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CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
INTERACTIONS
SERIES EDITORS: ELAINE ASTON · BRIAN SINGLETON
Theatre from Rhodesia

to Zimbabwe
Hegemony, Identity and
a Contested Postcolony
Edited by
Samuel Ravengai · Owen Seda
Contemporary Performance InterActions
Series Editors
Elaine Aston, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancashire, UK
Brian Singleton, Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Theatre’s performative InterActions with the politics of sex, race and
class, with questions of social and political justice, form the focus of
the Contemporary Performance InterActions series. Performative Inter-
Actions are those that aspire to affect, contest or transform. Interna-
tional in scope, CPI publishes monographs and edited collections dedi-
cated to the InterActions of contemporary practitioners, performances
and theatres located in any world context.
Advisory Board
Khalid Amine (Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Morocco)
Bishnupriya Dutt (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Mark Fleishman (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Janelle Reinelt (University of Warwick, UK)
Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland, Australia)
Harvey Young (Northwestern University, USA)
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14918
Samuel Ravengai · Owen Seda
Editors
Theatre
from Rhodesia
to Zimbabwe
Hegemony, Identity and a Contested Postcolony
Editors
Samuel Ravengai Owen Seda
Department of Theatre Department of Performing Arts
and Performance Tshwane University of Technology
Witwatersrand University Pretoria, South Africa
Johannesburg, South Africa
ISSN 2634-5870 ISSN 2634-5889 (electronic)

Contemporary Performance InterActions
ISBN 978-3-030-74593-6 ISBN 978-3-030-74594-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74594-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Picture by Mariola Biela for Wits Theatre
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my parents, Mkuleko Philemon Nzwura and Grace (Racy) Ravengai
for teaching me the value of education and who continue to inspire me in
most things (Samuel).
To my late parents Jaison and Emetina Seda-Dube, you were the
inspiration upon which everything rests (Owen).
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge several people who supported us in real-

ising this collection. We were pleasantly provoked by one of our former
students, Dr. Kelvin Chikonzo, who petitioned us to do what other
founding professors had done in their respective disciplines. Being the first
generation of academics who started the department of Theatre Arts (now
the Department of Creative Media and Communication) at the University
of Zimbabwe, we felt that we certainly needed to do something. Thank
you to Kelvin, who provided the original idea!
Many thanks also to the students, professional performers and theatre
organisations in Zimbabwe and South Africa who have created work with
us and the other theatre makers on whose work our research and that of
our contributors is based. These include Cont Mhlanga and Amakhosi
Theatre, Daves Guzha and Rooftop Promotions, Daniel Maposa and
Savanna Trust, Tafadzwa Muzondo and EDZAI ISU, James Mukwin-
didza and Vuka Africa, Danai Gurira, Patience Tawengwa and Almasi
Collaborative Arts, Silvanos Mudzvova and Vhitori Entertainment, Wits
Theatre and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Our gratitude also
goes to our publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for believing in this project
and our erstwhile peer and editorial reviewers who played a prominent
role in ensuring that the collection lived up to a high standard of schol-
arly engagement. Special thanks to Adrienne Pretorius for proofing and
indexing this collection.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We appreciate the role of the University of Zimbabwe, Theatre Arts

Department and its production house, The Beit Theatre, as well as our
current theatre and performance departments at the University of the
Witwatersrand and Tshwane University of Technology for providing the
space to carry out our intellectual project. The University of Zimbabwe
will continue to occupy a special place in our hearts for being the insti-
tution, which incubated and nurtured most of the contributors to this
collection as students, lecturers, research fellows and visiting scholars. We
also wish to thank staff and students at the following universities who
all played a role in our academic development by hosting the two of us
over the years as staff, students or visiting academics: the University of
Arizona, University of Cape Town, California State Polytechnic Univer-
sity Pomona, Africa University, the University of Jos, the University of
Botswana and the University of Pretoria.
Many thanks to the generous photographers and designers who gave
us permission to use their designs and photographs, Mariola Biela, Daniel
Maposa, Shadreck Dzingayi, and Joy Wrolson.
Finally, our heartfelt gratitude goes out to our respective families
whose unconditional love and support helped to sustain us as we worked
tirelessly on this collection.
Contents
1 Introduction: Contested Forms, Spaces

and the Politics of Representation in Zimbabwean
Theatre—A Historical Perspective 1
Samuel Ravengai and Owen Seda
Part I From Colonial to De-colonial Theatre: Contested

Forms
2 Colonial Zimbabwean Theatre, Cultural Production
and the Interplay with Rhodesian Power
and Discourse 25
Samuel Ravengai
3 Negotiating Whitehood: Identity and Resistance
in Rhodesian Theatre 1950–1980 47
Kelvin Chikonzo and Samuel Ravengai
4 Transformative Complexity of Found Objects
in Devised Zimbabwean Theatre 69
Tafadzwa Mlenga and Nehemiah Chivandikwa
5 Amakhosi Theatre Training (1990–2000): An Exercise
in Syncretism 89
Nkululeko Sibanda and Julia Yule
ix
x CONTENTS
6 Contestation in Postcolonial Drama: Residual

and Emergent Consciousness in Zimbabwean Theatre
at Independence—NTO and ZACT 111
Owen Seda
7 Creating Counter-Public Sphere(s): Performance
in Zimbabwe Between the Influence of Mugabe
and Western NGOs 131
Julius Heinicke
Part II The Politics of Representation

8 ‘I Was Never a White Girl and I Do Not Want to Be
a White Girl’: Albinism, Youth Theatre and Disability
Politics in Contemporary Zimbabwe 151
Chiedza Adelaide Chinhanu, Nehemiah Chivandikwa,
and Owen Seda
9 Popular Theatre as a Struggle for Identity
and Representation in Matabeleland: 1980
to the Present 169
Mandlenkosi Mpofu, Cletus Moyo,
and Nkululeko Sibanda
10 Harnessing the Whirlwind: Hybridity, Memory
and Crisis in Theatre During Zimbabwe’s Operation
Murambatsvina 193
Joy L. Wrolson
11 Towards a Democratic Protest Theatre in Zimbabwe:
Vhitori Entertainment’s Protest Revolutionaries (2012) 221
Kelvin Chikonzo
12 Who is Indigenous? Freeing Indigeneity from a Time
Warp 237
Pedzisai Maedza
Index 263
Notes on Contributors
Kelvin Chikonzo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Creative

Media and Communication, at the University of Zimbabwe, where he
teaches Performance Historiography and Post-dramatic Theatre. He holds
a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Zimbabwe. He is mainly inter-
ested in the relationship between theatre and democracy in Zimbabwe and
this is evidenced in the following publications: Theatre Research Inter-
national 41(3) 2016, published by Cambridge Press, Cogent Arts and
Humanities 5(1) 2018 and Critical Arts 33(1) 2019, the latter two
published by Taylor and Francis. He recently co-edited a book project
entitled National Healing, Integration and Reconciliation in Zimbabwe
(2019) published by Routledge.
Chiedza Adelaide Chinhanu is a Ph.D. researcher in the School of
Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Her
research focuses on the creative practices and potentialities of sharing
lived experiences with women in prisons. It is fully funded by the Univer-
sity of Leeds Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Council. Chinhanu is an
alumna of the Canon Collins Scholarship. She holds an M.A. in Applied
Drama and Theatre Studies from the University of Cape Town and a
B.A. Honours in Theatre Arts from the University of Zimbabwe. Her
research interests lie in participatory performances, cultural criminology,
gender and performative citizenship. Recent publication includes Ubuntu
in Education: Towards equitable teaching and learning for all in the era of
SDG 4 2020, published by NORRAG.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Nehemiah Chivandikwa is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Creative Media and Communication at the University of Zimbabwe. He
is a former head of the department of Creative Media and Communica-
tion. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from the University of Zimbabwe.
His current research focuses on applied media development commuta-
tion with a particular emphasis on theatre, television, participatory video
and community radio. Chivandikwa has been involved in several projects
in applied theatre on gender, political violence, disability and rural and
urban development. Chivandikwa has a particular interest in the use of
participatory theatre and media technology in the context of impact-
orientated research on marginalised groups such as women, youths and
disabled communities. His most recent publications are in Research in
Drama Education (RiDE) 25(4) 2020 published by Taylor and Francis,
Journal of Sustainable Development (2020) published by Canadian Centre
of Science and Education.
Julius Heinicke is Professor of Cultural Policy and holds the UNESCO
Chair in Cultural Policy for the Arts in Development, at the University of
Hildesheim since March 2020. He studied Cultural and Theatre Studies
at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he completed his doctorate
on theatre and politics in Zimbabwe. He went on to conduct research
in the Theatre Studies department at the Freie Universität Berlin before
accepting a professorship in Applied Cultural Studies at Coburg Univer-
sity. Since 2017 he has headed up the research project “Interfaces between
high culture and cultural education”. His thesis on diversity in the theatre,
“Sorge um das Offene: Verhandlungen von Vielfalt mit und im Theater”
was published by Theater der Zeit in 2019. Julius Heinicke has spent many
years working on arts and research projects with colleagues in Southern
Africa, particularly South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Pedzisai Maedza is a Newton International Fellow at the School of
Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, University of Warwick,
United Kingdom. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance, Memory and Geno-
cide Studies from the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Institute for
Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University-
Mainz, Germany. He is the author of Performing Asylum: Theatre of
Testimony in South Africa (African Studies Centre, University of Leiden,
2017) in addition to numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
in international journals on Performance and Cultural studies some of

which include the following: The Drama Review 63(4) 2019 published
by Project Muse, African Identities 17(3–4) 2019 and Social Dynamics:
A Journal of African Studies 43(2) 2017, all published by Taylor and
Francis.
Tafadzwa Mlenga is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Social Work
degree at Dalhousie University in Canada and hopes to pursue a career as
an Art Therapist. She is formerly a Lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe
in the Department of Theatre Arts (now Department of Creative Media
and Communication). She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Theatre Arts
and a Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Zimbabwe. She
has research interest in the fields of theatre design, child art therapy and
child and youth mental health development. Her most recent publica-
tions include Studies in Theatre and Performance 33(3) 2015 and a book
chapter in National Healing, Integration and Reconciliation in Zimbabwe
(2019) published by Routledge.
Cletus Moyo is a Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Faculty
of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lupane State University. He is
currently a Canon Collins Ph.D. Scholar at the University of KwaZulu-
Natal, studying Drama and Performance Studies. Cletus Moyo’s research
interests include social drama, theatre as both a product of society and a
shaper of society, theatre as a voice of the voiceless and the relationship
between practice and research within an applied drama paradigm. His
most recent publications are in Journal of Education and Practice 6(6)
2015 published by IISTE, Applied Theatre Research 7(2) 2019 published
by Intellect and a book chapter in The Routledge Companion to Applied
Performance (2020).
Mandlenkosi Mpofu is a Senior Lecturer at Lupane State University,
Zimbabwe. He holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communication from the
University of Oslo. Mpofu has eight publications covering ICTs and civil
society in Zimbabwe, theatre and alternative media and media power
amongst ethnic minorities in the age of online communication. His
research interests include the impact of new media, political commu-
nication, media regulation, community media and alternative media on
democracy in Zimbabwe. His most recent publications are in Journal
of African Media Studies 9(3) 2017, African Journalism Studies, 37(4)
2016 and Critical Arts 31(1) 2017, all published by Taylor and Francis.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Samuel Ravengai is Associate Professor and Head of Department of

