Samuel Ravengai is a professor of theatre and performance and teaches in the areas of theatre/performance studies, theatre directing and writing for live performance. He propounded the theory of Afroscenology in his research project at Wits called by the same name in 2018.
In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make... more In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre's Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape's Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts.
This chapter reviews the normative construction of colonial resistance by analysing how white the... more This chapter reviews the normative construction of colonial resistance by analysing how white theatre practitioners, in Rhodesia, resisted and defied official practices of separate development and racial segregation. It explores how the field of cultural production provided an opportunity for intercultural and interracial synergies, which dismantled the official binary construction of social relations in Rhodesia. Using a post-colonialist gaze, the chapter reveals how contamination, hybridity and interculturalism were used as strategies of resistance which in turn defined notions of whitehood from within. The chapter, therefore, argues that the colonial project was resisted from within yet this aspect of colonial resistance has received scant academic attention. The paper looks at the works of prominent directors such as Ken Marshall, Adrian Stanley, Monica Maarsden and Daniel Pearce, among others.
This chapter examines the soft power of colonialism which I call Rhodesian discourse. The chapter... more This chapter examines the soft power of colonialism which I call Rhodesian discourse. The chapter interrogates the interplay between Rhodesian discourse and Zimbabwean theatre produced in colonial times with occasional reference to other forms of cultural production such as literature. Past and present Zimbabwean theatre established its identity in discursive negotiation and contestation with Rhodesian discourse. I ask what is/was Rhodesian discourse and how did it affect the field of theatre production? At independence, Rhodesian discourse was sidelined from the public sphere to give way to the dominant patriotic and socialist discourse. However, the former reconstituted itself in other forms such as neo-colonialism, and colonial mentality within Eurocentric theatre institutions such as the National Theatre Organisation (NTO).
In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre’s Tears Become Rain and also make ref... more In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre’s Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre’s Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape’s Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts.
Studies on the history of censorship in Zimbabwe are very scarce. When Zimbabwe
attained her inde... more Studies on the history of censorship in Zimbabwe are very scarce. When Zimbabwe attained her independence from Great Britain on 18 April 1980, she chose to follow a socialist system of economic and social development. Even though this programme had the best intentions, like most programmes for the future, it was used, together with the recuperation of denuded indigenous culture, as a tool for restricting national debate and for censorship. After the failure of neoliberal policies that had begun in 1990, Zimbabwe plunged into a crisis which began in 1998 and ended in 2008. Protest theatre artists who voiced their displeasure with the underperforming economy and bad politics were censored, politically controlled and sometimes detained by the Zimbabwean Government. I seek to document this stifling of creativity through the method of thick description. I will specifically study the theatre and creative activities of Dambudzo Marechera and take a panoramic view of censorship and political control of theatre, of several key theatre companies of Zimbabwe, during the crisis period.
In this article I attempt to analyse three urban African performances; Nyawo, Tea party, and Beni... more In this article I attempt to analyse three urban African performances; Nyawo, Tea party, and Beni. I employ the socio-historical analysis model which attempts to understand the relationship between the field of cultural production and the field of power. Historically the ascendancy to power of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe facilitated the assimilation of its culture and taste by virtually all of Western civil society. Colonisation in Rhodesia (in its blue print form) intended to use the same principle of extending English rulership and influence with the goal of transforming Rhodesia to be like the metropolitan state in manifesting the nature and will of the English in lifestyle, actions, activities and culture. As evidenced by the nature of these urban African performances, domination does not necessarily result in absolute collaboration. Rhodesian discourse was both collaborated with and resisted by African cultural producers. I look at this element of collaboration and resistance through Ranajit Guha’s (1997) frame of the articulation of power where domination implies subordination. In the case of colonial administrations, coercion seems to outweigh persuasion in the articulation of domination thereby denying absolute assimilation of colonial culture by Africans as was the case of civil society in Western Europe.
My focus in this article is a Zimbabwean television soap opera, Studio 263, concentrating on the ... more My focus in this article is a Zimbabwean television soap opera, Studio 263, concentrating on the period 2002 to 2006, even though it is still running on ZBCTV, albeit with intermittent stops and resumptions. Studio 263 has also been screened in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa (from the Mnet Africa Magic channel). The Studio 263 sponsor PSI-Z is a Non-Governmental Organisation that originates from (and arguably represents the interests of) the United States of America. During the period, PSI-Z was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the British department of international development. The funding of Studio 263 by western development aid agencies is generally seen as bringing about development which I will argue places the developing world in a dependent relationship with the West making it a prisoner of history. During this period PSI sponsored Studio 263 and a television talk show called This is Life that was co-produced by PSI-Z and ZBCTV. The talk show offered a platform to discuss issues of sexuality, health, HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and mitigation, stigmatization, condom use and safe sex.
