The origin of African Drama and Theatre

African drama and theatre started to emerge in Africa continent when British came to make their
affairs of life imposed on Africans. They came with ideas; religion, education, business transaction,
making Africa a raw material place where their solid land was built up by it. Through this, African
lifestyle changed and wore another garment because of the predicament at the advent of British.
Though Africans had their normal dramatization (in form of folklore), their experiences for the
coming of British always feature in the African drama and theatre that was inherited from
Europeans.

The origin of African drama and theatre based on traditional, history, and contemporary dramatic
forms in Africa which range from sacred or ritual performances to dramatized storytelling, literary
drama, or modern fusion of scripted theatre with traditional performance techniques.

The diversity in performances is as a result of massive spread of cultures and traditions in each
country. A lot of these cultures have rich oral and ritual traditions, aspect of which survived into
contemporary society. Thus, National boundaries do not usually reflect traditional territories.
Therefore, traditional performances have been used as names of self- expression and empowerment
by people facing hostile political or social circumstances.

Another important element of African drama and theatre is its element that put in place in many
play in order to showcase values of African culture and tradition. Modern African literature have
been influenced to a remarkable degree by the continent’s long tradition of oral artistry. Before the
spread of literacy in the 20th century, texts were preserved in memory and performed or recited.
These traditional texts served many of the same purposes that written texts serve in literate
societies—entertainment, instruction, and commemoration, for example.

However, no distinctions were made between works composed for enjoyment and works that had a
more utilitarian function. Africa’s oral literature takes the form of prose, verse, and proverb, and
texts vary in length from the epic, which might be performed over the course of several days, to
single-sentence formulations such as the proverb. Wole Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman is
written in Yoruba oral tradition. The collective body of oral texts is variously described as folklore,
verbal art, and oral literature.

Nigerian playwrights of the 1970s produced plays that were more specifically concerned with the
social and moral effects of dictatorship than those by their predecessors. Bode Sowande explores
the themes of corruption and exploitation in Afamako—The Workhorse (1978) and Flamingoes
(1982). Babafemi Osofisan deploys Brechtian alienation effects as well as storytelling and role-
playing to introduce revolutionary potential into plots based on traditions or legends: Esu and the
Vagabond Minstrels (1991).
The history of drama during colonial period cannot mark out in the origin of African drama and
theatre in relations to its influences in the African drama. Colonization led to the suppression and
outlawing of many indigenous art forms, such as drumming and dancing even believes in the
ancestral worship while Western missionaries sought to instil Christian values through biblical
dramas pageant, Africans often adapted European dramatic form to their own satirical or political
purposes.

During the early, 1970s a number of military and discriminatory regimes held power, among them
the dictatorship of Idi Amin in Uganda and the apartheid government in South Africa. In opposition
to then, apartheid policy in South Africa is another influence in drama and theatre. Many playwrights
in South Africa played crucial roles to ensure that the situation of segregation appear on the plays
that comes up at that time. Playwright like Athol Fugard features the policy of apartheid
discrimination in his play titled SizweBanzi is dead to satirise the level of segregation in the country.

This type of writing usually based on the protest against the racial policy by between white, coloured
and black. These regimes, playwrights turned to radical and propagandist forms of theatre.
Simultaneously there was a reaction against bourgeois literary drama; theatre companies
increasingly sought to speak to the urban and rural poor and to include them in their activities by
moving out of national theatre buildings and into the local areas. This is done in order to provide
avenue for aids, gender and development.

One of the most powerful and effective pieces of political theatre to be produced during this period
was I Will Marry When I Want (1977), a play commissioned by the villagers of Kamiriithu in Kenya
from two playwrights, NgugiwaThiong'o and NgugiwaMirii. The play focuses on indigenous
exploitation and was performed in Kikuyu by and for the villagers in a theatre they built. In defiance
of apartheid, black theatre artists collaborated with the white intellectuals in South Africa to develop
new forms of protest drama.

The period after World War II ended in 1945 led to the struggle for and achievement of
independence in many African countries. The new nation-states were often established along
colonial boundaries and power was handed over to a bourgeois class who had been educated in
Europe. The epoch-making era of nationalism produced a number of African playwrights who
merged African theatrical traditions with European forms. These plays are still widely performed and
read in many parts of the continent.

In some countries independence spawned efforts towards radical social reform into which
playwrights were (and still are) sometimes co-opted. In others, the new regimes soon inspired
playwrights to use theatre as a vehicle for political opposition and in some cases mobilization.
Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland was associated with the socially reformist government of
Kwame Nkrumah. She founded the Ghana Drama Studio and modernized the traditional form of
Anansesem (spider stories) as a form of Everyman in Foriwa (1962) and the Marriage of Anansewa.

The early drama and theatre in Africa (especially in Ghana) portrays conflicts between parents and
children in order to reflect the prevalent incident so writers come up with different view toward the
spasmodic incidence in the society. This reaction of many writers serves as a call to different set of
drama and theatre in Africa. Play like The Dilemma a Ghost by Ama Ata Adoo (1964), focuses on the
intercultural marriage, and as well as Joe De Graft’s Son and Daughter (1963) disclose the issue of
conflict between parents and children which was a common thing among people in that particular
time.