Baobab Africa

Theatre reflects the deepness of a people

Professor Jenkeri Zakari Okwori is Head of Department, Theatre and Performing Arts, Ahmadu  Bello University (ABU), Zaria. An experienced actor, director, and producer, Professor Jenkeri Zakari Okwori has been teaching Participatory/ Development Communication at the ABU since 1984. In his office in Zaria, Okwori shares with SEGUN ORUAME and HALIMA MUSA some of his thoughts on the state of the theatre in Nigeria, the concept of Nigerian citizenship and argues that the absence of a Nigerian identity is responsible for the inability of the country to have a sustainable theatre form that could project its ideals (if there are at all any). Full of humour, Okwori believes that but for the failure of the country’s political leadership and absence of vision among this class, the theatre would have become a formidable tool for national development and a rallying ground to create a Nigerian Identity.

You have done quite a lot of work on the Nigerian media, and you are a scholar in communication arts, between the times you did your last research on the Nigerian media and now, would you say that the media has become more independent and more assertive?
I don’t think so. I think that the level of independence has not changed but I think that there is more certainty in the way the media are approaching issues in the Nigerian state now more than before. This because the current government has been talking about the rule of law, and seems to be respecting the rule of law and that has emboldened the media to speak out more coherently. But I think the most fundamental crisis of the media generally is the fact that, largely most of the people in the media are not properly trained, and so they are not professionalized, and that has consequences for in-depth approach to news gathering, approach to reporting, approach to analysis of information. Then there is a second problem which has to do with the fact that they are not properly paid. In our research we came across situations where some proprietors of media organisations actually do not pay salaries. They give their workers identity card of the company and say this is your meal  ticket. In other words you are to go and make a living for yourself by interviewing government officials, for in stance, who will in turn settle you in other to publish the interview.

Are you saying the structure of the media has helped to compromise it?
Yes! The media is highly compromised.

If you believe this current government is much more tolerant of the media, how do you reconcile this with the closure of Channel TV and Leadership Newspaper? The Leadership paper was not closed at least the president went to court, which was what we expected in a democratic setting. I can bet that if that had happened in the previous regime, it would have been different. But the other aspect that I will like to mention is the change in the media environment between the time we were conducting our research and now. At that time, there was only one community radio licensed and it happened to be a  university based radio station, the University of Lagos. Since then, about eight or nine licences have been granted including the one for the Ahmadu Bello University, my university here in Zaria. Nigeria was lagging behind in terms of community radio but by the time these stations come on board, we would also begin to join the league of countries with high number of community radio licence.


This is the age of home videos and cinemas, where does that leave the theatre and performing arts and unlike in America and even near by South Africa where the theatre culture is very vibrant, would it be proper to say that the theatre is dead in Nigeria? And then who killed the theatre, government, you the practitioners or the lack of audience?

 The theatre is not dead. The theatre is more alive in Nigeria than before and more alive than can be imagined. Some theatres may be dead though. In Ahmadu Bello University, we have a performance place called the Drama Village, if you place any performance there, you cannot contain the crowd that is coming. So when we say the theater is dead. Dead where? In most places where you have this kind of concentration of people, the theater is alive. But inside the cities where people do not have the culture of going to watch plays then there is a problem. And of course we have to link it with the larger problem of security and other social constraints. People are scared of going out in the night because of obvious reasons. Apart from that, people are battling to eat so the theater becomes an elite thing. But if you go to the joints in the evenings, and if you go to the working class people I can bet you that the theater is striving there. The theatre is still alive among this people. You  have the kwaghir performances of the Tiv people touring round the country. You have other  kinds of traditional performances that are going on and are updated. And then if you move further from the cities and you go to rural communities where more than 70% are based. Theatre forms of performances such as the traditional performances are still the means through which the community comes together; they are still the means through which the community establishes its oneness; they are still the means though which the community connects and adds a sense of belonging to the people. Spirituality they are still the means through which the community celebrate their identity. And guess what? This has also been imported into the cities. Every year, we mark the Idoma Day, we bring people performances  from various groups the whole day from morning till we close in the evening. The day is devoted to performances and exotic dances.

Look at the national theatre, the rot, the rustiness of that structure as a symbol of the state of the theater. What went wrong at that level is it that government does not appreciate the theatre as a tool for community participation?
We should disarticulate that link between the state of the national theatre and the performance theatre. The question is which theatre is dying? The literary theatre, the kind of theatre that is perpetuated in the national theatre is in a crisis for obvious reasons. The edifice itself is dying. Why?! It is dying because when it was not constructed with any research focus, there was no cultural policy until several years later, and even the cultural policy you don’t have a copy I don’t have a copy. It has no focus. We have a national troupe, whose main task revolves around the act of somebody to just write plays for them and they perform. And because people are looking for exotic materials from Nigeria, they package performances in that framework. They pick cultures and dances and so on and put it together and they go off to Brazil, Japan and the rest of the world and that becomes a  national theater. If you take the example of the Cuba National Theatre, you see where the national theatre becomes the ideological spread shift of a nation; you see that’s where the heart of a nation, the identity of a nation is projected. Our colleagues just returned from Tel Aviv and there is a national institute of Israeli theater and all they are doing is to research into Israeli performance forms and perform it on a regular basis. Do we have that here? No!

