‘Mea culpa’: We have given poetry, drama a bad name

Last week, I was caught up in the university strike and had to sing “bado mapambano” to save my skin from colleagues who found me busy teaching while the university was on lock down as workers downed their tools to demand overdue salary arrears the government seems to have refused to pay them.  

I was teaching in a new Japanese-built, bullet-proof, and high-tech smart classroom at the University of Nairobi, but I thought it unethical to continue teaching when my former colleagues were protesting exploitation by a government that doesn’t to value intellectuals all that much. After all, the class was on poetics of resistance in African writing. 

A generously funded Carnegie African Diaspora fellow whose main job is to help post-graduate students package their work for publication to fulfil new Commission for University Education rules, I’m honoured to be teaching on the side an undergraduate course on drama and poetry for the prestigious Department of Literature. 

The kids in my class are sharp and have so far kept me on my toes by asking probing questions and sometimes disagreeing with my allegedly now old-fashioned arguments about the inevitability of politics in African art. To the millennials, it’s time we embraced art for art’s sake.

But in a background probe (one that you do at the beginning of the course to gauge the level of the students’ knowledge), these young intellectuals couldn’t name three African poets outside East Africa, three African playwrights, three African poets who’ve written in local languages, three African women poets and dramatists, or any poet or dramatist from Northern Africa. 

STRANGE NAMES

The Nigerian Christopher Okigbo’s name sounded somehow familiar to the students, but they had no idea who on earth Tawfik el-Hakim, Zulu Sofola, Tanure Ojaide, Moufdi Zakaria, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Tchicaya U Tam’si, Werewere Liking, Bode Sowande, Niyi Osundare, Benedict Vilakazi, Bole Butake, Ahmed Shawqi, or Osonye Tess Onwueme could be. These are some of the major African poets and playwrights whose works an African student of African literature in an African university should be familiar with. 

Yet the students could trot out a long list of African writers and their texts, all novels. It appears that when we talk about African literature in our universities, we primarily limit ourselves to the novel. Probably that’s why African poetry and drama are grouped together in one course in the final year of university studies, as an afterthought. 

Of all the 30-plus post-graduate students I’ve talked with so far, none is working on drama or poetry. They are writing on interesting topics — ranging from eco-feminism to representations of queer desire — but they seem to give poetry and drama a wide berth. 

As an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi in the 1990s, I loved poetry, but I didn’t take drama all that seriously. The genre and its oddball teachers didn’t sound very intellectual to me, not even when the bearded professors in their leather sandals were unpacking the experimental dramaturgy of Derek Walcott or Athol Fugard. 

The drama teachers were given to using vulgar language in class; their lectures were usually a dramatic monologue to the succulent breasts of one beautiful classmate or the other; and they would openly pinch the bottoms of our female colleagues whenever they got a chance to do so. I disliked them. 

The students thought to be very good in drama smoked marijuana openly on campus and on the streets, flying a Jamaican flag on our way from class to the hostels across Waiyaki Highway and past St Paul’s Catholic Chapel as they chanted liberation songs by Gregory Isaacs and Mutabaruka. 

I opted for the novel, a supposedly more serious genre. I enjoyed Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and a little bit of Sembene Ousmane and Chinua Achebe. I wrote my final-year thesis on the beautiful sentences of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Inspired in the closet by my drama teachers, I later wrote on the novels of David G. Maillu, the undisputed father of Kenyan pornography. 

Still, when I teach African literature in the US today, my primary focus is the novel. Poetry features as frequent song interludes to explain basic concepts and to fill in time when I suspect the students have not completed reading the novel under discussion. I sometimes write on drama, but the novel takes the lion’s share of my research efforts. 

It is puzzling that we have so shamelessly neglected drama and poetry. Yet in Africa, these genres have been used for activist, resistance, and mobilization

purposes, especially in live performances. Poetry of protest was effective in the fight for independence in Kenya and Zimbabwe and in anti-apartheid activities in South Africa.

Poetry and drama are the T-beam of oppositional art because their immediacy and spontaneity allow them to do activist work impossible to accomplish with any other form of writing. 

The genres are also more accessible to non-literate audiences than, say, the novel. This is especially when they are performed in local languages. In fact, our governments fear poets and dramatists more than novelists because poetry and drama in local languages can reach the masses more easily than other genres. 

Others artistic forms (e.g., novels such Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Alex La Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End) refer to African poetry and drama, and we would better respond to these works by appreciating the poetry and drama they allude to. 

Other genres also use poetic and dramatic techniques for effects. Indeed, most of the African movies acquire their vigour and verve from using the techniques of an African stage play and orature more than the expected Hollywood-like spectacle. Ben Okri’s novels are more poetry than prose because the author is primarily a poet. 

DRAMA

As a form transplanted to Africa through colonialism, the novel seems to understand that it can’t do without some bit of drama and poetry, which have a longer history on the continent. Novels such as Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat incorporate scenes written in the drama format. His Caitani Mutharaba-ini (Devil of the Cross) came to life only when it borrowed from the Ngugi’s community theatre techniques, resulting in it being read and dramatised in pubs.  

Although in the course I am teaching African drama and poetry are probably lumped together for convenience, it is important to study the genres together because of the interface between them. Borrowing from oral literature, African poems usually use dramatic techniques while some plays use poetic devices found in traditional songs and dances. 

To be sure, some of the best African writers (e.g., Wole Soyinka and Micere-Githae Mugo) express themselves using both genres and, from their works, the boundary between poetry and drama is fluid. Their writing is best read as an assemblage of drama, orature, poetry, and many other good things.

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