When I first met Ngũgĩ in January 2000, in Africa's most beautiful capital city of Asmara, Eritrea, he had long been for me a beneficent but slightly terrifying haunting. Given that the core of my academic research has been on East African theatre I could hardly avoid making Ngũgĩ's work in Kamĩrĩĩthũ a central point of reference. When I began working in the late 1980s for a PhD on political theatre in Africa – from a position of considerable ignorance – I remember Martin Banham, the then font of all wisdom on African theatre in England, most kindly telling me that I really should read Ngũgĩ's Decolonising the Mind. I can no longer recollect the order, but over the following years, I would read the novels, the plays and much of the polemic, and then begin to teach them; engaging with the restless intelligence that constantly sought new forms to express ever more accurately the history of the multiple on-going oppressions of the African everyman, by both black and white, of the capitalist, Christian establishment. I was also humbled by knowledge of the price Ngũgĩ had paid for his integrity, from the minor loss of western critical approbation when he turned his back on the well-made novel, to the major traumas of imprisonment without trial, enforced exile and the abuse of members of his family.

When I went to the University of Leeds in 1994 to teach in the Workshop Theatre of the School of English, I found Ngũgĩ had preceded me, having enrolled a couple of decades earlier on an MA he never completed because he had been preoccupied with finishing the novel A Grain of Wheat. He was beneficent because I agreed so strongly with much, though not all, of his political analysis, and because he wrote and engaged with life and people with such artistry and passion. He was slightly terrifying because of all the opprobrium he poured on white people working in Africa and on the comfortable middleclasses. I was undeniably a member of both groups.

What I could not have then known was that at the same time I was reading Ngũgĩ he was also becoming a favourite author of an Eritrean freedom fighter named Alemseged Tesfai, a tegadalai (freedom fighter) living in the northern mountains on little more than bread and lentils.

If you asked a room full of African theatre people to choose six plays to publish you would have, not consensus, or even amicable argument, but trouble. So we didn't ask: we decided. We did have a few guiding principles. Given that African Theatre only recently – in 2014 – published a volume on the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka we would not include these most famous of names. However we would, given that these are the regions of our best knowledge, focus on West and East Africa. We would only include plays we really liked, but we would try to offer a wide variety of authorship, form and subject matter; and we would try to bring to wider notice some works, notably plays not written in English, that we thought would be of interest to an international audience.

There are not many anthologies of African plays in circulation. We edited one many years ago (Methuen, 1999), Biodun Jeyifo edited another in 2002 (Norton), and Ubu Repertory Theatre Publications brought out two volumes of francophone plays in 1987 and 1991; and that's it for collections that are not the work of one playwright or drawing on work from just one country. We thought the world might like another place to access some of the best of African theatre in one volume.

We also thought that people coming new to the work might appreciate a little help in understanding and contextualizing the plays they were encountering. So we asked a range of theatre scholars, many leading voices in the field along with a few newcomers to keep things fresh, to write us accompanying essays for each play. We asked them to tell us something about the playwright, her or his times, work and thought, and then to discuss, in whatever terms they chose, the play in question. The results, several by people who have known the playwrights, or else by scholars deeply knowledgeable on their chosen playwright, are hugely informative and thought provoking.

It is sadly true that the number of women playwrights in Africa, though significantly growing, is still limited. African playwriting remains dominated by men.

Moussa Diagana

Moussa Diagana was born in 1946 in the small, relatively isolated town of M'Bout in southern Mauritania. On finishing school he first became a teacher in Nouadhibou, the country's second largest city, before going on to study in the capital, at the University of Nouakchott. Diagana was an exceptional student who progressed to Tunisia for his master's degree (1972-1976) before taking a doctorate in the sociology of development at the University of Paris 1 (1977-1980). An occasional playwright, who has been made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la R.publique fran.aise, Diagana from 1989 earned his living working for the United Nations Development Programme, mostly in Mali, before more recently moving to the UN Office for Project Services running programmes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

La Lénde du Wagadu vue par Sia Yatabéré (The Legend of Wagadu as Seen by Sia Yatabere) was Diagana's second play – his first, the unpublished Le mariage contrarié (The Thwarted Marriage) dating back to 1968. La Légende was written at a time when amateur theatre was becoming enormously popular in the Mauritanian capital. Formal drama, as opposed to rich indigenous oral and performance forms, had been first brought to Mauritania, as to so many other European colonies, via colonial schools. The first Mauritanian play was written only in the 1950s, just a few years before the country voted for independence from France in 1960. Early plays focused on promoting communism and pan-Arab nationalism but, with little state support, theatre was slow to grow. However, in the 1980s and early 1990s a new crop of enthusiastic theatre makers and audiences emerged in the capital. More than a dozen new non-professional companies were established in this period, popular plays regularly sold out, the government built a national theatre and for the first time made a limited investment in theatre training (Rubin, 1999).

