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Popular Arts in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Karin Barber
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Extract

All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of laughing people. Without hearing this chorus we cannot understand the drama as a whole.

Mikhail Bakhtin

In the last three or four years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in African popular art forms so strong that it promises to become a movement. The individual researchers scattered over the continent, who for decades have been pursuing their interest in these arts in isolation, are suddenly finding that there is a forum emerging. Issues formerly raised piecemeal, mainly in short articles and often as a sideline by people whose principal expertise lay in some better-established field, are now getting full-scale treatment in the detailed monographs that are appearing from different parts of Africa. It seems the right moment to set out the scope and possibilities of this field, and to lay claim to a central position for it in the humanities and social sciences.

The most obvious reason for giving serious attention to the popular arts is their sheer undeniable assertive presence as social facts. They loudly proclaim their own importance in the lives of large numbers of African people. They are everywhere. They flourish without encouragement or recognition from official cultural bodies, and sometimes in defiance of them. People too poor to contemplate spending money on luxuries do spend it on popular arts, sustaining them and constantly infusing them with new life.

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Article
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African Studies Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 1 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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References

NOTES

1. Perhaps even more important is the fact that a large number of Ph.D. theses on or relating to the African popular arts have recently been completed, after an almost total absence of such work in preceding years. See, for example, Abdelsalam (1983), Alaja-Browne (1985), Arnoldi (1983), Beik (1983), Corbitt (1985), Diawara (1985), Hampton (1977), Idoye (1981), Larlham (1981), Martin (1980), Rabkin (1975), and Waterman (1986).

2. John Collins (1985: 13) observes that Fela outdoes the head of state in the size of the crowd he attracts and also in the size of his retinue.

3. Bergman (1985) gives a wonderful description of the installation of the Oba of Ondo, at which Ebenezer Obey played. Each subsection of the elite—represented in groups wearing the same costume—was called out to dance in order of rank. The observer himself was not allowed to dance, of course, but he went round behind the scenes, and there he found the attendants, mechanics, and poor hangers-on having their own dance to the same music. One could add that the ambiguities and contradictions of incipient class formation are illustrated in exemplary, because exaggerated, form by the social composition of the bands themselves, by the chaotic competitive struggle between them, and the tendency for a successful band leader to turn his “boys” into an exploited and insecure entourage (Waterman, 1982).

4. Lucy Duran, during her presentation at the 1986 ASAUK conference at the University of Kent.

5. A good example of how a complex of stylistic features and their interactions can be analyzed is Dick Hebdige's study of post–war British popular music (Hebdige, 1979).

6. Witness, for example, the wholesale clearance of slums in Nairobi in 1967-70, which left thousands of the poorest urban Kenyans homeless (Leys, 1975: 179-80). [This was not a new experience: it recalled the colonial government's Mathari valley operation in 1953 which left 7000 homeless, and before that fifteen years of attempts to clear “slums” and remove “vagrants” (Furedi, 1973)]. Similar operations have taken place in many African countries. In Nigeria there was the “Black Maria” incident in Lagos in 1980, in which over fifty people were arrested for vagrancy, packed into a police van and forgotten for three days, at the end of which most of them had suffocated. The disturbing properties of this “sturdy beggar” class are evoked with powerful imaginative effect in the work of some contemporary writers. Ousmane Sembene makes them the central theme of Xala; Soyinka gives the idea a more ambiguous but no less central role in Wonyosi Opera. Like their Elizabethan precursors, these hordes of impoverished and displaced persons, produced suddenly out of vast social upheavals, are a potent source of contemporary myth.

7. John Saul (1977) points out that the rhetoric of solidarity and the unity of large sections of the population does not need to correspond either to the objective facts or to the masses' own views of themselves to serve the ruling class's purposes. In reality, most ruling elites simply do not know how unified the masses are—or what any section of them thinks, believes, or aspires to. The attraction of imputing shared attitudes to vast sections of the population is that it provides a convenient rallying cry for mobilizing support when this is required. And if in the era of nationalist struggle some leaderships genuinely persuaded themselves that their politics reflected the “will of the people,” in the post–colonial era the populist rhetoric is much more often what Saul calls “manipulation”: a discourse so generalized that it diverts attention from the real internal inequalities and contradictions of the society.

