One Man Dancing

by Patricia Keeney

  He feels the spirit of Robert, trying to awaken a new generation of artists, many of them serious women artists.

  But Charles must also keep an eye on the wayward Jason who has already been in the gift shop with its jostled display of masks and carvings. Discovering goddess images with curls snaking around their heads.

  “Like Medusa,” he raves to Charles. “And I thought that figure only existed in Greek mythology. This is all so interesting.”

  Jason chatters on about animism, how the gods need people in order to exist. About the village justice figure who bristles with nails.

  “You feel them only if you are guilty,” says Charles, realizing how much he himself has absorbed, of the old ways. How much he has rejected.

  At the beginning of the conference next day, Jason — now garbed in newly-purchased traditional African cottons — is off to see a soccer match. Studying his crisp purple and white outfit over breakfast, Charles remarks, “My brother, you look like a prince. Be careful that people don’t insist on royal tips from you.”

  “Really?” asks Jason. “I don’t just look like a stupid white person trying to be African?”

  Charles is both amused and gratified by Jason’s genuine interest in his culture. They have already eaten crocodile meat and chewed kola nuts together. Pulled along by Jason’s insatiable curiosity, Charles knows he is alive again, wants things again.

  He appraises his younger white brother with an affectionate eye. In his Cameroonian costume, it isn’t Jason’s pale face that startles Charles. It is something about the way he walks. As though the body wanted jeans and a shirt, not this bright loose flapping fabric.

  “You don’t quite have the swing that goes with these clothes,” says Charles, finally, putting his arm around him. “Come on, I’ll show you how to walk African. I can do it even with a cane.”

  And off they saunter together.

  Outside the university, a crowd has gathered. Local officials, the Cameroonian Minister of Culture. Delegates from various countries. Photographers with huge cameras squat or stretch to catch these exalted guests who stand politely around not quite knowing what is expected of them, except that they must look as though they are exalted for these picture takers who will eventually try to sell them back their own awkward images.

  Everyone stands for Cameroon’s national anthem and for the rector’s prayer. Then high-pitched female voices fill the auditorium. Young voices, a sunny throng of shiny dresses wound around with festive red sashes, chanting welcome. One of them stops at each guest to present a small crépe paper rosette.

  Charles holds his flower tightly. He is genuinely moved by the ceremonial speeches that say how gratifying for Cameroon to have such esteemed artists and academics gathered from so many important theatre cultures. He doesn’t look up. His eyes are on the paper plant, its crinkly petals, its folds and angles, its secret centre holding everything together.

  He hears the Nigerian delegation whispering. Complaining about too much money being spent on their lavish hotel rooms. Femi Osofisan, one of the continent’s most important playwrights, leads the revolt. They believe they could have organized the event better. Should have. The presence of Osofisan deeply impresses Charles.

  His mind drifts back to the previous night — an evening at the hotel bar — really just a small alcove set against badly painted jungle walls. He and Jason listening to a lone Zimbabwean guitarist dressed in white jeans and blue T-shirt play Bob Marley — his dreads shaking, his forehead smooth as moon on water. Charles can neither shake the image nor understand why it continues to haunt him.

  He focuses on the speakers once again. Now it is the turn of the Minister of Education to sing their praises. Charles stares up above the politician’s head, above ribbon and floral excesses to a latticework opening high on the plain white wall, letting in leafy breezes, and thinks of the National Theatre in Kampala, the big rehearsal room upstairs. Structured with the same strong delicate sky eyes. Weaving threads from the air, a lacy coolness beginning somewhere far-off and pure. Like this room.

  How do they really see him? he wonders. This select group: African or foreigner? Broken theatre relic? Refugee?

  The electric fans creak slowly, endlessly. He hears Robert’s voice whispering through them. And Mr. Makuba’s.

  A short coffee break and the conference resumes. Papers. So many papers. African culture and politics. Social life and education. Theories, analyses, proposals and programs for the arts. Will they really care about Abafumi’s now ancient history, the blood-soaked tragedy that stopped its life?

