Preliminary notes on audiences in Africa

There have been audiences, presumably, as long as there has been performance. The perception that what creates an audience is the listeners' intentional orientation towards the speaker is the starting point of a far-reaching development in performance and media studies which focuses on the activity and creativity of the audience. If the audience has an active role in constituting the performance, cultural historians seeking to uncover histories of consciousness in African popular genres cannot afford to ignore it. But audiences are not all the same. Just as much as performances, they are a historical product. There are different ways of convening and of experiencing reception, whether collectively or in dispersal, which are deeply connected with the nature of the social life of the age and place. How people come together; how they relate to each other and to the spectacle or utterance they are attending to; what they consider themselves to be part of in doing so; how the spectacle/utterance addresses them-all these are historically and culturally specific and need to be empirically investigated. Specific African audiences have distinctive, conventional modes and styles of making meaning, just as performers/speakers have. We need to ask how audiences do their work of interpretation.