Nawa Journal of Language and Communication

(Volume 2: Number 2, December 2008)

Evolution of Theory and the Problem of Contextual and Cultural Configurations

in African Dramatic Literature

Nelson O. Fashina, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Abstract

The paper traces the recurrence of a great matrix of identical literary ‘codes’ and
‘signatures’ of African/black literature all over the world. It proves that this ‘birthtmark’
atavistically remains immanent in every black literature in spite of the cultural
diffusion and dispersion of the blacks and the relative textual conquest of black
literary values by the Western cosmopolitan literary culture. Literary productions
by Africans and their stock in America, Brazil, West Indies and Africa contain, in
varying degrees, the synergy of African cultural values. They integrate ancient
mythologies into modem context of post-colonial, post-slavery and post-industrial
global society. And it is from this universal matrix that we can evolve novel systems
of ritual aesthetic theory and criticism for African literature. The paper offers a critical
interrogation of attempts in African/black literary history to de-colonize African
Literature. It problematizes the claim that African rituals and festivals compare with
European drama and argues that though African literary identity is still concealed
by its burden of European linguistic, aesthetic and cultural contents, the hybrid
status should also be used as framework for developing a factual theory of African
literature. Lack of acceptance of this reality has put some barriers of authenticity
on the search for an African theory that is insulated from critical consultations
of Western reading theories. Thus, the paper recognizes the inevitable influx of
several confluences of linguistic, cultural and literary forms into African literature,
And it argues therefore that any reading theory of this literature must approach it
from the angle of its inextricable hybridity and at the same time recognize its depth
of source in African indigenous epistemology.

Keywords: African literature, identical literary codes, African theory, inextricable

hybridity, African epistemology.

Introduction

One of the problems of African/Black literature and, invariably, its dramatic genre,
and its theory, lies in the alienation created by its crisis of identity, a serious textual,
contextual and cultural problem which has received critical mention in Joel Adedeji
(1969), Michael Coleman (1971), Femi Osofisan (1973), M.J.C. Echeruo (1973),
Wole Soyinka (1976), J.C .de Graft (1976), Dapo Adelugba (1978), Ossie Enekwe
(1981), Ayo Banjo (1983), Henry Louis Gates (1988), Chidi Amuta (1989), Bill
Ashcroft et al (1989,1995). Writing about African literature in Africa (Eds. Phillis M.
Martin and Patrick O’Meara, 1995:295). Eileen Julien opines that

When most Americans and Europeans use the expression “African literature”,
what they mean is poetry, plays, and narrative written by Africans in English and
French, and perhaps Portuguese. … . But, it is not possible to speak or write of
African literature as homogeneous or coherent, any more than this claim can
be made for the varied texts that constitute European literature (1995:295).

Contrary to the above claims, African literature is not necessarily restricted to works
written by authors of African descent. Otherwise, one would deny the works written
by foreign authors on the African indigenous and postcolonial experience of their

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African ancestry. Scholars like Ulli Beier and Karin Barber have done extensive
works on African culture and oral literary traditions, and to this extent their works
are inextricable aspects of African literature. Ulli Beier’s play (written under the
pseudonym Obotunde Ijimere), The Imprisonment of Obatala, is a trenchant
example of a pure African-Yoruba traditional work whose status as an African
play is undeniable. Thus, we hope that any theory of classification and identity of
African literature should consider not just the African nationality of the author, but
the compliance of the work to African context, contents, form and aesthetics. Even
then, the above criteria are relatively limited as solution to contextual definitional
problems in African literature whenever the language problem is foregrounded. Yet,
this hybrid status of African literature, which also hallmarks its cultural and aesthetic
richness as well as its globalizing essence, is ironically its source of marginality
in the jaundiced eye of both the Western hegemonic discourse and the radical
‘nativist’ Africana scholars. This paper posits that African literary theory should
evolve naturally from a clinical consideration to its factual hybrid status. And this
provides an alternative view to the various Achebesque calls for cultural annihilation
of all foreign linguistic and cultural streaks that underscore the obvious naming of
‘hybridity’ in modern African literature.