This article is a contextual analysis of the socio-political and ideological conditions of theatr... more This article is a contextual analysis of the socio-political and ideological conditions of theatre production in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1996. In this article I discuss the construction of theatre identities, in what I have chosen to call alternative Zimbabwean theatre, at the level of
theatre training. In the field of Zimbabwean alternative theatre, a white-dominated theatre organisation, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO), and a black-dominated theatre organisation, Zimbabwe Association of Community based Theatre (ZACT), fought ideological and aesthetic wars and competed with each other for occupying the dominant position. These two organisations competed to host theatre festivals, to train theatre artists, to express their views in the media and consecrate their agents. They competed on the right to define national theatre. It was a cultural struggle to assume the power and right to tell others what national
theatre ought to be and to enforce national theatrical conventions. It invariably became a power struggle between two theatrical conventions – the NTO theatrical convention with a strong bourgeois illusionistic theatre orientation and the ZACT theatrical convention with a strong performatic orientation. Since both NTO and ZACT trained the same artists, the article argues that theatre makers used their own agency to choose what they wanted from the workshop materials and created theatre that was an admixture of dramatic theatre and African performative modes.
This article intends to situate Zimbabwean political theatre within the discourse of national ide... more This article intends to situate Zimbabwean political theatre within the discourse of national identity. National identity is deployed here as denoting any given set of myths, stories and beliefs propagated to justify a dominant group in maintaining power and in the case of Zimbabwe such generated myths and images are sectarian. Institutions such as theatre must be established to protect, nourish, articulate and perpetuate such identities. What is emerging now in Zimbabwe is that even if the government has supported such institutions often posturing as independent of sectarian political expedience, the resultant public imagery is the official version of history which incriminates those who have different views as sell-outs. Political theatre in Zimbabwe is one of the mediums which generates public imagery that challenges or maintains the ZANU-PF version of national memory. I argue that the totality of the state is expressed in its monopoly of images of meaning that float in the public mind through the medium of theatre. Where such theatre is consistent with what Ranger calls ‘patriotic history’ it is protected as memory should be guarded against dissolution. However, national identity can be an umbrella for determining what speech and passion is permissible and what is not. Thus in Zimbabwe, national identity has become a camouflage for a series of political controls that occupy the creative space and deny the opportunity for a pluralism of views and freedom of expression.
In this article, I do a textual analysis of Jonathan Nkala’s, The Crossing, through the lens of T... more In this article, I do a textual analysis of Jonathan Nkala’s, The Crossing, through the lens of Tim Creswell’s theories of mobility and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. I background the analysis by surveying migration trends since the fifth century AD and note that migration is human nature. My major preoccupation is to examine the 16 encounters that Jonathan Nkala, the writer/performer, has with other people on his way to the Western Cape. I argue that Nkala deviates from the victimhood trope characteristic of the other three plays written by Zimbabweans on the same subject of migration. I further argue that when mobility has taken place, the moving agent carries their tacit knowledge in their body which they share in performance with the receiving community.
Key words: victimhood, The Crossing, mobility, encounter, migration, Nkala
In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make... more In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre's Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape's Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts.
This chapter reviews the normative construction of colonial resistance by analysing how white the... more This chapter reviews the normative construction of colonial resistance by analysing how white theatre practitioners, in Rhodesia, resisted and defied official practices of separate development and racial segregation. It explores how the field of cultural production provided an opportunity for intercultural and interracial synergies, which dismantled the official binary construction of social relations in Rhodesia. Using a post-colonialist gaze, the chapter reveals how contamination, hybridity and interculturalism were used as strategies of resistance which in turn defined notions of whitehood from within. The chapter, therefore, argues that the colonial project was resisted from within yet this aspect of colonial resistance has received scant academic attention. The paper looks at the works of prominent directors such as Ken Marshall, Adrian Stanley, Monica Maarsden and Daniel Pearce, among others.
This chapter examines the soft power of colonialism which I call Rhodesian discourse. The chapter... more This chapter examines the soft power of colonialism which I call Rhodesian discourse. The chapter interrogates the interplay between Rhodesian discourse and Zimbabwean theatre produced in colonial times with occasional reference to other forms of cultural production such as literature. Past and present Zimbabwean theatre established its identity in discursive negotiation and contestation with Rhodesian discourse. I ask what is/was Rhodesian discourse and how did it affect the field of theatre production? At independence, Rhodesian discourse was sidelined from the public sphere to give way to the dominant patriotic and socialist discourse. However, the former reconstituted itself in other forms such as neo-colonialism, and colonial mentality within Eurocentric theatre institutions such as the National Theatre Organisation (NTO).
In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre’s Tears Become Rain and also make ref... more In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre’s Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre’s Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape’s Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts.