8. Ropo Sekoni (1985) provides a brilliant analysis of one such sub–cultural phenomenon, the political joke in Western Nigeria. By tracing the history of these jokes he is able to show how popular attitudes to the Nigerian leadership underwent marked changes between the period of nationalist struggle and the Second Republic.

9. The most eloquent and sophisticated recent statement of this position is in Vail and White's discussion of Mozambican protest songs (1983). In their Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique (1980) they also use popular songs extensively because, despite the admitted “problems in handling this type of evidence”, they feel that popular songs “have a claim over every type of source to be the true voice of the people, both from the past and in the present, as indicators of reaction to company and colonial over–rule” (p. 4). John Paden's biography (1985) of Ahmadu Bello likewise makes extensive and judicious use of popular song texts. Paden's work is exemplary in that it pays attention to the texts as texts, giving due weight to stylistic features in his interpretations.

10. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) calls this subterranean level of consciousness “habitus” and argues convincingly that it has far more explanatory power than the classic anthropological conception of a “world view” or “belief system” simultaneously complete, coherent and present in the consciousness of all members of a society.

11. Coplan bases his version of this well–known bit of musical history on an unpublished paper by John Collins (1972), and Collins also mentions “Ebi Te Yie” in his article “Ghanaian Highlife” (Collins, 1976b)

12. “Les locutions qui comportent l'épithète magique de ‘populaire’ sont protégées contre l'examen par le fait que toute analyse critique d' une notion touchant de près ou de loin au ‘peuple’ s'expose à être immédiatement identifiée à une agression symbolique contre la réalité désignée—donc immédiatement fustigée par tous ceux qui se sentent en devoir de prendre fait et cause pour le ‘peuple’ et de s'assurer ainsi les profits que peut aussi procurer, surtout dans les conjonctures favorables, la défense des ‘bonnes causes’” Bourdieu (1983: 98).

13. Ulla Schild (1980), in her discussion of Kenyan popular fiction, gives a useful summary of possible interpretations (Schild 1980).

14. For a number of clear references to this model see Bigsby (1976), especially the chapters by Bigsby and by Barbu. The popular/high culture opposition is set out fully by Gans (1974). Partly, but not entirely, because it has so often been absorbed into the category mass culture, which is seen as slick, stereotyped, exploitative, and conducive to passive conformity in audiences, “popular culture” in this model is very often viewed with disparagement. (For a fascinating history of the fear and disgust engendered by mass culture in Europe, see Patrick Brantlinger's Bread and Circuses). The argument that mass culture is primarily manipulative, an instrument of ruling class hegemony, has been been fully developed by writers on the left, ranging from the apocalyptic vision of Adorno and the Frankfurt school to the detailed and subtle expositions of exactly how such manipulation is carried out (for example, Davis and Walton, 1983; Gurevitch et. al., 1982, especially Stuart Hall's essay; Hall et. al., (1980). Some of this disparaging attitude may be read in the condescending tone often used to “praise” African popular arts, though at the same time this praise may represent a sincere appreciation of the ways in which the African popular arts are unlike the European/American ones—in being home–made rather than mass–produced, individual rather than uniform, crude rather than slick. For a more fruitful use of the tripartite model, with a promising application to African arts, see the discussion of Hall, and Whannel's, The Popular Arts (1964)Google Scholar.

15. Michael Etherton bases his distinction between popular and people's theater, elaborated in his recent study The Development of African Drama (1982), on Latin–American sources which he discusses most illuminatingly. The role of the intellectual is crucial in popular theater and the question of how he or she identifies with the interests of the people is one which has continued to be debated. For an illuminating recent Latin–American criticism of the kind of model employed by Etherton, see Chaui (1983).

16. Botswana: this was where the movement started. See Kidd (1979), Kid and Byram (1978), and Etherton (1982). Zambia: accounts of the University of Zambia's Chikwakwa theater movement, devoted to “taking theater to the people” are to be found in Idoye (1981) and Chifunyise (1977), and there are wonderful first-hand accounts of experiences in this theater in the movement's own Chikwakwa Review. Though the movement has now folded up, its effects are still to be seen in schools' drama as well as in a number of independent semi-professional town groups (see Crehan, 1984). Malawi: see David Kerr (1981, 1982) and Chris Kamlongera (1984) for an account of the efforts of the Chancellor College travelling theater to involve itself in development drama of increasing radicalism. Zimbabwe: since independence, development theater has become a major movement. See Laver (1986). Northern Nigeria: see Etherton (1982, 1986) and Crow and Etherton (1979). Tanzania: A full account of the theory, methods and results of one of the projects run by the Department of Art, Music and Theater at the University of Dar es Salaam is given in Mlama (n.d.). For a bibliographical essay covering the whole movement in performing arts for development, see Kidd (1982).