Problem of definition

The anti colonial anxiety about African literature only re-invents the myth of the
black man’s anger. And it is seemingly redundant in a 21st century drive towards
cultural globalization and multi-racism. Thus, any rejection of hybridity is restrictive
and ironic on the grounds that the variety of European language used in expressing
African literature is sometimes not the type acceptable to or even intelligible to
the average native speaker. Rather, the language is domesticated, and African
indigenous thoughts are violently forced or imposed on the foreign language in form
of translation or transliteration to make it bear the burden of ritual aesthetics and
speech idioms of the race. Thus, even though a large chunk of African literature
bear the burden of European language, much of them are however conveyed
in special hybrid variety that is not spoken anywhere in Europe, except perhaps
amongst the new African arrivals in the West. Therefore, neither the Euro-American
nor the Africana conservative concept of African literature is appropriate for being
used as yardstick for the definition and canonization of reading theories for African
literature. African literature is very wide and varied. Such diversities are caused
by linguistic and cultural heterogeneity as historical consequences of foreign
domination and control under colonial rule which gave rise to new languages and
invariably new and variegated patterns of cognition, thinking and living along such
cultural divisions such as Anglophone, Francophone, Iusophone countries. This
lays validity to Achebe’s time-tested assertion that “No man can understand another
whose language he does not speak” (1962:62). Here Achebe does not just mean
language in the sense of syntactic, lexico-semantic or phonological properties of
human speech alone. Rather he means language as it subsumes all aspects of the
totality of human history, culture and entire world-view. Thus, Bernth Lindfors warns
that “foreign critics should heed this warning and not attempt to tresspass brazenly
on territory that belongs to others who acquired the indigenous grammar while
young and thus know how to decode and interpret the deep structures underlying
their own semantic universe.”(2002:7).

Julien made a valid observation about the shifts, changes and evolution of African
literature in certain perspectives: understanding of African literature has changed
tremendously in the last twenty years, because of several important developments:

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the ever increasing number of women writers, greater awareness of written and oral
production in national languages (such as Yoruba, Poula and Zulu), and greater
critical attention to factors such as the politics of publishing and African literature’s
multiple audiences. These developments coincide with and have, in fact, helped
produce a general shift in literary sensibility away from literature as pure text, the
dominant paradigm for many years, to literature as an act between parties located
within historical, socioeconomic and other contexts (295-6).

Julien’s critical observation is another valid site for the consideration of the various
transformations which have taken place in the nature and characteristics of African
literature – all of which should add up to the criteria for developing a theory for
the reading of African literature. But, beyond critical recognition of this problem
and intricacy for defining and developing a theory of African literature is a very
compelling need to explore the context sensitive nature of the problem and to
configure their epistemological implications for the theory, criticism and meaning
of African literature.
Contextual and Cultural paradigms

The contextual and cultural crisis in African literature is partly predicated on its ‘post-
colonial status’ leading to inevitable modal transition from oral to written. And this is
largely informed by its linguistic, cultural and artistic hybridity – all of which conspire
to underline its elusive definition. Thus, invariably, European concept of drama/
theatre or literature is being foisted on the African forms of verbal performance and
ritual aesthetics. In the early sixties, the application of European idea of literature
to African literature was being hastily done with the view, perhaps, to disproving the
then canonized intellectual error in European idea that pre-colonial Africa never had
literature or it genres and aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, the early European historians
who wrote about Africa had ignorantly misrepresented Africa as a dark continent
whose people basked in primitive customs of animism and religious fetish. This
was an unscholarly view which smacked of parochialism anchored on the disgust of
colonial missionaries for any ‘Other’ but Judeo-Christian forms of worship.

