FOOD AS DRAMA: THE DRAMATURGICAL FUNCTIONS AND ARTISTIC INTERPRETATIONS OF FOOD RITUALS IN WEST AFRICAN PLAYS

Scholarship on food rituals in African drama has largely treated them as ethnographic markers of cultural identity
rather than as structural elements of dramatic craft. This study examines how food rituals function as deliberate dramaturgical instruments in four selected West African plays: Yaw Asare's Ananse in the Land of Idiots, Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost, Sam Ukala's The Placenta of Death, and Wole Soyinka's Kongi's Harvest. Drawing on Marvin Harris's cultural materialism and supplemented by Clifford Geertz's interpretive approach, the study employs qualitative textual analysis to identify and theorise four dramaturgical functions of food rituals across the selected texts. These are a catalytic function, in which ritual disruption or manipulation initiates the central dramatic conflict; a revelatory function, in which ritual behaviour exposes character psychology, social hierarchy, and moral disposition; a thematic- communicative function, in which food rituals carry and organise the plays' principal ideological concerns; and a preservatory- documentary function, in which the playwrights' faithful artistic interpretations constitute an act of cultural archiving. A cross- play typology is proposed to systematise these functions. The study concludes that food rituals in West African drama represent a distinctly African dramaturgical resource whose full analytical potential remains underexplored in theatre and performance
scholarship and recommends their integration into African drama pedagogy, criticism, and practice.