African Theatre as Indigenous Education

Abstract

African theatre is often seen in its traditional manifestation as total theatre. As total theatre, it includes indigenous elements of storytelling, music-and-dance performance, poetic recitation, and ritualistic and sacred performances in which the community is a participatory audience. As Duma Ndlovu has accurately depicted in Woza Albert! An Anthology of South African Plays, “grandmothers and grandfathers [were] telling their stories to families by the fireside. This was theater at its most natural, its most creative. This is the trend that has influenced our [African] drama and has set it apart from western theater” (1986, xix). When one witnesses a performance of Angano…Angano: Tales from Madagascar and sees how the storytellers vividly imitate by word and action mythic and cultural origins, one is reminded of the storytelling genesis of African theatre and its educational function. It was not a financial, capitalist venture; it was a community-oriented activity that taught people the importance of communal solidarity, values, and origins. In its manifestation, it educated people on what John S. Mbiti has referred to as the cardinal point of communal relationship and unity: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am” (1990, 106). Theatre was also “a way of passing on information from one generation to another” (Ndlovu, xx). The chapter will discuss how African theatre has been used throughout the ages to educate people on religion, spirituality, morality, filial and parental responsibilities, politics (both resistance and conformity), dynastic and genealogical history, life and death, and the importance of cultural preservation, among others. The chapter will also discuss how modern African theatre artists such as Hubert Ogunde, Wole Soyinka, Zulu Sofola, Femi Osofisan, J. P. Bekederemo-Clark, Efua Sutherland (from West Africa), Tewfiq al-Hakim (from North Africa), Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Githae Mugo (from East Africa), and Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona (from South Africa) have drawn on, or continued, this tradition in their dramaturgy. Whether as tragedy, comedy or satire, or simply as morality play, African theatre has maintained its prominence as a form of Indigenous education.