In order to counter this insulting claim and cultural denigration of Africa, some early
‘Africana’ scholars were desperately poised to establish that pre-colonial Africa had
a form of dramatic art which was either embryonic or fully mature and comparable
to the European forms of drama and theatre. This claim again appeared whimsical.
And it was meted with resistance in the works of Oyin Ogunba, Isidore Okpewho,
Ulii Beier, MJC Echeruo, Lewis Nkosi, Biodun Jeyifo, Abiola Irele and Karin Barber
to mention a few. The early Africana scholars argued that such comparisons are
often not cautious to compare African forms of literature - especially the dramatic,
poetic and the narrative - with its western type only at comparable periods of history.
After all, there is marked difference between pre-colonial African drama and colonial
or modern African drama. The question is: with what sense of propriety could one
describe the African festivals, rituals and ceremonies as ‘drama’ or ‘theatre’? This
poses a problem of identity for African verbal art and performance because the
cultural context that informs the European drama is different from that of the African
verbal performance. Thus, African drama is in dilemma of universal literary status
and invariably, the problem of evolving a zero-European critical theory is created
since the cultural instruments for decoding its meanings are neither resident in
western literary establishment nor even in European trained African scholars but
in the very indigenous active bearers of the tradition. By tradition here is meant
the totality of the anachronistic values, customs, culture, religion, and the timeless,
eternal, cosmological four-dimension space of the living (present) the dead/

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ancestors (past), the unborn (future) and the interlocking cosmic space between
history and cryptic future. However, there are African scholars and literary critics,
especially those whose scholarships are obtained in indigenous African cultures and
languages, whose study of the signifying timbers of African verbal and literary idioms
have enabled the distillation of African–centered methods of interpretation. This
effort is, however, still embryonic; but there is hope of striking the water level in this
quest since there is, nowadays, more interest in oral research especially in African
language literatures and cultures than European studies, in spite of the seeming
terror of globalization whose questionable method, at times, is towards the eclipse
of post-colonial, third world, values by the so called ‘universal’ western cultures. The
half-a-century old search for an African literary identity on the geo-literary global
map seems over now that the world speaks with one voice in acknowledging ‘the
significance’ of Things Fall Apart to global literary scholarship. This is epitomized in
the recent flurry preparations for international seminars in Europe, United States,
Asia, Germany, France, Africa, etc in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart in 2008. Biodun Jeyifo (1990) and Dan Izevbaye (2008: 8) have
both agreed that “Obierika’s introspection would mark him out as the ideal hero of
the novel form, where Okonkwo remains the ideal hero of tragic and epic forms” in
universal literary canons. This new readings of Things Fall Apart as a text with the
status of global forms of its kind (as well as the global acceptability and reception of
African literature since 1986 when Wole Soyinka became the first African writer to
win the prestigious Nobel prize for literature) provides evidence that African literature
needs no further theoretical justification in aid of its status as a standard variety of
world or commonwealth literature. Thus, the immediate next task for African literary
scholarship is to look within and look around the context and culture of its episteme
and verbalization in order to evolve poetics of readings and interpretations that
would excavate its own unique indigenous technology and theory of existence.

Re-configuring the relative status of rituals in developing an African theory. . .

Apart from the problem of nomenclature, several scholars of African literature have
always locked horns on the labeling of African ritual performances and festivals,
which have certain propensity for mimesis and dramatic or theatrical echoes, as
drama or theatre. Kerr (1981:131) observes that the English words “theatre” and
“drama” are loaded with certain “dramaturgical and aesthetic expectations arising
from the long history of western theatre”. In the Western theatre or drama, these
“dramaturgical and aesthetic expectations” would include the formalized dramatic
and theatrical elements such as character, dialogue, diction, mimesis, dance,
audience, costume, plot complication, suspense, concealment and disclosure,
reversals, causal relationship between happenings, conflict generation, conflict
resolution, proscenium effects of lighting, formalized stage, curtain, scenery and
spectacle. Although some of these aesthetic elements are also, in varying degrees,
present in pre-colonial African dramatic forms, they are, however, not backed up by
sophisticated canonized theories.

