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Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora
The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora.
Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams.
Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world.
Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country's first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.
Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across time and space. Physicalized ritual, direct interaction with spectators, improvisation, music, drumming, and metaphorical animal characters help create the theatrical forms in multiple plays. Recurring themes include the establishment or challenging of political authority, the oppression or corruption of government, societal expectations based on gender, the complex and transformational nature of identity, and the power of dreams.
Though each play is its own unique entity, reading them together allows readers to explore what theatrical elements and cultural concerns are perhaps essentially African. The Caribbean plays add further perspective to the questions of what values, theatrical and societal, are part of African drama, how these have influenced the Caribbean aesthetic, and what the relationships are between the old and new world.
Among the creators of the pieces are two Nobel Laureates, those who have been exiled or jailed for the political nature of their work, and the author of his country's first constitution. The volume can serve as the primary text for an intensive semester-long investigation of African drama and culture. But it is also possible to use this volume along with others in the series as texts for a single course on drama from around the world. The global perspectives approach, letting works from ancient, indigenous, and modern times resonate with each other, encourages thinking across boundaries and connective human understanding.
424 pages, Paperback
Published January 25, 2024
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April 27, 2025The Triumph of Horus: This play is really cool, even though it likely wouldn't be that much fun to watch. What makes it unique is that it's a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian ritual drama honoring the Pharaoh by associating him with the mythic triumph of Horus over Seth. The actual play itself is quite repetitive and focuses more on the honoring of the god than on plot, character development, etc., but it is more a ritual than a theatrical experience as we would think of one today. But, as an ancient Egyptian piece, this would be one of the oldest "surviving" examples of drama (reconstructed, really).
https://youtu.be/8ZVbICgEhM0
The Masque of the Boa-Constructor: This is an Egungun masque performed by the Yoruba of West Africa. It's a ritual more than a play in the way that we in the west now typically think of a play. There's little plot--basically that a hunter has the power to transform into a boa constrictor, but then he forgets how to transform back--and most of the action is driven by ritualized singing/chanting and dancing. Subsequently, this really doesn't translate well to the page, since almost the whole thing is driven by performance.
https://youtu.be/OoJZRpyoQEw
Duro Ladipo's Oba Ko So: I had a lot of trouble following this play, which seems to rely heavily on ritual speech and praise singing.
Tekle Hawariat's Fabula: This is a strange little play, which has no real dramatic action, but kind of follows the approach of a fable. The action (such as it is) largely centers around a group of sheep who encounter a number of other animals--a wolf, sheep dogs, a crow, a fox, a goat, etc. The animals all reflect their stereotypical cultural associations (e.g., the wolf is cruel and cunning, the fox is wily), but not much really happens. There are some bits in which the fable seems to reflect socio-cultural commentary, such as when the goat tells a story about a monkey being made a judge and judging badly as a metaphor for the descent of justice in Ethiopia. But I'm not sure that most of the episodes really have much larger meaning. Or they do, and I'm just far enough from the context of early 1900s Ethiopia that I'm not getting the references.
https://youtu.be/HXW1siPGVyA
Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu's When the Hunchback Made Rain: I really liked this play, which is a satire on issues of poverty, power, and the divine. The play focuses on two peasants--Kaboggoza and Nsereko--who go to God seeking rain for their drought-stricken farms. But God, who is only semi-competent, definitely not all-knowing, and temperamental, gives the rain sheet to his hunch-backed servant Kirabira, the drunken servant screws up his responsibility. He gives Nsereko the rain sheet, with which he brings rain to his farm, thereby enraging Kaboggoza, who threatens his friend, then goes and accidentally kills Kirabira while trying to get rain himself. Kaboggoza then tries to frame Nsereko, but Nsereko turns the tables by claiming that God had secretly ordered a reward for anyone who killed Kirabira. Kaboggoza then tries to claim the reward and faces God's wrath for murder. In this way, the play deals with issues of power and poverty, jealousy, and the role of the divine and the accidental in human life.
