Amidst much recent scholarship on festivals, Africa has received scant attention. Since the continent hosted two of the twentieth century's most robust and controversial arts festivals – the First and Second World Black and African Festivals of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Senegal (1966) and Nigeria (1977) – and regularly hosts festivals on storytelling, puppetry and theatre for development, African festivals merit focus. The latest issue of African Theatre (a journal published annually in book form) highlights the ambiguous place of festivals in national theatre, and artists’ ambivalence towards them.
Many articles are theoretically sparse but empirically strong. Patrick-Jude Oteh's history of the Jos Theatre Festival in Nigeria's Plateau State narrates best practices for community theatre festivals and contains prized research on festivals, such as details about funding sources, budgets and expenditures. Ahmed Yerima's piece on Nigeria's National Theatre, constructed for FESTAC during a national oil boom, attributes that building's decline to administrators’ lack of vision for the festival and its legacy. Such essays, accompanied by editor James Gibb's lists of performances and bibliographies of media reviews, construct archives for festivals with few material traces.
A central thread in the anthology is that festivals can impoverish national art scenes by diverting funds from more innovative initiatives. For Robert Kavanagh, high-profile events like the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) attract funding from foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but overlook Zimbabwean performers, whose productions often receive less billing at festivals than do visiting troupes. Amy Niang's report on the long-awaited Third Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN), held in Senegal in 2010, commends the festival for its display of international talent – including singers Baaba Maal and Wyclef Jean – but laments extravagant government spending by a president more concerned with his cultural legacy than with Senegal's energy crisis.
The two strongest articles are retrospectives of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFTET) and the Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival (PANAFEST) in Ghana. Sonali Pawha notes how CIFTET mirrored the Egyptian government's turn to neo-liberalism in the late 1980s by favouring foreign imports. Yet visiting troupes’ penchant for physical and multimedia performance sparked new trends in Egyptian theatre. Victor Yankah critiques how PANAFEST primarily courts diasporan tourists – a far cry from pioneering Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland's original call to foster theatre rooted in African history.
A new play by Ghanaian author Efo Mawugbe concludes the volume. Prison Graduates targets four newly released prisoners’ imagined forays into future stints as emigrating labourer, senator, drug dealer and corpse. Blocked by bureaucracy, they decide they were better off in jail. An allegory for newly independent African nations ultimately re-entrapped by international lenders like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Prison Graduates is the kind of historically informed theatre that Sutherland sought to cultivate in Ghana. Perhaps its publication here will lead to stagings at festivals across Africa, where this intriguing postcolonial play may foster the outcomes long promised by these festivals.
