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TRANSNATIONAL THEATRE HISTORIES
A History of
East African Theatre,
Volume 2
Central East Africa
Jane Plastow
Transnational Theatre Histories
Series Editors
Christopher B. Balme, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany
Catherine M. Cole, College of Arts and Sciences, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Tracy C. Davis, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Transnational Theatre Histories illuminates vectors of cultural exchange,
migration, appropriation, and circulation that long predate the more
recent trends of neoliberal globalization. Books in the series document
and theorize the emergence of theatre, opera, dance, and performance
against backgrounds such as imperial expansion, technological develop-
ment, modernity, industrialization, colonization, diplomacy, and cultural
self-determination. Proposals are invited on topics such as: theatrical
trade routes; public spheres through cross-cultural contact; the role of
multi-ethnic metropolitan centers and port cities; modernization and
modernity experienced in transnational contexts; new materialism: objects
moving across borders and regions; migration and recombination of
aesthetics and forms; colonization and decolonization as transnational
projects; performance histories of cross- or inter-cultural contact; festivals,
exchanges, partnerships, collaborations, and co-productions; diplomacy,
state and extra-governmental involvement, support, or subversion; histor-
ical perspectives on capital, finance, and administration; processes of
linguistic and institutional translation; translocality, glocality, transregional
and omnilocal vectors; developing new forms of collaborative authorship.
Series Editors
Christopher B. Balme (LMU Munich)
Catherine M. Cole (University of Washington)
Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern)
Editorial Board
Leo Cabranes-Grant (UC Santa Barbara, USA)
Khalid Amine (Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tétouan, Morocco)
Laurence Senelick (Tufts University, USA)
Rustom Bharucha (JNU, New Delhi, India)
Margaret Werry (University of Minnesota, USA)
Maria Helena Werneck (Federal University of Rio de Janiero, Brazil)
Catherine Yeh (Boston University, USA/ University of Heidelberg,
Germany)
Marlis Schweitzer (York University; Canada)
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14397
Jane Plastow
A History of East
African Theatre,
Volume 2
Central East Africa
Jane Plastow
Centre for African Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
Transnational Theatre Histories

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Acknowledgements
A great many people have helped me in writing this book; not only
my informants and interviewees but all those I have worked with across
East Africa for more than three decades. I am also indebted to my many
African students who have undertaken research projects at Leeds Univer-
sity and taught me much in the process. Especial thanks for specific
assistance with this project go to:
In Burundi
Freddy Sabimbona and Māeline Le Lay for an education regarding
Burundian theatre.
In Kenya
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Christopher Odhiambo and Simon Peter Otieno for
friendship, good conversation and patience in answering my questions;
while for a practical education in making theatre in Kenya the members
of Lagnet Theatre have been invaluable. Pepe kept my spirits up on very
many occasions.
In Rwanda
Martine Umulisa who was the best of research assistants and herself a font
of useful knowledge.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In Uganda
The deep bonds of friendship between my family and that of the Kigulis
have made Uganda a place of joy for me. In particular the help of Susan
Kiguli in facilitating so many meetings and interviews has been invaluable.
After years of collaboration the members of We Are Walukuba are now an
alternative family and making theatre with them has taught me much of
what I understand about Theatre for Development. Lilian Mbabazi has
moved over many years from student to artistic collaborator, becoming a
friend along the way. Sam Kasule’s help in answering my queries has been
much appreciated.
In Tanzania
Amandina Lihamba supported me in my doctoral research way back in the
late 1980s. My meetings with her over the years since have always been
educational, inspiring and much fun. Juma Bakari has similarly been a
long term advisor and I also owe a debt to Vicensia Shule who generously
answered my questions about contemporary theatre in Tanzania.
Outside Africa
I need to thank the Leverhulme Trust for giving me the Fellowship that
enabled the research for much of this book; The British Academy for
supporting research into Burundian theatre and the University of Leeds
for giving me time to write. So many friends and colleagues have helped
me with this research but in particular I wish to thank Christine Matzke,
Katie McQuaid, Ali Campbell, Matty Elliott and Bobby Smith, collabora-
tors, conversationalists and fellow theatre lovers. As always I acknowledge
the love and support of my family; most especially of my son, William,
with whom it has been a particular pleasure to make work in East Africa
in recent years.
Contents
1 Francophone Theatre: Burundi, Djibouti and Rwanda 1

2 Colonial Theatre in British East Africa: Kenya, Uganda
and Tanganyika 77
3 The Post-Independence Theatres of Kenya, Uganda
and Tanzania 129
4 Theatre for Development in East Africa 217
Conclusion 301
Reference 307
Index 309
vii
Praise for A History of East African
Theatre, Volume 2
“The second volume of A History of African Theatre focuses on theatre

forms, practices, practitioners and the underlying complex dynamic histor-
ical, cultural, political and economic factors that determine and influence
their emergence and growth. The book takes a panoramic critical survey
approach in its sampling of data and in analysis. As a critical survey, the
book explores variegated forms of theatre, practices, practitioners and
motifs from the Eastern African region. It is in this vastness of approach
that the richness of this book lies. It discusses theatre forms and prac-
tices, especially from Francophone Africa as well as theatre by women, that
have previously not been privileged. The book weaves together very well
both primary data generated through field work interviews and already
existing secondary literature on theatre forms and practices in Eastern
Africa. The way that the author has curated theatre forms and practices in
the region makes this an invaluable companion to theatre students, histo-
rians, researchers, scholars and practitioners. In my opinion this is a great
book.”
—Prof. Christopher Odhiambo, Professor of Literature and Applied Arts
at Moi University, Kenya
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 The notice given by the French Cultural Centre

in Djibouti of the cancellation of Les politiciens trottoir
(Photo by the author) 37
Fig. 1.2 From Buja sans tabou, 2020, Kambe by Arnold
Olol’enyanya (Photo by kind permission of Keith Ntwari
Rodriguez) 48
Fig. 1.3 Odile Katese ‘Kiki’, performs her one woman show, The
Book of Life, in Canada in 2019 (Photo by kind permission
of Dahlia Katz) 66
Fig. 2.1 A divinity student playing Jesus on his way to crucifixion
in the Passion Play Ggwe Waliyo? as produced at the CMS
seminary in Mukono in 1954 (Photo by Hans
Leuenberger. First published in The Passion in Africa,
1957) 85
Fig. 2.2 Milton Obote playing the title role in Julius Caesar
as performed by students at Makerere in 1948 (Photo
by Margaret Macpherson. First published in 1964, They
Built for the Future) 100
Fig. 2.3 The National Theatre in Nairobi, Kenya as first built
in the 1950s (Source http://www.mccrow.org.uk/eastaf
rica/JanetDavis/JanetBW1.htm) 110
Fig. 3.1 Renga Moi by Robert Serumaga performed by Abafumi
Theatre 163
xi
xii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 3.2 Rose Mbowa in 1995 in the title role of the Luganda
translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage (Maama
Nalukalala Ne’zzadde Lye) (Photo by kind permission
of Jane Collins) 177
Fig. 3.3 Acrobats performing at the Bagamoyo Festival in 1988
Fig. 3.4 Kwaya performance at the Bagamoyo Festival in 1988
Fig. 3.5 The Kenya Schools Drama Festival (Photo by kind
permission of Stephen Opanda) 194
Fig. 4.1 Workshopping the Forum Theatre production of Akatale
at the National Theatre in Uganda in 1990 (Photo by kind
permission from Ali Campbell) 229
Fig. 4.2 Circus in Ethiopia. This image clearly shows the link
to the Red Cross (https://archives.lefourneau.com/art
istes/circus/ethiopie/partenaires/partenaires_anglais.htm) 251
Fig. 4.3 The Angel Tree in Sala’a Daro, Eritrea, 97. The women’s
group was only confident to articulate their perspective
on their aspirations for village life by working through
the medium of religious song (Photo by the author) 255
Fig. 4.4 Using art to discuss issues around school life with young
people in Bogu, Eritrea, 2006 as part of the process
of play devising (Photo by the author) 258
Preface
This is the second volume of A History of African Theatre. Volume

one began with an extensive contextualising introduction to the major
concerns of theatre across the whole region before focusing on the
theatres of the Horn of Africa, looking at Somali language theatre
in Somalia/Somaliland, Djibouti and southern Ethiopia, and then at
Ethiopian and Eritrean theatres. In this volume I turn to central East
Africa. I begin with a chapter on francophone theatre; in Djibouti,
Burundi and Rwanda, before moving on to two chapters: one colo-
nial and one post-independence, shining a spotlight on Kenya, Uganda
and Tanzania. My final chapter is a pan-regional analysis of the history
of Theatre for Development and related forms seeking to make social
impact. The study is transnational. Not only has there been no previous
attempt at national historical studies of performance in many of the coun-
tries of East Africa, but more significantly no previous work has sought
to look in an holistic manner at the theatre of any African region. My
contention is that we have much to learn from understanding the histor-
ical and the transnational influences that have impacted on contemporary
East African theatres.
A key decision in undertaking this study was deciding how to define
East African theatre. I am all too aware that the definition has often,
Africa-wide, been a matter of contention, with some arguing that the
continent had its own theatre prior to colonialism and others seeing
it as an imported form. My position throughout this project is that
xiii
xiv PREFACE
modern East African theatres, in all their rich array of manifestations,

are hybrids. These have enormous diversity. At one extreme in the conti-
nent’s only uncolonised nation, Ethiopia, theatre was introduced in the
1920s by a nobleman, Tekle Hawariat, who had been educated in Russia
and brought his concept of drama from that country, melding it with
an indigenous poetic form, qene, to create a highly literary model for
theatrical performance which has led to the strongest contemporary urban
theatre movement in Africa (see Volume 1, Chapter Two). In contrast, in
Tanzania most contemporary theatre makers have substantially rejected
Eurocentric forms introduced during the colonial period to focus on
fusing an array national dance, music, story-telling and poetic traditions in
both their Theatre for Development and more formal play productions.
I would certainly refute, on the basis of my research for this project, that
there is such a thing as claimed by, for example, Wole Soyinka, as an
homogenous African theatre model.1 The reality is far more diverse and
more interesting with playwrights and theatre makers being influenced
at different times and to different degrees by local, Eurocentric and more
international performance forms. Discussion of this range of performative
thought and practice: where it comes from, whom it is aimed at and why
particular forms have been chosen in particular times and places, is one of
the main concerns of this project.
It is impossible in one volume to comprehensively cover the theatrical
histories of six nations. A key aspect of this study is therefore concerned
with selective focus. The problem was not so great in relation to the
francophone nations where more limited amounts of theatre have been
generated, but the anglophone nations of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania
were another matter. Covering the colonial period when there was only
limited output was not so problematic but for the post-colonial period
1 In his seminal book, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976) Soyinka has
an essay ‘Drama and the African world view’ in which he seeks to argue—based on a
series of examples only from Nigeria—that all Africa has certain common ideas about
the divine, and the relationship of the individual to society, which has influenced theatre
production across the continent making it recognisably African as distinct from European
drama. A moment’s thought as to the huge diversity of cultures in Africa and some very
different religious perspectives, even without knowledge of particular theatre traditions,
would reveal how incredible such an assertion is. A tendency to make loose assertions
about that mythical being, ‘African theatre’, pervades a huge number of Nigerian writings
when really the authors are speaking about Nigerian or at best West African theatre. One
aim of this book is to make such erroneous assertions less possible.
PREFACE xv
I had to come up with a selection strategy. This has involved offering a

theatrical timeline of key developments but focusing in on major areas of
work, with emphasis on movements that had a transnational basis; schools
festivals, popular commercial theatre, the Free Travelling Theatre move-
ment and more recently international theatre festivals. All too often an
outdated privileging of the published text, especially when that text is
written in a European language, coupled with a dominant interest in the
literary or thematic as opposed to the performative or the popular, on the
part of critics both local and international, has led to an over-emphasis on
a very small number of playwrights when considering East African theatre.
I by no means wish to deny the importance of great theatre writers, but
I also wish to recognise exceptional play makers, a rather different group.
So, in this study I seek to rebalance common critical practices—acknowl-
edging the poetic genius of Tanzania’s Ebrahim Hussein, the acerbic wit
of the Kenyan, Francis Imbuga and the craft of Ugandan, John Ruganda,
but spending more time analysing the popular theatre resulting from,
for example, the operatic partnership of Wassanyi Serukenya and Robert
Kawadwa or the performative experiments of Rose Mbowa.
An area which has been overlooked in all studies I am aware of is any
kind of comparative analysis of the theatres of francophone and anglo-
phone Africa. The problem is further compounded in that studies of
African francophone theatre seldom even mention East Africa. Analysing
the influences of these alternative traditions, with their impact extending
well beyond the colonial period, side by side in this book, enables us to see
how cultural perceptions and policies originating from outside the conti-
nent reverberate through time. Possibly my most significant finding from
this entire study is that if you wish for a vibrant national theatre you must
engage school children with the art. The historical accident of the fact
that throughout the twentieth century the British saw the school play as
an integral part of the education system, particularly in high schools, is the
major reason why theatre making at all levels has been so much stronger
in anglophone Africa than in Burundi, Djibouti or Rwanda, with Kenya’s
contemporary Schools Drama Festival, a direct descendent of a colonial
event established in the 1950s by the British Council, today being the
largest annual theatre event on the continent, regularly involving some
five million citizens in making or viewing young peoples’ work nation-
wide. Even outside these nations, in all my conversations with theatre
makers across the region, I found that it was always the taking part in a
school theatrical event which had inspired the careers of every aspiring
xvi PREFACE
artist, amateur or professional. There is therefore a direct correlation

