since 
variations may be introduced at each replacement, the tempo of 
evolution may be very quick (1963b:269).
10. Gaskiya ta fi Kwabo was founded as a Hausa language newspaper in 
1930. It was meant ‘to contradict false rumours ... It sold for one 
penny -  that is “kwabo” in Hausa. The title is literally “Truth is worth 
more than a penny” , the point being that, in the words of the 
Superintendent of the Northern Nigerian Literature Bureau, “A native 
of Nigeria can be kept in food for several days on 6d, and he can 
hardly be expected to pay so vast a sum for such an ephemeral thing 
as a newspaper.” (The old government paper, News Sheet, at the time, 
cost sixpence.)’ (East 1940:84).
6 AFRICANA
CHOREO-MUSICAL
PRODUCTIONS
Methodology and Critical Approaches
E---s-i- -K--i-n--n--i---O---l-u--s-a-n--y--i-n-  ir
For some time I have been concerned about several problems, conditions 
and circumstances rather peculiar to African theatre. These are issues which 
crop up repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. It behoves me then to focus 
largely upon the staging of tradition and the ‘classics’ -  professionalism in 
practice -  and this involves informed and objective criticism and the unfolding 
of canons and theory. I intend to offer differing ramifications, pro and con, 
in order to cover several aspects of the question and have produced this 
paper precisely because of the paucity of documentation and work on the 
subject.
Cp'
TRADITION
Tradition is not a nebulous term. It is the continuity of customs, information, 
attitudes, actions, beliefs, social patterns and institutions bequeathed to a 
community, large or small, which are in use by all or a segment of the 
population historically or in the present. In terms of the arts and aesthetics, 
it implies a convention, valued and cherished for its beauty, rarity, projection, 
power, and/or form and style.
The handling of tradition is an important part of contemporary theatre 
(whether popular, academic, professional, or commercial) and is a very delicate 
matter which deserves sensitive attention (which it does not often receive). 
Having been attacked so vehemently by colonialists inside and outside Africa, 
then misnamed and exploited so ruthlessly in the Americas, it has become 
chic and sophisticated in many quarters for blacks themselves, who have 
imbibed this posture, to despise the ancient arts. But seemingly in satire, elite
85
86 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
black society is now the only one which rejects its own treasures, abandoning 
them for other races to appreciate, collect, promote and utilise from the 
outside. This particular cultural crisis, this malady of mind and soul, affects 
every aspect of the African heritage and its arts. (Indeed, I have taken legal 
action 1988 to 1992 regarding it [Alii 1988]). Black society must realise that 
by debasing art, especially the mystical arts, one is misguidedly reducing its 
status and proving exactly what the negrophile erroneously sought to launch 
as a lack of African history, civility and culture.
Modernity versus Classicism
The integrity of African customs should not be apologised for, sheepishly 
justified, extravagantly defended, held as quaint, nor hybridised by those 
who hold the prerogative of choice and selection. The wisdom and ingenuity 
of these ancestors are to be as revered and cherished as any other -  not that 
there ever was the perfect society; the indigenous worldview was indeed 
abounding with creativity, refinement and philosophy. In the lively arts, many 
forms have matured impeccably, throughout tradition and have become classic 
-  definitive masterpieces. We may take the Asante (Akan) adowa or 
fontomfrom and the Yoruba (Oyo) bat a dances as fine examples. To attempt 
to ‘modernise’ or corrupt them only destroys a well established precept and 
theory: firstly that of the form, and secondly its maintenance. The desire 
should rather be to maximise the aesthetic potential upon each rendition. 
When new forms are desired, however, they should be created in and of 
themselves, but the classics must be extolled as such; held in esteem and 
celebrated. This is deemed a canon.
^  Grace and,  MalIl eabAility
Firstly, in the consideration of tradition on stage, it has to be decided whether 
a given piece of tradition is truly adaptable for presentation: what is considered 
is not only its liveliness and conjunctive appeal, but its total impact, as well 
as whether particular portions or the whole work is to be used. Often it has 
to be condensed extensively, but efficaciously, and one sometimes finds that 
the very medium of ‘the stage’ is unacceptable. The Western proscenium 
stage, too, is a hindrance, hence a reversion to theatre in the round or semi­
circle, and more natural settings such as gardens, courtyards and market 
squares, as used traditionally, can be introduced, especially for filming original
AFRICANA CHOREO-MUSICAL PRODUCTIONS 87
stage works. (Of course, this has to be positioned so that the wind does not 
blow away the sound from dancers and audience). Likewise, the theory of 
traditional African dance (sans boot and masquerade entities) is that the 
foot must touch the earth. That is why the foot is bared for contact with 
the floor.
If we consider a piece appropriate in and of itself, there are other factors 
about which to be cautious. Can the complexities be reduced compatibly 
enough to contain the greater outline of the source, at least; and is this 
acceptable? If so, how can this be executed? Is so much omitted that we 
distort the tradition? How realistic should it be? Should it be secularised? Is 
there anything in our portion that is so private that it does not lend itself to 
public showing? Can a female play a normally male role of a masquerader, 
or a particular part that tradition may not allow? (Males in some societies 
have played female roles, but there has been little in reverse.) If so, is she 
placed in jeopardy of being injured spiritually -  is the mask or play real or 
ritualistic? Is one’s rendition of theatre going to attract ‘phenomena’ at all? 
How ‘fortified’ are the properties and appurtenances? How much authenticity 
is desirable or necessary? One factor may conflict with the other.
One also has to consider the entertainment value of tradition versus 
ritual. When the ceremony is moved out of context, does it shed some of its 
sacredness? If so, when, why and how? If either the Efik Ekpe or the Yoruba 
Gelede masquerades serve as an example -  the Efik leopard masquerade (the 
typology and institution of which are widespread) occurs within a ritual, 
fraternal-cum-communal context. The dance, which focuses upon the solo 
leopard character and sports an intense ensemble, is as atmospherically- 
environmentally dependent as any. This is to infer that the illuminating drum- 
song-chant-linguistic-colour and design constituents, the ritual-seasonal- 
typographical-historical, social and sub-cultural factors which electrify the 
‘play’ are immediate -  as realised within all the charged and symbolic, 
dexterous and hypnotic plays of a formidable feline apparition. In like manner, 
the popular Gelede performance is an art which is very well rehearsed for an 
annual or three-year event of appeasement and placation. It is best known 
for its innovative song texts, the appearance and function of the masquerade 
characters, its dance, instrumental ensembles and communal responses. It is 
a spectacular showing which usually occurs overnight. How then, would co­
opted performers carry such a system hundreds of miles away to a sterile 
university stage, just to walk on, play and slide off? They must receive 
comprehensive permission, both from temporal leaders and the spiritual
88 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
patron, make an offering, and decide which and how many masks are to be 
used (not the most important of them, to be sure); which maskers will perform, 
which instrumentation will represent them, and so on (believe it or not, such 
occasions often do not allow performers an opportunity to warm up). But a 
very lacklustre performance can result, even from the correct source, if the 
people do not feel that the ritualistic aspect is of value to the audience, and 
that they even understand or care about what it is. They might not even 
complete the text, but ad lib portions of it. In that case, they are not performing 
Gelede or Ekpe at all, but are going through the motions. Not only that, it is 
the devout, unsullied performance which inspires people to act the most. 
This attitude is not at all necessary, but familiar for the reasons stated above. 
On the other hand, there are performances at which the actors savour every 
bit of spirituality and give their very best because of feeling a part of, or 
empathy with, the programme, having brought with them a sense of displaying 
the full art of the medium. There have been many cases where isolated 
performers inspire or commune with each other with total comprehension 
and of commitment to what they are doing. Sometimes, they even forget 
that they are ‘out of sync’, and enjoy the performance for themselves and 
make the stage their own.
Ritual actors, however, who are merely fitted in, are not very adaptable 
to theatre, and can pose a problem if they are not well co-ordinated, or lack 
some artistic quality desired of them if they are inserted into a commercial 
production. Short of training them to fit into an ensemble, one has probably 
to rework their role, double or chorus the part, or have them ghost-play or 
mime others. It has happened that the ritual specialists most available (say 
for chanting) are painfully shy, awkward and have very little stage presence.
The difference between the priest who is also an artist and a general 
practitioner is that the singular priest as well as the layman cannot readily 
adapt himself to the diverse movements, forms and styles, and reconcile them 
with the time-frame required (days or weeks rather than years or decades) 
for the theatre. The mystical artist, in this case, can perceive beyond the 
bounds of the cultural, sub-cultural or particular form.
THE REALISTIC AND EXPRESSIONISTIC
This also goes to say what previously had been alluded to: that much more 
effect and far less affectation (not affect) is provided in Oriental (Afro-Asian) 
than in Occidental performances. The fire that is shot out, eaten, or is danced
AFRICANA CHOREO-MUSICAL PRODUCTIONS 89
upon, and the encounter with sharp swords which are bandied and thrashed 
about (except in the University setting) are usually authentic. The ritual may 
be correct. Spirits may be interacting (positively or negatively) with or without 
inducement. Although the Western audience may find this incredible and 
attempt to argue vehemently against the very possibility, and of the state as 
untenable, it nevertheless is the hard fact! Therefore far more preparation 
and skill are demanded. This is why Western periodicals, even those of African 
arts, find it uncomfortable to accept articles which go into any of it in depth. 
Such alienating, obsolete policy has to be completely revised.
In Oriental theatre the effulgent, transcendental element (shining radiance 
and experience beyond normal comprehension) is a great asset. Actors from 
the Occident are constantly researching to capture just that finesse of Oriental 
performance which is incomparable and which, in itself, heightens the 
performance to enchantment. This evinces itself either in purely secular or in 
ritual theatre, but practitioners have various levels or intensities of absorption 
which they feel or exhibit at different times. Many factors (charms, costuming 
and instrumentation) beyond atmosphere, psychic state and initiations affect 
the actor. But sometimes great technique and the ‘acting’ (in character) of 
the part are confused with the spiritual dimension, just as artful or deceptive 
persons may feign levels of ‘possession’ on the stage or in pure ritual. The 
state of ‘natural high’ most often stems from an affinity with nature spirits, 
ancestral spirits or deities, which need not be called upon deliberately nor 
are easy to dispel. Such conditions must be developed and controlled. We 
not only want to stage dance and play with -  and in -  ‘spirit’ when we want 
it, but as much as we need and want. As in masquerade dances, at what 
point is the spirit there or not? It may not be predictable. Is it desirable at all 
on stage?
From there, we might ponder the opposite type of display that is largely 
portrayed by the manipulation of spirits as conjuration, as opposed to magic 
which is illusion or sleight of hand (Kinni-Olusanyin 1990:55). There the 
conjurer, talking drummers, praise singers and dancers appeal to and control 
the metaphysical to transform one manifestation to another and the 
phenomena work at their own pace. This kind of performance of power-in 
concentration is lengthy and filled with virtuoso music, dance-acrobatics, 
audience responses, singing and pageantry. It does not roll off second by 
second like an edited film strip, as Western spectators would demand. The 
space-time, entry-exit, movement around, theatrical dramatics, music and 
dance are all to be consumed critically as to intent, meaning, structure and
90 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
position or function in the performance. The language of the drums and the 
independent and corporate lines and punctuation of the music provide much 
of the impact. It is the culture of Africa or a highly professional audience, 
who appreciate this to the full, and who do not recoil with distaste at the so- 
called gory elements. The latter, in fact, excite the knowledgeable simply 
because of such feats as dismembering and rejoining the body. It is not sadistic 
behaviour but rather great mastery of occult arts. But it is just this facet of 
reality (effect) in ritual theatre, which gives it the great advantage of power. 
Intrigue and the possibility of danger lurking about often are the fantastic, 
bitter-sweet attraction.
Part of its veritableness, of course, just what separates conjuration from 
magic, is that everyone is free to examine the materials or the actors and to 
interact thoroughly. Of course, the ‘conjure’ is in the drumming and chanting, 
incantations and costumes, but one is also ‘raised up and let down’. After 
conjuration, ‘magic’ is but pale. There are astute professional magicians who 
are in search of the arts of conjuration, to develop themselves. Why then 
should an educational theatre house, which has had the benefit of the former, 
acquiesce to bill both of them indiscriminately, without benefit of critical 
evaluation (as indeed did happen in 1987 -  conjuration, and 1989 -  magic)?
It is obvious that traditional culture has much to offer the theatre. The 
indigenous theatrical set-up is inherent in the processing of rites, even when 
they focus on a palace, the market, shrine, hill, grove or river. Every deity 
has a ‘theatre’ with in its own idiomatic styles of presentation. Traditionally, 
a king might summon a number of these ‘theatres’ to perform for him in his 
courtyard and he, himself, might not even be seen. A secular audience might 
not be present, although a full-scale performance is in operation.
Professional performance, however, is nothing new either in the ritual 
or the secular realm. But tradition on stage cannot transcend present 
bifurcation in cultural knowledge and values, because of limited visions and 
techniques, of the weaker composer-directors even more than the 
aforementioned ‘misconstruction’ of the stage.
M IXED BLESSINGS
A situation which often turns out to be a puzzle in professional theatre is 
that of the extraordinarily high percentage of gifted amateurs in black society, 
due to the tenacious consumption-absorption of intricate rhythmic movement 
(metronome sense) and tonal forms/idioms which are part of the culture.
I t . Ii IV to A *  -  t  t t A-1 * SiC ifi \f> ? l  4
AFRICANA CHOREO-MUSICAL PRODUCTIONS 91
How do we harness all this talent and direct it appropriately? Such 
seemingly brilliant people may be pulled into a production on an ad-hoc
basis and fringe (the near outskirts) or even inside the theatre without the
proper attitude, intimate knowledge or any training at all and gradually 
ease his/her way up to the formal metier, only to wreak havoc upon the 
profession when settled, again by grasping far beyond their limitations. 
(This point is quite different from that of single performers or groups who 
excel on their own, point by point, and are rated upon their personality, 
flair and artistry; nor does it apply to those of genius, many of whom are 
singers.) Furthermore, we receive the most self-styled, redundant, disjointed, 
preposterous, dull choreography which is not culture-based from such 
persons. This plight permeates studios, culture centres and ‘national’ dance 
companies in African society. For some crass reason, albeit dance is not 
very well entrenched in the academic programme, very many try to capitalise 
upon it, thus demeaning the field, and this diminishes the reputation of 
dance and choreography as a discipline and as an art form.
At this juncture, let us compare the quality of music output to dance 
and choreography, a subject which discuss.
‘DELIVERY’
The emphasis upon percussive effect (fundamentally, most dance to 
percussion; most sing to strings and/or percussion), which relates to the 
‘drum mentality’ deserves brief mention, for it is asserted, both in Africa 
and its diaspora, that one ‘hears and feels something’ extra musical-linguistic 
from the sonorities. That certain ken, a sensation, impression, vibration, 
throb, penetration; then the propulsion and driving force (which also releases 
a ‘dancing spirit’ recognised in the African psyche) which is compelling, 
that even beseeches one to dance and that allows one to dance ‘into’ the 
music is cardinal. That it also leads to an altered state of consciousness 
(possession) is a priori.
The realisation that many persons receive the appropriate meaning or 
symbolism from the music, has not only to do with latent culture or 
enculturation, but with ethos -  a sensibility and receptivity towards the 
output which embraces (or apprehends) an intelligence and recomposes it; 
in tradition this would stem from the eleda (in Yoruba) or one’s substratal 
cognition. The music exudes an invisible essence, with which one 
is empathetic.
92 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
It is with professional traditional performers that we often find that the 
music, say drumming and playing of the xylophone, are far superior and 
more suited to the dance offered on ‘stage’, again because of low intrinsic 
value choreography, other arrangements and dance personnel who cannot 
really compete because they just do not have the skill. Singing, too, may be 
incongruous (Western intonation and voice production) thus being ‘out of 
character’. But there are opposite and bizarre instances where professional 
dancers find themselves in intolerable situations with amateurish drummers 
who either cannot produce or maintain the required patterns or, worse, have 
no music at all to play other than a constant running pulsation. Imagine 
trying to dance in a lively way before an audience of hundreds with such 
lacklustre impetus.
The ‘joker’ becomes apparent when drummers throw dancers off the 
beat by ineptitude, sometimes on heretofore seemingly unobtrusive parts of 
orchestration; and at those infrequent moments when a matching or 
harmonious dance cue or statement is mislaid due to the exasperating 
misdemeanour of inattention. Signals, too, rather than sustaining many counts 
for patterns or changes as in the West, are the norm. The danger is that the 
dancer is highly dependent upon the drummer who might forget or alter the 
signal. If the dancer happens not even to hear the signal, all is lost. The signal, 
however, is the most artful manner of procedure.
It is with chagrin that I mention some tedious ‘expired capacity’ dancers 
who can execute one or a few specific cultural patterns or forms beautifully 
but cannot or will not adjust to any other movements or configurations 
whatsoever. Our enjoyment is unprogressive.
