THIS reflection on the mask traditions of the Niger Vail is a summary of a five-year itinerary, during which £ travelled by boat, bush taxi, air plane, donkey and hat extended Sahel hike in the Dogon country, exploring t these traditions have influenced theatre in the respec countries along river Niger's vast basins. Editor troubadour combing the Niger Valleys, no doubt, is a rarity these days, especially since the influence of our griots of ancient times has been considerably diminished both by colonialism and the impact of the modern media. Olorunyomi Struck by my solitary enterprise, I sat on a knoll by the river's bank at Segou -old Segou of the famed trans Sahara trade route. This was midway between the desert (which had been left behind) and the tropical rain forest region of the Futa Jalon highlands source of the Niger, which I hoped to reach. Suddenly, I began to doubt my sanity. Hopefully, the g iant Jalon phallus would still be discharging its wild excitement of foams into the river's vast, craggy basin. The tho ight of exuberant foams shrinking into froths in sandy Timbuktu made me somewhat pensive. I needed all possible excitement on this concluding beat of a five-year itinerary, during which I had played part minstrel, part chronicl er of the Niger's immense cultural reservoir. By no means a novel motif, culture researchers have for long trod sources of spring, riverbeds, and basins-even of extinct rivers, trying to unravel cyphers of places, events and times beyond memory's recall Euphrates. Sumatra. Nile. Tigris. All produced valleys that dialogued with the past, that gave a hint about the present; with a fossil here, a hieroglyph therS, and multiple evidences of domesticated wilds, of plants and animals, we returned to the library. But what did the ancients think, their spirituality, their aesthetics? How did their primeval cultural artefacts and codes influence later thoughts? How were they carried over into the diverse performance idioms of the village square, proscenium stage and the celluloid traditions of countries of the Niger Valleys? The primary valleys of river Niger are Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria, through which the river runs, but cultural diffusion and geographical contiguity implicate Burkina Faso and Cote d'lvoire in an immediate sense, besides other West African countries whose tributaries derive from or end in the Niger. With an enormous arc stretch of over 5,000 km, straddling and linking the old Western and Central Sudan, the Niger thus becomes both a literal and figurative reference for West Africa, through which the arts of the subregion become the most travelled commodity. In a way, the Niger is - West Africa. The New Theatre? The conservatism in me somewhat strives to be reassured by the sentiment of the old school that tends to suggest that stage theatre is the real theatre of immediacy and real life concerns; but confronted with the dynamics of the genre today, a genre that has been internally combusted by the reality of the multi-media -accentuated in part by the electronic audio-visual technological revolution, such sentiment can only remain a romantic pastime. Of course, the resolution can not be in the appropriation of the term 'theatre' as an exclusive of the electronic medium, a medium which has greatly reduced theatre's communal sharing and atomised the audience. It may be more profitable in this context however to simply acknowledge the evolution of this form by investing it with its constitutive ingredients of mask, music, mime, pantomime, custume, make-up, lights, scenery and language, which Jay and large simply serve the agency of impersonation, that moment once the actor steps out of self. African Quarterly on the Arts Vol.1/NO 4 A Dogon Kanaga dance mask Angled this way, today's theatre becomes the sum total of what Chris Nwamuo once described as 'all the dramatic and spectacle elements in any drama or theatrical performance with the inclusion of the medium -the physical acting area, the cinema, the television, the video and the multi-media productions through which life's experiences are shared.' The reality of theatrical practice in the subregion is that it is diverse and harbours many phases and forms. To suggest therefore that the new dimensions are a force-field, elements violently dismantling traditional African theatre, is to misread these developments. The pertinent question is: how are culture workers and policy makers appropriating the changes in the iight of the old idioms? Properly articulated, the new era is indeed capable of integrating the cultural sensibilities of the peoples of the Niger Photo M RENAUDtAU Valleys. So far, culture workers have continually transformed indigenous forms into the new medium. Oral forms and the mask code have found their ways into both modern literary drama and the celluloid, for instance. Ola Balogun, Nigeria, and Dani Koyate, Burkina Faso, have demonstrated the transpositional character of their art through the incorporation of many folk elements in their films. Balogun revisits the theme of life's cyclicity and Koyate reintroduces the antelope and buffallo masks in Magic of Nigeria and Keita, de bouche a Oreille respectively. Talk of McLuhann's 'medium is the message'. DUSK Who is she though, this meandering spring - the Niger? Now listen son, a long time ago, when plants and animals could speak, she was the wife of the thunder one who was himself the king of an old empire... Umh, his name was Sangothe one who conjured fire through the mouth and nostril, and her name was Oya. ... but after a spell of a lifetime together, Oya had to return home. Oya's departure brought great sorrow to Sango who later committed suicide. When the sad news got to her, Oya fell down and sobbed. Her tears gathered into a puddle, into a lake-which swelled and swelled until it burst at its seams - Oya had transformed herself into a fiver.... whom some would later call - the Niger. Mask Beyond Ibn Batuta, beyond Ibn Khaldun, Leo Frobenius and the Prester Johns, there was the urgency to probe the past in a more embracing manner. We return to the traditional agencies for transmitting cultural heritage such as festivals, dance-guilds and voices of elders. Despite the values of these agencies in assisting the reconstruction of the past, they remain oral. Unlike those, however, the mask and sculptures even if in part sustained