between how much drama is made in schools and how strong a national
theatre tradition may be. Leading on from this none of the francophone
nations discussed has ever established a university with a theatre depart-
ment, though all the anglophone ones have done so, as has Ethiopia, and
we see from the early 1960s that it is the university departments which
have nurtured the vast majority of leading post-colonial playwrights and
directors.
Comparisons can also be usefully made between policies in relation to
what kinds of theatre are supported. In the whole of East Africa only
Ethiopia today offers state support to national theatre companies, though
many governments have sought at various times to co-opt theatre for
national propaganda campaigns, both social and political. More generally
arts education, artistic infrastructure and support for artistic production
have been woefully under-regarded by national governments. As a result
much of the best work in the region has been produced by dedicated
amateurs, while artists seeking to make a living from their work have been
intensely vulnerable to the agendas of external players. In francophone
nations the default option has to seek support from the local French
Cultural Centre. I show how these centres have often been relatively
generous to an array of elite artists, offering performance spaces, some
sponsorship and even opportunities to take work deemed exceptional on
foreign tours. The price to be paid is that in nearly all instances this work
must be made in French and support is offered only for productions in
national capitals. This has led to a situation where elite artists and leading
francophone African plays are freely exchanged across the continent, but
the work remains totally inaccessible to the mass of citizens who do not
speak the language and cannot access national centres. In anglophone
nations Britain has also offered sponsorship and entry to prestigious inter-
national African drama competitions for work made in English, though
not as generously as France. However, she has been much more open
to supporting local language productions, at least when they can be seen
as having development-related value. We see, however, in both groups
of nations, how the ongoing prestige of international recognition and
the opportunities for personal advancement and status represented by
making work in English or French continues to alienate elite theatre from
the mass of vernacular speaking local populations. Choice of language
remains a vexed issue for many African artists, though across much of
eastern Africa where colonial influence was either absent or less invasive:
PREFACE xvii
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia/Somaliland and Tanzania, all theatre is made

in national languages. It is true that the situation is complicated by the
fact that many of the nations concerned have populations with a multi-
plicity of language groups, but to add to this problem by superimposing
a linguistic division based on class—since only the better off can gener-
ally access an education that makes them fluent in French or English—is
objectively absurd; an absurdity which the old colonial powers elide and
which they are able to promote because national governments so patently
fail to accord any intrinsic value to their artistic cultures and because far
too many East African theatre makers sixty years after the end of colo-
nialism are still failing to challenge this grotesquely neocolonial artistic
heritage.
The final chapter in this book is the only one which covers the entire
region. Theatre for Development (TfD) and its related forms: Popular
Theatre, Campaign Theatre, Theatre for Conflict Resolution, etc., has,
since the 1980s, been increasingly the source of the enormous majority
of funding for theatre making in Africa and therefore has attracted
huge numbers of groups, from community level to full-time professional
companies, to make shows for the various pay-masters. Most discussions
of TfD focus on particular projects or particular practices. Here I show
how national players and national governments had considerable influence
on evolving practices so that we can see a marked difference between
TfD in, for example, Tanzania where it was developed by a group of
university-based activists and theatre-makers who created a national domi-
nant ‘Seven Stage Model’ and a form that works extensively through
‘traditional’ dance and music forms in comparison with a country like
Rwanda, where I argue that all TfD type activity is manipulated by the
ultra-controlling state to such an extent that it has become simply one
more avenue for state propaganda.
In this chapter I raise the many concerns that the funding of the
majority of a regions’ theatre by a disparate group of western-based
aid agencies to serve their particular development agendas has to occa-
sion. I discuss how the form was ‘turned’ from a radical hope for
creative and aesthetic community empowerment as envisioned by its local
creators and their international friends in the early 1980s into a message-
delivery system for international aid; a money-making operation for many
client theatre groups; and most often a very dubiously effective tool
for behaviour change among the poor. I also discuss how its exponen-
tial growth was driven by the HIV/AIDS crisis of the late 1980s and
xviii PREFACE
1990s, how some places have been thrown into disarray in the twenty-
first century as development aid priorities have changed and how in the
present day it seems that money is being thrown at work purporting to
deal with conflict and post-conflict resolution and the associated issue of
conflict-related trauma with much the same abandon and lack of analysis
as happened all those years ago when AIDS was the regional aid priority.
I also discuss instances of more sensitive, engaged and hopeful practice
that has continued to be made by many devoted practitioners at all levels
of society.
This book comes out of my own engagement with eastern Africa
since the mid-1980s when I first went to teach theatre at Addis Ababa
University. Since that time I have been fortunate enough to have made
theatre, taught theatre and learned about theatre from a host of friends
and colleagues in many countries in the region. I have been inspired
throughout my working life by the dynamism and diversity of theatre
in eastern Africa and by how important it has been; often speaking truth
to power when no other avenue was open for such talk even, at times,
when it cost the theatre makers their freedom or their lives. It has equally
importantly provided entertainment and food for thought to millions of
ordinary East Africans. Theatre in East Africa, over the past hundred
years, has shown many faces, used many forms and spoken many truths.
It has often been overlooked internationally, but here I have sought to,
critically, celebrate its multitudinous riches.
Leeds, UK Jane Plastow

CHAPTER 1
Francophone Theatre: Burundi, Djibouti

and Rwanda
In a region where theatre traditions are generally far less internation-

ally known than those of some other parts of Africa, countries that
were colonised by French-speaking nations: France and Belgium, have
been particularly neglected in scholarly discourse. Almost all writing
about theatre in French-speaking Africa has been confined to discus-
sion of West Africa and the Congo; while writing in English, other than
about art resulting from the Rwandan genocide, is particularly thin on
the ground. As I will show this is in part because the cultural policies
pursued by France and Belgium did not encourage the kinds of local,
syncretic production that enabled the evolution of socially relevant, acces-
sible theatre in countries like Somaliland and Ethiopia.1 Most particularly
confining support for theatre only to work made in French meant that,
except in Djibouti where popular Somali language theatre was nurtured
from across the border in Somalia and Somaliland, drama remained very
much a minority concern.
This chapter discusses theatre in Djibouti, Rwanda and Burundi. All
three are small nations, and prior to the eruption of the Rwandan geno-
cide in 1994 had been little known outside the region. Their wider
political insignificance meant both that little attention has been paid to
indigenous cultural forms and that their colonial masters were uninclined
to invest in arts and culture. In the case of Belgium, the colonial master
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Plastow, A History of East African Theatre, Volume 2,
Transnational Theatre Histories,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87731-6_1
2 J. PLASTOW
in Burundi and Rwanda between 1922 and 1962, we see a repeat of

the pattern displayed in their much larger colony of the Congo, where
minimal investment was made in any kind of empowerment or educa-
tive activity for the population. In Djibouti, as elsewhere in their colonial
possessions, French investment was also low, at least until after the Second
World War, as there was a deliberate policy in all French colonies to
restrict opportunity to a very small elite for fear wider investment in
the local population was likely to foment insurrectionary ideas (Gardinier
1980, 74). As I argue throughout this book, the single most important
factor across the region in seeding the idea of modern, secular theatrical
performance was the introduction of the school play. In none of these
three nations did the state support more than minimal schooling and
school teachers seldom promoted indigenous playwrights. As a result the
first Rwandan play was written in 1954 but the first Burundian production
was only in 1967. In both countries plays have been written and produced
in both French and the local language; Kinyarwanda in Rwanda and
Kirundi in Burundi, while since the new, anglophone, government took
power in Rwanda in 1994 theatre has also been made there in English.
Theatre scarcely existed outside major towns before the twenty-first
century, and even in urban centres was until very recently an exclusive,
elite entertainment form. In Djibouti, Somali language theatre took place
from the 1960s inspired by groups that took their work into the country
from Somaliland and Somalia (see Volume 1, Chapter One), but the
first Djiboutian play in French was only written in 1979 and theatrical
performances have been largely confined to the capital, Djibouti City.
Today there are small amounts of theatre made in Djibouti in French,
Arabic, Somali and Afar, but the population of Djibouti is less than a
million. With little state support all four groups struggle to find a popular
audience.
The Historical Background

to Burundi and Rwanda
The peoples of the Great Lakes region of Eastern Central Africa settled
their fertile lands in some numbers from the first millennium BC (Chré-
tien 2006, 45). High population levels and competition among lineage
groups gave rise to centralised societies which in turn led to the kingdoms
that, by approximately five hundred years ago, formed the basis of modern
Burundi and Rwanda as well various Western Ugandan polities (Chrétien,
107). There are numerous similarities between the ways the kingdoms of
the Great Lakes were conceived, organised and performed. They were
1 FRANCOPHONE THEATRE: BURUNDI, DJIBOUTI AND RWANDA 3
generally dynastic, with significant rituals relating to enthronements of

kings who had enormous power: spiritual and political. These kings ruled
through both patronage and via an elite class grouping, and they were
consistently warlike, with young men forming significant armies.
The greatest artistic linkage was through the royal drums. Rwandan,
Burundian and Bugandan royal drums are of various sizes, but generally
large, commonly standing some four feet tall; played in drumming bands
that were exclusive to the court and, until the post-colonial period, never
seen by common people. Across this region one of the elements of an
enthronement was ‘the presentation of the dynastic drum, which has been
rubbed in butter or blood and which the new sovereign touches, lifts up,
or beats as a sign of his taking possession of the country’ (Chrétien, 124).
The dynastic drum was known as ingoma (kingdom); it went everywhere
with the monarch and could only be ‘played’ by the king and his leading
religious officials. Chrétien lists seven kingdoms, including Burundi and
Rwanda, all of which had notably similar rituals and regalia and each of
which was ‘embodied by a principal drum’ (127).
The history of the Great Lakes kingdoms has been far from stable, with
many fluctuations of power and extent. Ntare Rugamba, for example,
the ruler of Burundi in the first half of the nineteenth century, doubled
the size of his country through a series of wars of conquest (Chrétien,
163). Moreover, the power dynamics within the kingdoms have changed
greatly over the years. It is not my intention to engage deeply in spec-
ulating about pre-colonial understandings of the labels Tutsi and Hutu.
In pre-colonial societies in both Rwanda and Burundi—and in Western
Ugandan kingdoms—four groups of people were acknowledged, but they
did not conform neatly to modern or Western conceptions of either class
or ethnicity. The ganwa were a princely class unique to Burundi, and
could be either Tutsi or Hutu. The Tutsi were the majority ruling class
in Rwanda and were usually pastoralists, though only a small percentage
lived elite lives and not all owned cattle. The majority of Hutu have
generally been characterised as agriculturalists, though a number were
also cattle owners, and Hutu as well as Tutsi could be chiefs and sub-
chiefs in both kingdoms. There is little evidence that the names Hutu
and Tutsi were seen in ethnic terms in pre-colonial Great Lakes soci-
eties. The fourth group were and are the Twa, a pygmoid minority who
were the original hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the region and who live
in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Burundi and Tanzania in small, scattered
4 J. PLASTOW
groupings. The mwami (king) was generally seen to be above, and sepa-
rate from, all labels. A small minority of Tutsi, around 10%, do appear to
have had elite status in the pre-colonial period. But the holding of power
in both kingdoms was a complex business. Hutu, Twa and Tutsi lived in
a web of negotiated, overlapping obligations, and a marked rise or fall in
wealth, cattle numbers and chiefly status could lead to individuals moving
between being recognised as Hutu or Tutsi. Moreover, these societies
also recognised allegiances to clan, and clans could include members of
all groups. The myth of the Tutsi as a separate ethnic group of conquering
incomers was largely developed by the Belgians.
As elsewhere, I have found it difficult to locate detailed information
about popular artistic forms in the pre-colonial period. The National
Museum website gives outline information on a number of dance/song
forms including the Hutu (though not named as such) umudiho, which
had numerous regional variations, was, and is, danced in pairs and has a
strong stamping emphasis.2 Jacques Nzabonimpa, director of the Rwanda
Academy of Language and Culture speaks of imharamba, a farming dance
performed with hoes and agricultural paraphernalia, and igishakamba, a
pastoralist dance in which performers mimicked the horns of beloved
cattle and he claims both predate the far more famous intore dance
common to both Rwanda and Burundi.3 Intore is a warrior dance; indeed
intore means warrior or ‘Chosen One’. The form was brought to Rwanda
from Burundi in the mid-nineteenth century. A number of Great Lakes
kingdoms had organised armies and this was particularly so in Rwanda
where from the mid-eighteenth century young warriors were established
in camps around the country. The intore, though more recently inscribed
as Tutsi, could originally be either Tutsi or Hutu (Chrétien, 161) and
were not just fighting men. They were trained in a whole courtly tradi-
tion of what it meant to be Intore y’Umwani (Chosen Ones of the King)
and
were imparted with knowledge on ancestral traditions and underwent

