Performing Pan-Africanism: Mohammed Ibn Abdallah in Perspective

Abstract

Many African leaders, in the 1960s, have appropriated the performing arts to propagate their political ideologies and Ghana’s case with Kwame Nkrumah, like his contemporaries, is no exception. Botwe-Asamoah (2005, pp. 127-128) acknowledges that the referential philosophy of the School of Performing Arts (SPA), University of Ghana (UG) was inspired by Nkrumah’s vision for the Institute of African Studies (IAS) and the SPA, through the setting up of the Arts Council of Ghana and its management of the National Theatre Movement, leading to proliferation of several performing arts groups in Ghana. This paper is an exposition on Nkrumah’s political philosophy of “The African personality and Pan-Africanism” (Schauert, 2015, p. 15; Nkrumah, 1963) as reflected in the artistic concept of Mohammed ben Abdallah, a product of the SPA. An examination of Abdallah’s artistic concept of “Abibigoro,” black theatre, indicates that his plays are rooted in the artistic-cultural extensions of Nkrumah’s “Pan-Africanism”. Therefore, the concept of Abibigoro, situated within the context of artistic-cultural performances, could be described as mere extensions of Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist agenda. To that end, the paper conducts textual analyses of selected plays of Abdallah and argues that his plays are characterized by elements of the Pan-Africanist ideology in order to preserve and espouse African heritage and values as were the case in the early 1960s.

Keywords: Performance, Pan-Africanism, Abibigoro, Philosophy, Concept