by orality have scribal representations in their creation. It is no wonder, therefore, that the root of West African theatre is to be found in its innumerable masks. The mask is a code that is capable of embodying both sacred and profane contents. The mask does not offer itself to simple literal interpretation. In the mask is concealed a plethora of meanings waiting to be decoded. As a storehouse, it is a repository of ancient and current knowledge such as myth, legend and history. Beyond this, it also harbours society's cultural sensibilities, its aesthetics, which invariably straddles all the genres. a single instance that is representative of other instances, other spaces and climes, other times. Though its language may be cryptic, it is obviously multivocal. This derives in part from its primary intended meaning, and also from other meanings invested in it in the process of interpreting its idiom. counted for by problems of distance and dislocation - such as we find with the black slaves in the new world, in their attempt to recapture the meaning of masks from which they were uprooted, or have simply arisen from the limitation of human memory. In other words, the undecoded mask is fossilised message, Such diverse and dispersed meanings have "been ac- What the, mask seeks to capture invariably corresponds with the total universe of man as outlined by John Mbiti about God as the ultimate explanation of the genesis and - Spirit being made up of superhuman beings and the spirit • Man, including human beings who are alive and those the African past. sustenance of both man and all things. of men who died a long time ago. about to be born - Animals and plants or the remainder of biological life - Phenomena and objects without biological life. 7 There are, broadly speaking, two types of masks. One represents a living person and therefore serves profane uses, mostly entertainment and amusement. The other type is employed for the purposes of ritual There are however moments of dilution of forms. By virtue of designation (e.g. invoking the spirit of the dead to enter into the masquerade during the dance), the mask and the dancer are sacrosanct. The process of deriving meaning from the mask in dramaturgic sense is such t.iat once the mask has been foregrounded as the primary genre, a dramatic genre can consequently be constructed from its code. 'The dramatic genre becomes transformed historically as it develops in new situations and environments. In this sense, the mask serves as the enabling conceptual metaphor of African and black drama itself.' 3 The mask code contrasts sharply with the mimetic code as it will become obvious in the suceeding pages in the performance of the Mambissa, (Jos Nigeria) Ki Yi M'bock, (Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire) and Kalakuta (Lagos) experiences. This includes a myriad of other similar efforts across Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso. What we now have though is no longer the old mask, but a reconstruction in the context of popular arts. Twilight The theatre traditions of the region defy a cut and dry classification due to the fact that there are too many in-between phases and the evolution of the different forms is continually being renewed. This partly explains the rich repertoire from which creative workers in the region (perhaps more than the other regions in the continent) are able to tap. For ease of comprehension however, we may have to contend with this broad schema; dramatic ritual, the traditional theatre (popular and modern traditional), the literary tradition and secondary orality (Television; Film; Video). The Igbo Egwugwu, Yoruba Egungun, Nupe Igunuko, Dogon Kanagaand Bambara Chiwara, even as dramatic rituals, share something in common: Nommo energy. Nommo, a concept of the Dogon language, denotes utterance-power, the 'magic' force of the spoken word, the sacred instance of word's African Quarterly on the Arts Vol.1/ NO 4 efficacy, word as latent energy. In the creation myth of the Dogon, Amma, the only God, created the earth as a woman, and then married her. His seed, Nommo is water and fire and blood and word. Nommo is the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all 'sleeping' forces and gives physical and spiritual life.4 Beyond being invested with utterance-power Nommo, like the Yoruba Ase, is the invocatory gift of its mask medium. Its ultimate theatrical direction is to reveal and invoke the reality of the particular mode that it has ritualised. It is a theatre style, as Jahnheiz Jahn has observed, that depends on power and power invpcation. It is word power; it is dance power; it is music power This was further butressed by the Hogon of Dogon (comprising the Mahan communities of Djiguibombo, Teli and Ende|, HRH Emkoungan Guindo and reputed carver Yusuf Guindo who explained in our chat the significance to the Dogon of the large iminana mask, which is carved and performed during the Sigui initiation ceremony that comes up only once in 60 years These elders revealed that during the Sigui, the Dogon performs dances using the iminana to help recount the story of the origin of the Dogon. Only women born during this initiation rites in Dogon land, can wear the mask. The mask in this sense is invariably, also, a symbol of power relations. The Sigu/-license granted Dogon women born in this era to wear the mask is indeed an exception in the region. Traditionally, gender disequalisation has been effected with the mask Even where the woman, as among the Dogon , had been the originator and agency of mask's medium, she was promptly emasculated from being its bearer once the mask became a source and symbol of communal authority. In the north west of Cote d'lvoire we have the Krobia, which is still sacred, unlike the Gbon of the north east, which has been influenced by Islam and is thus limited to entertainment. The Ndali, among the Mande, falls into this category, as well as Koteba, which is indigenous to the Malinke worlds of Guinea and Mali. There is also the Nigerian Kwagh-hirpuppetry (and theatre) of the Tiv, which shares a lot with the Bornu puppet show. TheFulani Gerewoland Tuareg Illoudjanoi Niger Republic are more of dramatised initiation performances. No doubt, the Niger serves more than a grazing ground for the appetite of the Fulani. I saw in the river a courier of ethnic cultural identity on arrival at the Malian town of