socialization in the ways of the court. Here, the virtues of a mili-
tary and courtly-pastoral tradition of the Tutsi elite – noble behaviour
(Ikuy-Abupfura/Ubupfura, fighting spirit and heroic courage (Ubut-
ware), manfulness (Ubugabo), discipline and self-control (Itonde) – were
cultivated. (Dahlmanns 2015, 121)
The soldiers were also trained in oral poetry and literature. Generally
performed by court ritualists (abiru), oral forms included ubucurab-
wenge (royal genealogies); ibisigo (poems about historical royal heroes);
and ibitekerazo (heroic recitations). Learning these poems, and how to
compose their own, was a central element of a soldier’s education—
followed after the introduction of the intore dance by a requirement to
also learn how to perform the dramatic and elaborate warlike steps. As in
other pastoralist, Tutsi societies (see Chapter 2 on related Ugandan Hima
performance), heroic recitation could feature oneself or one’s beloved
cows. Royal lead dancer of the 1940s and 1950s, Michael Kamuhangire,
describes the dance as follows:
Every body movement and gesture of Intore dancers is symbolical and all
the symbols are attached to fighting tactics and armoury which gives the
dance privilege from all Rwandan societies. An infantry is represented by a
mane of a lion which is the band of sisal worn in the head, while striker air
force is represented in the style called Agasiga or ‘eagle’, where the dancer
spreads the arms like the wings of an eagle and turns the head majestically
like an eagle inspecting the ground. (Quoted in Petersen, The New Times,
3.12.2017)
The major division, as we see transnationally across the more centralised

pre-colonial nation-states of eastern Africa, was between people’s perfor-
mance forms and dance, song and music created exclusively for court
use.
It is surely both interesting and significant that in so many societies
across East Africa, from highly centralised cultures such as that of the
Ethiopian Amhara through to the dispersed nomadic clans of Somalia,
either excellence in poetic creation or in elaborate dance, or in both, were
seen as essential markers of the elite in society. Artistic and creative ability
was highly revered and a central part of education. It seems indisputable
that it was the introduction of colonialism, for all its claims to civilisation
and cultural superiority, that in many cultures in the region led to a rela-
tive denigration of understandings of artistic creativity as intrinsic to the
realisation of a complete human being.
6 J. PLASTOW
German Colonisation
First contact for the Great Lakes societies with Europeans dates back to
the 1860s when explorer, John Speke, made contact with a raft of king-
doms in the region and in a typical act of Western hubris took it upon
himself to name the greatest of the lakes of the region Victoria after
his monarch. Further famous explorer-exploiters followed, many drawn
by the lure of locating the source of the Nile. Stanley, Livingstone and
Burton all passed through the area and were all impressed by the monar-
chical states they encountered (Chrétien, 203–204). As elsewhere the
explorers were followed by the missionaries. Buganda in Uganda had been
the earliest target and success of missionary endeavour in the region with
Catholics, especially the White Fathers and protestants, most notably the
Oxford-based Christian Missionary Society (CMS), both having marked
success in attracting converts—and nearly causing a religious civil war—
in the region (Chrétien, 207–208). However, in Rwanda and Burundi
where the White Fathers held a monopoly on missionary activity from
the 1880s until the second decade of the twentieth century, far fewer
conversions were achieved before the 1930s.
Missionaries were swiftly followed by colonists. At the time of the
Berlin conference of 1884 to divide Africa between leading colonisers
little was known in any detail of Burundi and Rwanda and there was
considerable political horse trading before in 1890 East African terri-
tories south of one degree south of the equator were allocated to
Germany, giving them an empire that encompassed Tanganyika, Rwanda
and Burundi (then known as Ruanda-Urundi) (Chrétien, 215–217).
However, the first German incursions into Burundi and Rwanda took
place only in 1896 with military expeditions concerned primarily with
assuring the valuable trade in ivory (Chrétien, 247). The Germans would
relatively easily win power in these countries, exploiting internal divisions
and backing up their claims with guns. With just a handful of officials
supported by small but highly pugnacious military forces they would rule
through the indigenous kings. Since the Germans had little interest in
either education or culture in relation to their Great Lakes possessions,
and since they were dispossessed following defeat in the First World War,
I do not propose to go into detail regarding their period in power over
the two monarchies. However, it is important that leading authorities
(Chrétien 2006; Lemarchand 1970) agree that in accordance with Prus-

sian militaristic and aristocratic understandings the Germans began the
disastrous colonial practice of favouring the Tutsi, whom they saw far too
simply as a form of aristocratic class/ethnicity in the region.
Belgian Power
The Belgians assumed control of Ruanda-Urundi formally in 1922.
Having played a leading role in ejecting Germany from the territories
in 1916 they were awarded these lands to administer as an adjunct to
their much larger Congo colony under a League of Nations mandate.
They would continue the German policy of indirect rule through
favoured kings. Up until 1925 Belgian engagement in Ruanda-Urundi
was minimal, merely maintaining the rudimentary German administra-
tive structures (Lemarchand, 65). They then began to theorise their rule,
basing it upon the maintenance of chiefly power, but with chiefs given
very little freedom to make any decisions for themselves. This was an
intensely paternalistic form of top down governance. It was also govern-
ment that allowed itself to be vastly over-influenced by the Catholic
Church.
Originally the church had made most, albeit small, numbers of converts
among poor Hutu. However, in 1927, an Italian priest won the confi-
dence of a leading Burundian court official and managed to first ‘sanitise’
and then replace the traditional harvest festivals; religious and cultural
events second only in importance to the enthronement rituals, with Chris-
tian prayers and blessings. In a very short time this great national festival
and many associated rituals and ritualists were denounced and their art
replaced by Catholic ceremonies. A similar process of deculturisation was
pushed through by the church in Rwanda in the name of Christian godli-
ness. Conversion became associated with power and privilege, and from
then on conversions began a long and spectacular growth until at inde-
pendence somewhere between a half and two-thirds of the population
were Catholic (Chrétien, 269).
The Catholic Church realised at the same time that it was to its advan-
tage to be associated with the elite and it began a systematic privileging
of the Tutsi whom it now inscribed as essentially different from the Hutu
in intellect, physique and ‘natural’ ability to lead. Elaborate and quite
unsubstantiated arguments were made that the Tutsi were of a different
race than the Hutu and that they came from Ethiopia. The church in
8 J. PLASTOW
Rwanda was led throughout the Belgian period right up to 1945 by Vicar
Apostolic Leon Classé, arguably the most influential single individual in
shaping state, church and the seeds of ‘ethnic’ hatred between Hutu and
Tutsi throughout the colonial period. Classé, says Chrétien:
made no secret of his views: a medieval style Rwanda should be

constructed, with its Tutsi aristocracy made to rule, its Hutu peasantry
made to work, and its Church made to shed light over the lot, all
while working hand in hand with civilian authorities. Rwanda would be
a ‘Christian kingdom’. (273)
Classé’s views persuaded the Belgian authorities and carried over to

Burundi where between 1929 and 1945 all Hutu, at the beginning of the
period representing 20% of chieftaincies, were stripped of any leadership
role.
The so-called ‘Classé doctrine’ (King 2014, 56) that embedded the
idea of intrinsic difference and Tutsi superiority in a generation of
missionaries and colonial administrators extended to colonial education,
the site of the very small beginnings of modern theatre in Ruanda-
Urundi. The first schools were set up by various missionary denomina-
tions, as throughout the continent, and these continued to be in charge of
almost all education until independence. The vast majority were so-called
‘chapel schools’, which offered only one or two years basic education
in the vernacular language, covering only reading, writing and religious
study (Duarte 1995, 281). The Church saw its role as offering:
Just enough schooling for the masses to master the catechism and accept
the church’s teaching without rejecting their traditional way of life and
occupations. (Hoben 1988, 11)
As late as 1957 only 3% of children were completing the official six years
of primary school. As in all Belgian colonies, similarly to the position in
French territories, the administration was strongly averse to promoting
advanced education, wanting only a small elite to have any meaningful
academic opportunity, with the intention that they would become a
subordinate group of administrators, teachers and priests. Only three
secondary establishments were set up across the entire region: a seminary
each in Rwanda and Burundi and the elite Groupe Scolaire in Astrida
(now Butare), run by the Brothers of Charity from 1932, which took
fifty pupils a year, half each from Burundi and Rwanda and massively
disproportionately admitted Tutsi (Chrétien, 285–286). Education was
given in an extremely dogmatic fashion, focusing on submissive obedi-
ence and large amounts of learning-by-heart, with absolutely no space for
critical reflection and all in French. No secondary education was avail-
able to girls. Study of theatre, seen largely as a branch of literature, was
exclusive to secondary schools and in line with usual francophone ambi-
tions to create a group of evolues offered only ‘courses in western classical
literature [including] the writings of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Aristotle
as well as of classic French writers such as Molière, Racine and Corneille’
(Nsengimana and Nkuriyingoma 1997, 237).
The Tutsi favouring policies initiated by church and state would
continue uninterrupted until after the Second World War. With the
League of Nations replaced by the United Nations a 1948 Commis-
sion sought to put pressure on the Belgians for emancipatory change.
The response was a defence of feudalism that was only slowly worn
down by repeated international criticism (Lemarchand, 79). Only in 1952
were the first tentative steps made towards allowing elected ‘advisory
councils’ to work alongside chiefs (Lemarchand, 81). At the same time
as the state was being pressurised to make its first democratic gestures
the Catholic Church conducted a volte face in its attitude to relative
Tutsi privilege. With Classé dead a new generation of missionaries came,
particularly to Rwanda, inspired by ‘ideals of Christian democracy’ (Chré-
tien, 301). Suddenly the church was supporting Hutu populism and
side-lining the Tutsi minority. Consequently, Rwanda was all set for an
intensely polarised Hutu versus Tutsi agitation for power, with the first
Hutu social organisation, the Muhutu Social Movement, established in
1957 by Gregoire Kayibanda, a protégée of leading Catholic missionary,
Monsignor Perraudin (Chrétien, 302).
The first play written and produced in the region was by an auto-
didact Hutu (Ricard 2002, 5). Francois-Xavier-Joseph-Deodatus Nayi-
giziki, better known as Saverio (1915–1984), was expelled from the
Groupe Scolaire for questioning his teachers. A truly transnational citizen,
although born in Rwanda, Nayigiziki spent his adult life working across
the region—not only in Ruanda-Urundi, but also in the Congo and
Tanzania. This travelling life is discussed in his highly autobiographical
fiction of 1950, Escapade Ruandaise (Rwandan Escapade). He wrote his
play, L’Optimiste (The Optimist) in 1954. Nayigiziki never comes out
openly against Belgian authority but his drama, concerning a socially
10 J. PLASTOW
contested love affair between a Hutu and the daughter of a Tutsi chief,
implicitly critiques colonial policies seeking to divide a nation he insisted
was essentially made up of equal peoples, with his reviewer arguing that
‘his deep thought was all about freedom’ (Ricard 2002, 7).
Although L’Optimiste was published by the Groupe Scolaire at Astrida,
only one school appears to have allowed local language productions at
this time, with Nicodeme Ruhashyankike staging plays in Kinyarwanda in
the 1950s at the seminary in Rwandan Nyakibanda, which through its
Cercle St. Paul has supported a range of artistic activity to an unusual
degree for many years. This slowly growing activity—all acted by boys
and men—developed only in the 1950s as Belgium tentatively began to
create a cultural policy for its African possessions as opposed to being
exclusively focused on their economic exploitation (Le Lay 2016, 46).
Maëline Le Lay discusses a fascinating result of that policy in her article
on theatrical links across the Belgian area of Congo and Ruanda-Urundi.
In 1956, for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Congolese
Upper Katanga Mining Union, which employed a large number of both
Rwandan and Burundian workers, it was decided to concoct what Le Lay
calls ‘a transnational collective Belgian African creation’ (46). This was
the first collaboration between artists from all three parts of the colony
and it was essentially a variety show. Conceived and collated entirely
by Belgians, Changwe Yetu (Our Festivity), was an excuse to showcase
both local dance and music forms and a series of ‘music hall style acts –
sketches, comic acts, games (musical chairs, for example) - and jazz-twist
type pieces of music’ (46). The production was evidently a success in the
eyes of the colonisers for the large group of performers were taken to
Brussels in 1959 to reprise the show as part of a ‘Universal Exhibition’
(47). Evidently the African artists worked in discreet groups and some at
least heartily disliked each other. The Burundians refused to talk with a
group that came from just over the border in the Congo while a Tutsi
group of Intore dancers, ‘openly showed their contempt of all the others,
including other Banyarwanda’ (47).
In the late 1950s, as agitation for independence swept Africa, Belgian
possessions suddenly came under intense pressure. The disaster of the
totally unprepared for concession of Congolese independence in 1960 is
well known (Weiss 2012). As in Ruanda-Urundi the country had a mere
handful of highly educated subjects and made minimal preparation for a
handover of power. In 1959 the Belgian government finally committed
itself to a programme of political reform in Ruanda-Urundi that was
intended to pave the way for democratic participation as the countries