Somewhat similarly but in respect of area and stylistic preference, since 
the mid-1970s New York City has witnessed excitement surrounding the 
wider-Mandingo, West African dance style which has been imported and 
deliberately taught by some continental performers. Despite the fact that many 
people have spent weeks incapacitated from injuries so incurred in pursuit of 
this scheme, it is still proceeding. The relevant factor, however, is that most of 
the black American practitioners are adherents and otherwise dedicated priests 
of their own Afro-Yoruba (Lucumi or Nago) tradition. Ironically, as 
individuals, they are more interested in Mandingo dance than the Yoruba, 
who are the most receptive at ceremonies while being overwhelmed by a 
deity. Because of this new focus, I even had some difficulty in procuring either 
enough students, or ensemble members for a Fon-Yoruba-Jazz orientated 
company in the mid-1970s -  and the curious trend has not abated.
AFRICANA CHOREO-MUSICAL PRODUCTIONS 93
Just as irksome as the ‘expired capacity’, but with a better prognosis for 
amelioration, is another state: the unstable ‘decisive moment’ dancers who 
try to rationalise less exertion during rehearsal by begging to amble or shuffle 
only through the choreography and to lightly mark the movements, instead 
of employing the full thrust of body, saving this for the performance. The 
tragic outcome of this, however, is that it hardly ever works. Unless the 
dancers receive tremendous support from the spectators immediately they 
arrive on stage, the same labour-saving device which was practised is going 
to be performed; that is, they contract stage fright and become self-conscious 
because of a poor attitude, and become ‘absorbed in the moment’, which 
does not allow them to achieve the zenith which they had not even yet 
acquired. When the dynamic music is not activated, we experience frustration 
and disappointment. That also accounts for just one of the reasons why 
instrumentalists in West Africa, at least, frequently have to be reprimanded 
for insulting wayward, uncoordinated, out-of-step dancers by music language, 
which always provokes a disruptive reply from the abused. These are yet 
other idiosyncratic pitfalls in African performance which would not arise, as 
such, elsewhere.
We find that because of the spontaneous, improvisatory character of 
African music and dance, both percussionists and solo dancers may spring 
out of control, in that the latter may decide to ‘show’ and therefore not stop 
at the required time during production. And likewise, drummers sometimes 
refuse to cease but accelerate eagerly, long beyond the dancer’s endurance, 
before cadencing out to a finale. Be that as it may, because percussionists 
and dancers play ‘to’ each other, even when not facing, the activating, elastic 
adaptations and buoyancy of the live performance still is, and eternally will 
be, the goal or epitome of every potent exchange.
STYLE AND FORM
A far more important concern, however, is that of crossing well established 
ethnic styles, or the maintenance of given stylistic consistency. Experience 
has shown me, both in theory and in practice, that it is very difficult for 
professional musicians, excepting those of Diaspora jazz, worldwide, let alone 
in the normal African society, to alter stylistic principles enough to concertise 
credibly in differing ethnic styles.
It often happens that in conventional institutions and companies 
musicians are required to render whatever a director, a board, or the necessities
94 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
of a contest, require, so that they need to possess a flexibility that does not 
exist. How then do we expect Dagomba drummers (this applies to dancers 
too) who trained in such idiom for over twenty years, to radically convert to 
play Akan, as Igbo, the Bambara, and to Jazz, for instance, or any one of 
these? They seldom do. Unless the director is very confident and well grounded 
in music and has most likely notated and memorised some essential parts in 
order to compare and control, the drummers (for example) merely run away 
with the music by resistance, habit and philosophical nescience. If indeed the 
technical aspects are properly demonstrated and grasped, it will revert and 
deteriorate until it is almost, if not totally, Dagomban again, even though a 
musician of the odd ethnic group might be present. This, of course, drastically 
modifies the dance. But even more difficult is that professional musicians 
might change the content of the music which they themselves offer for a 
particular dance, so that both the dance form and choreography must 
correspondingly be renewed at each and every rehearsal, and debate does 
not remedy the predicament. The reasons for this are numerous and have 
much to do with the structure of African music itself. Although variety is 
infinite, the number of rhythmic patterns is not very large, so that gong time­
lines, for instance, often portray subtle but pertinent deviation in rhythm, 
and the primary dance locution is based ‘to’ them. The relationship between 
all the components is so complex in the cross poly-rhythmic music that the 
major difference between one piece and another, from form to form, or from 
ethnic group to ethnic group, in many cases, might be in more overriding 
aspects of style. Phrasing, swing, shifting syncopes and accents, dynamics, 
change of parts, instrumentation, orchestration, timbre (tone quality), 
arrangement and improvisation all account for this, excluding talking 
instrumental language, chanting, signing techniques, scales, and so on.
It is just these minor but all-important divergences which make it onerous 
for the musician who remains outside the ethos of the performance. 
Nevertheless, when the music presents a startling contrast either in kinetic 
treatment, rhythmic or dynamic impetus, we encounter yet another exigency.
Sometimes a production which is rendered technically correct becomes 
so mechanical for lack of cultivation that the spectators and, especially, the 
dancers receive no lift or sparkle from it -  sparkle being the very effervescence 
which carries the performance. The brilliance must be sustained.
Particular points that are implied throughout this essay are those of 
perception and interpretation. In the arts we rely immensely upon intuitive 
powers. But our glowing perception also demands a broad and deep
AFRICANA CHOREO-MUSICAL PRODUCTIONS 95
theoretical base of the discipline and of the particular subject matter for 
sustained and informed visualisation. We interpret positively or negatively, 
accurately or not; eruditely, beautifully, inspiringly, elaborately, expressively, 
romantically, sympathetically, politically, diplomatically, and so on. We even 
reinvent. But then again the indigenous African interpretation or response to 
a given situation is as diverse as are the discrete cultures and ingenuity therein, 
even though there is a commonality of attitude and approach. It is required, 
thus canonical, that African people have an in-depth perception, thus having 
the capacity for expressive, objective and prolific interpretation of the 
performing arts, which will disallow anything less substantial.
SUMMARY
In summary, I have discussed several unique factors, challenges and especially 
canons of choreo-musico execution in African stage settings (as opposed to 
those of the Occidental world, whose presence everyone has had to recognise 
in contemporary theatre). That the highest standards of professionalism be 
elegantly maintained is not merely to be presumed, but judiciously scrutinised 
at all times, to avoid complacency and the superficiality of flash success.
The requirements of stylistic consistency cannot be dictated when 
confronted with colourful, polytypic cultural adaptations. But it must be 
exercised diligently when necessary, that is, in a state of mental or cerebral 
discernment of a real entity, without compromising any norms.
Furthermore, as a principle, we unconditionally acknowledge the positive 
and illuminating role of tradition in theatre. Moreover, one of the most 
important criteria of tradition is the dancing ‘foot touches earth’. Whereas 
the earnest art of dancing and choreography must be projected and polished; 
the invention of neoteric composition is laudable and requisite but the precious 
classics are inviolate. Let them not be adulterated but remain genuine.
We also must recognise that there is great effect and little affectation in 
African works and that the mystical and transcendental application is valid 
and often obligatory. Therefore, let it be mandated that as both the performing 
and plastic arts (including conjuration) are legitimate and multi-lateral topics 
of academic inquiry, the inclusion of their dynamic and preternatural 
magnitude is proper and responsible.
Tradition on stage shall be viewed as a luxuriance of place, so that the 
imperative respect and approach be affirmed; that we employ cultural 
property well, not only for the sake of society, but for ourselves, as the ethical
96 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 6c CULTURE
and committed. If there is no in-depth perception within us, let us gracefully 
avoid all tradition.
Therein lies probably the greatest perceptual, qualitative distinction 
between Oriental and Occidental methodology in choreo-musical 
productions.
-  APPENDIX -
Experiment in Technique of a Single Ensemble Dance: Bambose
Part of my small Yoruba bata dance ensemble, 1994, was an example of 
professional drummers (two) who are good dancers, which is a perfect 
combination. That notwithstanding, initially they found the group-dance 
precision technique arduous and complicated, because the choreography was 
deliberately unique but off the substructure of traditional stylistics. This was 
to expand the ‘dramatic’ motifs for stage. The other five members were less 
fortunate and thought the choreography insurmountable at its introduction 
because of their reactionary tendencies.
My students in three courses, who were taught exactly the same vigorous 
dance (of only two minutes in duration) understood it variously: the two 
graduating students who had one and a half years of challenging dance class 
previously, digested it readily (and one even used the portion of material 
taught thus far for his own production, under his own name) without pain 
to themselves or to the lecturer.
The second-year students, of whom there were thirty-six in number, 
were stunned at what was expected of them, but eventually managed it with 
grace and some with finesse, but many of them had been dancing in the 
other productions which my own graduating students organised, for 
assessment.
Of the first-year candidates, which were only sixteen strong and a brighter 
group than their seniors anyway, some began to dance with elan. Four of 
them, who are hard workers intellectually, came from zero (that is, literally 
from falling off the stage) to about a hundred per cent; one who had former 
experience was quite good and only one normally serious student had been 
hopeless, but eventually became adequate. The awkwardness was possibly 
due to the sudden strain upon her physique (tall and gangling). Her case was 
not such a surprise, for a man student in the second year, who was also 
intellectually sound and responsive, had the same quirk of lack of control.
AFRICANA CHOREO-MUSICAL PRODUCTIONS 97
The single student who missed no rehearsals and was in the top echelon of 
his class was the most impressive and committed.
Actually, they were taught a number of isolated patterns and all but five 
figures were used to flow into the dance when it was presented as a unit. In 
fact, I had not finished choreographing it when those first patterns were 
dictated.
The personal dance method employed is highly developed: I proffer a 
number of patterns and designs and change dynamics, tempo, metre, levels, 
nuances, and so forth to form a particular dance from my original concept 
of it. Although inspired, the Bambose piece (of 1994) was formulated in 
exactly this manner.
The experiment reveals that I should continue in the trend so inaugurated. 
A few students, however, who are not as well versed as town practitioners 
technically, were able to dance to their same level, but none of them was as 
developed in character or equalled the dancer-drummers in intensity. 
Incidentally, at the combined student performance, the three trained 
professional drummers for this composition were invited to play the same 
arrangement but one of the dancers understudied the drum part without 
extra rehearsal, while the other (with a praise chanter) danced the solo (of 
deified King Sango) with full ceremonial costume and conjuration (smoke 
and sparks). Much which hitherto had been discussed in class was finally 
realised on stage.
It is my long-standing opinion that dancers, whether Occidental or 
Oriental, do not know enough music. This insufficiency affects their entire 
attitude (receptivity) to presentation.
There are particular problems in choreographing and arranging bata 
dance and music, if they are to become stage-ready (but not to destroy classic, 
traditional form): the dance projections are expected to agree accentually, 
exactly to the master drum, or occasionally some other part, unlike most 
African drumming. Furthermore, a punctilious fashioning of choral dance 
for bata is uncommon, since the form is movable and semi-agreement only 
occurs at cadence points. Therefore, to organise just a portion of it in a less 
enigmatic manner for stage, and certainly to present it to a Western audience 
which does not comprehend the subtleties of both the sub-aesthetic and the 
inner-aesthetic, can pose a perpetual conundrum both to drummer and dancer.
P A R T  T H R E E
< ? r
-------------------
7 LITERATURE 
AND THE 
AFRICAN PUBLIC
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin
‘Taken in by surprise, the people, their ways of life, their values, all by 
surprise commented a writer-anthropologist generalising on the fate of 
the African societies, both traditional and modern, ever since the black man’s 
emergence into the Western historic awareness. How much of this truth 
remains true also of the literature of the people is what this paper attempts 
to discuss.
In discussing this or these literatures we need to qualify the role of the 
creative writer in connection with his existing realities out of which 
background he is born:* his faculties, his tools, and more particularly his 
commitments. There is hardly an uncommitted creative writer in any given 
society, time and condition, since the very phenomena of being inspirationally 
engaged embodies the sense of being spiritually and/or emotionally committed. 
Committed to what? Of course to his conscience first, and through his art to 
the conscious understanding of the needs, aspirations, prejudices and 
limitations of his society, and finally, through the conscious service of that 
society’s expression, a commitment to the service of universal art, since all 
art, after all, converges at the fundamental human level.
Before we come to the question of where African literature stands in 
this body of universality, or even more precisely to the old hoary question of 
what in fact African literature is, I would like to digress for a moment and 
consider it under more detached questions: What, in concrete terms, are the
As I remarked in the Introduction, this paper was written in 1970; the conventions of the day -  giving 
Africa the feminine gender and all human beings, especially writers and artists, the masculine -  have 
been preserved. -  Ed.
101
102 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
languages that should make African literatures, and what, in appraising these 
literatures, is the commitment of the writer to a given society? Certainly, it is 
not by avoiding the former all too well beaten argument -  ‘What is African 
Literature?’ ‘What our writers, patrons or critics tell us it should or should 
not be concerned in’ -  that we can get close to the heart of the matter. We 
must simply admit that there is no one single body of African Literature just 
like there is no one single body of Asiatic or European Literature with a 
capital ‘L’ and an exclamation mark. Yet, perhaps, by once again trying to 
define the role and commitment of any writer in any given society, or even 
by at least eliminating that literature which is not born out of the indigenous 
African vernaculars, we should be able to arrive at what makes African 
literature or not. Thus, Hausa literature is African and Bengali is not, Zulu is 
and English is not, and so forth.
But, as to why these trees of African languages were not so far given 
enough chance to bear fruit, demands that we face certain rigid factors of 
history and politics.
What was Africa considered to be before the colonial days? The 
Westerners had mostly to rely on what their travellers, their ivory hunters 
and slave traders reported to them, followed by the information from their 
missionaries and finally through the suppressed echoes of the whip of their 
colonial administrators. As such, the first introduction of the black man in 
the concept of the Westerners was in the image of a humiliated humanity. 
The slander to his dignity, to his way of life, to his values, which so incessantly 
recur as a matter of fact across the ‘civilised’ world today, drew breath then. 
Although his social systems were almost destroyed, although condemned to 
grapple with these world-wide historic and current realities which negate his 
values, yet it was not his capacity as an individual, not his success or failure 
as a member of a group, but the colour of his skin and his physical 
characteristics that appeared to be the core of the element by which the 
Western master judged him. He was put on trial by his very appearance and 
played the underdog of his country’s class structures.
Out of these and against these, the African was taught to protest in his 
master’s ways, in his master’s values, in his master’s language. Yet Africa was 
never mute in her own heritage of self-expression before or after the colonial 
days. The problem is how to record her abundant oral literatures in her own 
languages and preserve them for her children; first, how to record the very 
many social traditions both in their similar and contradicting shades and 
evolve them in a harmony of oneness through the test of time and the criteria
LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN PUBLIC 103
of their own humane level, since any language should be given time to develop 
its potential of literature.
The writer-sons of those who yesterday had to interpret their ways of 
life to their masters under the point of the coloniser’s gun and under his 
conditions, should be the ones, whose commitment it is, to reincarnate these 
languages.
The challenge is not whether they could or could not, but whether they 
should at all, and there is a double edge to this ‘should’.
The first is, should Africa,
— who must face the hard reality of her main political and economic 
languages being English and French -
— who must face the obvious multiplicity and limitations that the mother 
languages present paramount problems of insufficient expression, and 
that one cannot place these vernaculars overnight into one huge literary 
common denominator -
— who must face the reality that the two inherited English and French 
languages have successfully proved to Africa, and through her to the world, 
that they have brought her standard of higher education side by side with 
that of the Western academic scale -
— who must face the reality that her appeal through these two world-wide 
languages had, or should have, started a dialogue of understanding 
between the ‘mass’ of the outside world and the African public, considering 
herself ‘lucky’ to be the inheritor of these major languages -
Should Africa abandon these useful tools of communication and literature 
which history so inevitably put at her service?
The second edge is, should Africa,
— who must face the reality of the cultural bastardisation that has been and 
is being forced down the throats of the existing human conditions of her 
societies -
— who must face the time-honoured reality that the language any ‘native’ 
dreams in is the one nearest perfect tool to record or recount his experiences 
in, and that no full-grown culture or healthy tree, can, without losing a 
good part of its nuance essence or destroying that of its counterpart, be 
transported, transplanted, translated or trans-anything on to another root 
of tradition -
104 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
— who must face the responsibility that Africa’s own cultural trees should 
be given chances to bear fruit for their own consumers; the quality and
content of the fruit to be enjoyed or denounced by those societies out of
whose background conditions, settings, experiences is born the urge of 
inspiration that carry the scar and laughter of their life, and by the criteria 
of those who have developed a conscious taste for their vernaculars, and 
are now awakening into a new blood of national characteristics and 
historic awareness -
— who must realise that these shall always be an obvious and understandable 
French and/or English cultural prerogative in all those African writings 
of these expressions, and that as a contrast result, a gradual shrinkage 
and eventual extinction of the vernaculars is inevitable -
— who must realise, that the creative offspring of these French and English
cultural prerogatives, however localised they might have been made to 
appear, are bound to tag Africa’s values on to their own priorities, thereby 
exposing a bastardised calculated
midwifery -
Should Africa, at this point raxe neeu ana peei away any tumping up of 
colonial cultures which shatter her authentic heritages, under the cover of 
‘hard realities’? Realities they both are; a dilemma of realities. Yet, by the 
use of English and French, the nearest we achieve would be an Africanised 
English or an Africanised French, but not an African literature, since the 
imported languages do not spring from the life root of the people’s expression. 