17. For an example of such “take-off” see the discussion below in the section “The Location of the Popular Arts.”

18. See also the discussions in Bennett (1983), Ndung'u (1983), and Thiong'o (1983) of the work of Gakaara Wanjau, a Mau Mau activist who wrote and published many Mau Mau songs. I am grateful to Ann Biersteker for pointing out this material to me.

19. The interactions of the peasantry and the guerillas who worked with them were, of course, much more complex and problematic than this brief reference suggests, and they also changed over time. For a detailed investigation of the conjuncture and interpenetration of peasant and guerilla consciousness in Zimbabwe, see David Lan (1985), and for a discussion of the same issues in a wider framework see Ranger (1985).

20. It should be noted, however, that Etherton has subsequently revised this opinion, and now sees academic disparagement of the urban people's theater as regrettable (Etherton, 1986).

21. Mukadota has a counterpart in Nairobi who puts on soap opera style comedies which attract large low–paying audiences. Both of them made their names originally as television entertainers, but then found even greater success in stage shows—a reversal of the usual Euro–American success story sequence. Likewise, most students of African theater know of Ibrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile and other progressive plays produced in the university environment in Dar es Salaam, but there has been hardly any academic recognition of the new, very dynamic, and rapidly expanding urban popular theater in Tanzania (see subsection entitled “The general context of production” below) beyond one excellent B.A. dissertation (Songoyi, 1983).

22. Kavanagh (1985) distinguishes, in popular culture, between “constitutive” elements—i.e., those that are authentic expressions of the people's social experience—and “imposed” ones—i.e., those with which the ruling class brainwash them. This is a promising approach, especially in situations like South Africa where the imposed elements are simply dumped on them by a ruling class which is so clearly cynical and manipulative. But even here the imposed elements must be taken just as seriously as the constitutive ones, for they are part of popular consciousness. Because of this, the distinction is usually a more difficult one to make than Kavanagh suggests.

23. Bourdieu (1983), in “Vous avez dit populaire?” points out that in Europe popular is always a relative term and always the devalued half of binary oppositions that reaffirm social inequality.

24. Though not very many: Andrew Tracey's remarks on the subject have been much quoted, perhaps because his attitude is so rare. He complained that “In African music these days you almost never hear the original harmony. There's always someone putting in that third note and you have this sickly-sounding Western harmony all the time….” (quoted in Andersson, 1981 and Bergman, 1985. Coplan, however, does observe that most African ethnomusicologists have simply ignored popular music, considering it of less interest and worth than “true” traditional music (Coplan, 1978). The purist attitude can be found in the discussion of plastic arts: see Fagg (1963) and Brain (1980).

25. See the new surge of books and articles on popular music, e.g., Collins (1985a, 1985b), Bergman (1985), Andersson (1981), Chernoff (1985), all of which explore the ways in which modern musical forms build on traditional ones but incorporate a wide array of influences from outside. An earlier exploration of this theme is found in Roberts (1973).

26. This, however, is only the starting point of an extremely interesting argument: for a fuller discussion of Priebe's article see sub-section entitled “Sub–texts” below).

27. One could say that what is recognized as art is a matter of cultural convention, but that a great many cultural products have an aesthetic dimension without being institutionalized as arts. When the canons by which a body of products is discriminated as arts are uncertain or unformulated, the scope for the investigator becomes the whole field of the aesthetic. Within this, however, there tends to be a kind of ad hoc discrimination made by scholars—no doubt conditioned by their own culture's conventions regarding what counts as art. For my own ad hoc delimitation of the field, see footnote 41. This framework derives from Maquet, Jacques, Introduction to Aesthetic Anthropology (1974)Google Scholar, although I do not follow his definition of art as an object of aesthetic contemplation.

28. Traditional arts, even when innovating, often claim to be unchanging. Popular arts always claim to be new.

29. A.G. Hopkins (1979) has suggested a typology with commercial colonialisms typical of West Africa at one end and the settler farming colonialism typical of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia at the other, and with types based on mining and plantation agriculture in between.

