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In contrast to these stultifying approaches, the popular arts and culture paradigm is seen as useful for a systematic study not only of isiZulu or African-language literatures in general but also for black television drama. This paradigm is interdisciplinary and its intellectual genealogy includes, among others, social history, anthropology, Marxist literary criticism and Birmingham-style cultural studies and literary theory (Haynes, 2000). Significant aspects of this model were developed by Barber in her study of Yoruba travelling theatre which, in composition, drew from a variety of everyday sources. In her work on Yoruba theatrical performances, Barber has formulated a series of analytical approaches that are useful for the study of African-language literatures and television dramas as popular arts (Barber, 2000). Barber’s generative materialism, premised on a sociologically inclined approach to the arts, explores the economic, social and cultural levels of text production. Barber has since developed this approach to create a set of literary tools to explain African everyday culture, focusing on the inner pulse, or what she calls the ‘meristematic tip’, responsible for the continual evolution of African popular culture. Speaking of Yoruba popular theatre, she describes it as a living, contemporary, collectively improvised and continually emergent form (Barber: 7). The observations she makes for Yoruba travelling theatre are also applicable to African-language literatures and black television dramas. Modern African-language literatures likewise evince that internal dynamism that readily predispose them to commentary on topical, contemporary occurrences and happenings, drawing from the lived experiences of ordinary people in familiar localities and using appropriate linguistic resources.

Also significant in Barber’s model is her analysis of artistic products that, whilst drawing from popular culture, are able to edify their readers through the demonstration of moral messages flavoured by, and constructed within, local interpretation. The fact that local, cultural producers share the same world as their target audience indicates the close affinity that exists between the producer, the audience and the text. This interrelationship helps produce vibrancy in the production and interpretation of the texts. Thus Barber emphasises that ‘in Western Africa, then, people continually produce new forms in order to come to grips with the massive transformation of modernity’(ibid: 5). Although international and transnational media images appeared to be at the forefront of social transformation in the Yoruba context, Barber notes

that people’s overwhelming preoccupation was with social transformations that were perceived as locally rooted and were actually experienced on the ground […] It was these locally experienced transformations that set the terms in which images of other lives, other cultures were appropriated – in different ways at different historical moments. And it was these transformations which remained the mesmerizing focus of popular commentary, and which all the new popular genres of the twentieth century – the Yoruba novel, drama, neo- traditional poetry, visual art, popular music – were created to grapple with. In Western Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa and beyond, it was vernacular genres, representing local experiences that held people’s attention (2000: 133).

As I discuss later in the book, this latter aspect of Barber’s observation is conspicuous in South African black television series. Similar expressive modalities and extensive overlaps between black television dramas and African-language literatures in this case seem to be rooted in the regeneration and recycling of past themes, plot structures, lessons and styles of characterisation in a manner that Barber’s concept of generative materialism demonstrates in her study of Yoruba theatre. She points out that

real experience is narrativized and circulates in the form of anecdotes while existing stories become the templates by which real experience is apprehended […] In this cycle, written texts may participate on the same footing as the anecdotes of experience. Many plays seem to have been an amalgam of hearsay, anecdote, folktale, and written fiction (2000: 9).

In spite of this Barber points out that with Yoruba theatre there is an inherent quest for innovation, exploring the unknown through representations that go beyond the permutation of known elements (ibid: 9). This characteristic of forging forward towards the unknown constitutes the growing point bringing in newness. She points out that ‘no rendition of a play or theme is wholly predictable, for though it will recycle much existing material it will also always exceed it in one way or another’ (2000: 9–10). These comments are applicable to much of isiZulu literature and black television drama. The revisiting of many themes in television dramas may be seen as recapitulation, but the broadcast media versions, established much later than the print version, always introduce something new that speaks to the topical, the current and the sensational in society.

Barber’s approach also considers expressions of ‘critical creative metalinguistic consciousness’ such as proverbs and epithets. These paralinguistic aspects are at work even in the briefest and most mundane of everyday utterances. Not only are these inherently aesthetic, the consideration of these linguistic features is central, as Barber sees them, not only as the seeds of all the great literary genres but also as their summation. These verbal formulations are mental, archaeological sites that have found ways of being repeatedly cited and of being relevantly applied in contemporary textual productions. These metalinguistic features are encapsulated in a ‘discourse of the axiom’ as Barber calls it. Barber’s (2000: 267) view is that the proverbial sayings in a society constantly act as authoritative, moral codes and can always be used to explain similar situations in different contexts. Messages or themes in African-language written discourses tend to be encoded in ‘axiomatic expressions’. These proverbial injunctions constitute generations of folk wisdom from the traditional world, which is shown to be still applicable in modern society.

The repeated stories, observable in different types of media, have been drawn from daily phenomena in order to forge new perspectives on contemporary life styles. Barber points out that

In the generation of popular Yoruba plays, every moment and every level of production is a site of creative potentiality. Stories are drawn from available repertories but are reshaped; characters are excavated from the repositories of the actors’ personal experience, which is always incrementally growing; speech emerges from moment to moment, infused with what is currently in the streets, adapted in the light of the audience’s reactions, adjusted to the speech of the other characters in the scene, and fed by the actors’ own inspiration as well as the manager’s continually updated instructions (2000: 9).

Barber indicates that recapitulations in different periods and their transmutation into popular media like radio and television concretise local experiences. These recapitulations hold lessons steeped in recurrent and other related experiences that have generally been read and interpreted in the same manner. Eventually these assume authority. Barber’s premise in the study of Yoruba popular theatre stems from the observation that the stories that were staged mostly dealt with concrete, localised and familiar experiences (ibid: 266). The experiences presented were not only familiar but were also ‘real’ as the stories were a collective and interactive improvisation by actors who drew extensively from their own reservoir of experience, personality and competence based on hearsay, daily metaphors and proverbial sayings, contemporary events, anecdotes of experience circulating in popular culture, and so forth. Barber’s analysis of Yoruba popular culture is useful in explaining the recurrent morality lessons in African-language literatures generally, isiZulu literature specifically and in television dramas.

This way of analysing indigenous expression is supported by Chapman (1996) who points out that an evaluation of South African indigenous literature in terms of realistic criteria is misleading. In a realistic reading the oral ‘residue,’ which manifests itself in strong storylines, episodic plots, and copious repetitions, might not be recognised. This trend in thinking about indigenous literary expression is not entirely new. As early as the 1960s Ramsaran made a case for ‘old mythologies’ that propagated themselves anew as signs of the continued growth of a cultural life which, while it evolves, also preserves the vitality of the ‘old mythology’. Barber’s observations on Yoruba popular plays illustrate this point as does her emphasis on the moral aspects the plays perform as responses to the demands of modernity. When transferred to other contexts, like that of African language generally and literature specifically, these moral aspects contribute to our understanding of the role played by orality in responding to the complexities that resulted from modernity. Furthermore, this insistent recurrence of folkloric material in new textual forms points to both folklore and life experiences as sources for thematic material.

Barber’s approach, which focuses on everyday culture through the exploration of textual productions that aim to edify audiences through demonstrations of moral lessons, will be used to explain the recurrence of the old themes in new contexts and the emergence of new themes in both print and broadcast media.