Theatre and Performance at the University of the Witwatersrand, in
Johannesburg, South Africa. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Theatre and
Performance, both from the University of Cape Town. He is particularly
interested in the interconnection of race, nation, empire, migration and
ethnicity with cultural production. Ravengai’s most recent publications
are in Sounds of Life (2016) published by Cambridge Scholars, Critical
Arts 32(2) 2018, South African Theatre Journal 33(1) 2020, the last two
published by Taylor and Francis. He is currently involved in the research
project called Afroscenology which seeks to propound and document a
theory on African and Diasporic aesthetics based on their practice across
several years.
Owen Seda is an Associate Professor and acting section head (Theatre
Arts & Design: Performer) at Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria
in South Africa. He has also taught at the University of Zimbabwe, Africa
University, tThe University of Botswana and the University of Pretoria.
Seda holds a D.Phil. from the University of Zimbabwe. He has been
a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the
Department of Theatre and New Dance, California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona. In 2005 he was recipient of a joint Fulbright Alumni
Initiatives Awards grant with the late Professor William H. Morse of the
Department of Theatre and New Dance at Cal Poly Pomona.
Nkululeko Sibanda is a Drama Lecturer at the University of Pretoria,
South Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Performance Studies from
the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The need to develop a formidable,
relevant and effective performance theory and practice model within
African performance practice sits at the base of his research endeavours.
His research interests include African Theatre, alternative scenography,
alternative performance and identity, and performance and memory. He
has published more than 18 peer-reviewed research papers in theatre
design, theatre training, performance and cultural politics in Zimbabwe
and South Africa. His most recent publications are in Critical Arts 33(3)
2019, Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory
and Research 45(2) 2019 both published by Taylor and Francis and
Applied Theatre Research 7(2) 2019 published by Intellect.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Joy L. Wrolson is an independent theatre scholar and artist. Although

directing is her primary role, Wrolson also works in sound design, stage
management and new play development. She has a Ph.D. in Theatre
from the University of Kansas and is an alumna of the Fulbright-Hays
Dissertation Programme.
Julia Yule is a Lecturer in Performing Arts at the Simon Muzenda
School of Arts, Culture and Heritage Studies at Great Zimbabwe Univer-
sity. She is currently reading for her Ph.D. with the University of South
Africa (UNISA). She holds a Master of Arts degree in Dramatic Art from
Witwatersrand University. Recent publications are in Journal of Emerging
Trends in Educational Research and Policy Studies 8(1) 2017published by
Scholar link Research Institute, International Journal of Healthcare and
Medical Sciences 3(1) 2017 published by Academic Research Publishing
Group and International Open and Distance Learning Journal 2(1) 2018
published by Zimbabwe Open University.
List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 Vuka Afrika’s You Have No Right, a play

about the freedom of the press. Marita is being
questioned (Photo by J. Wrolson) 204
Fig. 10.2 All Systems Out of Order. Chishawasha Mission.
Confrontation between AncientMan and ModernMan
(Photo by J. Wrolson) 212
Fig. 12.1 GZU Venda dancers 241
Fig. 12.2 GZU Shangaan dancers 241
Fig. 12.3 GZU Venda dancers greeting the crowd 246
Fig. 12.4 GZU Shangaan dancers acknowledging the audience 247
Fig. 12.5 GZU Venda dancers on stage 256
Fig. 12.6 GZU Shangaan dancer in a solo routine 258
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Contested Forms, Spaces

and the Politics of Representation
in Zimbabwean Theatre—A Historical
Perspective
Samuel Ravengai and Owen Seda
This collection surveys the theatre produced in Zimbabwe from the last
days of colonialism in the 1970s right up to 2009 when the country’s
post-independence political and economic crisis, which had started in
November 1997, had slowed down significantly. The slowdown followed
the inauguration of a Southern Africa Development Community (SADC)
brokered Government of National Unity (GNU) that brought together
S. Ravengai (B)
Department of Theatre and Performance, Witwatersrand University,
e-mail: samuel.ravengai@wits.ac.za
O. Seda
Department of Performing Arts, Tshwane University of Technology,
Pretoria, South Africa
e-mail: sedao@tut.ac.za
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Ravengai and O. Seda (eds.), Theatre from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe,
Contemporary Performance InterActions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74594-3_1
2 S. RAVENGAI AND O. SEDA
the then ruling ZANU PF party (under the late Robert Mugabe) and
its chief post-independence political adversary, the Movement for Demo-
cratic Change (MDC) under the late Morgan Tsvangirai. We use the
establishment of the GNU of 2009 as a cut-off point for this collection
not least because the political and economic turmoil that characterised
the colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwean state became highly enmeshed
with the nature and extent of the country’s theatre and cultural produc-
tion as alluded to in the title of our edited collection. The collection
brings together the work of 13 scholars whose primary interest is located
at the intersection of political, cultural and performative discourses and
the flow of Zimbabwean history. The collection suggests that perfor-
mance not only intervenes, but also offers alternative insights into the
historical, socio-economic and political trajectories and narratives of its
time. The collection not only focuses on the history of performance
cultures in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, but it also extends its
critical gaze to include the history of political ideas that gave rise to
cultural contestations in the field of theatre and performance. We must
hasten to add from the outset that besides our joint editorship of this
collection of essays, both of us were not only founding members of
the University of Zimbabwe’s Department of Theatre Arts (from where
most of the research for this book was conducted) but have also been
involved in considerable research on Zimbabwean theatre. As a result, we
contribute a chapter each to the collection beside appearing as co-authors
in two other chapters in this collection. Over and above this, we do occa-
sionally refer to our previous publications on Zimbabwe theatre in other
books and journals in order to provide essential context where necessary.
For that reason, while it may sound ‘jarring’ to the reader’s ear, we opt
to refer to ourselves in the third person in those instances where we refer
to our contributions in the introduction to this collection or in previous
journals and book chapters.
Zimbabwe is a southern African country bordered on the south by
South Africa, in the north by Zambia, to the east by Mozambique and in
the west by Botswana and Namibia. Great Britain occupied and colonised
the country in 1890 through a company called the British South Africa
Company (BSAC) that was owned by Cecil John Rhodes. In a 1922
referendum, company rule or rule of the Southern Rhodesia dominion
by Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company as well as plans
1 INTRODUCTION: CONTESTED FORMS, SPACES AND THE POLITICS ... 3
to join the Union of South Africa1 were set aside. Rhodes’s company
had been granted a charter by the British Queen Victoria to set up an
administration for Southern Rhodesia as a British colony and explore
and exploit mineral resources in the colony’s regions of Matabeleland
and Mashonaland. In its place, a so-called responsible government took
over the affairs of Southern Rhodesia (as colonial Zimbabwe was offi-
cially called then) from October 1923 up to 1965. Between 1953 and
1963, Southern Rhodesia formed a federation with Northern Rhodesia
(present-day Zambia) and Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), which became
known as the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, or the Central
African Federation (CAF). The federation collapsed in 1963 due to several
reasons, chief among which were the rise of African nationalism and resis-
tance to the federation, including a call for an end to colonialism by
the African inhabitants who were agitating for independence, as well as
perceptions of the federation as an arrangement that was primarily benefit-
ting Southern Rhodesia (which happened to house the federal state capital
in the then-named Salisbury) at the expense of the two other countries in
the pact.
A radical white supremacist party called the Rhodesian Front, headed
by Ian Douglas Smith assumed power in April 1964 and unilaterally
declared independence from Britain in November 1965. It refused to
recognise the authority of the British Queen’s representative, Governor-
General Humphrey Gibbs, and appointed Clifford Dupont in his place.
A constitutional amendment during the first quarter of 1970 proclaimed
Rhodesia as a republic with powers to enact its own laws without refer-
ring them to the Queen for ratification. Ian Smith’s Rhodesia Front ruled
the country between 1965 and 1979 (a period commonly referred to
as the UDI period). The international community, including the colo-
nial master, Great Britain, did not recognise this political arrangement
and reacted by imposing punitive economic sanctions on the country at
the behest of Great Britain. Feeling isolated, the Rhodesian Front sought
legitimacy by engaging in dialogue with moderate African nationalists,
1 The Union of South Africa was formed on 31 May 1910 unifying different dominions
that had emerged out of the Anglo-Boer conflict, namely the Cape Colony, the Natal
Colony, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony. It included the territories that were
formerly the Orange Free State. It was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire
and it seemed logical that another dominion under the same empire, Southern Rhodesia,
become part of the Union, but that failed in 1922. The Union was dissolved after the
1961 constitution which formed the Republic of South Africa.
which resulted in a power-sharing government that brought together Ian

Smith’s rebel Rhodesia Front (RF) and the main African political move-
ments that were based within the country namely the United African
National Congress (UANC) led by the late Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the
Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led by the late Reverend
Ndabaningi Sithole and the Zimbabwe People’s Union (ZUPO) led by
the late Chief Jeremiah Chirau. The power-sharing government, which
became known as the internal settlement was inaugurated on 3 March
1978 leading to subsequent elections in April 1979 which Bishop Abel
Muzorewa ‘won’. Following the sham elections, the country was renamed
Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Unfortunately, the international community did not
recognise the internal settlement. The liberation war intensified forcing
the Rhodesia Front to accept talks with the major liberation parties
at the time comprising the Patriotic Front an umbrella body, which
brought together the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front
(ZANU PF) and the Patriotic Front Zimbabwe African People’s Union
(PF ZAPU).
The Commonwealth brokered talks were held at Lancaster House in
England leading to a ceasefire agreement and a peace settlement also
signed at Lancaster House in London in December 1979. A British
Governor-General, Lord Soames, was appointed to administer the colony
for a transitional period, effectively nullifying the rebel Rhodesia Front’s
unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) of November 1965. The
Lancaster House Agreement was followed by UN-supervised elections
and on 18 April 1980, Prince Charles officiated at the lowering of the
Union Jack in Salisbury, Rhodesia, where after having won the elec-
tions, Robert Mugabe was inaugurated as the Prime Minister of the first
republic. Robert Mugabe created a coalition government with Joshua
Nkomo, who had won 20 parliamentary seats against the 57 won by
Mugabe’s ZANU PF with 20 seats reserved for whites in a 100-seat
parliament. Sadly, the euphoria of independence was soon to dissipate
in less than two years after the attainment of freedom when disturbances
flared up between the two main liberation movements (Robert Mugabe’s
ZANU PF and Joshua Nkomo’s PF ZAPU) that had fought side by
side during the war of independence. The two protagonists became
embroiled in armed conflict after significant arms caches were allegedly
discovered at PF ZAPU-owned farms and properties across Matabele-
land province, which also happened to be the party’s regional political
stronghold. Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU PF immediately labelled this
discovery an act of treachery that was tantamount to treason, leading to

the dismissal from government of Nkomo and his ministers, confiscation
of several ZAPU-owned properties by government and the deployment of
a North Korean trained crack army unit (the Fifth Brigade) to the Mata-
beleland and Midlands provinces to flush out the so-called Nkomo and
PF ZAPU affiliated dissidents who had allegedly defected from the newly
integrated national army to embark on a militarised orgy of violence in
order to stage an insurrection against Robert Mugabe’s popularly elected
ZANU PF government. According to some independent reports and
records, Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade campaign (which became known by the
Shona language term Gukurahundi: meaning ‘the rains that wash away
the chaff’) led to the massacre of thousands2 of ethnic Ndebele and their
sympathisers (CCJP 1997; Sibanda 2005). The infamous Gukurahundi
massacres only ended in November 1987 with the eventual capitulation of
Nkomo’s PF ZAPU which agreed to unite with Robert Mugabe’s ZANU
PF and build a government of national unity in order to save lives. Later
we will discuss the problems that emerged shortly after the establishment
of the new post-independence government as well as how Zimbabwean
theatre, especially the type produced from Matabeleland, a PF ZAPU
stronghold, chose to represent this political crisis and to respond to it.
Given this historical context, we now want to establish the intersec-
tion of these colonial forces with Zimbabwean theatre and performance.
Although colonialism was experienced in different ways in different
African contexts—indirect rule, direct rule, protectorate rule, Lusophone,
Anglophone and Francophone colonialism—the African response to colo-
nialism was largely similar throughout the African continent. Frantz
Fanon (2003), while theorising on the evolution of the African writer
and the different phases of his/her consciousness, has provided a schema
that is relevant to the whole of African theatre and performance. The first
phase of responding to colonialism in African writing and theatre making
was to assimilate into the western culture. The inspiration of the African
theatre maker was, according to Fanon (2003, p. 179), ‘European and
we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature
of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation’. In
2 The exact number of people killed has not been scientifically verified and the estimates
depend on which source one is using. According to Eliakim Sibanda (2005), Nkomo put
the figure at 3000, church officials at about 1500 and the CCJP report (1997) at 3750.
Eliakim Sibanda is content with the average between 3000 and 10,000.
Zimbabwean theatre, most playwrights and directors applied realism as a

