Autos and the role of the Church European-style theatre was first introduced into the territory that is

today Lusophone Africa by Catholic missionaries. Missionary endeavours started as early as the sixteenth
century. A bishopric was established in S˜ao Tom´e in 1934, which included the present-day area of
Angola and the Congo. By 1596, with the erection of the diocese of S˜ao Salvador do Congo, the present
-day area of Angola already had its own bishop. This, if anything,reveals that the cultural efforts
associated with the church are long in date,at least in the coastal areas. And neither should the quality of
these cultural efforts be underestimated.
The sort of theatre cultivated by Catholic priests and friars were (‘acts’, plays) representing biblical
stories or incidents from the life of Christ. Judging from those autos that are still extant – and S˜ao Tom´e,
for all the particular reasons to do with its history and which render it a living museum, is the repository
of many of those autos – the style and structure were not too different from that of the English miracle or
morality play of the late Medieval period. What we see are the same didactic ends to which the stories are
put. Very often the purpose of representing the autos was catechetical, that is, they served as a way of
propagating the faith or of familiarising the faithful with Catholic doctrine and dogma. But this is not to
deny the intrinsic subtlety of many autos: the rich theological and iconic subtext is often conveyed
through what, to modern spectators, would be mundane verbal signs.
There is no evidence that the sort of autos produced through the auspices of the church changed
much over the centuries, for versions of them continued to be produced well into the twentieth century.
But it is probably true to say that the Christianised population in the more rural areas became familiar
with them only after the mid-nineteenth century, when the great missionary endeavours began. This was
also the period when Protestant missionaries established themselves in Angola. We cannot be sure
whether some of these churches and sects, many of them heirs to the worst excesses of the Puritans, ever
nurtured theatre. Commentators often speak broadly of theatre in the ‘Christian’ missions, Protestant and
Catholic, but no concrete details are ever provided.
Even though they served to deepen spectators’ understanding of the Christian faith and, perhaps
more importantly, to familiarise the indigenous population with western dramatic forms, church autos
also had a more insidious underside. They functioned as a tool of colonial ideological domination. The
Colonial Act of  made it clear that the Catholic missions were instruments in civilising the
‘natives’. We cannot be sure whether there were any practical spin-offs from their stands. The
generalised ethos suggested that the white man and his religion were morally superior . We see this
manifested in the casting of roles in nativity plays. It had become convention, and in Angola this
continued as late as , for blacks to play the roles of Judas and Satan and sometimes even Herod.
The roles of baby Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the angels were reserved for whites.It is significant that it is
these conventions that a more ‘Africanist’ theatre would want to overturn. For example, the first play
written in a native language was also a Christmas morality play: Domingos Van-D´unem’s Auto de Natal
(Christmas play), which was performed in Luanda in , was written in Kimbundu, one of
Angola’s tribal languages.
Indigenous European-style theatre
The earliest reference to native European-style secular theatre comes from around ,
when Carlos da Silva produced a tragicomic operetta,Os Amores de Krilolu ´ (Kril´olu’s Loves) in
Louren¸co Marques (now Maputo). Ant´onio Rosado, in his reminiscences about the early days of
Mozambique’s capital city , tells us that Torre do Vale, a well-known settler, played the role of a
Blackman , but also that Jo˜ao Albasini played the role of a prissy Goan very much proud of his second-
hand Lusitanian heritage (Gra¸ca, : ). This small referenc is interesting because Jo˜ao
Albasini was a mulatto and a journalist who wrote for the early black nationalist newspapersO
Africano(The African) and, later, O Brado Africano (The African outcry). Jo˜ao Albasini was a vocal
opponent of the abuses of the colonial system, the contract worker system and discrimination against
blacks (see Marshall,: ). His playing before a settler audience – and according to Rosado
the entire ‘town’ (read whites) came to watch the play – is probably revealing of a certain fluidity in racial
relations in the early years of the twentieth century. In those early days there were still significant mulatto
oligarchies. Whites would only become the dominant class from the s, when the fascist
apparatus began to pass all types of bills, beginning with the already mentioned Colonial Act of
. The kind of theatre that got to be performed in that period onwards was written for and reflects
the tastes of the dominant white settler class.