This was the context in which Moussa Diagana wrote his 1988 success, staged first by the Dijon-based Franco-Mauritanian company, Theatre de l'Espour, with help from the French Cultural Institute and directed by the French actor and director Patrick La Mauff.

At the time of writing Engida is the most popular play in production among some fourteen shows on offer each week in the state theatres of Addis Ababa. It is also one of two plays written and directed by Manyazewal Endeshaw (from here on in, Manyazewal in keeping with Ethiopian usage where the first name is the given name and the second is the father's first name) currently being performed in the Ethiopian capital, which is, with the possible exceptions of Cape Town or Johannesburg, the most consistently prolific location for the production of professional live theatre on the African continent. As with all plays put on in these theatres it was written and performed in Amharic, the language of the Amhara people who make up just over a quarter of the Ethiopian population, who ruled the Ethiopian Empire for hundreds of years before it was overthrown in 1974, and whose tongue has become the language of commerce, state and culture.

Manyazewal was born into urban poverty in 1960 in Addis Ababa. His father was uneducated and his mother disabled, and Manyazewal rose through the hugely over-crowded public school system to gain a place at Addis Ababa University as one of the first students of Theatre Studies in 1977. He also grew up during a hugely politically traumatic time period.

In 1974 the ancient Ethiopian Empire and its ancient monarch, Haile Selassie, were overthrown by a military junta, the Derg that, in the process of establishing its dictatorial authority, imposed a reign of terror over the people, particularly in the capital. Like many of his contemporaries the young Manyazewal was involved in opposition socialist politics. As he recalled: ‘Most of us were members of different opposition political parties. There were many types of brutality. You could lose your life or be imprisoned because of a small incident, and you could be forgotten in a prison. It was a dark atmosphere, and the hope of survival was meagre.’ Manyazewal himself sees his attraction to absurdism as originating in the world of what came to be known as The Red Terror:

After passing through such experiences, I never thought that people would start to live properly and plan the future.

Introduction

Mother Uganda and Her Children was a music-dance-drama production developed by Rose Mbowa in 1987 with a cast drawn from the Music, Dance and Drama Department (MDD) of Makerere University. Until now existing only in the memories of a few and on some partial and poor quality VHS tapes, the script never having been written down, the play has a big place in the mythology of modern Uganda theatre. Mother Uganda was produced at a moment of historical and political challenge and supported by the incoming – and still in power 30 years later – government of Yoweri Museveni. The manner of its production was highly controversial at the time, challenging institutional, academic, political and personal loyalties. In line with a favoured Mbowa play-making methodology Mother Uganda was an improvisational collective production. It was unique in that it drew on some ten indigenous dance and music cultures to advance an agenda of national reconciliation, reconstruction and unity. Rose Mbowa, arguably Uganda's leading theatrical figure at the time, made a piece that traverses boundaries between popular musical theatre, indigenous dance-drama forms, political theatre, theatre in education and theatre for development as it appealed to unity across ethnic diversity, the possibility of human reformation, and the need for a rapid move towards the embedding of women's rights.

My relationship with Mother Uganda – Patrick

Reflecting on, and writing about, Mother Uganda and Her Children has made me consider my history of working with Rose Mbowa. I was Rose's student from 1984 to 1988, and then I worked with her as a teacher at Makerere University in MDD from 1991 to 1999, when she sadly and suddenly passed on. I acted in her Nalumansi Mother of Lukabwe in 1985. As a student I observed the development of Mother Uganda and Her Children in 1987, and then performed in Mine by Right in 1989. I was subsequently employed by the rival dance-drama Ndere Troupe as Executive Director but soon lost the job, being told I was ‘too close to Rose Mbowa'. Writing about Mother Uganda and Her Children is therefore informed by my experiences as a participant, a colleague and an observer of Mbowa's work.