https://youtu.be/ARNwaFEkqmU
Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman: There are elements of this play that really appeal to me, but overall I am not a huge fan of literature engagee. I prefer somewhat more subtle works. That being said, however, I do like the way that this play sets up the resistance to English colonialism as a cultural resistance centered in sites of cultural essentialism, and how the play seems to acknowledge the problematics of essentialism. There are, I feel, contradictory readings of this play, each of which has a degree of validity, which makes this play a somewhat difficult one to really analyze. The conscious political message is rather blatant, but there are undertones of doubt and complications within the surface message.
https://youtu.be/8T45X4JHs1I
Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa: This play blends postcolonialism, feminism, and anti-capitalism in really unique ways. Aidoo's play tells the story of Anowa, a headstrong young woman who marries the man she loves despite her parents (mostly her mother) and the village disapproving of it. The young people go off and begin a business selling animal skins, and as they prosper and begin acquiring slaves--which she stridently resists despite him--and wealth, their relationship becomes strained to the point where they are virtual strangers in their own home.
One thing I really like about this play is the choric elderly couple, called The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper. The old woman is energetic, caustic, and curmudgeonly, while the old man is serene, balanced, but rarely asserts an opinion. Together they comment on the action of the play, taking different sides in the question of who is to blame for the events going on, and arguing issues like morality, fate, and inter-generational change.
https://youtu.be/oWEdIjMOh2k
Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's Sizwe Bansi is Dead: This play is about the difficulties of having or maintaining an identity under apartheid restrictions, but simultaneously how the amorphous link between identity and the black or coloured body can allow a kind of self re-definition. In the second half of the play, we follow Size Bansi, who has come to seek work in the city of Port Elizabeth, but is being deported back to King William's Town where there is no work. He has to go because that's what the official stamped in his passbook, but he wants to stay in the city. When his friend Buntu finds a dead body, Buntu realizes they can steal the dead man's passbook with his permission to find work in the city, and they can paste Sizwe's picture in. All Sizwe has to do is become Robert Zwelinzima. In other words, in order to stay in the city and find work, he needs to give up himself, his own identity. At the same time, however, because white officials don't really look at black people, just at the passbook, this is a loophole opened by the system through which Sizwe (now Robert) can achieve his goals and support his family.
The problem with Sizwe Bansi is Dead is the structure. It really is a play of two halves, with all the action I've just described in the second half. The first half is set in Styles' photo studio, and he narrates some important events from his life, his photography career, and his life philosophy. While Styles is a really entertaining character and this first half does introduce some of the themes the second half will develop, the two halves are only tenuously linked.
https://youtu.be/Ke7OhLnyBWE
Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain: As the title implies, this is a dream play in which things get surreal, supernatural, mystical, repetitive, and generally strange at different times. The play is filled with symbolism--like the spider which signals Moustique's forthcoming death, or the alignment of the cabinetmaker with death. The play uses this dream world, along with its more direct political/legal commentary, to critique colonialism and the ways in which the conflicting and destructive psychic forces of colonial power work on the subjects of colonialism. The protagonist of the play, Makak, is possibly mad, driven that way by rejection and the separation from his ancestral homeland of Africa, a place which his vision tells him he must go. On the more overt political level, the police corporal (who is a mulatto and hates Black people, including his own Blackness) continually utilizes rhetoric idealizing and valorizing the law--associated with whiteness and colonialism--and yet, his actions and even his commentary show how empty and arbitrary that law is.
