A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1 : Horn of Africa [1st ed.] 9783030472719, 9783030472726

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TRANSNATIONAL THEATRE HISTORIES

A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1 Horn of Africa Jane Plastow

Transnational Theatre Histories Series Editors Christopher B. Balme Institut für Theaterwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany Tracy C. Davis Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA Catherine M. Cole College of Arts and Sciences University of Washington Seattle, WA, 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 development, 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; historical 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 1 Horn of Africa

Jane Plastow Centre for African Studies University of Leeds Leeds, UK

Transnational Theatre Histories ISBN 978-3-030-47271-9    ISBN 978-3-030-47272-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47272-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Peter Adams Photography / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In many societies in the Horn of Africa naming conventions are as follows. The first name is the given name. A second name is the father’s first name. A third name is the grandfather’s first name. There is no family name and therefore it makes no sense to reference people according to a second or third name. People are known by their first names or by nicknames. This is the convention I have followed in referring to and referencing people in the region. Many of the plays I discuss have not been published. Where no publication details are given the date proffered is always the date of first performance. Ethiopia uses a different calendar to the rest of the world. It is a solar calendar with thirteen months and has a gap of seven to eight years from that pertaining elsewhere. New Year falls in August. Hence some dates being given as, for example, 1958/59, as in translating from Ethiopian practice, it is impossible to know which date would be correct.

For Alemseged Tesfai and Solomon Tsehaye, and in memory of Temesgen Alemseged and Snit Solomon.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this book has been the result of friendships stretching back half my lifetime. In a very real sense this is a thank you to everyone I have worked with and learned from in the region since 1984. In particular I need to thank: In Eritrea Alemseged Tesfai for inviting me to work in Eritrea in the first place and for information, beer and our friendship; Solomon Tsehaye without whom my continuing engagements with Eritrea would have been impossible; Yakim Tesfay who moved from student to right-hand man and always found a way to say yes and find a goat when it was needed; Esaias Tseggai for inspiration, friendship and in homage to a heroic life; Mizgun Zerai (Wad Faradai) for our friendship and artistic collaborations; Christine Matzke for our shared passion for Eritrean theatre and for the hoovering. In Ethiopia Manyazewal Endeshaw who has talked theatre and life with me for so many years; Belayneh Abune who made up our Theatre Studies troika; Mahlet Solomon for her research assistance; Zerihun Birehanu for all his help.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In Somaliland My thanks to all those who helped me so generously at the Hargeisa Book Fair, in particular Martin Orwin, Yasmin Mohamed, Said Salah Ahmed, Jama Musa Jama and Abdilahi Awad. In Djibouti For facilitating all their contacts my thanks to Mohamed Afrah and Dr Abdirachid. In the UK I need to thank the Leverhulme Trust for giving me the Fellowship that enabled the research for this book and the University of Leeds for giving me time to write it. Always my thanks in relation to African theatre have to go to Martin Banham who gave me a career, who shares my love for our subject and with whom I have collaborated on so many projects. To my colleagues and friends, Ali Campbell, Richard Boon, Tim Skelly, Paul Warwick and John Holmes who have laughed at and with me, helped me drink a few beers and collaborated on so much work, particularly in Eritrea. To my parents, Mary and Gerald Plastow, who unfailingly offered love and encouragement, and to my son, Will, who has been dragged around Ethiopia and Eritrea since he could put one foot in front of the other and whose critical eye is always a joy.

Praise for A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1 “This book, an ambitious project, telling the history of the regional Theatre of the entire Eastern Africa, is the first of its kind. It is informed by the authority of research by a leading theatre scholar and director but also that of personal experience. Professor Jane Plastow has researched and made theatre in all the nine countries, under study. This book will be of interest to the general reader and definitely, of immense value to the student of Theatre in Eastern Africa, Africa and theatre in general.” —Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA

Contents

Introduction  1  Chapter 1: Somali Theatre 51  Chapter 2: Ethiopia and Eritrea: The Imperial Theatre—1921–1974137  Chapter 3: Ethiopia and Eritrea: 1973–2016211 Index299

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List of Figures

Chapter 1:  Somali Theatre Fig. 1 Hodeidi playing his oud in 2013. (Source: All three Somali images came from net sources that are multiply available—i.e. not owned by a particular site.) 80 Fig. 2 The Somali National Theatre 82 Fig. 3 Waaberi (The Dawn). The most famous Somali ‘band’ in the 1970s 102

Chapter 2:  Ethiopia and Eritrea: The Imperial Theatre—1921–1974 Fig. 1 Priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church dancing and playing drums and sistrums for the yearly festival of Timket (Epiphany). (Source: Photo by the author. Addis Ababa, 1985) Fig. 2 An early postcard image of Teatro Asmara—later known as Cinema Asmara—built 1918 Fig. 3 Image from 1955 revival production of Z’halfene N’bret Eritrea (The Way Eritreans Lived) by Berhe Mesgun. (Source: Asres Tessema. Reproduced by kind permission of Christine Matzke.) Fig. 4 Philip Caplan meeting Emperor Haile Selassie at the Addis Ababa University Cultural Centre after a performance in the early 1960s. Precise date unknown. (Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Melissa Havard, Philip Caplan’s daughter.) Fig. 5 Mahber Teyatr Asmera (Ma.Te.A.) (Asmara Theatre Association members in 1961). (Source: Reproduced with kind permission from Christine Matzke.)

139 154 157

172 195

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Chapter 3: Ethiopia and Eritrea: 1973–2016 Fig. 1 A section of the massive 1984 parade ordered by President Mengistu Haile Mariam for the occasion of the launch of the Workers Party of Ethiopia in what was then known as Abiot (Revolution Square). (Source: Photo by the author.) 213 Fig. 2 Image from April 1986 production of Hoda Yifejew by Fisseha Belay by students at Addis Ababa University. (Source: Photo by the author.) 228 Fig. 3 Image from Ye Inbuay Kaab (Thorn Apple Pie) as performed by the community in the model village of Yet Nora. December 1987. (Source: Photo by the author.) 230 Fig. 4 An EPLF cultural troupe performs. Note the two-tone outfits with the lead singer in reversed colours to the rest of the group. (Source: Photo from the personal collection of the author.) 236 Fig. 5 Image from the filmed version of Alemseged Tesfai’s Eti Kal’a Quinat (The Other War). Solomie talks to her grandmother, Letiyesus243 Fig. 6 Image from Addis Ababa University student production of an adapted folk story, The Thief and The Chair on tour to local primary schools. 1986. (Source: Photo by the author.) 249 Fig. 7 Image from 2016 production at the City Hall theatre of Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida (The Guest) (Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Manyazewal Endeshaw.) 264

Introduction

The Shape of the Project This is the first attempt to write a regional history of African theatre. As such it will, I am sure, contain errors of both fact and judgement. I have sought to make the errors of fact as few as possible and take full responsibility for my mistakes. Disagreements about judgement and interpretation are inevitable in the writing of any history. Issues of perspective mean understandings change over time, place and situation, but more significantly, I have been constantly aware that I have been weaving together the strands of often limited published material with many ‘grey’ sources (unpublished dissertations, manuscripts, letters and the like) and a range of recollections from interviews, conversations and my own experiences in the region over more than thirty years. This uneven braid has meant certain people, plays and events can shine out brightly over the years, while elsewhere it has been frustratingly difficult to find both facts and detail and sometimes, I am sure, I have simply failed to recognise or have overlooked the significance of events or productions. It would not have sounded very convincing to have called this book a ‘provisional’ history of East African theatre, but I certainly make no claims as to the ‘definitiveness’ of my study. Rather, I hope this book may stir debate and further research and look forward to my views being contested and my oversights revealed as African theatre historiography moves forward.