Theatre of the variety or vaudeville kind was to become very popular among the white settler class. The
genre spawned many plays of doubtful quality , but two from Mozambique are worth recalling: O Imp
´erio da Laurentinas (The empire of the Lagers) from  and Palhota Maticada(Walled-up hut )
from , both of them by Fernando Baldaque and Arnaldo Silva. The period also produced what
got to be called teatro colonial (settler theatre), in other words, theatre about the lives of the settlers. A
curious example of this sort of theatre is O Mato (The bushveld), performed around . It was
written by Caetano Montez, a lieutenant in the army. Rodrigues J´unior, a cultural critic writing in the
s, had this to say about the play: Everything in this play seems to be about the revenge of the
‘bush’ [bushveld] – the ‘bush’ seems to get off on ruining and destroying
the white man. And his own revenge has something that is al-
most diabolical because, when he tortures the ‘bush’, he feels a joy
that is like a spasm, a convulsion, the final letting go, exhausting,
dominating. (quoted in Gra¸ca, : ; my trans.)
These different theatrical manifestations reveal the extent to which Louren¸co
Marques was a lively and cosmopolitan centre. In Louren¸co Marques, for
example, there was even an amateur English theatrical society that managed
to perform in South Africa. But this city was probably the exception rather
than the rule. There are records of plays having been staged in Luanda and
in Bissau, as well as in other provincial towns, but usually on a sporadic
basis and without the support of any infrastructure, such as permanent
theatre houses. Louren¸co Marques’s proximity to South Africa might have
something to do, perhaps not so much with the quality of the work, but with the attempts at creating a
wider range of cultural possibilities. An example
will suffice. The N´ucleo de Arte, which was to become a theatre house for
quality shows, was started in order to provide a place for Jascha Heifetz to
perform. This name probably does not mean much nowadays, but at the time
Heifetz was also a world-famous violinist and virtuoso performer. He had
been performing in Johannesburg. The good citizens of Louren¸co Marques
thought their city also worthy of a visit by a world-class performer, and so
they created a theatre house.
Tours by Portuguese companies
Spectators, especially in more cosmopolitan centres like Luanda and
Louren¸co Marques, were further familiarised with European-style theatre
through the tours of Portuguese-based theatre companies. There are records
of tours from as early as . These became more frequent from the s
onwards. The sort of shows they performed were the vaudeville or variety
kind popular among white society. It was only in , with a tour by the
Teatro Experimental de Cascais, that Angolan theatre-goers at least became
more familiar with the more innovative aspects of Portuguese theatre. African nationalism and theatre
The factors that I have discussed – church autos, European-style plays and
variety shows and tours by foreign companies – all contributed to helping
spectators become more familiar with theatrical conventions and dramatic
form. When the first native theatre got to be written, it betrayed the formal
influences of the kind of theatre that had been around until then. By ‘native
theatre’ I mean theatre produced, not by foreigners or settlers, but by people
who had grown up in those countries and who wrote, in some way or
another, about the social realities they themselves experienced. This sort of
theatre was by its very nature political.
The period following World War Two saw the rise of a more vocal and
articulate African nationalist consciousness and also of a more systematic
programme of resistance. It was in this period that the three main liberation
movements were established: PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of
Guinea and Cape Verde), MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of
Angola) and FRELIMO (Mozambican Liberation Front). Many of the future
leaders of these movements were studying in Lisbon in the s, and they
were associated with the activities of the Casa dos Estudantes do Imp´erio,
a university residence for African students. These activities were as much cultural as they were political.
There was a considerable overlap between
the two. (For example, Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president, was also
a distinguished poet.) Anti-colonial struggle, nationalism and a new-found
pride in Africa were powerful themes to be deployed in literature. A number
of very bright and talented people started publishing in the s and s.
There was something of a literary renaissance. The appearance of a native
theatre was probably not unrelated to this since, in Angola at least, many
poets and writers also wrote plays.
But the poetry that got to be written was bold, articulate and experi-
mental. Very often it employed the full resources of indigenous traditions
of oral recitation. It also appropriated the images and metaphors of African
cultures. One thinks of the work of Jos´e Craveirinha. The same could be said
of Luandino Vieira’s highly poetic fiction from Angola. These are just two
examples. The point is that in the context of such sheer creativity one would
expect some sort of cross-over into the theatre. The sort of drama that was
written or the sort of theatre that was performed did not break any ground;
its formal qualities were those of the theatre that had been produced by and
for whites.
