Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage
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Books Duro Ladipo: Thunder-God on Stage. By Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi, and Abiodun Duro-Ladipo. 2nd edition. Ibadan: IAS (Institute of African Studies), University of Ibadan & IFAnet Editions, 2008 (2003); 207 pp. Nigerian Naira 1200 paper. Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o’s Drama and the Kamı˜rı˜ı˜thu˜ Popular Theater Experiment. By Gïchingiri Ndïgïrïgï. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007; 308 pp. $29.95 paper. If you are based in the Northern hemisphere and looking for English- language works on African theatre and the performing arts, choices are limited, but not dismal. First, you might examine what Africana publishers with a good humanities program have to offer: James Currey, for example, Bayreuth African Studies Series (BASS), or Africa World Press. Then you might consult academic publishers with African studies and/or theatre series: Indiana University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, or Rodopi, to name but a few. If you are interested in African theatre scholarship published on the African continent, however, material is much harder to come by. The most obvious source to consult is the African Books Collective (ABC), a UK-based nonprofit marketing and distribution outlet owned by a group of African publishers. Yet despite covering some 119 publishing houses in 19 African countries, their drama and theatre section is extremely small. In June 2008, ABC only featured three full-length studies in their catalogue—a drama handbook and two single-author studies, all of them published in or prior to 2002. I am not trying to say that there is little contemporary theatre scholarship in Africa. Last year’s IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) conference on “Theatre in Africa—Africa in the Theatre” in Stellenbosch, South Africa, is proof of the contrary, with roughly a quarter of the 300 participants coming from longstanding African theatre departments, such as those at the University of Ibadan, the University of Dar es Salaam, and the University of Botswana. The statistical makeup, however, is quite indicative of the resources available to local theatre scholars. Often, the dissemination of their work is hampered by lack of funding and/or affordable publishing outlets, and a dearth of wider-than-local distribution channels. Publishers often demand printing costs upfront—hardly affordable for your average theatre person—while distribution beyond the national academic market is habitually difficult. Much of the theatre material generated by colleagues in Africa thus never makes it into print; and that which does, often does not make it beyond the local campus library or the author’s immediate circle of colleagues and friends. The first book under review here, a sourcebook on the Nigerian theatre artist Duro Ladipo, thus came to me by chance rather than choice—hand-delivered by a Nigerian colleague attending a conference in Europe. It is often these personal contacts that keep knowledge about theatre scholarship in Africa alive, via former or ongoing research collaborations, alumni networks, and conference contacts. It goes without saying that such links remain selective. And to bring the story to full circle, many Books 158 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.164 by guest on 23 September 2021 academics at African universities face similar problems. Often they cannot get hold of theatre books published abroad, partly because of the cost, partly because marketing, payment, and delivery arrangements leave much to be desired. This somewhat haphazard movement of people, performance, and knowledge between the South and the North is also reflected in the lives of the two artists under discussion. The late Duro Ladipo—performer, musician, dramatist, and director with a permanent base in Oshogbo, Nigeria—frequently toured the world, spreading the word about his highly acclaimed Yoruba “folk opera”; Ngügï wa Thiong’o, Kenyan novelist, playwright, scholar, and essayist, was forced into exile in the US after his involvement in a local, highly politicized community theatre project, and has been operating from there ever since. Both artists have been very influential as theatre practitioners; both were “popular” in Africa, though in different senses; and both produced plays in African languages. Their work nonetheless differs in many respects, as do the approaches to the study of their dramatic heritage. Thirty years after Ladipo’s death, Remi Raji-Oyelade, Sola Olorunyomi, and Abiodun Duro- Ladipo have brought out the second edition of a sourcebook on the artist’s life and craft. Much of the material gathered here is based on the private collection of Abiodun Duro-Ladipo, one of Lapido’s wives and most closely involved in the Duro Ladipo Theatre. She collected letters, newspaper clippings, notes, and pictures beginning in the early 1960s. The book is primarily an “homage to an enduring tradition of