30. I am grateful to Fred Cooper, who suggested formulating the distinction in terms of scope or space during the meeting at Madison, and who develops the idea further in his critique of this paper.

31. Colin Leys (1975) has a fine description of how such delegations comport themselves and how the “favours” system works in Kenya. Another example from Kenya shows how even the most isolated and conservative peoples reflect national social change in their cultures. The people of Kajiado District—mainly Maasai—have to a great extent resisted modern inroads into their culture: even the popular Congolese style of guitar music which has spread all over Eastern Africa since the 1940s has been slow to catch on in this district: “There are one or two young men who have been singing song in 01-Maa to a guitar accompaniment… but none has had much impact outside his own immediate area” (“Kajiado District,” in the District Socio–cultural Profiles Project, by the Ministry of Finance and Planning with the Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, 1984 [draft]). But within the Maasai oral tradition of song, which is highly developed, new themes have appeared, notably “political songs” (e.g., in praise of Moi) and development songs (e.g. in praise of literacy classes). They are sung by new institutional groups such as the women's Harambee and Maendeleo organizations.

32. This impression is corroborated by Gutkind (1975) who shows that among the Ibadan poor each layer of the ordinary people both despised those they considered to be below them and resented those they considered to be immediately ahead of them and whom they blamed for blocking their access to the centers of influence. My own analysis of two Yoruba popular plays (1982) suggests that the tendency seen in Osanyin, simply to drop the issue of the real poor and concentrate on the more interesting question of the differences between sections of the relatively rich, is also found in layers further from the center than Osanyin's own. Popular plays by the Adéjobí Theater Company and the Edá theater Company, Onà Olà and Gbangba Dekùn respectively, introduce the subject of the poor only to write it off—Gbangba Dekùn by shifting ground rather in the manner of Osanyin, Ona Olà by explaining away the poor as lazy and foolish.

33. For an excellent discussion of this issue in the context of the modern South African conjuncture of class, race, and nation, see Kavanagh (1985). A similar point about the role of tradition is made by Andersson (1981).

34. Popular music is in a sense a unique case of syncretism, because almost all the foreign traditions which were combined with traditional African genres to produce the characteristic syncretic styles were themselves African in origin: ragtime, jazz, calypso, reggae, soul have all been brought back to Africa via the recording industry. An insight into the process is given by Fela's memorable statement that it was only in the U.S.A., listening to jazz, that he really discovered the Africanity of his own music: “I had been using jazz to play African music, when really I should be using African music to play jazz. So it was America that brought me back to myself” (Collins, 1977: 60)Google Scholar.

35. Even the most disapproving governments find it hard to stem the flow. Some even find themselves joining in against their will: many television broadcasting services in Africa have had to buy in a large proportion of their programs from America, since it is far more expensive to produce their own. See Tunstall (1977), Mytton (1983), and Bassopo–Moyo (1984).

36. Emmanuel Mbogo, Institute for Kiswahili Research, University of Dar es Salaam, personal communication. Dr. Mbogo suggested that the specific source of the serial format might be the serialized fiction in national newspapers, as a wider public has access to these than to imported magazines. But this newspaper fiction is itself modelled on the magazine format and also comes into popular culture from the outside, being one of the official media of the governing class.

37. Charlie Chaplin was an early model for Ghanaian concert parties (Bame, 1985). Bernth Lindfors discusses the influence of film on Onitsha market literature (1968b: 445). Oelmann (1984) has a detailed discussion of the external sources of imagery in bar art in Bo and Kenema in Sierra Leone. Similar observations have been made all over Africa. Mwanga (1980) shows, for instance, how change of taste in foreign pop stars from James Brown to Bob Marley has affected bar art in Dar es Salaam, as the record sleeves and the images they portray change. Deregowski (1977) shows how Zambian bar art reflects imagery from American Westerns.

38. Amini the uncivilized had too much boasted/ As the conqueror of British Empire/ The beating he got was big enough/ Amini cried: “Men help me!” he panicked/ Tanzania has now fired its artillery/ Eighty kilometers inside Uganda/ Kambarage said: “Cool, Amini, cool/ These are just light rains, heavy ones are coming'/ Let us beat him thoroughly/ Carry him, like a snake, on finger tips/ Let us throw him away/ Lest he smell to us/ Amini is mad. Heavy rains are falling.” One wonders how much this dance form owed to the Beni dance, syncretic and military in flavour, which penetrated far into the Tanzanian hinterland between the two world wars (see Ranger, 1975). I am grateful to Mr. Songoyi for his kindness in giving me access to this information.