This too is a reality. Is it not because Shakespeare originally dreamt in English 
that he had the courage to refrain from playing his talent into the lure of 
Greek and Latin which held the platform of international repute then? Can 
young African talents, unlike Shakespeare and his contemporaries, afford to 
play their gifts into the classified columns of Paris and London literary papers, 
and by so doing live apart and above the needs and realities of their societies? 
We have already said that these very many vernaculars are all too limited in 
scope to accommodate sufficient expression for modern thought. But 
whatever effort and will that has been exerted in them so far has been more 
in the line of the research of language sciences, and not in helping them 
develop as possible tools of literary mediums. Besides, ‘limitation’ had once 
been the big challenge at the root of all the major languages of today.
It is by recording ideas in the very language one dreamt in, first, and 
then having the same translated into foreign languages, second, that the
LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN PUBLIC 105
recognition and growth of vernaculars into wider instruments of literature is 
guaranteed; that is, the language of conception is the one given priority to 
express in, however limited its scope happens to be at the beginning. In other 
words, the work is more complete when recorded in the language of its 
original conception, even though it might appear limited in the extent of its 
expression. Having dreamt or conceived an idea in one’s own language and 
then depicting the same into the written words of that same language, is not 
an all too simple process, let alone having to translate or adapt the original 
idea or dream into the idiom of an alien tongue whose approach, warmth 
and attitude of thought is a far cry from that of the conceiver’s dream. It is a 
generally accepted fact that the very sense of a translated idea in literature 
disallows full-blooded completeness in the work concerned. The focus would 
be concentrated more on the skeleton and theme only, and less on the form 
and quality of the content.
Perhaps enough has not yet been said about the dilemma of these realities 
one is supposed to challenge. The language, or particularly the social dilemma 
of the African public (both being the close concern of the writer), arise not 
only from the multiplicity of tribal vernaculars which greatly hinder both 
inter-African and inter-state communication, but, also from the fact that to a 
major extent, the African continent, being born out of traditionally humane 
communal societies of collectivism, is now bordering on the problem of how 
to bring about a modern image of Africanist thought without having to 
succumb to the materialistic hands of technological civilisation, or without 
having to gamble with the possible contamination of a Marxist ideology; on 
how to bring about a modern image of the Africanist thought, acceptable by 
all concerned and adaptable into their own particular variations while at the 
same time the core of their value judgement would converge into an historic 
solidarity of African purpose. Between these hard realities we are confronted 
with the conflicting African image, and the survival of our cultural, linguistic 
and social values which we cherish lies with this image. Our conscious 
question, then, is how to bridge this inevitable transitional precipice for a 
modern Africa. Since free Africa is an Africa politically torn between the 
forces of these world-patronising ideologies, each force pulling her away 
from the ‘isms’ of their disfavour: Washington pulling her away from the 
‘menace of Communism’, Moscow/Peking pulling her away from ‘the menace 
of Capitalism’, whether she likes it or not, it merely accelerates the dilemma 
of the creative artist who must at least live with the wishful thinking that his 
gift is a vehicle of free thought and not a battlefield for the game of dogma-
106 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
wrestlers. Added to this, new African governments, having made politicians 
and militarists run amok with power greed, are cutting as many images of 
the Africanist concept as their egos need them to feed upon, and mystifying 
the questions which the artist looks for behind the ready-made answers 
fabricated to blunt the thrust of his sincerity. Coupled with this is the old 
world which, on the one hand, like the toothless terror of a deadly wounded 
god, plagues and exasperates the modern ideas of the writer into a host of 
complexities; into a sense of guilt for the role he affects as the sensitive medium 
where the timeless old values conflicted with the inconsistent and untested 
new; into a sense of incapacity for his lack of knowledge concerning what 
exactly each tribal tradition and religious custom imposed in a similar or 
contradicting manner to one another; into a sense of defence against the 
dangerously sensational misinterpretation of the Western film consumers’ 
outlook of Africa; into a sense of awareness (and acceptance with a pinch of 
salt) of a seemingly ‘civilised’ technological world which uprooted man and 
his centuries of effort with its two major wars, presenting Africa with a fait 
accompli and still threatening life with a third and fatal if not total war. On 
the other hand, the heritage of his fathers which his ‘civiliser’ almost effaced 
and which the artist selects at his own discretion to keep and bridge for a 
future African generation, framing it into a form of a modern angry 
expression, would add to his mental exasperation whenever the questions 
raised by his ideals fail to gain corresponding answers under the test of 
concrete research.
Out of these, each forms a theory, an image, each in his own Africanness, 
differing in the interpretation of his national or local heritage and experience, 
and each expressing the self and society inside the uniform black-cloth (which 
is but a pigment cover of the self). Several theories have already been formed, 
either out of well-meaning intention like Negritude and Pan-Africanism, or 
out of sinister motives, like apartheid. Yet the image of the Africanness which 
we indigenous Africans have in common (however much it might have been 
interpreted or distorted to fit into the manner and motive of each politician, 
writer, critic or racial supremacist) cannot be based on any of these new 
theories, whether Negritude, African cultures of English expression for 
Commonwealth members, apartheid or Black Power for that matter, but on 
the predominant basis of a traditionally humane society. It is their geographic 
and, particularly, glaring historical factors, that have necessitated the birth 
of these theories (and perhaps of more to come) -  the factors in which, and 
because of which, Africa suffered and still suffers a psychological, moral,
LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN PUBLIC 107
physical and economic disalienation. Disregarding those degenerate theories 
of sinister motives for a moment, that is, the theory of the apartheid clan or 
its extreme counterpart, and considering those theories of healthy intent which 
are born out of Africa’s indigenous interest, whatever differences they appear 
to have had so far in their supplement towards a total African image are 
differences of degree and not fundamental. This is because, born Negritude 
and the theories expressed in its disfavour from the ex-British colonies arise 
from the same historical backbone of an Africa Lost and Regained. Regained 
in an historic factor of violent engagement and still facing the constant shock 
of alienation, still living in the oppressed-oppressor ring of combatant in 
protest and jailer in guilt. It is in the regaining of this total Africanness that 
her sons cannot afford to prostitute her traditional sensibilities; sensibilities 
which are at the core of her identity and are at the same time both age- 
bound and current; current because her die-hard sensibilities are still 
challenged and influenced by East-West values; age-bound because these 
sensibilities which we treasure have their own established governing values 
and should awaken into a transitional context by her own right and not by 
being bogged down into threatening forces with doubtful motives. The threat 
lies within
— the exodus to the cities, mainly because of the centralised economic 
opportunities, leaving the communal background, family concern, 
language and values behind, thus creating a vacuum whose substitutes 
are usually elements that sap the energy of traditional ideas, resulting in 
a total alteration of the personality;
— it lies within the tendency of the African conscious writer, being lured 
and drained into government services out of necessity for his livelihood, 
and from where he dares not make objective statements at variance with 
the existing political thought of his state;
— it lies within the avoided ugly question of how British certain 
Commonwealth African States have become, or how French the Senegalese 
have become (however much they might hate or love themselves for it);
— it lies within the evaluation of the thrill and fear-ridden god-masks that 
will have soon lost their terror but not their traditional significance and 
social timelessness in the forming of a people’s national characteristics, 
since, out of all religious cults evolves a people’s cultural backbone, and 
out of the craft of the carver, a nation’s art;
— it lies within the realisation and acceptance of the fact that we cannot
108 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
afford to concentrate literature or the aristocracy of the speech-making 
intellectuals on their exportation to the patrons’ newspapers, but must 
embrace and involve all groups of tribe or clan societies.
And the only way to do so is by using their vernaculars.
I should add this, lest I appear merely advising against the idea of all 
‘Westernist’ or ‘Easternist’ processes of assimilation which of course have 
already taken us by the head. My meaning is simply that we, like them, 
should be allowed to preserve our cultural identities (language being the 
most conscious tool of culture), our experiences, our conditions and our 
needs with the awareness and responsible contribution towards man’s 
universality at the basic human level. By stressing that all authentic African 
settings and the everyday realities originating in an African experience should 
be first recorded for the African in his own language is not to set any form 
of imaginary boundary between the basic and universal human nature 
expressed in all sorts of literatures, but once more to underscore the fact 
that there can be no true African literature without the use of her own 
languages. Nor is this a mere attitude of aloofness over one’s Africanness, 
a nostalgic defiance in favour of the Motherland’s nationalism. It is a matter 
of need, a purpose of concern, for the poet-engaged, the painter, critic, 
politician and all concerned in the development of a true cultural personality 
of the Africans.
These are a few lines by the West Indian novelist, E.R. Braithwaite, 
from his To Sir with Love (1971):
‘I have grown up British in every way, myself, my parents, 
and my parents’ parents, none of us knew or could know any 
other way of living, of thinking, of being; we knew no other 
cultural pattern,’ and then, ‘I realised at that moment that I 
was British but evidently not a Briton ... I would need to 
examine myself and my whole future in terms of this new 
appraisal.’
And we ask no less of an appraisal for Africa, only she needs not wait until 
she has lost it all; a cultural right growing side by side with her political 
right is what she must appraise before it is too late, as it appears to be for 
the West Indian in Braithwaite’s novel. And surely one’s own language is 
the lifeblood of one’s culture. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, whom
LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN PUBLIC 109
Shakespeare well understood, once said ‘To have one’s own language is the 
dignity of a people.’
Besides, it is not the mere assertion, protest, or political-moralist 
declamation in the oppressor’s language to the oppressor, but the mirroring 
of a society in all her complexities and in the literature of her own language 
which expresses her to herself, that exposes her to her own image, that she is 
finally absolved. And it is within this absolution that the duty of the writer 
artist lies.
If priding yourself in your colour (whatever that is supposed to mean), 
and exclaiming it out loud in French or English poetry, implied that you 
were once taught to be ashamed of the same or made to feel little because of 
it; why not record and proclaim the poem in the vernacular you dreamt it in, 
to embrace and involve your own people first, and if and when necessary, 
translate it into the foreign idiom? Why not?
Perhaps, from among the African nations, Ethiopia is one of the lucky 
ones in this context, in that, ‘the best that has been known and said’ has, 
through the centuries, been recorded and expressed in the languages of her 
heritage, in the literature of her own script since 800 b c , first in Geez, in 
Tigre-Tigregna, and finally in Amharic, all languages of wide scope and not 
mere dialects as some Western misconceptionists consider them to be. They 
are all derivatives of the same Geez root, a most ancient script, from one of 
Ethiopia’s earliest of people, the Ag-Azi of the time-old Adulis, Beha, and 
Acum cities whose ruins still stand, depicting the country’s historic and cultural 
backbone. The Western thought which abandoned African painting and 
sculpture as crude and primitive has had to reconsider its cocksure disdain 
in the words of Elie Faure who wrote of African art as characterising ‘the 
universe itself’, and as reflecting ‘the orderliness of the Cosmos ...’. Who 
knows what African literatures would do if only given the chance of survival 
by us, her young writers who appear to have abandoned her languages? 
Certainly, what our new African languages need for their development, as 
possible literary tools, are the attractions of modern realities adapted into 
the roots of their own existing potentials, to attract the realities outside the 
boundaries of their circulation and cross-fertilise them into their own 
circumstances without effacing the essential characteristics of their cultural 
inheritance, and at the same time considering the nature of the new qualities 
that make themselves newly acceptable to the African warmth; unless, by 
refusing a wider range of accommodation for the newer realities, we invite 
the dangers of parochialism that may lag the transitional forces long set in
110 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
motion, and by so trying create some sensitively narrow customs edged into 
their own rigid sterility. Narrow provincialism or clan sense would render 
us, in literature as in progress, crippled exhibitionists supporting falling tribal 
walls against one another, and the energies we exert would only hasten our 
being buried with them.
Yet it is not by allowing our spirit to be hypnotised by the spectre of 
West-East ideologies or bogged down by their cultural inoculations that we 
can help realise a totality of an African image, particularly when this practical 
and immediate necessity cannot be solved within our endless debates of 
abstractions instigated by the sinister motives of the selfsame ‘friendly’ 
pharaohs. The African writer, is not long past the period of questioning his 
idea as to what ingredient of his African totality might have been eliminated 
in the process of his alien rehabilitating techniques, and what essentials of 
language, art and literature he cannot afford to overlook in the grave 
responsibilities he exercises in the guidance and background formation of 
younger writers. Although he might not be able to afford to disregard these 
current forces which are at work and are in a better position to influence the 
temper of the times, it must at least be with the conscious awareness that the 
influence cannot be at the risk of mental or cultural colonisation, as, for 
instance, in the degenerate ‘go white -  go beautiful’ notion, inculcated into 
certain lighter-skinned Negro Americans, or the back-handed encouragement 
of apartheid (the deadliest wedge thrust in the soul of our African-ness), 
glaring at us behind the idle but calculated silence of Anglo-American 
Incorporated. Within this lies the core of our conflicting value judgements. 
We might heed Benjamin Franklin’s words here, ‘As we must account for 
every idle word, so we must for every idle silence’, or that a friend cannot be 
a flatterer at the same time. Certainly, there will be little or no African art if 
our laws of creativity were out of touch with these hideous realities being 
played against our cultural values.
Thus it is only literature that involves all groups to this awareness, the 
literature of Africa’s expression by right of indigenous birth, in transcending 
time and dogma and on the digestion of time and generations, that would 
help the writer and the consumer to form a conscious thought of an African 
future, no longer alienated in determining the pace and direction of a world 
that concerns her. It is, therefore, more with the literatures that embrace 
each and every group who have developed a conscious taste for his vernacular, 
in the recalling to life and awareness the structural backbone of the ways of 
the colonial and traditional survivals, in forecasting for him what new realities
LITERATURE AND THE AFRICAN PUBLIC 111
Africa’s culture is about to naturalise, what social impact this new 
naturalisation represents in relation to, or in conflict with, that of his past or 
passing realities, in the findings of what it might reflect on the East-West 
ideological impact as envisaged through the image of his Africanness, and, 
in the depiction of these messages which unfortunately happen too fast for 
Africa’s pace and in which she is incessantly hamstrung, that the engagement 
of the African writer should first stand. It is more in the literatures of a total 
African involvement and less in his contemporary niche in the temple of 
fame, that the commitment and excitement of the African man of letters 
who stands out as her culture reincarnate and the embodiment of her 
literatures, would find himself his rightful and deserving responsibility.
8 AFRICAN LITERATURE 
AND THE CRISES OF 
POST-STRUCTURALIST 
THEORISING
Niyi Osundare
INTERROGATING THE INTERROGATORS
Let me begin by confessing to a nagging unease about the ‘post-ness’ tagged 
on to contemporary theorising in general: post-structural, post-modernist, 
post-colonial, post-Marxist, post-industrial, and so on. There is also talk 
about the ‘post-humanist’ era, though we hope in all earnestness that the 
‘post-human’ society will never arrive! This innocuous-looking prefix ‘post’ 
kicks up temporal, spatial, even epistemological problems, operates most 
times on a set of fallacies which seduce us into a false consciousness that 
human thoughts, ideas, actions, experiences, and the significant events they 
generate are arrangeable in a linear, x-before-y, y-after-x framework, very 
much like a series of temporal scenarios in an overdeterministic succession.
Implicit in this linear arrangement is a suggestion of misleading 
chronology, a temporal-ideational faction which constructs progression as a 
process in which ideas are used and discarded, then superseded and supplanted 
by new ones. This method hardly looks back except for self-justification and 
self-authentication (Jeyifo 1990a:2), it is so full of contemporaneist bravado 
about the relative (at times absolute) superiority of its own perceptual 
ideology, theoretical re-categorisation and analytical methodology. However, 
the prefix ‘post’ raises issues of a fundamental philosophical nature. When 
used with a temporal signifier, it acquires a clearer, more originary power 
than when yoked up with the ideational. Compare ‘post-1945’ and ‘post­
structuralist’. While it is possible to point to January 1946 as the specific, 
immediate commencement of ‘post-1945’, we would be hard put to it to tell 
specifically when ‘post-structuralism’ began -  the time and place it was born, 
its progenitors, its birth weight, the attending midwives, and so forth. This is
113
114 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
why, despite the several claimants to its originary authorship, we still find it 
difficult to say in unmistakable terms who the ‘founders’ of post-structuralism 
were or are. There is an inevitable fuzziness, even indeterminacy about these 
things which theories of the ‘post’ variety are often too hasty to admit.