a spectacular variety of African theatre” (vii); it also aims at revising “certain unresolved information on the man” (vii) and artist. What this “unresolved information” might be remains a little elusive, yet the authors certainly succeed in paying tribute to one of the most innovative and formative theatre artists in modern Nigeria. Divided into books 1 and 2, the volume takes us progressively through Ladipo’s life. Book 1 comprises two chronological accounts of his “dramatic beginnings” and the company’s tours respectively (including Ladipo’s premature, and somewhat fabled, passing); a longer interview with Abiodun Duro-Ladipo; snippets from conversations with friends, mentors, and critics; and an evaluation of Ladipo’s contribution to Nigerian theatre by University of Ibadan Professor Philip Adedotun Ogundeji. This is followed by various appendices that reproduce song texts, contracts, reviews, “palavas” (gossip) (77), and letters, mostly in English, some also in Yoruba. Book 2 consists entirely of photographs from Abiodun Duro-Ladipo’s private collection. The material is a real treasure trove of unpublished pictorial insights into Ladipo’s craft at home and abroad—the troupe in their early stage, at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, in New York, Brazil, and at the height of their fame in Nigeria—even if the quality of the reproductions is somewhat lacking. Unfortunately, this section is not paginated, with the final index only covering Book 1. This is regrettable since many pictures relate to events narrated or referred to in the previous part, and it is thus left to readers to match text and relevant illustrations. The picture material also suggests that the book is as much about Abiodun Duro-Ladipo as it is about her late husband. Widely known by her stage name Oya, “the river-goddess, wife to King Sango, god of thunder and light[n]ing” (9) in Ladipo’s most famous play Oba Ko So (The King Did Not Hang; 1963), Abiodun Duro-Ladipo features strongly in the book, both visually and as a narrative voice. Little is said about Ladipo’s other wives and their contribution to the company, or about other artists. On the whole the focus is on Ladipo’s biography and the company’s tours, not on the performative or metaphysical aspects of their theatre. Readers interested in the connection of form and meaning in Ladipo’s plays are better advised to consult Olu Obafemi’s Contemporary Nigerian Theatre (1996) instead. All in all, little of the material covered in this volume can be considered “critical”; most of it is descriptive in nature, often with a hagiographic slant. At times I wished for more scholarly rigor with regard to incomplete (or incorrect) bibliographical references, citations, or the spelling of names. A serious mix-up of sources can be observed among the reviews culled from various US newspapers in 1975 about Ladipo’s last overseas tour. Previously published in Abiodun Ladipo’s I Only Wanted to Help Him (1988)—in much better order—the layout of Books 159 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.164 by guest on 23 September 2021 bibliographical references up until page 88/89 makes it seem as if the reference (the newspaper in which it is published and the date) belongs with the preceding review rather than the one that immediately follows. For the researcher trying to trace the original publications, this is bound to cause problems. It would have also helped to identify more fully those commenting on the artist, and to list the date, place, and recording methods of the interviews. Nonetheless, the book has a lot to offer students of African theatre. Most valuable are the previously unpublished documents and pictures from Duro-Ladipo’s private archive. I also enjoyed reading the com- ments by Ladipo’s mentors, critics, and friends. Fruitful for further research will be the contra- dictions and tensions emerging from these texts, and how they relate to earlier studies, such as Duro Ladipo Theatre member Ademola Onibonokuta’s personal account, The Return of Shango (1983), and other publications from the Duro Ladipo Memorial Series edited by Ulli Beier. The authors can certainly be commended for unearthing and making available these resources on one of Nigeria’s most formative artists. Thunder-God on Stage is a timely reminder of the greatness of Ladipo’s work on the 30th anniversary of his demise. It is to be hoped that this new material will rekindle interest in further studies, not only in historical reconstructions of the where’s and when’s, but also in performance-based analyses of his productions. It is this focus on the sociological and historical dimension, rather than an evaluation of its aesthetic aspects, that Gïchingiri Ndïgïrïgï criticizes most strongly in the reception of Ngügï wa Thiong’o’s theatre work to date. Until recently, Ngügï’s dramatic oeuvre has been neglected in African literature circles, emphasis being placed on his prose and essayistic writings, while theatre scholars have often concentrated on the radical activist spirit of the Kamïrïïthü experi- ence.