moved towards independence. In Rwanda politics was already polarised
around notions of Hutu and Tutsi identity, with church and coloniser
now fully supporting the Hutu cause. Elections in 1960 had set up a
proto-parliament, but in January 1961 a Hutu coup d’etat was conducted
with Belgian support leading to the proclamation of a new republic of
Rwanda firmly under Hutu control (Lemarchand, 84–85). In Burundi in
contrast a provisional government was elected through the ballot box, the
monarchy was preserved and both major groups were represented in the
national assembly.
The Djiboutian Background

Djibouti was secured by the French entirely to satisfy mercantile inter-
ests. With the Suez Canal opening up a relatively swift route into Asia
in 1870 the Red Sea became of huge interest to European colonisers. In
1881 the French purchased the port town of Obock to use as a coaling
station for their steamships. The Côte française des Somalis was established
according to the current borders of present-day Djibouti by 1887 after
France entered into treaties with Afar and Somali sultans who had previ-
ously controlled these lands. 90% of Djibouti is desert and it is home to
two very different, historically frequently confrontational, but both tradi-
tionally camel herding nomadic peoples: the minority Afar who also live
in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Somalis, mostly of the Issa clan (see Volume
1, Chapter One). Up until the Second World War this colony was ruled
by a governor who had enormous power over his politically voiceless
subjects. The major investment made by the French was in building a
railway which from 1917 took goods from the port of Djibouti to Addis
Ababa in Ethiopia. Socially very little investment was made in this smallest
of colonies until after the Second World War. The first modern school,
run by missionaries—who have had little impact on this strongly Islamic
state—was opened in 1888, but by the time of the Second World War it is
estimated that only some 1100 children were enrolled in secular primary
schools, with many more attending indigenously run centres of Koranic
education.4
Following the Second World War, where Djibouti supported Vichy
France until 1942 when it was taken by a mixture of Free French
and Allied forces, French colonial expenditure on education expanded
12 J. PLASTOW
considerably. The centralised policy that ensured all children in French-

administered schools followed the same curriculum whether in Dunkirk
or Djibouti reflected the philosophy that a French-based universalism was
the essential basis of civilisation. However, in Djibouti from the 1960s a
modification was introduced with Koranic teaching in Arabic incorporated
into state education. It is extraordinarily difficult to find detailed infor-
mation on colonial Djibouti so much of what I write has to be inferred
from more general French colonial policy. However, my informants, who
mostly attended school in the 1970s and 1980s, all agreed that education
was still very much for a minority. Secondary schools, largely staffed by
French expatriates, offered quite a high level of very formal French educa-
tion. Some did put on French classics for end of year activities and some
ran extra-curricular drama clubs where occasionally children were allowed
to make more informal short sketches, though still these were always in
French. (Interviews with Aisha Mohamed Robleh and Fardouza Mousa,
Djibouti City, March 2017.)
From the 1950s the question of whether Djibouti would become an
independent country would never go away, though the French fought
exceptionally hard—with many suggestions of nefarious dealings—to
retain the territory. A first ballot on the question was held in 1958, when
all French territories were invited to make a choice about whether they
would opt for independence or remain part of France under new, French
Community, constitutional arrangements. The country voted to remain
French, with Afar and European communities uniting, though the UN
agreed with the Somali majority that it appeared highly likely that there
had been considerable vote rigging. Somalis in all five territories5 that had
been colonised, from the early 1950s through to around 1990, united
most unusually, transnationally, across clan lines in irredentist demands
for a single Somali state. Theatre would play a significant role here and
as early as 1958 a British Somaliland company, Walala Hargeisa, took a
play, Isa Seeg (Mutual Miss), into Djibouti, arguing for Somalis to be able
to join with their brethren. This work inspired activists in Djibouti who,
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, used the Somali language and Somali
language theatre as major tools to agitate for Somali areas of the terri-
tory to be allowed to secede from France and make up a single Somali
state rather than having separate Djiboutian independence (see Volume
1, Chapter One).
A second plebiscite in 1967 returned another result favouring France,
albeit with a smaller majority, but again there were widespread claims
of vote rigging and considerable unrest, to which France responded with

increased repressive force. Only in 1977, after a third vote, did the French
finally concede to popular demands, and an independent Djboutian state
was declared with power largely in the hands of the Somali majority.
The Influence of Francophone

Thought on the Theatre Cultures
of Burundi, Djibouti and Rwanda
Colonised by different states, and with Djibouti separated by thousands of
miles and a profoundly different indigenous culture from Ruanda-Urundi,
one might expect that colonial and post-colonial theatre practices were
likely to be notably different in the three francophone East African states.
What I focus on here are a number of important transnational similarities
that originate in francophone colonial thought and have continued to
resonate to the present day.
At the centre of this thinking was the idea of the exceptional greatness
of French thought and culture which was the foundation for the French
colonial mission civilisatrice (civilising mission). This would be achieved
through the creation of an elite of evolues, quite literally the ‘evolved’,
the peak of whose evolution was that they would become ‘assimilated’
into the francophone universe as black Frenchmen. This was partly seen
as possible because unlike all the other major European colonists France
constructed her empire as constituting a Greater France, with deputies
elected from the colonies to the French parliament. A number of very
important African politicians and artists would accede to this vision, with
no less a figure than Leopold Senghor; first president of Senegal, poet
and cultural theorist, arguing that: ‘universalism was consubstantial with
Frenchness, and that French language and culture was the most appro-
priate to achieve the harmonious combination of European classics and
traditional African features’ (Le Lay 2018, 496).
This vision, and by far the greatest efforts to implement it, was centred
at the core of France’s African empire, in West Africa, home to the famous
Ecole William Ponty,6 the crucible of francophone African theatre in the
1930s and 1940s (Conteh-Morgan 1994, 50). Carefully theorised atti-
tudes to thought and culture might seem a very long way from the
minimal cultural investments we see in francophone East Africa but I
14 J. PLASTOW
am going to argue that their echoes resonated significantly across the

countries with which we are here concerned.
Most obviously we see this in relation to language. It is not that all
other colonisers did not impose their languages on their colonial subjects
and try to persuade them of the linguistic superiority of their English,
Italian, Portuguese or Spanish; but there is a unique, almost mystical,
belief in French-speaking territories that somehow the acquisition of the
language is of itself a medium of civilisation. As far back as the early
twentieth century the central plank of the assimilationist vision was the
creation of a communaute de lange (community of language) (Le Lay
2018, 494). It might seem odd that I argue in this way in relation to
Belgian-controlled Ruanda-Urundi but we have to remember that the
minimal education on offer in those lands was in the hands of the Catholic
Church, and the Catholic Church was for many years of colonial rule in
the hands of Vicar Apostolic Leon-Paul Classé, a Frenchman.
This was a profoundly alienating educational regime that made no
concessions to the situated realities of the boys experiencing it. By incul-
cating ideas of the superiority of the French language, of French thought
and of French culture, these children were of necessity profoundly
distanced from their communities and taught to think they were supe-
rior to them. Nothing, it was implied, of their previous lives, was of any
value. This extended to performance culture where all that was taught
was, it seems exclusively, the works of the great trio of France’s pre-
eminent seventeenth-century playwrights: the classical tragedians Racine
and Corneille and the comedy of Molière. Moreover, French educational
tradition places far less emphasis on play production than does the anglo-
phone. In later years these schools did mount productions of the classics,
but mostly students just read them, and nowhere in these countries can
I find significant evidence of any more informal play production; nativity
plays, passion plays, or even the little moralising sketches or dramatisa-
tion of folk stories that happened quite widely in British East African
churches and schools. A key result of this set of beliefs and practices
was that indigenous theatre making began notably later in the franco-
phone territories than it did in the anglophone or even more notably in
independent Ethiopia.7
As the francophone colonies moved towards independence, the
French, like other colonists, sought to find ways to maintain influence in
all areas, including the cultural. This is where we see France more overtly
stepping in to engage with Rwanda and Burundi. As Belgium stepped
back France most definitely included these French-speaking nations in its

overarching vision of Francafrique which developed from the mid-1950s
as the means to seek to ensure that France remained a global power.
John Conteh-Morgan, in his Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa
(1994), discusses a range of cultural strategies that France evolved that
affected theatre across this broad area.
Of great significance were the French Cultural Centres, operating
under various names in different times and places, that were set up
across the world, and notably for the purposes of this argument, post-
independence in all three countries we are concerned with. Maëline Le
Lay also sees this as being of significant importance to the French cultural
vision, explaining that:
These structures, still in place today, have promoted the classical French
repertoire since the 1970s and 1980s. Their directors – all French – urged
[…] African dramatists to return to Molière, Corneille, and Racine, instead
of “promouvoir les cultures nationales, au risqué de l’ethnocentrisme”,
(promoting national cultures for fear of ethnocentrism) (Dedieu 2012,
164). The injunction to stay within the French dramatic repertoire can
be seen as an attempt by the French State, fearing a loss of influence in
Africa and beyond, to assert French predominance in its formerly colonized
territories through the diffusion of high French culture. (2018, 496)
In East Africa the Cultural Centres run libraries and French classes, but
also host a whole range of cultural events: literature, photography, film,
fine art, poetry and theatre; both bringing groups and teachers across
from France and providing a venue, and sometimes funding, for local
groups. Rwandan, Augustin Gasake, for example, told me that prior to
the genocide the local French Cultural Centre used to bring over profes-
sionals from time to time to provide theatre training, while a French
government-funded professor at the university, John Foucault, offered
some informal training to students. In Burundi from the 1970s until the
present day it has been the French Cultural Centre which, in the absence
of any other formal theatre space, has hosted nearly all French language
productions other than those given in secondary schools. In the notable
absence of significant indigenous government support for cultural activity
the importance of this French backing has often been much appreciated
by local artists and was frequently mentioned by my interviewees in all
countries concerned.
16 J. PLASTOW
Another way in which theatre was explicitly supported ‘was the estab-
lishment in 1966 by the French Office de la Cooperation Radiophonique
of an Inter-African Radio Drama Competition. The only requirement
for participation was to be sub-Saharan African and to submit a play
in French’ (Conteh-Morgan, 55). By 1978 Conteh-Morgan says this
opportunity attracted over four thousand entries (55). The competition
played a major role in diverting francophone playwrights in East Africa
from local language production. Apart from Nayigiziki’s L’Optomiste
all three countries under consideration were developing local language
theatre traditions until the elite were diverted by French patronage and
opportunity. The first two French language Burundian plays, written in
1975: both Louis Kamatari’s, Soweto ou le cri de l’espoir (Soweto or The
Cry of Hope), and Ambroise Niyonsaba’s, La métamorphose (The Meta-
morphosis), were written explicitly for the competition—and won prizes
(Nsengimana and Nkuriyingoma 1997, 239). Elsewhere the support of
the French Cultural Centres in showcasing work, funding opportunities
to travel sponsored by France to show work internationally and in some
cases offering publication opportunities were all powerful lures inducing
the writing of plays in French and the distancing of the theatre from
the mass of the citizenry who could not understand the language. This
notion of an Africa-wide competition was not unique to France. Britain
has hosted similar events, but the French prizes were vastly superior. The
winner got a scholarship to study in France and money to tour their
play around francophone Africa. They also got their work internationally
broadcast and published. Conteh-Morgan says that: ‘Scores of playwrights
have launched on successful dramatic careers thanks to this competition’
(56).
A final strand of influence has been in relation to the international
theatre festivals held regularly in France. There are a number of these in
which African productions often feature but the most significant is the
Limoges Festival International des Francophonies which has strong links
with Africa and annually not only profiles plays but organises symposia
and a range of learning opportunities besides funding writers-in-residence
programmes (58). Aicha Robleh of Djibouti has been one East African
playwright who has benefitted from this opportunity.
Central to all this sponsorship is that all work must be given in
French. Form is not regulated; indeed, going right back to the days of
William Ponty encouragement was given to the incorporation of local
performative forms; song was the only area where local languages were
tolerated. However, unsurprisingly all that school tutelage in classical

