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Langaa RPCIG - N. Gomia

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295 pages

English

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This book draws on years of rich empirical research on radio drama production in Cameroon to offer a strikingly new perspective in Development Theatre discourse in Africa. Chronicling the history and evolution of Development Theatre practice in Anglophone Africa and arguing for literary forms that address the basic everyday realities of ordinary people in a medium they understand, the book revisits the crucial question of utilitarian literature in a continent that continues to brandish a begging bowl even as it celebrates fifty years of independence. Radio Theatre�s inherent latitude to reach the masses in a manner and matter that they identify with makes of it an invaluable albeit often neglected sub-genre in the universe of Development Theatre. Reaching an enlarged audience through radio drama productions � plays that address the rustic, ascetic and practical realities of the people � is liberating. Through radio plays and their capacity to provide for an enormous degree of authenticity, ordinary people are able to enhance their self-esteem. Like main stream Development Theatre, Radio Drama sets out to address the concerns of all in an all-embracing approach that explores interactive learning characterized by continuous questioning of and adaptation to reality. It disparages the omniscience of the superstructure meant to be perceived as indispensable and all-knowing. As a medium of development communication with unique aesthetic qualities found in and not limited to sound and silence, Radio Drama creates events and condenses reality into dramatic constellations with a high sense of authenticity that invites its audience to participate in the creation process with a strong sense of direction in a story, a plot and a moral. This people-oriented culture re-animation process is the fertile ground for grassroots empowerment. It is the point of departure for feasible development initiatives that this book explores.

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Publié par	Langaa RPCIG
Date de parution	28 juin 2012
Nombre de lectures	2
EAN13	9789956727933
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1235€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

VICTOR N. GOMIA

Mobilizing the Hordes Radio Drama as Development Theatre in Sub-Saharan Africa Victor N. Gomia

L a ng a a R esea rch & P u blishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon Langaagrp@gmail.comwww.langaa-rpcig.net Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective orders@africanbookscollective.com www.africanbookcollective.com ISBN: 9956-727-54-7 ©Victor N. Gomia 2012

DISCLAIMER All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Langaa RPCIG.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………... v Preface………………………………………………………….. vii Introduction…………………………………………………….. xi List of Abbreviations…………………………………………….Xv Chapter One: Alternative Development Theatre………………... 1 Chapter Two: Theoretical Basis and Critical Focus…………….. 23 Chapter Three: Development Theatre: Progress, Impediments and an Alternative Approach…………………………………………… 45 Chapter Four: African Radio Drama as Theatre for the Multitude……………………………………………………….. 93 Chapter Five: Radio Theatre Aesthetics: Engineering Development Initiatives on the Air……………………………………………. 139 Chapter Six: Development Discourse in Selected Cameroon Anglophone Radio Plays………………………………………... 191

iii

Conclusion……………………………………………………… 233 Bibliography…………………………………………………….. 255

Acknowledgements This book is based in part on research carried out at the Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaftliche, University of Bayreuth. Numerous people gave me support in the course of this research. I am particularly grateful to my Doktorvater, Prof. Dr. Eckhard Breitinger for the assistance he offered me during my stay in Bayreuth. I am thankful for the advice given to me by Prof. Bole Butake of the University of Yaounde 1. I am profoundly grateful to the Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Delaware State University for approving my request for Academic Enrichment Program Award, an award that facilitated the field work during the last phase of this work. I am indebted to Dr. Joe Amoako, Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages, my colleagues in the Department and Dr. Marshall Stevenson, Dean of CAHSS for their unflinching support. This work is dedicated to my wife, Nelly Tutuwan Gomia and our daughter, Nahsima Nchuyeke Gomia; the greatest support came from them.