  Charles sits through it all, his tense wooden body hunched over a stalled soul. Rigid with memory. Clutching a wrinkled rosette.

  They eat lunch in a campus restaurant festooned with calendars of semi-naked girls. Charles enjoys the tang of genuine African food once again: yassa chicken, okra and fish over dense, starchy cassava. Open Cross Wines and sharp beer stacked against wide wooden shutters and giant green fronds.

  That evening, they see a play. The Battle of Tankriti. Delegates are told it is an important event. The first time in six years a production has been allowed at the university campus. So even censorship is being relaxed for them.

  Charles is one with the actors, deep in their joy and sorrow, fear and need. Singing and dancing the range of their feelings — shaping, shading, beating down, ringing out.

  When the king receives a gift, Charles too, signals pleasure — a small stately movement, restraining ecstasy.

  He watches the enactment of a people’s moral code, the foundation myth of Cameroon.

  He knows he has come home. Robert has finally brought him home.

  “We must cultivate subtlety in our theatre for social action,” says Mariya, a Zambian director, a young woman whose outspoken ideas have intrigued Charles. “Our theatre uses no texts. We improvise around a theme. Debate issues with the audience.”

  It is day two of the conference.

  Charles quizzes her over lunch about the difference between politics and theatre. How far does theatre for social action move toward the directly political?

  “Politics is so complicated,” she says. “A government censor wrote a report against one of our plays that got him a promotion. At the same time, he told me personally that he liked the work. Ultimately, although the official system cannot support an aggressive theatre of opposition, in the laboratory of experiment, we can do almost anything.”

  “So,” says Charles, “if you stay at the level of a work-in-progress, you’re safe.” She nods assent.

  “It wasn’t like that in Uganda for us under Amin,” says Charles. “If the censors did not understand, we were told it had to stop. Close down.”

  But the talk charges on. The energy of argument among artists does not stop.

  “If you write, produce, and perform your own piece,” he hears himself saying, “then you can improvise dangerous material into a safe form. Those who know how to read it, will. The others will leave you alone. That’s what Serumaga did.”

  “Exactly so,” says Mariya. “It is a form of subtlety we all practise. But there also exists a subversive kind of censorship. If I am not mistaken, Charles, Abafumi toured extensively but played only rarely in Kampala.”

  “It’s true and when we did…”

  “It was the beginning of the end, wasn’t it?”

  Charles smiles grimly.

  “Try to remember we are artists, not politicians,” Mariya adds. “We all start with the same story, the human story that begins in the womb of woman.”

  As she makes her statement, she picks up a steaming yam with her fork. “And this is also what unites us.”

  “And this,” says Dickson, a smiling Zambian playwright with thick glasses and a twinkle in his eye, hoisting high his frosty bottle of Flagg beer, glistening cold from the cooler. Adding, “I, for one, want to drink to the
metaphor. We are, after all, poets of the theatre. Metaphor keeps us in the domain of art. Diatribe turns us into bullies and tyrants.”

  “Robert used to say,” says Charles, “that the language of the oppressed was a silent language, spoken by the image.”

  They nod agreement. He is being listened to. Those around him hear him, react to the hard-won wisdom of his words. He is acknowledged here as a veteran of Africa’s theatre wars. Fate has blasted apart, ripped open, exposed and re-arranged him in every way. But he has endured and they sense it. He is still dancing and they see it.

  Mariya reminds them that in Zambia now, there is so much job training for women that men are starting to hang back.

  “That’s not good either,” says Charles.

  “We need a man’s movement,” asserts Dickson with a sly wink.

  “You’ve had one,” retorts Mariya. “For centuries.”

  Did men really have their way? Charles wonders. Did he? Was it the old way? Father’s way?

  Memories pour in.

  And what is the new way?