Studies on the history of censorship in Zimbabwe are very scarce. When Zimbabwe
attained her inde... more Studies on the history of censorship in Zimbabwe are very scarce. When Zimbabwe attained her independence from Great Britain on 18 April 1980, she chose to follow a socialist system of economic and social development. Even though this programme had the best intentions, like most programmes for the future, it was used, together with the recuperation of denuded indigenous culture, as a tool for restricting national debate and for censorship. After the failure of neoliberal policies that had begun in 1990, Zimbabwe plunged into a crisis which began in 1998 and ended in 2008. Protest theatre artists who voiced their displeasure with the underperforming economy and bad politics were censored, politically controlled and sometimes detained by the Zimbabwean Government. I seek to document this stifling of creativity through the method of thick description. I will specifically study the theatre and creative activities of Dambudzo Marechera and take a panoramic view of censorship and political control of theatre, of several key theatre companies of Zimbabwe, during the crisis period.
In this article I attempt to analyse three urban African performances; Nyawo, Tea party, and Beni... more In this article I attempt to analyse three urban African performances; Nyawo, Tea party, and Beni. I employ the socio-historical analysis model which attempts to understand the relationship between the field of cultural production and the field of power. Historically the ascendancy to power of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe facilitated the assimilation of its culture and taste by virtually all of Western civil society. Colonisation in Rhodesia (in its blue print form) intended to use the same principle of extending English rulership and influence with the goal of transforming Rhodesia to be like the metropolitan state in manifesting the nature and will of the English in lifestyle, actions, activities and culture. As evidenced by the nature of these urban African performances, domination does not necessarily result in absolute collaboration. Rhodesian discourse was both collaborated with and resisted by African cultural producers. I look at this element of collaboration and resistance through Ranajit Guha’s (1997) frame of the articulation of power where domination implies subordination. In the case of colonial administrations, coercion seems to outweigh persuasion in the articulation of domination thereby denying absolute assimilation of colonial culture by Africans as was the case of civil society in Western Europe.
My focus in this article is a Zimbabwean television soap opera, Studio 263, concentrating on the ... more My focus in this article is a Zimbabwean television soap opera, Studio 263, concentrating on the period 2002 to 2006, even though it is still running on ZBCTV, albeit with intermittent stops and resumptions. Studio 263 has also been screened in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa (from the Mnet Africa Magic channel). The Studio 263 sponsor PSI-Z is a Non-Governmental Organisation that originates from (and arguably represents the interests of) the United States of America. During the period, PSI-Z was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the British department of international development. The funding of Studio 263 by western development aid agencies is generally seen as bringing about development which I will argue places the developing world in a dependent relationship with the West making it a prisoner of history. During this period PSI sponsored Studio 263 and a television talk show called This is Life that was co-produced by PSI-Z and ZBCTV. The talk show offered a platform to discuss issues of sexuality, health, HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and mitigation, stigmatization, condom use and safe sex.
This article is a contextual analysis of the socio-political and ideological conditions of theatr... more This article is a contextual analysis of the socio-political and ideological conditions of theatre production in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1996. In this article I discuss the construction of theatre identities, in what I have chosen to call alternative Zimbabwean theatre, at the level of
theatre training. In the field of Zimbabwean alternative theatre, a white-dominated theatre organisation, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO), and a black-dominated theatre organisation, Zimbabwe Association of Community based Theatre (ZACT), fought ideological and aesthetic wars and competed with each other for occupying the dominant position. These two organisations competed to host theatre festivals, to train theatre artists, to express their views in the media and consecrate their agents. They competed on the right to define national theatre. It was a cultural struggle to assume the power and right to tell others what national
theatre ought to be and to enforce national theatrical conventions. It invariably became a power struggle between two theatrical conventions – the NTO theatrical convention with a strong bourgeois illusionistic theatre orientation and the ZACT theatrical convention with a strong performatic orientation. Since both NTO and ZACT trained the same artists, the article argues that theatre makers used their own agency to choose what they wanted from the workshop materials and created theatre that was an admixture of dramatic theatre and African performative modes.
This article intends to situate Zimbabwean political theatre within the discourse of national ide... more This article intends to situate Zimbabwean political theatre within the discourse of national identity. National identity is deployed here as denoting any given set of myths, stories and beliefs propagated to justify a dominant group in maintaining power and in the case of Zimbabwe such generated myths and images are sectarian. Institutions such as theatre must be established to protect, nourish, articulate and perpetuate such identities. What is emerging now in Zimbabwe is that even if the government has supported such institutions often posturing as independent of sectarian political expedience, the resultant public imagery is the official version of history which incriminates those who have different views as sell-outs. Political theatre in Zimbabwe is one of the mediums which generates public imagery that challenges or maintains the ZANU-PF version of national memory. I argue that the totality of the state is expressed in its monopoly of images of meaning that float in the public mind through the medium of theatre. Where such theatre is consistent with what Ranger calls ‘patriotic history’ it is protected as memory should be guarded against dissolution. However, national identity can be an umbrella for determining what speech and passion is permissible and what is not. Thus in Zimbabwe, national identity has become a camouflage for a series of political controls that occupy the creative space and deny the opportunity for a pluralism of views and freedom of expression.