Sivera. Almost feeling a sense ofdeja-vu, I watched single Fulani men participate in a dramatised beauty contest in order to win the attention of eligible women. The main event is the Yaake, a late afternoon performance in which the men dance, displaying their beauty, charisma and charm. Suddenly, I realised I was watching a replay of similar motions from far away Niamey (Niger), Gusau and Kotonkarfe (Nigeria). African Quarterly an the Arts •| \;,U/NO-I The Wodabe, an extension of this performance, could slide into fierce rivalry, when youngsters take part in Soro, an event where a suitor stands smiling while he is being hit with sticks. As we move into the modern traditional era, the influence of both Hubert Ogunde and Duro Ladipo of Nigeria becomes compelling. For one, their theatres embodied, more than any other group in the subregion, the soul of the traditional and experiments of Western dramaturgic forms. They were, in a way, direct descendants of the Yoruba alarinjo theatre and were evidently the first crop of trado-modern theatre professionals. In the duo, there was the attempt to make the play the Nguessan Ayateau, Ivorian comedian says: 7 have a tall order of jokes' All photos by Sola Olorunyomi ritualised context of reality. Said Sussanne Wenger, the Osogbobased Austrian artist and Yoruba traditionalist in a conversation: 'Duro was a genius. He was the first that really made the myth of Sango and other Orisa alive on the stage... With Duro Ladipo and the older Ogunde, it was possible to get the religious experience on the stage.' So intense were some of these outings that our informant revealed that she and her family had to escape from the theatre during the performance of Oba Koso because, 'It was like a violation of taboo, a violation of privacy for the Olorisa.' Script Basically, these traditions have influenced modern dramatic forms. According to SidibeValy,5 that icon of Ivorian and West African theatre, the first level is through the transposition of cultural artefacts, both verbal and visual. Modern Ivorian drama uses proverbs, for instance, and traditional artefacts such as cowrie shells to adorn the stage for specific effect. Besides this, characters wear masks and there is sufficient synthetic assimilation of the old forms. Apart from costumes, myths and legends, the new theatre also takes on board a certain sense of irony which the traditional form utilises. Why did these forms not evolve into a travelling theatre troupe, apart from the experiences of Nigeria's Yoruba travelling troupes and Ghana's concert parties? While research is still apace on this, it is significant to note that one factor, at least, that assisted the popularity of the alarinjo travelling theatre was the fact that early enough, Yoruba masq-dramaturgy broke out of the cocoon of lineage practice and became a property of the social guild. This way, it became multiplied by dispersal. If modern drama was influenced at all by the travelling troupes in francophone West Africa, according to Valy, it must be from these sources. He cited Amon Dabie and Bernand Dadie as representing such groups because of their proximity to Ghana in the coastal areas. Otherwise, there is little evidence of indigenous travelling theatre in other parts. It is important to make a distinction here, from the griot tradition where the Jali could move from place to place but was neither conceptualised nor developed along the lines of a travelling troupe. An experience close to this form is that of students who during the long vacation perform from one place to the other. Even for the griots, their sphere of activities is receding. They may still play a role during funerals or baptism, but the practice has somewhat receded to Malinke area and other urban areas where you have the Malinke community. The griots themselves are complaining of their slow disappearance. They try to explain this effacement as a manifestation of social alienation and regression. In a way, it is the destruction of an identity. If we focus attention slightly on the role of the Chief in black West African theatre of French expression, it is due largely to what Colin Grandson's study since the William-Ponty Teachers' College,Senegal, in 1933 revealed: 'the historical Chief and his present equivalent, the political leader, appear as the main character in more than fifty percent of the Black African plays of French expression since independence.' 6 Although these plays did not initially challenge in any profound sense the colonial order, they evoked a pre-colonial past based on legends, as in the play to Ruse de Diegue. The theatrical experiment of William-Ponty was to have a profound influence on French West African theatre, being the 'nursery' of the region's elite. The basic imperative of this theatre is drawn from a French desire to perpetuate an Aristotelian tradition of tragedy but beyond this, it required that the characters be of noble birth or illustrious men and that the themes be drawn from history or myth. With a region where historical traditions have been kept alive by the griots, equivalent local references were easily found in the likes of Soundjata, Samoory Toure and Abraha Pokou - the Baoule female saviour figure, who risked her life and sacrificed her daughter to save her community like Moremi of Ife who has resurfaced in Femi Osofisan's theatre as Titubi in Morountodun. Titubi's similarity with Nokan's Pokou is further demonstrated in that she strives to be not only a nation-builder, but also a figure of democratic principle. With independence in tow, the playwrights tried to reconstruct historical figures in a larger project that negated earlier attempts by colonialism to render superfluous the spirit of African history and civilisation. Dadie revisits in his plays the essential themes of Senghor's negritude, showing the contradictions inherent in European rationalism by its own materialism. Other writers turned inwards, in the sense of questioning the new order and emphasising the need for accountability in the new nation. Bernand Zaorou Zadi, who is the current Ivorian Minister of Culture, belongs to this tradition. By stressing the need to uphold (not merely glorify) aspects of the past that symbolised courage, honour and self-sacrifice, his Didiga Theatre, like other recent theatres, links up with the traditional theatre which had as its main function 'to offer the living