African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 936
using dramatic techniques and plot motifs drawn from indigenous folklore. University
traveling theaters, such as those found at the universities of Ibadan, Legon, Makerere,
Zambia, and Malawi, began taking plays out of the university cities into the rural towns
and villages (Kerr 1995, 133–48).
As a result of this interaction between literary drama and mass audiences, a form of
popular urban improvised drama emerged among amateur troupes, mobilizing the vast
labor reserve of unemployed college graduates. In Uganda, for example, during the
1970s, playwrights like Wycliffe Kiyingi and Byron Kawadwa built up a strong Luganda
popular theater, based on a mixture of school drama techniques and popular paradramatic
performance, until the movement was crushed by Idi Amin’s reign of terror (Kerr 1995,
127–29). Similar phenomena occurred, though in less repressive circumstances, in many
other African countries.
A slightly different form of popular theater is associated with the efforts of
postcolonial governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to use local
language drama as a tool of communication for development purposes. Although there
were many colonial precedents, the orgins of “Theater for Development” are often traced
to the Laedza Batananai movement for adult education in Botswana in the early 1970s.
By the 1980s, partly due to the donor funds it attracted, several varieties of “Theater for
Development,” “Animation Theater,” or “Community Theater” became pervasive
throughout sub-Saharan Africa. These ranged in style and ideology from the nakedly
instrumental tools of NGOs to communicate sectoral messages about health, agriculture,
literacy and so on, to a more community-oriented focus on indigenous cultural renewal
and social mobilization (Mda 1993). The most famous, radical variant of the latter is the
Kamiriithu experience in Kenya during the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was
vigorously crushed by the Kenyan Government (Ngugi 1986, 59–62).
Another form of theater which became increasingly popular during the postcolonial
period is that associated with the mass media. Even drama forms which appear to be
totally Western in their origins, such as television and radio drama, acquired very
different structures, styles, and techniques when adapted to African radio and television
stations. Syncretic forms of popular theater such as the concert party and Yoruba opera
found a fruitful expansion on Ghanaian and Nigeria television in the 1980s (Jeyifo 1984).
Less obviously, African traditions of narrative structure and presentation became
essential to the success of the radio plays, especially through the technique of collective
improvisation as a play-creation device (Kerr 1998).
The entire history of postcolonial popular African theater, both mediated and
nonmediated, is testimony to the resilience and adaptive capacity of indigenous African
performing arts, despite the transformations caused by capitalism, urbanization, and
modernization.
References
Adedeji, Joel. 1978. Alarinjo: The Traditional Yoruba Tavelling Theatre. In Theatre in Africa, ed.
Oyin Ogunba and Abiola Irele. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.
Barber, Karin, John Collins, and Alain Ricard. 1987. West African Popular Theatre. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; Oxford: James Currey.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa. London: Oxford University Press.