This is Crash Course Theater and today we're going to Africa.

Now.

Africa, as you are probably aware, is a big continent.

It's like 20% of the world's landmass.

It's made up of 50 some nations.

That is, Ah, lot of theatrical tradition can recover all of it in one episode.

Absolutely not, but we'll try to briefly give you some sense of the range of traditions and practices while focusing more closely on the influential Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka.

What's that?

Well, York tells me that Soyinka, a Nobel Prize winner, is still with us.

We are talking about living writers, lights up and skulls up before we get going.

For real.

Let's talk for a minute about methodology.

Here in America, we don't discuss African theater history a lot.

Maybe it's because we spend too much time on that balding Elizabethan dude and his rock and pentameter.

Or maybe it's because in the pre colonial period there were 800 spoken African languages, but not many written African languages, so not a lot in the way of written literary tradition or performance documentation survives.

It's also because when colonizers came to Africa they, um, kibosh TTE a lot of native performance culture.

Colonizers ruin things, to put it lightly, though sometimes African artists responded by creating place that explicitly mocked their colonial oppressors fair and a perfect use for theater.

This is all to say that we wish we knew more and talked more both here specifically and in general, but the history of African theater and its diverse practices.

We also wish that we were better at pronunciation.

So fair morning.

I'm probably gonna mangle a lot of words in this episode, but we don't want that to stop us from sharing a few examples of longstanding African performance traditions, many of which are still in use today.

In Nigeria, for instance, the Europe of People participate in an elaborate masquerade called the a Goon goon Ah festival held the beginning of the planting season.

Participants spend the night before in prayer, then emerge in costume from a sacred grove accompanied by drummers.

In Ghana, storytellers specialize in a non see Sam or tales of a non see the spider on moonlit nights.

Storytellers act out these tales, which are both entertaining and educational, designed to reinforce the morals and practices of the community in Sierra Leone.

Among the Mendi group, storytelling is also a central part of the performance culture stories called domain are told at the end of the harvest season, With the performance typically beginning in the evening, the audience sits in a circle and the performer moves among them, occasionally integrating questions and interruptions.

The audience participates by clapping and sometimes dancing.

In Mali, the Bambara people perform a dance called Kotarba, which mimics the spiral of a snail and combines movement with comedy.

Other communities and Molly are big into puppetry, creating elaborate performances shown before planting and before harvest.

Most of the young men and the unmarried women in the community participate with female singers, setting the rhythm for the puppet dance.

In South Africa, the Zulu people practice several forms of dance used in ceremonies and initiation rites.

Ah, performance, called the in Goma, is danced by boys and girls who wear seed Pod rattles around their ankles.

In Islam, who was traditionally a war dance but is now performed at weddings, men perform it wearing skins called Ama Bachchu while carrying shields and spears.

Most African states won their independence in the middle decades of the 20th century.

During the Colonial period, theater in Africa had mostly been by and four white colonists.

But after Independence, a lot of countries began to support a burgeoning black literary theater and organizations and community theater's worked to bring theater to the people in Ghana.

Player at FUS, Sutherland founded the Ghana Drama Studio in Akra and also helped start university programs to research indigenous storytelling and performance.

She wrote plays about contemporary Ghanian life and several plays for Children's theater.

And she adapted Summon on CSM into a 1975 play called The Marriage of a Non si Wa, which combined elements of Western theater with traditional storytelling practices.

In Kenya, playwright Googie Watch Iago helped create the camera through Community, Educational and cultural center.

The center staged his play I'll Marry When I Want, which is a fusion of dramatic narrative with indigenous song and dance.

But the Kenyan government shut down the play and later destroyed the theater theater as we remember from the Romans and the Renaissance, English and the post Renaissance English.

And basically all of history, it seems, is dangerous to those in power.

The camera through remained a big influence on other radical African theatre groups In Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, artists worked to preserve and celebrate indigenous forms of dance and storytelling while also connecting them to contemporary social and political life.

In Tanzania, which had a socialist economy, universities created a new non imperialist performance style for a new political climate, Ganj era combined verse and dialogue with dance like gestures.

In 1965 Zambia created a national dance troupe that integrated ancient games, stories, religious rituals and initiation rites into contemporary dance performance.

Zimbabwe supported the growth of several community theaters and its national dance company is also interested in preserving indigenous forms.

In Senegal and the Cote d'Ivoire, The French government had sponsored theater troupes and plays by black playwrights.

Even during the colonial periods, the plays were usually history plays or theatrical versions of African epics, and they were created by students at French run teacher training schools and were written and performed in French.

After independence, France continued to send theater professionals to work with indigenous writers and performers, a way of keeping French culture going.

Some artists have embraced France's involvement, but others called for a return to pre colonial forms in South Africa.

During apartheid, black artists created a form called the Township Musical, a fusion of jazz and stories drawn from modern life.

