African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 941
References
Coplan, David. 1985. In Township Tonight: South African Black City Music and Theatre. Harlow:
Longman.
Kerr, David. 1996. African Popular Theatre from Precolonial to Modern Times. London: James
Currey, Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann; Nairobi: EAPH; Harare: Baobab; Cape Town: David
Philip.
Ranger, Terence. 1985. Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe. London: James
Currey.
Pongweni, Alex. 1982. Songs that Won the Liberation War, Harare: College Press.
Vail, Leroy, and Landeg White. 1997. Plantation Protest: the History of a Mozambican Song. In
Readings in African Popular Culture, ed. Karen Barber. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, Oxford: James Currey.
DAVID KERR
THEATER: THEATER FOR
DEVELOPMENT
Theater for Development is a technique of drama building which rests on an interaction
between people who are affected by development projects, and those who initiate such
projects. It has been used in many countries of Africa since the 1970s. There are two
basic forms.
Firstly, it can be initiated by a government or nongovernment agency (NGO) as a
means of promoting a particular message suited to its purpose. This is sometimes called
Campaign Theater because it has been widely used in campaigns with specific goals such
as the promotion of good health (vaccination, clean water, safe sexual behavior) and in
HIV/AIDS information campaigns, as well as in education-oriented strategies. This
approach is didactic in orientation and seeks to communicate a message from the agency
to the recipient people.
The second form is as an open-ended strategy for giving people an opportunity to
identify, address, and analyze issues that they consider to be of primary importance to
their daily lives. This is a participatory strategy, seeking only to provide an opportunity
and a platform for people to focus their concerns and to articulate them in familiar forms
of performance. In this latter approach, the people are in control of both the technique
and the content. It is oriented toward interrogating issues arising in response to the
presence or absence of “development,” that is, the social and physical changes brought
about by national and international agency, whether governmental or nongovernmental.
Within government social departments and donor aid agencies, this form of Theater
for Development has found itself frequently (and perhaps increasingly) constrained by a
direct cause-analysis-action paradigm identifying it as a theater of social information and
social education. This form of Theater for Development reverses the direction of the flow
of information between “developers” and the “developed.” It does this by using familiar
forms of performance that help to instill in people a sense of their own worth, respect for