French theatre has often meant that, as in anglophone Africa, some writers
have produced work which is imitative in both form and language of
European theatrical art. Conteh-Morgan is passionate and eloquent in
his critique of this linguistic policy. ‘Francophone African theatre’ he says:
has continued to depend heavily and, to my mind, unhealthily on that

country for its survival. […] Where the French have been totally uncom-
promising is in the language. Form and content may be discretionary, but
the language of francophone drama has to be French if it is to be spon-
sored at all. And this is precisely this theatre’s Achilles heel. For drama
written in a language that can only be understood by 20 per cent of the
population cannot possibly hope to have a national resonance or significant
social impact beyond the confines of the Westernised elite. (59–60)
I would add that the French have never shown any interest in even trying
to make francophone African theatre accessible to the mass of the popula-
tion. Here there were no national schools competitions and no travelling
theatre movements, and even in the area of Theatre for Development the
French have shown little interest. Francophone African theatre exists for
the French primarily to reflect the glory of Francafrique, with exemplary
products sometimes taken around other francophone capitals, but also
sucked in to the motherland to illustrate the cultural supremacy of greater
France, with apparently no concern whatsoever for the cultural benefit of
the generality of the people in the countries from which these plays origi-
nate. In Djibouti, in Burundi and in Rwanda French language theatre has
produced some very interesting work, but given that in all three nations
the access to the secondary schooling which might make this work under-
standable has remained, right up until very recently, notably lower than in
many parts of the continent, it is a theatre that has only spoken to and for
a local elite and for the benefit of France’s neocolonial sense of grandeur.
There is another, more sympathetic, way in which French cultural
policy in Africa could be read. In my interviews with local artists working
in theatre in the 1970s and 1980s I was struck, particularly in Burundi
and Rwanda, by how many French-speaking groups were putting on
works by Francophone playwrights from other parts of the continent.
Francois-Xavier Ngarambe, Hategekimana Dunia Birusha and Augustin
Gasake all spoke to me of their enjoyment in being involved in produc-
tions by African playwrights, notably from neighbouring Congo and from
18 J. PLASTOW
Cameroon, which they saw as entirely relevant to local contexts (Inter-

views, Kigali, December 2017). In Djibouti too there are records of
West African plays being produced, notably the work of Ivorian, Bernard
Dadié. Such inter-African exchanges fit in with the French concept of
a mutually enriching context of cultural francophonie and do indeed
help combat the dangers of a narrow national theatrical world. I am
also aware of a number of linkages between East African and French
and Belgian theatre companies and theatre artists which have enabled
collaboration to take place in both Europe and East Africa. The career
of Dorcy Rugamba of Rwanda would be a prime example here. A man
who grew up working with his father’s dance troupe, Rugamba lost most
of his family in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, fleeing first to Burundi,
then to France and finally to Belgium. He now lives between Belgium
and Rwanda, making hugely successful international productions while
seeking to support the rebuilding of Rwandan performance culture back
home.8 The issue is essentially, does one want to be part of an interna-
tional theatre culture, and one that offers considerable rewards to those
seen as exceptionally gifted, if the price for that participation is the exclu-
sion of the vast majority of one’s fellow citizens and an indubitably
neocolonial dependency on continuing French or Belgian patronage?
Rwanda and Burundi 1962–1994

In Rwanda the party that took power at independence on 1 July 1962 was
the strongly anti-Tutsi Parmehutu. In the following thirty years, seen as
scapegoats for every problem, some three quarters of million people iden-
tified as Tutsi fled to a range of neighbouring states: Burundi, Uganda,
Zaire (Congo) and Tanzania (Chrétien, 305). In an inverse situation in
Burundi, after the assassination of the progressive socialist first president,
Louis Rwagasore, only three weeks after taking power, this country which
had been up until now considerably less poisonously divided by the cancer
of contrived Hutu/Tutsi fear and hatred rapidly fell into disarray. Disputes
were not just Hutu versus Tutsi, but reflected splits on a clan basis and
rivalry between monarchists, republicans, those who supported links with
Belgium and the Christian hierarchy, and tension between democrats and
military forces. A second president was killed in 1965 and the monarchy
overthrown in 1966, to be shortly followed by a military coup that
heralded decades of Tutsi domination (Watt 2016, 32–34).
In 1972 a Hutu revolt in Burundi led to the massacring of much of

the Hutu elite, with 200,000 dying and 300,000 fleeing the country,
while in 1964 and 1973 political crises in Rwanda led to more thousands
dying and more hundreds of thousands fleeing, though in this case the
victims were Tutsi. From 1976 Burundi was in the hands of Lieutenant
Colonel Jean Baptiste Bagaza who took power in a bloodless coup, and
in a parallel to current Rwandan policy, concealed the continuing Tutsi
domination of the state by banning all mention of ethnic groups (Watt
2016, 41). Bagaza has won some praise for various development poli-
cies, though he was extremely authoritarian and Watt says that: ‘This was
the worst time to be Hutu’ (42), as the group were excluded from both
educational and career opportunities. Bagaza was forced out in 1987, to
be replaced by another Tutsi, Major Pierre Buyoya, who the following
year dealt brutally with an upsurge of ethnic violence on the Rwandan
border, where in response to the killings of some 300 Tutsi the army
killed 20,000 Hutu, while many more fled into Rwanda. The crisis in
Burundi led to an overhaul of the constitution which now condemned
ethnic politics and for the first time allowed for multiple political parties,
enabling in 1993 the first elected president, the Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye,
to take power and establish a multi-party government of national unity
(Watt, 46).
Only three months after taking power Ndadaye was murdered in a coup
d’etat undertaken by the Tutsi controlled army. This event led to la crise,
possibly the worst time in post-independence Burundian history. Hutu
rose across the country, killing tens of thousands of their Tutsi neighbours
and in revenge the army carried out indiscriminate attacks on Hutu so
that in total some 100,000 people died and many more were forced to
flee their homes (Chrétien, 327–328). In the months that followed full
scale civil war developed which would continue until 2005.
As Chrétien argues, each country only amplified the fear and hatred
existing in the other as tales of atrocities criss-crossed borders and refugees
regularly washed up in search of sanctuary. From a cultural viewpoint
post-independence theatre has to be looked at as being divided in two
times frames: pre and post the 1993 la crise in Burundi and pre and post
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
20 J. PLASTOW
Theatre Culture Between

Independence and Genocide: 1962–1993/4
In both Rwanda and Burundi (and in the Congo) the school curriculum
was slow to change post-independence; indeed the old Belgian model
persisted as far as literature and theatre were concerned well into the
1970s. All my informants who were at school in the 1960s and 1970s
in all three nations spoke of Racine, Corneille and Molière as the main
theatrical fodder. (Interviews Augustin Gasake, Hategekimana Birusha
and Francoise-Xavier Ngarambe, Kigali, December 2017.)
One institution which created an impetus for the local creation of
drama in Rwanda was the National University in Butare, founded in
1963. Here there was a drive to produce work in Kinyarawanda such
that by the late 1970s Nsengimana and Nkuriyingoma tells us that 132
plays had been registered, 113 in local languages and nineteen in French,
though early local language plays in both Rwanda and Burundi were often
for popular radio drama slots and since they were never published are
not available for analysis (1997, 237). Although there has never been
a formal theatre arts department at the university much activity took
place and by the mid-1980s university graduates Joseph Nsengimana and
Damien Rwegera, ‘instituted a national theatre training programme at the
National University leading to the institution of an expanded Concours
national d’interprétation théâtrale (National theatre competition) that
attracted entries from thirty five amateur groups, almost equally split in
making their offerings in either French or Kinyarwanda. The vast majority
of groups in the country and taking part in the competition were attached
to educational institutions’ (238).
In Burundi theatre was slower to take off; although Emmanuel
Nzikobanyaka’s very first play, Abuzukuru ba Kimotabugabo (The Grand-
sons of the Complete Man), written in 1967 had such success that it was
in 1970 translated into French and he followed it in 1971 with Nsubiza
aho unkuye (Bring Me Back Where You Took Me). The plays were
performed by college students at L’école normale supérieure, the higher
education institution where Nzikobanyaka was studying. Juvenal Ngor-
wanubusa, the only man to publish book length studies of Burundian
literature, says that: ‘des personnages vivant dans un milieu en transition
et preconisant le retour aux valeurs traditionelles’ (The characters live in
an environment in transition and advocate a return to traditional values)
(Ngorwanubusa 2013, 198). All the plays that followed were in Kirundi
until the mid-1970s when the francophone Inter-African Radio Drama

Competition attracted some to the incentives available to those writing in
French. In order to be able to enter this competition some plays were even
adapted from Kirundi into French, a case in point being Gérard Butoyi’s
Mbanzabugabo mwananje (Ask Me What It Means To Be A Man), origi-
nally performed in Kirundi in 1977 and then translated and adapted into
French for the competition in 1979. At this time, unlike in the present
day, Burundi operated a system of theatrical censorship. Ngorwanubusa
tells us that seemingly the only victim of this system was Ambroise Niyon-
saba, whose L’espoir au pays des Mbala (Hope in the Land of the Mbala),
written in 1978, only reached the stage in 1990 (198). Regrettably, and
this obviously reflects the lack of schooling in, and esteem accorded to,
Kirundi and Kinyarwanda by the educated classes; there is no published
critical literature on plays made in either of these languages, making it
impossible to assess thematic or formal differences between work made in
indigenous and metropolitan tongues.
Generous support for those who made work in French was particularly
significant given the ongoing lack of national state support. Among those
who benefitted were the three older men I interviewed in Kigali in 2017.
All were Rwandan citizens but all had experienced a notably transnational
adolescence as their families and they moved, prior to 1994 apparently
very freely, for educational and employment purposes between Burundi,
Congo and Rwanda. So, for example, Francois-Xavier Ngarambe went to
school in the Congo in the 1960s and then studied history at the Univer-
sity of Burundi in the 1980s. He was involved with various groups in the
Burundian capital, Bujumbura, where he told me that theatre going and
making was a popular middle-class activity at the time. At school Ngaram-
be’s exposure was to classical French theatre, with plays being mounted
each term; he particularly remembered acting in works by Corneille, but
in Burundi groups turned to African francophone writers, with works
from Cameroon being popular. Ngarambe painted for me a picture of
a relatively leisured, relaxed urban middle class in 1980s Burundi, putting
on plays in French for entertainment and culture, with considerable
support from the local French Cultural Centre, as an amateur activity that
could attract significant audiences (Interview, Kigali, December 2017).
Hategekimana Dunia Birusha ‘Michel’, born in 1957, went to primary
school in Burundi before attending secondary school and university in the
Congo. He remembers a vibrant culture in Bujumbura in the 1960s, with
strong musical influences from both neighbouring Congo and Tanzania.
22 J. PLASTOW
While at Nyangezi, a junior seminary boarding school in Eastern Congo,