It is an irony that a theoretical theology such as post-structuralism, whose 
principal tenet is the deconstruction of dichotomy, should have its own temple 
erected on a similar binarism: structuralism versus post-structuralism, 
modernism versus post-modernism, and the rest. For one of the abiding 
concerns of the New Historicism is the reconstruction of our view of history 
not as a progressional, evolutionary inevitability, but as a multidirectional 
network of ruptured continuities in which cause may be effect, effect cause; 
a complex, supratemporal artefact in which the present derives its force from 
the unpastness of the past.
Post-structuralist practice understands this temporal and ideational 
fluidity, even if its theory appears to negate it. More than any other literary 
theory in recent times, post-structuralist practice derives a great number of 
its paradigms from the ‘unpastness of the past’. In a rarely eclectic case of 
archaeology and necromancy -  deconstructionists have exhumed the 
sagacious bones of Plato, Nietzsche, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhaur, Heidegger; 
Marx, Sartre, Bakhitin, and others. For critical and analytical terminologies 
(and methods) they have dug deep into the catacombs of Classical rhetoric: 
tropes, topos, metaphor, metonymy, hypostasis, aporia, polysemy, and so on 
have all been dusted up and sent on ‘new’ post-structuralist errands.
There is thus a significant ‘bending over backwards’ in post-structuralism, 
a rummaging through the jungle of primeval epochs. How really self-assuredly 
new, then, are these terminologies, these methods, even in their new 
significations and functions, when their very origination interrogates the ‘post- 
ness’ of their ‘structuralism’. Most times the old-new wine of post-structuralist 
analytical idioms feels quite ill at ease in the old wine-skin of its theory. 
Contemporary literary discourse is thus clogged with mongrel jargon, cultic, 
overprofessionalised, trapped in hermitic closures. The newer things appear 
to be, the older they really are.
HOW ‘POST-COLONIAL’ IS POST-COLONIAL 
DISCOURSE?
The world is shaped -  frequently determined -  by the words we use for 
expressing it. In naming the world we also name ourselves, evoking a
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 115
recognisable, tangible construct of that panoply of realities which constitutes 
what we call the human experience. Names serve as the door to the house of 
experience, a guide to hidden meanings in the shadowy nooks of time and 
place. Names tell stories, liberate or imprison; they may also serve as self- > 
fulfilling prophecies. Names commit; which is why the Yoruba say that it is y/ 
only mad people who do not mind what names they are called, or who 
refuse to see the difference between the names they choose to bear and the 
ones the world prefers to call them by. The negative ‘politics of representation’, 
so famous in contemporary literary discourse, is very much the product of 
misapprehension as it is of mis-naming and mis-verbalisation. There are times 
people do not need to call a dog a bad name to hang it: the bad name does 
the hanging itself.
Conscious of the politics of naming, many African writers have expressed 
profound apprehension about the term ‘post-colonial’ as applied to the 
African situation in general and African writing in particular. For instance, 
speaking at a Commonwealth conference in London in 1991, Ama Ata Aidoo, 
playwright and novelist, challenged her audience in these words: ‘Ask any 
village woman how post-colonial her life is.’ ‘Colonialism,’ she added, ‘has 
not been “posted” anywhere at all’ (Chreachain 1991). Most appropriately, 
the paper from which these words emerged was titled ‘Collective Amnesia 
and the Role of the African Writer’.
First let us collectively remember to ask a few questions: Whose invention 
or re-invention is the term ‘post-colonial’? Who was the first to apply it to 
the writings of Africa and other parts of the developing world? Since when 
has it become fashionable, theoretically and critically correct, to refer to 
these parts of the world by this term? What social and cultural constructions 
are thrust up by this concept? How are we committed by this term, having 
so profoundly naturalised its meaning without pausing to think about its 
implications? To re-echo our former trope, this terminology names us, but 
do we know its own name and the origin and giver of that name?
It is pertinent to ask these questions for the term ‘post-colonial’ is not 
just another literary-critical construct to be used with the same terminological 
certitude and blissful complacency with which we employ its counterparts 
such as ‘post-structural’, ‘post-modernist’, and others. More than other 
terminologies of the ‘post-’ variety, ‘post-colonial’ is a highly sensitive 
historical -  and geographical -  trope which calls into significant attention a 
whole epoch in the relationship between the West and the developing world, 
an epoch which played a vital role in the institutionalisation and strengthening
116 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
of the metropole-periphery/centre-margin dichotomy. We are talking about 
a trope which brings memories of gunboats and mortars, conquests and 
dominations, a trope whose accent is bloodstained. We are talking about a 
terminology whose ‘name’ and meaning are fraught with the burdens of 
history and the anxieties of contemporary reality.
The first of these burdens concerns the politics of the genealogy of the 
term ‘post-colonial’. Like many other phrases and concepts which define the 
African reality, this terminology owes its origination to foreign Adams. It is 
yet another instance of a ‘name’ invented for the African experience from 
outside, a name which finds little or no acceptance among its African objects.
It is undoubtedly this conflict between the African reality and the exogenist 
determination and representation of it that led Fipinne N. Chreachain to r 
this conclusion about the Commonwealth conference mentioned earlier on 
in this essay: ‘It is obvious to anyone familiar with British Africanist circles 
that a vast gulf exists between critical perspectives within Africa and those 
prevalent among British Africanists’ (1991:4). For ‘British’ substitute 
‘Western’. Chreachain’s views here possess a thrust similar to that of Biodun 
Jeyifo in his critique of the ‘exclusively and prescriptively Western monument 
of High Theory’. Jeyifo observes further:
the contemporary understanding of theory not only renders it 
an exclusively Western phenomenon of a very specialised 
activity, but also implicitly (and explicitly) inscribes the view 
that theory does not exist, cannot exist outside of this High 
a. Canonical Western orbit. (1990a:3)
This apprehension about the imperialism of theory is by no means an 
exclusively African concern. In an interview with Gayatri Spivak in New 
Delhi, Rashmi Bhatnager, Lola Chatterjee and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan took 
their learned guest to task on the use of ‘First World elite theory’ for the 
literatures of the ‘colonies’:
Now there is a certain uneasiness here about the ideological 
contamination of theory by the specific historical origins which 
produce it and therefore about the implications of employing it 
in our own context. Would you defend the post-colonial 
intellectual dependence upon Western models as historical 
necessity? (Spivak 1990)
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 117
It is instructive to note that Spivak’s short, cryptic, and evasive answer to 
this very important question indeed ends up in another question counterposed 
to her interviewers: ‘What is an indigenous theory?’
For ideological and intellectual reasons, it must be stressed here that 
what is really at issue in this argument is not simply the provenance of theories, 
but the ease and complacency with which Western theories take over the 
global literary and intellectual arena, the way they inscribe themselves as 
though the other parts of the world were a tabula rasa. There is something 
ethnocentric about this ‘universalism’, an attitude and behaviour which 
constitute the world’s literary discourse into a monumental Western 
Monologue. In several ways, this totalises literary experience and the way 
people relate to it. So rigidly located in one place, how can we see the Great 
Mask of the world from different angles?
The second problem with the term ‘post-colonial’ is its denotative and 
descriptive inadequacy. What are the semantic -  and socio-semiotic -  
designations of this compounded word: beyond-colonialism, past-colonial, 
after-colonial, free-from-colonial, anti-colonial, or simply not-colonial? In 
other words, is ‘post-colonial’ a qualitative tag or a mere temporal phase- 
marker?
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin wrestle bravely with 
the monster sprung up by this term when they declare in The Empire Writes 
Back, a very valuable even if controversial book:
We use the term ‘post-colonial’ to cover all the cultures affected 
by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the 
present day. (1989:2)
This declaration gives the prefix morpheme ‘post’ a new and baffling meaning. 
At work here is an aberrant, one-catch-all metonymy in which the part is too 
small for the whole it is used to represent. The logic of this definition puts 
works as far apart as When Love Whispers (1947), The Palmwine Drunkard 
(1952), Fragments (1969), and I Will Marry when I Want (1982) in the 
same ‘post-colonial’ bag. There is no doubt that this container is also large 
enough to swallow the works of D.O. Fagunwa, or the poetry of Sheban 
Roberts!
Further down the page, attention shifts from ‘culture’ to place, and the 
authors disclose the enormous assortedness of the fishes in the post-colonial 
net: Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Malaysia,
118 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific, Sri Lanka -  and 
the United States of America! Needless to say, what we have here is an 
unconscionably mixed bag whose constitutive items are so gross and so 
general that very little room is left for the crucial specificities of individual 
parts. And what’s more, to so liberally apply the ‘post-colonial’ label to 
places such as Africa and Australia, the Caribbean and Canada -  places 
whose colonial pasts are so fundamentally different -  is tantamount to 
mocking the real wounds of the colonial infliction where they are deepest 
and most enduring. We certainly need to distinguish formal and superficial 
coloniality in places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand from the 
systematic exploitative -  and, above all, racist -  coloniality in the rest of the 
countries in the list.
Colonialism is a complex, protean monster with various levels, degrees, 
and complexions. Its intricate mutations defy a simple, short-hand name, 
its continuities make a mockery of a totalising, comprehensive nomenclature. 
Thus, Ashcroft et al.'s submission that ‘The Idea of “post-colonial” literary 
theory emerges from the inability of European theory to deal adequately 
with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of post-colonial writing’ 
(ibid.:2) sounds ironical in the face of the inadequacy of the emergent ‘idea’ 
itself.
And besides, who needs this adumbrative tag with its own ‘false notions 
of the universal’ ? Wasn’t this name invented by Western Theory as a 
convenient nomenclatural handle on their epistemic spheres of influence? 
To reiterate our earlier point, the ‘tag’ post-colonial is more useful for those 
who invented it than it is for those who are supposed to wear it, its passive 
signifieds. It rings truer for those who have ‘posted’ colonialism in posh 
conference halls and arcane seminar rooms conveniently far from the real 
battleground of colonial encounter.
And this explains the problem of misrecognition and the resultant 
misrepresentation plaguing the term ‘post-colonial’ . Whether used 
ideationally or temporally, the term lures us into a false sense of security, a 
seeming pastness of a past that is still painfully present. It is common 
knowledge (no longer restricted to social scientists, especially of the political 
economics persuasion) that to apply the term ‘post-colonial’ to the real 
situation in Africa today is to be plainly naive or majestically futuristic, no 
matter what the degree of metaphoric extension we are prepared to grant 
that term. We are talking about a continent with very, very little control 
over its economy and politics, whose intra-continental interactions are still
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 119
dominated by the same old colonial languages -  a continent so heavily 
indebted to the financial houses of the advanced industrialised world that 
many of its governments are virtually under foreign receiverships. How can 
we talk so glibly, so confidently about the ‘post-coloniality’ of a place so 
neo-colonial? Shouldn’t we distinguish ‘flag post-coloniality’ from its genuine, 
purposive namesake? We need a new dictionary of contemporary literary 'V 
terms.
The term ‘post-colonial’ is thus more loaded, more polysemic, more 
positional than its inventors and users are readily aware of. It even carries an 
(unintended) taint. The word ‘post-colonial’ endows its principal morpheme 
‘colonial’ with an originary privilege. ‘Colonial’ carries the voice of the 
beginning; it is the moving force, the significant point of departure. African 
literature, oral or written, in whatever language and style, is presented as 
having no identity, no name except in reference to it. However, history 
frequently intervenes with its intriguing fluidity. Consider the example of 
Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons written in the ‘post-colonial’ 
period, but whose content and politics are so aggressively pre-colonial; or 
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart written in the colonial period, but whose narrative 
thrust straddles both pre-colonial and colonial epochs. What name, relative 
to ‘colonial’ shall we call those epics which thrived in many parts of Africa 
when history was once-upon-a-time and the white man had not made his 
momentous entry? What makes a work ‘post-colonial’: the time and place of 
its author or its own intrinsic subject?
Lastly, the phatic import of that term. How does it sound, how does it 
feel to be called a ‘post-colonial writer’ ? Should Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Achebe, 
Aidoo, and the others feel happy for having attained the ‘post-colonial’ status? 
When you meet me in the corridors tomorrow will you congratulate me on 
my ‘post-colonial’ poetry? In brief, is there life besides ‘coloniality’?
UNDECONSTRUCTED SILENCES
All theories leak. Old assumptions give way to new ones. Pre-existing 
platitudes get spruced up in new raiment, and what used to be called ‘six’ 
receives a brave new baptism of ‘half-dozen’. Post-structuralism in its various 
mutations and manifestations is, no doubt, a grand ambitious project. Its 
grounding in history, philosophy, and linguistics certainly gave it a rigorous, 
even radical head start. Its interrogative methods have provoked answers 
from shadowy silences, or gingered those answers into further questions.
120 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS 6c CULTURE
But, like Oedipus, post-structuralism’s swollen foot emanated from its origins. 
As an ‘exclusively and prescriptively Western’ theory (Jeyifo 1990a:2), post­
structuralism has erected the West into a monumental metonym for the world, 
another instance of that part which considers itself larger than the whole. 
Because Africa (and the rest of the developing world) is absent or abscised 
from the post-structuralist Master Theory, most of its theoretical and 
conceptual projects have proved grossly inadequate in the analysis and 
apprehension of issues and developments outside the Western orbit. Literary 
space is inundated by a plethora of ‘new’ terminologies, methods and 
discursive practices, but these are hardly matched by a new consciousness 
about the world outside Europe and the United States, by a new grasp of the 
social, political, economic and cultural specificities of those parts of the 
universe pushed to the fringe.
In no aspect is this exclusivist ideology more palpable than the dialect 
of the celebrated practitioners of contemporary theorising, their preoccupation 
with Western topoi and exempla, their cultivation of impenetrable jargon, 
their demonstration of utter lack of awareness about places and peoples 
outside their own locales. In fact, many aspects of post-structuralist theorising 
have made the humanisation of discourse impossible, as a result of their 
fetishisation of the text and its theory. The over-abstract, reified processes of 
contemporary theorising have hitherto not shown any efficient medium of 
recognising, analysing and representing the urgent concrete specificities of 
the developing world. Old prejudices, myths, fallacies, and misconceptions 
have not been deconstructed; on the contrary, they have been re-constructed 
into faddish frameworks couched in new-fangled lingo. The interrogative 
power of contemporary theories has been severely selective.
Let us illustrate some of the points above by examining a book on 
Conrad: Heart o f Darkness: Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (Murfin 
1989a). It must be said to the credit of this book that it provides a potentially 
solid pedagogical tool for the study of Conrad’s most famous book. It is 
compact, well-researched and informative, a long overdue attempt at bridging 
the gap between post-structuralist theorising and post-structuralist literary 
analysis. And it takes Conrad through the diversity of contemporary projects: 
a chapter each on Psychoanalytic Criticism, Reader-response Criticism, 
Feminist Criticism, Deconstruction, and the New Historicism.
I grabbed this book with enthusiasm, eager to see Conrad’s archetypal 
silences and ambivalences unravelled, the gaps in the tale filled in, the old 
parable interrogated with a revolutionary critical weapon in the last quarter
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 121
of the twentieth century. I was anxious to see which theoretical practice 
would be able to engage the story, enter the text, initiate a humane dialogue 
with Conrad, ask him why there are no African human beings in a ‘yarn’ 
whose setting is Africa. I was expecting a post-structuralist open surgery on 
Conrad’s Heart o f Darkness, but what I got was a complex series of evasions, 
open-eyed blindness, wilful forgetfulness, or, simply, an intellectual and racial 
connivance with the European novelist.
Instead of a set of new and vigorous perspectives, what hit my eye were 
the same old critical shibboleths in tinsel post-structuralist phraseology: the 
Chinese box narrative structure, the dangerously thin divide between 
civilisation (Europe) and barbarism (Africa), the ordeal of the civilised 
European mind when thrown in the heart of African darkness, and one or 
two suppressed murmurs about Conrad’s view of imperialism. In none of 
these chapters is Conrad’s systematic and pervasive dehumanisation of 
Africans discussed, much less interrogated. Our critics simply join Conrad 
in a ‘post-structuralist’, ‘post-colonialist’ voyage down the Congo, they too 
being ‘wanderers on a prehistoric earth’ (HOD, p.50)1 surrounded by ‘black 
shadows’ (p.3), ‘black bones’ (p.31), cannibals splashing around and pushing 
(p.49), appalled by the ‘smelly mud’ (p.35) of the Congo -  several miles, 
several centuries away from ‘the tranquil dignity’ (p.18) of the Thames. To 
them, too, Africa is nothing more than a ‘wild and passionate uproar’ (p.51).