Enekwe (1981) opines that what constitutes drama is functionally determined by

the conceptual framework of this aesthetic medium. Dramatic art, as aesthetic
communication, is based on the appetite for art, celebration, creativity and
didacticism in ‘culture-specific’ and variable ways, as observed in each cultural
space across the world. Enekwe (1981:152) suggests that:

Function determines the nature of drama in every culture. In the 5th century B.C.
Greece, for instance, poetry was central to drama because for the Greeks it was the
most desirable and perfect art form. In Asia and Africa, on the other hand, dance,

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mime and music are the essence in the theatre. While the mainstream European
theatre is syllogistic in form, the Asian and African theatres are ritualistic. In Greek
tragedy moral order must be reflected by the order of events.

Enekwe’s relativist position contradicts Michael Echeruo’s functionalist view of

drama. According to Echeruo (1973:25), the rituals do not pass for drama because
they are, functionally spiritual, sacred and transcendental occasions. He posits that
“the dramatic content of the ritual is buried in its ritual purity”.

In his own study, Okafor (1991) deconstructs the likes of Echeruo’s perception of
African rituals with a European critical lens. Okafor argues that “Misunderstanding
… arises when it is evaluated on the basis of Western critical criteria” (39).
Obviously, Echeruo’s view of drama is grounded on the very lack of symmetrical
correspondence of African ritual performances and the Greek and Western concepts
and practices of drama. Bill Ashcroft et al ( The Empire Writes Back, 1989) have
observed that the failure of the so called universal western literary hegemony “to
deal adequately with the complexities and varied cultural provenance of post-
colonial writing”(12)provided “unprecedented” opportunity for the ‘marginal’ post-
colonial discourse to attain “creative energy” of resistance and to challenge the
center.

Re-figuring a reading theory of African literature

It is, perhaps, appropriate that some theory and poetics of African drama should
be allowed to evolve naturally from the long history of aesthetic and mimetic
experience of verbal art in the African world. Consequently, African literary theories
should emerge from the various dynamics of cultural and aesthetic transformation
influencing the literature within time and space. Gates Jr. (1986:20) has expressed
the necessity to explore the possibility of devising a distinct critical theory for black
and African indigenous arts:

I once thought it our most important gesture to master the canon

of criticism, to imitate and apply it. But now, I believe that we must
turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism
indigenous to our literatures.

The need to distil a critical aesthetic poetics for African literatures may look rather
utopian owing to the textual incongruity between the indigenous verbal arts, which
were the enabling texts, and the written form. An indigenous theory could, however,
be evolved for the African primordial features because, except in some modern
versions, these primordial forms suffer from the eroding influence of Western
theatrical tradition. The adoption of the written mode of artistic expression in Africa
has led to the textual enslavement of the oral text-mode. Thus the aesthetic principles
of the Western writing culture have not only silenced, but have also disabled and
marginalized the unique oral aesthetic values of African texts.

Despite the above, the social, psychological and thematic contents of some African
scripted plays bear a heavy burden of classical and Elizabethan traditions of the
theatre. Albert Ashaolu (1982) has convincingly revealed the “coincidence”, the
“correspondence” and the marked influence of classical and Elizabethan forms of
tragedy on J.P. Clark’s Song of a Goat and The Masquerade; Rotimi’s The Gods
Are Not to Blame; Sutherland’s Edufa and the mythic-ideological plays of Soyinka,
ranging from The Bacchae of Euripides, The Strong Breed and The Swamp Dwellers
to Camwood on the Leaves. Ashaolu argues that:

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Clark himself admitted in an interview with Lewis Nkosi in September

1962 that he “may have been influenced by the ancients, the ancient
Greek”. But even then, Clark has warned against the erroneous
identification of certain area of coincidence and correspondence in
Greek and African dramatic works as borrowing from, or imitation
of, the classics (78).