Meanwhile, the Space Theater and the Market Theater, which opened in the 19 seventies, specialized in political work by white and black playwrights.

The best known South African playwright, Athol Few guard is white, but several of his best known plays, like Says We Beyonc, Is Dead and the Island, Our collaborations with black artists like Winston Chona and John Connie.

The most significant playwright to emerge from post colonial Africa is Wally Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986.

So Inca, the son of an Anglican priest, was born into a Yoruba family, and maybe a coup to Nigeria in 1934 grew up alongside a rich performance culture.

In addition to indigenous performances like the Gungan masquerades and storytelling rituals, Christian churches also encouraged the performance off Bible plays, so Inca was exposed to Shakespeare and Greek tragedies at school, and he could listen to BBC transmitted radio dramas.

He would likely also have been familiar with your Aruba opera, pioneered in the 19 forties by Hubert Oh Gundy, which combined choral numbers with satirical sketches and is performed in your Aruba and pidgin English.

Lincoln went to university, first in Nigeria and then in England.

In 1959 he became involved with London's Royal Court Theater.

He returned to Nigeria, and in 1960 he wrote his first major work, A Dance of the Forest.

His plays are deeply engaged with post colonial Nigeria, and they often deal with the conflict between tradition and modernity and how oppression impacts everyday life.

He combined his writings with academic research and activism while trying to prevent Nigeria civil war.

In 1967 he was imprisoned.

He was released in 1969 after 22 months in solitary confinement.

Two years later, he left Nigeria for a long period of exile.

So Yuka has always been interested in the collision and parallelism between what he sees as, Ah Western theater aesthetic and an African one.

He discusses this most directly in his book Myth, Literature and the African World.

In 1973 he tested some of these theories, adapting Europeans, Bach I as he saw similarities between the your abogado goon and the Greek god Dionysus.

The synthesis of Western and African traditions didn't always sit well with other African intellectuals for a closer look at Soyinka style and his attempt to create a fusion of Western and Yoruba aesthetics, Let's turn to his 1975 play Deaths and The King's Horsemen.

In a preface, Swink tells us that this play is based on real events.

He says that he realizes that the play risks being read as a fast I'll quote clash of cultures.

He asks instead that the play be read as largely metaphysical.

Help us out Got double.

As the play opens, the Yoruba king has died.

That means that his horsemen, a laysan Oba, has to die to his death will help the King to the afterlife and safeguard the community.

Laysan dances through the market, saying his goodbyes as the women dress him regally.

He sees a beautiful girl, and he asks yellow job the mother off the market for an introduction.

Yes, that is a euphemism.

The girl is engaged to theologians own son, but yellow Gia can't refuse a dying man.

So she says Yes, she'll arrange an introduction.

The girl is not consulted because, of course, the girl.

Meanwhile, Simon Pill Kings, the colonial officer, and his wife, Jane, are preparing for a costume party on officer Arrives, announcing a lessons planned suicide pill.

King's sees suicide as barbaric, and he's ignorant of the rituals importance to the village.

He orders a Laysan arrested, and then he goes off to his party.

Is it just me, or do the men in this play have weird priorities?

Lessons.

Son Alone D Returns from medical school.

LeBron Lundy is pretty Westernized, and he left without his father's permission.

But when he learned of the king's death, he came home to help his father see the ritual through.

So when he learns that his father's dawdling and pill king's interference have prevented its completion, he's pretty mad.

Good to know that teenagers being embarrassed by their parents is cross cultural.

Ilija comes to visit a lesson in prison and yell at him for not completing the ritual on time.

She tells him someone else had to do it.

Instead, a large bolt of cloth unrolled, revealing Lundy's body.

The Laysan is so distraught that he strangles himself with his chains just as Pill King's rushes in and theologians like happy now, thanks to a trouble.

Despite what Soyinka says, this play is in some ways very much a culture clash.

The British and the Africans see death and ritual differently, and that difference drives the tragedy, though, of course, it is worth noting that only one group, the British, tries to impose their own vision, which makes it a tragedy of imperialism.

And if we look beyond this, the play also fuses two styles.

The goo goo masquerade and the Western classical tragedy in tow.

One hole, and it explores in both British and African communities.

The use of ritual, the ceremonial suicides and the masquerade balls to support social and cultural systems probably will never know as much as we want to know about African theater before colonialism but African theater after colonialism.

Though hindered by civil war and state oppression and systems like apartheid, it's flourished.

It often creates deeply interesting dialogues with old forms while pushing forward new ones.

We'll see next time for our final episode of Crash Course Theater.

It's the one many of you have probably been waiting for.

It's an all singing, all dancing look at the golden age of the Broadway musical York.

Create a one skull kick line.

You're gonna have to wait and see, but my bet is on us.

Until then.

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