the lesson of the noble deeds of the ancestors' as a collective means of positively mediating the future. Zadi uses his theatre to query basic assumptions of society; for example, he made a woman to wear a mask on stage and there was some uproar against it. Zadi justified this to me one drizzling August morning at his make-shift ampitheatre in the Lyce Technique area of Abidjan, saying: 'We have moved to the phase of modern theatre, so I can ask a woman to wear a mask. What I have on stage is no longer tradition, but a revision of it.' 7 The writer for him should be free because the play is not a faithful representation but a recreation. Traditional forms can be incorporated but the writer Is not obliged to respect the rules of tradition. Mali's modern stage theatre is relatively underdeveloped compared to its neighbours. This is however surprising in relation to its rather high showing in celluloid production. Partly due to the paucity of theatre troupes in the country, a prominent playwright like Moussa Konate had written 'mental' plays in the tradition of African Quarterly on the Aits Vol.11 SO 4 Hakim El-Tewfik's Fate of a Cockroach, even if his primary impulse and social circumstance differ slightly from the latter. Between Le Dernier Pas, L'Ordu diable, Le Cercle au Feminin and Fils du chaos we find a theatre ouvre of denounciation, almost anarchic, which Konate prefers to the engagee tradition Konate espouses his 'non-interventionist' stance as informed by a belief that 'Literature can not change society.' With the demise of this influential playwright, it is still unclear in what direction the Malian theatre will go. Wole Soyinka represents another important moment in the evolution of the region's literary drama. His 'mythopoeic' attitude to history, his 'constant penchant for transforming experience into metaphysical trans-historical, mythic dimensions'8 stands him out. This attitude partly explains the suggestion in the preface of Death and the King's Horseman: 'The colonial factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely. The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical, contained in the human vehicle which is Elesin and the universe of the Yoruba mind • the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passage which links all: transition. Death and the King's Horseman can be fully realised only through an evocation of music from the abyss of transition.' But beyond the dramaturgy, Soyinka's attempt at professing an African theory of tragiGart, remains the most promising up till date. He says in The Fourth Stage:' 'Tragedy, in Yoruba traditional drama, is the anguish of this severance, the fragmentation of essence from self. Its music is the stricken cry of man's blind soul as he flounders in the void and crashes through a deep abyss of aspirituality and cosmic rejection. Tragic music is an echo form that void, the celebrant speaks, sings and dances in authentic archetypal images from within the abyss. All understand and respond for it is the language of the world.' Despite such acknowledgement of the essence of African aesthetic, a writer like Soyinka still remains relatively obscure even to the Nigerian theatre audience. What explains this? Generally speaking, the literary tradition is more tempered than the popular tradition, the latter being more impulsive, conventional and affective. It is no wonder therefore that quite often, there has always been the attempt to negotiate the stricture of this divide. Biodun Jeyifo may be correct to suggest that a schism between the literary and the popular traditions in drama need not be mandatory, but the same historical, cultural and ideological underpinnings of art which he alludes to, are at the very core of the inevitability of such a schism. The division does not simply end with the literary and the popular, because even the literary is capable of either a popular African Quarterly on the A rts Vol. II NO 4 or esoteric approach. No doubt, Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, Trials of Brother Jero, and Rotimi's Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again are cast in the popular mode in spite of being in the literary idiom. Once we acknowledge the division of society into classes, then it should be possible to see how even a supposedly popular cultural event like a literary drama can be turned esoteric by merely making it inaccessible to some publics. The walls of the university, where these theatres thrive, still intimidate the average Nigerian, in the same way that the French cultural centres, which harbour most of West African francophone modern theatre habits, are somewhat put-offish elite outposts. Above all however, generating a popular tradition will National Institute of Arts, Bamako, Mali depend on the ability to develop an interpretive community. It is ultimately this community that can decode and relate to the new cultural expression. If our literary drama has not sufficiently become popular, it is due largely to the fact that it has not sufficiently developed an interpretive community or put differently, integrated itself into the codes of that community. And this would be due not only to textual but also extra-textual considerations. A relatively new theatre sub-genre that has gradually worked into public reckoning in the last two decades is the experimental theatre, a popular theatrical idiom that is geared towards stimulating community development. This practice has been variously described: Theatre For Development (TFD) Theatre for Integrated Development (TIDE), Theatre for Integrated Rural Development (THIRD), Community Theatre (CT) and Community Theatre for Integrated Rural Development (CTHIRD). This tradition of theatre practice seeks to provide an alternative medium and approach through which the marginalised rural and urban poor can address their own problems. To this effect, it utilises a dramaturgical procedure that is collective and emphasizes participation. In addition, the experiment operates from within the cultural matrix of the people using forms like song, music, dance and also puppetry, mime and story-telling. Chuck Mike of the Performing Studio Workshop (PSW), Nigeria, in order to show fidelity to this matrix has somewhat strained his practice by working from stage to script, not from script to the stage. Oga S. Abah, an influential popular theatre practitioner at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria identified three levels with which the oral medium is incorporated. 