The development of African drama

Abstract

Abstract Teachers and students who wish to practice the arts of African theatre as well as analyse its performances and texts wili welcome Michael Etherton's The development of African Drama. Written specifically to enhance theatre arts programmes in African universities, the book maintains a straightforward, demystifying style that should be a boon to teachers in Britain and America as well as Anglophone Africa. General readers may wish to pass over sections on Aristotelian theory and basic concepts of European dramatism; but there are plenty of issues in the drama of African performance and society here to interest them as well. Gone, perhaps mercifully, from this analysis are the listsof characteristic features used to differentiate categories of ‘traditional’, ‘popular’, and ‘literary’ forms in other volumes on African drama.1 instead, Etherton approaches the problem of definition dialectically, revealing the contradictions and social context of categorization in relation to the interplay of class and culture. The book similary examines the cultural dialectic of autonomy and dependance, integration and alienation; and the political one between crItical playwrights and autocratic institutions. Most importantly, the author treats African drama not as artifact but as process, centered in the relations of cultural production and in the dynamic of consciousness.