Ghanaian performance culture has enjoyed considerable scholarly attention since the turn of the millennium; from studies on concert party theatre to collected theatre essays and tributes to Efua Sutherland, and from the Ghana Dance Ensemble to a plethora of musical styles, including jazz and the once popular highlife. These works attest not only to the wealth of Ghanaian performance practice, but also to the pliancy, mobility and multiple interconnections of performative genres typical of much of West African culture.
Two new studies now join the ranks of notable publications in the field, and both use the Akan trickster figure of Ananse as the guiding principle for their investigation. Both spider and human being, Kweku Ananse is the owner and protagonist of all Anansesem (folktales about or in the spirit of Ananse), who has long branched out to other cultural terrains: literary drama, hip hop and stand-up comedy, religious and political discourses, television and social media. Clever, crafty and comical, Ananse signifies doubleness and ambiguity, cunning and contradiction, shape-shifting and subversion. As cultural icon and social metaphor Ananse points to the constant refashioning and double-voicing of Ghanaian artists, but also of pastors and politicians, in the face of sociopolitical change. It is in this complex web of political economy, social practice and artistic performance that both authors situate their work: Shipley from British colonialism to the 2007 re-enactment of Kwame Nkrumah's declaration of independence; Donkor with a focus on the years of J. J. Rawlings, a former flight lieutenant turned post-military president who shaped the country from 1979 to 2001.
Trickster Theatre is Shipley's second book, after his accomplished Living the Hiplife (2013) which focused on entrepreneurship and celebrity in this popular form of contemporary music. A film-maker and anthropologist by training, he now uses his extensive experience on the ground to narrate the emergence of a modern post-independence theatre in Ghana in the context of pan-African liberation politics. With Spiders of the Market, actor, director and theatre scholar David A. Donkor presents his first monograph, reading selected performances against a rigorous analysis of Rawlings's political affairs. Already from the outset there is a disciplinary shape-shifting going on: Shipley, the anthropologist, is listed under Theatre/Drama on the IUP website while theatre scholar Donkor is published in their Ethnological Multimedia series (with online access to supplementary audiovisual material on registration). Both draw on each other's previous works, with the blurb on Donkor indicating that Shipley was one of its initial reviewers. Disciplinary boundaries are indeed blurred in these studies. Both authors resort to similar immersive methodologies as co-performers and participant observers, combined with qualitative interviews and archival research; and both address conflicts over increasing commodification of the arts in the shift from Nkrumah's vision of pan-Africanist communitarianism to Rawlings's neoliberal policies under the influence of the IMF. What makes a comparative reading so fascinating is the different conceptual viewpoints from which they write: Shipley from a more mediating position, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each political period; Donkor from an unapologetically anti-Rawlings stance which gives his analysis a harsher edge.
In eight chapters, Shipley offers a fairly chronological narrative that provides an excellent overview of significant theatre idioms and cultural moments from the then Gold Coast to the present. For Shipley the line between the ‘real’ and the ‘staged’ is often ambiguous in public performances across genres, with the trickster serving as paradigm for a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ (p. 1) that helps us read society as a whole. Local performance discourses function as critical theory to comprehend market forces, policy making and social relations; theatre becomes a means to reappraise state and society. The book is divided into two parts of four chapters each, a historical section and a part on ‘Stagings in Millennial Ghana’. The narrative is a veritable, very readable, tour de force through Ghanaian performance practice. From British views on ‘African traditional culture’ and European modernity taught at key institutions of colonial education (Chapter 1) we move to the National Theatre Movement as a state-based decolonization project in the Nkrumah years, embodied by two widely different theories of African theatre: Efua Sutherland's reconfiguration of rural storytelling in her ‘Ananse theatre’, Anansegro; and Joe de Graft's formal English-language drama geared toward the pragmatics of urban life (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 explores Rawlings's Cultural Revolution in the 1980s, a project which revived Nkrumahist notions of cultural nationalism, but increasingly struggled with conflicts between leftist state control and external pressure to liberalize. This also affected theatre practice and institutions, resulting in clashes over artistic and financial control. The example of playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah is a case in point, one of the numerous artist-politicians in the Rawlings years who looks back on his growing disillusionment (Chapter 4). Chapters 5–8 then examine different types of contemporary performance: the 1998 restaging of one of Abdallah's Abibigro (‘African theatre’) plays; the structural transformation of concert party popular theatre through corporate sponsorship and television mediatization; the eerie similarity of performance by charismatic pastors and popular comedians (producing both thrill and anxiety about ‘fakes’); and the faithful re-enactment of Nkrumah's 1957 independence speech at its fiftieth anniversary, which turned into an unplanned parody of historical promise. In all his readings, Shipley allows for an Ananse-like ‘double voicing’ to emerge – the articulation of contradictory views, both on- and offstage – which highlights the self-reflexivity and often ambiguous complexity of much of Ghanaian theatre.
Donkor looks at select examples of three Ghanaian performance genres deeply rooted in Anansesem: politically ambivalent gyimi (stand-up comedy) by the hugely popular (recently deceased) Bishop-Bob Akala (Chapter 3); the trickster manoeuvres of a small concert party troupe in defiance of sponsor-imposed artistic constraints (Chapter 4); and kodzi (traditional storytelling, Chapter 5), here as a ‘staged’ tourist performance of Anansesem in the village previously known for its collaboration with Sutherland. Donkor carefully prepares the ground for his inquiry. Chapter 1 provides a political history of Ghana geared towards Rawlings's rise, with Chapter 2 introducing the trickster performance tradition and its various interpretations. Two aspects are important here: Ananse's counterhegemonic potential and his ‘politically salient doubleness’ (p. 73), which can be ‘both subversive and supportive of the social order’ (p. 72, emphasis in the original). Rawlings himself is read in trickster terms; a shape-shifter constantly reinventing himself to stay in power, a hustler co-opting trickster-related performances for political legitimization. Donkor's anti-Rawlings stance takes artists and institutions more severely to task, unlike Shipley, who also writes about those who readily moved into politics for the advancement of culture. Yet Donkor too concludes that Ananse's spirit allows performers to (re-)outwit the trickster in government.
Donkor's study is the more academically formal of the two, possibly due to being a first book, rather than a confidently written second. I have small issues with both: Shipley's one-dimensional rendering of ‘Western’ performance theories as producing ‘clarity and singularity’ (p. 117) rather than the inbuilt ambiguity of Ghanaian performance, and his occasionally odd citation style (providing the editor of an essay collection, rather than the chapter's author); Donkor's somewhat moralistic tone at times, and his analysis of a small girl disturbing the kodzi performance as ‘the trickster's return’, which, to me, seems a slight over-reading. On watching the shaky video footage of the show, it appeared to me that the ‘real’ trickster was the village itself: by participating in a staged, not to say ‘fake’, Anansesem performance for earnest US African heritage tourists, they were not objects of neoliberal co-optations, but actively hustling for their share of the cake.
In the overall assessment, however, these are minor concerns. If Shipley reads society through the lens of performance and storytelling, Donkor reads performance through the lens of political economy; now and then they analyse related shows. I strongly recommend reading them in combination.