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Plastow, A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47272-6_1

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This history looks at theatre in nine nations; ten if one counts Somaliland as separate from Somalia:1 these are Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia/Somaliland, Tanzania and Uganda. Volume One focuses on the Horn of Africa (Djibouti—Somali language theatre only—Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia/Somaliland), while Volume Two will look at countries often seen as being at the core of East Africa (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda—and includes French language theatre from Djibouti), with a final chapter looking at Theatre for Development (TfD) across the whole region. Even making this initial decision as to what nations to include in the study was not straightforward since there is no agreed definition as to what constitutes East Africa. In my early thinking I had planned to include South Sudan, but ongoing hostilities in the area meant the idea became impracticable. I will not be conducting a series of separate national studies. I have long been interested in the transnational links between the theatre histories of the region. In a previous comparative study (Plastow 1996), I looked at how shared socialist perspectives prior to the end of Cold War affected the development of the theatres of Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. As a Briton I am also acutely aware as I travel and work in the region that even in the twenty-first century the history of whether a nation had been colonised, and who by, strongly affects theatre down to the present day, and where several countries shared a coloniser, they also share important elements of theatrical history. My decision to write a history that would group nations together, while giving plenty of space for analysis of events in particular countries within chapters, was therefore determined with a view to taking a transnational view that would enable practitioners, students and scholars to see national histories within a broader regional context. I also chose to write in this way because I am aware that many African scholars have limited opportunity to travel across the region, while my strongest USP (Unique Selling Point) was possibly that I had already lived, worked, made theatre and researched in five of the nations concerned.2 In Volume One I therefore have three large chapters alongside this Introduction which contextualises and lays out the significant transnational issues that recur throughout the study. Chapter 1 looks at Somali theatre, a cultural and linguistic phenomenon beginning in the 1940s that crosses Somalia/Somaliland, Djibouti and reaches into southern parts of Ethiopia and even across the Red Sea into Yemen. Chapters 2 and 3 both deal with Ethiopia and Eritrea. These nations have at various stages prior to 1991 been ruled as a single entity;

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they also have significant linguistic, religious and cultural synergies. Chapter 2 deals with the period from the first Ethiopian play in 1921 up until the fall of the last emperor, Haile Selassie, in 1974. Chapter 3 looks at more contemporary developments in a context of war between the nations and their subsequent independent divergence. Volume Two will essentially differentiate between Anglophone and Francophone nations. Two chapters will study the theatres of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, from their closely shared colonial experience into the post-colonial period where radically differing political organisation would similarly lead to a separation of theatrical trajectories. Burundi and Rwanda were colonially ruled by Belgium while Djibouti was a French territory, but I bring these countries into a single chapter to look at how francophone historical perspectives on performance and culture have influenced all three. My final chapter, on Theatre for Development, since the mid-1980s the most strongly funded strand of theatre across the continent, is the only one which will deal with the whole region, since funding, directing and training has often been exogenous, dominated by international aid rather than indigenous culture or thought. I am all too aware that these groupings over-simplify a range of cross-cutting linkages and concerns—from individual travels to national political philosophies and from issues such as the position of women in theatre to questions of form and dramatic theme. I try to point to these links within the book as they arise, and in this Introduction I seek to bring into focus the key concerns that recur transnationally, to varying extents, throughout the body of the work.

Transnationalism The transnational focus at the centre of this project is immensely complicated. Not only were national borders artificially contrived by the colonial powers but those borders have changed considerably and been violently contested at many points. At various times nations have come together; Somaliland and Somalia and Eritrea and Ethiopia, both between 1961 and 1991, with the subsequent splitting of the Somali nations still not recognised by most of the outside world, and Zanzibar and Tanganyika unifying as Tanzania in 1964. The borders of all the nations under consideration, with the single exception of Djibouti, changed during the twentieth century, never, except when Eritrea won its independence in a UN-recognised referendum, with the consent of the populations involved, but in a series

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of colonial fiats.3 Peoples, cultures and languages live across national borders. Internally many have been brought together in single nation states when historically they have been regularly violently opposed.4 While many playwrights speak in strongly nationalistic tones, their vision of nation and national loyalty has often not corresponded with legal borders. This has been most strongly the case in Somali theatre, which has regularly addressed it itself to all Somali peoples irrespective of the five nations in which they live;5 while in Eritrea prior to reunification with Ethiopia in 1952 leading theatre artists spent much energy advocating the policy, only to find themselves a decade later beginning to argue the other way.6 In countries with multiple languages we also have to ask what populations the theatre is addressing. Eritrea makes theatre mostly in Tigrinya, Ethiopia almost exclusively in Amharic, while in Uganda there is no meaningful local language theatre other than in Luganda. These are all the languages of the capitals and of the ruling elite but of a minority of the population as a whole, they can therefore only speak to or for particular segments of their nations. The only country that has entirely strategically overcome this problem is Tanzania where Kiswahili has, since independence, been artificially but entirely successfully adopted as the national language. Elsewhere, attempts have been made to argue that an international language, English or French, can be constructed as supra-national and therefore speaking to all. However, this is in all cases a complete fallacy, speaking to an intensely class-based understanding that excludes the majority in all nations who do not fluently speak a European tongue. I speak here of language because it is the easiest vehicle for understanding the complexity of East African local, national and trans-national identity constructions, but other cultural codes vary equally deeply and may cut across language barriers, with societies where populations are split across religious divides, for example, often having very different outlooks on cultural production. These complexities mean that what are apparently ‘national’ theatres are very often not that at all. They are at various times trans-national, ethnic, urban or class-based in their perspectives and allegiances, claiming frequently to speak on behalf of peoples who have not made, seen or understood the work in question. Seeking to disaggregate the national at pertinent points throughout my narrative will, I hope, allow a more nuanced exploration of the theatres of East Africa.

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Defining East African Theatre I am arguing in this project that in East Africa, theatre did not exist prior to the colonial period and that all current manifestations are hybrids: fascinatingly diverse, bringing together of ideas imported from Europe and elsewhere, melded with indigenous performance and cultural traditions. I am aware that this is a contentious position, with many scholars having argued for the validity of pre-colonial theatrical manifestations in various parts of Africa (Mlama 1991; Losambe and Sarinjeive 2001; Sirayi 2012; Diakhate and Ndumbe Eyoh 2017). However, my evidence from across the East African region argues otherwise. This argument is based on a particular understanding of the term theatre as opposed to performance. Here I follow and slightly adapt the thinking of theatre anthropologist Richard Schechner, who in his Performance Theory lays out what I find a persuasive idea that visualises drama, theatre and performance as a series of widening circles (1988, 68–105) with drama being script-centred, theatre being about the embodying of a story, while performance includes a much wider range of activity and may encompass not only dance or music productions but events such as games and political rallies. It is crucial to my argument and to the underlying premises of this book that the reader understands that none of these forms are being seen as in any way intrinsically superior to each other. I think some of the heat in previous debates has been generated by old colonialist arguments that the introduction of theatre to Africa should be correlated with an idea that the imported form was in some way inherently superior to indigenous performance modes. This is not in my view in any way true. Considerable energy has also been expended in arguing that certain African performance forms had theatrical elements and should be considered therefore as pre-colonial, indigenous theatre. I have no problem whatsoever in recognising that a range of story-telling, narrative, dance and ritual performances had significant theatrical elements; indeed, many of these have been co-opted into modern theatrical performances to great effect. My premise is simply that theatre— understood here as a secular, embodied story-telling form where actors are seen as representing particular fictionalised characters distinguished from watching (though in some cases also participating) audience members—was essentially recognised across the region as a new cultural form wherever it was introduced. So, for example, in the 1920s one of the earliest Ethiopian

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playwrights, Yoftahe Negussie, working in an internationally staffed school, explained how he came to make theatre. Those Egyptian teachers translated Shakespeare’s play and other historical playwrights’ work but their language was not good. They begged me to correct the language. In the process of editing their playscript I understood the content of the books and the overall idea of theatre. After that I thought to write. (In Mulugeta 1972, 30)

Similarly, one of the first Somali playwrights, Ahmed Sulaiman ‘Bidde’, in the early 1950s, was invited to create school plays in Somali by the British colonial authorities to persuade people of the value of ‘modern’ colonial education and like a number of teachers in such establishments became persuaded of the potential of the form to engage the Somali public (see Chapter 1). These men had no problem seeing theatre as a European introduction but having grasped the fundamentals of the form they radically adapted it, taking ownership by creating plays in their own languages and making work using their own poetic and musical forms and drawing on their particular religious and cultural sensibilities. Having established this premise, my work is primarily interested in how East African societies have taken the idea of theatre and in myriad ways made it their own through hybridisation with indigenous performance forms, indigenous cultural semiotic codes and indigenous thought. This is in no way different from a range of other international cultural innovations and need not be considered as implying pejorative judgement on any African culture. We have no problem in recognising, for example, that both classical ballet and opera originated in Italy,7 but have been subsequently developed and re-imagined in various ways around the world. Closer to home African music forms have been taken and hybridised internationally; as evidenced in historical studies of gospel music, reggae, country and western, rap and hip-hop, all acknowledged as having African roots,8 and all more recently re-imported and utilised within the continent. Once we acknowledge that culture is not static and that art constantly reinvents itself, incorporating new ideas across the globe, we can transcend the mythical notion that tradition and performance have ever been unchanging, or that an artistic creator can only be ‘authentic’ if they draw only on modes historically perceived as ‘pure’ and indigenous, in order to be free to interrogate and celebrate the realities of modern evolutions of East African theatre.