'One, it defines or names the problems which need to be addressed ...or What Paulo Freire calls codification. Two, it is through the oral medium that analyses of the issues are carried out. And thirdly, the oral may work in combination with gestures to concretise the issues and thereby provide a visual dimension.' Along with Ross Kidd of the International Council for Adult Education, Toronto Canada, Tar Ahura, Michael Etherton and David Cook, this theatre form was introduced in Igyura, Benue state, Nigeria among many other site projects that have been accomplished over the years. Then there is also modern Cameroun's children's theatre which can be traced back to the cultural practice of the people with the many children games, dances, initiations and folknarrative performances. While such theatre has somewhat receded to the provinces, where some elder on some moon-lit night would narrate the age-old stories of the clan, through which society's ethics are imparted, what we now have for the urban child are radio, comic strips, and the television's world of Sesame Street. Some amateur efforts in schools and colleges, at times in the Sunday Schools, have also contributed to this development and there has been some excellent results. The example of Guillaume Oyono Mbia with Three Suitors, One Husband ( 1 956) written as a student at the College Envangelique de Limbamba has often been cited as a case in point. It has been suggested that the most prominent troupe working exclusively for children is Etoundi Zeyanga's Bobo et Mange Tout. Based in Younde and founded in 1 984, the group of two stand-up comedians perform a number of slap-stick comedies to children. Its plot is always weaved around the two stock characters: Bobo, who is small, witty, intelligent and Manage Tout: fat, stupid and-ugly. Another group working in this area isBounya Epee's Trotty Show, founded in 1988. This theatre has also moved into the television studios. The only independent children's theatre troupe in the country so far is Yaounde Children's Theatre Collective founded in 1989. But across the subregion theatre has been the victim of the development of cinema and other media. What cinema has done, generally, is to take the best of the theatre and poaching along with it, the theatre audience. The likes of Sidjiri Bakaba, Isaac Bankole, Therese Taba and Bienvenue Neuba came from the stage theatre, but can only be watched now on Ivorian screen. Television Since 1956 when the Western Nigerian Television (WNTV) was established, TV plays have become very central to its programme. Today, Nigeria has over forty TV stations, thereby expanding the scope of such plays. Plays by Duro Ladipo and Hubert Ogunde formed the nucleus of that pioneer effort, and they were mainly in Yoruba Language. Soyinka's first short play, My Father's Burden, in English, had its premiere production in 1 960on the same station. This pattern is somewhat replicated among the other large language groups such as the Hausa and the Igbo. Multi-linguistic regions such as the Niger delta areas of Nigeria and the old Mid- West have resorted to either English or Pidgin language for the production of their TV plays. Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) Enugu's popular play Masquerade and Hotel de Jordan of NTA Benin are two such compelling features. The Masquerade's pidgin idiom is by no means suggestive of lack of linguistic homogeneity among the Igbo, but due more to the national accessibility of pidgin as a medium of (cultural) communication. The Village Headmaster was one experiment that tried to serve as the melting pot of Nigeria's babel cultures (not language) in its junction setting of Oja village. The Masquerade's attempt in this direction was limited largely because only southern voices were represented. The popular agricultural Jos TV play Cock Crow at Dawn reversed the situation whereby northern voices became more prominent. African Quarterly on the A rrs Vol.1/ NO 4 The three most popular soap operas up till date are Ripples, Supple Blues and Checkmate - which is the equivalent of America's Dynasty. This latter trend in Nigerian TV genre represents, perhaps, the most radical rupture with the old cultural matrix of the mask code. However, the Igbo video scene is replete with mask motifs. Living in Bondage, acclaimed as the first Igbo video film, narrates how the lead character uses charm to become rich, by killing his wife. Nneka the Pretty Serpent merely intensifies this supernatural ambience, with Nneka casting spell on any man she sufficiently has interest in, turning him into her zombie. In Ikuku we find the finest expression of this tradition. A nouveau riche Igbo in Lagos faces problems with his business which is on the decline because he had abandoned his duties to ancestral masks, of whom he was supposed to be a custodian. In a spirited attempt to find a resolution to the impasse created by this supersensible intervention, he returns home. However, unable to cope with the rigour of self-effacement and communal responsibility, a burlesque scenario is created as he tenders to the gods, through the elders, a letter of resignation! With the introduction of the home video, no doubt, an additional channel was created for theatrical expression. The stylistics of this medium is quite diverse. While the mask code is quite trenchant, it is by no means the . only outlet in terms of style. Themes of 'modernisation'are becoming increasingly popular and the commercial impulse of producers have driven many to dilute their art to serve this end. Besides this, there is another tendency to expand the income space by accommodating the resolution of plots in favour of Judeo-Christian and Islamic positions, a factor that in itself subverts mask narrative. There are however complaints of proliferation of the medium. In this regard a timely caution has been given by the maverick Ibadan based screenwriter, Charles Ogu, during the shooting of his new title Harry's Crew. In a rather anecdotal style he quipped: 'now they are flooding the market, but let them remember that you don't learn to fall into a pit, all it takes is the first step. A lot of'our video practitioners may soon get flushed off in their selfimpelled deluge.' DAWN ... I have started building the nucleus of the type of studio I am advocating. 