The medicine of theatre in Sudan, Cameroon, Mauritius, Ghana and Nigeria, though delivered in tiny homeopathic doses to vast bodies politic, may be life- or spirit-saving.
The countries are odd. Old themes come in guises so new you feel like a first-time visitor to a wierdly familiar but mad planet. Playwrights condense, whether writing plays or articles, and this book offers many readable potted histories — an analytic, provocative intellectual’s guide to some aspects of current Africa.
It’s an Africa seen by travelled souls. The European theatrical mindsets of Shakespeare, inevitably, but also Jarry, Brecht, Ionesco, Kafka and Beckett have been applied. And the book is partly edited and written by those gadflies, the French, British and German theatricals, who so busily galvanise — or madden — African theatres.
There’s a history of Ubu Roi rampant for years in several new avatars in the Theatre Vollard in Réunion. The Royal Court Theatre’s interesting adventures in stimulating and presenting Ugandan playwrights, not in London but in Uganda, are presented, and the charming story is told of the British and Italian Nomad Theatre troupe turning “a whole village” outside Port Elizabeth into male and female Pantalones posturing in Commedia masks.
There’s full coverage of a new production of Aimé Césaire’s La Tempète in the Gate Theatre, London, and the full text of Toufann, a Mauritian fantasy-satire by Dev Verasawmy that again reworks The Tempest (incorporating into it the villains and heroes of virtually every other Shakespeare play), this time from a tropical islander’s perspective.
Khalid al Mubarak Mustafa has been a playwright critic of successive repressive Sudanese regimes. He is an Arabic scholar who quotes the Caliph who said of non-Muslims, “If they come on the day of judgement with achievements and we turn up with none, they’ll be more worthy of Muhammed than we.” His work is indirect, but still gets stopped in Sudan. Al Mijmara, a 1980s play on a Buddhist theme, was revealed in a whole series of local articles (by another playwright) to be an attack on Sudan’s regime. Mustafa remained silent but now acknowledges that the critic was right.
He complains that “nationalist and so-called Islamic dissidents” are no less totalitarian than government — their “medicine is not democratic” and they attack his work. For him, after 20 or more plays in Arabic, to write in English is to be released and recognised. He wants Sudan to be part of a world where clerics don’t censor publications.
Bole Butake avoids crude confrontation, but won’t submit play scripts to the Cameroon Ministry of Territorial Administration as required. A series of his lyrical but corrosive plays deals with a constant group of archetypes, a cynical but redemptive woman (somewhat after Mother Courage), a weak, corrupt king, a cunning foreigner (a figure of Christian Mitterrand, the French president’s son, who “pervasively interfered” in Cameroonian politics) and a wise but harrowed traditionalist.
Butake’s story creates a world of its own, but starts with a real 1986 disaster, when natural gas erupted from Lake Nyos and poisoned the people in the valley. The event was in real life seen by the people as a wicked conspiracy cooked up between the Cameroonian government and Israeli scientists to test a nuclear device.
This was, ironically, because Israeli scientists and medical relief workers, who were active in Cameroon, immediately appeared to help and examine victims. Butake, seriously interested by the way the people think, took this starting point and made three plays that go deeply into the national psyche and what he may see as its finally redemptive myth-making Eckhard Breitinger’s account of these and other works by Butake is one that must stimulate theatre writers anywhere. It presents a subtle, subterranean theory of theatrical politics that can reach both ordinary people and sophisticates. He does what Brecht theorised about and failed, really, to do.
There is a 30-page “Notice Board” by James Gibbs, a sort of Ghanaian Mike van Graan, who writes of theatrical life there so racily that it takes on a sinister charm, a Fitzgerald-like dreamy decadence. Book and theatre reviews at the end are generally animated and cover festivals continent-wide.
Something odd, though: up there in West Africa they think we’re doing great in theatre down here. Some want to imitate Ipi Tombi and Sarafina II and The Lion King, which South Africans are seen as dominating in New York.