Ashaolu accepts the possibility of cultural correspondence and coincidence across

space between Greece and Africa. He, however, insists that “the classical temper in
Clark’s Song of a Goat and The Masquerade can hardly escape critical note” (78).
The source of Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame and Soyinka’s The Bacchae of
Euripides is vocally Greece since they are, in varying degrees, adaptations of Greek
tragedies to the African mythic, social and historical exigency. But then, pre-colonial
African society shares virtually the same type of culture as the ancient Greece that
produced Sophoclean tragedy. Therefore, aspects of Greek influence on African
drama may not be located in the tragic issues and the inextricable link of heroes
fatal tragedy to the supernatural forces, but in the structural principles of the tripod
unities as well as the restriction of the tragic end of hero to non- accidental death
but prolonged trail of calamity which produces cathartic effect on the audience.
This is a matter of genre-specific stylistic difference, and not of cultural divergence
between Africa and Greece. Our claim of cultural correspondence between Africa
and Greece may be reinforced if, for example, we change the names of characters
in Greek tragedy to African names. The result would be that no African would
suspect that the values in the texts are non-African. One would see that some pre-
colonial African cultures could produce such tragedies. But, the stylistic, structural
and aesthetic principles of Greek tragedy are alien to the African indigenous canons
of oral drama/performance evolved and defined by indigenous African artists and
their co-bearers of the tradition.

Consequently such African works with apparent influences from the Greek or
Western stylistic and aesthetic forms cannot be safely insulated from the critical
reflexes of the Western dramatic tradition that gave them textual enablement.
Izevbaye (1968:4) takes a historical review of the call for an African aesthetics:

The call for an African aesthetics was first made in the fifties as
part of the larger nationalist struggle for African cultural and political
emancipation which was sweeping the continent at that time. The
first International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists which was
held in Paris in 1956 had as its theme “The Crisis in Negro Culture”
and was much concerned with criticism. At the congress literature
was considered only as one of the many disciplines which the
participants put forward as part of African studies to be emphasized
and improved in the fight for cultural freedom and rehabilitation of
the black man on the world scene.

Subsequent conferences and congress of African, Afro-Caribbean and African-

American writers and critics have examined the negative impact of writing or book-
culture on the drive for a black critical aesthetics. In deed, the 1980s marked a
decisive phase in the evolution of African literary theory. Concerted efforts have
been made, and are still being made, to forge a distinct critical poetics for African
works. Such attempts include Gates Jr’s Black Literature and Literary Theory (1984);
Armah’s “Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-à-vis African Revolutionary Theory
and Praxis”, published in Presence Africaine 131, (1984); Amuta’s The Theory of
African Literature (1989); Jonathan Ngate’s Francophone African Fiction: Reading

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a Literary Tradition 1988; Anozie’s Structural Models and African Poetics: Towards
a Pragmatic Theory of Literature (1987); The Empire Writes Back, Abiola Irele’s
The African Imagination (1990) and so on. The book culture with which African
art communicates is a Western dominant mode whose form, style and principles
influence the shape and aesthetic meaning of the African contents in the works.
This kind of modal interplay, which at once impairs and organically fuses the oral
and written literary forms, is what Finnegan (1982) describes as an “overlap”. Even
in the African-American context, the early black form of literary expression such as
The Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass (1845) was constructed on the space
between the writing of Douglass’s slave master.

Before the insurgence of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in America, black
writing had been psychologically shaped and censored by the white dominant mode
of stylistic expression. This was due to the textual politics that engulfed that flowering
era of black emancipation in socio-cultural and intellectual spheres. For example,
Wright’s adoption of the realistic mode in his novel Black Boy (1945) has been traced
to the influences of the changing western discourse whose fashionable style was
the adoption of realism in place of surrealism and romanticism from the very dawn
of the twentieth century. Thus the disclaiming of the relevance of western critical
theories to black texts such as Jones’s Dutchman, Hansbery’s A Raising in the Sun
and many other black plays presented at the prestigious Broadway in the New York,
sounds like an emotional racial sentiment. For these plays must have conformed to
certain prescribed conventions of white drama before they were adjudged suitable
for presentation at the Broadway. The black life was considered to be “too exotic”
and producers feared that plays on “Negro” theme would attract a limited white
audience; hence, the exclusion of their plays from the famous Broadway in America.
Turner (1972) points out that the first serious Broadway production of African-
American plays was a one-act play, called “Chip Woman’s Fortune” by Richardson
in 1923. Such black plays are contiguous to western plays in terms of dramatic or
theatrical effects. Thus, Western critical cannons can be safely applied to them.

