Yvette Hutchison's Histories 1850–1950 is a most welcome addition to the African Theatre series as it updates and significantly expands on the scant literature that currently exists on the subject of African theatre history or ‘A history of theatre in Africa’ (as the title of Martin Banham's 2004 publication would have it). This book sets out to accommodate those African theatre histories that have hitherto eluded or been sidelined by the dominant literary history. It includes nine chapters, each representing a distinct but valuable contribution to the field of African theatre historiography.
Influenced by and borrowing from Diane Taylor's theatre history in South America, Hutchison highlights the necessity for scholars to move away from an over-reliance on the material archives of literary drama to a ‘so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge’ (p. xi), which provides the best means of documenting and retrieving the transient moments and historical practices often ignored by material or literary archivists and historians. Hutchison argues that the inherent advantages of exploring the embodied archive include, among other things, ‘the presence of those in whom the memory and/or form resides, which in turn insists on returning agency in defining histories to individuals and local communities' (p. xii). Hutchison suggests that the relationship between the literary material archive and the embodied oral archive is complex. Embodied and document/material archives are not binaries or necessarily oppositional; rather, they ‘interact and affect one another in complex ways' (p. xii).
Christine Matzke's chapter, ‘Looking for “Eritrea's past property”’, ‘trace[s] various people's memories of Berhe Mesgun's play Zehalefe Nebret Ertra … performed in the Eritrean capital Asmara in 1947’ (p. 1). Matzke outlines the obvious difficulties of theatre historiography research in Eritrea, which include government control and thus the potential for manipulation. But given the scarcity of written material, embodied memory/archive remains a useful source for the historian despite its tendency to be ‘idiosyncratic, partial, fragmented and very subjective’ (p. 7). The second chapter is James Gibbs' ‘Seeking the founding father’, which revisits the history of what is now generally accepted to be the first African literary play, The Blinkards, by the Ghanaian Kobina Sekyi. Gibbs outlines Sekyi's significant involvement in the premiere of the play in Accra in 1916. He also provides hitherto hidden or unpublished details and offers his considered opinion on the little matter of whether the play was monolingual or bilingual: it is now generally believed that Sekyi wrote the play in both Fanti and English.
Owen Seda's ‘Medieval morality & liturgical drama in colonial Rhodesia’ uses the ‘documentation, influences and practice of early Christian drama in colonial Rhodesia’ to assess how church dramas were used in evangelization efforts by the major churches in the country (p. 38). Samuel Ravengai's chapter on Rhodesia examines Nyawo and Beni, both urban hybrid theatre forms of the colonial period, and explores the relationship between the ‘field of cultural production and the field of power’ (p. 53). He argues that these urban performances celebrated and copied colonial culture while also resisting and satirizing it. Sam Kasule's chapter, ‘Don't talk into my talk’, unearths archival material of musical recordings from 1930s colonial Uganda that reveal a lot about little known performance practices and forms which have helped shape contemporary theatre in Uganda. Kasule argues that a ‘contemporary “reading back” of musical performance through recordings can help reconstruct them’ (p. 88) and thus contribute to a fuller Ugandan theatre history.
‘The leaf & the soap’ by Cristina Boscolo draws on a Yorùbá proverb explaining assimilation through closeness to argue that, among black Victorian Yorùbá in Lagos, Abéòkùta and Ìbàdàn, the new cultural form of theatre – ‘the leaf’ – was transformed, hybridized and ultimately indigenized by its closeness to Yorùbá culture – ‘the soap’. Between 1860 and 1920, she argues, theatre did not just imitate Western canons but also was appropriated to ‘affirm Yorùbá ethnic identity’ (p. 91). Using Spivak's famous title-question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Marisa Keuris looks at the representation of Khoisan characters in early Dutch-Afrikaans plays in South Africa. She argues that ‘although we find Khoisan characters present in these dramas … [we] must still speculate to what degree these depictions and portrayals are “real” in the sense of being the people's own voices' (p. 110). Steve Nicholson's ‘Images of Africa in early twentieth-century British theatre’ concentrates on stage plays written out of theatre history today to show what images of Africa were presented on the early British stage. This is a very useful contribution because of the depth of information it adds to African theatre history in Britain. Noting that all the plays appear to have been written by European playwrights, Nicholson also argues that although ‘tone, attitude and approach varied … images and stereotypes derived from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness frequently seeped onto the stage’ (p. 123).
In ‘The first African play’, Jane Plastow looks at Tekle Hawariat's Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia and its influence on the development of a national theatre in Ethiopia. One is not quite sure why Plastow should refer to it as the first African play, given that its probable date of 1921 comes after Sekyi's 1916 play. However, Plastow's description is correct for Ethiopia, where Hawariat sowed ‘the seeds for the growth of the particular hybrid that grew into Ethiopian drama’ (p. 140). Excitingly, the book also contains the first English translation by Belayneh Abune of Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (The Comedy of Animals). Overall, this collection is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on African theatre historiography.
