An Analysis of Major Themes, Structures and Forms in Selected Modern African Drama.

Abstract

Modern African drama consists of Africa's written plays. It is an artistic endeavour which grew out of two literary cultures: the Indigenous oral and the Western dramaturgical traditions. This paper, therefore, is a descriptive review of major themes and forms of written drama across Africa. The review is restricted in scope to selected popular plays of established African writers, which have inspired popular categorisations of modern African drama based on their themes and forms. This paper reveals the progress in this specific literary genre of African literature and affirms that it has helped to give the uniqueness that has undoubtedly distinguished it as an established literary tradition. In this review, it is also observed that the wide varieties of cultural, historical and political experiences of Africa have helped to influence and shape the emergence of the themes and forms of her written plays, though the same can be said about the two other genres of the continental literature, namely, prose and poetry. This review has the potentials of reminding African and non-African literary scholars that the peculiar experiences of a people play a tremendous role in shaping their literature and the literary standards that should be used in judging their literature. The paper concludes that judging by the variety of its themes and formal features, the written dramatic tradition in Africa has grown in leaps and bounds such that it has become a veritable source of narrative knowledge.