Saturday March 28, 2010. Yale Old Campus.
A ceremony to celebrate the cultures of peoples of African origins was held Saturday in one of Yale’s ornamental rooms, the Lindsley-Chittenden Hall 102 on Old Campus. It was a small ceremony featuring African cuisine, music, drama, and art. Everything was designed to represent the diverse cultures of Africa.
However, I just didn’t feel at home with one of the plays choreographed and performed by the Yale African Students Association club. The play, performed without a title, themed a stereotyped religious family from a West African country. I provide here a synopsis of the play:
The play begins with the four-person family of a church pastor waking up to a daily routine of prayer and cleansing. The pastor reads a passage from the scriptures, while the wife of the pastor shouts “Amen! Amen!” after each word. The pastor’s two daughters, hardly listening to their father, and paying little attention to their overly dramatic mother, mindlessly giggle at each other. The morning devotional ends with a resounding, “IN JESUS’ NAME!”
Time moves forward several hours and the family is now in a church. The wife of the pastor is leading a praise team. The praise session is executed with such cultist fervor – jumping, thumping, dancing, shouting, et cetera, et cetera. In sum, the church and the congregation can be seen in total disarray. The pastor, having invoked the Lord’s name many times in order to calm the congregation, settles on the pulpit to present the sermon. He preaches from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.
“Who will rescue me from this body of death?” He screams. “What a miserable man I am! Who will deliver me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?”
The congregation respond thunderously, “Mercy! Ay! Mercy!” The pastor’s wife is particularly vocal: “Ay, ay, ay! Aaay!”
Fast forward. A few days later, a youth from the church arrives at the pastor’s house. The pastor and his wife are away. In the house is one of their daughters. The young man flirts with the girl. Another fast-forward: A couple of weeks later, the girl shows signs of pregnancy.
The wife of the pastor gets very excited upon learning the news. She is aware of the ramifications of having an unwed pregnant daughter in the home. The neighbors won’t be kind to such a development. Her worries become realized when, on stage, two of her best church-friends jeer at her family.
“Did you hear?”
“The Pastor’s daughter?”
“What shame. And to top that, he’s the pastor.”
Meanwhile, trouble is brewing at the pastor’s home. The pastor alienates his wife and children. “They are not my daughters,” he denies. The wife is infuriated by the pastor’s disavowal of his daughters. When they were the beautiful young lasses, they were HIS children, but now that things have gone south, they are HER daughters! Eventually, the family seeks the counsel of a local elder. At the conciliation, the second daughter asks to make an important announcement. The audience is left guessing if problems will continue to plaque the pastor’s house.
Overall, the play was well acted. But the artists may have taken on themselves too huge a task. Evidently, the play was designed to to bring to light common misunderstandings about the African culture; yet, the manner in which the actors handled the issue was lacking. In their quest to correct stereotypes, they let themselves fall into the very murk they desired to lead their audience from. Personally, I found their portrayal of the African christian household distasteful and ignorant. Even among the most fanatical believers of the christian faith in most African households, there are very few that practice their faith in such cultist manner as satirized in the play.
It should be noted that the African christian household is often conservative. This, however, must not be misconstrued to mean that the African christian household is feverish and maniacal about their faith. True, unexpected occurrences such as unplanned, premarital pregnancies in the homes of faithfuls are treated with more than due excitement. Nonetheless, these events are rare and hardly representative of an entire community of believers. The African christian is respectable, courteous, and moderate. Cynics who want to soil the character of the African christian only do so because they do not appreciate the nobility of the African christian.
The play concluded to a resounding applause from the audience. However, whether the audience praised the beauty of the stage-act, or its theme is open to debate. What is clear, however, is that the play succeeded to convey one message: African cultures are still poorly understood, but the intellectuals entrusted with the task of educating the world about them are dismally incompetent at their job.