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Also essential to the perspective of this study is a rejection of any claim that there might be such a thing as an in any way homogenous view of African theatre. I have lost count of the number of African theatre-related events I have attended and writings I have critiqued that claim in some way to speak to ‘African theatre’. Usually this means the writer or speaker is claiming that form of theatre they are most familiar with—based on a narrow national, occasionally regional, perspective—is representative of the continent as a whole. Possibly the leading offenders in this matter are Nigerian commentators, following the lead of Nobel prize winner, Wole Soyinka, who in his 1976 essay, ‘Drama and the African world-view’, argued that there were essential elements to African cultures that shared a common perception about the relationship of the individual to society, nature and the divine; though notably all his theatrical examples in support of his contention that this perception shapes African drama as essentially different from the Western model come from Nigeria. I think this publication can effectively debunk such an essentialist contention. One simply cannot argue that, for example, Eritrea’s most famous play, Alemseged Tesfai’s realist examination of the lives of a family of women living under Ethiopian occupation, Eti Kal’a Quinat (The Other War) (1984), has anything even faintly resembling the aesthetic, philosophy or spiritual perspective of the Ugandan, Robert Serumaga’s mythic, athletically dance-based parable discussing leadership and relationships between individual and community responsibilities, Renga Moi (Renga Moi) (1972), or of the Somali popular theatrical form of the mid to late twentieth century that called for plays focussed on seven or eight philosophical and alliterative poems set to music, with actors clustered around a handful of on-stage microphones improvising the linking dialogue. These are all African forms, all beloved and admired in their home settings, and all with completely differing aesthetics resulting from profoundly different cultural sensibilities. While I find such diversity a matter for celebration, I think it is also important to consider why the myth of African cultural homogeneity has proved so strong and long-lasting amongst certain western and African commentators. An important factor here is accessibility of material. Very few African theatre scholars have had opportunities to travel widely, certainly trans-regionally, on their own continent. Only a minute fraction of African theatrical output has been published and while ever more is available on social media channels such as You Tube, high-value filmed theatrical production is rare indeed. Moreover, much of the work is in  local

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languages, while the theatre that gets profiled is the miniscule amount published by a few internationally known figures—Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard or Ngugi wa Thiong’o—who write in European languages. It is notable that little has been translated even between French and English, the two major languages of the Global North used on the continent. As a result few scholars or practitioners have been able to engage with the theatre, sometimes even of neighbours, let alone across the immensity of the continent. There is also a politico-cultural reason for the assertion of a unitary African culture, one that I think derives from an under-researched and rather sentimental understanding of Pan-Africanism. The Pan-African ideal born in the USA and the Caribbean, among black leaders seeking to assert a sense of identity in the face of massively oppressive white-led societies, was embraced politically by the leader of Africa’s first nation to decolonise, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1957,9 and sought again by Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere as he tried to create an East African polity by uniting Tanzania with Kenya and Uganda in 1961/62.10 It has always sadly failed to supersede nationalist narratives in the political world, but continues to be invoked culturally in many fora. This response by many African intellectuals who have sought to make common cause to contest, politically, philosophically and culturally the Eurocentric dominance, ignorance and arrogance which has so often denied not just equality but even full humanity to black populations is easily understandable.11 Movements such as francophone negritude as posited by Aime Casaire arguing in the 1930s for a specifically African sensibility12 and the Pan-­ African ideal of uniting on the basis of a concept of a common continental culture have to be read as a response to historic white oppression of black people. They certainly do not hold up to any detailed interrogation of the myth of a unitary black culture and entirely fail to acknowledge issues such as inter-African racisms and cultural supremacist beliefs that riddle the continent.13 A factor that has often bolstered the Pan-African cultural argument in relation to theatre is that it is undoubtedly true that almost all the cultures I deal with in this book have strong traditions of dance/music/song, often known in this region by the Kiswahili term, ngoma. In many parts of Africa the incorporation of what I shall refer to as ngoma from here on has become almost synonymous with public performance and a considerable number of playwrights and scholars see such incorporations as a signifier of a specifically African aesthetic. Certainly, ngoma, either performed in

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isolation or as part of a play, remains very popular amongst a wide range of populations, both urban and rural. However, it is by no means true, anywhere I know of in East Africa, that a majority of playwrights are following this idea of a fusion of indigenous performance forms into their theatre. In Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea I will show how many professional groups brought ngoma into popular variety performances that also included equally enthusiastically embraced innovations such as ‘modern’ music, incorporating the use of introduced instruments, sound systems and a more ‘pop’ music sound, comedy routines and acrobatics. In all these variety programmes, theatre remained dialogue dominated, broadly realist or melodramatic, with no melding of performance forms, either introduced or indigenous. Some significant playwrights have sought to bring aspects of ngoma and theatre into a single whole; here I would mention the Ethiopians, Malaku Baggosaw and Yoftahe Negussie in the 1930s and 1940s; the Ugandans Byron Kawadwa and Robert Serumaga and the Tanzanians Penina Mlama and Amandina Lihamba in the 1970s and 1980s as examples. Such ‘total’ theatre, incorporating music, dance, colour and spectacle, has often been enormously popular, and less skillful playwrights have often subsequently bolted on dance sequences to their plays in a fairly tokenistic nod to indigenous cultures. However, overall East African theatre, dominated by playwrights rather than practical theatre makers, has remained concerned primarily with language and speech. My observations might seem to endorse the notion that ‘authentic’ African plays ‘should’ incorporate forms of ngoma. Such a conclusion would be far too simplistic. In Ethiopia and Somalia it has not been music and dance that have been seen as the indigenous artistic form that should most importantly be incorporated into authentically national theatre; rather central significance is given to important poetic forms; hees in Somalia and qene in Ethiopia.14 Moreover, Somali language theatre from the late 1950s gloried in its sung poetry, essentially accompanied by the oud. The instrument quickly became ubiquitous and many poetry recitals still see the poet perform accompanied by an oud player as I witnessed on a visit to Somaliland in 2016. But, in an example of recent introductions that rapidly become accepted as established indigenous traditions, the oud is an Arabic instrument that only reached Somalia in the 1940s. It is no more or less ‘authentically’ Somali than is theatre across the region that eschews the use of music or dance.

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The reification of ‘traditional’ performance forms as necessary to the making of authentically African theatre is a dangerous game. At one extreme it leads to what has become known as ‘airport culture’, where troupes of professional dancers are employed to perform sanitised or, not infrequently, ‘sexed up’ versions of local dances for official airport greetings ceremonies or simply for the titillation of tourists. Elsewhere, it has led to the condemnation of work because it is not recognised by particular interest groups as ‘properly’ representing national culture; often in my view simply an expression of cultural, political or religious conservatism. A significant problem is that there has been insufficient in-depth research into the evolution of particular ‘traditional’ ngoma forms which can therefore be too easily assumed to be culturally static authentic representations of ethnic art. As Terence Ranger’s study of the Beni ngoma and its spread and mutation over more than forty years, from Tanzania across vast swathes of Eastern and Southern Africa shows, ngoma forms have responded to exogenous influences and constantly mutated in a series of hybridisations with existing local artistic forms (Ranger 1975). More recently, Schauert’s 2015 publication discussing Ghanaian dance demonstrates how even a national troupe dedicated to the preservation of indigenous ngoma forms, when it revisited the sites the dances had first been collected from two decades earlier, found they were now performed in notably different ways while retaining the same nomenclature (113). The question therefore arises as to which might be considered the ‘authentic’ performance? It seems to me that what is needed is a subtle and complex negotiation of understanding of when theatrical modes have been so imposed that they shut down creative artistic thinking about form as playwrights in a blinkered fashion followed what they perceived to be rigid ‘rules’ about play creation. This was indubitably and damagingly the case when French, Belgian and British colonists in East Africa introduced their dialogue-­ dominated realist forms and inculcated the belief in some of their subjects that this form of culture was either superior to the utilisation of more syncretic African forms or was just plain ‘right’. This cultural supremacist attitude is undoubtedly a prime reason why in the Belgian possessions of Rwanda and Burundi hardly any local plays were made prior to the late 1960s,15 with the few elite schools insisting on productions of Moliere and Racine and failing to make any engagement with indigenous cultures (Nsengimana and Nkuriyingoma 1997, 237). However, elsewhere playwrights have been well aware of the choices they have made in choosing