creative method and depended on the psycho-technique to transform play
texts into performance. While writing on trends in Zimbabwean theatre,
Samuel Ravengai3 (2006) called this group of theatre makers ‘con-
formists’ to describe their assimilation of western aesthetics. This work
was produced by the first generation of Zimbabwean theatre makers born
between the early part of the twentieth century and 1939. Although some
of the work captured local content such as the crowning of Ndebele kings
and the life of the Zulu as in Osias Mkosana’s uSikhwili (The grudge)
(1957) and Ngiyalunga (I am doing well) (1958), or teaching African
morals and culture in Paul Chidyausiku’s Ndakambokuyambira (I warned
you) (1968), Davidson Mugabe’s Rugare tange nhamo (Peace comes
after trouble) (1972) and Arthur Chipunza’s Svikiro (Spirit Medium)
(1978), this local content was presented using western aesthetics. The
work was produced and supervised by the colonial Rhodesia Literature
Bureau and therefore conformed to the colonial aesthetic preferred by
the bureau. A section of the second generation of Zimbabwean theatre
makers, born between 1940 and 1959, which collaborated with white
liberals such as John Haigh and Karl Dorn also espoused the western
aesthetic, for example, Ben Sibenke’s My uncle Grey Bhonzo (1982) and
the Athol Fugard plays performed by Walter Muparutsa, John Indi,
Friday Mbirimi, Dominic Kanaventi and Stephen Chigorimbo under the
direction of John Haigh of Sundown Theatre.
Fanon calls the second phase ‘literature of just-before-the-battle’
(2003, p. 179). During this phase, the African cultural producer, recog-
nised that he/she did not belong to the western world. The theatre maker
needed to tap from the stories of African people. Haunted by the ghost
of western aesthetics, the theatre maker revisited African legends, myths,
folklore, stories, history and past happenings, but presented them ‘in
the light of borrowed aesthetic and conception of the world which was
discovered under other skies’ (Fanon 2003, p. 179). A typical example
from South Africa is Herbert Dhlomo, who revisited the life and times of
black South African kings and staged plays about them, utilising western
staging aesthetics. Dhlomo wrote and produced plays such as Shaka,
Cetshwayo, and Moshoeshoe, among others. Dhlomo prefigured many later
African playwrights of the twentieth century such as Wole Soyinka and
3 Samuel Ravengai is co-author of this introduction and two other chapters in this
collection.
Welcome Msomi. In Zimbabwe, this kind of theatre was the product

of what Samuel Ravengai (2006) has referred to as the ‘first genera-
tion of theatre makers’ who were born between the early part of the
twentieth century and 1939 as exemplified above. Because of the influ-
ence of the white-dominated National Theatre Organisation (NTO), this
aesthetic continued to guide theatre creativity even after the attainment of
Zimbabwe’s formal independence with typical examples being the works
of Stephen Chifunyise, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ben Sibenke and Walter
Muparutsa.4
Fanon refers to the third phase as ‘fighting literature’, ‘revolutionary
literature’ or ‘literature of combat’ (2003, p. 179). In the field of theatre,
this is variously referred to as theatre of resistance, struggle theatre,
protest theatre, guerrilla theatre, liberation theatre and so on. In this
phase, theatre makers abandoned assimilationist trends and western forms
of presenting African issues to focus on African song, dance, mime
and content. Past forms and content were used to raise black people’s
consciousness. In South Africa, black people produced what they called
black theatre under the banner of the Black Consciousness Movement
as championed by Steve Biko. Black theatre aimed at addressing African
people in order to raise their consciousness about oppression as a psycho-
logical phenomenon. This was a characteristic feature of theatre in many
African countries with a history of military struggle against colonial
armies.
In Zimbabwe, this type of theatre was produced in guerrilla training
camps in Zambia and Mozambique, where the liberation movements had
established rear bases. Guerrillas performed this type of theatre: pungwe
(meaning: theatre and cultural performance in aid of the revolution that
was produced during war-time all-night vigils) on Zimbabwean territory
in combat, and in liberated and semi-liberated zones during mass mobil-
isation meetings lasting throughout the night (see Ravengai 2016). The
main characteristics of this theatre movement were didacticism, bifurcated
4 Some of Stephen Chifunyise’s plays include the following: Not for sale (1984),
Medicine for love (1984), When Ben came back (1984), Intimate affairs (2008), Lovers,
friends and money (2008). Tsitsi Dangarebga’s only known play is She no longer weeps
(1987). Ben Sibenke wrote My uncle Grey Bhonzo (1982) Dr Madzuma and the vipers
(n.d) and Chidembo Chanhuwa/The polecat stunk (n.d). Walter Muparutsa did not write
any known play, but adapted Shona novels to theatre with Mbare based Chiedza Theatre
Company.
characters (playing more characters than one), minimalism, flat charac-

ters (characters that do not develop and more often than not, show only
one dimension) or performers playing themselves, use of open/empty
spaces, use of the storytelling format, chance arrangement of compo-
nents (aleatory technique), use of untrained performers and reliance on
the body as the main vehicle of performance, while other components
were low in hierarchy. We list these characteristics because most of them
provided the matrix or the DNA of a new theatre that emerged after
the fall of colonialism. Some of the works discussed by scholars in this
collection are in fact, strongly influenced by struggle theatre. Struggle
theatre has been extensively researched by other scholars, notably Plastow
(1996), Kaarsholm (1994) Ravengai (2016) and Viriri (2013) for those
who may need more information on the form. For this reason, this collec-
tion has not covered this type of theatre. We are, convinced, however, that
this background is important in order to fully grasp the intricacies of the
contestations that were obtained among the various players in the field of
theatre after the fall of colonialism.
Part I: From Colonial to Decolonial

Theatre: Contested Forms
The framework developed by Fanon on the transformation of African
theatre can be expanded further to cover the aesthetic shifts that theatre
makers initiated to respond to the politics of decolonisation. In most
African countries, African politicians who took over from colonial govern-
ments immediately began a process of decolonisation of the economy, the
civil service, the academy, the arts and culture, in fact, most facets of life.
A robust student movement, as in the case of Zimbabwe in the 1980s
and 1990s and South Africa beginning from 2015, supported this. Like-
wise, in the field of theatre, theatre makers called for the decolonisation
of theatre where new forms emerged, as in the case of anansegoro (story-
telling theatre) or abibigoro (black theatre) in Ghana, black aesthetics in
South Africa and theatre of assimilation or fusion in the Caribbean islands.
A new theory has now emerged which provides a language of description
for the range of theatre innovations happening in Africa and the African
Diaspora which Ravengai (2020) has called Afroscenology. In its current
usage, Afroscenology refers to performance practices developed by African
practitioners and Africanists who have revolutionised and expanded our
understanding of acting/performing and actor/performer training. The
global theory of the actor can no longer fully explain the developments in
African performance. As the work moves forward, Afroscenology seeks to
document, conceptualise and theorise the ways in which African prac-
titioners creatively work and perform in order to establish a method
of theatre making and performer training that brings together what is
currently scattered.
Different theatre makers across the African continent theorise the
methods of this decolonial theatre in different ways. However, the form
that they propose gravitates towards a single identity—a theatre that is
generated from an African matrix (one of its many rituals) with several
other texts grafted into it, dominated by a presentational style, with
the body as the dominant sign of performance (see Ukala 2001; Asiedu
2011). Ukala has called this contestation ‘the politics of aesthetics’ (2001,
p. 30).
The chapters in this part deal with the phenomenon of contesting
Rhodesian discourse through form and episteme. In this collection, we
allude to the notion of a contested post-colony as a way of acknowledging
the long history of the development of Zimbabwean theatre as a discourse
of concrete instances of contestation in material practices, texts and narra-
tives. The two chapters by Tafadzwa Mlenga and Nehemiah Chivandikwa,
Nkululeko Sibanda and Julia Yule seek to negate Eurocentric discourses
that often propagate the inferiorisation or denigration of African theatre
and its related cultural formations as inherently weak and at the mercy
of superior, marauding and all-conquering Eurocentric cultural forma-
tions. Rather, these chapters view theatre in the Zimbabwean post-colony
as an arena in which imported Eurocentric practices were often foiled
in their attempt to impose a totalising and homogenising completeness.
Further to this, some of the scholars in this collection, such as Sibanda
and Yule, acknowledge the intercultural nature of Zimbabwean society as
one, which from the onset fostered syncretic cultural rapprochement as a
direct result of racial contact in a period spanning over 100 years of the
country’s colonial and post-independence history.
For us, then, contestation in cultural production in the Zimbabwean
post-colony played out in line with Antonio Gramsci’s outlook on hege-
monic power as something that is always contested, always historically
contingent and always unfinished and in a state of transition. We therefore
agree with Michel Foucault (1978) who argues that power is not neces-
sarily always repressive, nor a tool of control wielded by one class or set
of social institutions over subordinate sections of society. Rather, power

flows in multiple directions. We view subordinate classes in Zimbabwe
as having played a prominent part in the construction of the country’s
cultural identity in the theatre as much as the dominant classes within an
overarching framework of cultural contact, resistance and change. Also,
in line with Foucault, we conceptualise the development and manifesta-
tion of Zimbabwean theatre since 1890 when the country was formally
colonised by the British as a terrain in which hegemonic and subordinate
discourses simultaneously became mechanisms of social power. In this
way, we view hegemony in the practice of Zimbabwean theatre as always
contested, with the relative success of hegemonies occurring at particular
times but not obtaining a permanent victory along the trajectory of the
development of that theatre. These momentary hegemonic victories thus
occasioned the development of syncretic forms, which following Laclau
and Mouffe (1985), persuades us to adopt a more fluid conception of
hegemony as one where a series of hegemonic moments arose within
a complex and shifting discursive reality of contestation. According to
Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is never fixed and permanent but rather,
a result of discursive subject positions that are constantly shifting. These
constant shifts result in a series of nodal hegemonic moments that are
enjoyed by certain subjects at specific moments in time.
As part of creating a new Zimbabwean theatre identity after the demise
of colonialism, some directors turned to workshop/collaborative/devised
theatre, the matrix of which can be traced back to Zimbabwean and
South African struggle theatre. In fact, the director of the play Half
Empty Half Full, Mncedisi Shabangu, was South African. While Mlenga
and Chivandikwa agree that the decolonisation of theatre was achieved
by valorising the performing body and making it the dominant feature
of performance, they argue that this decolonial theatre could not be
fully realised without recourse to other design elements such as props
and costumes. These visual elements, they argue, are as important as
the performing body and cannot be dispensed with in devised theatre.
Nkululeko Sibanda and Julia Yule focus on one theatre group, Amakhosi
Theatre Productions, to point out the major steps that the group took
in an effort to create a different training model from that of colonial
theatre, which as they argue, was the main model of tertiary education
training. Sibanda and Yule make the case that the mainstream theatre
training models at the University of Zimbabwe and Hillside Teachers’
College were inherently colonial and they argue that Amakhosi’s training
programme was a resistive strategy to the residual colonial model at
tertiary institutions. What is interesting is that before Amakhosi estab-
lished its training academy, it had attended training workshops offered by
both ZACT and NTO. Sibanda and Yule argue that Amakhosi created
a syncretic blend of ZACT, NTO and formal training methods with a
strong Ndebele indigenous text. The formative identity of Amakhosi as
a karate club also provided a solid physical theatre underpinning. The
resultant training model was characterised by karate movements, Ndebele
song, games, dance, mime and stunts. From this bricolage of physical
theatre, the authors argue that Amakhosi developed a unique physical
theatre style that has attracted the attention of formal training institutions.
One of the most enduring legacies of colonialism was to construct a
compartmentalised world consisting of the coloniser and the colonised.
In this binary opposition, the colonised races outside Europe and the
west became subject to a systemic racialised hegemony that was at once
material and economic as it was also psychological. As members of the
‘inferior’ races in this binary division, colonised people were socialised to
view their racial and cultural inferiority through the lens of a superior
white race and culture in which the latter was significantly valorised at the
expense of the former. It became easy in both the economic and cultural
spheres, then, for colonialist values to propagate themselves as superior
and dominant through hegemonic discourses of western identity.
For over a century, scholars and theorists in the socio-political organisa-
tion of societies have sought to understand how subordinate races, classes
and groups of people either accede to or resist domination. They have
equally sought to explain how those who lack political and economic
power consent to hierarchies of social power that privilege some races,
classes, cultures and identities over others, in that process perpetuating
unequal relations of power. The scholars in this collection seek to inter-
rogate the intersection between hegemony and identity in terms of how
the Zimbabwean nation state has been a contested space in both the
colonial and the postcolonial phase of its existence dating back from
1890 to the present. The scholars here make a significant departure from
traditional conceptions of ideology such as that espoused by Marx and
Engels (1970, 1974), which tends to connote ideology as some form of
closure and a unidirectional flow of power. Owen Seda,5 for example,