he told me that with some friends and the support of one of the brother-
teachers, he started a drama group putting on mainly French language
Congolese plays. Between school and university Birusha returned to
Burundi where he acted for a group called Les Mirroir. This very active
amateur group, supported by the French Cultural Institute, was also
putting on Congolese theatre and included among its membership the
woman brought up in Burundi who would become Rwandan president,
Paul Kagame’s, wife, Jeannette Rwigema. The popularity of the group
was such that Birusha told me: ‘We needed to manage fame’ (Interview,
Kigali, 2017). Birusha’s interest in theatre continued at the University
of Lubumbashi, a colonial creation in the far south of the Congo where
he studied International Relations but spent a lot of time making theatre.
Very similarly to Ngarambe, Birusha spoke of the strength of this amateur
theatre scene in the late 1980s, where he was part of Le théâtre de la
Kasapa, putting on local plays, though he says he was the only Rwandan
at the university so occupied. Birusha only went to Rwanda in 1986 after
failing to find work in Burundi. He said that at the time there was very
little theatrical activity taking place in the country, with a few school
groups making occasional performances, and a couple of writers trying to
make work at the university in Butare, including plays in Kinyarwanda. He
set up a new group in Kigali, where he sought to Rwandanise Congolese
plays, mainly by adapting local dances for incorporation, though all the
work was still given in French, mostly at the French Cultural Centre.
The only person I managed to interview from this period who had a
substantial career in theatre but was brought up in Rwanda was Augustin
Gasake, well known in contemporary times as a writer of traditional stories
and as a radio actor in Kinyarwanda for children’s programmes. Born in
1956, like all I spoke to Gasake’s first introduction to formal theatre was
at high school in the early 1970s where he read Molière and Corneille,
though his first creative inspiration was his grandmother with whom he
lived in school holidays who told him traditional stories (Interview, Kigali,
2017). Gasake has had a variety of non-artistic jobs to support his lifelong
passion for story, particularly indigenous folk stories, and for performance.
From the mid-1980s he ran an evening theatre club for children, La
Troupe Rafiki as part of the Rafiki Club which had been set up in 1975
by the Dominican Fathers to promote arts activity among poor youth and
which toured a series of local halls. Each commune (district) had a hall
that could be hired for cultural events with the facility taking 20% of all
ticket receipts while the hiring group retained the rest. Gasake also wrote
two plays in Kinyarwanda. As a man who has lived all his life in Rwanda
he remembers a number of groups operating in the period before the
genocide. He spoke of anthropologist, Damien Rwegera, who directed
francophone African plays at the university and made work in English,
French and Kinyarwanda; of a comedy group, La troupe du rire; and of
a group operating with American support run by Landoald Ndasingwa, a
hotel owner. He concluded our interview with me by saying sadly: ‘There
were other groups, but many died [in the genocide]’.
Indubitably the most significant Burundian playwright, and the most
prolific of all East African producers of drama, has been Marie-Louise
Sibazuri. Born in 1960 in the Congo, she wrote her first play at sixteen,
having been inspired by acting the part of Sganarelle in a school produc-
tion of Molière’s L’Amour-médecin (Doctor Cupid). By the age of twenty
she had written nine plays (Ngorwanubusa 2013, 199; 2014, 131). In
her 2014 interview with Ngorwanubusa she explained that at the time
she had written eighty-two stage plays and nine video productions. She is
most widely known in Burundi for two major radio drama series. Tuyange
twongerie (Let’s Talk Again and Again) which was broadcast between
2003 and 2007 ran to 331 episodes, while Umubanyi ni we murtango
(The Neighbour is also Family) for which she produced 874 episodes,
went out between 1996 and 2010 (132). She is also a novelist and
poet and, now living in Australia, has most recently become involved
in collecting Rwandan folk stories, many of which she learnt from her
mother as a child.
As a young adult Sibazuri worked as a teacher but she also in 1982
joined an amateur theatre troupe, Les modestes, so called because of
the moderate resources its members could pull together to make their
shows. For the group she wrote a number of plays, all performed at
the French Cultural Centre, until in 1986 they had a discussion about
why some people who could not even speak French were attending their
shows. Realising many Burundians were being linguistically disenfran-
chised Sibazuri started making some of her work in Kirundi and with
friends formed a new company for these works, Geza aho (Let’s Stop It).
The dominating issue in Sibazuri’s early work was the position of
women:
24 J. PLASTOW
L’écrivaine burundaise fait ressortir la cohort des humiliations don’t la

femme fait l’objet dans la société, mais qu’en fin de compte, la justice a
son égard finit par triumpher. (Ngorwanbusa 2013, 200)
The Burundian writer brings out the range of humiliations which women
are subjected to in society, but in the end, justice ends up triumphing.
(Translation by this author)
Her commitment extended beyond theatre into activism. In the 1980s

she joined the Union des Femme Burundaise (UFB), rising to become its
general secretary in the early 1990s.
Unlike many of those who have written about the plight of women in
East Africa Marie-Louise Sibazuri chose to reject ideas of victimhood and
powerlessness. In her works women are much abused but they also find
ways to triumph over their circumstances. In La condition masculine (The
Masculine Condition), the heroine, Mireille, is forcibly married to a rich
businessman by her father for the sake of the large dowry he offers. She
is then confined to the house and expected to pander to her husband’s
every whim, looking decorative while serving also as a baby machine—
she produces five children in seven years. In Scandale a huite clos (Scandal
Behind Closed Doors) Sibazuri focuses on Virginia, a young girl raped by
Philippe, her friend’s father and then discarded as soon as she becomes
pregnant. Sens unique ou le baiser de Judas (One Way; or The Kiss of
Judas) turns a spotlight on the fate of a barren woman, Claudine, and the
attempts of her rival, Chantal, to lure with promises of sensual delights
Claudine’s husband, Gérard, into following tradition and abandoning a
woman who cannot give him heirs.
None of the evil-doers end up triumphant. Mireille leaves the conjugal
home and seeks emancipation through training and work. With the help
of a band of women: her mother, her friend, the rapist’s own wife and a
female lawyer, Virginia successfully prosecutes Philippe; while Claudine’s
husband, Gérard, resists all attempts to lure him away from his wife and
most unusually in a Burundian context asserts that, since both he and his
wife work, he will be helping with the household chores, rejecting the
usual expectation that a wife does all the domestic work: ‘afin d’assurer le
bein-etre du seigneur du logis vautre dans son fauteuil’ (in order to ensure
the well-being of the lord of the house wallowing in his armchair) (Act II,
Scene 1) (Ngorwanubusa 2013, 200–202). Notably all these plays, simi-
larly to the situation with elite Dijboutian women playwrights, are written
in the Eurocentric well-made form and feature middle-class situations.
By 1993 Sibazuri was becoming so uniquely successful as a writer that

she was able to give up teaching. But, during la crise her family was not
exempt from the genocidal violence. Her house was burned to the ground
and several manuscripts went up in flames. All commentators agree that
the events of 1993 led to an effective near shut down of theatre and all
other art forms.
Depuis les événements d’octobre 1993, la creation théâtrale au Burundi est

sinistrée au même point que autres forms d’expression, tells que les arts
plastique ou la musique. Les troupes existantes ou en voie d’êmergence
ont pour la plupart disapru et sone en hibernation pours les raisons liées
â l’insécurité et aux difficultés de déplacement. (Claude Prieux in Wurtz,
J.P. and V. Thfoin 1996, 69)
Since the events of October 1993, theatrical creation is grimly difficult
as for other forms of expression such as the plastic arts and music. The
existing troupes or those emerging have for the most part disappeared
or are in hibernation for reasons related to insecurity or difficulties of
displacement. (Translation by this author)
It is extremely hard to find detailed information on the range of perfor-

mances in Rwanda and Burundi in the period between the end of
colonisation and the Rwandan genocide, but certain patterns allow some
preliminary speculation. In both countries schools are and have been
undoubtedly the major generators of theatre. Marie-Louise Sibazuri says
that in Burundi:
The largest number of groups are within the secondary school system,
usually connected to language training classes, where both classical Euro-
pean and modern Burundi plays are regularly staged by students. (1997,
73)
A similar pattern seems to have been the case in Rwanda. These groups
were supplemented by activities emanating from the national universities.
The university groups put on some local theatre but have also been the
centre of introducing and experimenting with European theatre. Iryamuje
(Sun of the Vale) company consciously sought in the late 1980s and early
1990s to engage with the ideas of such as Brecht, Grotowski and Boal
putting on a range of French, francophone African and local productions
(Nsengimana and Nkuriyingoma 1997, 238).
26 J. PLASTOW
In both countries a number of independent amateur groups came

and went in the 1970s and 1980s. Some like Les Mirroir and Landoald
Ndasingwa’s group in Rwanda only put on French plays, were based in
the capital and appealed only to the educated middle class. In Burundi
alone there was the phenomenon of guild companies; amateur groups
supported by a trade body such as the postal workers or those engaged in
the transport industry. These received support from their trade organisa-
tions to put on a major production each year. The country also had two
semi-professional companies until the mid-1990s. Mutabaruka and Geza
Aho took it in turns to mount a show every three months. Rwanda alone
had two state-supported dance companies from the mid-1970s, Ballet
National Urukerereze and Ballet Amasimbi n’Amakombe. Both had a
primary function of: ‘the preservation and development of the national
cultural heritage’ (Nsengimana, 237), but both also explored fusing
Western and local dance forms. And then there were groups in both coun-
tries that came together for just one or two productions. The remaining,
strong, home for drama was the radio. This was hugely popular in both
countries from the 1980s and in Burundi a professional troupe, Ni Nde,
was supported by the state media to create and perform weekly radio
dramas. Formal drama remained linked to the elite and urban based, but
within that class and those places there were sub-divisions between those
preferring to work on international productions in French as opposed
to groups producing local work in indigenous languages (Sibazuri 1997,
74).
Djibouti, Post-Independence Political History

Djiboutian power struggles have been first for independence and then
between the two main peoples of the territory, the Afar and the Somali.
When France was forced to cede independence to Djibouti it ensured
that it would lose little of its influence. French military forces have been
maintained and have trained and supported the Djiboutian army consis-
tently, and the first president, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, of the politically
dominant Somali population, had previously been a deputy in the French
parliament (Mohamed Kadamy 1996, 512). On attaining power the pres-
ident immediately set about getting rid of opponents and repressing any
dissent. In 1981 he declared a one party state with only his Rassemble-
ment Populaire pour le Progrès (RPP) party permitted. The RPP has been
in control, either ruling alone or as the lead partner in political coalitions,

ever since.
The regime has been massively supported by a range of powerful states,
notably France, the US and Saudi Arabia, who all maintain forces in
Djibouti with an eye to containing perceived Islamic terrorist threats
and because of the importance of the positioning of Djibouti on the
tip of the Horn of Africa and just across the Red Sea from Yemen and
the Middle East. The regime is universally recognised as profoundly
corrupt, repressive and dictatorial (Mohamed Kadamy 1996; Berouk
Mesfin 2011).
In 1991 three Afar groupings which had been contesting, sometimes
violently, RPP government for years, came together as the Front for the
Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) and launched an insur-
gency from the north of the country. Initially FRUD made considerable
gains, taking over control of large parts of the Afar-dominated northern
lands. Government forces, supported tacitly by France, Ethiopia and
Eritrea—with the latter two fearing the rise of Afar nationalism since they
both had Afar populations within their borders—responded and several
thousands died. By the time peace was declared in 1994 Djibouti had
moved to become a multi-party state, with four registered parties, but
the RPP maintained its power, incorporating some elements of FRUD
and including more non-Somali into the government. In 1999 Ismail
Omar Guelleh, the nephew of the outgoing president, took power and
has retained it ever since, changing electoral rules that had allowed any
president only two terms of office in order to retain control. Berouk
Mesfin says that the opposition is weak and divided but also lacks any
chance of overcoming the regime in power because of state dominance
of the media and refusal to tolerate any criticism. He also raises concerns
about the minimal division between state and party in the running of the
country (Berouk Mesfin, 4).
French Language Theatre in Colonial Djibouti

Djibouti is the smallest nation in terms of both size and population of
all those included in this study yet it alone appears in both volumes of
my history. In my Horn of Africa book I discuss work made in Djibouti
as part of the transnational phenomenon of Somali language theatre. In
carrying out this study I am aware that I am ignoring theatre made in
Afar and Arabic in Djibouti, both of which make up part of its artistic
28 J. PLASTOW
weave. This only illustrates the complexities of cultural positioning in a

country made up of two diverse, originally nomadic, pastoralist peoples,
the Afar and Somali, which was colonised by the French and because of
its geographical positioning on the Red Sea, the importance of trade with
countries such as Yemen and the wider Middle East and the dominance
of Islam, has also strong Arabic influences.
As elsewhere the first formal theatre was made by expatriate French
seeking amusement. The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre says
that in the 1950s: ‘Eventually enthusiastic amateurs moved from produc-
tions of French classic comedies to plays with elements of local satire by
Djiboutian writers’ (1997, 69). Moussa Hassan and Kamil Aytileh appear
to have been key names in relation to this experiment, but contemporary
playwright Aisha Mohamed Robleh claims that because of the differences
in cultural realities these adaptations were either ambiguous or incom-
prehensible to Djiboutian audiences (Mohamed Houmed Hassan 2013,
311).
Most unusually, since France very seldom invested in material struc-
tures for the making of arts events in her colonies (Conteh-Morgan 1994,
54–55) in 1965 the colonists built the 1200 seat open-air Théâtre des
Salines in Djibouti City. I have been unable to ascertain why such an
unusual project was undertaken, though given that France at the time
was committed to seeking to retain control of the country it may have
had something to do with providing entertainment for the expatriate
community which, given the substantial French military base, was unusu-
ally large. The plays initially put on in Théâtre des Salines are likely to
have been French amateur productions, probably with the addition of
touring groups from France since this was the widespread practice in
relation to French colonies, though when I visited the French Cultural
Centre in Djibouti the current staff said they had no historical infor-
mation they could share. A comparative study of colonial attitudes to
French language and Somali theatre points up a stark disparity. Where
the Théâtre des Salines was a significant investment for the promotion of
francophone cultural events, Somali language theatre, like local language
theatre across the African continent, was never supported by the French
establishment. Indeed, much Somali language work was strongly anti-
colonial and a number of playwrights were imprisoned for their work (see
Volume 1, Chapter One).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
PLATE XXXVIII
SHRUBBY CINQUEFOIL.—P. fruticosa.
Of all the cinquefoils perhaps this one most truly merits the title
five finger. Certainly its slender leaflets are much more finger-like
than those of the common cinquefoil. It is not a common plant in
most localities, but is very abundant among the Berkshire Hills.
Silvery Cinquefoil.
Potentilla argentea. Rose Family.
Stems.—Ascending, branched at the summit, white, woolly. Leaves.—Divided

into five wedge-oblong, deeply incised leaflets, which are green above, white with
silvery wool, beneath.
The silvery cinquefoil has rather large yellow flowers which are
found in dry fields throughout the summer as far south as New
Jersey.
Golden Ragwort. Squaw-weed.