And yet, one of the most significant chapters in Murfin’s book is on a 
‘reader-response’ approach to Heart o f Darkness. Now, reader-response 
criticism operates through an empowerment of the reader, making her/him 
‘an active, necessary, and often self-conscious participant in the making of a 
text’s meaning’ (Rosmarin 1989:155). Meaning becomes an event through 
which the reader comes to a deeper, fuller understanding of the art and the 
persons it fabricates. The reader, too, is expected to live through the text, 
probe its absences, fill in its gaps. The act of reading thus becomes an art in 
itself, a conscious, dynamic process of unravelling. This process functions 
through collaboration or confrontation with the text and its originary spirit.
It goes without saying that this chapter has opted for collaboration with 
Conrad and his vision, or rather, with the Western reader of Conrad and her/ 
his vision. Or how could Adena Rosmarin have arrived at this ‘reading’ of 
Conrad’s colour code?
While it is true that dark men in this tale tend to behave in
ways more moral and more civilised than do white men -
122 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
virtually every critic notes, for example that the near-starving 
cannibals on board keep their hungry eyes off their masters — 
darkness remains the place and mode of Marlow’s terminal 
struggle with Kurtz. (1989: 161)
So much then for noble savages and benevolent cannibals and their 
missionary restraint! Rejoice, oh black anthropophagi! You are ‘more moral 
and more civilised’ than white men in Africa. And you have the magnanimity 
of Conrad and the naivety of his critic to thank for this! And for this piece 
of unmatchable wisdom Rosmarin has the authority of ‘virtually every critic’ 
(ibid.) as source of ready appeal. Need we ask who such critics are, and 
what their intellectual and racial identity is?
On page 156, Rosmarin asks a crucial question: ‘What is the experience 
of reading Heart o f Darkness like?’ How I wish she had included the African 
in her group of respondents. But as is customary in most Western discourse 
on Heart o f Darkness, the African is conspicuous by her/his very absence. 
After all, in Conrad’s tale, it is the forests, the shrubs, the river which possess 
the active, transitive impulse; not the Africans who are nothing more than a 
swarm of ‘naked breasts, arms, legs, and glaring eyes’ (HOD, p.60). The 
African response can only matter if you agree that she/he is a human being 
in the first place. But if, like Conrad, you believe she/he is not, why should 
you waste precious time seeking the response of a savage beast?
Rosmarin’s reader-response criticism of Heart o f Darkness is a clear 
demonstration of the fundamental ethnocentrism of most post-structuralist 
theorising, its several blindnesses, and pitfalls; and, in particular, of the new 
metaphysics of readerly power and authority. For the questions which are 
left perpetually unanswered include: Who is the reader? What kind of pre­
text -  social, cultural, ideological, epistemic, etc. is she/he importing into 
the text? Is or isn’t the text really what the reader means it to mean?
The chapter on ‘The New Historicism and Heart of Darkness’ begins 
with a cautious, dubitative concession (the only such concession in the whole 
book): ‘It [Heart o f Darkness] tells us little, perhaps, about Congolese 
peoples’ (Murfin 1989b:226, my emphasis). But earlier on in the paragraph 
Ross Murfin has hit the reader with this magisterial ‘new historicist’ 
proclamation:
A work of art, it [Heart o f Darkness] is at the same time a kind 
of historical document. It undoubtedly presents as accurate a
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 123
picture of a colonised Africa as many other supposedly non­
fictional accounts written during the same period. (Ibid., my 
emphasis)
By the impeccable logic of this assertion, Conrad’s jaundiced fiction is Africa’s 
historical fact, a European novel ‘about’ Africa becomes an ‘accurate’ 
chronicle of Africa by some other name. But there is some method in the 
madness of the above proclamation: the ‘non-fictional accounts’ mentioned 
as parallel text here are, indeed, most likely to contain the same ‘history’, 
being invariably the accounts of colonial functionaries, European missionaries, 
or various ‘discoverers’ and ‘explorers’ of the African ‘darkness’. But some 
information about modern African historiography would have instructed 
Murfin on the kind of ‘history’ in such accounts. However, this is not the 
place to ask how much or what kind of African history our author knows. 
We can only wonder how seriously to take those critics who embark upon a 
‘new historicist’ analysis without a thorough and comprehensive apprehension 
of the text and its context; critics who practice ‘historicism’ without history.
In fairness to Brook Thomas, his new historicist analysis is the one that 
shows the most prominent awareness of the African in Heart o f Darkness. 
Unfortunately this awareness only comes in brief, pale flickers, the analytical 
channel having got thoroughly clogged by mountains of received critical 
baggage.
For instance, Thomas follows on the old beaten path. Conrad remains 
for him the Christian of human experience (1989:237). Africans, even of the 
late nineteenth century, ‘exist in a state prior to history’ (ibid.:248); a journey 
to Africa is both a physical and temporal journey into darkness; African 
savagery is the context in which European civilisation finds its truth, Africa 
remains the abode of the unconscious, contrasting sharply with Europe’s 
triumphant rationality.
Most times, Thomas’s ‘interrogative’ reading leads to further perversity. 
Just as Rosmarin mentioned earlier on, he too awards Africans who 
accompany Marlow up the river a medal for restraint for not ‘killing and 
eating the whites’ (ibid.:251) despite their lingering starvation. Even more 
intriguing is Thomas’s reading of the following passage which is Conrad’s 
clearest summative testament to the African’s sub-humanity:
The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon 
the shackled form of a conquered monster but there -  there you
124 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and 
the men were -  no, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, 
that was the worst of it -  this suspicion of their not being 
inhuman... (Quoted in ibid.:245).
Note here the complex dubitabilities, the stalking, stammering syntax of a 
mind which puts the African’s claim to humanity to a monologic European 
debate. Note the tortuous indirectness which finds expression in the choice 
of double negatives: ‘their not being inhuman’. The word ‘human’ occurs 
twice in this passage, undermined each time by the negative prefix ‘in-’. In 
the final analysis, the African’s humanity is a mere ‘thought’, a ‘suspicion’, 
her/his relationship to the world dims into a ‘remote kinship’ from ‘the night 
of first ages’. Conrad’s Africans ‘howled and leaped, and spun’, and made 
horrid faces; engaged in a wild and passionate uproar; they were ‘ugly’. In 
spite of these and several other implicit and explicit textual signals so prevalent 
in the novel, Thomas comes up with the conclusion that Conrad’s narrative 
‘disrupts’ commonplace racial prejudices. He seems to have been misled by 
the jejune ‘chinese box’ narrative trickery which puts those rabidly racist 
words and thoughts in the mouth of a distant narrator while granting Conrad, 
their creator, an absolute indemnity.
Even so, Thomas reinforces rather than deconstructs the ontological 
binarism which confirms Conrad’s studied Manichaeism:
The West versus Africa
Future versus Prehistory
European civilisation versus African savagery
Rational versus Unconscious
Language versus Silence
Light versus Darkness
European Self versus African Other
The last pair in the series is particularly important here. For although Thomas 
makes some attempt at critiquing the ‘Eurocentric perspective’ (ibid.:242) 
which constructs itself into a Self that constantly distances ‘the Other’, he 
himself demonstrates a Eurocentric inability to recognise that ‘Other’, to 
apprehend her/his ontology, and lay out an unambiguous interrogation of 
her/his misrepresentation. This is partly so because, like Conrad and his 
critics, Thomas neither knows nor understands the African ‘Other’, and
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 125
therefore cannot sympathise with her/him as a victim of a Eurocentric 
discursive and cognitive violence. For, in actual fact, Conrad’s construction 
of the African in Heart o f Darkness is other than the ‘Other’. The sense of 
complementarity which shores up the relationship between the self and the 
Other cannot exist in a situation of an absolute negation of that Other. It 
would be enormously charitable to picture Conrad’s African as the true Other 
of the European, for what does not exist cannot, except by some liberal 
metaphoric licence, aspire to the alter ego of what does. In Conrad’s Africa, 
the real absent factor is the African.
A practical, incontestable demonstration of this dehumanisation and 
abscising is Conrad’s denial to his African that most supremely human of all 
attributes: language. Africans ‘howled’ and ‘shrieked’; these beings are so 
rudimentarised by the novelist that their ‘wild and passionate uproar’ never 
rises to the level of linguistic sublimity. There is sound and noise all right, 
but no language, no articulatory competence, no discursive command. A 
pathological silence entraps the ‘natives’, as they become, in Toni Morrison’s 
words, ‘Conrad’s unspeaking’ (1989:9). Any wonder then that for a definition 
and articulation of the African’s world-view (if she/he is ever credited with 
any such thing in the novel) we have to rely on the pronouncement of a new 
Prospero, of another ‘bud of the nobler race’?
But the real pathology here is Conrad’s, a victim of a chronic ethnocentric 
malaise which springs instant hostility to and denigration of what he does 
not understand. To such afflicted souls, difference (on the other side) is defect, 
variance is abnormality. Since Conrad never understood, and never considered 
worth understanding, the linguistic ‘peculiarities’ of his Africans, whatever 
language they possessed could not have been anything more than ‘a violent 
babble of uncouth sounds’. After all, his Africans spoke no Polish, no French, 
no English.
And yet a prevalent, perplexing blindness/silence has fallen on this aspect 
of Conrad’s ethnocentrism in Western criticism. For instance, Brook Thomas 
makes the very important point that language is humanity’s ‘only access to 
truth’ (1989:250), but his ‘new historicist’ project at no time interrogates 
the denial of that ‘access’ to Conrad’s Africans.
This combination of silence and blindness has characterised Conrad 
scholarship in the West since the debut of Heart of Darkness. Ross Murfin’s 
case study, despite its post-structuralist aspirations, is no exception. It is 
noteworthy, for instance, that apart from Brook Thomas who cited Chinua 
Achebe’s thoughtful and seminal essay (1989) in his reference, no other
126 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
contributor to this book showed any awareness of an African response. Even 
Thomas’s magnanimity is limited: although Achebe’s essay is listed under 
‘Recent Historical Studies of Conrad’ (ibid.:257), his own new historicist 
study does not betray even the slightest trace of the content of Achebe’s 
essay. With this process of ‘unfair selectivity’ and ‘preferred visions’ (Jeyifo 
1990b:10) late twentieth-century Western critics have continued Conrad’s 
silencing and negation of Africans.2 Contemporary Western critics are still 
co-pilgrims in the steamer up the Congo; for them, the African’s humanity 
still remains a ‘thought’, a fragile ‘suspicion’.
Either as a result of the politics of their provenance or an inherent crisis 
in their modes and methods of analysis and application (or both), ‘mainstream’ 
Western post-structuralist theories have demonstrated little or no adequacy 
in the apprehension, analysis, and articulation of African writing and its 
long and troubled context. This essay is not intended to push an exclusivist, 
essentialist viewpoint that ‘our’ literature cannot be apprehended by ‘their’ 
theory. But it is the case that the ethnocentric universalism of contemporary 
theoretical practice: its reification of theory into some oracular Western 
canonical monologue, its fetishisation of text and disregard for the deeper 
reaches of referentiality, its replacement of theory itself with masochistic 
theoreticism -  all these crises have produced a kind of radical conservatism, 
an anti-hegemonic hegemony which distances Western theory from the 
fundamental peculiarities of non-Western peoples.
In many ways, post-structuralist methods and tools of analysis lack the 
depth of perception, cogency of insight, and clarity of procedure displayed 
by other theories (Osundare 1989). Deconstruction, for instance, confuses 
rather than explains, pontificates instead of interpreting. Its treatment of 
African literature has demonstrated that ‘new’ is not necessarily better, and 
that a project which sounds ‘post-colonialist’ in intent may turn out to be 
neo-colonialist, even ‘re-colonialist’ in practice.
The preceding submissions are not another ‘anti-theory’, anti-rigour 
campaign, and should not be construed as such. Theories matter. They provide 
a neat, handy background aid to methodological and analytical procedures. 
They foster and enhance a reflective globality on issues while sharpening 
that predictive and speculative capability which facilitates the marriage of 
imagination and knowledge. So a critique of one type of theory (in this case 
the post-structuralist variety) should not be mistaken for a negation and 
rejection of all theories. As post-structuralist theories are beginning to accept, 
thanks to the New Historicism, all theories are positional, contingent,
POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORISING 127
connected, even partisan. In their original, epistemological, and analytical 
presumptions, the ‘major’ literary theories in the world today are exclusively 
Western and oracular. They have yet to demonstrate adequate capability for 
coping with issues and events in other parts of the world.
NOTES
1 . All page references are to the Ross Murfin (1989) edition of Heart of 
Darkness, abbreviated here as HOD.
2. For further demonstration of this attitude, see readers’ responses to 
Gerald Graff’s very significant article, ‘What has Literary Theory 
Wrought?’ (Chronicle o f Higher Education 12 Feb. 1992:A48), in the 
issue of 11 March 1992 of the same periodical, p.84.
A
9 YORUBA 
TRAGIC DRAMA
A Note on the Origins o f Nigerian Theatre
Dele Layiwola
Improvisation was fundamental to the origins of most theatrical forms and 
to their subsequent development (Aristotle 1965:36-37; Rose 1965:129-36). 
The general understanding that King Sango instituted the beginnings of 
costumed Yoruba drama, setting up an invocation cult at the royal 
mausoleum, is only part of the matter. It is noted in history that he founded 
the Bara or royal mausoleum on the outskirts of ancient Oyo and nominated 
a high priestess to care for the chambers of his ancestors. The priestess is 
known as the Iyamode (Johnson 1921:43-44). She invokes the spirits of the 
ancestors on ritual occasions. The invoked spirits, appearing as costumed 
figures, are thus the prototype of the Egungun masquerades in the Oyo period 
of Yoruba history. V  > .................................................................................
It is not likely that this is the actual inauguration of the cult of the dead 
and its enactments as there are many other quasi-mythic references to such 
enactments as belonging to an earlier date. What seems to me to be of import 
is just that Sango brought the initiation of the female chorus into the 
performances of the cult and its various dramas.
It must be emphasised that Sango’s description in history as a magic 
worker and a conjurer of fire has far greater implications than is always 
supposed. That man was an adroit juggler and a creator of spectacle. It was, 
therefore, not surprising that he incorporated other possibilities into what 
he knew to be a burgeoning dramatic art. Samuel Johnson writes of him:
He was of a very wild disposition, fiery temper, and skilful in 
sleight of hand tricks. He had a habit of emitting fire and smoke 
out of his mouth, by which he greatly increased the dread his 
subjects had for him. (Ibid.: 149)
129
130 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
It was most probably Sango’s introduction of the female character into 
these mystical dramas which marked the beginning of the ubiquitous chorus 
of female singers who regularly contributed to the performances that were 
done in the King’s court. The choral group of the king’s women which 
provided the interlude to the dramatic sketches of the Alarinjo as recorded 
by Captain Clapperton in 1829 is a surviving element of this form (1829:56). 
The Ijuba choruses of the Ogunde theatre and its numerous disciples are 
actually derived from this chorus of women singers. The major contribution 
of Ogunde and his myriad contemporaries is that they liberated formalised 
theatre from the hold of religious cults, churches and the court of kings. As 
a consequence, they took it to the market places, the cinema halls, and the 
public at large. This is the whole enterprise that Ebun Clark sets out to 
document in her book on Ogunde theatre (1979). The chorus of women 
also celebrates the death of the king or the obligatory immolation of the 
Crown Prince (subsequently of the king’s horseman) as part of the royal 
obsequies.1
This article will detail an example of a public sepulchral re-enactment 
of a Yoruba funerary cult in an account of an Iseku (funeral) ceremony 
witnessed and rendered by Isaac Delano in his book, The Soul of Nigeria 
(1937). He notes that this re-enactment of the dead traditionally takes place 
on the fortieth day, when the image or the persona of the man is heralded by 
drums after a long vigil. The dead man then emerges accompanied by two 
‘guards’ to be seen by all relatives, mourners and well-wishers. The position 
of the female chorus as the invocationary spirits of the rite is unmistakable:
The women stopped dancing at once. A song was started, the 
music was compelling, and the dance was resumed. But not 
the women only this time; two men danced out from the house 
to each of the circles, and then back again. On their return a 
few women accompanied them, as if to act as an escort, and 
then they rejoined their companions ...
The music stopped and the songs with it. Then two women 
started singing solos in rich soprano voices. The words were 
all concerning the dead man. It was almost like invoking his 
spirit. (Delano 1937:115-16)
After what seemed to be a long invocation, a stilling of all movement ushered 
in the man:
YORUBA TRAGIC DRAMA 131
Dead silence. The man came slowly, very slowly. His gait, his 
action, his movements and dress. He even carried a walking 
stick!
What struck me most forcibly was that the bones of his 
body had been made whole. There was no pretence about it.
The walking stick was not carried in support of weakened feet.