https://youtu.be/9JjSoh2zAlk
Michael Golkes' Couvade: This play uses the central characters of Lionel and his very pregnant wife Pat to explore postcolonial issues of Guyana's national self-identification. The couvade ritual involves a soon-to-be-father undergoing some kind of physical suffering or danger during his wife's labor in order to build a spiritual bond with the child. In this case, Lionel is not able to articulate that this is what he's doing, but he goes into a frenzy of painting, largely denying himself food, rest, etc. and even risking his eyesight through overwork and strain. But this couvade ritual isn't tied just tot he birth of his own multi-racial child, but to the self-definition of Guyana and a multi-racial/multi-ethnic nation. This debate occurs in the play, as Lionel defends a version of Guyana that embraces and blends the various ethnic and cultural traditions of the people--African, Indian, Indigenous, Chinese, etc.--whereas his friend Arthur takes the position that Guyanese people of African descent should embrace their African heritage as their "true" identity. The dream elements of this play, representing Lionel's dreams/visions, seem to support Lionel's ideal of a multi-ethnic national identity, as the dreams feature an Indigenous shaman, an Ashanti priest, and a Hindu priest, who collectively invoke the couvade ritual to explain Lionel's quest.
https://youtu.be/l6dvf3WAMlE
https://youtu.be/8ZVbICgEhM0
The Masque of the Boa-Constructor: This is an Egungun masque performed by the Yoruba of West Africa. It's a ritual more than a play in the way that we in the west now typically think of a play. There's little plot--basically that a hunter has the power to transform into a boa constrictor, but then he forgets how to transform back--and most of the action is driven by ritualized singing/chanting and dancing. Subsequently, this really doesn't translate well to the page, since almost the whole thing is driven by performance.
https://youtu.be/OoJZRpyoQEw
Duro Ladipo's Oba Ko So: I had a lot of trouble following this play, which seems to rely heavily on ritual speech and praise singing.
Tekle Hawariat's Fabula: This is a strange little play, which has no real dramatic action, but kind of follows the approach of a fable. The action (such as it is) largely centers around a group of sheep who encounter a number of other animals--a wolf, sheep dogs, a crow, a fox, a goat, etc. The animals all reflect their stereotypical cultural associations (e.g., the wolf is cruel and cunning, the fox is wily), but not much really happens. There are some bits in which the fable seems to reflect socio-cultural commentary, such as when the goat tells a story about a monkey being made a judge and judging badly as a metaphor for the descent of justice in Ethiopia. But I'm not sure that most of the episodes really have much larger meaning. Or they do, and I'm just far enough from the context of early 1900s Ethiopia that I'm not getting the references.
https://youtu.be/HXW1siPGVyA
Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu's When the Hunchback Made Rain: I really liked this play, which is a satire on issues of poverty, power, and the divine. The play focuses on two peasants--Kaboggoza and Nsereko--who go to God seeking rain for their drought-stricken farms. But God, who is only semi-competent, definitely not all-knowing, and temperamental, gives the rain sheet to his hunch-backed servant Kirabira, the drunken servant screws up his responsibility. He gives Nsereko the rain sheet, with which he brings rain to his farm, thereby enraging Kaboggoza, who threatens his friend, then goes and accidentally kills Kirabira while trying to get rain himself. Kaboggoza then tries to frame Nsereko, but Nsereko turns the tables by claiming that God had secretly ordered a reward for anyone who killed Kirabira. Kaboggoza then tries to claim the reward and faces God's wrath for murder. In this way, the play deals with issues of power and poverty, jealousy, and the role of the divine and the accidental in human life.
https://youtu.be/ARNwaFEkqmU
Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman: There are elements of this play that really appeal to me, but overall I am not a huge fan of literature engagee. I prefer somewhat more subtle works. That being said, however, I do like the way that this play sets up the resistance to English colonialism as a cultural resistance centered in sites of cultural essentialism, and how the play seems to acknowledge the problematics of essentialism. There are, I feel, contradictory readings of this play, each of which has a degree of validity, which makes this play a somewhat difficult one to really analyze. The conscious political message is rather blatant, but there are undertones of doubt and complications within the surface message.
https://youtu.be/8T45X4JHs1I
Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa: This play blends postcolonialism, feminism, and anti-capitalism in really unique ways. Aidoo's play tells the story of Anowa, a headstrong young woman who marries the man she loves despite her parents (mostly her mother) and the village disapproving of it. The young people go off and begin a business selling animal skins, and as they prosper and begin acquiring slaves--which she stridently resists despite him--and wealth, their relationship becomes strained to the point where they are virtual strangers in their own home.