Senecio aureus. Composite Family (p. 13).
Stem.—One to three feet high. Root-leaves.—Rounded, the larger ones mostly

heart-shaped, toothed, and long-stalked. Stem-leaves.—The lower lyre-shaped, the
upper lance-shaped, incised, set close to the stem. Flower-heads.—Yellow,
clustered, composed of both ray and disk-flowers.
A child would perhaps liken the flower of the golden ragwort to a
yellow daisy. Stain yellow the white rays of the daisy, diminish the
size of the whole head somewhat, and you have a pretty good
likeness of the ragwort. There need be little difficulty in the
identification of this plant—although there are several marked
varieties—for its flowers are abundant in the early year, at which
season but few members of the Composite family are abroad.
The generic name is from senex—an old man—alluding to the
silky down of the seeds, which is supposed to suggest the silvery
hairs of age.
Closely allied to the golden ragwort is the common groundsel, S.
vulgaris, which is given as food to caged birds. The flower-heads of
this species are without rays.
——— ———
Clintonia borealis. Lily Family.
Scape.—Five to eight inches high, sheathed at its base by the stalks of two to
four large, oblong, conspicuous leaves. Flowers.—Greenish-yellow, rather large,
rarely solitary. Perianth.—Of six sepals. Stamens.—Six, protruding. Pistil.—One,
protruding. Fruit.—A blue berry.
PLATE XXXIX
Clintonia borealis.
When rambling through the cool, moist woods our attention is

often attracted by patches of great dark, shining, leaves; and if it be
late in the year we long to know the flower of which this rich foliage
is the setting. To satisfy our curiosity we must return the following
May or June, when we shall probably find that a slender scape rises
from its midst bearing at its summit several bell-shaped flowers,
which, without either high color or fragrance, are peculiarly
charming. It is hard to understand why this beautiful plant has
received no English name. As to its generic title we cannot but
sympathize with Thoreau. “Gray should not have named it from the
Governor of New York,” he complains; “what is he to the lovers of
flowers in Massachusetts? If named after a man, it must be a man of
flowers.... Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you
please, but his name is not associated with flowers.”
C. umbellata is a more Southern species, with smaller white
flowers, which are speckled with green or purplish dots.
Yellow Lady’s Slipper. Whip-poor-Will’s Shoe.

Cypripedium pubescens. Orchis Family (p. 17).
Stem.—About two feet high, downy, leafy to the top, one to three-flowered.
Leaves.—Alternate, broadly oval, many-nerved and plaited. Flowers.—Large,
yellow. Perianth.—Two of the three brownish, elongated sepals united into one
under the lip; the lateral petals linear, wavy-twisted, brownish; the pale yellow lip
an inflated pouch. Stamens.—Two, the short filaments of each bearing a two-celled
anther. Stigma.—Broad, obscurely three-lobed, moist and roughish.
The yellow lady’s slipper usually blossoms in May or June, a few
days later than its pink sister, C. acaule. Regarding its favorite
haunts, Mr. Baldwin[3] says: “Its preference is for maples, beeches,
and particularly butternuts, and for sloping or hilly ground, and I
always look with glad suspicion at a knoll covered with ferns,
cohoshes, and trilliums, expecting to see a clump of this plant among
them. Its sentinel-like habit of choosing ‘sightly places’ leads it to
venture well up on mountain sides.”
The long, wavy, brownish petals give the flower an alert, startled
look when surprised in its lonely hiding-places.
PLATE XL
SMALLER YELLOW LADY’S SLIPPER.

—C. parviflorum.
C. parviflorum, the small yellow lady’s slipper, differs from C.

pubescens in the superior richness of its color as well as in its size. It
also has the charm of fragrance.
Early Meadow Parsnip.

Zizia aurea. Parsley Family (p. 15).
One to three feet high. Leaves.—Twice or thrice-compound, leaflets oblong to

lance-shaped, toothed. Flowers.—Yellow, small, in compound umbels.
This is one of the earliest members of the Parsley family to
appear. Its golden flower-clusters brighten the damp meadows and
the borders of streams in May or June and closely resemble the
meadow parsnip, Thaspium aureum, of which this species was
formerly considered a variety, of the later year.
The tall, stout, common wild parsnip, Pastinaca sativa, is
another yellow representative of this family in which white flowers
prevail, the three plants here mentioned being the only yellow
species commonly encountered. The common parsnip may be
identified by its grooved stem and simply compound leaves. Its roots
have been utilized for food at least since the reign of Tiberius, for
Pliny tells us that that Emperor brought them to Rome from the
banks of the Rhine, where they were successfully cultivated.
Golden Club.
Orontium aquaticum. Arum Family.
Scape.—Slender, elongated. Leaves.—Long-stalked, oblong, floating. Flowers.

—Small, yellow, crowded over the narrow spike or spadix.
When we go to the bogs in May to hunt for the purple flower of
the pitcher-plant we are likely to chance upon the well-named golden
club. This curious-looking club-shaped object, which is found along
the borders of ponds, indicates its relationship to the jack-in-the-
pulpit, and still more to the calla lily, but unlike them its tiny flowers
are shielded by no protecting spathe.
Kalm tells us in his “Travels,” “that the Indians called the plant
Taw-Kee, and used its dried seeds as food.”
Spearwort.
Ranunculus ambigens. Crowfoot Family.
Stems.—One to two feet high. Leaves.—Oblong or lance-shaped, mostly

toothed, contracted into a half-clasping leaf-stalk. Flowers.—Bright yellow, solitary
or clustered. Calyx.—Of five sepals. Corolla.—Of five to seven oblong petals.
Stamens.—Indefinite in number, occasionally few. Pistils.—Numerous in a head.
Many weeks after the marsh marigolds have passed away, just
such marshy places as they affected are brightly flecked with gold.
Wondering, perhaps, if they can be flowering for the second time in
the season, we wade recklessly into the bog to rescue, not the marsh
marigold, but its near relation, the spearwort, which is still more
closely related to the buttercup, as a little comparison of the two
flowers will show. This plant is especially common at the North.
Indian Cucumber-root.
Medeola Virginica. Lily Family.
Root.—Tuberous, shaped somewhat like a cucumber, with a suggestion of its

flavor. Stem.—Slender, from one to three feet high, at first clothed with wool.
Leaves.—In two whorls on the flowering plants, the lower of five to nine oblong,
pointed leaves set close to the stem, the upper usually of three or four much
smaller ones. Flowers.—Greenish-yellow, small, clustered, recurved, set close to
the upper leaves. Perianth.—Of three sepals and three petals, oblong and alike.
Stamens.—Six, reddish-brown. Pistil.—With three stigmas, long, recurved, and
reddish-brown. Fruit.—A purple berry.
One is more apt to pause in September to note the brilliant
foliage and purple berries of this little plant than to gather the
drooping inconspicuous blossoms for his bunch of wood-flowers in
June. The generic name is after the sorceress Medea, on account of
its supposed medicinal virtues, of which, however, there seems to be
no record.
The tuberous rootstock has the flavor, and something the shape,
of the cucumber, and was probably used as food by the Indians. It
would not be an uninteresting study to discover which of our
common wild plants are able to afford pleasant and nutritious food;
in such a pursuit many of the otherwise unattractive popular names
would prove suggestive.
Common Bladderwort.
Utricularia vulgaris. Bladderwort Family.
Stems.—Immersed, one to three feet long. Leaves.—Many-parted, hair-like,

bearing numerous bladders. Scape.—Six to twelve inches long. Flowers.—Yellow,
five to twelve on each scape. Calyx.—Two-lipped. Corolla.—Two-lipped, spurred at
the base. Stamens.—Two. Pistil.—One.
This curious water-plant may or may not have roots; in either
case it is not fastened to the ground, but is floated by means of the
many bladders which are borne on its finely dissected leaves. It is
commonly found in ponds and slow streams, flowering throughout
the summer. Thoreau calls it “a dirty-conditioned flower, like a
sluttish woman with a gaudy yellow bonnet.”
The horned bladderwort, U. cornuta, roots in the peat-bogs and
sandy swamps. Its large yellow helmet-shaped flowers are very
fragrant, less than half a dozen being borne on each scape.
Yellow Pond-lily. Spatter Dock.

Nuphar advena. Water-lily Family.
Leaves.—Floating or erect, roundish to oblong, with a deep cleft at their base.

Flowers.—Yellow, sometimes purplish, large, somewhat globular. Calyx.—Of five
or six sepals or more, yellow or green without. Corolla.—Of numerous small, thick,
fleshy petals which are shorter than the stamens and resemble them. Stamens.—
Very numerous. Pistil.—One, with a disk-like, many-rayed stigma.
Bordering the slow streams and stagnant ponds from May till
August may be seen the yellow pond-lilies. These flowers lack the
delicate beauty and fragrance of the white water-lilies; having,
indeed, either from their odor, or appearance, or the form of their
fruit, won for themselves in England the unpoetic title of “brandy-
bottle.” Owing to their love of mud they have also been called “frog-
lilies.” The Indians used their roots for food.
PLATE XLI
INDIAN CUCUMBER-ROOT.—M.
Virginiana.
Winter-cress, Yellow Rocket. Herb of St. Barbara.

Barbarea vulgaris. Mustard Family (p. 17).
Stem.—Smooth. Leaves.—The lower lyre-shaped; the upper ovate, toothed or

deeply incised at their base. Flowers.—Yellow, growing in racemes. Pod.—Linear,
erect or slightly spreading.
As early as May we find the bright flowers of the winter-cress
along the roadside. This is probably the first of the yellow mustards
to appear.
Black Mustard.
Brassica nigra. Mustard Family (p. 17).
Often several feet high. Stem.—Branching. Leaves.—The lower with a large

terminal lobe and a few small lateral ones. Flowers.—Yellow, rather small, growing
in a raceme. Pods.—Smooth, erect, appressed, about half an inch long.
Many are familiar with the appearance of this plant who are
ignorant of its name. The pale yellow flowers spring from the waste
places along the roadside and border the dry fields throughout the
summer. The tall spreading branches recall the biblical description:
“It groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth
out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the
shadow of it.”
This plant is extensively cultivated in Europe, its ground seeds
forming the well-known condiment. The ancients used it for
medicinal purposes. It has come across the water to us, and is a
troublesome weed in many parts of the country.
Wild Radish.
Raphanus Raphanistrum. Mustard Family (p. 17).
One to three feet high. Leaves.—Rough, lyre-shaped. Flowers.—Yellow, veiny,

turning white or purplish; larger than those of the black mustard, otherwise
resembling them. Pod.—Often necklace-form by constriction between the seeds.
This plant is a troublesome weed in many of our fields. It is the
stock from which the garden radish has been raised.
PLATE XLII
WINTER-CRESS.—B. vulgaris.
Cynthia. Dwarf Dandelion.