'I will name the centre The New Culture Studio where I will En route Djenne: 'the Niger is both the literal and figurative reference for West Afnca, through ,t the arts of the subregion become the most travelled commodity' Mambissa It did not take too long after a first encounter with this Nigerian artiste about a decade ago, to whiff the presence of a visionary, cultural Pan-Africanist, even if a little unorthodox in his ways. With braided hair • his modest register of alternative outlook, and a dangling ear ring, Tar Ukoh comes off as an intriguing bohemian. He is also a philosopher and multi-genre performer, who skilfully captures the essence of Africa's artistic legacy. His 'total theatre' compels the audience to notice a master singer-dancer, puppetry expert, choreographer - with the directorial energy of late Hubert Ogunde. Listening to Tar's music, watching him perform, you are African Quarterly on the Arts Vol. 1/ NO 4 try to develop my ideas on African art with any African artist who has a philosophy identical with me..' Carnivalesque Sometimes though Demas Nwoko, that prodigious theatre practitioner of the Mbari era, comes off like a dreamer gone far beyond an early rise. And somehow, too, he gets a multitude of fellow travellers. His ideas of working with 'any African artist' is informed by what he had elsewhere alluded to as the need to perpetuate 'our artistic traditions'. What he is calling for is a medley of sorts, the stuff of which the carnivalesque is made. That passion to identify and claim Africa's artistic personality is a feature that we can readily identify with Tar Ukoh, Werewere Liking and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti through their respective experiments: Mambissa, Ki Yi M'Bock and Kalakuta trapped into a colourful spectacle of mask stagecraft comparable only to the Riviera // mad house - Ki Yi M'Bock of Werewere Liking in Abidjan. Like Ki Yi M'Bock, Tar's Mambissa strives towards the melange and aesthetic hodge podge of Africa's diverse theatre traditions. His renditions are usually in the various Nigerian languages, as well as in Swahili, Zulu, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. This has made his expressive art a unique and dynamic cosmopolitan entertainment genre. When again I fielded questions to Tar last harmattan he revealed a resume of superlatives that ran like eternity. His Best of Africa won, in 1986, the first prize of NTA National Merit Award in dance drama. He returned first prize winner in 1 988 with a musical opera, Songs of Wisdom, at the Nigeria Festival of Television Programmes (NIEFETEP). Six other consecutive awards were won in the variety/ light entertainment on the same occasion. The group's performances in the 1 980s have been well applauded, a factor that led to its nomination for the 1 990 Nelson Mandela Prize in African Music by URTNA, Nairobi Kenya. While the Mambissa strives to collapse distance by reenacting and re-interpreting Africa's rich cultural reservoir, the primary imagination of the group has been influenced by the best of the Kwagh-Hir. The Tiv Kwagh-Hir theatrical repertoire is infused with a variety of poetic forms ranging from the heroic, didactic, religiomedicinal to the elegiac and romantic. A single thread that runs through them all is the interrogation of essences-what is man, his place in the universe, the nature of human existence, the basis for his cornucopia of problems and above all, why is man replete with foibles? For an exuberant art form that had thrived since ages, it was not until December 1 973, during the festival of traditional dances held in all states of Nigeria, that the Kwagh-Hir puppet and masquerade theatre of the Tiv communities settled in Gboko, Makurdi and Katsina-Ala began to work itself into national reckoning. But what is Mambissa? Tar responds in a detour: 'You watch the performance, you listen to the music, you dance to the pulsating rhythms and the curious question comes back again: what is Mambissa? ' Mambissa, he finally offered, is a historical and cultural excursion into the deep, troubled soul of Africa. Mambissa is a RETURN TO SOURCE, as we approach the dawn of the 21st century and its challenges. Mambissa is African pride. Tar located Mambissa's etymology in the resistance against slavery and colonialism. Those brave sons of Africa who fired the forge of resistance were called Mambi, while the courageous daughters of Africa were called Mambissa. Children of lion, wounded but unbeaten! In a tone similar to Werewere Liking's, Tar preaches the rediscovery of Africa. A Mambissa performance is therefore geared towards a re-affirmation of faith in ourselves. Today, the Mambissa has resurrected, like the undying phoenix, from the ashes of cultural despair into a colossus of cultural self identity with a mission to take Africa's place in world history. Ki Yi M'Bock 'That idealist who fled her native country for Cote d'lvoire', was the way an angry, cynical Camerounian critic described her When I met Werewere Liking during rehearsals at her Village Ki Yi, she still wore the looks of a dreamer. She did indeed have the ambience of a roamer - like the Fulani cattle rearer, with eyes gazing at, through and beyond me into a distance you could not decipher. She was perhaps wondering what to do with a dishevelled knap sack carrier who had just intruded into rehearsal well space. Somehow, we eventually fix an appointment and an interview got underway after three failed attempts. Liking had left her native eountry, Cameroun, some say, out of spite, after starting as a singer, to explore the cultural environment of Cote d'lvoire. 'That is not true' she fired back, 'although I did sing from age sixteen to eighteen, but I was painting already. I moved on to writing poetry, and then to theatre. When I left my country at twenty-seven , I was already known as a coming painter, a poet and playwright, a woman with ideas, and a wife and mother! I exhibited in Abidjan in 1975, as part of a series of international exhibitions. I returned to Cote d'lvoire in 1978 to work at Abidjan University doing research into Negro-African traditions and aesthetics for six years, before I founded the Ki Yi group'. And what is KI Yi M'Bock? 