One thing I really like about this play is the choric elderly couple, called The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper. The old woman is energetic, caustic, and curmudgeonly, while the old man is serene, balanced, but rarely asserts an opinion. Together they comment on the action of the play, taking different sides in the question of who is to blame for the events going on, and arguing issues like morality, fate, and inter-generational change.
https://youtu.be/oWEdIjMOh2k
Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona's Sizwe Bansi is Dead: This play is about the difficulties of having or maintaining an identity under apartheid restrictions, but simultaneously how the amorphous link between identity and the black or coloured body can allow a kind of self re-definition. In the second half of the play, we follow Size Bansi, who has come to seek work in the city of Port Elizabeth, but is being deported back to King William's Town where there is no work. He has to go because that's what the official stamped in his passbook, but he wants to stay in the city. When his friend Buntu finds a dead body, Buntu realizes they can steal the dead man's passbook with his permission to find work in the city, and they can paste Sizwe's picture in. All Sizwe has to do is become Robert Zwelinzima. In other words, in order to stay in the city and find work, he needs to give up himself, his own identity. At the same time, however, because white officials don't really look at black people, just at the passbook, this is a loophole opened by the system through which Sizwe (now Robert) can achieve his goals and support his family.
The problem with Sizwe Bansi is Dead is the structure. It really is a play of two halves, with all the action I've just described in the second half. The first half is set in Styles' photo studio, and he narrates some important events from his life, his photography career, and his life philosophy. While Styles is a really entertaining character and this first half does introduce some of the themes the second half will develop, the two halves are only tenuously linked.
https://youtu.be/Ke7OhLnyBWE
Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain: As the title implies, this is a dream play in which things get surreal, supernatural, mystical, repetitive, and generally strange at different times. The play is filled with symbolism--like the spider which signals Moustique's forthcoming death, or the alignment of the cabinetmaker with death. The play uses this dream world, along with its more direct political/legal commentary, to critique colonialism and the ways in which the conflicting and destructive psychic forces of colonial power work on the subjects of colonialism. The protagonist of the play, Makak, is possibly mad, driven that way by rejection and the separation from his ancestral homeland of Africa, a place which his vision tells him he must go. On the more overt political level, the police corporal (who is a mulatto and hates Black people, including his own Blackness) continually utilizes rhetoric idealizing and valorizing the law--associated with whiteness and colonialism--and yet, his actions and even his commentary show how empty and arbitrary that law is.
https://youtu.be/9JjSoh2zAlk
Michael Golkes' Couvade: This play uses the central characters of Lionel and his very pregnant wife Pat to explore postcolonial issues of Guyana's national self-identification. The couvade ritual involves a soon-to-be-father undergoing some kind of physical suffering or danger during his wife's labor in order to build a spiritual bond with the child. In this case, Lionel is not able to articulate that this is what he's doing, but he goes into a frenzy of painting, largely denying himself food, rest, etc. and even risking his eyesight through overwork and strain. But this couvade ritual isn't tied just tot he birth of his own multi-racial child, but to the self-definition of Guyana and a multi-racial/multi-ethnic nation. This debate occurs in the play, as Lionel defends a version of Guyana that embraces and blends the various ethnic and cultural traditions of the people--African, Indian, Indigenous, Chinese, etc.--whereas his friend Arthur takes the position that Guyanese people of African descent should embrace their African heritage as their "true" identity. The dream elements of this play, representing Lionel's dreams/visions, seem to support Lionel's ideal of a multi-ethnic national identity, as the dreams feature an Indigenous shaman, an Ashanti priest, and a Hindu priest, who collectively invoke the couvade ritual to explain Lionel's quest.
https://youtu.be/l6dvf3WAMlE
Displaying 1 of 1 review