African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 940
Christian sects as the Zionist Christian Church, the Coon Carnivals of Cape Town,
militaristic mimes like Muganda and Kalela of Malawi and Zambia, South African
township musicals, such as those of Gibson Kente, and improvised African language
radio plays.
More elitist forms of European performance, such as the literary play, opera, and
ballet, also had an influence on popular African theater, particularly in the late twentieth
century. Literary drama, promoted through the formal school system, tended to be elitist
when performed in European languages. When schools’ drama festivals began to open up
to plays in African languages (like Setswana in Botswana and Seswati in Swaziland), or
when university theater programs (such as the travelling theaters of Zambia and Malawi)
began to use indigenous languages, on their own, or mixed with English, this became the
catalyst for popular drama, not only in educational institutions, but also among amateur
(and occasionally professional) troupes.
Theater for Development schemes, promoted by government departments, educational
institutions or donor-assisted, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) contributed much
to this type of popular theater. The Laedza Batanani Popular Theater movement in
Botswana, through a series of local and regional workshops, provided an influential
model for a theater that strategized solutions to socioeconomic problems through
community-based, participatory, didactic theater.
Examples of independent popular drama groups, performing plays that ranged from
commercial domestic farces through sociopolitical melodrama, through Theater for
Development to agit-prop, include Kanyama (Zambia), Kwathu (Malawi), Amakhosi and
Zambuko/Izimbuko (Zimbabwe), and Magosi (Botswana). In Lusophone Africa,
professional theater troupes tended to restrict themselves to plays in Portuguese in the
urban areas. The spread of the popular theater ideology, however, through the cultural
activities of the Southern African Development Community, has seen groups like
Producoes Ola of Mozambique, attempting to make their theaters more accessible to
popular audiences.
Language in South African theaters has been complicated by the apartheid
government’s attempt to link African languages to the Bantustan concept, where each socalled
nation (such as English, Dutch, Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho), had its own cultural
forms. The black consciousness theater movement in the 1970s tried to break down these
stereotypes by valorizing English as a pan-South African medium of communication.
By the 1980s, however, more varied forms of protest theater emerged, linked, for
example, with the Trade Union movement in Durban (the collectively created, Ilanga Le
So Phonela), the liberal urban professional theater (such as Woza Albert! by Ngema,
Mtswa, and Albert), or township protest theater (such as Matsamela Manaka’s Pula).
These varied forms of theater, though using different ideological and dramatic strategies,
tended to have in common, an antiapartheid perspective and a multilingual codeswitching
flexibility.
The victory of the democratic struggle in South Africa has had a catalytic role not only
in that country, but throughout the region. Within South Africa it has widened the scope
of popular theater to include themes other than anti-apartheid protest. Within the region,
it has given impetus to a growing crossfertilization of popular theater ideas, techniques,
and movements.