analyses the contestations between a white-dominated National Theatre
Organisation (NTO) and a black-dominated Zimbabwe Association of
Community-based Theatre (ZACT). His interest is not on plays produced
during the ensuing period, but on the politics of theatre governance
in the new Zimbabwean nation. What is interesting about this analysis
is Seda’s awareness of colonial discourse, which underpinned practical
choices made by the NTO. Seda observes how the counter-colonial narra-
tive espoused by ZACT influenced artistic choices made by the groups
affiliated to it. He further observes that neither the colonial discourse nor
counter-colonial discourse was an absolute philosophy. He singles out a
few post-independence Zimbabwean theatre companies, such as Meridian
Theatre, with roots in colonial Zimbabwe, which toed neither the NTO
nor the ZACT line. They created what Seda elsewhere calls ‘intercultural
theatre’, which appealed to a multiracial audience.
Chapters such as this one by Seda, negate the Marxian conception of
ideology in favour of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (1971).
Whereas Marx and Engels (1970, 1974) placed a premium on ideology,
which to them referred to the ways in which large swathes of society
adopt the ideas and interests of the dominant economic class almost as a
matter of course, Gramsci’s hegemony places emphasis on inherent and
on-going conflicts in the construction and propagation of networks of
power through knowledge and discourse. It is in this perspective that
the chapters in this collection focus on preoccupations with issues of
contestation and the refashioning of identities of the self in the history
and development of Zimbabwean theatre from 1890 up to the present.
However, contestation must have a force against which its energies are
directed. In the case of Zimbabwe, this force was Rhodesian discourse,
which was no different from discourses of superiority that other colonial
governments had constructed in order to contain supposedly inferior and
undesirable African discourse.
Samuel Ravengai explicates Rhodesian discourse, thereby providing an
overarching framework to the rest of the collection. His chapter sets the
background and foundation upon which the other chapters build their
various cases. The colonial presence was to subsequently provide reasons
for counter-narratives that resisted colonial discourse. It also provided
5 Owen Seda is co-author of this introduction and two chapters in the collection.
techniques and forms that allowed postcolonial theatre makers to resist

the new nationalist and patriotic discourse. Ravengai’s chapter delves deep
into the mechanics of colonial discourse, which he refers to as Rhodesian
discourse. Rhodesian discourse provided strictures to cultural produc-
tion and restricted what was written and what was performed. For this
reason, a certain type of theatre emerged that was written by both white
and black playwrights, which toed the line of non-resistance to the colo-
nial presence. Ravengai makes the interesting observation that Rhodesian
discourse is a metanarrative of the past and the present. Its reconstitu-
tion in post-independence white cultural production has continued to
provide a reason to transform the nature, form and content of alternative
Zimbabwean theatre.
Following the colonial encounter, writers and critics of African theatre
and cultural history have often identified the provenance of three
competing discourses in studies of contemporary black theatre (African,
African-American and Caribbean). For instance, Olaniyan (1995) and
Okgabue (2009) state that our understanding of African theatre ought
to be framed against the three competing discourses of a hegemonic or
colonialist Eurocentric discourse, a counter-hegemonic, anti-colonialist
Afrocentric discourse and an emerging post-Afrocentric discourse ‘which
subverts both the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric while refining and
advancing the Afrocentric’ (Olaniyan 1995, p. 11). This view on the
development of African cultural formations within the creative industries
echoes the ideas of Michel Foucault (1978), who argues that the exer-
cise of power always implies the possibility of resistance. Whereas there
is a sense in which resistance to Rhodesian discourse could be easily seen
solely as an endeavour by Africans, Chikonzo and Ravengai interrogate
the very notion of Rhodesian ideologies and proffer the view that there
was a section of white liberals who resisted Rhodesian discourse through
their artistic practice. Chikonzo and Ravengai focus on white performance
from the period 1950 up to 1980. The two scholars demonstrate that the
very idea of White-hood was reinvented while at the same time using
the same settler theatre as a field of counter-discursive strategies to the
dominant discourse.
Foucault observes that while domination permeates all social relations
(including the cultural and the creative), these relations, as Gane and
Haraway (2006, p. 151) elaborate, ‘aren’t all powerful, they are inter-
rupted in a million ways (…) one minute they look like they control the
entire planet, the next minute they look like a house of cards’. In the
early days of the settler colony, Rhodesian whites toed the official colo-
nial line by respecting the notion of separate development, which was
upheld by the radical supremacist Rhodesian Front headed by Ian Smith
from 1965 onwards. However, the white liberals who inserted themselves
in the cultural structures of the settler colony decided to disrupt colonial
ideologies by inviting African performers to white performance spaces.
Some white liberals also worked with African performers in spaces where
racial mixing was allowed, such as in church halls. This was an act of
refusal to adhere to the controls of physical mobility dictated by Rhode-
sian discourse. Some theatre companies such as the Salisbury Repertory
Theatre successfully challenged the city by-laws, which prevented African
audiences from viewing theatre together with whites. While Chikonzo
and Ravengai agree that some white liberals resisted Rhodesian discourse,
they concede the fact that they continued to play the dominant roles in
multiracial theatre, thereby restricting African upward mobility in cultural
production. While white liberals consciously resisted Rhodesian discourse,
this resistance was couched in residual dominant ideology.
In the second part which follows below, we look at how theatre makers
from Matabeleland contested Eurocentric forms as well as ‘Shonacen-
tric’ (meaning forms in which the performance traditions of the country’s
majority Shona population are portrayed as normative and majoritarian)
identities through performance. In Julius Heinicke’s chapter, the same
notions are contested visually through theatre space to create what
Mlenga et al. have called ‘post-traditional spaces’ (2015, p. 230). These
spaces were also used to advance Ndebele nationalism and conscious-
ness and this is captured in Heinicke’s chapter. Heinicke analyses two
theatre spaces in Zimbabwe. He views these two spaces as providing
a performance arena that has been able to circumvent the state’s over-
weening attitude towards dissent. Heinicke uses Habermas’s concept of
counter-public spheres to analyse Amakhosi’s Township Square Cultural
Centre and Rooftop Promotions’ Theatre-in-the-Park as iconic venues for
commenting on the politics of the postcolonial state below the radar of
state censorship.
Part II: The Politics of Representation

The five chapters in this part grapple with the notion of representation in
Zimbabwean popular theatre. The issues that fascinate the scholars’ imag-
ination range from how protest and popular theatre represent disability,
Ndebele identities, the Zimbabwean crisis and subaltern characters. The

scholars in this part present varied and disparate positions in ways that
enable the reader to understand the complex nature of Zimbabwean
theatre, society and history. We are able to understand various dynamics
of Zimbabwean history through theatre.
The notion of representation is complex. Stuart Hall (1996, p. 15)
defines representation as ‘an essential part of the process by which
meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture.
It does involve the use of language, of signs and images, which stand
for and or represent things’. Hall identifies a number of representa-
tional systems that are sites of meaning making. Meanings are produced,
constructed, circulated and exchanged in these systems of representation.
He identifies a number of signifying systems, which subsume language
(discourse), photography, exhibitions of objects and artefacts, film, tele-
vision and advertising. Given that Hall’s book focuses on the media, the
list is not exhaustive and in other disciplines, it may include literature,
drama, theatre and performance. In these signifying systems, those with
access to power choose to represent reality in a manner that promotes
their values. As this part of the collection will demonstrate, those without
access to power can use the same systems of representation to create
counter-narratives that seek to challenge the dominant metanarratives by
privileging the values, feelings and thoughts of the subaltern.
Take the chapter by Owen Seda, Chiedza Adelaide Chinhanu and
Nehemiah Chivandikwa, for example. Students living with albinism use
workshop performance to disrupt meanings proffered by disabled and
abled students. The latter’s meanings typify the general perceptions held
by most Zimbabweans about albinism. The trio focus on two plays:
Visionaries (2011–2012) and The White man from Buhera (2011–2012),
both of which were workshopped in collaboration with university students
living with disabilities. While the process of play making was taking place,
the authors wanted to interrogate the politics of representation for people
living with disabilities. During the phase of performance at the University
of Zimbabwe, Wits University in South Africa and Amakhosi Theatre in
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the authors sought to decipher the responses of
their audiences to the performance of disability by disabled performers.
The research discovered that this kind of theatre is a strategic site that
can be used successfully in re-orientating and sensitising young people
with albinism and society on a number of ableist prejudices. The authors
submit that the results of this action research provided a space to deal
with such prejudice.
Hall discusses three theories of representation, the reflective,6 the
intentional7 and the constructionist approaches. Scholars in this part of
the collection deploy the constructionist approach. Hall understands the
constructionist approach as suggesting that objects and symbols do not
inherently have meaning. People purposefully construct meaning using
representational systems such as theatre and performance. Hall argues:
Constructionists do not deny the existence of the material world. However,

it is the material world, which conveys meaning. It is the language system
or whatever system we are using to represent our concepts. It is social
actors who use the conceptual systems to construct meaning, to make the
world meaningful and to communicate about the world meaningfully to
others. (1996, p. 25)
In this part of the collection, the authors deal with the politics of
representation, which is essentially the effects, and consequences of
the representation of albinism, Ndebele, Venda and Shangaan cultural
identities, and subaltern characters in Zimbabwean protest theatre. The
authors point out that Zimbabwean theatre makers purposefully create
work that constructs meaning in ways that favour the marginalised
groups in Zimbabwe. The scholars construct meaning by the manner in
which they choose to combine various codes available to produce the
desired meaning. They are preoccupied with how marginalised groups
in Zimbabwe seek to use theatre and performance in its various forms
(protest theatre, applied theatre, panic theatre, popular theatre) to contest
the meanings that dominant narratives produced by the ruling ZANU PF
government have placed on them.
The politics of representation that is the focus of part II is framed by
two major crises in postcolonial Zimbabwe. The first one was the civil
war that broke out between the state militia (the Fifth Brigade), and
6 The reflective approach is sometimes called mimetic for the reason that meaning is
assumed to lie in the object, person, idea, or event in the real world. Language, according
to this paradigm, works as a mirror to reflect or imitate the truth that already exists (see
Hall 1996, p. 24).
7 The intentional approach holds that it is the speaker or author who imposes their
meaning on the object, event, idea or person through their choice of language (see Hall
1996, p. 25).
the so-called dissidents, who belonged to the disbanded ZIPRA forces.8

