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Encyclopédie des historiographies : Afriques, Amériques, Asies

 | 
Nathalie Kouamé
, 
Éric P. Meyer
, 
Anne Viguier

C

Concert Parties in Ghana

Représentations populaires au Ghana

Michelle Gilbert

Résumé

Les Concert Parties sont des représentations de théâtre populaire et de musique qui durent toute la nuit. Elles se déroulent dans des cours tout au long du xxe siècle, dans les campagnes et les villes du Ghana. Elles combinent de la musique jouée par un orchestre, de la comédie et des pièces moralisatrices. Petits sketchs joués au départ en anglais après l’école pour l’élite, ils sont rapidement produits dans les langues locales et s’adressent à un public jeune moins éduqué. Les thèmes hybrides reflètent les influences étrangères changeant au fil du temps, tout en étant ancrés dans des pratiques antérieures comme celle des contes de l’araignée Ananse. La publicité des concerts était faite par de grandes toiles peintes mêlant le quotidien au fantastique, exprimant autant le plaisir que la peur.

Texte intégral

Introduction

1Concert Parties were a popular musical and theatrical genre in the former Gold Coast and post‑independence Ghana. For an historian, they are a good source, however unconventional, for understanding change in West African social life: as an evolving self‑representation, they provide an insider view of a society in transition. Over the course of the 20th century, the performance has increased in length and changed from English to the vernacular Akan language, outside influences have merged with the indigenous story‑telling event, and the audience has changed from the elite to that of the common people.

2“Concerts” began in the 1920s as short after school skits in English for and by the elite: they were influenced by Hollywood silent movies and Christian nativity plays. In the 1940s and ‘50s, political references were added, first to World War ii and later to Independence. By the second half of the 20th century, the Concert Party had evolved into groups of travelling actors and highlife musicians who performed all night popular music, comedy and theatre events in the local language throughout rural and urban Ghana in open courtyards or arenas. A Concert began at 8 p.m. with urban popular dance music and songs, changed after a few hours to the band’s own highlife compositions, and after an hour of slap stick comedy at mid‑night, a multi‑act (sometimes as many as 20) morality play ended at dawn. The interludes were signaled by musical refrains: highlife, lyrics commenting on the plot, or philosophical reflections. Liberal use of traditional proverbs and a moralistic ending were signs of a good play.

3The performances were advertised by huge painted boards, 6 feet by 7 feet, in sets of three to five that were displayed at the cross-roads of the town. The paintings and play were of hybrid subjects that reflected rapid social change and outside influences, yet at the same time remained essentially local. They combined vaudeville, morality drama and Christian revivalist sermons.

Performance

4The main indigenous source for the Concert Party was the Akan tale about Ananse, the trickster spider hero. These tales generally told at night, included mime, audience response and proverbs with moral messages. Musical interludes in the narrative structured the mime. Early outside influences included nativity plays performed at Christian missions and silent movies that came to Ghana in the 1920s and 30s with ragtime songs, tap dancing, and stand‑up comedians of American vaudeville and “blackface” minstrel shows.

5The first Concert Parties in the early 1920s addressed a small urban educated elite. They were short comic plays performed in English at the end of the school year or at elite venues such as the Optimism Club in Sekondi or the Palladium in Accra. The coastal Fante area was the first to encounter European traders and sailors and they experienced Christianity before the interior.

6The actors in the plays were originally all men. In the 1930s, Concert performances had three main characters: the Joker, the Gentleman, and the Lady Impersonator. The narratives were framed by the Joker who was a fusion of the mischievous Ananse, a hero/anti‑hero full of ambition and folly, and the “blackface” actor of early Concert days. The role was known as the “Bob”, after the well‑known Fante comedian Bob Johnson. Much of the comedy was broad, coarse, and robustly farcical. The partially scripted plays gradually became longer and the number of actors increased, though they still portrayed conventional stereotypes of men and women. By the 1940s the plays included political themes such as “The Coronation of King George vi and “The Downfall of Adolf Hitler”. In the 1950s the plays supported the independence movement and addressed corruption in high places. The Akan language was used throughout and the guitar band highlife music embellished the play so that play and music were inseparable. In the 1960s and 1970s, Concerts were at their height with 50 to 60 groups touring the country. Due to economic hardship, government curfew and competition from lower cost video screenings and from travelling high‑tech light shows with recorded rather than live music, Concert performances dwindled in popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the 1990s, audiences had become smaller. The appeal was to a young, unsophisticated semi‑literate working‑class constituency of rural or first‑generation city‑dwellers: mostly boys aged 14‑25, though at festival time the genders were more mixed. Women traders who attended two‑day markets also attended Concert as a safe way to spend the night. The comedy skit that introduced the play and separated it from everyday life was largely based on incongruities in the use of words and behavior. As the bands toured from one part of Ghana to another, they adapted the jokes to be ethnically specific, but the message was rarely politically or sexually subversive.

7The formulaic themes of the plays in the 1990s varied: the abuse of power by greedy religious leaders who claimed to acquire knowledge from supernatural beings and God as in “The Judgement Day” by Osofo Gyamfi; witchcraft, rivalry and competition in chieftaincy politics as in “When a Royal Dies, we Take Him Home” by the successful bandleader and recording artist Obooba J. A. Adofo; or the jealousy and envy of an older powerful woman towards her junior, as in A. B. Crentsil’s play “If you Do not Allow Your Brother to Climb” written by D. K. Nyarko that resembled the readily available Grimm’s fairy tale of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. All were morality tales and all had a tidy ending in which the intended victims survived and the evil perpetrators died. Fragmented references to Christian, Islamic and traditional religious practices co‑existed in the narratives as in everyday life, and the traditional and the global formed a synthesis of great power. Jealousy and envy, wealth and poverty, co‑wife rivalry, orphans, inheritance disputes, chieftaincy affairs, witchcraft, ancestors, contests between Satan and traditional deities were all common themes. Competition between Christian and traditional religious practices was also a focus. The largely young concert party audience faced with the ambiguities of modern life and harsh economic and social problems derived moral instruction and were emotionally uplifted by the plays’ guide to “correct” behavior.

