Performance Research

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Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature

Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

To cite this article: Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o (2007) Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature,
Performance Research, 12:3, 4-7, DOI: 10.1080/13528160701771253

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528160701771253

Published online: 11 Mar 2010.

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Notes towards a Performance Theory of
Orature
n g ũ g ı̃ w a t h i o n g ’ o
The rise of Performance Studies in the academy,
a rise that begins with Richard Schechner and
company when they transformed the graduate
theatre studies at NYU into a Department of
Performance Studies, and now championed
continually in TDR, has brought about what
amounts to a Kuhnian paradigmatic shift in
performance thought. In this shift, theatre is
one of equally valid performance genres
including sports, games, carnivals and street
processions. Theatre is not the top of a
hierarchy of performance genres; it is part of a
network. A paradigmatic shift in thought is only
so if it brings about a revolution in how we look
at that which we have been looking at already
and sheds new light at previous orderings of
knowledge. For instance, although Marxism as a
system comes into being with Marx and Engels,
it has been able to shed light on pre-capitalist
social formations and on many areas of
knowledge from the arts to social science, not
to mention political theory and practice.
George Thompson’s illuminating work
Studies in Ancient Greek Society owed its
method to Marxian dialectics. A focus on
performance brings out the obvious: that much
of our relationship to reality, even to the
everyday, is negotiated through performance.
The invisible is often made visible through
performance. It is in the light of the all-pervasive
presence of Performance that I want to look at
orature; a term that may help shed light on a
whole lot of other arts and systems of artistic
thought.
Pe rf o rm a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 2 ( 3 ) , p p . 4 – 7 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 0 0 7
D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 0 7 01 7 7 1 2 5 3
The term orature has been used variously
since the Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu coined it
in the early seventies of the last century to
counter the tendency to see the arts
communicated orally and received aurally as an
inferior or a lower rung in the linear
development of literature. He was rejecting the
term oral literature. But he never lived long
enough to develop the concept; his life was
untimely cut short by the brutal Idi Amin
dictatorship, whose agents poisoned him in
Nigeria during the famous Festac ’77. Idi Amin
hated critical performing artists, and Pio Zirimu
was one in a list of his victims. But his brief
definition of orature as the use of utterance as
an aesthetic means of expression remains
tantalizingly out there, pointing to an oral
system of aesthetics that did not need validity
from the literary. The term however has spread,
and one reads variously of Hawaiian Orature,
Namibian Orature, Ghanaian Orature and many
others. Despite the widespread usage, very few
have engaged with the term to tease out the
various theoretical possibilities in the term.
Pitika Ntuli of South Africa is one of the few
who have attempted to take the term beyond its
Zirimian usage.
Pitika Ntuli is a very talented sculptor, poet
and storyteller, now back home in South Africa.
But in his years of exile in the London of the
eighties of the last century, and working with
the multinational, multi-continental
performance group African Dawn, he reacted
strongly to what he saw as the atomization of
4
004-007 771253-Thiong'o (JB) 30/11/07 17:26 Page 5
life and culture in Western bourgeois society
and saw in the oral-aural arts of the African
Notes towards a Performance
people a healing opposite, a wholeness. In the
arts of his childhood, he saw no boundaries
between art forms. Instead, what he saw was
fluidity between drama, story, song, discourse
and performance. In ‘Orature: A Self-Portrait’,
Pitika claimed that a fusion of all art forms was
the basic characteristic of orature. But it was
more than that, it was kind of Gestalt, the
wholeness of all being bigger than the parts that
contributed to it. He put it more poetically:
‘Orature is more than the fusion of all art forms.
It is the conception and reality of a total view of
life. It is the capsule of feeling, thinking,
imagination, taste and hearing. It is the flow of
a creative spirit’ (1988: 215). He expressed the
interconnectedness of phenomena in terms of a
‘beginning come full circle on a higher plane’
(215). Like Pio Zirimu before him, Pitika Ntuli
never elaborated on the piece, but it remains the
most intriguing treatment of the concept,
particularly its central core of fusion and
connections of features and elements that made
up the wholeness.
Underlying the specific features and elements
contributing to the wholeness was the
Weltanschauung assumed by orature. This takes
for granted the normality of the connection
between nature, nurture, super-natural,
supernurtural and, we may add now,
cybernurture (cyberture) and cybernurtural, as
