Drama and Orality in Kenya’s Radio Advertising.

Abstract

The relationship between drama, cultural practice and electronic media in Kenya is built around a history of intricate relationships informed by history, aesthetics and values adored by the African people since time immemorial. By function, drama has always addressed cultural, historical and emerging themes. For quite some time now, it has become a very fashionable technique of advertisement production in Kenya, yet research on drama as a persuasive genre remains scant. This paper examines the relationship between advertisement drama in radio and indigenous literary practices of the African people. It is based on the assumption that since the purpose of advertisements is to influence mass buyers, the choice of drama genre by advertisers imply that it possesses unique persuasive elements that can render for scholarly analyses. Since radio is a purely oral-acoustic medium just like primary orality, elements of primary oral cultures serve to enhance the expressiveness of radio-mediated advertisements. The paper begins from awareness that drama has always been a cultural production in Kenya, and that indigenous literary forms have always punctuated dramatic experience at every phase of its development both in content and style. Using a qualitative design, data is in the form of audio recordings of advertisements that use the technique of drama in radio. These are transcribed, translated and analyzed to arrive at conclusions about the persuasive strategy of theatre in the radio medium. Walter Ong’s theorizing about transiting from primary orality to typographical forms will enable us understand the psychodynamics of how audio messages are crafted to resonate with those who hear them. Ong’s ideas about the notion of ‘imagined audiences’ will also be used. These ideas enable us examine how advertisers imagine their audiences via virtual experience. It is expected that aspects of indigenous literary forms will manifest, and that these elements have rhetorically latent. It is also expected that the language in theatrical ads will be uniquely fashioned to persuade, and that these adverts will reveal how their consumers understand the world around them.