Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn

Abstract

The book under review explores modern Senegalese theater from its colonial inception at the scholastic stage of the William Ponty elite training school, to the screen adaptation of the theatre populaire (popular theater) of grassroots theater troupes, to the emergence of Senegalese digital television series. Brian Valente-Quinn’s study of Senegalese theater across time foregrounds an analysis of the practices of “theater-making” and “stagecraft.” He describes the former as “the work of crafting the stage space through the use of text, place, and embodied performance,” and the latter as “the nuts-and-bolts work that goes into the craft of theater-making from conception to reception” (pp. 1, 13). The book employs both terms to conceptualize theatrical practice and meaning while drawing on both textual analysis and fieldwork. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the development of modern Senegalese theater in six chapters. The initial chapter traces the origins of Senegalese theater to 1930s colonial French West Africa, when the pontins, or African students of the elite École Normale William Ponty school, began almost incidentally to experiment with Western-style theater performance to stage their respective ethnic cultures as part of the school’s extracurricular program launched by Charles Béart (p. 3). The outcome was the birth of a colonial théâtre indigene (indigenous theater) that combined French-style dramaturgy and African music, ritual, and dance to bring African stories on stage. While the pontins were political subalterns under an assimilationist French colonial public policy, the author argues that the pontin actors—who arrived in Senegal’s historic Gorée Island from different French colonies of Africa — could use “the stage to project themselves beyond the limited roles assigned to them as colonial intermediaries,” thereby engaging in a form of “decolonizing stage space” (p. 3, 6). By writing and/or enacting local stories, such as Bernard Dadié’s Assémien Dahyle, King of the Sanwi, The Conference of Samory and Captain Peroz – 1887, or Lat Joor, the pontins staged moral values of valor and honor—typical of Jean Racine’s and Pierre Corneil’s tragedies—in order to revise or question Western colonial metanarratives about Africa. The author reads the pontins’ performances as a subtle subversion of Ponty’s scholastic stage aimed not just at repositioning African historical figures as agents of history, but also at speaking to an important audience of colonial administrators during annual events. The next chapter investigates how the colonial centres culturels français (CCF), or French cultural centers, shaped theater-making in colonial and postcolonial Senegal and broader French West Africa. It contextualizes the emergence of the cultural centers in the transformative aftermath of World War II, when West Africa’s French-educated elite embraced a transnational French identity that reconciled “Africanness” with “Frenchness” (p. 41). In the absence of Ponty’s stage, West Africa’s 107 cultural centers filled the gap and “provided a platform for reprising debates around the role of African administrators and cultural leaders within a changing colonial and institutional context” (p. 42). Like in the Ponty stage, they capitalized on the performance of culture, experimenting with “an expanding transnational notion of French identity” (p. 41). The chapter’s discussion of theater-making focuses on the colonial livelihoods and the legacies of La Coupe Théâtrale, or Theatrical Cup, initiated in 1955 by High Commissioner Bernard Cornut-Gentille for colonial West Africa’s French cultural centers. The author discusses the Coupe as a theater tournament where a series of local and regional theater competitions, performed by amateur actors in the French language, led up to inter-federal face-offs which, in turn, ended in a final competition for the cup and first place title held in the Théâtre du Palais in the colonial capital, Dakar. The Coupe, which produced successful troupes such as Côte d’Ivoire’s several-time champion Centre Culturel et Folklorique de la Côte d’Ivoire, became a heterogenous site of intra-African and French African cultural exchange, with the double purpose of disseminating French values and of francizing the colonial subjects. Aside from the Coupe’s popularization of theater in colonial West Africa, the chapter shows that its tournament structure as crafted by the cultural centers eventually shaped the cultural and sports activities of postcolonial Senegal. The author examines the example of the nawetaan soccer tournaments of the 1970s–1990s that were held in parallel with local and regional theater competitions. The third chapter explores the 1966 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar, and how it foregrounded theatrical performance for staging Black culture and pan-African identity. While Lépold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s first president and former member of the Académie Française, was the festival’s figurehead, the author rightly notes that its inception owed first to the tenacity of Senegal’s pan-Africanist author Alioune Diop, who founded the legendary Présence Africaine literary magazine. This chapter explores how the Dakar festival showcased Blackness as pan-African identity through diverse art exhibits and the performances of representatives from thirty African countries and African diasporas in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago. It also documents how Senghor’s festival became a site of neocolonial politics for France’s Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux, whose presence there—as both homme de culture and statesman—illustrated how the former metropole resorted now to culture as an instrument of postimperial influence on former colonies. While the 1966 festival had its load of controversy, the author notes that it helped craft a postindependence “Senegalese stage epic” as illustrated in Les Derniers Jours de Lat Dior, a play by William Ponty graduate Amadou Cissé Dia, and L’Exil d’Albouri, a play by Cheikh Alioune Ndoa, both of which carry a nationalist rhetoric. At the festival’s stage, the author notes that this historical epic “situates the hero’s resistance narrative within a constellation of fellow founding fathers,” thereby performing symbols of national identity (p. 71). The fourth section of the book explores the influence of Sufism—often glossed as mystical Islam—on Senegalese stagecraft. This chapter tracks the history and impact of a now extinct touring play called Bamba Mos Xam (“Who Tastes Bamba Knows”), performed by the theater troupe of the same name. First named Amicale Sérère Colette Senghor in honor of the Senegalese first lady of the time, the troupe changed its name to Bamba Mos Xam in 1968, symbolically shifting allegiance from the state to a Sufi-Islamic authority while practically devoting its work to staging the biographical stories of Ahmadu Bamba, the founder of Senegal’s Muslim brotherhood Muridiyya. The chapter describes the troupe’s metamorphosis as a response to Senghor’s nonchalance toward its performance at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, but also as a result of the actors’ disillusionment both with Francophonie and with Senghor’s centralized cultural policy and elitist nationalism. The author notes this quite well when he writes that the troupe “envisioned a stage culture untethered to notions of cultural globalism and Francophonie” (p. 87). In that endeavor, the Bamba Mos Xam stage performance illustrates how Sufi stories have successfully appropriated Western theatrical stages to center Sufi ideology and worldview, while articulating resistance to Senghor’s French-centric modernism. Furthermore, the chapter shows that the Murid audience did not simply receive the play as an artistic symbol or metaphor. Reading the play’s embodied meaning