African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 935
more popular art form, with professional troupes touring their plays around community
halls and bars.
The concert party used melodramatic or farcical plots with all-male casts and stylized
costumes and makeup to project stereotyped characters, such as the good-time girl, the
country bumpkin, or the faithful wife, in plays that relied heavily on domestic conflicts or
rags-to-riches/riches-to-rags formulae. Highlife singers and instrumentalists integrated
their musical performances with the dialog, as well as providing postperformance dance
music (Barber et al. 1997, 12–14).
Similar syncretic drama forms emerged during the colonial period in other parts of
Africa. In Western Nigeria, Yoruba opera had its origins in the independent Christian
churches. Christian choirmasters or teachers like Hubert Ogunde, Ola Ogunmola, and
Duro Ladipo combined a Western Christian cantata style with indigenous theatrical and
musical traditions, such as Alarinjo, to create a syncretic form of popular theater.
Dialogue (usually in Yoruba), music, singing, and mime were mingled in plays that
ranged through themes concerning history, Christian morality, the supernatural, crime,
and domestic conflicts (Barber, et al. 1987, 38–54).
In East Africa, Vichekesho theater had more secular origins. Itinerant professional,
almost invariably male Zanzibari mime artists during the 1930s used Indian film-acting
techniques, Taarab music, and indigenous African ngoma music and dance mime to
create stylized farces which satirized aspects of modern urban life.
A similar mix of music, singing, dialogue, and stereotyped characterization emerged
in South Africa during the 1960s in the township musical, with Gibson Kente as the most
prominent artist/entrepreneur. The township musical combined the traditions of Western
dialog drama with African choral music and township jazz (itself a syncretic form of
music) (Kavanagh 1985, 135–44).
Yoruba opera and township musicals differed from concert parties and Vichekesho in
that they used female as well as male actors, although male actors and entrepreneurs still
maintained aesthetic and financial domination. All these forms tended to concentrate on
domestic situations (usually from a male perspective), relying on an appeal to
precapitalist community moral values to mediate and judge the rapid transformations
brought about by modernization.
Post-Colonial Popular African Theater
In the postcolonial period, existing forms of indigenous and syncretic theater not only
survived, but often flourished. The heyday of concert parties and Yoruba opera was
probably in the 1960s and 1970s, with a massive expansion of traveling theater troupes
well after independence.
Other forms of popular theater, however, also emerged in the postcolonial period. One
of the most potent, if apparently unlikely sources was the elitist tradition of literary
theater in schools and universities. Although in its early stages this tended to be rather
unadventurously close to European models of theater (with aesthetic dependence
reinforced by financial support from the British Council and Alliance Française),
eventually many of these art theater institutions initiated programmes that attempted to
widen their appeal, particularly through the performance of plays in African languages,