Senior. Lecturer in Directing and Performance Studies, University of the Witwatersrand.
The Western dramatic canon has been a source of irritation to some Afrocentrists, who see it as providing unfair criteria for judging new work in Africa. Some call for its total abandonment and pursue performance modes that are relevant to Africa. I argue for its appropriation and repurposing in order to address Africa’s cultural needs.
There are several models in which this process can be carried out.
The Black Orpheus model
The first model is generally called transposition. Some American scholars call it Black Orpheus. African playwrights create African equivalents of Western dramatic classics with a direct one-to-one correspondence.
Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame, based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, follows the same schema. In it Oedipus becomes Odewale, the setting changes from Thebes to Kutujeand all other names are changed to Yoruba equivalents. The Greek culture becomes a metaphor. A new text is formed which addresses African issues but with Greek structural underpinnings.
Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha which was first performed in 1971 at the University of Natal’s open-air theatre, did exactly the same thing. It was based on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but changed the setting to 19th-century Zululand during the reign of Shaka and Dingane. Banquo became Bhangane, Lady Macbeth became Kamandonsela, Duncan became Dangane and the Thane of Cawdor became Khondo. It was performed entirely in Zulu.
Through this process, Msomi was able to re-programme the play’s reception as an African play dealing with African issues. Apartheid South Africa was preoccupied with the Afrikanerisation of theatre and the sidelining African culture and performances. Due to the activities of the Black Consciousness Movement, most radical theatre activities were banned during the time.
The performance of uMabatha was allowed under the pretext that Africans were complicit in their cultural colonisation. Yet the transposition of Macbeth decolonises Shakespeare through the insertion of Zulu dances, songs, drums, costume and praise poetry. The Zulu culture under threat from apartheid is revived and celebrated under the guise of Shakespeare. It was an incitement outside of the controls of censorship.
The Black Athena model
The second model of repurposing Western dramatic classics, especially of Greek origin, is “reclamation” – sometimes called “Black Athena” by diasporic Africans in the US. The creative impulse emanates from the historical fact that much of the material contained in Greek plays is of African origin. According to the Greek father of history, Herodotus, the Greeks received their myths, gods and culture from ancient Egyptians who were phenotypically a combination of yellow and black.
Dionysus was a version of the African Osiris god. The Egyptians created performative theatre which was stolen/copied/appropriated by the Greeks as dithyrambic singing and dancing. But they later developed this into the dramatic canon associated exclusively with the West. According to this paradigm, to select material stolen from Africa and reinserting it back into Africa is not cultural colonisation, but a corrective returning of the culture to its rightful owners.
While the occult dimension of Western theatre has dissipated since the rise of the western bourgeoisie rule, it is still a part of the African theatre. My play Vumani Oedipus celebrates the power of the metaphysical world over humans.
Read More: African theatre: why it’s important to transpose Western dramatic classics
