Staging Sacrifice: Performing History, Memory, and Ancestral Culture in Four African Ritual Plays

Abstract

Returning and recurring cultural forms, ancestral incarnations, theatrical imaginations, and racial memories in African plays construct a specific kind of historicity - the conjuring of the dead and the revitalization of cosmic energy or spiritual power. These formations perpetuate the construction of Africa and African-ness through reinvocations of the principle of sacrifice. This article sets up a genealogy of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘figures of sacrifice’ that manifests in plays that represent and reinvent Africa. The main argument is that invocations of rites of sacrifice form a significant part of these theatrical imaginations of Africa. Four African plays, Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka, 1975), Woza Albert! (Mtwa, Ngema, & Simon, 1983), Sizwe Bansi is Dead (Fugard, Ntshona, & Kani, 1972), and The Strong Breed (Soyinka, 1973) stage ritualized acts of conjuring the dead and the retraditionalization of the principle of sacrifice as part of African acts of self-determination. The article uses the critical analytic tools of theatre and performance theory, with a focus on the processes of surrogation and conjuring. Keywords: ritual theatre, sacrifice, ancestral memory.