In this article, I do a textual analysis of Jonathan Nkala’s, The Crossing, through the lens of T... more In this article, I do a textual analysis of Jonathan Nkala’s, The Crossing, through the lens of Tim Creswell’s theories of mobility and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. I background the analysis by surveying migration trends since the fifth century AD and note that migration is human nature. My major preoccupation is to examine the 16 encounters that Jonathan Nkala, the writer/performer, has with other people on his way to the Western Cape. I argue that Nkala deviates from the victimhood trope characteristic of the other three plays written by Zimbabweans on the same subject of migration. I further argue that when mobility has taken place, the moving agent carries their tacit knowledge in their body which they share in performance with the receiving community.
Key words: victimhood, The Crossing, mobility, encounter, migration, Nkala
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attained her independence from Great Britain on 18 April 1980, she chose to follow a
socialist system of economic and social development. Even though this programme
had the best intentions, like most programmes for the future, it was used, together with
the recuperation of denuded indigenous culture, as a tool for restricting national debate
and for censorship. After the failure of neoliberal policies that had begun in 1990,
Zimbabwe plunged into a crisis which began in 1998 and ended in 2008. Protest
theatre artists who voiced their displeasure with the underperforming economy and
bad politics were censored, politically controlled and sometimes detained by the
Zimbabwean Government. I seek to document this stifling of creativity through the
method of thick description. I will specifically study the theatre and creative activities
of Dambudzo Marechera and take a panoramic view of censorship and political control
of theatre, of several key theatre companies of Zimbabwe, during the crisis period.
theatre training. In the field of Zimbabwean alternative theatre, a white-dominated theatre organisation, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO), and a black-dominated theatre organisation, Zimbabwe Association of Community based Theatre (ZACT), fought ideological and aesthetic wars and competed with each other for occupying the dominant position. These two organisations competed to host theatre festivals, to train theatre artists, to express their views in the media and consecrate their agents. They competed on the right to define national theatre. It was a cultural struggle to assume the power and right to tell others what national
theatre ought to be and to enforce national theatrical conventions. It invariably became a power struggle between two theatrical conventions – the NTO theatrical convention with a strong bourgeois illusionistic theatre orientation and the ZACT theatrical convention with a strong performatic orientation. Since both NTO and ZACT trained the same artists, the article argues that theatre makers used their own agency to choose what they wanted from the workshop materials and created theatre that was an admixture of dramatic theatre and African performative modes.
Key words: victimhood, The Crossing, mobility, encounter, migration, Nkala
attained her independence from Great Britain on 18 April 1980, she chose to follow a
socialist system of economic and social development. Even though this programme
had the best intentions, like most programmes for the future, it was used, together with
the recuperation of denuded indigenous culture, as a tool for restricting national debate
and for censorship. After the failure of neoliberal policies that had begun in 1990,
Zimbabwe plunged into a crisis which began in 1998 and ended in 2008. Protest
theatre artists who voiced their displeasure with the underperforming economy and
bad politics were censored, politically controlled and sometimes detained by the
Zimbabwean Government. I seek to document this stifling of creativity through the
method of thick description. I will specifically study the theatre and creative activities
of Dambudzo Marechera and take a panoramic view of censorship and political control
of theatre, of several key theatre companies of Zimbabwe, during the crisis period.
theatre training. In the field of Zimbabwean alternative theatre, a white-dominated theatre organisation, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO), and a black-dominated theatre organisation, Zimbabwe Association of Community based Theatre (ZACT), fought ideological and aesthetic wars and competed with each other for occupying the dominant position. These two organisations competed to host theatre festivals, to train theatre artists, to express their views in the media and consecrate their agents. They competed on the right to define national theatre. It was a cultural struggle to assume the power and right to tell others what national
theatre ought to be and to enforce national theatrical conventions. It invariably became a power struggle between two theatrical conventions – the NTO theatrical convention with a strong bourgeois illusionistic theatre orientation and the ZACT theatrical convention with a strong performatic orientation. Since both NTO and ZACT trained the same artists, the article argues that theatre makers used their own agency to choose what they wanted from the workshop materials and created theatre that was an admixture of dramatic theatre and African performative modes.
Key words: victimhood, The Crossing, mobility, encounter, migration, Nkala