if each of these was an expression of the
primary substance that connected them all. In
the Gı̃kũyũ system of thought detectable in the
language, largely Bantu, this substratum
(substance) is ndũ. Mũ-ndũ stands for Human;
Kı̃-ndũ for a Thing; ha-ndũ and kũ-ndũ for
place/space; Ũ-ndũ for phenomenon; and hı̃-ndı̃
where ũ becomes ı̃, stands for time or, more
appropriately, space-time. The verb that
expresses being nı̃ is derived from ndũ. Nı̃ niı̃, I
am, Nı̃ kı̃o, it is etc. Ndũ then stands for that
which connects material and abstract being, the
being of phenomenon of nature, nurture,
thought and spirit. In my novel Wizard of the
5
Crow, one of the characters, called AG, goes
round the fictional territory of Aburiria looking
for this Ndũ because of his belief in the
interconnection of phenomena. Ndũ is the
primary substance of all being, and it expresses
the interdependence of all existence.
Humans are definitely part of nature. In that
sense they are not different from animals and
plants that all depend on the same environment
of earth, air, water and sun. They are products of
the same mother-environment. Orature takes
that for granted. Hence in the narratives of
orature, humans, birds, animals and plants
interact freely, they often assume each others’
forms, including language. Humans in distress
talk to birds and give them messages, the most
famous being the biblical dove sent by Noah to
survey the land after the Floods. The Homeric
epics The Iliad and The Odyssey assume the
same interactive mutuality between the various
realms of being. The most clear about this is
Ovid’s Metamorphosis where different forms of
being change into each other – change itself, in
fact, being the central theme. The classical epics
in all cultures are rooted in orature: even when
recorded in writing, they are realizable only in
oration, narration orally. I have talked to a
number of Indian people about Mahabharata
and Ramayana, and I have not yet come across
any who has actually read the epics, but they
know most of the stories in the epics, these
having been transmitted to them orally. What is
often arrested in writing is a particular version,
a particular rendering, which is what J. P. Clark-
Bekederemo says of his written Ijaw Epic, The
Ozidi Saga, which he took down as performed by
particular performers at a particular moment.
Nature, then, in orature manifests itself as a
web of connections of mutual dependence, the
Pitikian full circle. This web of connections is
the language of nature, or, rather, the various
aspects of nature are in active communications
within themselves and with others. Within each
biological unit is the entire communication
system between and within cells. This system of
communication can be seen in the rain circle of
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water, vapour, clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and
seas, the subject of poetry and song. It is seen in
the interaction between bees and butterflies
with flowers, a process that enables fertilization
between plants. Eliminate all bees and
butterflies, and famine will threaten human life.
Nurture has mimetic relationship to nature,
for it is clearly an imitation of the structures
and also a translation of the communication
systems of nature. The entire human
transportation system including rockets and
space ships are an extension of the leg; the
entire machine-making technology, the hand;
the telescopic system, the eye; the
telecommunication systems including
telephones, the ear; and the latest, the computer
technology, the brain. Nurture comes out of
nature while having its particularity as nurture.
Orature does not take the boundaries between
the particularity of nature and that of nurture to
be absolute. Just as nature has given rise to
nurture, nurture itself has given rise to
cybernurture or cyberture (virtual reality).
Cyberture is to nurture what nurture is to
nature. It mimics nurture in the same way that
nurture mimics nature.
Unique to nurture is the realm of spirituality,
a beyond the material, a combination of an
awareness of a beyond nature, the supernatural,
and a beyond nurture, the supernurtural. The
highest conception of the supernatural is God
and the spirits, a conception that is codified into
religious beliefs and practices. All religions
recognize Godhood and Spirits, Christianity for
instance having a Three-in-one God and a host
of spirits in the form of angels or their opposite,
the evil ones, Satan and Devils. The highest
conception of the supernurtural is the Soul.
Here the two realms of nature and nurture find
their reunion, for God (the absolute embodiment
of no beginning and no end or the continuity of
beginning and end, the totality of the universe)
is reflected in the concept of the soul, which is
seen as the temple of God, the site of struggle
between good and evil, the evil, Lucifer-fashion,
trying to dislodge God from his temple. The soul
is the internal manifestation of God; and God is
Thinog’o
the external manifestation of the soul. God is
the absolute soul. The soul is the temple of God.
The supernatural and the supernurtural now
find themselves linked in the realm of
spirituality and ethical existence, the full Circe
that Pitika was talking about in his conception
of orature. The trouble with most religions is
that they have expelled God from the Universe