  “Nowadays,” continues Mariya, “a wife can even take her husband to court. Can charge him with rape.”

  The heat of their talk cools with the setting sun. Evening scents deepen gold and green. Returning Charles to where he began.

  Now it is his turn to address the delegates. He has asked Prof. Don to walk with him to the podium, stand beside him while he speaks, artist and scholar together, mutually reinforcing.

  Don smiles and takes Charles’ arm, walks with him towards the stage. Charles is introduced to earnest applause. He turns, puts his papers on the lectern. Looks out.

  Feels so strongly the weight of lives lived and stopped. Lives in triumph and ruin. Lives of song and story and dance. Wandering lives. Lives of passion and pain. Innocent lives. Doomed lives.

  An inner script scrolls before his eyes. They wait for him to begin. For many, perhaps most, Abafumi is a vague but legendary memory. As is Robert.

  Charles knows what he is supposed to say. What he wants to say. The words are written before him. But he stands in silence.

  Finally beginning in a fierce whisper, as though telling them a secret intended only for private, sympathetic ears. He is testing his audience, assessing their worthiness to hear what he has to say.

  They lean forward, straining to catch his words.

  “I would like to begin by expressing the gratitude, joy and privilege of being on African soil once more….” He pauses and adds, “in the name of theatre.”

  Slowly, his life unfolds. His own creation story.

  “In 1971, a school of theatre was begun in Uganda and a group of young men and women assembled, after rigorous search and auditions.”

  A strong confident stage voice begins to pull him along, take him back. Into his life. Into legend, myth.

  “For Robert Serumaga, Abafumi was to deal fearlessly with the problems of contemporary Africa. We would be African in both form and content.”

  The memories flow. Father. Mother. A white man in a car. But his words are on target.

  “Abafumi, The Storytellers. Ours was to be an actor’s theatre. The actor’s body and soul was the centre of it. Its language would connect to rituals, movement, and stillness. Sounds and silence. Mime, visual symbols, and emotion. That is how we would communicate.”

  The audience is with him now. He knows it as an actor knows it. They are brothers and sisters in the art of in his words.

  “The training was intense. We were so physically and psychologically conditioned that our sense of reality actually altered. We became hypnotized. Almost possessed by the spirits of our ancestors whose legends and myths we were sharing. This company, this commune became a family, embodying past and future. Time and location never separated us. We were blood.”

  Charles is wound tight in the telling, his tension felt throughout the space.

  “The hero, Renga Moi, had to spill blood to save his village. But the sacrifice was terrible.”

  Charles stops. Takes a deep breath.

  “I want you to know that the warrior hero, Renga Moi was Robert Serumaga who gave us his vision, his blood, and his life. The seventies was a Golden Age for African theatre, for Ugandan theatre, thanks largely to him. We must acknowledge his great gift.”

  Charles’ emotional tribute cracks open his audience like fissures in a volcano.

  “Our next play, Amarykiti, took the flame tree for its symbol, a tree where, in some Ugandan communities, dogs are brought when they die. You drop the animal off and walk away. You don’t look back.”

  Charles stops, deeply emotional now. There are tears in his eyes. A minute passes. Prof. Don puts an arm round him and whispers something in his ear. But he shakes his head, collects himself and continues.

  “At the beginning of that play,” he goes on haltingly, “a figure appears in the forest and lights a candle. He is giving the gift of life to the people. At the end of the play, the candle is extinguished. As Robert’s life was.”

  Charles pauses a long time before adding, “The mythical world of that play was the nightmare we were living in Uganda under Idi Amin. I see that so clearly now.”

  “It was the hero of Renga Moi who changed our lives. In 1976, we were asked to perform the play for assembled heads of state at a meeting in Kampala. The show we put on that night was not simply theatre; it was a cry for freedom. None of us knew whether we would ever get off the stage alive.

  “After the performance a colleague told us that Amin was planning our deaths. We escaped to Kenya, were arrested on the way, released and finally we flew to Europe where we honoured a few bookings that Robert had arranged for us.

