ABSTRACT

The discussion of the history of African theatre has always presented a number of invisible pitfalls. Because of the strong discernible links between contemporary African theatre and the indigenous resources of dance, storytelling, masquerade and mime, there is a tendency to postulate a seamless relationship between theatre practice and such indigenous resources and to pursue their histories as essentially the same and moving in the same direction. There are of course many advantages in tracing the state of theatre and of indigenous forms as having the same inextricable roots and being affected by the same historical processes, but there is a sense in which this standpoint prev­ ents theatre in Africa from being seen as a specifically constituted transformative domain continually responding to a variety of both internal and external influences in order to produce a theatrically mediated understanding of reality.