8In the 1990s Pentecostal‑charismatic churches with strong international links were embraced by the fervently religious youth. Most of these churches discouraged their members from attending Concerts. They opposed dancing and the portrayal of “devils” in the paintings and plays. A few, however, tried to gain exposure by having their own biblical plays performed at the National Theatre in Accra or on television. These plays were short (45 minutes), more mundane, theatrically more realistic than the original Concerts, and largely devoid of traditional deities and mediums; they reflected a difference in the sophistication and gender of the audience.

  • 1 Meyer, 2015.

9By the end of the 1990s, due to economic hardships - the high cost of musical instruments and of transportation from one venue to another - and to competition from lower cost video screenings, Concerts began to disappear. The action, horror, fantasy and biblical movies, largely from Hollywood, Nigeria and India that replaced Concerts were first shown in small video‑centers in rural and urban areas that were powered by generators; later with the spread of electricity, they were viewed in people’s homes on television sets. The appeal was to school children on holiday, young boys in urban areas who did menial work, and members of evangelical and Pentecostal‑charismatic churches and prayer groups who shared an imagination of evil in which witchcraft, money and family problems were recurrent features.1 Many young commercial artists painted posters on recycled flour sacks to advertise these foreign films: they re‑figured the images on the video wrapper to increase the violence or playful fantasy. Both Concert Party and video paintings conflated transnational and traditional symbols; for both, the meanings were unstable.

Paintings

  • 2 Gilbert, 2000.

10The announcement of a Concert Party performance was visual: a number of large colorful paintings on wooden boards were erected at the cross‑roads of the town with the name of the band and the title of the play. The paintings were commissioned by the band‑leader who would tell the painter the outline of the play; some bandleaders even gave the artist a sketch of the images he wanted portrayed. A number of artists in the coastal Fante area created these paintings that advertised the Concert. The most acclaimed master of the genre was the artist Mark Anthony (d. 2010), a Fante from Agona Swedru. The striking images on the hinged plywood boards depicted highlights of the play, but there was often considerable discrepancy between the plot and characters in the actual Concert performance and the images that advertised it.2 The paintings depicted violent and disturbing fantasies as well as the realities of daily life. There were mythic dwarves with backward facing feet and hairy forest giants, angels and devils from Christian prayer groups, images from 1960s Hindu religious pamphlets and popular Indian films, as well as from 1980s Hollywood movies - Transylvanian vampires and Jurassic Park animals. There were images from King Kong, Wizard of Oz, and Goldilocks, portrayals of Muslim holy men, Christian evangelists, and traditional spirits. The suggestion was that of a new morality with no complete break with the “traditional”. The varied sources were freely combined, re‑worked and transformed. The extraordinary was juxtaposed with the ordinary and the paintings elicited fear, compassion and amusement. The paintings and play together presented a moral arena for the war between good and evil, fresh interpretations that were revelatory. The layering of disparate and unrelated images was not haphazard, but was done with an awareness of the reaction of shock and attraction both pleasurable and fearful. The images were meant to horrify and entice, they were meant to be enigmatic. The paintings were used for at most two years by which time the play would have been seen and a new one created. Old paintings that had not disintegrated were recycled as storage boxes, screen‑doors or kiosks.

Figures 1 and 2. Two concert party paintings by Mark Anthony, Ghana for the City Boys Band, Int.

Figures 1 and 2. Two concert party paintings by Mark Anthony, Ghana for the City Boys Band, Int.

Légende: acrylic on plywood

Photo: Michelle Gilbert 1998

11The content and language of the all‑night multi‑act plays, the messages of the popular highlife songs, and the changing composition of the audience all illustrate fundamental trends and changes in Ghanaian society. The startlingly bold and multi‑vocal symbols displayed on the large paintings that advertised the performance visually replicate in ambiguously fragmented ways the multiple foreign and local elements that were seamlessly combined in the music and theatrical performance. Examination of this theatrical genre over time illustrates changes in Ghanaian society as well as persisting abstract reflections on good and evil.

Bibliographie

Books

Bame Kwabena N., 1981, Come to Laugh: A Study of African Traditional Theatre in Ghana, Baafour Educational Enterprises, Accra. [9780936508085]

Barber Karin, Collins John & Ricard Alain, 1997, West African Popular Theatre, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and James Currey, Oxford, 304 p. [9780852552445]

Cole Catherine, 2001, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 196 p. [9780253214362]

Gilbert Michelle, 2000, Hollywood Icons, Local Demons: Ghanaian Popular Paintings by Mark Anthony, Trinity College, Hartford [exhibition catalogue], 72. p.

Meyer Birgit, 2015, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana, 408. p. [9780520287686]

Paper

Gilbert Michelle, 1998, “Concert Parties, Paintings and Performance”, Journal of Religion in Africa xxvii (1), p. 62‑92.

Notes

1 Meyer, 2015.

2 Gilbert, 2000.

Table des illustrations

Titre Figures 1 and 2. Two concert party paintings by Mark Anthony, Ghana for the City Boys Band, Int.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pressesinalco/docannexe/image/23389/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 37M
Légende Légende: acrylic on plywood
Crédits Photo: Michelle Gilbert 1998
URL http://books.openedition.org/pressesinalco/docannexe/image/23389/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 36M

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