Salihu M. Bappa parks his old blue Peugeot station wagon on a dusty street lined with low houses. Mr. Bappa, a drama lecturer at nearby Ahmadu Bello University, gets out and strides through a short alley. It opens into an earth-floored, outdoor courtyard surrounded by crumbling, one-story buildings made of mud and stucco.
Musicians are playing loud, rhythmic music on drums and a gurmi, a two-stringed, sitar-like instrument. A singer welcomes guests and chants improvised praises to those who proffer donations, his voice distorted by the cheap sound system. Then the evening’s main performance begins. Six young men clad in white, each wearing a waist belt with long tassels, put on a frenzied display of acrobatic dancing.
Spectators step up and touch small bills to the forehead of a performer and let them fall to the ground, where the money is snatched up by young assistants.
The evening’s show is staged by the Gamji neighborhood culture-and-drama club, one of several formed with the support of the university’s drama department. The community outreach is central to the department’s focus on Theater for Development, a movement in which performance is put to use teaching and influencing people to better their lives. The approach has particular appeal on a continent where many people are illiterate, and the majority are dirt poor.
While today’s performance is strictly to entertain, Gamji often stages performances promoting better sanitation (club members have also organized neighborhood cleanups), AIDS prevention, the education of both boys and girls, and peaceful relations among neighbors of different ethnic groups. Ahmadu Bello, Nigeria’s largest university, is often involved in the productions, and several of the club’s musicians and dancers are employed by the drama department to help train students.
Neighborhood drama clubs have been established across Nigeria. But here in the conservative, predominantly Muslim north of the country, theater is widely viewed as bawdy and not quite proper. Women are often prevented by their menfolk from watching performances, let alone acting in them.
So the 10 female members of the Gamji drama club come from the fringes of society; they are prostitutes or professional mistresses of prosperous men. They and the group’s 30 male members form a close-knit community, helping one another in times of need. Six of the women live in rented rooms around the courtyard. Binta Mohammed, a young woman missing several teeth, says she is glad that she joined the group two years ago. “Drama entertains people,” she says, “and they pay attention to what you have to say.” She adds, “All unmarried women should be free to act.”
All of Ahmadu Bello’s 330 drama students are exposed to Theater for Development. Naya Iliyasu, a second-year student, and her classmates have been sent out in pairs into the neighborhood near the campus. They have spoken with people in shops and homes about hygiene, children’s education, gender issues, and problems with local officials.
“We brought back our ideas and decided to write a play using their language, culture, and songs,” she says. After it was performed at a community center, the floor was thrown open for questions, and there was a lively debate about such issues as AIDS and forced marriages.
This theatrical approach, also known as Popular Theater or Community Theater, is a relatively recent phenomenon, begun in Western Europe in the 1960s. Around the same time, the Brazilian director Augusto Boal was developing an overtly Marxist form, Theater of the Oppressed, which has been particularly influential in Africa.
In the 1970s, Theater for Development projects began appearing in southern and eastern Africa. The efforts spread and gradually took on a more distinctly African style, full of music, dance, and song, after the fashion of performances practiced in villages for centuries. Today the phenomenon is a vibrant art form in Nigeria and a number of other countries around Africa, promoted mainly by university drama departments.
“Earlier we had a very pronounced Marxist perspective,” says Oga Steve Abah, a drama lecturer at Ahmadu Bello and founding director of the Nigerian Popular Theater Alliance. Like other Africans, the Nigerians have gradually dropped Marxist theoretical texts, which used to be an important part of the curriculum of drama departments, and have turned to the growing number of Nigerian playwrights who explore the harsh realities of life in modern Nigeria. Still, Bertolt Brecht, the German communist playwright, remains one of their most important influences. “What we find useful,” says Mr. Abah, “is Brecht’s style of questioning his own society.”
It is one thing for members of the educated urban elite to stage plays meant to teach poor people about better hygiene or the importance of education. Even the former colonial powers supported a few paternalistic efforts like that. But it is quite another to use theater to encourage common people to express their own concerns and think about the causes of their problems and possible solutions.
This more revolutionary approach has been a strong part of Theater for Development from the beginning. Mr. Bappa, the drama lecturer, became convinced of the need for such an approach after an incident he experienced as a master’s-degree student at Ahmadu Bello in the late 1970s. He and some classmates were sent to a rural area to perform a play for villagers about improving hygiene. But local cattle herders interrupted the performance to plead for one more day to pay their taxes. The military government then in power had the nasty habit of locking up peasants who were late in paying, and the herders had mistaken the city-dwelling students for tax collectors.
“We had to abandon our more simplistic ideas of talking to villagers about hygiene and rural credit schemes,” says Mr. Bappa. “We realized we had to talk about more political issues,” like the seizure of farms and cattle for unpaid taxes, encroachment onto peasant lands by commercial farms, and oppression by local chiefs.
In the approach developed by the drama department, students go to a village or urban area and work up a performance in collaboration with local people. Often these are only rough skits, which are sometimes stopped in midstream so that the actors can ask the spectators what should happen next. At times, members of the audience are invited on stage to improvise a typical problem -- their dealings with arrogant officials, or the lack of health care.
African drama departments have received support for such work from Western overseas-development agencies as well as from their own governments. But the attitude of African authorities has wavered between support and repression, since they themselves are often the targets of the criticism raised by the theatrical productions.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist and playwright, is considered one of the most important African proponents of the form. Authorities in Kenya jailed him for a year in the late ‘70s, after his play I Will Marry When I Want was used as an organizing tool to urge peasants to rebel against their exploitation.
“Most development-theater practitioners tread a very fine line” between criticizing corruption and injustice and avoiding arrest, explains Jane Plastow, a lecturer in theater studies at the University of Leeds, in Britain. She has worked with practitioners in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and a number of other countries in East Africa.
A few months ago, the Gamji neighborhood drama club here in Zaria was reminded of such dangers when police detained several of its members. The actors had been preparing a performance critical of local politicians.
But at tonight’s performance, the acrobatic dancers finish to eager applause and are followed by two muscular, bare-chested fire-eaters who squirt arcs of flaming kerosene from their mouths. A one-legged man on crutches joins them and makes a dramatic show of pulling a knife across his tongue and throat without drawing blood. The small crowd loves it. As long as the performance entertains -- without too insistently raising questions about power and corruption -- the authorities are happy to leave the drama to the actors.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Page: A48