Edward Wilson-Lee was brought up in Kenya amongst conservationists and is now a Shakespeare scholar teaching at Cambridge. Shakespeare in Swahililand, a piece of popular scholarship telling stories of Shakespeare being read, adapted and performed across East Africa, is something of a bringing together of these two disparate worlds the author has inhabited. It is by no means an attempt at a comprehensive history, though it ranges in time from the 1850s and stories of Shakespeare-loving explorers, right up to a concluding discussion of the circumstances that led to newly independent South Sudan mounting a production of Cymbeline for the 2012 Globe to Globe festival in London – though strangely Wilson-Lee never actually tells us the year of that event. It is also not a piece of conventional scholarship in that, although he is of course dependent on literary sources for the Victorian period information, most of the time the book is more of a Shakespeareinflected travelogue, as Wilson-Lee tells us of his attempts to track down people and places involved with various Shakespearian productions. If you want to know about Shakespeare and East Africa this also means you have to plough through quite a lot of padding, with extensive musings on assorted Shakespeare characters, and descriptions of the places the author went to in the course of his research. Some of this is quite whimsical, and some definitely of tangential interest. I found myself skimming quite a lot of the flummery that brings the book up to 288 pages.

In a ‘Prelude’ that made my post-colonial Africanist soul twitch uneasily at the mention of ‘tribe’ and ‘a land … braved by white travellers’ (xi), I was then, as one interested in the history of theatre in Africa, rendered queasy when Wilson-Lee said he was looking for ‘the Holy Grail of Shakespeare Studies: an understanding of Shakespeare's universal appeal’ (xii). Surely scholarship has moved beyond ideas of a singular ‘universality’ in apprehending any cultural product. And surely Wilson-Lee must recognize that colonialism imposed the idea of Shakespearean exceptionality, and that the continued teaching of Shakespeare in certain African states says at least as much about colonized minds (See Ngugi's 1981 Decolonising the Mind) as it does about an Elizabethan playwright.

Introduction

Ethiopia is an interesting place to look at the changing lives of actresses in Africa, both because it has the longest and strongest tradition of state supported theatre houses anywhere on the continent, and because it has moved from a time when, prior to 1951, all parts were played by men, to a present when leading actresses can be nationally recognized ‘stars’.

The first modern play, written like nearly all Ethiopian theatre in Amharic, dates back to 1921, and was performed by a cast of schoolboys. Play writing subsequently became a fashion among the aristocrats of the court of the last Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie, in the 1930s, and the first professional theatre, the Hager Fikir, was established in the 1940s, followed shortly afterwards by the City Hall Theatre, and in 1955 by the 1,400-seat Haile Selassie 1 Theatre (now the National Theatre with a staff of over 200). Ever since that time theatre-going has been a part of life in the capital Addis Ababa, which currently has five major theatres (though only two were operating fully at the time of writing) with productions also mounted by private companies in a number of halls, and tours regularly undertaken to major cities around the country. At times theatre has played a major political role in agitating for change, and since 1974 the companies in the state theatres have been government employees on recognized salary scales and with full pension rights. A number of attempts to create theatre training schemes have been made since the 1960s, but nowadays most actors, playwrights and directors are graduates of the Theatre Arts Department of Addis Ababa University, which began offering degree courses in 1978.

Ethiopian plays are put on in repertory. A play is normally performed once a week and a run may last for up to three years. Theatre houses put on a number of plays simultaneously, with the largest number being performed at the National Theatre where shows take place every day except Monday, with two performances on Saturdays and Sundays. Ticket prices are regulated, and recently there has been a battle between theatre professionals and the government which wanted to hold prices down to 15 birr (approximately US$ 0.60).

Stephanie Newell & Onookome Okome (eds),

Popular Culture in Africa: The episteme of the everyday

New York & London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2014

ISBN 9280415532921 (hbk) $140

Any book about popular culture in Africa is likely to find some orientation from Karin Barber's seminal essays: ‘Popular Arts in Africa’ (1987) and ‘Views from the Field’ (1997). The editors of Popular Culture in Africahave done more than touch base with these two important essays, they have persuaded her to write a densely argued seven page Foreword in which she revisits and sometimes corrects her earlier ideas. The editors’ Introduction reflects their allegiance to Barber's founding concepts, and almost every one of the fifteen articles in the book cites Barber, usually in reverential mode. The book is a Festschrift in all but name.

Barber's ‘scholarly architecture’, as Newell and Okome describe her work, derives to some extent from Raymond Williams's categorization of British culture into residual, dominant and emergent culture, which in Barber's 1987 essay becomes transmuted into ‘traditional, elite and popular’, although by 2014 she regrets this simplification, preferring to rely on more complex, overlapping categories.