Krigia Virginica. Composite Family (p. 13).
Stems.—Several, becoming branched, leafy. Leaves.—Earlier ones roundish;

the latter narrower and often cleft. Flower-heads.—Yellow, composed entirely of
strap-shaped flowers.
In some parts of the country these flowers are among the earliest
to appear. They are found in New England, as well as south and
westward.
The flowers of K. amplexicaulis appear later, and their range is a
little farther south. Near Philadelphia great masses of the orange-
colored blossoms and pale green stems and foliage line the railway
embankments in June.
Rattlesnake-weed.
Hieracium venosum. Composite Family (p. 13).
Stem or Scape.—One or two feet high, naked or with a single leaf, smooth,
slender, forking above. Leaves.—From the root, oblong, often making a sort of flat
rosette, usually conspicuously veined with purple. Flower-heads.—Yellow,
composed entirely of strap-shaped flowers.
The loosely clustered yellow flower-heads of the rattlesnake-
weed somewhat resemble small dandelions. They abound in the
pine-woods and dry, waste places of early summer. The purple-
veined leaves, whose curious markings give to the plant its common
name, grow close to the ground and are supposed to be efficacious in
rattlesnake bites. Here again crops out the old “doctrine of
signatures,” for undoubtedly this virtue has been attributed to the
species solely on account of the fancied resemblance between its
leaves and the markings of the rattlesnake.
H. scabrum is another common species, which may be
distinguished from the rattlesnake-weed by its stout, leafy stem and
unveined leaves.
Dandelion.
Taraxacum officinale. Composite Family (p. 13).
PLATE XLIII
RATTLESNAKE-WEED.—H. venosum.
If Emerson’s definition of a weed, as a plant whose virtues have

not yet been discovered, be correct, we can hardly place the
dandelion in that category, for its young sprouts have been valued as
a pot-herb, its fresh leaves enjoyed as a salad, and its dried roots
used as a substitute for coffee in various countries and ages. It is said
that the Apache Indians so greatly relish it as food, that they scour
the country for many days in order to procure enough to appease
their appetites, and that the quantity consumed by one individual
exceeds belief. The feathery-tufted seeds which form the downy balls
beloved as “clocks” by country children, are delicately and beautifully
adapted to dissemination by the wind, which ingenious arrangement
partly accounts for the plant’s wide range. The common name is a
corruption of the French dent de lion. There is a difference of opinion
as to which part of the plant is supposed to resemble a lion’s tooth.
Some fancy the jagged leaves gave rise to the name, while others
claim that it refers to the yellow flowers, which they liken to the
golden teeth of the heraldic lion. In nearly every European country
the plant bears a name of similar signification.
Poverty-grass.
Hudsonia tomentosa. Rock-rose Family.
“Bushy, heath-like little shrubs, seldom a foot high.” (Gray.) Leaves.—Small,

oval or narrowly oblong, pressed close to the stem. Flowers.—Bright yellow, small,
numerous, crowded along the upper part of the branches. Calyx.—Of five sepals,
the two outer much smaller. Corolla.—Of five petals. Stamens.—Nine to thirty.
Pistil.—One, with a long and slender style.
In early summer many of the sand-hills along the New England
coast are bright with the yellow flowers of this hoary little shrub. It is
also found as far south as Maryland and near the Great Lakes. Each
blossom endures for a single day only. The plant’s popular name is
due to its economical habit of utilizing sandy unproductive soil
where little else will flourish.
Bush-honeysuckle.
Diervilla trifida. Honeysuckle Family.
An upright shrub from one to four feet high. Leaves.—Opposite, oblong, taper-
pointed. Flowers.—Yellow, sometimes much tinged with red, clustered usually in
threes, in the axils of the upper leaves and at the summit of the stem. Calyx.—With
slender awl-shaped lobes. Corolla.—Funnel-form, five-lobed, the lower lobe larger
than the others and of a deeper yellow, with a small nectar-bearing gland at its
base. Stamens.—Five. Pistil.—One.
PLATE XLIV
BUSH-HONEYSUCKLE.—D. trifida.
This pretty little shrub is found along our rocky hills and
mountains. The blossoms appear in early summer, and form a good
example of nectar-bearing flowers. The lower lobe of the corolla is
crested and more deeply colored than the others, thus advising the
bee of secreted treasure. The hairy filaments of the stamens are so
placed as to protect the nectar from injury by rain. When the
blossom has been despoiled and at the same time fertilized, for the
nectar-seeking bee has probably deposited some pollen upon its
pistil, the color of the corolla changes from a pale to a deep yellow,
thus giving warning to the insect world that further attentions would
be useless to both parties.
Cow Wheat.
Melampyrum Americanum. Figwort Family.
Stem.—Low, erect, branching. Leaves.—Opposite, lance-shaped. Flowers.—
Small, greenish-yellow, solitary in the axils of the upper leaves. Calyx.—Bell-
shaped, four-cleft. Corolla.—Two-lipped, upper lip arched, lower three-lobed and
spreading at the apex. Stamens.—Four. Pistil.—One.
In the open woods, from June until September, we encounter
the pale yellow flowers of this rather insignificant little plant. The
cow wheat was formerly cultivated by the Dutch as food for cattle.
The Spanish name, Trigo de Vaca, would seem to indicate a similar
custom in Spain. The generic name, Melampyrum, is from the
Greek, and signifies black wheat, in reference to the appearance of
the seeds of some species when mixed with grain. The flower would
not be likely to attract one’s attention were it not exceedingly
common in some parts of the country, flourishing especially in our
more eastern woodlands.
Meadow Lily. Wild Yellow Lily.

Lilium Canadense. Lily Family.
Stem.—Two to five feet high. Leaves.—Whorled, lance-shaped. Flowers.—

Yellow, spotted with reddish-brown, bell-shaped, two to three inches long.
Perianth.—Of six recurved sepals, with a nectar-bearing furrow at their base.
Stamens.—Six, with anthers loaded with brown pollen. Pistil.—One, with a three-
lobed stigma.
What does the summer bring which is more enchanting than a
sequestered wood-bordered meadow hung with a thousand of these
delicate, nodding bells which look as though ready to tinkle at the
least disturbance and sound an alarum among the flowers?
PLATE XLV
MEADOW LILY.—L. Canadense.
These too are true “lilies of the field,” less gorgeous, less
imposing than the Turks’ caps, but with an unsurpassed grace and
charm of their own. “Fairy-caps,” these pointed blossoms are
sometimes called; “witch-caps,” would be more appropriate still.
Indeed they would make dainty headgear for any of the dim
inhabitants of Wonder-Land.
The growth of this plant is very striking when seen at its best.
The erect stem is surrounded with regular whorls of leaves, from the
upper one of which curves a circle of long-stemmed, nodding
flowers. They suggest an exquisite design for a church candelabra.
Prickly Pear. Indian Fig.
Opuntia Rafinesquii. Cactus Family.
Flowers.—Yellow, large, two and a half to three and a half inches across.
Calyx.—Of numerous sepals. Corolla.—Of ten or twelve petals. Stamens.—
Numerous. Pistil.—One, with numerous stigmas. Fruit.—Shaped like a small pear,
often with prickles over its surface.
This curious-looking plant is one of the only two representatives
of the Cactus family in the Northeastern States. It has deep green,
fleshy, prickly, rounded joints and large yellow flowers, which are
often conspicuous in summer in dry, sandy places along the coast.
O. vulgaris, the only other species found in Northeastern
America, has somewhat smaller flowers, but otherwise so closely
resembles O. Rafinesquii as to make it difficult to distinguish
between the two.
Four-leaved Loosestrife.
Lysimachia quadrifolia. Primrose Family.
Stem.—Slender, one or two feet high. Leaves.—Narrowly oblong, whorled in

fours, fives, or sixes. Flowers.—Yellow, spotted or streaked with red, on slender,
hair-like flower-stalks from the axils of the leaves. Calyx.—Five or six-parted.
Corolla.—Very deeply five or six-parted. Stamens.—Four or five. Pistil.—One.
PLATE XLVI
FOUR-LEAVED LOOSESTRIFE.—L.
quadrifolia.
This slender pretty plant grows along the roadsides and attracts
one’s notice in June by its regular whorls of leaves and flowers.
Linnæus says that this genus is named after Lysimachus, King of
Sicily. Loosestrife is the English for Lysimachus; but whether the
ancient superstition that the placing of these flowers upon the yokes
of oxen rendered the beasts gentle and submissive arose from the
peace-suggestive title or from other causes, I cannot discover.
Yellow Loosestrife.
Lysimachia stricta. Primrose Family.
The yellow loosestrife bears its flowers, which are similar to

those of L. quadrifolia, in a terminal raceme; it has opposite lance-
shaped leaves. Its bright yellow clusters border the streams and
brighten the marshes from June till August.
Rock-rose. Frost-weed.
Helianthemum Canadense. Rock-rose Family.
About one foot high. Leaves.—Set close to the stem, simple, lance-oblong.
Flowers.—Of two kinds: the earlier, more noticeable ones, yellow, solitary, about
one inch across; the later ones small and clustered, usually without petals. Calyx.—
(Of the petal-bearing flowers) of five sepals. Corolla.—Of five early falling petals
which are crumpled in the bud. Stamens.—Numerous. Pistil.—One, with a three-
lobed stigma.
These fragile bright yellow flowers are found in gravelly places in
early summer. Under the influence of the sunshine they open once;
by the next day their petals have fallen, and their brief beauty is a
thing of the past. On June 17th Thoreau finds this “broad, cup-like
flower, one of the most delicate yellow flowers, with large spring-
yellow petals, and its stamens laid one way.”
In the Vale of Sharon a nearly allied rose-colored species
abounds. This is believed by some of the botanists who have travelled
in that region to be the Rose of Sharon which Solomon has
celebrated.
The name of frost-weed has been given to our plant because of
the crystals of ice which shoot from the cracked bark at the base of
the stem in late autumn.

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Transnational Theatre Histories

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1 Francophone Theatre: Burundi, Djibouti and Rwanda 1

“The second volume of A History of African Theatre focuses on theatre

Fig. 1.1 The notice given by the French Cultural Centre

This is the second volume of A History of African Theatre. Volume

modern East African theatres, in all their rich array of manifestations,

I had to come up with a selection strategy. This has involved offering a

artist, amateur or professional. There is therefore a direct correlation

Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia/Somaliland and Tanzania, all theatre is made

Leeds, UK Jane Plastow

Francophone Theatre: Burundi, Djibouti

In a region where theatre traditions are generally far less internation-

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

in Burundi and Rwanda between 1922 and 1962, we see a repeat of

The Historical Background

generally dynastic, with significant rituals relating to enthronements of

were imparted with knowledge on ancestral traditions and underwent

The major division, as we see transnationally across the more centralised

(Chrétien 2006; Lemarchand 1970) agree that in accordance with Prus-

made no secret of his views: a medieval style Rwanda should be

Classé’s views persuaded the Belgian authorities and carried over to

intended to pave the way for democratic participation as the countries

The Djiboutian Background

considerably. The centralised policy that ensured all children in French-

of vote rigging and considerable unrest, to which France responded with

The Influence of Francophone

am going to argue that their echoes resonated significantly across the

back France most definitely included these French-speaking nations in its

tolerated. However, unsurprisingly all that school tutelage in classical

has continued to depend heavily and, to my mind, unhealthily on that

Cameroon, which they saw as entirely relevant to local contexts (Inter-

Rwanda and Burundi 1962–1994

In 1972 a Hutu revolt in Burundi led to the massacring of much of

Theatre Culture Between

until the mid-1970s when the francophone Inter-African Radio Drama

While at Nyangezi, a junior seminary boarding school in Eastern Congo,

L’écrivaine burundaise fait ressortir la cohort des humiliations don’t la

Her commitment extended beyond theatre into activism. In the 1980s

By 1993 Sibazuri was becoming so uniquely successful as a writer that

Depuis les événements d’octobre 1993, la creation théâtrale au Burundi est

It is extremely hard to find detailed information on the range of perfor-

In both countries a number of independent amateur groups came

Djibouti, Post-Independence Political History

in control, either ruling alone or as the lead partner in political coalitions,

French Language Theatre in Colonial Djibouti

weave. This only illustrates the complexities of cultural positioning in a

SHRUBBY CINQUEFOIL.—P. fruticosa.

Stems.—Ascending, branched at the summit, white, woolly. Leaves.—Divided

Golden Ragwort. Squaw-weed.

Stem.—One to three feet high. Root-leaves.—Rounded, the larger ones mostly

When rambling through the cool, moist woods our attention is

Yellow Lady’s Slipper. Whip-poor-Will’s Shoe.

SMALLER YELLOW LADY’S SLIPPER.

C. parviflorum, the small yellow lady’s slipper, differs from C.

Early Meadow Parsnip.

One to three feet high. Leaves.—Twice or thrice-compound, leaflets oblong to

Scape.—Slender, elongated. Leaves.—Long-stalked, oblong, floating. Flowers.

Stems.—One to two feet high. Leaves.—Oblong or lance-shaped, mostly

Root.—Tuberous, shaped somewhat like a cucumber, with a suggestion of its

Stems.—Immersed, one to three feet long. Leaves.—Many-parted, hair-like,