Introduction by Yvette Hutchison

Summary

In the decades following independence for many countries in Africa, and in the last sixteen years following the end of apartheid in South Africa, politicians, historians and artists have engaged in various revisions of constitutions, curricula, especially in relation to history. Researchers have been rewriting the histories of the arts in their respective countries because, it has been argued, one cannot understand or engage with the present without a clear sense of the past.

Critics have warned of the perils of ignoring history. For example, Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang has argued that ‘[h]istory that advances by denying itself is not history but a pain that perpetually begins anew’ (1996: 64), and the hugely influential French literary theorist, Roland Barthes, has said that ‘it is when history is denied that it is most unmistakably at work’ (1986: 2).

Re-evaluating how history has formulated national memory and identity has been central to the post-independence processes of African countries. In this process great emphasis has been placed on the revision of national and theatre histories from the 1960s onward, from the perspective of unravelling these from their previously dominant colonial perspectives. However, in theatre history, much of the focus of the writing still has been on literary drama because of the complexities of accessing oral performance linguistically and also because of the ephemeral nature of performance itself. Furthermore, it is often hamstrung by being reframed in terms of how ‘progress’ is defined, and by whom (Neale, 1985).