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both a more word-based form of theatre and indeed in choosing to play with forms that have interested them from the Global North. Ethiopia, with its strong literary traditions, has probably been the country which has most easily taken this path; from playwrights like Kebede Mikael and Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin wishing to translate Shakespeare and Moliere in the 1950s and 1960s to Manyazewal Endeshaw translating Edward Albee and Ionesco in the 1990s. Moreover, a number of Ethiopian writers including Manyazewal and Tsegaye have been so intrigued by more avant garde western writers that they have written plays exploring new styles within a national context; and here I could mention Tsegaye’s Ye Kermasow (A Man of the Future) (1965/6) as an acknowledged response to Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in the early 1960s and Manyazewal’s more recent, 2016 Engida (The Guest) that engages with absurdist traditions in an entirely Ethiopian setting.16 These choices are in no way apemanship but are manifestations of artistic open-mindedness, curiosity and the essential freedom to engage with new ideas that is the life-blood of all artistic creation. The one area where I have found little evidence of any substantive value in engaging with exogenous ideas about theatre is linguistic. The most influential, beloved and popular theatre across the region has almost always been made not in French or English but in the indigenous language of the playwright who wrote and the people who make up his (and it usually has been his not her) audience. My evidence leads me to argue that it was Somali theatre, always ‘composed’17 in Somali, and with some of the strongest local adaptations of form to suit local audiences, that between 1960 and 1990 was the most inclusively popular theatre the region has seen. It is surely ironic that it is also a theatre almost no one outside Somali-speaking territories has any knowledge of, with only one play, Hasan Sheikh Mumin’s Shabeelnagood (Leopard Among the Women), having ever been translated into another language (1974). The Somalis took only the most essential concepts of theatre from the West, picking up the idea in the few British colonial middle schools, composed their work for many years orally in Somali and rooted the drama in the alliterative poetic forms so central to their culture, with an admixture of musical numbers, an idea picked at least in part from India’s Bollywood. They then created a theatre that transcended national boundaries to speak to Somali-speaking populations across nation and clan, about Somali political aspirations and anxieties regarding how to reconcile tradition and innovation. This theatre engaged both urban and rural populations and rich and

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poor. Productions with tickets costing only the price of a snack were not uncommonly mobbed, requiring the police to maintain order in queues to gain entry; presidents wept at command performances and claims have been made that theatre was centrally involved in the overthrow of both the first, democratically elected government and the dictatorship of Siyad Barre (Johnson 1974, 169; Gates 2002, 209). The strongest professional theatre of the region is that based in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and always given in Amharic. Here, growing slowly from the 1930s, the theatre has become an integral part of urban life, so that as I write the capital hosts five state-funded theatres, as well as a steady stream of private productions. Plays are put on in a repertory system, one day each week, with a single theatre simultaneously hosting up to six or seven shows, and the most popular productions running for up to three years in venues that can seat up to 1500 people. In Africa’s only non-colonised nation, theatre evolved with little international influence, the concept having been brought over in the 1920s by an Ethiopian brought up in Russia, Tekle Hawariat, and then again in the capital’s few international schools in the 1930s (Terega and Solomon 2014). Elsewhere the most influential and popular national theatres were the liberation theatre developed in the 1980s by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in Tigrinya and toured both domestically and internationally to the Eritrea diaspora to promote the cause of freedom (Matzke 2003), and the ‘variety’ performances which all included drama in Luganda in Kampala in the 1970s and 1980s (Mbowa 1999) and in Kiswahili for the many companies performing in Tanzania, around Dar es Salaam, from the early 1970s through to the 2000s (Edmondson 2007). Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o is undoubtedly the most famous international advocate of indigenous language African theatre production, having come to realise the power of Kikuyu language performance after managing to slowly decolonise his mind from the impact of a British education in both an elite colonial boarding school and then at the colonial university for East Africa, Makerere in Uganda.18 Ngugi’s English language novels were and are highly regarded by international critics, but it is the far less critically regarded theatre, moving from 1950s creaky English language realism to spectacular musical and local language theatre, that the writer saw as making the biggest impact both on himself and on his people; explaining in relation to the creation of his first Kikuyu language community play that:

 INTRODUCTION 

13

The six months between June and November 1977 were the most exciting in my life and the true beginning of my education. I learnt my language anew. I rediscovered the creative nature and power of collective work. (Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. 1981b, 76)

Thousands of people hired buses to see performances of Ngaheeka Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) and the state panicked—as it had never done for Ngugi’s equally subversive English-language texts—at the potential power of this peoples’ theatre. Within most of the countries under consideration in this project Ngugi’s call to write in a local language would be entirely unexceptional; indeed Kenya is probably the country in the region that puts on least theatre in local languages. However, in the international world, and even in other parts of Africa, Ngugi’s repeated calls for the promotion of art in local languages are largely treated with respectful disregard. Playwrights argue that in multi-lingual nations one has to use an official, international language, generally English or French, to transcend linguistic boundaries. The problem of multiple national languages is a real one. Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Uganda all have multiple language populations and it is undoubtedly true that theatre is only made substantially in the language of the capital. However, I would still claim that this argument is somewhat disingenuous. English or French language theatres can only speak indigenously on a class basis, because even today when many children can speak these languages to an extent as a result of schooling, most people cannot enjoy the intricacies of the play in a foreign language to nearly the same extent as they would in their mother tongue.19 International language theatre can only be for the upper classes and the international world, it cannot be for the people about whom it purports to speak and this, surely, is a peculiar and concerning neo-colonial situation. I do think that it is of significant importance to share knowledge through translation and transnational performance opportunities. Here I would applaud Ngugi’s decision to write his work in Kikuyu and then translate it into English. But if you write only in English or French, your theatre can only reach a tiny minority of your national population. I note that the wider world knows almost nothing of these regional local language theatres, allowing critics, including East Africans like Taban Lo Liyong, to for many years speak of the East African literary desert (1969). My contention would be that it has only ever been a desert if you only recognise published work in English or French, but that this is like a man

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who can only see the colour purple arguing that he lives in a monochrome world because while the environment surrounding him teems with glorious shades of blue and green and red and pink, it fails to contain the only colour he is able to recognise.

Historiography There is a problem with the lack of theatre historiography throughout East Africa. No university in the region teaches specifically East African theatre history and only a few have dedicated modules on a national theatre history.20 Indeed, it would be difficult to teach such modules comprehensively for lack of suitable resources. Having said this there are a range of writings, both published and unpublished, which deal with aspects of theatre history and which have been invaluable to this study. The only publications that go any distance towards covering the whole region are Martin Banham’s Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994) and Don Rubin’s Africa volume of his World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (1997). However, neither of these deal with Djibouti, Eritrea or Somalia/Somaliland and Banham in addition does not mention Burundi or Rwanda. The only book that attempts anything of a transnational comparative study of theatre in the region is my own African Theatre and Politics: The evolution of theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (1996). We do have a number of important national studies, though many do not see themselves explicitly as histories. For Volume One of this project I have drawn hugely on the work of Maxamed Afrax (Mohamed Afrah) in his unpublished 2013 PhD thesis, ‘Between Continuity and Innovation: Transitional Nature of Post-Independence Somali Poetry and Drama 1960s-present’ and on a range of articles as well as her unpublished 2003 PhD thesis, En-gendering Theatre in Eritrea: The Roles and Representations of Women in the Performing Arts, by Christine Matzke. For Ethiopian theatre I had to rely on myself as the most prolific theatre scholar, though I have been much helped by being able to consult a wide range of unpublished student theses from Addis Ababa University, while in recent years a number of Ethiopians have begun to publish internationally on their rich theatre history. When it comes to central East Africa we have no significant publications on Burundian theatre, while in Rwanda the first book-length study of any aspect of national theatre is Ananda Breed’s 2014, Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice, Reconciliation. This leaves Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda

 INTRODUCTION 

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which have had significantly more written about them. For Kenya there is a massively disproportionate—though very interesting—body of work about the theatre of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Much of this is by the writer himself, though Ingrid Bjorkman also wrote a 1989 book-length study of his later theatre.21 A first specifically Kenyan history of the national theatre that has been enormously helpful to this publication is Rose Komu’s unpublished 2017 PhD thesis, A History of Kenyan Theatre: The Intersections between Culture and Politics. In Uganda the late Rose Mbowa was the most prolific writer on national theatre history with a range of articles, notably in the hugely informative 1999 collection edited by Eckhard Breitinger, Uganda: The Cultural Landscape; while Samuel Kasule’s 2013, Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre: Trends in Ugandan Theatre since 1960 is the only book-length published history. This leaves Tanzania where besides my own 1996 study there is a range of useful published and unpublished work. Most well known is probably Penina Muhando Mlama’s Culture and Development: The Popular Theatre Approach in Africa (1991), though Amandina Lihamba’s unpublished 1985 PhD thesis, Politics and Theatre in Tanzania After the Arusha Declaration: 1967–1984 is a more historiographic work. Other important scholarship has come from Joachim Fiebach, Ebrahim Hussien, Frowin Nyoni, Laura Edmondson, Robert Phillipson and Vicensia Shule, to name only some of the most prominent.22 All of this discounts the really large literature on Theatre for Development from across the region, most of which is in article-length studies of particular initiatives. What we can see from the above are some interesting patterns and omissions. Notably much key work by African scholars has not been published. This speaks to a number of relevant issues. Firstly, theatre studies though growing—and rapidly so in some nations such as Ethiopia where nine new departments have been opened in universities in the past decade—is still a minority subject across the continent. The only journal/book series that aimed to speak to theatre studies across the continent, African Theatre, is ceasing publication in 2020, for lack of sales after twenty years. The ‘natural’ buyers for the kind of books I list above would be universities and students, but African universities often have tiny book-buying budgets and students even smaller disposable incomes so publishers understandably fail to publish. What publishers there are tend to be in the West and many African academics do not have the contacts, time or support to bring publications to international Western publication even where there might be an opening.

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Moreover, it is very hard for African scholars to access the time and resources to undertake major research assignments. Given the lack of books—for which often intermittent internet access cannot by any means fully compensate—and an improving but continuing problem with good local mentorship in many nations, plus often very heavy workloads, it is extremely difficult for these scholars to undertake in-depth studies. Hence many of the texts listed above originating in PhD studies are usually undertaken in Western universities, for which scholars have had to compete for scarce scholarship opportunities. Even here there are few suitable supervisors and work has to be written in international languages. In practice this means writing in English since I know of no theatre theses written from the region in French, and the only book-length study written in a local language is Maxamed Afrax’s self-published 1987 Somali text, Fan Masraxeedka Soomaalida. While there have been a scattering of theses written around the world it is notable that a single university, Leeds in the UK, has been the location for more of this scholarship than anywhere else. The Kenyans—Chesaina, Otieno, Mwaura, Njeru and Komu—all wrote from Leeds, as did the Tanzanians—Lihamba, Bakari and Nyoni—and the Ugandans—Mbowa, Kasule, Lutwama, Mangeni, Maddy, Sentogo and Kiguli.23 Where scholars do not have English to the required level or access to international schemes such as Commonwealth scholarships, it becomes almost impossible to pursue extensive studies. This is at least a partial explanation for why some countries, notably those at the core of the old British East Africa, have been far more written about than others. Some of the consequences of these difficulties have become apparent to me while researching for this project. Firstly, those working in theatre in the region often have very sketchy knowledge of their theatre history, which can mean they may be unaware of important factors in the development of their traditions or be disproportionately influenced by the few texts and little learning to which they have been exposed. Moreover, since not only scholarship but also play texts are seldom published, students can often only read a tiny number of plays and university courses seldom teach the work of any but the most famous regional playwrights. I have also found that there is a particular problem in that there is very little research into either theatre or performance forms pre-1960. What this means in practice is that contemporary scholars and practitioners are often unaware of the foundations on which their theatre traditions have been built and over-influenced by vague assertions about, for example, the ‘purity’ of pre-­ independence performance forms, while simultaneously not having access

 INTRODUCTION 

17

to information about how colonial projects influenced theatre traditions in a range of very particular ways which continue to resonate into the present day. What I have also found, everywhere I have travelled in researching this project, has been an overflowing generosity amongst informants willing to share their knowledge and expertise and well aware that much is in danger of being lost if it cannot be recorded and shared.

Transnational Form I have already discussed the most important transnational issue of form; the melding of a host of indigenous performance modes with the imported idea of Western theatre to create new and locally relevant hybrids. Linked to this imaginative originality, and something that attracted me to much African theatre from the outset, is the refusal by many theatre makers to allow either the content or form of their work to fit into neat pigeon holes—the kind of categorisations beloved by many critics in the Global North. Political drama is often set in a domestic world; religious considerations mingle with both, and a biting condemnation of corruption can be mixed with romance and comedy. Not all East African theatre by any means is so holistic, but I would argue that there is a welcome tendency to see the world in the round, recognising that the personal and the political, the spiritual and the mundane co-exist and are often experienced in close proximity in our day to day lives. However, there are a number of specific forms that have interested a range of East African theatre makers across national borders. A phenomenon that operated in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda in the latter part of the twentieth century was the variety performance. Variety—incorporating theatre, traditional and ‘modern’ music and dance, comedy, and in Tanzania acrobatics—was the bedrock of commercial theatre for many years. This was a mostly urban, capital-based form, always given in local languages and appealing to predominantly working class and lower middle class audiences. Evidence is scanty but it seems the Ethiopian/Eritrean form came from early twentieth-century Italian influence while in Tanzania and Uganda the original model was British. At the height of the variety craze it was immensely popular. In Tanzania dozens of intensely competitive groups were performing six days a week in the 1980s (Plastow 1996, 197–203) while in Uganda in the mid to late 1980s, Mbowa says there were over 200 groups in Uganda, performing mostly at weekends to fulfil an apparently insatiable appetite (Mbowa 1994, 132–133). In the

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television and video age the variety bubble has been largely popped, with only a few, highly skilled, slick operations remaining in business, but for many years over much of East Africa variety was theatre for the majority of urban theatregoers. What the theatre elements of these performances had in common was that they enabled audiences to engage and see themselves reflected in contemporary colloquial language. In short plays dealing with common social issues presented through a mixture of comedy and sentimentality, frequently incorporating raunchy sexual encounters, audiences were given well-recognised character types—the good time girl, the corrupt businessman, the trickster and the innocent countryman falling foul of the ways of the big city—which people felt comfortable engaging with and in which they could see some elements of their own lives. When the variety troupes performed traditional and ‘modern’ music and dance, they both fed peoples’ nostalgia and sense of cultural identity and allowed them to feel modern, cool and up to the moment. The ever present comedic content allowed an escape from often difficult lives and a place to let oneself be simply entertained. However, it is important to recognise that people also went to the theatre expecting education. Many have said that art for art’s sake does not exist in Africa. This may not be entirely true in the present day but the art of the variety troupes was often intensely moralistic in its underlying messages and people expected a didactic element to these plays which would condemn the corrupt and reinforce aspirations to good living. There are definite transnational parallels between East African commercial theatres, largely based on urban living, and the very similar issues confronting the mass of working people in major African towns. While elite drama is often serious all my research shows that popular theatre across the region privileges comedy and in particular dislikes a tragic ending. This comic engagement goes back to the earliest days of modern theatre. For example, the man known as the ‘father’ of Eritrean theatre, Alemayehu Kahasai, modelled his work in the 1950s on that of the Chaplinesque Italian film star known as Toto, or ‘The Prince of Laughter’ (see Chapter 2). Even earlier, in the 1930s, British colonialists in East Africa invented the character who came to be known as Kapere in Uganda. Kapere was Mr Foolish in a series of colonial educational films that showed him doing stupid things like burying money under a telegraph pole that he wanted to send to a relative. His popularity under a host of names across East and Southern Africa as a slapstick fool was such that the form, under the Kenyan name, vitimbi, became a specific popular