'Knowledge of the Universe', she says, drawing from the sagely wisdom of her South Cameroun Bassa. In the context of artistic creation, however, the microvillage, Ki Yi M'Bock, operates as a community in a living and work space equipped with infrastructure for creating, promoting and diffusing the arts. There is an art gallery, a museum, a photographic and audiovisual laboratory, studios for sculpture, painting, weaving, sewing.... Beside the home-made costume for each show, a commercial clothes label now exists: Ki Yi lines, a new source of income in addition to recipes from all over Africa. Liking further enthused: 'Young people from all over, and from all ethnic origins, have seized this unhoped for chance, taking up dance, singing, writing, acting, in a harmony where team spirit, change and discipline constitute the basis of an undertaking that is, to say the least, singular. Nothing is left to chance at Ki Yi village, for not only must each member master his daily programme, he must also Afiiaw Quarterly on the Arts Vol. II NO -I interest himself in what the others do, so as to be able to fulfil any role, especially in a tour abroad.' Founded in 1 985, the Ki Yi group is conceived as a Pan African movement on contemporary artistic creation. It comes out as a mini-African multi-artistic project and hopes to give Africa the easons to look towards the future with hope. Liking hopes for an aesthetics that can unite in one Ouvre the creativity of writers, poets, plastic artists, actors, singers and dancers with a view to presenting a 'utopia' of a new Africa that would at least dream for herself. Sidibe Valy said of her effort: 'What Werewere Liking is doing is positive. She is associating theatre, dance, puppetry and choreography. She has an approach of theatre which is global and this is a direction in which African theatre should move. To that extent, she is to be encouraged as she is opening paths to the future development of African theatre. She is bringing together different forms, tocreate a total theatre. So, what else is hidden about this woman who has made such a great impact on African Youth?' And she continues: 'I am also a Pan Africanist. My earliest influences were from Kwame Nkrumah, Azikiwe...people who spoke of a great united Africa. I was a child during independence when the women sang praise to those heroes.... What I learned about African culture, I learned through women's songs, women from my ethnic group are very patriotic. They have fought to create the image of a great Africa, within their children's minds.' If Liking has dedicated her songs and studies across Cote d'lvoire, Mali and Cameroun to women, it is because she is convinced that spirituality is important for human development, of which the woman must be availed. Her belief in Pan Africanism is informed by an assessment that poses the ideology as the only way to correct the many wrongs done to Africa. Therefore, Pan Africanism is the only way to bring Africa together in solidarity between brothers and between sisters. The themes of her production are quite diverse. They range from the struggle of the African woman in contemporary society to Pan Africanism. There are also environment related themes and social dilemma narratives. Her 1 985 'Mixed-Up Woman' narrates the instance when a woman is latent energy invested with enormous power by the cultural context. Thus, we find a woman who does not need power because she is herself power 'Caesarean', 1986, explores Africa's vicious circle which makes her tomorrows difficult to have a natural birth, while 'Singue Mura', 1990, is a hymn dedicated to African and universal Woman. A measure of her diversity is seen in the environment sketch, 'A Touareg Married a Pigmy', 1992, a African Quarterly on the Arts Vol. 11 NO 4 musical comedy about desert and forest meeting. By 1992, Liking refocused her imagination on the diverse social malaise in the continent. 'Widow Dilemma' is about the condition of African women up against some strange traditions, while 'Ya Match' is a lyric choreography on the subjects of money and misery. This concern spilled into 1 993 when 'Water Hero' was produced, and she denounces the evils of secrecy. 'Craddle Awakening'-, which was premiered in 1 993, was taken on tour to Accra, Ghana in 1 996. This theatrical concert, in a way, marks the group's recent musical inclination, and what it has achieved in two years with Zairean musician Ray Lema. In the movement dedicated to the late Dr.Kwame Nkrumah, the stage grew dim, the drums slower, paces heavy and studied and the visage of the lead actor became sombre - as the cast floundered, eyes dilated, with hands stretched skywards groping, groping, they ask: what happened to the continent he slaved for? Elder Carver: Yusuf Guindo, Ene/e village, Dogon, Mali The Ki YiM'Bock theatre repertoire is indeed multinational both in content and in form. While the persistent message is the integration of the African Peoples, the aesthetics of delivery is drawn from different sources in the continent. Costuming at any session is always a pool of Africa's medley of histrionics. The stage is adorned with raffia stripes, gourds and rattle gourds, cowrie shells and the like. The Attoungblan drum -the conveyor of secrets, the tam-tam, maracas and flutes carved locally, are some of the musical equipment used. In one breadth, Likfng pushes to prominence Kuntu drama; Kuntu being a Bantu concept of evolving the African aesthetic. This is given meaning by her mask code of presentational style, buttressed through action, structure, characterization and audience reaction. If what you expect in the structure of a Ki Yi performance is some arcane linearity, set in historical time, then you will be disappointed. For rather, what you will probably get is a simultaneity of both historical and mythic time - with a participatory chorus and audience. Announcement: There will be no rehearsals tomorrow. Sunday is a rest day in the village Kalakuta Whereas Werewere Liking merely glared into space wondering what to do with me after I had intruded into her rehearsals, with Fela in Lagos it was different. He hauled invectives at me and punched holes in my rather calm posture, suggesting that my knap sack reminded him of the fabled eternal bearer of sins. 'Aren't old men expected to be more guarded with their utterances?' I hit back and Fela dissolved into a mischievous grin. 