and from the human soul to a residence outside
of both, an onlooker on earth supervising
adherence to moral instructions already
contained in a holy text, with threats of hell and
rewards of heaven, both also outside the
universe. In orature, godhood is treated as the
ideal spiritual expression of nature and nurture.
The major generic elements of orature –
riddle, proverb, story, song, poetry, drama and
dance – are an imaginative attempt to explain
the universe. The riddle seeks to see
resemblances and parallels, among the
apparently diverse and contradictory in the
universe.
The riddle as an image reflects the riddle of a
universe, which is one in many. In the Agikuyu
riddle, I have a house without a door, whose
answer is egg; or I have a companion who never
tells me rest, whose answer is road or shadow,
the solutions to the riddles are aesthetically
satisfying. In Sophocles, Oedipus gives a correct
answer to a riddle, which has otherwise baffled
the whole population, but the answer sets him
on the tragic journey to glorious heights and
gory depths. Odysseus’ journey from Troy back
to Ithaka involves facing many riddles that he
has to solve in order to advance.
The Proverb famously described in Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart as the palm-oil with which
words are eaten among the Ibo is important in
all cultures. A proverb, a codification of wisdom,
has the three parts of the cognitive process: data
of the sensory experience being the basis of a
story, and the story being the basis of a
universal, a generalized pithy statement
applicable in similar situations. Aesop is the
best exemplar of this process. To every proverb
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among the Agikuyu, there is a story, itself
obviously drawn from observations of
Notes towards a Performance
characteristic behaviour of humans and
animals.
The story whose central ingredient is the
question of what happens next, or what
happened next, raises an anxiety of expectation
satisfied only by the final denouement. The
story has its origins in human confrontation
with time. Nobody knows what will happen in
the next hour, next day, next week, next month,
next year, years to come, in short, the future.
The biggest unknown is what happens after
death. In a story, as opposed to real life, one can
know what happens next. A good storyteller is
the one who raises anew the anxiety of
expectation. From the tongue of a master
storyteller, even when his listeners already
know the general outline of the story and the
ending, he or she is still able to recreate afresh,
in the listener, the anxiety of expectation and
then satisfy it. The story becomes new in every
telling and retelling.
Dance is a celebration of freedom from fixity,
a momentary triumph over gravitational pull, a
symbolic conquest of gravity. Dance is often
accompanied by song, itself a celebration of
sound, motion. And motion is the fundamental
to change, growth, development in nature and
nurture. Life is motion for we know that a thing
is dead when it ceases movement. Sound also
grapples with space, distance. It is there in all
struggles with nature (hunting songs, work
songs) and nurture (war songs and work songs)
and in spirituality (songs that accompany
religious rites, worship for instance). In the
beginning, according to St John, was the word,
which then became flesh and thus launched
creation, but since sound preceded the word, for
the word is a particular organization of sound,
we can say with Sikhism that in the beginning
was the sound.
The important in orature is the
interconnectedness of all these elements.
Central to them, is performance. Each is a
performance genre, but performance holds them
together. Performance is the central feature of
orature, and this differentiates the concept of
orature from that of literature. Performance
involves performer and audience, in orature this
often being a participatory audience; and
performance space, in orature this being
anything from the fireside, the village square or
market place, to a shrine. But whatever the
combination of location, time and audience,
orature realizes its fullness in performance.
Is orature peculiar to Africa? Orature does not
simply refer to Africa; we can talk about Asian,
African, European, Pacific and Latin American
orature. And within each we can talk about
classical and contemporary orature. An area
that needs exploration is that of cyber-orature
born out of cyberture (cybernurture). In the
electronic space, or the virtual space, orality in
general and orature in particular are coming
back.
references
Achebe, Chinua (1994) Things Fall Apart, New York:
Anchor Books.
Clark-Bekederemo, J. P. (1991) The Ozidi Saga:
Collected and Translated from the Ijo of Okabou
Ojobolo, Washington, DC: Howard University Press.
Ntuli, Pitika (1988) ‘Orature: A Self-Portrait’, in Kwesi
Owusu (ed.) Storms of the Heart, London: Camden
Press.
Thiong'o, Ngũgı̃ wa (2006) Wizard of the Crow, New
York: Pantheon Books.
Thompson, George Derwent (1961) Studies in Ancient
Greek Society, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Zirimu, Pio (1998) ‘Oral Power and Europhone Glory:
Orature, Literature, and Stolen Legacies’, in Ngũgı̃ wa
Thiong’o Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards
a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.