39. Landeg White (1982), however, takes the view that the Kamazu songs sung on these occasions derive directly from indigenous traditions of praise–singing and fulfill the same functions—which include implicit criticism as well as praises.

40. A cultural field which could be described with all the same adjectives as popular arts: vigorous, variegated, innovative, syncretic, eclectic, fluid, adaptive, ever–changing and reflective of a new individualism. See for instance Rosalind Hackett (1985) on the popular religion of Calabar. Ideas forged by popular religious movements often penetrate popular arts. The symbiotic relationship between juju music and the Aladura church is strong and close (Collins and Richards, 1982). It is noteworthy, too, that one of the common themes in Yoruba popular theater is the fake Aladura preacher who robs his congregation!

41. I want a definition of arts that includes decorations on mammy wagons and fancy bread labels, but excludes religious doctrine, football, and carpentry. I would say that the dominant function of the arts in this definition is an expressive/communicative one which must also be pleasurable and perhaps also memorable. Although football and carpentry do communicate all kinds of meanings, this is not their main function; and though the main function of doctrine is to communicate, I doubt if it is considered essential that it should do so in a manner that emphasizes its pleasurable character.

42. So that “the total musical system… exhibits a complex macro–pattern of stylistic similarities and differences which may, with caution, be interpreted as a ‘map’ of dominant patterns of Lagos identity” (Waterman, 1986: 92).

43. Lánrewáju Adépòjù, leader of the Akéwì Theater, is actually much more famous as a performer of ewì chants on television, radio, and records. Bàbá Sàlá (Moses Oláiyà) as well as leading the famous Alàwàdá Theater group was the editor of Atóka magazine. Hubert Ogúndé's company produced a large number of popular music discs. For a more detailed discussion of the Yorùbá popular theater in relation to the Nigerian informal sector, see Barber (1986).

44. Dr. Emmanuel Mbogo, Institute of Kiswahili Research, University of Dar es Salaam; Mr. Elias Songoyi, Department of Art, Music and Theater, University of Dar es Salaam; personal communications. The recent rapid development of a new popular theater in Malawi can likewise be explained in terms of the growth of a new urban school–leaving class of unemployed for whom pocket money is better than nothing. See sub–section below, entitled “A Popular Style?”

45. Oelmann (1984) describes how Sierra Leonean bar artists often produce a painting whose size and quality depends on how much the customer who commissions it agrees to pay—for ten shillings you get ten shillings worth of art, and no more. In Nigeria, Twins Seven Seven himself is famous enough to have entered a market where any work with his signature will fetch a high price; but his wives, working in the same studio, produce beautiful batiks whose prices they estimate according to the number of yards of material covered. Szombati–Fabian and Fabian (1976) and Jules–Rosette (1979a) show how artists' output is affected by the need to work rapidly, sell a large number of pictures, and economize with materials. I return to their discussion in the sub-section on “Reading A Text.” Priebe (also further discussed below) and Dodson (1973) have shown the constraining effects of narrow profit margins in popular publishing in Ghana and Nigeria respectively.

46. Fabian: lack of reliable supplies of paint made artists stress line and form rather than color as carriers of significance. Jules–Rosette: paintbrushes were expensive, slow to use if you cleaned them and quick to wear out if you didn't—so the Lusaka painters began to use palette knives instead, which made their line sharper and more angular; some deliberately exploited these effects while others did not.

47. A kind of fertile import substitution had been going on long before the colonial period. As early as the 17th century. Gold Coast gunsmiths were expert at improving imported guns: W.A. Richards (1986) quotes G. Loyer (1702) to the effect that the Assini could “make good guns out of bad ones by retempering them, and make guns fire which had failed to fire previously.” In mid-nineteenth century Zinder (now in Niger) “gunpowder, muskets, cannon mounted on carriages and projectiles were manufactured” and exported to neighbouring states (Smaldone, 1977). With the flood of imports unleashed by colonialism, this kind of activity intensified and became general.

48. In Harare, however, vigorous attempts are now being made by the national government to revive indigenous cultural activity after its long history of repression.

