III.

Theater of the Colonial Period

The period of colonial domination in Africa was consolidated at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884 and 1885 when the European powers mapped out the division of Africa. Colonization led to the suppression and outlawing of many indigenous art forms, such as drumming and dancing. The colonial attempt to stifle indigenous African belief systems has been best dramatized by Nigeria’s foremost playwright and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, in his play Death and the King’s Horseman (1975).

While Western missionaries sought to instill Christian values through biblical dramas and pageants (for instance the Roman Catholic Church’s vast medieval passion plays in Rwanda and Zaïre), Africans often adapted European dramatic forms to their own satirical or political purposes.

In 1915 the Ghanaian playwright Kobina Sekyi wrote The Blinkards, a full-length play that satirizes the Fante nouveaux riches of Cape Coast who “abjured the magic of being themselves” in favor of uncritical acceptance of European norms and values. Another Ghanaian, “Bob” Johnson, developed the concert-party performance tradition with the establishment of his troupe The Versatile Eight in 1922. Concert parties were characterized by long musical openings, stock domestic situations, and audience intervention. The form remains popular in French-speaking West Africa.

Known as the father of Nigerian theater, Hubert Ogunde founded the first Yoruba Opera traveling theater troupe in the 1930s. It performed biblical and later political dramas in urban areas; plays such as Strike and Hunger (1945) and Bread and Bullets (1951) took issue with colonial exploitation. This form became immensely popular and was employed by dramatists Kola Ogunmola and Duro Lapido in the 1950s. It was eventually incorporated into television drama.

African plays were produced in indigenous and European languages from the 1880s onward. The early years of British colonial education in South Africa involved the encouragement of European-style literary and theatrical activities by educated black men. Playwrights such as Esau Mthethwa wrote social satires about local life in the Zulu and Xhosa languages. In the 1920s teachers and pupils collaborated in devised theatrical productions at Marionhill School in South Africa while the William Ponty School (founded 1933) in Dakar, Senegal, encouraged the research and production of plays based on traditions of the pupils’ own communities.