Norberto de Castro and Domingos Van-D´unem started the Clube de
Teatro de Angola sometime after World War Two. The group did not survive
for long, but it was the impetus behind the Companhia Teatral de Angola,
another short-lived group, and also Ngongo, an amateur dramatic society
that staged traditional tales and sketches, this from  to the mid- s.
Ngongo produced at least one play of merit, Muhongo-a-Kasulo, an adaptation
of a short story from Oscar Ribas’s ´ Ecos da Minha Terra, this in . All
these endeavours were geared towards an urban or semi-urban audience, but
there are records of plays performed for rural people in the early s.
Similarly with Mozambique, plays whose subject matter dealt with the
local reality only began to appear in the early s. The two principal
theatre groups – Teatro dos Estudantes Universit´arios de Mo¸cambique and
Teatro de Amadores de Louren¸co Marques – were open to all races, but in
the main they performed experimental plays from the European canon. The
first play dealing specifically with the ‘African’ reality was Lindo Lhongo’s
Os Noivos Ou Conferˆencia Dramatica sobre o Lobolo ´ (Bride and bridegroom,
or a dramatic discourse on bride-money), performed in . The work
spoke positively in favour of the lobolo – or ‘lobola’, as it is known in
South Africa. Lhongo also wrote As Trinta Mulheres de Muzeleni (The thirty
women from Muzelini), which is about the clash of European and African cultures. According to some
nationalist commentators at the time the play
was too tied to the now outdated principles of negritude (Gra¸ca, : ).
In an interview he gave at the time Lhongo said his play was about ‘the
anguish of this acculturated class, which is called “evolved”, and which has
one foot in Western culture and the other foot in the ancestral customs and
traditions, in that culture that is really part of their own make-up’ (quoted
in Vaz, : ; my trans.). In  Jo˜ao Fumane wrote Feitic¸o e Religiao˜
(Sorcery and religion), about a Christianised black man who is still tied to
his ancestral beliefs.
There are probably three factors which would account for the kind of
theatre that was being produced from the s through the mid- s: the
negative views of African folk traditions on the part of the African ´elite; a
climate of terror and police surveillance; and the guerrilla war. I shall talk
about each of these items separately.
The first factor relates to what I have previously said about theatre being
formally indebted to the European models spectators were familiar with.
African theatrical traditions (dance, music, mimicry) did not find their way
into this kind of theatre – and, in fact, it is only in the late s that they are
added to the repertoire. This can be explained by two different motives. The
dominant ethos among the liberation movements – by and large Marxist-
Leninist in orientation – was that tribalism was something divisive and
negative, which needed to be eradicated. Those theatrical manifestations of
which I discussed a few were probably seen as being too closely related to
specific tribal cultures, and maybe not fit for the ‘new de-tribalized Africa’. As
it was, it was precisely these ‘folkloric’ spectacles that the colonial state most
often encouraged and nurtured. There is the example of the the Dance of the
Bull, mentioned above, which was often performed for colonial dignitaries.
Carlos Vaz makes the legitimate point that the same state that was vigorously
opposed to the appearance of a revolutionary African theatre also cultivated
these expressions of African folklore (: ). We can understand the
reluctance of playwrights and directors to be seen to be pandering to colonial
tastes.
The second factor was the ever-constant vigilance on the part of the
PIDE, the Portuguese security police. It was easier to hide a typewritten
poem than to hide a public performance of a play. This probably discouraged
writers from either tackling themes that were too bold or even attempting
to have them performed. The third reason was the colonial war, which started in Angola in ,
in Portuguese Guinea in , and in Mozambique in . Many of the
most talented writers left for exile or joined the guerrillas at this time.
An indication that these writers might have turned to the theatre had
things been different is the observation that the noted poet Costa de Andrade
and the writer Pepetela were both involved in theatre work in the MPLA-
controlled areas of Angola. The sort of work they produced was along the
line of children’s plays. These plays would be staged, often with improvi-
sations, before adult audiences. They were used to explain why the MPLA
was waging its war against colonialism. Theatre had become a very useful
and practical tool to educate entire sectors of the population. This sort of
lesson would be brought in when theatre was reconstituted in the period
after independence.