49. In Ghana the Concert Parties were occasionally co–opted by the Nkrumah regime, and put on shows with titles such as Nkrumah is a Great Man. Nkrumah also founded his own concert party from the Workers' Brigade. In Nigeria the indifference of successive governments to popular culture of all kinds has been more or less unqualified.

50. Robert McDonald, for example, wrote a critique in Transition in which he “exposed” Ouologuem's “deception,” and seemed to be recommending that Bound to Violence should be thrown out of the canon into which it had mistakenly been accepted, after widespread critical praise (“including full page reviews in both Time and Newsweek”!). McDonald warns that we can now never be quite sure how much of the rest of the book is authentic: “The doubts and suspicions will always remain”; poor M. Ouologuem “now has no possible way of proving conclusively that he did write his book.” This review exposes, not Ouologuem, so much as the mechanisms by which the canon is established and protected, and the vested proprietary interests which underlie it.

51. Keith Nicklin describes another such radical departure from what is known in a local culture in the case of Akan Edet Anamukot, an Ibibio metalworker whose bread and butter was to turn out functional vessels and tools, but who began to make fanciful and non–functional decorative objects—airplanes, weathervanes, birds, masquerades which no one in his area had made before. He had once seen that kind of thing in another town (Nicklin, 1976).

52. I am grateful to Tom McCaskie of the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, for providing me with detailed information about these pamphlets. As far as I know nothing has yet been published on the subject.

53. Or as if behind a proscenium arch—Jeyifo perceptively points out that the staging of these plays deliberately ignores the possibilities of in-the-round production, even when the actual performance conditions would allow it. In this respect the popular drama detaches itself very definitely from the conventions of traditional festival drama and Apidan entertainment masquerades (see Gotrick, 1984).

54. An impression corroborated by many others, including Gotrick (1984), Olatunji (1984), Yai (1972), Wolff (1962), and Barber (1979).

55. But for an example of the effects of a period of rapid change, in the nineteenth century, on the oriki tradition, see Barber (1981).

56. Ranger (1975: 31) comments that “one very powerful tendency of Swahili society over the centuries had been its readiness to assimilate innovations—often through the mechanism of changing fashions.”

57. For information about the Travelling Theater movement see Chris Kamlongera (1984) and Patience Gibbs (1980). For the story of the creation of the play said to have inspired the popular theater, see Kerr (1982). My own impression is that the radio comedies of S.L. Mbewe may actually have had a more important role than the university travelling theater. Joyce Kumpukwe (1983) has a good description of the two series, Kapalepale and Pa Majiga, in the university magazine Baraza.

58. From Nkoteko by Dickson Chipatala and the Umodzi Theater Group, transcribed and translated by Manuel Kazembe, 1985.

59. Some film and some television, in this view, though transmitted through the mass media, is truly popular because it establishes sympathy with the audience—an example is Charlie Chaplin. What characterizes the mass as opposed to the popular arts is their distance from the audience. They are not in sympathy with it; they are sold to it—after market research to find out exactly what it will swallow.

60. The first is Ulla Schild (1980). She is discussing one particular sub–genre, the romantic novelette, which does seem to be very imitative and dreary. She is, however, drawing a contrast between Onitsha and Kenyan fiction as a whole, using the romantic fiction as an example of the latter. The second is Elizabeth Knight (1979) who tempers her judgment with the observation that in the midst of all this muck the reader may “find the hymn of the common man… which speaks as clearly of social injustice as… Song of Lawino, but with less anger and more cynicism.” This seems to me to be a just observation.

61. E.g., Samuel Kahiga's Lover in the Sky, in which a bored and embittered young school-leaver, fed up with his affluent relatives in Nairobi, fondly broods about a holiday with his old illiterate grandmother in the country, and reflects “Why couldn't one always stay with the people he loved?” But he makes no attempt to put this dream into practice; instead he starts training as a pilot, and falls in love with a rich sophisticated playgirl, an urbanite to the core.

62. David Maillu's The Kommon Man, Book III, is largely given over to a recreation, by the embittered urban narrator, of his childhood in the country and his idyllic courtship of the woman who is now his intolerable, unfaithful urban wife. Francis Mudida's The Bottle Friends is the recreation, by a character in jail for drunk driving, of all the events that led up to his present predicament; a large portion of it dwells on his rural youth.