The second was a political and economic crisis, which began in 1998
and slowed down at the beginning of 2009. The theatre that emerged
during these crises was responding to the postcolonial state’s new patriotic
narrative, which had labelled oppositional politics, whites and coloureds
as sell-outs while those who toed the state discourse were patriots.
While theorising on the problems experienced by the national bour-
geoisie that takes over from colonial governments in African nations,
Fanon (2003, p. 119) popularised the epithet ‘the pitfalls of national
consciousness’. By this phrase, he meant the common errors committed
by the ruling black elite while pursuing the good intentions of decoloni-
sation. Among several other pitfalls of national consciousness, Fanon
expounded on the retrogressive process of misconstruing the nation for
the race (only blacks belong) or preferring ethnicity to the state, in this
case, only one ethnic group from which the leader comes enjoys the
rights of full citizenship. In Zimbabwe, there was a political disagreement
between two major liberation movements, PF ZAPU and ZANU PF,
after the latter won the popular vote. The coalition government that had
been established by the then Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, from the
progressive forces of both parties collapsed in the first quarter of 1983.
A number of PF ZAPU leaders from the Ndebele-dominated region
of Matabeleland were arrested and tortured. Various military forces,
the so-called dissidents, foreign-sponsored armies9 and the Zimbabwean
government’s counter-insurgency crack unit called the Fifth Brigade occu-
pied Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands province. Depending on
which source one uses, between 3000 and 10,000 people (Sibanda 2005;
CCJP 1997) were killed between January 1983 and 1987, most of
them, by the Fifth Brigade in an operation code-named Gukurahundi.10
8 The dissidents numbered not more than 2000 and by the time of the amnesty in
1988, only 122 dissidents surrendered to the state.
9 Super ZAPU (with no allegiance to ZAPU) was formed by apartheid South Africa
from disgruntled elements of ZIPRA and former black Rhodesian soldiers as well as
refugees from Dukwe camp in Botswana to fight on behalf of South Africa in Zimbabwe.
They were retrained and supplied by South Africa to kill civilians and engage ANC linked
uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) soldiers who used Matabeleland as a transit space to fight in
South Africa (see Sibanda 2005, p. 261).
10 The first spring rains that wash away the chuff and dirt just before summer begins.
Metaphorically, therefore the operation was to clean up the dirt (political malcontents,
‘dissidents’).
Gukurahundi came to be viewed as a disruption of the civil liberties

of Ndebele people by the dominant Shona government. The Mata-
beleland region remained largely underdeveloped as compared to other
provinces in Zimbabwe because of the conflict. The cultural programmes
spearheaded by ZACT were subsequently viewed as processes that were
meant to dilute Ndebele culture and identity leading to the emergence of
counter-narratives in the form of theatre from Matabeleland.
Cletus Moyo, Mandlenkosi Mpofu and Nkululeko Sibanda write from
a space to which they refer as subaltern—Matabeleland. The trio view
popular theatre and performance (including music, song and football
games) as channels for mobilisation and resistance against state hege-
monic forces. They apply the Gramscian cultural theory of hegemony to
demonstrate how the ruling ZANU PF government sought to diminish
Ndebele identity through a national cultural programme that was run
by ZACT and the Ministry of Education and Culture. This programme
seemed to favour the Africanisation of theatre using socialist ideolog-
ical underpinnings. The people of Matabeleland sought to counter the
state-sanctioned hegemonic forces by lobbying for Ndebele represen-
tation using popular theatre, music, football games and performance.
This was a way to project Ndebele representation and to shape and
project Ndebele identity within the national space. Moyo, Mpofu and
Sibanda establish that beyond the 1990s, the resistance to ZANU PF’s
excesses had spread all over Zimbabwe as evidenced by various theatre
performances by cultural groups of diverse ethnic extraction.
Ten years after the end of the Gukurahundi disturbances in the Mata-
beleland and Midlands Provinces as outlined in an earlier part of this
introduction, another crisis of national scope emerged. This was the
Zimbabwe economic crisis, which lasted roughly between 1997 and
2009. On 14 November 1997, the Zimbabwean dollar collapsed as a
result of fiscal indiscipline when about 50,000 veterans of Zimbabwe’s
liberation war were each awarded ZW$50,000 (US$5000) and a monthly
gratuity of ZW$2000 (US$200) for which the government had not
budgeted. The government had simply resorted to printing the money.
By 2003, 72 percent of the population was living below the poverty line, a
significant slump for a country that had enjoyed a middle-income status in
the 1980s. By July 2008, official inflation had risen to 231 million percent
and by the end of that year, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
had declined by 54 percent. Steve Hanke and Alex Kwok (2009, p. 354)
put the monthly rate of inflation by mid-November of 2008 at 79.6
billion percent. The local currency became worthless and by October of

2008, businesses no longer accepted it as legal tender. The major oppo-
sition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)11 organised
a number of public strikes, demonstrations and ‘stay-aways’ to protest
against the declining standards of living, the collapse of basic infrastruc-
ture and the erosion of civil liberties. The state responded by enacting
punitive legislation and coming down heavily on the opposition. Protest
theatre emerged in response to this national challenge.
Pedzisai Maedza critiques the tendency in post-independence African
countries to reify what he refers to as pre-contact identities. Maedza
is concerned that this process of reification is propagated at a newly
established university in post-independence Zimbabwe. In his chapter,
Maedza analyses the work of two traditional dance troupes at the Great
Zimbabwe University. He bemoans the erroneous equation of indigeneity
with essentialist pre-contact identities that are fixed and immutable. In his
analysis, the fixed identities of the African past and its present play into
the hands of colonialist divisions and time-trapped conceptions of African
culture and tradition.
Two chapters by Joy Wrolson and Kelvin Chikonzo devote attention
to the practice of protest theatre. Chikonzo focuses on the politics of
representation of subaltern characters in Zimbabwe’s protest theatre. He
observes that there are three kinds of intellectuals: state intellectuals, anti-
state intellectuals and organic intellectuals who are essentially an offshoot
of the latter. These different categories of intellectual wrestle with each
other in an effort to influence the production of meaning. Chikonzo
observes that much of Zimbabwean protest theatre produced during the
crisis period was dominated by the discourse of anti-state intellectuals,
which seemed to sideline organic intellectuals. According to Chikonzo,
mere opposition to a system of oppression does not necessarily produce
democratic practices. He is of the view that the subaltern characters
created by oppositional discourses played the victimhood motif, which
did not give them the resistive agency to challenge, strategise and to
inflict harm on the state. Chikonzo demonstrates the existence of a type of
11 Since its founding in 1999, the MDC party has broken into several factions that have
maintained the same name with the leader’s initial at the end. The party referred to in
this collection is the main one formerly headed by Morgan Tsvangirai while he was alive
and Nelson Chamisa after the former’s death.
protest theatre, which gave transformative agency to the subaltern char-

acters. He considers that protest theatre can be a space, which if left
unchecked can erode democracy by performing the discourse of anti-state
intellectuals while neglecting the discourse of organic12 intellectuals.
During the same crisis period, the government of Zimbabwe began
to label shantytowns as potential spaces for harbouring criminals and
concealing arms of war. The government proceeded to carry out a clean-
up operation that was code-named Operation Murambatsvina (Restore
Order). The operation displaced an estimated 700,000 people in the
country’s urban and peri-urban areas within the space of six weeks in
May 2005. Joy Wrolson, who was in Zimbabwe at the time, analyses
the theatre that emerged during this period. She refers to this theatre
as panic theatre. She relies on Marvin Carlson’s theoretical twin concepts
of ‘ghosting’ and ‘haunting’ to argue that panic theatre relied on recy-
cling narrative techniques from indigenous Zimbabwean texts, notably
the communal labour practice of nhimbe where participants indulged
in socially sanctioned criticism of authority through work songs. The
songs were often bawdy and graphic as they critiqued participants who
had overstepped socially acceptable behaviour using ‘hidden transcripts’.
Wrolson borrows the concept of hidden transcripts from James Scott
(1990). Wrolson sees ghosting taking place in three productions where
the audience was aware of the characters that were being satirised. Satire,
Wrolson argues, becomes a hidden transcript synonymous with nhimbe:
or traditional collective or co-operative work parties among the Shona
people, where the audience laughed at those who were being lampooned
in order to make them feel ashamed and hopefully change their ways.
Wrolson argues that hidden transcripts and ghosting became ways of
evading Zimbabwean state censorship during the crisis of Operation
Murambatsvina.
12 A Gramscian term which he uses to distinguish a group of intellectuals produced

by the education system of the dominant polity. The group grows organically within the
dominant ruling class and when fully formed performs the intellectual work of the ruling
class.
References
Asiedu, Awo. 2011. Mohamed Ben Abdallah’s search for an African aesthetic in
the theatre. In Trends in twenty-first century African theatre and performance,
ed. Kene Igweonu, 367–384. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP). 1997. Breaking silence:
Building true peace—A report on the disturbances in Matabeleland and the
midlands 1980–1988. Harare: CCJP/LRF.
Fanon, Frantz. 2003. The wretched of the earth, trans. R. Philcox. New York:
Grove Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality, volume I: An introduction, trans.
R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
Gane, Nicholas, and Jane Haraway. 2006. When we have never been human,
what is to be done? Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory, Culture and
Society 23: 135–158.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci:
Volume II , trans. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International
Publishers.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. In
Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, ed. Stuart Hall, David
Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 411–440. London: Routledge.
Hanke, Steve H., and Alex K.F. Kwok. 2009. On the measurement of Zimbab-
we’s hyperinflation. Cato Journal 29 (2): 353–364.
Kaarsholm, Preben. 1994. Mental colonization or catharsis? Theatre, democracy
and cultural struggle from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. In Politics and perfor-
mance: Theatre, poetry and song in southern Africa, ed. Liz Gunner, 225–251.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy:
Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1970. A contribution to the critique of political
economy. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1974. The German ideology. London: Wishart.
Mlenga, Tafadzwa, et al. 2015. Contemporary theatre spaces: Politico-ideological
constructions in Zimbabwe: A dialectical approach. Studies in Theatre and
Performance 35 (3): 221–236.
Okgabue, Osita. 2009. Culture and identity in African and Caribbean theatre.
London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers.
Olaniyan, Tejumola. 1995. Scars of conquest masks of resistance: The invention of
cultural identities in African, African American and Caribbean drama. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Plastow, Jane. 1996. African theatre and politics: The evolution of theatre
in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe—A comparative study. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Ravengai, Samuel. 2006. An Investigation into the practice of directing and

theatre making in post-independence Zimbabwe up to 1990: Some urban
theatre makers and directors as case Studies. Zambezia Journal of Humanities
33 (I/II): 67–94.
Ravengai, Samuel. 2016. Chimurenga liberation songs and dances as sites of
struggle to counter Rhodesian discourse: A postcolonial perspective. In Sounds
of life: Music, identity and politics, ed. Fainos Mangena, Ezra Chitando, and
Itai Muwati, 165–181. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
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University of South Africa Institutional Repository.
PART I
From Colonial to De-colonial Theatre:

Contested Forms
CHAPTER 2
Colonial Zimbabwean Theatre, Cultural

Production and the Interplay with Rhodesian
Power and Discourse
Samuel Ravengai
Introduction: Discourse and Power

