A leading contributor to the canon of American drama wrote a play about an African family that struggled to find a united attitude towards the influence of interlopers from other continents.
Sadly, the playwright passed away before finishing the work, but several productions have been mounted of uncompleted drafts posthumously.
Family members in the narrative were given names that hailed from disparate parts of Africa. This choice was made in good faith by the writer, with the apparent aim of serving a Pan-African agenda.
In my experience of working on two productions of the play in question – one for radio and one for stage, the ensemble had to invent a fictitious African culture from scratch, drawing inspiration from various heritages that have customs and worldviews that share little in common with each other.
Products of imaginations that would like to subscribe to romanticised visions of what it entails to be an African are valid. Anyone interested in the reality of African experiences is likely to regard such works as distractions, however.