63. In Out for a Choice by Charles Wambugu, the hero visits Fairview Hotel, and is filled with admiration for the subdued atmosphere, the unseasonal freshness of the foliage, the neatness of the lawn, the well–arranged furniture, and reflects upon the happy circumstance that whites and blacks now sit there side by side talking peacefully! In For Mbatha and Rabeka the city man takes Rabeka to tourist spots for a really special day out, showing that he is at ease in “international” surroundings. In both of these stories—and in many others—the perfection of a place is measured by how “white” it is: the dream is to enter the sumptuous world occupied by rich foreign tourists and businessmen.

64. Visual arts are the most conspicuous but not the only popular art forms that are incorporated into the world market, and thus have imposed on them an alien definition and significance. Nigerian pamphlet fiction at one time enjoyed a great vogue in the U.S. among collectors. In 1968 Lindfors noted that “booksellers in New York and Detroit, parasites who feed on parasites, are asking and presumably getting as much as 3 dollars for a chapbook that may sell for as little as a shilling or two in Onitsha” (Lindfors, 1968: 442)Google Scholar.

65. There are expressive forms in the First World which do not enter the “art market” in the Fabians' sense of the word, and which fulfil a role comparable to that of the Shaba paintings. Holiday photographs for instance “bring a story” in a class as well as a family discourse. Russian ikons (bought by ordinary people) were said to be written rather than painted. Religious painting and statuary in general-and especially the cheaply reproduced images commonly available in Catholic countries-are surely valued less as art than as reminders.

66. See Jules–Rosette (1979b) where she defines an ideological message as “any form of communication that one group uses to distinguish itself from others.”

67. A similar point is made by Beinart (1968) with reference to decorative wall painting in South African and Mozambican townships.

68. Naomi Ware takes a similar approach in her discussion of popular music in Siena Leone. She sees the mingling of musical styles as symbolic not only of a transcendence of ethnic divisions within the country, but also of a progressive pan–African or pan–black consciousness, evidenced in their enthusiasm for Soul music and for the musical styles emanating from other African countries. A much more developed and extended analysis of musical styles and social identities, which I regret was not yet available at the time I wrote this paper, is Chris Waterman's study (1986) of Yoruba popular music.

69. An aspect emphasized by Chris Kamlongera (1986) in his recent discussion of a related form, the Malipenga dance of Malawi.

70. The songs are given much more prominence in the work of other writers on Beni and related forms: for instance Jones (1945) on the Mganda dance, Lambert (1962-63) on Beni, Mitchell (1956) on the Kalela dance, and Nambote (1983) and Kamlongera (1986) on Malipenga.

71. An aspect made much of by functionalist approaches to modernization: see Banton (1957) and Little (1965) on the Temne dance associations of Freetown, and Mitchell (1956) on the Kalela dance, related to Beni.

72. A point developed by David Anthony (1983) in his study of popular culture in Dar es Salaam from 1865 to 1939.

73. What seems interesting in this situation is that the strategies used by elite authors and popular ones are identical: as if the pervasive oppressiveness of Banda's regime has generated a common secret code with which to talk about it.

74. John Collins's still unpublished book on the Jaguar Jokers, a Ghanaian concert party, shows with nice matter–of–fact modesty how his blues harmonica was welcomed into the highlife band—each profiting from its contact with the other—and how his novelty value as an exotic stranger was merely another version of the Jaguar Jokers' own exoticism, as they toured the villages with their fascinatingly novel and fashionable urban shows. His view of the concert party from the inside (or perhaps from the side, as they seemed to spend a lot of time asleep in the wings) is a demonstration of the gains to be won from real participation. Other collaborators of this kind include John Chernoff in Ghana, Gerhard Kubik in Malawi, and Johnnie Clegg and David Coplan in South Africa, all participating in musical groups of various kinds.

75. In this way I learned how the conventions of various theatrical genres operated. In the discussions about what part should be created for me, for instance, I learned that I could be an oba's wife (folkloric exoticism) but not the wife of a modern lorry driver (comic realism). I also learned the conventions governing the construction of dialogue as key lines were worked out for me, often with great care and deep thought about their intended effects.

76. This was partly a move to counteract the disreputable image of the theater by claiming a moral function, and partly no doubt an inheritance from the church opera days. Mr. Adejobi used to say that his work was no different from that of a preacher: “We both take a story, and make a lesson out of it.”

77. In my discussion of another play by this company (Barber, 1986) I discuss the nature of the theater's “radical conservatism” in full, relating it to economic and social change.