 INTRODUCTION 

19

genre on stage and television throughout the later twentieth century (see Volume Two, Chapter 1). Commercial companies across the region have recognised that even in serious plays comic elements appeal to audiences, and this includes both joking language and often broad physical comedy. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Ethiopian commentators often bemoan the dominance of popular comedy on the professional stages of Addis Ababa from the early 1980s, and we see a more recent growth specifically of romantic comedy in both Ethiopia and Kenya. Serious drama may have attracted both more critical attention and generally higher status across the region, but if we are to consider issues of quantity and commercial popularity, then indubitably it is the comic form that has to be recognised as that most beloved of audiences across the region. I would argue that the dominant form of acting across East Africa tends towards the presentational and melodramatic. This is not intended as a pejorative statement. I am aware that it conflicts with the perceptions of many actors I have spoken with, who, while most were not particularly aware that styles of acting might be categorised, when pushed thought they were performing in a broadly realistic manner. There has been relatively little research into acting styles in Africa, but a number of commentators have mentioned the tendency to melodrama. Simon Peter Otieno discusses melodramatic acting in the Kenya Schools Drama festival in his PhD thesis (2008); Christine Matzke talks of presentational acting in Eritrea (2003); and Grit Koppen discusses what he sees as a multitude of contemporary ‘Addis Ababa melodramas’ (2010, 27). We can begin to understand this tendency if we accept that East African theatre is seldom primarily concerned with the introspective individual, but tends to be interested in people in society, in the dis/functionality of given communities and in domestic, social and power relations. This then leads to a tendency for actors and directors to think of roles in terms of character types which need to be clearly signalled so that audiences will understand each actor’s social role in the play. On stage the focus is extroverted and conceived in broad character strokes, with actors seeking to present as opposed to inhabiting their part. In international terms this would correlate with the somewhat simplified distinctions often made between Brechtian and Stanislavskian performance. The former, being concerned with the external world and socio-political relations, is interested in presenting types, while the latter focuses on the importance of the actor becoming the character and inhabiting him/her in nuanced detail. The result of a social approach is often a presentational style of

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performance. The actor conveys the type of their character—fool, good-­ time girl, patriarchal father figure and so on—by focusing on a few salient features as popularly understood and presenting these to often enthusiastic public recognition. With serious theatre this may lead to melodramatic performances that sharply divide good and bad characters, ensuring that audiences know which type the character belongs to and where their sympathies should be placed. For comedy actors often in addition play up slapstick elements to ensure audiences get the laughs they expect from the show. The above sentence indicates where presentational and melodramatic acting can be problematic. I have often seen that in their anxiety to engage audiences—and in particular to get easy laughs—actors may exaggerate performances as a default position. We also see acting that at times plays up to social stereotypes, thereby precluding more nuanced exploration of motivations and social complexities. The issue, I think, is not to do with presentational acting as such but, particularly with inexperienced actors and directors, a lack of rehearsal that explores other potential modes of performance, something that in turn relates to poor opportunities for many to access the training that would enable theatre makers to choose between alternative acting styles. Generally we see less extreme acting in those who have gone through formal training programmes, while in my experience many purely commercial, school and Theatre for Development groups use melodrama and presentational acting to make easy moralistic and sentimental points, to ensure they carry audiences with them and to win laughter and applause.

Themes Many themes dealt with in East African theatre have been transnational. This discussion will follow a loose timeline as certain themes predominate across the region in particular decades. The first thing to note is how few plays were written by Africans during the colonial period. Partly this is because only a small percentage of the population, and that nearly exclusively male, had access to the secondary schooling where most would first encounter modern theatre. Partly it is due to a lack of resources and infrastructure to support African arts and partly it is because the colonial authorities were very wary of encouraging any activity which might be a focus of criticism of their rule. We therefore see that the only country in the region that produced more than a handful of original plays prior to the

 INTRODUCTION 

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decolonising wave of the early 1960s was the only independent nation, Ethiopia. Uniquely Ethiopian theatre can be traced back to 1921 and a play, Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals) written by a nobleman, Tekle Hawariat, who had spent his teenage years in Russia and there picked up a love of the art (Terega and Solomon 2014). Fabula was an allegorical critique of what he perceived as the misrule of the Empress Zauditu and her coterie of ministers and was summarily banned after a single performance. This example illustrates how from the outset East African theatre was intensely political. Where censorship has permitted it has remained so ever since. The theatrical coup executed by Ethiopia’s last Emperor Haile Selassie, when he came to power in 1930, shows how states have put energy into seeking to ensure that the political messages endorse, rather than critiquing, the state. As I argue in Chapter 2, Haile Selassie had a passion for theatre and nurtured it into the force it would become in his nation, but he also, at least until the late 1950s, through his patronage ensured that it would be a form supporting a conservative nationalist view endorsing the status of the throne and the symbiotically linked Ethiopian Orthodox Church. On a smaller scale, Somali theatre in British Somaliland in the 1950s is a good example of political theatre contesting the government in power, in this case with a focus on protesting British and French segmentation of Somali-speaking peoples. So Somali plays from the mid1950s focussed on issues such as the British ceding territory to Ethiopia, the Haud, which Somalis saw as part of their lands; Soomaaladii hore iyo Soomaalilidii dambe (The Somalis of the Past and the Present) (1955); Cartan iyo Ceebla (Artan and Ebla) (1955) advocating Pan-Somali union, and Isa Seeg (Mutual Miss) (1958) discussing how in Djibouti elections were rigged by the French in 1958 to prevent Somalis there voting for union with wider Somalia. This theatre all emanated from British Somaliland, and it seems it was possible because the very small colonial presence included few Somali speakers capable of censoring the artists. In more heavily controlled colonial states this kind of freedom of expression was quite simply inconceivable. The best example I have of such repression comes from Uganda and deals with Ngugi’s student play, The Wound in the Heart (1962a), written for the annual Makerere University literary competition where a recent tradition had arisen that the winning play would be put on in the new National Theatre. This was what the then James Ngugi assumed would happen to his play and he was duly

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excited. He was, however, summoned to the office of his British tutor to be told that the sponsors of the staging, The British Council, refused to allow the play to be performed because it is mentioned in the text that a British district officer raped the wife of the Kenyan hero, a Mau Mau liberation fighter. The excuse given was that “They think a British officer could not do that” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 2016, 2–6). The rejection came with none of the reprisals Ngugi and many fellow playwrights would later endure from independent governments but it demonstrates how colonial states would not tolerate critical writing. We should bear in mind that, like The Wound in the Heart, up until the 1970s much of the theatre emerging from East Africa was what might be called apprentice work. A lot of it was short, one-act plays predominating with running times of well under an hour. It also involved many playwrights seeking to evolve writing styles they found relevant, or even seeking to understand how theatre works. Thanks to the efforts of a few expatriate teachers working in the region in the 1960s—notably the British tutor at Makerere, David Cook—we have an unusually rich published record of many of these early efforts from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in anthologies published in 1965 and 1968.24 These were written, in English, by students at Makerere University, and many are rather clunky, with stilted dialogue and often given as African equivalents of ‘drawing room’ drama. However, we also see emerging attempts at more indigenously inspired theatre, notably Tom Omara’s 1965 piece The Exodus and Elvania Zirimu’s Family Spear (1972), both of which recount and question aspects of myth and modern relations to those stories. In a different kind of apprenticeship, while the Ugandans and Kenyans struggled not to be over-determined by Western models and tutelage, Ethiopian early playwrights engaged in a series of what now seem somewhat eccentric stylistic experiments. The dominant influence here was the art forms; music, fine art and poetry of the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox Church, exemplified both in the sermon plays of nobleman Ras-Bitwodded (Lord-Beloved) Makonnen Endalkachew and in the musical spectaculars—with sermon elements—of school teacher Yoftahe Negussie. An imperial fashion for playwriting between the 1930s and 1950s meant many who had little idea of just what constituted a play tried their hand at the art. The longest play ran to thirteen acts and in some stage directions were not differentiated from spoken text (Kane 1975, 21). By far the most widespread transnational trope in this theatre—one that has played out in various ways across the entire time period of this

 INTRODUCTION 

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study—is the tension between what was perceived as tradition and imported ideas representing modernity. This was particularly strong in the 1960s and early 1970s. It took a variety of forms. One of the most interesting is, I think, the ambivalence felt by many playwrights about where their countries should seek to find a balance between valuing the indigenous and welcoming the new. This is hardly surprising given that the writers were usually young people who had experienced the dubious benefits of colonial/westernised education, while in their earlier youth and in holidays living with communities many of which were relatively untouched by new knowledge and thinking. A range of playwrights therefore give us profoundly flawed protagonists, crippled by their inability to choose or reconcile between the old values and the new. So, for example, the early Ugandan play, written in Luganda by Wycliffe Kiyingi in 1954, Pio Mberenge Kamulali (Pio Mberenge Kamulali) has its protagonist living a double life, pretending to be a good monogamous Christian leader in the daytime but living as a polygamous Ugandan chief at night (Mbowa 1994, 124). Ngugi’s 1962 play, The Black Hermit, has as its protagonist the graduate Remi who has to choose between two women—the bride approved for him by his village community, Thoni, and his white city lover, Jane. As Mbughuni explains: ‘He cannot make a choice between his tribal customs and their binding legacy on the one side, and the modern cosmopolitan life of the city’ (1976, 95). Even in comedy we see the same theme. The Ethiopian, Mengistu Lemma’s much loved 1963 piece, Yelecha Gebecha (Marriage of Unequals), has an idealistic educated protagonist, Baharu. In this instance our hero thinks he does know the answer to the tradition/modernity conundrum. He leaves the city and seeks to educate a village community. However, Baharu severely under-estimates the forces of conservatism and temporarily loses his village bride. This being a comedy all comes right in the end, but the playwright is very obviously warning that naïve goodwill will not be sufficient to create a utopian marrying of the best of old and new worlds (Plastow 1996, 97–8). Ethiopian texts frequently position the urban as synonymous with decadent modernity and the rural with conservative tradition. A similar split can be seen elsewhere. So numerous Somali plays warn against the corrupting tendencies of the city, a good example being Ali Sugulle’s 1966 production Kalahaab iyo Kalahaad (Wide Apart and Blown Asunder). Here the civil servant, Ina Caateeye, abandons tradition when he starts attending nightclubs, womanising and getting drunk. The playwright embodies the tensions between old and new—in this case very definitely

