The Republic of Kenya is a land of stark contrasts. Its precapitalist policies have long attracted multinational investment and international loans. External capital is apparent to Western tourists in the capital city of Nairobi, an urban area with luxurious hotels, modern corporate and government offices, expensive automobiles, large sports stadiums, and numerous stores. But the modern features of Nairobi do not represent the real Kenya, the Kenya known to the vast majority of those in the country. The average Kenyan is not wealthy and does not possess Western-style amenities. Most Kenyans work in agriculture-related activities which range from subsistence farming to wage labor on large estates or plantations. In fact, recent statistics show that the agricultural sector employs over 81 percent of the labor force, contributes 65 percent to the value of total exports, and accounts for 31 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (World Bank, 1986a).

In addition to an appreciable disparity in income between urban elites and agricultural laborers, there is also an uneven distribution of resources within the agricultural sector. The present structure of agriculture is closely linked to the colonial period, when Europeans controlled large-scale farms in areas with fertile land. Although few Europeans farm in Kenya today, the agricultural system is still inequitable and biased toward Africans with large farms. Inequality is evident in the distribution of farm land, the flow of capital in and out of agriculture, and the class structure that perpetuates this situation. The Kenyan state remains closely aligned with elite interests in both rural and urban areas, thereby maintaining an unproductive agricultural system that contributes to underdevelopment.

Addis Ababa, founded a century ago, has exerted influence over its periphery like no other Ethiopian town before it. From a straggling, disjunctive village in the 1880s, Addis Ababa (New Flower) developed into one of the largest urban centers in Africa. By the end of World War II, it was a city of over a half million people and home to the Organization of African Unity and several other international bodies. The growth of this metropolis was phenomenal, particularly since it emerged within an economy that was 90 percent agricultural and largely feudal.

After serving initially as Shewa's provincial center, Addis Ababa became the imperial capital in 1889 with Menilek's accession to the Ethiopian throne. Addis Ababa also became the geographic center of an Ethiopia that in the 1880s was in the process of constituting itself both physically and culturally. The twentieth century provided Addis Ababa and its imperial resident with the technological and economic means with which to dominate and defend a state that was larger than that of any previous Abyssinian ruler. Modern firearms permitted the conquest of areas never before subject to the Abyssinian monarch; improved communications in the form of roads, transport vehicles, telegraph, and telephone gave the center the means with which to supervise a distant periphery; new export crops and improved access to international markets insured the financing of these modern innovations. Addis Ababa was at the heart of these changes. Its own evolution and development reflected the efforts of both Menilek II (r. 1889-1913) and Haile Sillassie I (regent 1917-1930; emperor 1930-1974) to modernize and centralize the feudal state.

“I was fed up with my wife, I was not happy at all, because in the four years since I had married her she was not pregnant” (Tutuola, 1981: 21). Thus does the narrator of Amos Tutuola's The Witch Herbalist of the Remote Town express his distress at his wife's barrenness. The problem so pained him that he undertook a six-year quest in search of a cure, because to remain childless would be untenable. The issue of fertility and the need to perpetuate the family into future generations inspired Tutuola, whose story examines the singularly important issue of fertility as a social, cultural, and medical concern among the Yoruba of Nigeria and, by extrapolation, the peoples in transition in West Africa.

Amos Tutuola, a clerk in the Nigerian department of labor, has written several quest novels, all of which reflect various aspects of Yoruba culture. A native of Abeokuta in western Nigeria, Tutuola received the equivalent of a Western sixth-grade education. Raised as a Christian, he infuses his works with religious morality coupled with traditional perspectives.

Tutuola's writing career began as a relief from the boredom of his everyday job. He wrote his first novel in a two-day spurt of activity and sent it to what he thought was a publishing house, but which turned out to be a Methodist missionary group. The group forwarded the manuscript to the London publishers Faber and Faber and The Palm-Wine Drinhard was published in 1952 with little revision. Written in a distinct style of nonstandard English, the strange, fantastic story received praise from Western readers and critics, but derision from their African counterparts.

Although over the last decade there has been a considerable growth in African theater research, the majority of such work has confined itself to the analysis of traditional theater practices or to that of contemporary literary theater. While acknowledging the functional dimensions of African theater, this research has focused on the aesthetics of African performance. When the social dimensions of theater have been evoked, they have been asserted mainly in terms of the propositional value of theatrical content. Playscripts have been analyzed for propositional claims and thematic concerns, and social critiques have then been constructed on such analyses.

This essay presents an analysis distinct from that critical trend. It examines neither traditional theatrical practices nor contemporary literary theater but rather an ambiguous theatrical practice that can be labeled popular theater. The first section of the paper discusses the concept of the popular and suggests that it is best understood as a functional discourse which can legitimate or subvert the existing power structures of society. The second section focuses on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian adult educator whose work provides the theoretical basis for most popular theater projects in Africa. The essay then analyzes the discursive construction of popular theater in various African contexts including Botswana, Zambia, and Nigeria. Through the history of popular theater in Africa, the paper shows the growth of popular theater theory. The last section, on the Kamiriithu production of Ngaahika Ndeenda, illustrates some of these theoretical claims.

Contemporary scholarship on Africa by Japanese anthropologists is vital, diverse, and expanding. This brief review surveys the development of anthropological research on Africa by Japanese scholars and is followed by a compilation of Japanese publications on Africa in English and French. Although some observations about Japanese anthropological research in Africa will be offered, the goal is primarily to inform American Africanists of this Japanese scholarship and the contexts within which it has developed rather than to attempt a critical appraisal.

It is not commonly known among western scholars that anthropology was formally established in Japan over one hundred years ago. The Anthropological Society of Tokyo (now the Anthropological Society of Japan) was established in 1884 by Shogoro Tsuboi, and two years later its journal Zinruigaku Zassi was first published. In 1893 Tsuboi was appointed the first professor of anthropology at the University of Tokyo. The Linguistic Society of Japan was formed in 1896 (although linguistics had been taught at the University of Tokyo for a decade), the same year that the Archaeology Society of Japan was established. As Takao Sofue notes, because anthropology at the University of Tokyo developed primarily as physical anthropology, ethnology (only termed cultural anthropology after World War II) emerged later and with the influence of Japanese folklorists (1962: 173-75; see also Yamaguchi and Nagashima, 1987). An informal group of scholars began meeting in 1928. Their name, the APE Circle (standing for Anthropology, Prehistory, and Ethnology), represented their desire to pursue a broader study of humans. In 1934 they formally created the Japanese Society of Ethnology and their journal Minzokugaku kenkyu appeared in the following year. The Folklore Society of Japan also was established in 1935.