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  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin
  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 66 (2004/05)
  • Article

In this Issue

Studying Africa

  • Bessie Head - Elinettie Chabwera
  • Sudan's Privatisation Experience 1990-2000 - Khalid Hassan Elbeely
  • Myth-Making and the Rationality of Mass Murder - René Lemarchand

Reading Africa

  • Review of Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea - Jane Plastow
  • Review of Olonana Ole Mbatian - Christopher Fyfe
  • Review of The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War - Christopher Fyfe
  • Review of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid - Yvette Hutchison
  • Review of Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing 2002 - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli
  • Review of Talking Gender: Conversations with Kenyan Women Writers - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli
  • Review of Theatre and Performance in Africa: Intercultural Perspectives - Martin Banham
  • Review of Art of the Lega / Ways of the Rivers / African Folklore / Omoluabi - Martin Banham
  • Review of “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries - Malyn Newitt
  • Review of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio - Kevin Dawe
  • Review of The Names of Ankole Cows / Oral Literature of the Asians in East Africa - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli and Dan Twinomujuni
  • Review of African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change - Andrew Dougill
  • Review of Africa in the New Millennium: Challenges and Prospects - Samuel Bekalo
  • Review of A Short History of African Philosophy - Paul Davies

Imagining Africa

  • Two Poems - Solomon Tsehaye

Remembering Africa

  • Professor Carolyn Baylies - Lionel Cliffe

Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 66 (2004/05) Friday 16 July 2004

Review of Theatre and Performance in Africa: Intercultural Perspectives

By Martin Banham (University of Leeds)

Abstract

 

  • Article keywords:
  • Bole Butake
  • Eckhard Breitinger
  • Martin Banham
  • Martin Rohmer
  • Oga Steve Abah
  • Olu Obafemi
  • Rose Mbowa
  • theatre
  • Zakes Mda

Theatre and Performance in Africa: Intercultural Perspectives ed. Eckhard Breitinger. Bayreuth African Studies No. 31, Bayreuth, 2003 (new ed.) 224pp. ISBN 3 927510 73 4, ISSN 0178 0034. €22.95 $22.95.

First published in 1994, this edition of collected essays (with contributions by, amongst others, Olu Obafemi, Martin Rohmer, Oga Abah, Bole Butake, Zakes Mda and the late Rose Mbowa) has been revised and expanded by Eckhard Breitinger, specifically with the addition of an essay by Breitinger himself; ‘Soyinka’s The Beatification of Area Boy: Street Sociology and Political Satire’. Reviewing this book when first issued I commented that it was ‘an important resource for all concerned with African theatre’. This remains the case. The book has seminal essays which have gained importance with the passing of time (and people), a good case being Rose Mbowa’s ‘Artists Under Seige: Theatre and the Dictatorial Regimes in Uganda’ and Breitinger’s own complementary essay on Mbowa’s Mother Uganda and Her Children. The range of essays on southern and South African theatre documents times as well as theatre initiatives, and the whole collection is given strength by the fact that so many contributors are themselves active and innovative practitioners. Breitinger’s new essay on Area Boy is a welcome chronicle of the creation of an important play (and international theatre initiative) that has not received the attention it deserves in terms of the manner in which it is rooted in the playwright’s earlier work.

[Published in Leeds African Studies Bulletin 66 (2004), pp. 80-81]

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