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in favour of the old—when he pits nightclub dancers to western music against an invading group of upright young Somalis who enter the den of corruption and perform a traditional Somali dance challenging Ina and his associates to join them. Very few voices across the region come down unhesitatingly on one side or the other. Tradition is often seen as a straight-­ jacket, stifling individual choice and opportunity—in particular opportunity for women—but is celebrated for maintaining balance, order and a strong sense of identity; while modernity offers new knowledge and emancipations—especially for women—but often at the cost of losing identity, coming to despise one’s own culture and falling prey to the commonly portrayed evils of alcoholism and sexual license. The final evils of modernity pointed out in early plays, significantly featuring most strongly the more intensely colonised nations of Kenya and Uganda, are the dangers of colonial apemanship and selfish capitalistic greed. I link these together because they are both definitely seen as emanating from a desire to live a more European lifestyle. Mirroring Franz Fanon’s analysis that the first stage of cultural colonial domination of black minds is the unquestioning imitation of the white man,25 we see a number of plays in the immediate post-colonial period warning against this evil, usually in terms of material acquisitiveness. The Ugandan, Elvania Zirimu’s Keeping Up With the Mukasas (1962) is all about a man, Mwebe, cripplingly jealous of his neighbour’s superior prosperity, epitomised in the acquisition of a car; while the Kenyan, Gerishon Ngugi’s 1961 play, Nimelogwa Nisiwe na Mpenzi (I Need to Catch a Lover), features Ben who is madly jealous of the material success and acquisitions of his old school mates, in this case most particularly of a suitable wife. A second common thematic strand is nationalism. Given that this history is concerned with a time of liberation struggles and state efforts to unite disparate populations within national borders this is hardly surprising. As I discuss in Chapter 1 a central, unifying theme that helped create the popularity of Somali theatre was the trope urging irredentist struggle to unite all Somali-speaking territories within a single polity. In Chapter 3, there is extended discussion of how Ethiopians and Eritreans both used theatre as a major weapon in their war, with the Eritreans developing propaganda arts to an unprecedented apogee in the region. In Volume Two I will have a significant focus on how in the post-genocide era the Rwandan state has put huge efforts into ensuring that both state-sponsored performance spectacles and smaller theatrical events conform to the over-riding concern with building national unity (Breed 2014).

 INTRODUCTION 

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Related to nationalistic tropes has been an interest in certain nations in historical drama, often focused on decoloniality, recuperating histories elided by colonial narratives, or on asserting the glory of the nation. So we see the Tanzanian, Ebrahim Hussien’s, Kinjeketile (1970) staging an instance of resistance to German colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century to enact a fascinating debate regarding the power of ideas about liberty, unity and self-determination to plant seeds that will grow into successful national independence movements over time. An alternative view of the same rebellion, known as the Maji Maji wars, was created by Amandina Lihamba in 2016, who in her Nkhomanile, told the previously little known story of the eponymous female chief who played a leading role in the revolt (Shule 2015, 81). In Kenya the history of the national Mau Mau liberation struggle has been as contentious in theatre as in the historical record. This guerrilla war has been variously seen, by both Kenyans and international commentators, as a heroic fight against the huge power of the British Empire or as a struggle where ordinary Kenyans were forced into terrifying oathing rituals and support for the guerrillas against their will. The earliest play dealing with Mau Mau was by the best-known Kenyan Asian playwright, Kuldip Sondhi. In his 1968 piece, Encounter, he sought to show the point of view of both the British settlers and the Mau Mau guerillas, coming down broadly on the African side while condemning violence on both sides. This was followed by Kenneth Watene’s 1973 verse play, Dedan Kimathi, whose portrayal of the eponymous guerrilla leader as profoundly flawed led to such outcry that George Outa says it finished him as a playwright (Outa 2003, 56). The theatrical riposte was one of the most internationally well-known East African plays, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976), a work that celebrates Kimathi as a national hero and damns the corruption of colonialism and capitalism. Of all the countries under consideration it is undoubtedly Ethiopia that has most widely engaged with the history play. Prior to the 1960s pure fiction plays were rare, and the majority of serious drama either retold historical episodes of national glory focused on great leaders such as the mythical Queen of Sheba (Assaber Gebre-Hiwot’s 1958/9 Yenegesta Azab Tarikawi Guzo [The Historical Journey of the Queen of Sheba]) and the leader of nineteenth-century reunification, Tewodros (Germachew Tekle-Hawariat’s 1948/9 play Tewodros) or else enacted biblical stories, a favourite focus for the theatre of the Prime Minister, Makonnen

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Endalkachew (Plastow 1996, 56–57). There was a whole raft of plays written in Ethiopia in the 1950s reviewing the trauma and atrocities committed by the Italians during their seven-year occupation of the country from 1935 and celebrating Ethiopian resistance fighters.26 In later years fiction took centre stage but plays with a historical theme have remained popular, as epitomised by leading playwright, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’s much revived, and indeed three times re-adapted, play about the national hero, first produced in 1966, Tewodros. Much East African theatre of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s advocates a more or less socialist future. Given that the colonial powers had all been capitalist, that this was the period of the Cold War (often fought hotly in proxy wars across Africa) and a time when the vast majority of intellectuals and artists worldwide were influenced by socialist thought, it is hardly surprising that left-wing thinking of various shades dominated the theatre. What this also means is that governments which committed themselves to socialist policies tended to have an easier ride with playwrights than did more capitalist states. The early socialist years of Julius Nyerere’s administration, especially after the 1967 Arusha Declaration on socialism and self-reliance, are notable in that for more than a decade he had leading playwrights almost unequivocally writing in support of his policies. A whole raft of plays were written, for example, strongly advocating the later controversial villagization policy (Plastow 1996, 135–6). Nyerere’s linking, through his ideas of ujamaa (loosely familyhood), of the rural past with an ideal of a communitarian future also made it easy for playwrights to support his vision that seemed to bring together the best, most egalitarian elements of pre-­ colonial life with a specifically Tanzanian understanding of contemporary socialism. So we see plays such as Penina Muhando’s Tambueni Haki Zetu (Recognise Our Rights) (1973) and Edwin Semzaba’s Tendehogo (Tendehogo) (1980) that like Kinjeketile see links between past and present, inscribing that present in the most hopeful of terms. Tanzanian writers even invented a new dramatic form, ngonjera, constructed as dramatised poetic dialogue to support the ideals of ujamaa.27 It is important, though often difficult, to differentiate between the work of artists independently supporting socialist governments and work made with the encouragement, at the behest, or through the enforcement, of the state. In Tanzania the state directly backed a number of performance companies in its early years, increasingly via troupes emanating from nationalised industries and organisations. These groups always

