Word: kongi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Negro Ensemble Company seems to be forging a dubious tradition of brilliantly staging mediocre material. Last season, the company managed to make interesting evenings out of two rather lumbering efforts from Africa - Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and Kongi's Harvest. The play the Negro Ensemble offered last week lumbers out of dark est Georgia. God Is a (Guess What?) was written by Atlanta Schoolteacher Ray Mclver, whose intention was clearly to make a cutting satire of black-white relations...
...languished in jail since August on charges that he aided the Biafran secession. His voice is being heard loud and clear off Broadway. Two Soyinka one-acters were produced in November, and now the skillful and creative Negro Ensemble Company (TIME, Jan. 12) has undertaken his full-length Kongi's Harvest. In their hands, it is a considerably better production than it is a play, although there is some interest in seeing how an African writes about Africa's No. 1 problem: turning tribes into nations...
...Kongi (Moses Gunn) is an Nkrumah-style dictator trying to get the cooperation of a tribal chief in organizing a harvest ceremony that will symbolize the unity of his new nation, Isma. The chief is a wily old rascal who knows a thing or two about exploiting tribal traditions for his own advantage. Kongi's more dangerous antagonist is the chief's nephew and heir, an educated young man presumably dedicated to the ideals of Western democracy...
...Kongi's Harvest was clearly a labor of love for the Negro Ensemble, which does its best to move the play along with a remarkably fluid use of its ingeniously economical set. Far livelier than Soyinka's prose, though, is the ensemble's simulated tribal dancing, clearly the most pulsating choreography in town...