African Ritual Theatre

the long version

The two plays translated here by a team of Cameroonian scholars form part of the vast ritual repertoire which has secured Werewere Liking a place of honor in Cameroon stage, indeed even in the African theatrical scene. The plays re-enact rituals emerging from the grassroots lore of tropical Africa, raise fundamental issues for the benefit of contemporary African audiences, and derive their compelling power from traditional theatrical aesthetics. Liking's dramatic art synthetically harmonizes the elements which characterize the present socio-political and cultural situation in Cameroon and, by extension, in Africa. Through her ritual matrix she focuses on the country's/continent's past without extolling it and at the same time she succeeds in penetrating the whole fabric of contemporary society in order to criticize it. This possibility of her ritual plays to shift from one level to the other, from rituals to topical issues without seeming didactic, gives it a sophistication and an overwhelming impact that one hardly finds in realistic drama so prevalent in Francophone Africa. This mighty statement by one of the most innovative African woman dramatists to date makes The Power of Um and A New Earth, two of her earliest plays translated here into English, a must-reading for Anglo-American scholars and students of African literature.