These had been made sound and strong. It was carried for effect.
The man walked straight and gracefully ... He quickened his 
step. Then I noticed there were two men, one in front, the other 
behind him, acting as bodyguard.
His face was not covered. It must have been very 
successfully painted, for the wrinkles and scars were all there 
as evidence of his identity. (Ibid).
Thereafter the man inspected his former bedroom and went on to the 
graveyard where he received supplications and gave his blessings in mute 
response.
The two bodyguards that the author mentions are also found with high- 
ranking egunguns: supposed ancestral embodiments who must not be touched 
or defiled in any way. Obviously that could not have been the dead man, an 
actor who had similar features was simply made up and costumed to act 
the role.
Most dramatic enactments, especially those of the tragic passions of 
gods and heroes, still remain in the repertory of their various cults as 
‘copyright’ materials. A few are staged publicly at post-harvest festivals. An 
example is the annual enactment of the captivity and ransom of the suffering 
deity, Obatala, as an aspect of the cathartic induction of death and 
regeneration (Beier 1959).
We must recall here that the essential aspect of Yoruba tragic mysteries 
was probably connected with a defunct, pristine chorus, for in the poetic 
repertory of Ifa has been found a certain story. It tells that the essential 
paraphernalia of the Egungun cult belonged to women and that it was later 
that men asserted their rights and appropriated it by guile from its original 
custodians. This odu, or corpus, Osa Meji, was collected by Pierre Verger 
(1965) and as he rightly conjectured, there was a time in the past when 
society was matriarchal and it was only at the inception of settled communities 
that men seized the political initiative. This is more than mere extrapolation 
because the ancient myths of other cultures also bear marks that show that
132 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
certain cultural initiatives had a primal association with feminine intuition. 
I have speculated on this elsewhere (Layiwola 1986). It is actually this lost 
initiative that Sango restores to the feminine model. This again is one of the 
reasons why in Sango mysteries it is often argued that though he is in historical 
terms the most recent of the deities, he is the elder to his compeers.2 Thus for 
him the saying is true - ‘The child is father to the man’. That is, the historical 
Sango of the fourteenth century was a later manifestation of a much older 
phenomenon.
The Nigerian scholar and critic J.A. Adedeji has painstakingly gleaned 
various shades of fact from the ancient corpus of Ifa so that he might attempt 
a coherent chronological development of the Yoruba Masque theatre (1970). 
He cites various Odus and Orikis where mention has been made of the Masque 
theatre and its practitioners but the various representation of facts in mystico- 
poetic chants, as is to be expected, hardly shows any consistency of 
chronological data. In the first place, these documentary evidences have as 
many sources as there are versions, and inasmuch as they make mention of 
factual events and characters, the kind of linguistic and aesthetic economy 
which is adopted by oral documentations often codifies, conceptualises and 
re-arranges events in mythical serialisation so that their exact time in history 
is obscured by the ciphers. It is in this respect that Adedeji’s model, an 
otherwise invaluable work, suffers from assumed simplifications. Traditional 
materials, as Babayemi has cautioned (1980:21), are to be scrutinised before 
they are interpreted. Babayemi’s own accounts are also varied but he does 
not draw any far-reaching historical conclusions from them. Thus Adedeji’s 
is a more elaborate venture. • ̂
The accounts of Ifa narrative, for instance that Olugbee Agan, the 
supposed initiator of professionalism into masque dramaturgy, was Taped 
by a gorilla are of especial concern to us here. Adedeji adopts the rather 
mythical account as an historical truth and subsequently works on that 
assumption, associating him with some historical personalities and placing 
him in the seventeenth century. The chronological accounts of Oyo kings are 
political and historical accounts and could be verified in time and space; but 
certainly not that of this quasi-mythical character. The claim that the account 
of the actor being fathered by a gorilla could be taken as true because there 
were reports of such instances in ancient times is also unfounded (Smith 
1965:64). There may have been ancient instances whereby warriors and 
marauders of some sort from rival clans and kingdoms disguised themselves 
as gorillas to rape the women of their rivals or plunder their homes. In fact,
YORUBA TRAGIC DRAMA 133
a known historical example is the Igbo-Ife confrontations and the instance 
of Moremi’s heroism where a rival clan would disguise its warriors to plunder 
a neighbouring state. The truth of Olugbee Agan’s malformed features, 
especially when other dramatic entertainers have been reputed to be 
hunchbacked or deformed, will be found in a different explanation as I shall 
presently discuss. The fact also that theatrical troupes carry the red monkey 
as Olugbee’s symbol is just the mere recognition of a totem or a patron 
element. This is a sociological fact in traditional communities -  where patents 
are adopted by families and personalities. Samuel Johnson, in fact, noted 
that some diviners keep these totems, pretending that they inspire magical 
communication with natural forces (1921:29).
So we arrive at the roots of the matter; how co me tht it the archetypal 
entertainer, the artist, is a man and an animal or is reputed to have combined 
both features? Or let us voice it in the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘What 
does that synthesis of god and goat in the Satyr point to?’ (1974:7). Much as 
the Greeks thought of the Dionysiac hero as a god and a satyr, the Yorubas 
enunciate the vision of the revelling spirit as the schismatic as well as the 
complementary purveyor of tortured mirth.
The optimistic morality of the community that seeks outlets in festivals 
and occasions of relaxed, unburdened consciousness realises that the same 
moment of time that bears such lofty visions of release must, of necessity, 
equally accommodate pessimism. The schismatic consciousness is thus an 
exemplary model of true reality. One harmonious and glorious excess of the 
artist-singer is thus counterbalanced by the rigours of creative ecstasy. This, 
perhaps, rings forth in the language of Shakespeare, voiced by Florizel in 
The Winter’s Tale (IV:iii):
The gods themselves
Humbling their deities to love, have taken 
The shape of beasts upon them: Jupiter 
Became a bull, and bellowed; the green Neptune 
A ram, and bleated; and the fire-rob’d god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now: -  their transformations 
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer, -  
Not in a way so chaste, since my desires 
Run not before mine honour, nor my lusts 
Burn hotter than my faith.
134 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
Such also is the excess portrayed by Titania’s lust after the performer, 
Bottom, who is for the purpose cast as half man, half ass in A Midsummer 
Night’s Dream.
The traditional representation of the reveller as symbolic of the man 
and the beast in the lurid visions of his unconscious realisation is a legacy of 
many ancient civilisations and have been found among Yoruba ancients too. 
The artist, in a creative enterprise, espouses the essential mystical suffusion 
of being as a fluidic whole and thereby merges a fragmentation of disparate 
psyches as a Dionysiac orgiastic, and also as a redemptive Apollonian persona. 
The muse is therefore the nexus of a varied confluence of forces.
An interesting phenomenon in the story rendered in the Ifa citation of 
Qwqnrinse that the ancient family of the artistic cult (the Ologbin) at the 
palace of the Alafin all belong to a lineage of hunchbacks is of importance 
(Adedeji 1970:72). It is recorded that the primordial performer of the drama 
was an old man from the forests who was a hunchback. We recall this instance 
to prove the fact that the contorted personality of the actor, the aspiration, 
apart from the beauty of his art, towards a kind of conceptual ugliness, is a 
legacy of many ancient cultures, Hellenic and African. As a contrived 
alternative to the optimistic spirit of festival display there was also the 
subconscious transformation which yielded the tragic instinct. This is the 
inception of the tragic form. The plastic realisation of the form to supplement 
the bare improvisation of the contorted ego or destiny is the invention of the 
mask, carved or moulded.
Naturally, varied and distinct sub-forms emerged from the mask in 
experimentation with the shades of ‘disguise’, even though its earliest 
conception was ritual and ceremonial. Not only as a lurid representation of 
the dead and the invocation of the alter-ego, but also as an essential aspiration 
towards the arrest of time and the geometric or virtual abolition of temporality 
and discrete moments in space. The array of Epa masks and the examples of 
Gelede masks in Yoruba plastic conceptions are clear illustrations of this 
point. Their serenity and stability of transcendent form is without equal.
Some of the terracotta masks and images excavated from the sites of the 
ancient Nok civilisation in Northern Nigeria bear a striking resemblance to 
some of the functional masks used in Gelede dances (Eyo and Willet 1982:28). 
This is a valid hint that the ceremonial masks of Gelede cult dramas are, 
perhaps, later fashions of the art heritage of the same people. The kinetic or 
dynamistic qualities of these carvings reveal that their intentions are ritual 
rather than just static decorative forms. It is possible to see in the works the
YORUBA TRAGIC DRAMA 135
incorporation of the fourth dimension of temporal energies. This is almost 
always a fundamental matrix in the dimensions of ritual plasticism, at least 
in Yoruba symbolic emblems and cult objects.
There is absolutely no doubt that the genesis of African tragic forms is 
elevated from the ritual concourse of dramatic re-enactment of personalities 
and figures practised by the accredited cults of the dead and the threnodic 
antiphons of the female chorus that often accompany them. The patent proof 
of this is to be found in the natures and functions of the masks that have 
been unearthed in Ile-Ife and Owo from sepulchral remains and tombs laid 
out to heroes and kings (Willet 1966). In line with my earlier affirmation, 
what King Sango did in the fourteenth century to inaugurate a ritual worship 
as a cult for his fathers is just an innovative convention following older 
traditions. The origins of Yoruba theatre therefore date back beyond the 
Alarinjo troupes. The art of the Alarinjo mummers was merely a later 
innovation to fashion entertainment in a ‘profane’ version of the form of 
what used to be a tragical art and preoccupation. It is in this respect that 
another of Adedeji’s most resourceful essays on this subject (1978) is only an 
historical exposition of the craft of comedy, satire and allied genre rather 
than the study of the pristine origins of the dramatic endeavour.
The communal property of art as the aesthetic and psychotechnic channel 
of force must be well acknowledged. In the passions of gods and heroes, in 
the mysteries of ritual and dramatic cults, are to be found the predisposition 
to the release and guidance of earth energies in metasocial endeavours: 
festivals. The motions of the various dance dramas, orgies, and ecstatic 
motivations of ceremonies often apprehend the extra-literal dimension of 
geometric constructs of space and time. The traditional actor, immersed in 
the manipulation and control of the physical as well as psychic potential, 
becomes the human vessel for the expression of a god. This is because role­
acting is, at its best, an intuitive process. The empathy of man with nature 
and the co-ordinated reaffirmation of the totality of being is a sustained 
balance of the cosmic channels of force.
It is true, as it is often observed, that such an attitude, which emerges 
from total immersion into the expansive depths of ritual or celebrative 
consciousness, undermines the intellectual conception and mastery of matter 
and seeks cowardly refuge in its spiritual identification whilst attenuating 
the historical purview of linear time. But we must accept, on the other hand, 
that the dynamistic conception of time or the kinetic apprehension of form 
does inspire phenomenal artistry and this was probably the reason why ancient
136 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
Africa has been able to produce, more than anywhere in the world, such 
prolific traditions of wood carving and sculpture. In spite of a certain basic 
misunderstanding of what constitutes tribal art as opposed to contemporary 
art, even William Fagg concedes that the intellectual simplifications 
consequent on industrial civilisation often stifle dynamistic apprehension 
and render emerging art forms static (1982:34).
The dramatic nature of the concept of immanent energy affirms itself in 
varying, even dialectical patterns. In its very fluid, unstable nature, it governs 
the trajectory of the fiery hoop of ether that neatly circumscribes the frenzied 
pleats of the tutu skirt of a Sango votary in pirouette, or the nimble, suave 
and calculated design of parquetry that a bata dancer weaves on the margin 
of dance. In a different category, it constitutes the totality of fossilised temporal 
quality arrested on the frame of a mask. Both are aspects of the same dramatic 
construct. In contemporary theatre practice, the plays of Duro Ladipo and 
Wole Soyinka have laid the prime exegesis on the theme of African tragic 
dramas. The operas of Ladipo espouse the former of the categories mentioned 
above and those of Soyinka, the latter.
It is the ritual impregnation of the masker or the serene avocal mien of 
the human mute that is the basis of Soyinka’s dramatic exposition in The 
Road. That is why he notes that Murano, the mute character, serves as an 
arresting of time, the mystique of reference being the Mask of Agemo, a cult 
of the dead.
The most vibrant assimilation of the tragic essence, the consciousness 
that bridges the gulf between life and death, being and non-being, joy and 
tragedy, and all such emerging contrarieties of the human condition form 
the underlying experience behind the aesthetic notion of tragedy and the 
resource, and perhaps, resolution, of dynamic immanent energies.
NO TES
1. I have described elsewhere Duro Ladipo’s enactment of the ancient 
ritual in Oba Waja and Soyinka’s adaptation of the same theme in 
Ladipo 1986:Chs 2 and 3.
2. Once in a discussion with me at Osogbo, Western Nigeria, the Afro- 
Austrian ethnologist, Susan Wenger also repeatedly affirmed this point.
10 AFRICAN THEATRE
The Issue of an 
Historical Approach
Joel Adedeji
The writing of African history before European ad&venturism and eventual 
colonisation has been a subject of unusual academic controversy. Thanks to 
the research and scholarship of the Ibadan School of History with its concrete 
methodological assertions and assorted contributions, making Oral Tradition 
not only a subject of literary significance for use as documentary evidence 
but equally the subject matter for the study of African History before a d  1500. 
The study of African theatre history has benefited immensely from this 
exegesis, particularly in our study of the Alarinjo, the traditional masque 
theatre of the Yoruba peoples of Western Nigeria (Adedeji 1969). This study 
has provided a vast field of knowledge and insight into the making of theatre 
as an art form, its emergence as an aspect of social and political history, and 
its development as a literary corpus.
In constructing the historical aspect of the study we had recourse to a 
methodology based on an hypothesis made by the eminent theologian, 
historian and journalist, Chris Johnson, who said, inter alia,
It is common practice in every civilised community to set up in 
brass or marble, in work of art or literature, in songs or 
traditions, worthy memorials to perpetuate the achievements 
of its scions with noble aims. (Nigerian Chronicle 5 Feb. 
1909, p.6)
African cultural arts yield valuable source material which can be structured 
into a series of sequences to form themes or headings for the theatre historian. 
Theatrical art combines the poetry of motion and a design factor. It is brought 
about by an interesting and graceful exercise known as Terpischorean Art.
137
138 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
Based on the instinct of ‘play’, and using the imitative principle, the strength 
of this form of art results from the human achievement through a recourse 
to the arts of communication set in place in an arena of voluntary exchange 
which is informed by a tradition that is mutually understood. People realise 
themselves in a communicative situation where they express themselves and 
bring up their creative energies to bear on, and in response to, their 
environmental exigencies. To this extent, the emergence of the theatre which 
is basic to an imitative principle, develops along lines which differ from 
community to community, and from one culture to another. Drama or the 
play element, which is basic to the theatre, uses the raw material of human 
experience in shaping and/or re-ordering its own existence. As an activity, 
whether in its pristine form as a ritual, or its subsequent development as a 
social art, the dramatic art is based on creative artists’ own adjustment to 
the facts of existence, the factors of their own culture, the presence in the 
environment of influential forces and of course, ultimately, the security which 
they enjoy amongst their fellow artists whose co-operation they must seek. 
Thus, the content of theatre varies and is found in endless variety and differing 
combinations in the cultures of the world. As a complex artistic form involving 
many apparently independent arts in its composition, the theatre encapsulates 
and summarises the content of life and the life-style of a people. It conveys 
important information to its own audience and, as a performance art, its 
parameters can be exclusive. We are familiar with such distinctions and 
peculiarities which inform the theatrical art of Western civilisation which 
developed from the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece, from those which 
produced the Chinese Opera, the Natyasastra of the Hindus of India, and 
the Alarinjo of the Yoruba of Western Nigeria. Theatre historians are agreed 
that each culture produces its own theatrical art. Despite the pervasiveness 
and expansive nature of Western civilisation, the record of the history of 
each theatre attests to the influence of each people’s culture as a point of 
departure.
CREATING A M ETH O DO LO GY OF W RITING 
THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN THEATRE
Historiography or the writing of history as a discipline is based on the critical 
examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic 
materials, and the synthesis of such particulars into a narrative that will 
stand the test of critical methods. How do we purpose these distinctions in
AFRICAN THEATRE 139
writing a history of an African art phenomenon which originates and proceeds 
from Oral Tradition, Oral History and what is now generally referred to as 
Oral Literature? The root elements of African theatre are the mimetic masks, 
the chant/song and the dance. Since a theatrical performance is the sum total 
of all of these and the united product of gesture and costume, the art of the 
theatre is best appreciated within the framework of its history, the aesthetics 
of the art form and the sensibilities of the people. The specific obligations of 
the art form in terms of its function over and above its means of entertainment, 
namely education and edification, are intrinsic to meaning and significance.