Why are we not there?
First of all the cultural policy is not clear, is not properly articulated. It was made without prerequisite interest and feed back from different stakeholders and then the government has never looked at the arts as a development tool, as an instrument where they could project the identity and ideology of us as a nation because we don’t even have one. In a situation where people simply look at governance as a place where you go to leverage resources for your private pocket and for where you are from, you can’t expect any national ideology. Nobody is looking at Nigeria in the same sense in which Cubans look at Cuba or Israeli look at Israel. The national theatre or the cultural policy has no real link to a Nigerian identity because we don’t have a Nigerian identity. We did a research and we were  going around asking people what is citizenship, no society in Nigeria has a name for a concept called citizenship. What we have is ethnicity, what we have is the son of the soil, people trace their identity, their citizenship to Nigeria via the prism of ethnicity and people define themselves by their ethnic group first of all. So there is no Nigeria identity that you can even say you want to push forward. And we trace the problem to the constitution. We discovered that constitutionally, we have been divided. The constitution says that you are a Nigerian because your father happens to come from a community indigenous to Nigeria; that means I cannot claim that I am a Nigerian in Kaduna State even though I  have been here for over 20 years. Because I cannot trace my identity through my father to this location here I still have to fill in my form that I am from Benue State, you understand.

In other words, there is no Nigerian culture?
Nothing like a Nigerian culture instead we have three hundred and seventy four plus cultures.

When you talk about American culture, you are talking about a country with diverse racial identities, how do they come to harmonize their diversity to have the American identity? Is it also possible for us to arrive at that?
Yes! It is very possible and we are pushing for it. If I were born in Kentucky, I can decide to be a New Yorker and I can become the governor of New York constitutionally. The constitution in Nigeria disarticulates Nigeria along the original disarticulations, how do you forge a national identity when the constitution says you are from Anambra State therefore you are Igbo, first and foremost not that you are a Nigerian first and foremost. If for example the constitution says once I am in Kaduna State for six years I am entitled to contest for Kaduna State governorship, if I am denied I can go to court and enforce the rights; it means that I don’t have to bother about whether I am originally from Benue  State. As long as the constitutions recognizes me first as a Nigerian before being one from Kaduna or Benue state then my area of origin becomes irrelevant. And once it becomes irrelevant where else will I look up to but the constitution that confers this authority on me to belong to Kaduna State? Once this is in place, issues like settler concept will just disappear. It may not disappear over night but obviously you can then go to court to fight it.

Prof, you earlier talked about a cultural framework that has no clear-cut policy thrust. What then can the ministry of culture and tourism do in terms of creating a national identity and encouraging the growth of the literary theatre?
Year in, year out, the ministry gets a grant from the government, they pay salaries for the workers, and do one or two projects, the year runs out; next year is the same story and what are these projects? May be national festival of arts and culture, may be the Abuja carnival, and may be another project. That’s it! You hear nothing else. There is no intellectual grounding, no intellectual build up, no intellectual research to say let us build a consciousness; let us develop an ideology for this country. I mean you know that until recently a lot if people do not know that Hollywood was actually supported by the American State because it was projecting an American culture and American ideal. And they actually sat down to articulate how they will project this American ideal. It was only recently that an attempt was made by the National Film and Video Censors Board to bring people together to begin to talk about things like that. To see if film producers, actors, everybody can come to one kind of consciousness and then each of our artistic products can begin to articulate a Nigerian ideology but where is the ideology? Where is the identity? Where is even the way of the focus of where we are going?

In a nut shell, constitutionally we can’t even have an ideology as it were?
We can’t because of the way our governance is framed. It is not framed with the consciousness of somebody who has a vision and would expect to have some level of support for his vision from the people down at the bottom. Our governance does not emanate from the conscious participation of the people below so there is no vision that evolves as a result of the articulation of the people below so it is difficult to get everybody’s hand that will be supporting that vision. And if there is no vision to pursue, there is no ideology to establish.

We have lived through political instability that should have created a lot of materials for up coming literary writers but that don’t seem to be working. Why is there a drought of great writers in the likes of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and J P Clark?
You are making a very valid point but what you should know is that there is a politics of knowledge production and those days if you should count them they were one, two three, four .and the publishers Longman Heinemann and so on, were making a lot of money by promoting these writers. I can tell you that for every one writer you have in that period you have one thousand more now. Even here right on this campus I know over five people who have written literary woks: poetry, drama, you can count them but what is happening is that big giants are no longer publishing them. Instead these people are publishing themselves. You print one thousand copies and you get one course to accept it to be taught in the school and they buy it, you break even, and you keep it and add it to your arsenal of saying I have written plays. There is somebody in our department who has seven plays; there are two or three people who have published plays. They are self published so it goes nowhere; nobody  knows about them. And if you go further, they are so many people only those people who break away from Nigeria, who get blue chip publishers at the international level are the ones you get to hear of. I can tell there are beautiful stories in the country but because the politics of publishing does not favor those groups of people they have not been able to break even. You send your manuscript to Heinemann, Heinemann sends the script to this people; this same old people it’s a big debate and they shoot it down like a cartel. And it’s only them who keep writing, who keep getting promoted.



There is a politics of knowledge production and those days if you should count them they were one, two three, four [writers] and the publishers Longman Heinemann and so on, were making a lot of money by promoting these writers.


There are beautiful stories in the country but because the politics of publishing does not favour those groups of people they have not been able to break even. You send your manuscript to Heinemann, Heinemann sends the script to this people; this same old people it’s a big debate and they shoot it down like a cartel. And it’ only them who keep writing, who keep getting promoted.

 

 

 

 

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