However, the African ritual aesthetics, festival and other metaphysical performances,
which are culturally determined and are often projected in both oral and written
textual dramas, are capable of being exclusively analyzed and appreciated from
African functional perspectives. This thought may have moved Chinua Achebe
to declare in his dialogue with Elizabeth Pryse in 1962: “we are not opposed to
criticism but we are getting a little weary of all the special types of criticism which
have been designed for us by people whose knowledge of us is limited” (79).

One essential link among the blacks everywhere in the world is the observable
genetic correspondence in emotive actions and mythical conceptions of the universe.
Another link is the homogenous pattern of translations of cultural codes throughout
the rather diverse ethnic and national spaces in Africa and the diaspora. Abiola Irele
(1990:54) describes this symbiotic essence of African collective consciousness as
the “organic aspect of the African imagination”. It is this unified matrix of blackness
and black essence that supplies the thesis to which European cultural configurations
become an antithesis. Thus, the ritual codes as well as the great mythical code of life
transition from the world of the living to the world of the ancestors, the dead, and the
unborn, provide a synthetic and unifying signal for mutual knowledge of one another
amongst the blacks in the world. Gates (1984:286) has foreclosed the doubts about
this cultural, aesthetic and cosmological continuity in black communities anywhere
in the world when he posits that:

Esu Elegbara in Nigeria and Legba among the Fon of Dahomey

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whose New World figurations Esu in Brazil, Uchu-Elegua in Cuba,

Papa Legba in the pantheon of the Ioa of Voudou in Haiti, and
Papa La Bas in the Ioa of Hoodoo in the United States – speak
eloquently of the unbroken arc of metaphysical presuppositions
and patterns of figuration shared through space and time among
the black cultures in West Africa, South America, the Caribbean
and the United States.

One area of black generative poetics of criticism in mythic, ritualistic or cultural

aesthetics could be located in such “unborn arc of metaphysical presuppositions
and patterns shared through space and time among the black cultures” (Gates,
1984:286). In essence, blacks all over the world share a general system of mutually
intelligible cultural and artistic, or dramatic and theatrical signification. However,
this grand signature of blackness can not be correctly decoded by those who have
‘limited knowledge of Africa.’ In deed, the core black cultural aesthetics is, to a large
extent, unintelligible to those whose cultures are alien to African cosmic space.

The marked black code therefore serves as the deep structure of many written
African drama texts. The black oral code becomes the enabling text for the scripted
modern African drama texts. It is against the background of this textual transformation
that one should begin to question the critical stances of those who, in an attempt
to define African drama, often forget two important antecedents: one, that African
drama is definable only when it is linked to the circumstance and context of its
mythic genealogical transformations through space and time; and two, that modern
African drama is influenced by the Western written text-mode and Western drama
or theatre theory. Thereby underscoring its inextricable hybridity.

This type of transformation by way of Western influence did not only affect the arts.
Even the rhythms and forms of social life in Africa have been subjected to great
European and American influences to the extent that a sort of cultural ambiguity has
emerged. This mixture of cultures continues despite Jones’s (1978:vii) observation
that:

One of the greatest transformations of modern times, starting slowly

in the early years of this century, gaining impetus through the Harlem
Renaissance, and greatly accelerating since the independence of
Ghana, has been the pride with which blacks all over the world now
look back on their African origins.

Jones also confirms, that “America … has its complementary influence on the
writing of Africans in Africa” (viii). In Canada and Australia, the original inhabitants
have maintained their oral traditions till only recently when their long traditions of
oral narrative, especially amongst the Indian, Inuit and Australian Aboriginal people,
began writing themselves into new existence. But, according to Arthur (1990:23),

Oral cultures are paradoxically participating in those processes

that previously wrote them out of history by neglect, denigration,
or simply by euphemizing reasonableness of their civilized, rational
discourses – legal, anthropological, religious, and scientific.