PrefaceIt is with great personal pleasure that I introduce the reader to this seminal work of Dr. Victor Gomia’s on the cultural possibilities of Development Theatre delivered in the medium of African radio drama. My encounter with Dr. Gomia in August 2005 was an eventful and fortunate one, I think for both of us. While serving as Chair of the Division of Literature, Languages, and Philosophy at Kentucky State University, I was desperately on the look for an additional instructor of English at a time when our enrollment was greater than expected. Serendipitously, Prof. Gomia appeared in my office at precisely the right time, having just immigrated to the United States. He was at the point of having completed his doctoral thesis, the germ of the current book, but was awaiting his final defense for completion of the Ph.D. Having had a number of Cameroon nationals serving in our Division before, I was well aware of their tradition of rigorous academic preparation and strong work ethic, and Dr. Gomia proved to be no exception. He received the appropriate work visa and immigration papers and was welcomed into our Department of English, where he taught until the end of spring 2011. During a summer hiatus, he was able to travel to the University of Bayreuth in Germany, where he had been doing a good deal of research, and successfully defended his thesis. My association with him was not only the normal professional relationship one would expect between an administrator and faculty member, but took a distinctive intellectual turn. As a professor of philosophy with wide interdisciplinary interests, I teach and do research not only in my field of specialization, but also in Kentucky State’s unique Integrative Studies Program (IGS), an academic division devoted to the exploration of cross-disciplinary interactions and cultural history. As part of my duties in IGS, I regularly teach an undergraduate course entitled “The Modern World,” a course required of most baccalaureate degree-seeking students, which focuses on intellectual and cultural revolutions from the vii

Enlightenment to the emergence of the developing world, post-colonial literature, and the global environmental crisis. During the sessions on post-colonial literature, where we read Frantz Fanon and Chinua Achebe in particular, I would consult with Dr. Gomia; moreover, I invited him to give guest lectures on the history of post-colonial thought and literature with an eye toward assaying the roles of Fanon and Achebe. These lectures were most successful in engaging student interest. Indeed, on the basis of these lectures, I found Dr. Gomia to be quite learned in the history of modern African culture, and I personally learned a great deal from him, gaining a much deeper cultural perspective and context for the study of Fanon and Achebe. While I am not a specialist in this field, I believe I can say with confidence that one of the virtues of the present work is the critical survey it contains of the relevant literatures in the African humanities. As a non-specialist, I certainly found the critical discussion of the literature to be accessible. Thus, the book will have scholarly value, irrespective of whether or not one accepts the particular theses Prof. Gomia is proposing. In reading this work, I was struck in particular by the following passage which speaks to the essence of what he is attempting to argue: “The communal participation occasioned by Development Theatre creates a forum for the appreciation of views that have been relegated to the background since independence in Africa. It reconsiders and takes into consideration the ‘old culture’ issue thereby creating the culture of dialogue that sees development as a process and not an imposition by the political or intellectual elite within or without the developing country. In this way, both the political and intellectual elite would recognise the political and creative potential that the people at the grassroots possess.” For the sake of the development of democratic pluralism, health and prosperity in African nations, I hope that Dr. Gomia’s viii

recommendations as expressed above are taken seriously. As a number of philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Paul Ricoeur have pointed out (in their different ways), literary narrative possesses a power to reach audiences and to advance social reforms far better than theoretical treatises that speak primarily to elite intellectual audiences. To allude to one of Rorty’s examples, the “Coda” to Dickens’Bleak Housedid far more to institute social and th economic reforms in 19 century England than did any social scientific treatise of the time or any philosophical argument of J. S. Mill’s. If this notion of the “power of narrative” is sound, then it seems to me that Dr. Gomia’s theses in this book warrant careful and serious consideration. While, as I have argued in my several publications on the philosophy of technology, technologies – including media technologies – are morally ambiguous (they can render disastrous as well as very positive results), it appears to me that the objectives of Development Theatre are toward sustaining community and enhancing democratization. In the context of current African political and cultural struggles, these appear to me to be very laudable objectives. I thus recommend both this work and its author. George W. ShieldsDivision of Literature, Languages and Philosophy Kentucky State University