Jan Vansina’s book, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology 
(1965), is an important compendium for writing a history based on Oral 
Tradition. This book, in particular, explores the possibility and examines the 
difficulties of reconstructing the history of non-literate peoples from their 
oral traditions. The author also surveys existing literature on the subject.
It is generally agreed that a knowledge of the African past must be gleaned 
from myths, legends, folktales, chants or praise-songs, as well as from their 
sculptures and other forms of artistic manifestations. This is true also of 
theatrical history. The nature of investigations must include an understanding 
of the systems of thought and ritual worship, of oral wisdom and verbal arts 
which are prominent features and special attributes of the performance art.
In creating an historiographic methodology and a theory of the art of 
the African theatre, the following sources are crucial determinants:
•  System of Divination
•  Myths, Legends and Tales
• Verbal Arts
System o f  Divination
The system of divination in African society is esoteric by tradition. It is 
characterised by an order of priesthood, the use of artefacts and a cultic 
mode of performance and disposition. An example among the Yoruba is Ifa 
Divination which, in a systematic way, constitutes the religious philosophy 
of the Yoruba.
What distinguishes the African system of divination from others is its 
exponential frames which allow for the discovery of hidden and open-ended 
knowledge. Its divinatory component includes myth, legend and history. Very
140 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS &c CULTURE
much like the liturgy of the Christian church, its centralised feature includes 
performance involving the use of gestures, patterns and cadences which are 
theatrical. With its varied forms of human expression, including the use of 
historical antecedents in its recitations and narratives, the African system of 
divination provides a ready source for historical reconstruction in a medley 
of select items and elements both mystical and explicit.
Myths, Legends and Tales
These are stories which attempt to explain the African world, its culture and 
society. Using the narrative form, they vary in contextual and attributive 
detail, one from the other. _______________ ............................
Myths are religious in character and are usually narrated during ritual 
or festival occasions. They are usually intended to control the conduct of the 
worshippers and govern their faith. Significantly, myths relate historical events 
connected to beliefs, institution and natural phenomena. Because myths are 
tied to religious rites and beliefs, they are given uncritical acceptance by the 
members of the group for whom they are designed.
Legends are narrative accounts of the lives of heroes and heroines, usually 
those regarded as founders of the people’s settlements whose bravery and 
exploits are of historical significance for purpose of commemoration in rituals 
and festivals.
Tales are fictitious narratives drawn from the imagination. Sometimes 
they contain allusions to historical episodes and may be conceptually secular 
with mythical traditions. Usually tales are used to draw out moral lessons. 
Characteristically a tale may be common to a group for the purpose of 
amusement and moral instruction. There are tales which are narratives of 
events or a sequence of some actual legendary or fictitious events. Tales based 
on folklore, legends of great men or a series of facts which are told with 
explanatory statements or with intent to entertain or amuse may be uncritical 
or inaccurate in terms of time sequence and/or place of occurrence. It is 
therefore essential to know whether a tale is spun by a moralist or by a 
raconteur and if it is regarded as a historical fact or fiction.
Verbal Arts
Africans are known for their skills in the use of words. Thus certain individuals 
are appointed to the office of speaker or spokesman. Verbal artists are also
AFRICAN THEATRE 141
found among raconteurs and the spoken word can be the most fixed and 
reliable section of oral tradition. Verbal arts are expressions relating to, or 
concerned with words, used sometimes for effect rather than meaning, but 
adroitly put together with painstaking and sometimes elaborate detail. Some 
are in categories which combine music or a chanting mode; some use the 
drum and syncopated music and counterpoint, which are not only artistic by 
design, but add significantly to the sensibility of meaning.
What has been defined as verbal art is a unique system which includes 
compositions like the Yoruba Oriki, Esa or Ewi (praise chants of guilds) 
which can be used in the tracing of pedigrees or the origin of certain traditional 
settlements. There are also poems in this category which contain personal 
and place names, addresses of family lineages, and salutations of certain 
plants and animals which are integral to life and the life-styles of the people.
As a mode of communication a verbal art can assume a conventional 
mode of artistic expression in the hands of guilds or professional chanters. 
Some of the poems are historical, even though the historical and the mythical 
may be mixed together in the same framework or layout. It is significant that 
the medley usually includes wise sayings (proverbs, riddles and epigrams) 
and oral wisdom. y  V
The artistic style of each category of a verbal art is a constant order of 
composition. Presentation can be a thing of beauty because of its spectrum 
of original inspiration and its attribute as essential part of traditional lore 
and philosophy.
Visual Arts
Except for a few cases of paintings (on wall or rock), most African visual art 
form is sculptural. The art of carving, cutting, hewing, moulding or 
constructing materials into ornaments, statues or figures is so pervasive that 
African art is almost entirely summarised in its avalanche of sculpture. Even 
the paintings have sculpturesque qualities which make their two-dimensional 
frames flow in the manner of sculptures in their aesthetic attributes.
African sculptures are found to be of historical value because most of 
them commemorate events, draw upon anecdotes about legendary or mythical 
figures, or illustrate observations on periodic happenings or current history.
Many African artists indulge in caricature. This art of deliberate 
distortion or ludicrous exaggeration can be extended to mythological 
characters as well as to important social figures. This feature of African life
142 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
is also ritually significant and can be extracted in chants or included in 
performance as a way of pin-pointing by humouring or explaining through 
a subtle form of amusement. Examples of this form of artistic representation 
can be found in door panels, bas-reliefs and wall paintings.
African visual arts, therefore, serve as a record of events of happenings 
in society and can be dated by their periodic styles. They furnish illustrations 
of dress, ornament, material culture, and sometimes the custom of the people 
at particular points in time. They also help in tracing artistic growth over the 
long period of African history before and during the contact with Europeans, 
Arabs and Asians. This artistic technique is described by Father K. Carrol as 
‘humanistic’ because ‘the artist sympathetically observes and represents life 
that he sees around him’ (1829).
Performance Art
Many African religious observances include enactments of historical scenes. 
At many festivals and during installation ceremonies of priests and chiefs, 
the events of history are revealed in a type of stage-acting or dramatisation 
which forms part of the total ceremony. We have found that the enactments 
or re-enactments help to trace history even though they are not specifically 
designed to record it. For example, although the Adamuorisa Play in Lagos, 
Nigeria, marks an important landmark in the history of this metropolis, yet 
the performance, which is still re-enacted as often as there is an occasion 
that warrants the celebration, is ritually significant. The historical evidence 
of the House of Ado, the conflict between Kings Akitoye and Dosumu, and 
British intervention, can only be gleaned from the interplay of characters 
and dramatis personae in the larger structure of the drama in the theatrical 
arena.
There are festivals which commemorate certain historic events and 
personalities. These include dramatisations to characterise certain important 
features of the historic events like warfare or battles, use of dated weaponry 
and other relics or artefacts which are historic. An example is the Obatala 
Festival at Ede. Such episodic features or enactments may be generalised for 
the purpose of raising the level of entertainment or subjected to certain cult 
obligations. Acting out in a ritual ceremony may be done with a view to 
purport ethical cleansing or drawn out as a sketch designed to humour the 
gods. One such example of this form of festival play is the Edi Festival or the 
Play of Moremi at Ile-Ife, Nigeria. This annual festival play commemorates
AFRICAN THEATRE 143
the history and exploits of Moremi and re-enacts her legendary life over a 
seven-day cycle. The history of Moremi is displayed in an artistic vision 
which is mutually compatible with the worship of the heroine who laid down 
her life so that the city and people of Ife might survive.
It must be noted that enactment ceremonies which dramatise certain 
essential events of historical or mythical significance honour the substance 
of the religious or ritual observance of the occasion rather than its historical 
entity. To this extent, the theatre historian must not participate in the myth 
as though it were a reality but examine the historical potentialities in detail. 
Other antecedents which are of value and of related premise may be used 
comparatively as a guide.
CRITIQUE OF THE SOURCE:
The various and varied sources used in historiography would require careful 
analysis in order that the element of assumption or presumption is minimised. 
There are certain constants which must be pursued since these would provide 
the threads in the volume of available material for the historical substance to 
emerge.
The issue of content and form may be a relevant point of criticism. 
Since all that is contained in a speech or the volume of any expression may 
not be specifically related to the body of facts being investigated, and since 
the main substance or meaning of a narrative or discourse may be tangled up 
in the form element of expression, it is pertinent for the researcher to 
distinguish between content and form. Form may be used to give content its 
own nature and character. Sometimes the content may be an arrangement of 
several aspects of the parts of a thing which may project an artistic image of 
great substance. While the concepts of content and form analyses may be in 
place, care must be taken that aesthetic considerations do not override the 
dating of period styles which mark out distinctions. African world-view defies 
logic to a large extent. The concept of the existence of the past in present 
consciousness may create a measure of diffusion in cultural patterns. ,
There are art objects, artefacts or even commemorative ceremonies whose 
historical contexts have become aberrant due to incidences of mysticism or 
mystification. For example, Sango, the fourth Alafin of Oyo, believed to 
have reigned during the fourteenth century, may not be acknowledged for 
emotional reasons as an historical figure but rather as a mythical character 
grouped in the same pantheon with Obatala, the arch-divinity and Ogun,
144 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
the god of iron. The researcher who happened to use any of Sango’s 
worshippers or priests may find undue emphasis placed on his divinity, instead 
of his humanity as an ancestor. To this extent, the researcher may be consumed 
by the attributes of Sango, and the symbolic essence of his worship as ‘Orisa’ 
or god.
The same measure of confusion may exist in the delineation of the 
Alarinjo, the Masque Theatre of the Yoruba, from the Egungun, the cult of 
masqueraders from which the theatrical art originated. Another area of 
confusion exists in the place of Alafin Abiodun who came to the throne of 
Oyo in about 1770 (Akinjogbin 1964) when the Oyo Empire became very 
extensive and reached the apogee of its fame. Because of his patronage of the 
arts, Abiodun became a popular name among craft guilds. He had encouraged 
each craft guild to contribute its best art products to enhance the prestige of 
the Crown. He, in fact, encouraged the theatre guilds to establish themselves 
along professional lines through commissions, competitive performances and 
extensive touring programmes (Adedeji 1969:143-45). It was discovered that 
artists after his reign, who claimed recognition through their ancestors, and 
who were distinguished during his hegemony, could still refer to their works 
of art as dating back to the period of this popular king. For example, Lagbayi, 
a descendant of the famous carver, Olojowon, could be claimed by an 
successful artist as an ancestor without regard to the factor of dating and, 
sometimes, period styles. ✓ A
The Oriki or praise-chant could be another source of confusion due to 
the significance and premium of the praise-chant in Yoruba society. For 
example, Ologbin Ologbojo, the creator of the Yoruba Masque Theatre, 
was King Ogbolu’s Ologbo (staff-bearer) at Oyo Igboho towards the end of 
the sixteenth century. Ogbolu, otherwise called Abipa, was the last of the 
kings who reigned at Igboho around 1590 (see Smith 1965:70). The masque- 
theatre as court entertainment developed from his involvement with the 
phenomenon of the ‘Ghost Catcher’ stratagem (Johnson 1960:165-66). When 
Ologbojo died, the body of this versatile court entertainer and dramaturge 
was carried from Igboho and buried in a court dedicated to his memory and 
nicknamed ‘Ode Ogboluke’, that is, Eni ti Ogbolu fi Ode-ile ke (One whom 
King Ogbolu honoured with a court).
Without distinct recognition of their historical periods but with due 
acknowledgement of their artistic merits and distinctions the Oriki of Ologbin 
Ologbojo are sometimes found to be transferred to or identical with those of 
Esa Ogbin, a native of Ogbojo, a town named after Ologbojo. This
AFRICAN THEATRE 145
simultaneity of reference can create a problem for the historian who might 
mistake one for the other. Esa Ogbin, in fact, became a distinguished masque 
dramaturge at the court of King Abiodun around 1770. He was only a 
material descendant of Ologbojo through Aladafa, a great and renowned 
carver, and a maternal relation by some remove. The collector of the praise- 
chant, Oriki Ologbojo, could be carried away by the encomiums that bring 
the two great artists to the same level of prominence and attribution. The 
poetic style and chanting mode may, in fact, be the same, to a large extent, 
but there are certain important and significant developments which distinguish 
them from each other. Individualism in Yoruba art creates the element of ete 
(an artistic device). This may make all the difference and it is important to 
watch out for it as the source is checked and scrutinised.
This brings up the importance of the place and role of the informant. 
Usually kings and priests are the most trustworthy because their installations 
require some tutoring in sacred precincts where they receive privileged or 
coded information. I recall an experience at Iragberi where an attempt was 
made to initiate me into the essence of the cult of the ritual surrounding the 
information I needed before it was given by an old priest. Some informants 
are active participants in the performances while some are spectators. It is 
useful to have recourse to both perspectives on the same item of information 
in order to determine their humanistic interests. Conventions of style and 
medium of artistic expression may bring about certain views and particular 
circumstances which may lead to generalisations. Interpretation can therefore 
be faulty if other factors, like religion in particular, are not taken into account 
during the process of observation and evaluation. There are informants who 
are originally pagans but are later converted to Islam or Christianity at the 
stage of encountering them. These may bring up a perspective favourable to 
their religious persuasion on the artistic phenomenon being discussed with 
them. Hybridity of information also abounds to create distortion.
CO NCLUSIO N
Artistic canons change from time to time, even within the same historical 
period, depending on the existence of certain vital forces in the society. The 
arts of the Yoruba yield valuable source material for the theatre historian 
but it is important to have recourse to a methodology which can trace history 
through a combination of sources which are both historical and aesthetic. 
Source materials could have been structured into a series of sequences to
146 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
form themes or headings which by extraction can be useful for the theatre 
historian even if the intention of the staging of a dramatic performance or 
the presentation of a work of art was not specifically to record history. 
Limitations of source materials are identified, especially in view of the 
incidence of individualism in Yoruba art and the context of generalisation 
due to particular circumstances which cannot be easily perceived.
The theatre historian has to be critical as it is not sufficient to record 
only facts. For the purpose of evaluation it may be necessary to recreate the 
circumstances in which the art work first manifested itself and was then 
developed. Calculations of probability existed in the past, dates are not usually 
given, and informants observe certain cult imperatives or obligations which 
prevent them from divulging coded information. Recourse to aberrations 
and caricaturing are prolific pastimes in the Yoruba creative enterprise. The 
context of present happenings and contemporary history may provide 
adequate thrusts and perspectives on the past in the working out of an 
adequate methodology. There is no royal road to the Yoruba past, and, 
therefore, to the issue of its recorded hi story.
CONSOLIDATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A biodu n , R o w lan d . 1 9 9 0 . T h e F uture o f  A frican  A rt S tud ies: A n  A frican  Perspective. 
In African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline. W ashington: Th e N a tio n a l 
M u se u m  o f  A frican  A rt, Sm ith son ian  In stitution . r
A b rah am , R .C . 1 9 5 8 . Dictionary of Modem Yoruba. L o n d on : H einem ann.
A chebe, C h in u a. 1 9 6 4 . Arrow of God. L o n d on : H einem ann.
--------- 1 9 8 9 . A n  Im age o f  A frica: R ac ism  in C o n rad ’s Heart of Darkness. In Hopes
and Impediments: Selected Essays. N ew  Y ork : D oubleday.
A dedeji, Jo e l . 1 9 6 9 . T h e A larin jo  T h eatre : T h e Study o f  a  Y oru b a  Th eatrical A rt 
from  its Earliest Beginning to the Present T im es. D octo ra l thesis, University 
o f  Ib ad an .
--------- 1 9 7 0 .T h e  O rigin  o f Y oruba M asq u e  Theatre: T h e U se o f  Ifa D ivination  C orpus
a s  H isto r ica l Evidence. African Notes 6 ( l ) :7 0 - 8 6 .
--------- 1 9 7 8 . ‘A larin jo ’ : The T rad ition al Y oruba Travellin g T h eatre. In O yin O gu n ba
an d  A b io la  Irele (eds), Theatre in Africa. Ib ad an : Ib ad an  U niversity  Press, 
p p .2 7 -5 1 .
A d ep egb a, C .O . 1 9 8 2 . A  R eview  o f  A tm ore , A . an d  Stacey, G ., Black Kingdoms, 
Black Peoples. African Notes 9 ( l) :5 1 - 5 2 .
--------- 1 9 9 4 a . Historical Sculpture of West Africa. A C ata lo gu e  o f  an  Exh ib ition  o f
A fr ic an  Sculpture. C arlisle : T rou t Gallery.
--------- 1 9 9 4 b . Y oru ba A rt: C on cep t an d  Reality . O d u n jo  M e m o ria l Lecture. In
O la tu n d e  O latun ji (ed.), The Yoruba: History, Culture and Language. Ibad an : 
Ib a d a n  U niversity  Press fo r  J.F . O du n jo  M e m o ria l Lectures, p p .71-94 .