Much of the book is devoted to arguments about the tendency for commentators to apply binary terminology, such as traditional/modern, oral/literate and local/global. The various authors, anxious to deconstruct false antinomies, emphasize simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Barber herself gives the example of Tanzanian Hip Hop, in which ‘gangsta’ costumes seem to exclude the genre from mainstream society, while the lyrics, for the most part, promote healthy lifestyles.

After the editors’ Introduction Popular Culture in Africais divided into four parts: I Theoretical Overviews; II Gender and Sexuality; III The Place of Humor; and IV Popular Discourses of the Streets.

The editors’ overview is a very useful update of some arguments which emerged from Barber's earlier essays. Newell and Okome try to map the class and ethnic variables which are able to describe the literate, but to a large extent subaltern, groups who are most responsible for the creation of popular arts. These include ‘sub-elites, emergent elites, local intellectuals, urban intellectuals, cultural brokers and local cosmopolitans’. The last term has given rise to a common colloquial construct: ‘Afropolitan’.

Introduction (JP)

This project arose from a serendipitous series of encounters at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds in England where, between 2000 and 2010, Alison Lloyd-Williams, Evelyn Lutwama-Rukundo and Susan Kiguli all studied for postgraduate degrees with me. Both Evelyn and Susan wrote PhD theses during this time about aspects of Buganda culture in Uganda.1 During the process of supervision I became interested in issues in Buganda society concerning theatre and the situation of women in Buganda society, which is particularly strongly patriarchal. However, since the National Resistance Government took power in 1986 and encouraged a grassroots programme of women's participation in social and political issues, a number of women, operating both alone as oral poets and within a growing matrix of nationwide amateur theatre groups, have been producing performances concerning women's issues. I was also interested to learn that the strongly hierarchical nature of Buganda society made it difficult for women to speak freely across age and educational barriers, even amongst themselves. Finally, there has been an ongoing battle since 1964, in one form or another, to enact legislation in the form of a Marriage and Divorce Bill which would grant women improved rights in relation to marriage.

I had previously run a short workshop at Makerere University on Theatre for Development; Alison had worked in Ugandan schools, Evelyn had researched and practised with rural women's theatre groups and Susan taught literature at Makerere. Susan and I are practitioners as well as academics. I developed the idea that we could collaborate on a piece of work which would be innovative (I knew of no other intergenerational women's theatre project in Africa); would model collaboration with equal weight given to all participants’ views; and would be a genuine experiment to see whether performance was a good way to find out about women's perspectives on their lives and a situation in which they could be encouraged to exchange views across the barriers of class, age and education. Together we developed our project proposal, conducted the work, and Susan and I have written this article.

It is thirteen years since the African Theatreseries published its previous volume discussing the role of women in the performance cultures of the continent, where it became, and remained, the best selling volume in the series. There is an undoubted hunger amongst scholars, not only of theatre, but more widely of African culture and of African women's studies, to know more about women's contributions to the dramatic arts, and it is a hunger which the editors think remains to be satisfied. We therefore decided to produce a volume looking specifically at women working in the twentyfirst century, soliciting articles from as wide a range of perspectives – and countries – as we could find.

Women's contributions remain obscured in many discussions of African theatre. While thousands of women work in the industry, and some, for example Penina Mlama and Amandina Lihamba in Tanzania, and Zulu Sofola and Tess Onwueme of Nigeria, have won national fame, relatively few have achieved an international profile. This is partly because in many places theatre is performed in local languages, uses local theatrical idioms, and speaks to local concerns, so that someone like Elizabeth Melaku (discussed below in our article on Ethiopian actresses) who is a huge national star of stage and screen in Ethiopia, is utterly unknown to the non-Amharic speaking world. However, the issue of localism is not, of course, gender specific. So the question remains: why, while at least a small number of African men have become regular subjects of scholarship, is it still extremely hard to find out about the work of contemporary African women theatre artists?

On reading the articles in this volume it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that sexist inequalities, in a range of forms, have much to do with the matter. Actress, director and playwright Dalia Basiouny discusses the huge problems she experienced from a jealous, obstructive husband in developing her career; the essential context of the intergenerational women's theatre discussed by Kiguli and Plastow was that the Ugandan government and Buganda society at domestic and state levels discriminate against women's rights; and Sefi Atta's play, The Sentence, explicitly discusses the predicament of an underprivileged northern Nigerian woman faced with the ‘justice’ of an extreme interpretation of shari'a law.