  “We lost Robert in Rome. He disappeared for months. Not even his family knew where he was. The last time we saw him was on television, in combat uniform, as a field commander among exiled groups waging war against Amin. He was playing his last — maybe his most important — role in an effort to liberate his beloved country.”

  A long pause.

  In the thick silence that fills the auditiorium, his heroism is finally recognized. Applause begins. Slowly. Each clap shattering. Exploding.

  Charles walks back to his seat, thunder building around him. He is now in the embrace of his large theatre family. Passion streams down his face.

  For some moments, he floats on sweet waters that carry him up and over the difficult terrain of his life, milky clouds filtering out all harshness. There is no pain.

  Next day, the conference visits the village of Kribe where the group of academics and theatre people will picnic by the sea. Kribe is a long drive from Yaounde along an ancient lurching road. Charles watches, amused, as, en route, their rusty bus wheezes up to a gaggle of university students flapping and chattering by the side of the road like large birds, their white shirts and blouses snapping in the sunny breeze. Box lunches, once stiff and spotless, now limp and grey with chicken grease, are loaded on by the students. Then heavy drink coolers into what remains of the aisle. The student helpers finally sprawl over makeshift seats, their spirits high and their songs shrill, for the rest of the journey.

  The bus stops for petrol. It stops to take on board an old Singer sewing machine from a large woman yelling something about her sister in Kribe. It stops to let some of them relieve themselves in the long grass.

  Charles recognizes these arrangements, the chaos and exuberance. He recalls the many bus rides with Abafumi, the receptions, the excursions with dignitaries to local sites.

  For a moment, he is there again.

  Passing countless shacks of mud and wood, some with Fanta signs set in little clearings on powdery brown soil. Public bathing spots where clothes and bodies slither in lather. Roadside booths of copiers with typewriters, pecking away at the spoken letters for those who cannot read or write. All this along dirt roads that suddenly plunge in
to dense palm forests, meeting one another in the bush.

  “Life makes different routes for each of us,” Charles says to Pat.

  Humidity smothers them as they approach the coast. Trees hang in heavy liquid silence. This is the climate Charles remembers. Wet. Close. Soft as Suna. They stop to watch water crash down from high rock and a dugout canoe paddling over shining sea. Where the jungle pours out, flowering in sun and blood.

  Journalist Jason and playwright Dickson discuss prostitutes in the town. Who was and who wasn’t. Overhearing them, Mariya chides them for being interested in lust not love. They see nothing wrong with that.

  Charles smiles, recalling his own wars.

  Long lazy hours on the beach. A break from serious things. Later, the bus — carrying a sleeping throng now, undisturbed by clacking crickets and lulled by quenching breezes, hurtling past a blur of gleaming night market bulbs that rival the looming moon — shoots quickly, precipitously, back to the capital.

  The closing day of the conference and Charles’ final few hours in Africa, delegates are gathered for lunch at the high white house of their host, in the hills above Yaounde. They have travelled there again by the bus they now affectionately call Bumpity through the dust of lurching roads to Prof. Hansel’s gracious home.

  At tables under the trees, guests dressed in dazzling white and throbbing reds, greens and blues, swoop over a brilliant array of food, picking and savouring with obvious pleasure. Then plump down beside one another to drink and chat.

  “You’ll need the five stomachs of a cow to digest it all,” laughs Hansel. “But it will keep you going for days.”

  Delegates and guests share succulent peanut chicken and hot plums in tangy sauce and then return to the unbroken threads of their conversations. Randomly they pull filaments of African theatre out of the air, not greatly caring which seeds float down and pollinate.

  Charles is thinking how unsubtle censorship can be, almost at the same moment as Maryia comes forward with her painful reminder of direct government intervention. “I saw students taken,” she says without expression. “Their heads were shaved. They were pushed onto the ground and forced to roll around in the mud simply for performing publicly.”