This essay tries to pin down how a book or play influences a reader. Specifically I want to chart some of the influences that Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest and I will Marry When I Want by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ have had on me personally and on my theatre practice in Africa. I shall try to show how, in addition to a play’s content, other determining factors are important, such as the age of the reader, the place where s/he reads the text, the performance or non-performance of the text and previous influences that the author has had on the reader. That is, a dramatist’s influence is part of an extended conversation, debate or even argument with the reader/ audience. I suggest also that, in an African context, influence is often a collective process which is not just a dialogue between author and reader, but an extended set of mutual influences between author and various interlocking audiences and readerships.

Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest

The first time I read a sub-Saharan text of any genre was in 1963 as an undergraduate student in the library of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne where I stumbled upon the Oxford edition of Five Plays by Wole Soyinka. At the time I was dissatisfied with the traditional English ‘lit. crit.’ fare that I was being fed in the English Department lectures, and I proceeded to do a lot of extra-curricular reading of Asian, Caribbean and Latin American novels. Soyinka’s Five Plays was the only sub-Saharan African text I could find. The first play I read in the collection was The Lion and the Jewel, which I enjoyed thoroughly, as I made mental comparisons with Molière and Goldsmith. My rather complacent pigeon-holing was completely shattered by the next play I selected, The Strong Breed, and even more confused by The Swamp Dwellers. I realized that if I were to make sense of these plays I would need far more extensive reading of African history, anthropology, sociology and literature. Over the next five or six years I made forays into this material, but it was in competition with other intellectual interests – Marxism, cultural studies, race relations, and environmental issues. My reading of black power texts (Angela Davis) led me onto Pan African texts – Du Bois, Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah, as well as Negritude poets, Césaire and Senghor.