'What again do you want foolish boy?' We settled into an intervew session that lasted some two hours, during which he threatened thrice to terminate our discussion grumbling that foolish 'University people' like me could ask foolish questions. By evening I was back at hrs shrine (self-styled Kalakuta Republic by the 70s) and like many other shrine members sat patiently under drifting marijuana smoke clouds. But unlike many, I was this time not particularly anxious about his musical performance, rather, it was his 'invocative Saturday Divination Night', that I was awaiting. As I soon realised, a Kalakuta performance embodies the mask code in several ways. The inscription of white chalk (powder) on the faces of band members at the beginning of the performance, relates to the symbol of man conquering death in Yoruba ritual drama. Fela's communion with the past is a sort of ritual device to affirm presence with the ancestors. This merely complements Fela's last names: Anikulapo (one who conquers death), a cultural signifier which refers to this concept of continuity. It is more than an ideational category; it implies both sameness and difference. By the power of the mask, you cannot die; when 'death' is reckoned with, however, it is deemed to represent a transition to other spheres of performance. Life is believed to be a sort of self-regenerative, transformative, universal energy wound off by a first cause in the breath of Olodumare. Since colonialism soughtto explain away non-Islamic, non- Christian Africa as simply indescript, Fela's aesthetics seems to emphasise the inscription of a unique practice and theory of counter-culture. His mask display of ancestral sculptures triggers off a vibrance of figuratives. Their simultaneous evocation of several dimensions of time is realized through the congealed narratives of these figural sculptures, their condensation of myths, engagement in current dialogues and ability to prognosticate. His performance venue is called a shrine, reflecting that he intends it to be more than a nightclub; it is meant to be a place of communal celebration and worship. Rather than the 'tribal' communalism of old, however, his new society is a rallying point of Pan-African progressivisrn. Fela alludes to this stylization of the African shrine as a place of worship that embodies all the attributes of the performative arts. The ritual paraphernalia at the shrine include the statutes of Esu, Sango, Ogun and Orisa Obeji; with these, portraits of Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti adorn the worship cubicle. There are also earthen mounds containing honey, palm oil-soaked wick and cowrie shells. FT.*— fftam/i Some kola nuts are placed in a covered calabash. A keg of display of ancestral SCUlp- pa|mwine and three triggers Off a bottles of Gordon Gin Of figiwa- are tucked in a corner. . Their Stimuli- A sacrificial cock in the ZtteOUS eVOCatitOn cubicle, looks away exof several dimen- pectantly' The m ( us"al . accompaniments ror SlOtlS Of time iS divination rites are only realized through four: metal gong, the Congealed wooden rattle, conga nSMTSltive& Of these drum, and a Western, figural sculptures, brass drum"setwith cym" their condensation ba's' k T.he cub'fe has red, blue and green bu]bs on The wick is ,it of myths, engagement in current for the ritual to comdialogues and mence, buttheproceedabllity tO m9 n t u a l I S a revision of prognosticate. an ancient Practice • At another level, it reveals the impact of the city and urbanity on erstwhile folk aesthetics and the rippling changes in their figural devices and meanings. The ritual commences with the clanging of a metal gong and wooden rattle, followed by the conga. Then the drum set and cymbal is unleashed on the shrine in an upbeat, high tempo pace. For a while, it is repetitive but suddenly takes a faster tempo, reaching a crescendo with the rising smoke of the burning wick. At that moment, Fela appears, with a few votarists — all .masked in white (chalk) powder on their faces. In these few minutes, one begins to observe a gradual encoding of African Quarterly on the A its Vol.1/NO 4 diverse signifiers in the performance. Only the metal-gong and wooden rattle maintain a repetitive, continuous stream of clanging, while the accentuation of the conga and drum set and cymbals denote alteration of tempo. The impact of the repetitive clanging here, as in traditional worship forms, is clearly evocative, a device by which elements of the etheral and supersensible world are invited into ritual preceedings. The ritual process continues with Fela leading a few other votarists to the cubicle. He assumes a crouching position, picks up some cowrie shells arid lobes of kolanut, throws them on a spread out tray and begins to observe intently. His brows betray different moods from anxiety, perplexion to elation and satisfaction. At this point, he takes a bite of the kolanut, dips his left fingers into the honey mound for a taste. Also, some Gordon gin is sprinkled on the floor for the ancestors, after which he empties the contents into the four fire points. Fire infused with methanol, the flame rises, bathing this Chief Priest from torso up, but he is unyielding, does not move. The cock is ripped at the neck, with bare hands. Gradually, the Chief Priest stands up, holding the cock above his mouth and sucks the drippling blood. His body is covered with sweat; his eyes, thunder-shot, are glittering; his teeth, blood-red, are grating. He is past concentration; he merely glares into space, momentarily suspended in the middle of nowhere. He is seemingly attempting to move but somewhat restrained by what the rest of us cannot quite see. His biceps are enlarged in this intense struggle to break off; his head gradually drops to the right and he starts to mumble or chant, but it is incomprehensible. Meatiwhile, he seems to finally succeed in breaking this invisible fettering chain - and only then does he seem to regain consciousness of his immediate surrounding. With unsteady steps, he moves to the right of the cubicle and picks up a long canvas soaked in water. Gripping it with two hands, he swirls it round, moving backwards, eight steps, but with head thrust forward - gazing at the cubicle. He repeats this motion and then replaces the canvas. He finally pours some palmwine into a calabash and takes a sip. The remaining content and an extra calabash are handed over to a votarist, who now takes the two calabashes up stage and feeds the other members of the band. Fela, now back on the stage, is handed a nine