‘I smoked them out’ Perspectives on the Emergence of Folk Opera or ‘Musical Plays’ in Uganda

Summary

Opera, as it is discussed in Western academic contexts, still focuses on Western forms of composition and performance; to the ordinary Ugandan, it is for the elites, academics and students of Western art music and does not make sense. Their musical matrix is usually rooted in indigenous performances. Folk operas and musical plays in Uganda incorporate these local forms. Therefore, European and Asian artists based in the local cultural industry who could neither speak local languages nor understand the metalanguage of the people have been unable to estimate and appreciate the aesthetic complexity of these indigenous performances, including local folk operas and musical plays.

Conversely, a similar dearth of semiotic aptitude to interpret the information encoded in the indigenous performances may explain why non-indigenous audiences find it difficult to interpret and understand folk operas or musical plays. The ‘Western concept’ of opera does not fully explain the interrelationship between music, language, poetry, song, and dance in Uganda. Too often, this performance genre has been seen from within the West by Eurocentric scholars as creating naturalised links between the texts and ideas, or defining a space in which Eurocentric concerns are foregrounded. In this respect, the significance of Wole Soyinka's observation on the compartmentalisation of these performances by theatre and ethnomusicology studies scholars is relevant to this discussion. He states that the scholars ‘acknowledge quite readily the technical lip service paid to the correspondence of African music to the tonal patterns of […] the language, but the aesthetic and emotional significance of this relationship has not been fully absorbed’ (1988: 31). This critical observation relates to the informing statement to this essay, ‘I smoked them out’, i.e. foreign performing artists (Okot 1980), derived from a conversation I had with the poet and critic Okot p’Bitek concerning his radical changes at the National Cultural Centre in Uganda, which includes the National Theatre. Between 1959 and 1963 the National Theatre in Kampala was dominated by European and Asian artists until Okot p’Bitek was appointed as its first Ugandan Director. Okot's radical rejection of foreign domination underlined the cultural crisis that emerged in the difference between what was staged at the National Theatre and what most Ugandans could recognise and enjoy as performance.