African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 932
THEATER: AFRICAN POPULAR
THEATER
African popular theater is a contested but useful term that critics have applied in many
contexts. This survey takes a broad definition, which incorporates mimetic performances
involving some portrayal of character and an explicit or implicit narrative, presented to an
audience that is representative of the majority, rather than elite groups in a community.
Despite authorative suggestions that drama in the European sense of the term is
virtually unknown in precolonial Africa (Finnegan 1970, 516), there is broad consensus
that scriptless theater or paradramatic oral performances were very widespread in the
precolonial era. Indeed, European drama may have had an African origin in the Osiris
mysteries of first millenium Phaeronic Egypt, which transferred to Greece through
Orientalist cults.
A useful categorization of African popular theater can be based on a simple diachronic
periodization into pre- and postcolonial eras. This, however, is rather misleading. Arabic
domination of indigenous peoples in North and East Africa conceivably constitutes both
cultural and political colonialism. Similarly, Jane Plastow (1996) has argued
convincingly that Ethiopean theater in Amharic during the Haile Selassie regime was
tantamount to a colonial form of theater, dominating subordinate languages and cultures.
For the purposes of simplicity, however, it is useful to keep a periodization based on
precolonial, colonial and postcolonial traditions, with colonial referring to the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century incursions by English, Portuguese,
French Spanish, and German missionaries, armies, administrators, and educators.
Precolonial Popular Theater
Scholars frequently make distinctions within precolonial theater between ritual and
secular performance, with ancestral masquerades, hunting dances, and spirit-possession
rituals given as example of religious theater, and entertainment dances and oral narratives
as examples of secular performances. The distinction is useful with the proviso that very
few secular performances were without some ritual elements, and that ritual
performances had enormous variations in their levels of sacredness. Moreover, a
diachronic analysis of forms shows that they were capable of changing their functions,
with, for example, some ritual forms becoming gradually more secular over the years.
In most precolonial masquerades, such as Egungun, Ekoe, Okukmpa (West Africa),
and Makishi and Nyau (Central Africa) worshippers considered masked dancers to be the
spirits of ancestors who returned to earth during sacred rituals in order to sustain the
living souls’ links with the dead, and to cleanse the community of spiritual and physical
impurities.
The masked dancers had a hierarchical grading, with some considered very sacred,
and others, less sacred. In Yoruba Egungun, the “elder” masks, which covered the whole
body (including the face) with richly embroidered cloths were the most sacred, while
more approachable, comic masks (such as onidan) were more representational and