A Survey of African Poetry in the London Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement 1865-1985

Excerpt: "One of the themes in The Development of African Drama is that those who would preserve the traditional culture of Africa are actually destroying it, encouraging the desire to perfect the arts of performance, but at the cost of losing touch with the community which alone gives them meaning and value...Etherton offers a lengthy series of accounts of the conditions which have led up to and which surround the production and performance or publication of a wide range of plays from various parts of (mainly Anglophone) Africa. The plays are categorized according to the issues which his overall approach suggests--the survival of the orally transmitted theatre; the growth of "literary" or "art" theatre, and the institutions which promote it; the relationship between written texts and performance; "protest" theatre; and so on. There is a detailed discussion of the work of individual playwrights such as Soyinka, Ngugi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rotimi, Ebrahim Hussein..."