One reason, perhaps, for committing African literature into writing is to write the
African indigenous art of performance, entertainment and ritual aesthetic into “new
existence”. African artists foresaw the ultimate fainting and inaction of the oral mode
owing to the acquisition of Western education and literacy which often alienates the

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African elite from his oral text and cultural heritage. However, a form of alienation
results which takes a linguistic form. This question has agitated the mind of Henry
Louis Gates Jr. (1985:12) when he argues, “Black writing is a process, which is so
very ironic from the outset; how can the black subject posit a full and efficient self in
language in which blackness is a sign of absence?”

By extension of Gate’s argument, one may ask: how, for example, can anyone
escape the ironies in post-colonial written literature that desires full, distinct
international recognition as ‘African’ literature? African writers are literally practicing
what Derrida (1985:294) describes as “attempting to speak the other’s language
without renouncing their own”. There lies part of the problem of identity, or linguistic
alienation, in African drama. Arthur (1990:32) believes that “oral traditions are at an
advantage in that memory is their mode and so memory/history is recognized as a
changing two-way negotiation between past and present”. If memory is the mode
of transmission in oral traditions, the print replaces that function in modern African
drama. Thus, the ability of this drama to mediate between the past and the present
becomes stock and frozen since there is no room for flexible accommodation of
the creative ‘present’ within the relics of the past. In the determination of aesthetic
experience, time element is a rather expansive mass of limitless mat, spreading
from the past to the present and into the future. The past runs into the present and
the present into the future. The past and future collaborate in the process of creating
the moment. Thus, drama, in an attempt to imitate life, fuses together these three
divisions of time. In an exploratory study of “Japanese idea of a Theater”, Ueda
(1967:348) reveals that Nō drama of Japan “visualizes a realm where the past, the
present and the future (emphasis mime) merge together, where only the universal,
timeless, transcendental laws prevail”. It is, in deed a form of drama where the
intangible world of higher reality is made tangible.

The Nō drama of Japan, therefore, by transforming a mythical ‘unreality’ to a real

one, bears some ingrained mythico-historical and transcendental correspondence to
Yoruba which, as Haney II (1990:34) describes it is “representational and visionary”,
attempting to “implement the traditional function of Yoruba myth by actualizing the
actual transition of a metaphysical gulf”. Soyinka, for example, in his plays, explores
the ritual form not as an historical ideal but as an examination of history, raising
the historic to cosmic proportions. In Myth, Literature and the African World (1976),
Soyinka identities a “fourth stage” which he distinguished from the three commonly
acknowledged African worlds – those of the ancestors, the unborn, and the living.
Soyinka’s fourth space, according to William Haney II, “constitutes a coexistence
of all spaces” (35). In Soyinka’s words, the fourth stage constitutes a “continuum
of transition where occurs the inter-transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality”
(26). It is this mythico-historical and transcendental essence that we would call the
great code in African dramatic display. It is a large mark of identity for what could
be called ‘African’ cultural symbology in drama. Thus, even in the written forms of
African drama, such as Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests, The Road, The Swamp
Dwellers and The Strong Breed; Clark’s Ozidi and Song of Goat; Rotimi’s Kurunmi,
Olagoke’s Death in the Forest and Nelson Fasina’s gods at the Harvest, the great
code of Africa is observable in their deft exploration of the rituals, mythologies and
metaphysics of the African world. Adedeji (1987:105) explains that “For Soyinka, the
purpose of theatre is to impart experience not to provide ‘meaning’ or ‘moral’, to set
a riddle, not to tell a story”.

The impact of colonialism in the diffusion of certain aspects of African cultural matrix
has greatly influenced the artistic expression. The widening of the gap between ritual
experience and myth is part of what Osofisan (1982:75) has characterized as man’s