White Rhodesian cultural players developed Rhodesian discourse.1 They
appropriated ideas and theories, indeed, a collection of ‘truths’ proffered
by European scholars (such as Hegel, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud,
De Gobineau, Linnaeus and Blumenbach) who formulated cultural
frames that were applied by various European empires. Their ideas are
often grouped together in postcolonial criticism as colonial discourse.
1 Anthony Chennells (1996) first used the epithet Rhodesian discourse to refer to
white Rhodesian myths about blacks. He investigated a number of novels written by
white Rhodesians and saw common disparaging views about Zimbabwean blacks expressed
through these works.
S. Ravengai (B)
Department of Theatre and Performance, Witwatersrand University,
e-mail: samuel.ravengai@wits.ac.za
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Ravengai and O. Seda (eds.), Theatre from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe,
Contemporary Performance InterActions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74594-3_2
26 S. RAVENGAI
Being the subjects of Rhodesian discourse, Rhodesians drew on the philo-

sophical and (pseudo)-scientific theories propagated by such scholars in
their dealings with Africans. The whole vision of colonialism in Rhodesia
was summed up by Cecil John Rhodes, the proprietor of the Char-
tered Company (British South Africa Company) that ran the country
from 1890 until 1922, who declared ‘[e]qual rights for all civilised men’
(Mamdani 1996, p. 17). The ‘uncivilised’ African would be subjected to
a process of tutelage in order to enjoy the privileges of citizenship. It
covered a whole spectrum of intellectual activity including the field of
cultural production (theatre, drama, film, music, dance and fine art). The
struggle in the Rhodesian cultural field over the imposition of legitimate
public imagery is inseparable from the struggle between white Rhode-
sians and African cultural producers to impose principles or definitions of
human accomplishment. Bourdieu offers an explanation that is applicable
to the Rhodesian field of cultural production:
The field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at

stake is the power to impose the dominant definitions of the writer (artist )
and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the
struggle to define the writer (artist )… In short, the fundamental stake in
literary struggles is the monopoly of power to say with authority who are
authorised to call themselves writers; […] it is the monopoly of the power
to consecrate producers or products. (1993, p. 42; emphasis is mine)
The struggle to impose a dominant discourse is explicable in terms

of what Foucault calls ‘power’, which resonates with Gramsci’s (1971)
‘rule’.2 In order for the colonised to be effectively dominated, the
coloniser must produce a ‘discourse’ that aspires to what Gramsci calls
‘hegemony’. Rule constitutes the coercive apparatus of the state estab-
lished according to law in order to exclude, block and repress those
groups who do not consent to domination by the coloniser. Even where
there is no evidence of non-compliance, Gramsci (1971) argues that
2 The term power has various dimensions. When used to mean the exercise of force
or control over individuals or particular social groups by dominant groups (Edgar and
Sedgwick 2008), it tallies with rule. However, when legislative power is exercised to limit
the behaviour of individuals, it is executed without coercion and in some instances with
‘justifiable force’ exercised within the limits of legality. The other dimension of power has
little to do with coercion. Foucault defines power as imbedded in knowledge. Discourses
of knowledge are in fact an expression and embodiment of power.
2 COLONIAL ZIMBABWEAN THEATRE, CULTURAL PRODUCTION … 27
this apparatus is proactively put in place in anticipation of moments of

crisis. However, power would be a fragile phenomenon if it worked on
the level of force, or to put it in Foucauldian terms, ‘exercis[ed] itself
only in a negative way’ (1980, p. 59). Hegemony, which operates as the
persuasive front of power, supplements it. Gramsci defines hegemony as
‘the spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population
to the general directions imposed on social life by the dominant group’
(1971, p. 12). In Rhodesia, this consent followed ‘naturally’ as a result
of the perceived accumulated prestige of white cultural producers. They
managed to persuade Africans to see whites and their culture as the ‘right’
race and culture.
Power produces knowledge—the ‘right’ knowledge. In order to
achieve that spontaneous consent, Rhodesians produced knowledge that
justified the domination of Africans. According to Foucault (1980,
pp. 93–94), power cannot be maintained and strengthened without the
manufacture of a discourse, which is then archived and circulated through
various conduits of power such as the media, the academy and cultural
production. It seems to me that power cannot exist without the knowl-
edge that justifies it. Power therefore orders the production of discourses
of truth, which it forces cultural producers to speak and write about.
Power continually renews, recreates and modifies itself until it is capable
of institutionalising and professionalising every field including rewarding
producers who help to further its pursuits. In a way, power produces the
knowledge that serves it. Power and knowledge support and imply one
another.
Theoretical Moorings and Structures

of Rhodesian Discourse
It is useful to contextualise Rhodesian discourse by looking at systems
of knowledge that supplied it with substance at that time. Rhodesian
discourse drew on a synthesis of race science, culturalism and biological
conceptions of sex and hygiene. In pre-colonial Zimbabwe, differences
which existed between people were not biologically defined. However,
with Charles Darwin’s contribution to the field of science through the
publication of On the Origins of Species (1859), science took on the task
of defining and ordering the world. Darwin problematised biblical truth
when he introduced the theory that our species evolved from one form to
28 S. RAVENGAI
another until the finest and purest form had emerged through a process
of natural selection. He postulated that humans had evolved from apes.
Scientists such as De Gobineau (1855) developed an interest in discov-
ering intellectual and physical differences between human species and
apes. They argued that the missing link between apes and humans was the
Negroid races (that is, sub-Saharan Africans). These were placed right at
the bottom of the human evolutionary hierarchy with the Caucasoid races
(that is, the Europeans) at the top and other races such as Mongoloids,
American Indians and Malayans being placed somewhere in the middle.
If the shape, colour and culture of a group were closer to European
conceptions of development and civilisation, the better group was appreci-
ated by Europeans. Zimbabwean cultural productions were nowhere close
to European standards of performance and they were either to be closed
out as a hostile discourse or Rhodesians would teach Africans how to
perform according to ‘civilised’ standards. Robert Kavanagh concurs:
It is important to realise this because theatre, as it was established by the

settlers and colonial administrators during the colonial period, tended to
take one form – naturalistic performances on raised stages in rectangular
halls. As the colonial education system taught the colonised that African
indigenous forms of theatre were not theatre, people came to see the form
of the theatre established by the colonial master as the one and only form.
(1997, pp. 36–37)
Colonial theatre, indeed, played a part in the discourse of ‘civilised

standards’. Taylor (1968), writing a history of Rhodesian entertainment
up to 1930, dismisses African performances as ‘infrequent amusement’.
Riding on the wave of Darwinian terms, he argued that the first white
settlers came from environments which had all the ‘sophistication of the
nineteenth century, environments which for their relaxation, required
entertainment of the standard civilised type’ (1968, p. 13).
In Rhodesia, the direct involvement of the highest imperial office
(the Governor) gave legitimacy to the type of theatre the colony had
to practise. The dominant elite class established the standards of theatre
through the involvement of Lady Rodwell, the wife of the Governor of
2 COLONIAL ZIMBABWEAN THEATRE, CULTURAL PRODUCTION … 29
Southern Rhodesia, Sir Cecil Rodwell. Salisbury (Harare) was a class-

conscious society in the 1930s.3 According to Robert Cary (1975), the
elite lived north of an imaginary line estimated to be passing through
Baines Avenue or Montagu gardens, stretching infinitely east and west.
Godwin and Hancock (1993) have extended the line to the railway line
coming from Chegutu and passing through the southern portion of the
central business district on its way to Mutare. South of this line lived
lower-class white settlers ‘such as shop assistants, junior clerks, office
workers – whose lack of adequate birth and income ruled them out as
“people one ought to know”’ (Cary 1975, p. 12). Lady Rodwell had orig-
inally come to South Africa as a member of a touring company playing
Miss Hook of Holland before marrying Governor Sir Cecil Rodwell. Like
all other spouses of the elite, Lady Rodwell was particularly fond of
morning tea parties (something that was to be appropriated by blacks
in the townships later) and bridge. She did not give up on theatre and
in January 1930, according to Robert Cary (1975), she produced Alice
in Wonderland, and four of the Rodwells appeared in the cast. She
preferred musicals to dialogue theatre. When the first European theatre
company (Salisbury Repertory Players) was formed in February 1931,
Sir Cecil and Lady Rodwell agreed to become patrons. In this way, a
theatre aesthetic with the blessing of the Imperial Office was established
in Rhodesia. Studies carried out by Wortham (1969), Plastow (1996)
and Godwin and Hancock (1993) revealed that the aesthetic had not
significantly shifted from the pioneering days. The involvement of the
Imperial Office throughout the history of colonisation in Rhodesia was
a constant reminder of the official theatre standards to be bequeathed
to later generations and Africans. For example, the opening of the new
theatre space located at Second Street extension (now Sam Nujoma
Street) for Salisbury Repertory Players in 1960 was attended by Lady and
Lord Dalhousie, who was the Governor-General during the Federation
years.4
3 The class nature of white Rhodesia began to change after the Second World War.
European continentals, Afrikaners from South Africa, Jews and whites retreating from
decolonisation in Asia and elsewhere in Africa, started pouring into Rhodesia and eventu-
ally outnumbered Britons by a third (see Alexander 2004). Class distinctions disappeared
as being white was enough to have access to government and private capital.
4 Between 1953 and 1963 Malawi (Nyasaland), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and
Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) became one country called the Federation of Rhodesia
30 S. RAVENGAI
Rhodesian discourse also drew from the belief that all cultures are
not equal (culturalist theories) and that some cultures are inferior to
others. In South Africa cultural theories underpinned the ideology of
apartheid or separate development. This is sometimes referred to as social
Darwinism as an indication of its debt to evolution theories. After the
Jewish Holocaust, which ended in 1945, driven largely by a combination
of race science and culturalism, challenges to race science took centre
stage. Zimitri Erasmus argues that ‘mainstream scientific conceptions of
race were turned upside down: race was demoted from being a biological
fact or truth to a meaningless falsity’ (2008, p. 171). Britain, the colonial
master, pushed for reforms in Rhodesia and hoped that the Federation
of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which had begun in 1953 would introduce
reforms towards partnerships with black people. However, contrary to the
process of decolonisation taking place in Asia and most of Africa, after the
collapse of the Federation in 1963, Rhodesian whites refused to budge.
A radical white supremacist party, the Rhodesia Front, came to power
in 1964 and immediately demanded independence from Britain. When
Britain refused, Ian Douglas Smith proclaimed Unilateral Declaration of
Independence (UDI) in 1965 and continued with race and culturalist
theories, which the whole world had rubbished, at least theoretically.
If racism as a science cannot be irreproachably used, then culturalism,
which emphasises difference, can be used to achieve the same racist objec-
tives. Difference can be nurtured but separated in ‘reserves’ (Tribal Trust
Lands—TTLs), ‘locations’ (townships) and ‘compounds’. Race was sani-
tised and relegated to the unconscious using culturalism, which prescribed
whites as having the most advanced culture. Culturalism allowed for
‘racism without races’ (Alexander 2004, p. 198). Culturalism created
separate spaces for each cultural and/or ethnic group. White Rhode-
sians created a white world, which could not be inhabited by blacks.
Rhodesian discourse as the dominant discourse was open to everybody
who wanted to be like whites, although carefully controlled in many
ways. Black discourse5 was closed to every white person apart from
missionaries and Native Commissioners who stayed in TTLs. Their job
and Nyasaland or the Central African Federation (CAF) under the premiership of Godfrey
Huggins.
5 Black discourse refers to counter-narratives created by blacks in the form of ideologies
such as Ethiopianism (African syncretic Christian doctrines created by African independent
churches), black power and nationalism, as well as orality in the form of songs, dances,
Another random document with
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O voi ch' avete gl' intelletti sani,
Mirate la dottrina, che s' asconde
Sotto 'l velame degli versi strani.
DANTE.
CHAPTER CCIX.
EARLY APPROXIMATION TO THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—GEORGE FOX.—

ZACHARIAH BEN MOHAMMED.—COWPER.—INSTITUTES OF MENU.—BARDIC
PHILOSOPHY. MILTON.—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
There are distinct degrees of Being as there are degrees of Sound; and the whole
world is but as it were a greater Gamut, or scale of music.
NORRIS.
CHAPTER CCX.
A QUOTATION FROM BISHOP BERKELEY, AND A HIT AT THE SMALL CRITICS.
Plusieurs blameront l'entassement de passages que l'on vient de voir; j'ai prévu leurs
dédains, leurs dégoûts, et leurs censures magistrales; et n'ai pas voulu y avoir égard.
BAYLE.
CHAPTER CCXI.
SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON.—CUDWORTH.—JACKSON OF

OXFORD AND NEWCASTLE.—A BAXTERIAN SCRUPLE.
S'il y a des lecteurs qui se soucient peu de cela, on les prie de se souvenir qu'un
auteur n'est pas obligé à ne rien dire que ce qui est de leur goût.
BAYLE.
CHAPTER CCXII.
SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—DOUBTS AND

DIFFICULTIES.
Voilà bien des mysteres, dira-t-on; j'en conviens; aussi le sujet le mérite-t-il bien. Au
reste, il est certain que ces mysteres ne cachent rien de mauvais.
GOMGAM.
CHAPTER CCXIII.
BIRDS OF PARADISE.—THE ZIZ.—STORY OF THE ABBOT OF ST. SALVADOR DE

VILLAR.—HOLY COLETTE'S NONDESCRIPT PET.—THE ANIMALCULAR WORLD.
—GIORDANO BRUNO.
And so I came to Fancy's meadows, strow'd

With many a flower;
Fain would I here have made abode,
But I was quickened by my hour.
HERBERT.
CHAPTER CCXIV.
FURTHER DIFFICULTIES.—QUESTION CONCERNING INFERIOR APPARITIONS.

