Africa's most talked about playwright is Nigerian Wole Soyinka, 33, who has languished in jail since August on charges that he aided the Biafran secession. His voice is being heard loud and clear off Broadway. Two Soyinka one-acters were produced in November, and now the skillful and creative Negro Ensemble Company (TIME, Jan. 12) has undertaken his full-length Kongi's Harvest. In their hands, it is a considerably better production than it is a play, although there is some interest in seeing how an African writes about Africa's No. 1 problem: turning tribes into nations.
Kongi (Moses Gunn) is an Nkrumah-style dictator trying to get the cooperation of a tribal chief in organizing a harvest ceremony that will symbolize the unity of his new nation, Isma. The chief is a wily old rascal who knows a thing or two about exploiting tribal traditions for his own advantage. Kongi's more dangerous antagonist is the chief's nephew and heir, an educated young man presumably dedicated to the ideals of Western democracy.
Soyinka's play circles this situation at inordinate length, talking to itself. The talk is at its best in the satirical back-and-forth among the dictator's six stooge councilors, whose function is to carry on "disputations" in order to arrive at the correct political interpretation of whatever matter is at hand. Sometimes the talk climbs into the foothills of poetry, as in the rich rodomontades of the grey-bearded tribal chief, played with ferocious gusto by Douglas Turner, the company's artistic director. But for the most part, Soyinka's language is clotted and obscure, his action rambling and repetitive.
Kongi's Harvest was clearly a labor of love for the Negro Ensemble, which does its best to move the play along with a remarkably fluid use of its ingeniously economical set. Far livelier than Soyinka's prose, though, is the ensemble's simulated tribal dancing, clearly the most pulsating choreography in town.