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economic separation (alienation) from nature. And this had led to the “disintegration
of the animist metaphysics that underlies”, in this case, African scripted drama.
Surprisingly, this has not only influenced the modern scripted African drama, but also
the so-called traditional African or indigenous drama. For example, the separation of
such dramas as Albert Ogunde’s theatre, Baba Sala’s comic drama, Duro-Ladipo’s
mythico-historical plays, from the realm of African natural, unformalized stage, is
underlined by the influence of the Western proscenium stage technology such as
lighting, video-recording, microphone or sound amplifier system. Under such an
overpowering influence of Western stage technology, the validity of such drama’s
claim of Africanness becomes severely questionable. Thus, it is very appropriate
to review our conception of such plays, the westernized African plays and traveling
theatres in Nigeria. Clark groups the traveling theatres under “traditional drama”,
the fledgling traveling theatre, which reigned in Nigeria up till the 1980’s have now
become near extinct being now silenced by home video plays. However, since the
form of traditional drama has been largely influenced by the western mode, it has
become more appropriate to label it as modern-traditional African drama; that is the
semi-oral mode. They are semi-oral in the sense that plays by Hubert Ogunde, Baba
Sala, Jimoh Aliu, Ishola Ogunsola, and others are no longer presented exclusively
as live performance. Rather they are now either in celluloid or home video modes,
which are steps of modernity.

In other words, apart from the use of English medium of expression, there is
probably nothing more African in the plays of Ogunde such as Aiye, Jaiyesimi, Baba
Sala’s Mosebolatan, Jimoh Aliu’s Ajagunmale, Yanponyanrin and others on the one
hand, than in Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forest, The Road and The Swamp Dwellers
on the other hand. Perhaps, the only differentiating element lies in the fact that
the former are semi-oral while Soyinka’s are in print, waiting for oral enactment on
stage, though nearly all of his plays are always performed on stage before being
published in print. Owing to the use of Western dramatic structure and form as
well as African myths, rituals, magic and metaphysics as subtexts from which the
dramas have their resources, Soyinka’s drama is probably more modern and more
intellectual in outlook. Soyinka does not suggest that Africa has an impeccable
glorious past that is worthy of ‘recycling’ into modern existence. But he posits that
African mythology provides some self-purifying mechanism. Thus in the drama of
Soyinka, man can cross the seemingly impassable gulf between the historical and
the mythical, between the ancestral past and what Jacques Derrida (1984:294)
would call “the totality of this present”.

Despite the modern ideological context and environment in which Soyinka

operates his ritual theatre, for example, both the characters and the physical and
spiritual audience of A Dance of the Forest, The Road and Death and the King’s
Horseman move back and forth across what Haney II (1990:35) would describe as
the “ontological gap toward an experience of psychic wholeness”. Soyinka does
succeed in using his ingenuity to integrate ancient mythologies into the context of a
post-colonial, industrial society. Thus he opens up one’s contemplation of methods
through which novel systems of ritual aesthetic theory and experience could be
derived. By such a means, the aesthetics of the oral dramatic forms strive for
survival within the rather stifling written text mode of Western origin.

Conclusion

In this exegesis, we have attempted to explore aspects of the problem of context,

meaning, language, culture and theory in African literature, especially the dramatic
form. We aver that the understanding of this intricate problem will provide template

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for the march towards relative distillation of an African specific theory of reading
African literature. In this direction, definitional problem such as the Euro-American
hypothesis that African literature refers to works written by Africans in any particular
European language is debunked. We aver that African literature includes works
written by foreign authors, but are nevertheless focused on the historical, contextual,
cultural and contemporary postcolonial conditions of Africa. On the language
question, it is suggested that the cultural worth, the aesthetic status, and the
African nationality of this literature is relatively affected to the degrees of affective
and reductive influence of foreign linguistic medium in which it is communicated.
Thus, any theory of African literature must take into consideration the implications
of its hybrid status in terms of its ‘contamination’ by the language, literary forms
and aesthetic stamps of Western hegemonic literary discourse. And this does not
necessarily serve as advocacy for the elimination of the European language medium
in African literature. Rather, any theory and any definition of African literature must
also take into consideration its linguistic and aesthetic hybrid status. African literature
will therefore be defined as any literary work either creative or critical/theoretical
by an African, or non African author, that deals on the socio-cultural, economic,
political, historical and contemporary epistemology and problems of philosophy of
African life and situations in Africa and its Diasporas’ continuities around the world.

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