—BLAKE THE PAINTER, AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA.
In amplissimá causâ, quasi magno mari, pluribus ventis sumus vecti.
PLINY.
CHAPTER CCXV.
FACTS AND FANCIES CONNECTING THE DOCTOR'S THEORY WITH THE VEGETABLE
WORLD.
We will not be too peremptory herein: and build standing structures of bold assertions
on so uncertain a foundation; rather with the Rechabites we will live in tents of
conjecture, which on better reason we may easily alter and remove.
FULLER.
CHAPTER CCXVI.
A SPANISH AUTHORESS.—HOW THE DOCTOR OBTAINED HER WORKS FROM

MADRID.—THE PLEASURE AND ADVANTAGES WHICH THE AUTHOR DERIVES
FROM HIS LANDMARKS IN THE BOOKS WHICH HE HAD PERUSED.
ALEX. Quel es D. Diego aquel Arbol,

que tiene la copa en tierra
y las raizes arriba?
DIEG. El hombre.
EL LETRADO DEL CIELO.
CHAPTER CCXVII.
SOME ACCOUNT OF D. OLIVA SABUCO'S MEDICAL THEORIES AND PRACTICE.
Yo—volveré
A nueva diligencia y paso largo,
Que es breve el tiempo, 's grande la memoria
Que para darla al mundo está á mi cargo.
BALBUENA.
CHAPTER CCXVIII.
THE MUNDANE SYSTEM AS COMMONLY HELD IN D. OLIVA'S AGE.—MODERN

OBJECTIONS TO A PLURALITY OF WORLDS BY THE REV. JAMES MILLER.
Un cerchio immaginato ci bisogna,

A voler ben la spera contemplare;
Cosi chi intender questa storia agogna
Conviensi altro per altro immaginare;
Perchè qui non si canta, e finge, e sogna;
Venuto è il tempo da filosofare.
PULCI.
CHAPTER CCXIX.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY DRAWN FROM A PLURALITY OF

WORLDS SHEWN TO BE FUTILE: REMARKS ON THE OPPOSITE DISPOSITIONS
BY WHICH MEN ARE TEMPTED TO INFIDELITY.
—ascolta
Siccome suomo di verace lingua;
E porgimi l'orecchio.
CHIABRERA.
CHAPTER CCXX.
DOÑA OLIVA'S PHILOSOPHY, AND VIEWS OF POLITICAL REFORMATION.
Non vi par adunque che habbiamo ragionato a bastanza di questo?—A bastanza

parmi, rispose il Signor Gaspar; par desidero io d'intendere qualche particolarita
anchor.
CASTIGLIONE.
CHAPTER CCXXI.
THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF DOÑA OLIVA'S PRACTICE AND HUMANITY.
Anchor dir si potrebber cose assai

Che la materia è tanto piena et folta,
Che non se ne verrebbe à capo mai,
Dunque fia buono ch'io suoni à raccolta.
FR. SANSOVINO.
INTERCHAPTER XXV.
A WISHING INTERCHAPTER WHICH IS SHORTLY TERMINATED, ON SUDDENLY

RECOLLECTING THE WORDS OF CLEOPATRA,—“WISHERS WERE EVER
FOOLS.”
Begin betimes, occasion's bald behind,

Stop not thine opportunity, for fear too late
Thou seek'st for much, but canst not compass it.
MARLOWE.
CHAPTER CCXXII.
ETYMOLOGY.—UN TOUR DE MAÎTRE GONIN.—ROMAN DE VAUDEMONT AND

THE LETTER C.—SHENSTONE.—THE DOCTOR'S USE OF CHRISTIAN NAMES.
Πρᾶγμα, πρᾶγμα μέγα κεκίνηται, μέγα.
ARISTOPHANES.
CHAPTER CCXXIII.
TRUE PRONUNCIATION OF THE NAME OF DOVE.—DIFFICULTIES OF

PRONUNCIATION AND PROSODY.—A TRUE AND PERFECT RHYME HIT UPON.
Tal nombre, que a los siglos extendido,

Se olvide de olvidarsele al Olvido.
LOPE DE VEGA.
CHAPTER CCXXIV.
CHARLEMAGNE, CASIMIR THE POET, MARGARET DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE,

NOCTURNAL REMEMBRANCER.—THE DOCTOR NOT AMBITIOUS OF FAME.—
THE AUTHOR IS INDUCED BY MR. FOSBROOKE AND NORRIS OF BEMERTON
TO EJACULATE A HEATHEN PRAYER IN BEHALF OF HIS BRETHREN.
Tutte le cose son rose et viole

Ch' io dico ò ch' io dirò de la virtute.
FR. SANSOVINO.
CHAPTER CCXXV.
TWO QUESTIONS GROWING OUT OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTER.
A Taylor who has no objection to wear motley, may make himself a great coat with
half a yard of his own stuff, by eking it out with cabbage from every piece that comes
in his way.
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
CHAPTER CCXXVI.
THE AUTHOR DIGRESSES A LITTLE, AND TAKES UP A STITCH WHICH WAS

DROPPED IN THE EARLIER PART OF THIS OPUS.—NOTICES CONCERNING
LITERARY AND DRAMATIC HISTORY, BUT PERTINENT TO THIS PART OF OUR
SUBJECT.
Jam paululum digressus a spectantibus,
Doctis loquar, qui non adeo spectare quam
Audire gestiunt, logosque ponderant,
Examinant, dijudicantque pro suo
Candore vel livore; non latum tamen
Culmum (quod aiunt) dum loquar sapientibus
Loco movebor.
MACROPEDIUS.
CHAPTER CCXXVII.
SYSTEM OF PROGRESSION MARRED ONLY BY MAN'S INTERFERENCE.—THE

DOCTOR SPEAKS SERIOUSLY AND HUMANELY AND QUOTES JUVENAL.
MONTENEGRO. How now, are thy arrows feathered?
VELASCO. Well enough for roving.
MONTENEGRO. Shoot home then.

SHIRLEY.
CHAPTER CCXXVIII.
RATS.—PLAN OF THE LAUREATE SOUTHEY FOR LESSENING THEIR NUMBER.

—THE DOCTOR'S HUMANITY IN REFUSING TO SELL POISON TO KILL VERMIN,
AFTER THE EXAMPLE OF PETER HOPKINS HIS MASTER.—POLITICAL RATS
NOT ALLUDED TO.—RECIPE FOR KILLING RATS.
I know that nothing can be so innocently writ, or carried, but may be made obnoxious
to construction; marry, whilst I bear mine innocence about me, I fear it not.
BEN JONSON.
CHAPTER CCXXIX.
RATS LIKE LEARNED MEN LIABLE TO BE LED BY THE NOSE.—THE

ATTENDANT UPON THE STEPS OF MAN, AND A SORT OF INSEPARABLE
ACCIDENT.—SEIGNEUR DE HUMESESNE AND PANTAGRUEL.
Where my pen hath offended,

I pray you it may be amended
By discrete consideration
Of your wise reformation:
I have not offended, I trust,
If it be sadly discust.
SKELTON.
CHAPTER CCXXX.
DISTINCTION BETWEEN YOUNG ANGELS AND YOUNG YAHOOS.—FAIRIES,

KILLCROPS AND CHANGELINGS.—LUTHER'S OPINIONS ON THE SUBJECT.—
HIS COLLOQUIA MENSALIA.—DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW
EDITION.
I think it not impertinent sometimes to relate such accidents as may seem no better
than mere trifles; for even by trifles are the qualities of great persons as well disclosed
as by their great actions; because in matters of importance they commonly strain
themselves to the observance of general commended rules; in lesser things they
follow the current of their own natures.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

CHAPTER CCXXXI.
QUESTION AS TO WHETHER BOOKS UNDER THE TERMINATION OF “ANA”

HAVE BEEN SERVICEABLE OR INJURIOUS TO LITERATURE CONSIDERED IN
CONNECTION WITH LUTHER'S TABLE TALK.—HISTORY OF THE EARLY
ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THAT BOOK, OF ITS WONDERFUL PRESERVATION,
AND OF THE MARVELLOUS AND UNIMPEACHABLE VERACITY OF CAPTAIN
HENRY BELL.
Prophecies, predictions, Or where they abide,

Stories and fictions, On this or that side,
Allegories, rhymes, Or under the mid line
And serious pastimes Of the Holland sheets fine,
For all manner men, Or in the tropics fair
Without regard when, Of sunshine and clear air,
Or under the pole
Of chimney and sea coal:
Read they that list; understand they that can;
Verbum satis est to a wise man.
BOOK OF RIDDLES.
CHAPTER CCXXXII.
THE DOCTOR'S FAMILY FEELING.
It behoves the high

For their own sakes to do things worthily.
BEN JONSON.
CHAPTER CCXXXIII.
THE PETTY GERMAN PRINCES EXCELLENT PATRONS OF LITERATURE AND
LEARNED MEN.—THE DUKE OF SAXE WEIMAR.—QUOTATION FROM BP.
HACKET.—AN OPINION OF THE EXCELLENT MR. BOYLE.—A TENET OF THE
DEAN OF CHALON, PIERRE DE ST. JULIEN,—AND A VERITABLE PLANTAGENET.
Ita nati estis, ut bona malaque vestra ad Rempublicam pertineant.
TACITUS.
CHAPTER CCXXXIV.
OPINION OF A MODERN DIVINE UPON THE WHEREABOUT OF NEWLY

DEPARTED SPIRITS.—ST. JOHN'S BURIAL, ONE RELIC ONLY OF THAT SAINT,
AND WHEREFORE.—A TALE CONCERNING ABRAHAM, ADAM AND EVE.
Je sçay qu'il y a plusieurs qui diront que je fais beaucoup de petits fats contes, dont je
m'en passerois bien. Ouy, bien pour aucuns,—mais non pour moy, me contentant de
m'en renouveller le souvenance, et en tirer autant de plaisir.
BRANTÔME.
CHAPTER CCXXXV.
THE SHORTEST AND PLEASANTEST WAY FROM DONCASTER TO JEDDAH,

WITH MANY MORE, TOO LONG.
Πόνος πόνῳ πόνον φέρει

Πᾶ πᾶ γὰρ οὐκ ἔβαν ἐγώ.
SOPHOCLES.
CHAPTER CCXXXVI.
CHARITY OF THE DOCTOR IN HIS OPINIONS.—MASON THE POET.—POLITICAL

MEDICINE.—SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.—CERVANTES.—STATE PHYSICIANS.—
ADVANTAGE TO BE DERIVED FROM, WHETHER TO KING, CABINET, LORDS OR
COMMONS.—EXAMPLES.—PHILOSOPHY OF POPULAR EXPRESSIONS.—
COTTON MATHER.—CLAUDE PAJON AND BARNABAS OLEY.—TIMOTHY
ROGERS AND MELANCHOLY.
Go to!
You are a subtile nation, you physicians,
And grown the only cabinets in court!
B. JONSON.
CHAPTER CCXXXVII.
MORE MALADIES THAN THE BEST PHYSICIANS CAN PREVENT BY REMEDIES.