A figb o , A .E . 1 9 7 7 . F act an d  m yth in N igerian  h istoriograph y. Nigeria Magazine 
1 2 2 -2 3 :8 1 -9 8 .
--------- 1 9 8 1 . Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture. Ibadan : O x fo rd
U niversity  Press.
A jay i, J .F . A de. 19 6 5 . Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891: The Making of a 
New Elite. L on don : L ongm an .
A kin jogb in , I.A . 1 9 6 4 . The O yo em pire in the 18th  century: A  re-assessm ent, journal 
of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3 (1 ):3 8 -4 1 .
A lii, I. 1 9 8 8 . M u sica l C h airs. Prime People, M a y  13-24 . L a g o s : Prim e Publication s, 
p .2 4 .
147
148 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
A ristotle. 1 9 6 5 . O n  the A rt o f Poetry. In Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. D orsch . 
H arm on d sw orth : Penguin, p p .36 -3 7 .
A sh croft, B ., G riffith s, G . and T iffin , H . 1 9 8 9 . The Empire Writes Back: Theory and 
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. L o n d on  and N e w  Y ork : R ou tled ge .
A tan d a , J .A . 1 9 8 0 . An Introduction to Yoruba History. Ib ad an  U niversity  Press.
Awe, Bolanle. 1 9 9 1 . Hearken to the Ancient Voices. Ibadan: A ssociation  o f  O ral H istory  
and T rad ition s.
B abayem i, S .O . 1 9 8 0 . Egungun among the Oyo Yoruba. Ib ad an : O yo  State  C oun cil 
for A rts an d  C ulture.
B am gb ose , A yo. 1 9 7 4 . The Novels ofD.O. Fagunwa. Benin C ity : E th iope Publishing.
Beier, U lli. 1 9 5 9 . A Year of Sacred Festivals in One Yoruba Town. L a g o s : N iger ia  
M agazin e .
Bello , M u h am m ed . 19 2 2 . Infaku’l Maisuri. T ran sla ted /p arap h rased  by F.J. A rnett in 
The Rise of the Sokoto Fulani. K an o : School o f O rien tal an d  A frican  Stud ies.
Blier, Suzanne Preston. 1 9 8 7 . A frican  A rt Stud ies a t the C ro ssro a d s : A n A m erican  
Perspective. In African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline. W ashington: 
T h e N a tio n a l M u seu m  o f A frican  A rt, Sm ithsonian  In stitu tion , p p . 9 1 -1 0 7 .
B oulton , L a u ra . 1 9 6 9 . The Music Hunter. N e w  Y ork : D oubleday .
Brain , R o b ert. 1 9 8 0 . In troduction . Art and Society in Africa. L o n d o n  an d  N e w  Y ork : 
Lon gm an .
B ravm an n , R ene A. 1974 . Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa. L o n d o n : C am b ridge  
U niversity  Press.
C arro l, Fath er K . 1829 . Ekiti-Yoru vo od  carv ing. Odu 4 :3 -1 0 .
C lap perton , H u gh . 18 2 9 . Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa 
from the Bight of Benin to Soccattoo. L o n d on : J .  M u rray .
C lark , Ebu n  an d  O gunde, H u b ert. 1 9 7 9 . The Making of Nigerian Theatre. O x fo rd : 
O x fo rd  U niversity  Press.
C oote, Jerem y an d  Shelton, Anthony. 1992 . Introduction. In Jerem y C oote  and A nthony 
Shelton  (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. O x fo rd : C laren d on  P ress,
p p .1 -1 1 .
C reach ain , F. 1 9 9 1 . P ost-co lon ialism  o r secon d  indepen den ce? African Literature 
Association Bulletin 17 (3 ):5 -6 .
D ark , Philip J .C .  1973 . An Introduction to Benin Art and Technology. O x fo rd : 
C laren d on  Press.
D elan o , Isaac  O . 19 3 7 . The Soul of Nigeria. L o n d on : Laurie.
D io p , D avid . 1956 . C ontribution  to  the debate on  national poetry. Presence Africaine 6. 
D u  B o is, W .E. B u rgh ardt. 1 9 7 0 . The Negro. N ew  Y ork: O x fo rd  U niversity  Press. 
E a st, Joh n . 1 9 4 0 . A  H au sa  jo u rn al. Overseas Education 1 1 (2 ), 1 :8 3 -9 4 .
E a st, R .M . 1 9 3 6 . A  first essay  in im agin ative  A frican  literature. Africa 9 (3 ) :3 5 0 -5 8 . 
E yo , E k p o . 1 9 7 7 . Two Thousand Years of Nigerian Art. L a g o s : F ederal D epartm en t 
o f A ntiqu ities.
CONSOLIDATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 149
E yo , E k p o  an d  W illet, Frank . 19 8 2 . Treasures o f Ancient Nigeria. L o n d on : C ollins.
F ag g , W illiam . 1 9 5 8 . T h e Text. In E lliot E liso fo n  (ed .), The Sculpture of Africa. N ew  
York: H ark er  A rt Books.
--------- 1 9 6 3 a . Nigerian Images. L on don : L u n d  H u m ph ries.
--------- 1 9 6 3 b . T h e T rib a l A rtist. In Ja c o b  D rach ler (ed.), African Heritage: Intimate
Views of the Black Africans from Life, Lore and Literature. N e w  Y ork: 
C rom w ell-C ollier.
--------- 19 8 2 . T h e Y oru b a  an d  their Past. In F ag g , Pem berton  an d  H o lco m b e (eds),
1982 .
F ag g , W illiam , P em berton , Jo h n  an d  H o lco m e, Bryce (eds). 1 9 8 2 . Yoruba Sculpture 
of West Africa. L ondon : C o llin s; N e w  Y ork : A lfred  A . K n o pf.
F an on , Frantz. 1 9 7 8 . The Wretched of the Earth. H arm o n d sw o rth : Penguin.
G illon, W emer. 19 8 4 . A Short History of African Art. N ew  Y ork : Viking. Repr. Penguin 
1986 .
H a llam , W .K .R . 1 9 6 6 . T h e B ay a jid a  legend in H a u sa  fo lk lo re . Journal of African 
History 7 (1):47~60 .
H au ser, A rno ld . 1 9 8 5 . The Philosophy of Art History. E v an sto n : N orth w estern  
University Press.
H eath , F. 1 9 6 2 . A Chronicle of Abuja. T ran sla ted  an d  arran ged  by F ran k  H eath  
from  the H a u sa  o f A lh aji H a ssa n  an d  M a lla m  Sh u aib u  N a ’ibi. L a g o s : A frican  
U niversity  Press.
H egel, Friedrich. 1 9 5 6 . The Philosophy of History. N e w  Y ork : Dover.
H o rto n , R obin . 19 6 5 . Kalahari Sculpture. A p ap a : D ep artm en t o f A ntiqu ities.
--------- 19 8 1 . Ik ak i: T h e Torto ise  M asq u erad e . In  Yem i O gu n biy i (ed .), Drama and
Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book. L a g o s : N igeria  M agaz in e , p p .4 8 1 ­
94.
Id ow u , E . B olaji. 1 9f6 2 . O/liodumare: God in Yoruba Belief. L o n d on : L on gm an . 
Jey ifo , B. 199 0 a . D ecolonizing Theory: Reconceptualizing the N e w  English Literatures. 
Paper presen ted  at the M .L .A . A nnual C onferen ce , C h icago .
--------- 1 9 9 0 b . F o r C hinua Achebe: Th e R esilience an d  the P red icam en t o f  O bierika.
U npublish ed  m anuscript.
Jo h n so n , Sam uel. 1 9 6 0  [1921], History of the Yorubas. L a g o s : C M S  B o ok sh o p s. 
K in n i-O lusan yin , E . 1 9 9 0 . O riginal A frican  co n ju ra tio n  in th eatrical perform ance. 
Orunmila 5 :5 5 -5 9 .
L ad im eji, O .A . 1 9 7 4 . N atio n alism , alienation  an d  the cr isis o f  ideology. Transition
9 (4 6 ):4 0 -5 1 .
L a d ip o , D uro . 1 9 8 6 . S tagecraft in N igerian  D ram as . D o c to ra l thesis, U niversity  o f 
Leeds.
L a st, M . 1 9 6 7 . The Sokoto Caliphate. L o n d on : L on gm an .
L ay iw o la , D ele. 1 9 8 6 . Soc io log ical Im p lica tio n s o f  F em in ist M o tifs  in N igerian  
Folk lore an d  D ram a. Paper presented to  the 11th  A nn ual C onferen ce o f  the
150 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
A frican  L iteratu re  A sso c ia tion , M ich ig an  State  U niversity, 16 -1 9  A pril.
Leiris, M ich el and Fry, Jacq u e lin e  (eds). 1 9 8 6 . African Art, tran sla ted  by M ich ael 
R o ss . L o n d on : T h am es an d  H u dso n .
L o m a x , A lan . 1 9 6 8 . Folksong Style and Culture. W ash in gton , D C : A m erican  
A sso ciation  for the A dvan cem en t o f  Science.
M arg o lis , J .  1 9 8 0 . Art and Philosophy. B righ ton : Th e H arvester Press.
M e rriam , A lan  P. 1 9 7 0 . African Music on LP. N orth w estern  U niversity  Press.
M a r x , K arl. n .d . T extes su r le co lon ialism . M o sco w : Progress.
M o n ro e , C . Beardsley . 1 9 8 2 . The Aesthetic Point of View. Selected Essays, ed. M .J. 
W reen an d  D o n a ld  N . C allen . Ith aca an d  L o n d on : C orn ell U niversity  Press, 
p p .3 5 2 -7 0 .
M o rriso n , T. 1 9 8 9 . U n sp e ak ab le  things un spoken : Th e A fro-A m erican  p resen ce in 
A m erican  literature. Michigan Quarterly Review 2 8 ( l ) : l - 3 4 .
M u rfin , R .C . (ed.). 1 9 8 9 a . Joseph Conrad, H eart o f  D arkn ess: A  Case Study in 
Contemporary Criticism. N ew  Y ork : St M a rtin ’s Press.
--------- 1 9 8 9 b . T h e N e w  H isto ric ism  an d  Heart of Darkness. In M u rfin  (ed .), 1 9 8 9 a .
N debele , N .S . 1 9 8 4 . T u rk ish  ta les an d  som e th ou gh ts on  Sou th  A frican  literature. 
Staffrider.
--------- 1 9 8 6 . Th e red iscovery  o f  the ord in ary : Som e new  w ritin gs in Sou th  A frica.
Journal of Southern African Studies 1 2 (2 ):1 4 3 -5 7 .
N g u g i W a T h io n g ’o. 1 9 8 7 . Decolonizing the Mind. L on don : Ja m e s  Currey.
N ietzsch e, Friedrich . 1 9 7 4 . The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W m . A. H au ssm an n . N ew  
Y ork: G o rdon .
N k etia , J .H . K w ab en a. 1 9 8 0 . A frican  m usic an d  W estern p rax is : A  review  o f  W estern 
perspectives on  A frican  m usico logy . Canadian Journal of African Studies 
2 0 (1 ) :3 6-56.
N o ib i, D .O .S . 1 9 9 0 . D ep artm en t o f  A rab ic  an d  Islam ic S tud ies, U niversity  o f  Ib ad an , 
p erson al com m u n ication , 2 5  M a y  1 9 9 0 .
O su n d are , N . 19 8 9 . A n  em pty technology  o f  the text? D econ struction  an d  A frican  
L iteratu re. Critical Currents in African Literature.
Palm er, H .R . (ed.). 1 9 0 8 . T h e K a n o  C hron icle. T ran slated  w ith  an  in trodu ction  by 
H .R . Palm er. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain 
and Ireland 3 8 :5 8 -9 8 .
--------- 1 9 2 8 . Sudanese Memoirs. Being Mainly Translations of a Number of Arabic
Manuscripts Relating to the Central and Western Sudan. 3 V ols. L a g o s : 
G overn m ent o f  N igeria .
Perkins, W .A. 1 9 5 7 . C u rricu la  in N igerian  secon dary  schools. West African Journal 
of Education 1 :4-7 .
R o se , H .J .  1 9 6 5 . A Handbook of Greek Literature. L on don : M ethuen .
R o sm arin , A . 1 9 8 9 . D ark en in g  the R eader: R eader-R espon se C ritic ism  an d  Heart of 
Darkness. In M u rfin  (ed.), 1 9 8 9 a , p p .148-71 .
CONSOLIDATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 151
Sieber, Roy. 1 9 8 6 . A  P ropos. In  Leiris an d  Fry (eds), 1 9 8 6 .
Sm ith , R .S . 1 9 6 5 . T h e A laafin  in exile. Journal of African History 6.
Soy in k a , W ole. 1 9 7 6 . Myth, Literature and the African World. L o n d on : C am b ridge  
U niversity  Press.
--------- 19 8 9 . Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems. L o n d o n : D eutsch .
S p iv ak , G .C . 1 9 9 0 . The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. N ew  
Y ork an d  L on don : R o u tledge.
Sw anzy, H . 1 9 5 4 . Q uarterly  n otes. African Affairs 1 4 (1 7 6 ) :9 6 -9 7 .
Tem pels, P lacide. 1 9 5 9 . Bantu Philosophy. Paris: Presence A fricaine.
T h o m as, B. 1 9 8 9 . Preserving an d  K eeping O rder by K illing T im e in Heart of Darkness. 
In M u rfin  (ed .), 1 9 8 9 a , p p .237 -5 8 .
T h o m p so n , Je rry  L . an d  V ogel, Susan . 1 9 9 0 . Closeup: Lessons in the Art of Seeing 
African Sculpture. N e w  Y ork: The C enter fo r A frican  Art.
T h o m p so n , R .F. 1 9 7 3 . Y oru ba A rtistic C riticism . In D .L . d ’A zevedo (ed.), Traditional 
Artists in African Societies. B loom ington  and L on don : Indiana U niversity Press, 
p p .19-61.
Tracey, H u gh . 1 9 4 8 . R ecord in g  journey from  the U nion  into  the R h odesias. African 
Music Society Newsletter 1 :12-14 .
--------- 1 9 5 0 . R ecord in g  to u r  1 9 4 9  (M ozam b iqu e, B elgian  C on go , R h od esia  and
N y asa lan d ). African Music Society Newsletter l (3 ) :3 3 - 3 7 .
--------- 1 9 5 2 . R ecord in g  tou r in T an gan y ika by a team  o f  the A frican  M u sic  Society.
Tanganyika Notes and Records 3 2 :4 3 -4 8 .
--------- 1 9 5 4 . T h e state o f B an tu  A frican  m usic. African Music 1 (4 ):8 -11 .
--------- 1 9 5 7 . R ecord in g  in the L o st  V alley (Z am b esi). African Music 1 (4 ):4 5 -4 7 .
--------- 19 6 0 . African Music Research Transcription Library of Gramophone Records:
Handbook for Librarians. Joh an n esb u rg : G allo .
--------- 1 9 6 3 . E d ito ria l. African Music 3 (2 ):5 .
--------- 1 9 6 6 -6 7 . Ed itorial. African Music 4 (1 ):5 .
--------- 19 7 2 . E d itoria l. African Music 5(2):5.
V an sin a , Ja n . 1 9 6 5 . Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. L o n d on : 
R ou tled ge  an d  K egan  Paul.
---------  1 9 8 4 . Art History in Africa: An Introduction to Method. L on d on  an d  N ew
Y ork : L on gm an .
Verger, Pierre. 1 9 6 5 . G ran deu r et decadence du  culte de Iyam i O so ro n ga . Journal de 
la Societe des Africanistes 3 5 :1 5 1 -5 3 . ,
V ogel, Su san  M ullin . 1 9 8 6 . African Aesthetics: The Carlo Monzino Collection. N ew  
Y ork: T h e C enter fo r  A frican  Art.
W achsm ann , K.P. 1 9 6 6 a . N egritu d e  in m usic. Composer 1 9 :1 6 .
--------- 1 9 6 6 b . T h e  trend in m u sico logy  in A frica . Selected Reports in Musicology
(U niversity o f  C alifo rn ia  at L o s  A ngeles) 1 ( l) :6 1 - 6 5 .
W ali, O bi. 1 9 6 3 . T h e dead  end o f  A frican  literature. Transition 10.
152 RETHINKING AFRICAN ARTS & CULTURE
W illet, F ran k . 1 9 6 6 . O n  the fun eral effigies o f  O w o and Benin an d  Ife, N igeria . 
MAN, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute l ( l ) :3 4 - 4 5 .
---------  1 9 6 7 . Ife in the History of West African Sculpture. L on don : T h am es an d
H u d so n .
--------- 1 9 7 1 . African Art. N ew  Y ork : Praeger.
W ober, M allory . 1 9 7 5 . Psychology in Africa. L on don : In ternational A frican  Institute.
*