—THE DOCTOR NOT GIVEN TO QUESTIONS, AND OF THE POCO-CURANTE
SCHOOL AS TO ALL THE POLITICS OF THE DAY.
A slight answer to an intricate and useless question is a fit cover to such a dish; a
cabbage leaf is good enough to cover a pot of mushrooms.
JEREMY TAYLOR.
CHAPTER CCXXXVIII.
SIMONIDES.—FUNERAL POEMS.—UNFEELING OPINION IMPUTED TO THE

GREEK POET, AND EXPRESSED BY MALHERBE.—SENECA.—JEREMY TAYLOR
AND THE DOCTOR ON WHAT DEATH MIGHT HAVE BEEN, AND WERE MEN
WHAT CHRISTIANITY WOULD MAKE THEM, MIGHT BE.
Intendale chi può; che non è stretto
Alcuno a creder pïu di quel che vuole.
ORLANDO INNAMORATO.
CHAPTER CCXXXIX.
THE DOCTOR DISSENTS FROM A PROPOSITION OF WARBURTON'S AND

SHEWS IT TO BE FALLACIOUS.—HUTCHINSON'S REMARKS ON THE POWERS
OF BRUTES.—LORD SHAFTESBURY QUOTED.—APOLLONIUS AND THE KING
OF BABYLON.—DISTINCTION IN THE TALMUD BETWEEN AN INNOCENT BEAST
AND A VICIOUS ONE.—OPINION OF ISAAC LA PEYRESC.—THE QUESTION DE
ORIGINE ET NATURA ANIMARUM IN BRUTIS AS BROUGHT BEFORE THE
THEOLOGIANS OF SEVEN PROTESTANT ACADEMIES IN THE YEAR 1635 BY
DANIEL SENNERTUS.
Toutes veritez ne sont pas bonnes à dire serieusement.
GOMGAM.
CHAPTER CCXL.
THE JESUIT GARASSE'S CENSURE OF HUARTE AND BARCLAY.—

EXTRAORDINARY INVESTIGATION.—THE TENDENCY OF NATURE TO
PRESERVE ITS OWN ARCHETYPAL FORMS.—THAT OF ART TO VARY THEM.—
PORTRAITS.—MORAL AND PHYSICAL CADASTRE.—PARISH CHRONICLER
AND PARISH CLERK THE DOCTOR THOUGHT MIGHT BE WELL UNITED.
Is't you, Sir, that know things?
SOOTH. In nature's infinite book of secresy,

A little I can read.
SHAKSPEARE.
CHAPTER CCXLI.
THE DOCTOR'S UTOPIA DENOMINATED COLUMBIA.—HIS SCHEME ENTERED

UPON—BUT ‘LEFT HALF TOLD’ LIKE ‘THE STORY OF CAMBUSCAN BOLD.’
I will to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of mine own, a new Atlantis, a
poetical commonwealth of mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build cities, make
laws, statutes, as I list myself. And why may I not?
BURTON.
CHAPTER CCXLII.
FARTHER REMARKS UPON THE EFFECTS OF SCHISM, AND THE ADVANTAGES

WHICH IT AFFORDS TO THE ROMISH CHURCH AND TO INFIDELITY.
—Io non ci ho interresso

Nessun, nè vi fui mai, ne manco chieggo
Per quel ch'io ne vò dir, d'esservi messo.
Vò dir, che senza passion eleggo,
E non forzato, e senza pigliar parte;
Di dirne tutto quel, ch'intendo e veggo.
BRONZINO PITTORE.
CHAPTER CCXLIII.
BREVITY BEING THE SOUL OF WIT THE AUTHOR STUDIES CONCISENESS.
You need not fear a surfeit, here is but little, and that light of digestion.
QUARLES.
CHAPTER CCXLIV.
THE AUTHOR VENTURES TO SPEAK A WORD ON CHRISTIAN CHEERFULNESS:

—QUOTES BEN SIRACH,—SOLOMON,—BISHOP HACKET,—WALTER SAVAGE
LANDOR,—BISHOP REYNOLDS,—MILTON,—&C.
—Ἀλλὰ σὺ ταῦτα μαθὼν, βιότου ποτί τέρμα

ψυχῇ τῶν ἀγαθῶν τλῆθι χαριζόμενος.
SIMONIDES.
FRAGMENTS TO THE DOCTOR.
A LOVE FRAGMENT FOR THE LADIES,—INTRODUCED BY A CURIOUS

INCIDENT WHICH THE AUTHOR BEGS THEY WILL EXCUSE.
Now will ye list a little space,

And I shall send you to solace;
You to solace and be blyth,
Hearken! ye shall hear belyve
A tale that is of verity.
ROSWALL AND LILLIAN.
A FRAGMENT ON BEARDS.
Yet have I more to say which I have thought upon, for I am filled as the moon at the
full!
ECCLESIASTICUS.
FRAGMENT ON MORTALITY.
FRAGMENT OF SIXTH VOLUME.
FRAGMENT.
J'ay fait le précédent Chapitre un peu court; peut-être que celui-ce sera plus long; je
n'en suis pourtant pas bien assuré, nous l'allons voir.
SCARRON.
FRAGMENT WHICH WAS TO HAVE ANSWERED THE QUESTION PROPOSED IN

THE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-SECOND CHAPTER.
Io udii già dire ad un valente uomo nostro vicino, gli uomini abbiano molte volte
bisogno sì di lagrimare, come di ridere; e per tal cagione egli affermava essere state
da principio trovate le dolorose favole, che si chiamarono Tragedie, accioche
raccontate ne' teatri, come in qual tempo si costumava di fare, tirassero le lagrime agli
occhi di coloro, che avevano di ciò mestiere; e cosi eglino piangendo della loro
infirmita guarissero. Ma come ciò sia a noi non istà bene di contristare gli animi delle
persone con cui favelliamo; massimamente colà dove si dimori per aver festa e
sollazzo, e non per piagnere; che se pure alcuno è, che infermi per vaghezza di
lagrimare, assai leggier cosa fia di medicarlo con la mostarda forte, o porlo in alcun
luogo al fumo.
GALATEO, DEL M. GIOVANNI DELLA CASA.
FRAGMENT ON HUTCHINSON'S WORKS.
FRAGMENT RELATIVE TO THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL AT DONCASTER AND THE

LIVING OF ROSSINGTON.
FRAGMENT OF INTERCHAPTER.
FRAGMENT ON WIGS.
MEMOIRS OF CAT'S EDEN.
More than prince of cats, I can tell you.

ROMEO AND JULIET.
MEMOIR OF THE CATS OF GRETA HALL.
ΕΙΣ ΤΟΥΣ ΑΔΡΙΑΝΤΑΣ.
Ὁ μὲν διάβολος ἐνέπνενσέ τισι παρανόμοις ἀνθρώποις, καὶ εἰς τοὺς τῶν βασιλέων
ὕβρισαν ἀνδριάντας.
CHRYSOST. HOM. AD POPUL. ANTIOCHEN.
EPILUDE OF MOTTOES.
L'ENVOY.
THE DOCTOR,
&c.
CHAPTER CCI.
QUESTION CONCERNING THE USE OF TONGUES.—THE ATHANASIAN

CONFESSORS.—GIBBON'S RELATION OF THE SUPPOSED MIRACLE OF
TONGUES.—THE FACTS SHOWN TO BE TRUE, THE MIRACLE IMAGINARY, AND
THE HISTORIAN THE DUPE OF HIS OWN UNBELIEF.
Perseveremus, peractis quæ rem continebant, scrutari etiam ea quæ, si vis verum
connexa sunt, non cohærentia; quæ quisquis diligenter inspicit, nec facit operæ
prætium, nec tamen perdit operam.
SENECA.
For what use were our tongues given us? To speak with, to be sure,
will be the immediate reply of many a reader. But Master, Mistress,
Miss or Master Speaker (whichever you may happen to be), I beg
leave to observe that this is only one of the uses for which that
member was formed, and that for this alone it has deserved to be
called an unruly member, it is not its primary, nor by any means its
most important use. For what use was it given to thy labourer the ox,
thy servant the horse, thy friend,—if thou deservest to have such a
friend,—the dog,—thy playfellow the kitten,—and thy cousin the
monkey?1
1 Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia notis.
ENNIUS.
In another place I shall answer my own question, which was asked in

this place, because it is for my present purpose to make it appear
that the tongue although a very convenient instrument of speech, is
not necessary for it.
It is related in Gibbon's great history, a work which can never be too

highly praised for its ability, nor too severely condemned for the false
philosophy which pervades it, that the Catholics, inhabitants of
Tipasa, a maritime colony of Mauritania, were by command of the
Arian King, Hunneric, Genseric's detestable son and successor,
assembled on the forum, and there deprived of their right hands and
their tongues. “But the holy confessors,” he proceeds to say,
“continued to speak without tongues; and this miracle is attested by
Victor, an African bishop, who published an history of the
persecution within two years after the event. ‘If any one,’ says Victor,
‘should doubt of the truth, let him repair to Constantinople, and listen
to the clear and perfect language of Restitutus, the subdeacon, one
of these glorious sufferers, who is now lodged in the palace of the
Emperor Zeno, and is respected by the devout Empress.’ At
Constantinople we are astonished to find a cool, a learned, an
unexceptionable witness, without interest and without passion.
Æneas of Gaza, a Platonic philosopher, has accurately described his
own observations on these African sufferers. ‘I saw them myself: I
heard them speak: I diligently enquired by what means such an
articulate voice could be formed without any organ of speech: I used
my eyes to examine the report of my ears: I opened their mouth, and
saw that the whole tongue had been completely torn away by the
roots; an operation which the physicians generally suppose to be
mortal.’ The testimony of Æneas of Gaza might be confirmed by the
superfluous evidence of the Emperor Justinian, in a perpetual edict;

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Theatre from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe 1st

Edition Samuel Ravengai

The History and Political Transition of Zimbabwe: From

Intercultural Aesthetics in Traditional Chinese

The Zimbabwe Council of Churches and Development in

EPIDEMICS: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of

Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance

Social Media and Digital Dissidence in Zimbabwe Trust

The Challenge of World Theatre History 1st ed. Edition

Translating Samuel Beckett around the World 1st Edition

Theatre from Rhodesia

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-5870 ISSN 2634-5889 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Picture by Mariola Biela for Wits Theatre

We would like to acknowledge several people who supported us in real-

We appreciate the role of the University of Zimbabwe, Theatre Arts

1 Introduction: Contested Forms, Spaces

Part I From Colonial to De-colonial Theatre: Contested

6 Contestation in Postcolonial Drama: Residual

Part II The Politics of Representation

Kelvin Chikonzo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Creative

Nehemiah Chivandikwa is an Associate Professor in the Department of

in international journals on Performance and Cultural studies some of

Samuel Ravengai is Associate Professor and Head of Department of

Joy L. Wrolson is an independent theatre scholar and artist. Although

Fig. 10.1 Vuka Afrika’s You Have No Right, a play

Introduction: Contested Forms, Spaces

Samuel Ravengai and Owen Seda

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

which resulted in a power-sharing government that brought together Ian

discovery an act of treachery that was tantamount to treason, leading to

Zimbabwean theatre, most playwrights and directors applied realism as a

Welcome Msomi. In Zimbabwe, this kind of theatre was the product

characters (playing more characters than one), minimalism, flat charac-

Part I: From Colonial to Decolonial

of social institutions over subordinate sections of society. Rather, power

closure and a unidirectional flow of power. Owen Seda,5 for example,

techniques and forms that allowed postcolonial theatre makers to resist

Part II: The Politics of Representation

Ndebele identities, the Zimbabwean crisis and subaltern characters. The

Constructionists do not deny the existence of the material world. However,

the so-called dissidents, who belonged to the disbanded ZIPRA forces.8

Gukurahundi came to be viewed as a disruption of the civil liberties

billion percent. The local currency became worthless and by October of

protest theatre, which gave transformative agency to the subaltern char-

12 A Gramscian term which he uses to distinguish a group of intellectuals produced

Ravengai, Samuel. 2006. An Investigation into the practice of directing and

From Colonial to De-colonial Theatre:

Colonial Zimbabwean Theatre, Cultural

Introduction: Discourse and Power

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Being the subjects of Rhodesian discourse, Rhodesians drew on the philo-

The field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at

The struggle to impose a dominant discourse is explicable in terms

this apparatus is proactively put in place in anticipation of moments of

Theoretical Moorings and Structures

It is important to realise this because theatre, as it was established by the

Colonial theatre, indeed, played a part in the discourse of ‘civilised

Southern Rhodesia, Sir Cecil Rodwell. Salisbury (Harare) was a class-

EARLY APPROXIMATION TO THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—GEORGE FOX.—

A QUOTATION FROM BISHOP BERKELEY, AND A HIT AT THE SMALL CRITICS.

SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON.—CUDWORTH.—JACKSON OF

SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—DOUBTS AND

BIRDS OF PARADISE.—THE ZIZ.—STORY OF THE ABBOT OF ST. SALVADOR DE