 INTRODUCTION 

27

supported the government line on key issues and it is impossible now to know what genuine ideological commitment was being expressed as opposed to simply saying what your funder wanted said. All indications are that Nyerere’s policies enjoyed massive support in his first decade of rule, but by the time I was living in the country in the immediate post-Nyerere government period of the late 1980s, and even though troupes were no longer enjoying direct state support, they had fallen into a continuing trope of blindly supporting the government and parroting slogans in support of CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi), Nyerere’s political party. Writing in 1985 Mlama calls this ‘puppet art which largely parrots what the leaders are saying’. She says there is ‘no artistic treatment of the content [or] any views or analysis or interpretation of the subjects expressed’ (14). Very similar situations existed in both Ethiopia and Somalia under the Marxist dictatorships of Mengistu Haile Mariam (1975–1991) and Siyad Barre (1968–1990) respectively; though because these were military dictatorships criticising the state through art could lead to very serious consequences indeed. In all these countries there were artists who maintained a critical distance and sought to continue to exercise the right to critique the state, but the mass of popular artistic production was highly propagandistic. The ever increasing danger of challenging oppressive governments, both ostensibly left-wing—in Ethiopia and Somalia—and avowedly capitalist—Djibouti and Kenya—through theatre would become ever more apparent in the 1970s and 1980s. Ngugi would begin by rocking the establishment with the popular response spilling out on to the street when his The Trial of Dedan Kimathi was staged at the normally white-­controlled National Theatre (Plastow 2014a, b), and public response only escalated when he started putting on community theatre in Gikuyu. Ngaheeka Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) (1977) led to a year’s imprisonment, before following an abortive production of Maitu Njugira (Mother, Sing For Me) (1981) both the playwright and his collaborator, Ngugi wa Mirii, had to flee in to exile and the people’s open air theatre in Kamiriithu was razed to the ground by government order (Bjorkman 1989). In Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia I show in Chapters 1 and 3 how multiple playwrights contesting dictatorial rule suffered imprisonment, with the Eritrean, Soloman Gebreghzier, surviving an execution squad that riddled him with twenty-four bullets and left him permanently disabled for putting on his 1974 anti-Ethiopian play (Uninherited Wealth). In Uganda leading playwrights John Ruganda and Austin Bukenya were both forced

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to flee the country in the 1970s because of their writings, before being followed by Robert Serumaga whose command performance of his Renga Moi (1977) in front of a troika of African dictators (Amin, Bokassa of the Central African Republic and Mobutu of Zaire) led to his entire company having to flee the country, with three actors caught and murdered by the state (Rubin 2014, 191–193). The result of this widespread artistic repression was that from the mid-1980s we see a diminution of overtly politically ideological theatre contesting the state, a move to theatre focusing on more social problems and entertainment and the rise of Theatre for Development.

The Theatre for Development Conundrum Since the mid-1980s when an economic downturn led to a collapse in prices for many primary products grown or extracted in the Global South and support for international socialism foundered, Structural Adjustment Programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for loans led to massive cutbacks in many African nations in social, cultural and educational programmes. As a result support for indigenous theatres, productions and playwrights became extremely difficult to find. Into the void stepped the phenomenon commonly known as Theatre for Development. This practice, explicitly focused on message-based theatre, has become by far the most widespread source of theatrical funding across East Africa. Generally funded by INGOs (International Non-Governmental Organisations) with no knowledge or interest in locally inflected art forms, groups ranging from enthusiastic school leavers to some of the biggest professional outfits, such as Steven Rwangwezi’s Ndere Troupe in Uganda or Mashirika in Rwanda, started producing work to order; sometimes with idealism about the intended aims—raising AIDS awareness, supporting projects trying to get girls into education or promoting inter-ethnic harmony—but mostly driven by the need to make a living for artists in a tough economic environment (Plastow 2014a, b). Universities joined in with modules or whole courses devoted to training students to deliver Theatre for Development and sometimes with departments themselves bidding to make the work. However, once basic models had been established, the ‘seven stage model’ in Tanzania or ‘magnet theatre’ in Kenya, plus INGOs pushing the omnipresent Forum Theatre mode of production,28 these have tended to be unquestioningly replicated, with performances commonly taking place in market places and

 INTRODUCTION 

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evaluations based on the numbers estimated to have seen the work rather than any more sophisticated or nuanced understanding of meaningful impact. This is of course a simplification of wide range of practices that I will be exploring in Volume Two, but whilst TfD has sustained and in some cases expanded theatre groups across the region, it is highly questionable both as to whether it has often had the desired social impacts or whether it has been of any benefit to culture, thought or artistic excellence. A number of commentators decried the dumbing down of art for propaganda purposes in the later years of socialist propaganda, but it is arguable that this highly controlled state patronage has only been replaced by funding for equally banal development art that being foreign funded is even more problematic in its distance from local performance languages and its imposition of neo-colonial agendas in terms of both form and content.

Contemporary East African Theatres In the twenty-first century, we see theatre traditions becoming ever more divergent. In Eritrea the form has almost died except for propaganda performances in the face of extreme government repression. In Somalia protracted civil war and the rise of Wahabi Islamic power that categorises theatre as haram (forbidden) has had a similar effect, though in Somaliland and in the Somali diaspora creative artists are fighting back. Without the vivifying force of Somali theatre work in tiny Djibouti struggles; with the additional complication of three language theatres; French, Somali and Afar, competing for scarce resources and audience. A further casualty appears to be Tanzanian theatre. The once huge commercial variety tradition has lost out to television and video consumption and the loss of political sponsorship. In the late twentieth century this was replaced by a massive engagement with INGO funded Theatre for Development that funded a host of both more professional and community group activity, but recent commentators have bemoaned the recent drying up of this source of funding (Shule 2015). With little state support, school drama or intellectual leadership Tanzanian theatre seems to have lost a sense of direction and ideas of how to regain either finance or popular audiences. Somewhat brighter stories can be told elsewhere. In conflict-riven Burundi a number of agencies have been funding theatre work largely focused on community cohesion; while in Rwanda since the genocide the state, international agencies and both indigenous and international artists

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have flooded into the country with a range of initiatives using the arts with an overwhelming focus on memorialising the dead and seeking to build national unity. Uganda and Kenya both retain a strong schools drama tradition which feeds into a host of enthusiastic community groups. Professional, semi-professional and other quasi-commercial companies struggle; picking up TfD work where they can to supplement putting on their own plays for often short runs in a range of theatres, cinemas and other co-opted spaces, but where one group fails another seems to spring into being and love of the art is widespread in small towns and cities across the countries. Only Ethiopia retains a strong state-backed, popular professional theatre alongside more than a dozen university theatre departments, though activity remains massively centred on the capital of Addis Ababa. The one new area that is growing across the region, notably within the past decade, is the international theatre or arts festival. Until the current decade the only such festival was held in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, where the arts college has sponsored a largely Swahili—though with international guests—event, every year since 1982. However, in Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda since 2010 each country has set up international theatre festivals that bring together leading companies from across the region as well as from a range of nations worldwide. The force in most cases driving this initiative has been the US originating East African Sundance Institute, but local artists have enthusiastically answered the call and a range of national and international players have added their funding to the events, which surely gives a welcome transnational boost and intercultural perspective to theatre across the region.

How Do You Build a Strong East African Theatre? Something that came increasingly to interest me as I worked on this project was the issue of why theatre has been extensive and popular in certain places and at certain times while making negligible impact elsewhere. Given a contemporary world where many of my African colleagues have made what I think are premature declarations that theatre is dying in the face of television and film, but where most certainly video drama can drain audiences for live art, while new forms like live comedy shows are attracting large audiences in a number of the region’s cities where theatre fails to have the same ‘pull’, it is surely worth thinking about the factors that have influenced the evolution of East African theatres.

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My strongest conclusion is that if you want theatre makers and audiences you have to get people young and nourish school drama. In every country and pretty much throughout the entire time period of this study, the vast majority of those involved in making and with any interest in going to the theatre acquired the spark for their interest at school. As recently as July 2019, I was discussing this question with my friend Obul— part-time Theatre for Development actor/part-time fisherman, but a man so in love with acting that he has set up an informal theatre group amongst his fellow fishermen in Homa Bay, a small town in Western Kenya by the side of Lake Victoria. As we were digging our car out from the mud of a village track after a show I asked Obul where he had got his passion for theatre from. ‘At school’, was his unhesitating answer; an answer I have heard time again, from old and young across the region, and something that fits with my earlier discussion of how theatre began to be popularised in Somalia and Ethiopia. It is not that Theatre Studies are a strong element of the taught curriculum anywhere, though in Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya the state is hesitantly attempting to make arts subjects more a part of core teaching. What we are talking about generally is extra-curricular school drama, often made for special days or for national drama festivals. There is a direct historical reason involved here that I contend explains why theatre is stronger in ex-British than in Italian or French former colonies. Quite simply the British have a much stronger tradition of school drama then do either France or Italy and when British teachers came to work in East African secondary schools they everywhere started putting on school plays. This even occurred when the teaching was by British proxies. So in Somaliland and Ethiopia some of early teachers were Egyptian, but those Egyptians had attended British colonial schools and were generally working to a British curriculum. Interestingly the only British-run school for Ethiopians in Ethiopia, the Wingate School, was the place that inspired both Ethiopia’s most famous playwright, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, and the Eritrean who for many years has run his country’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Solomon Tsehaye, to first engage with drama. When the British went on, under the auspices of the British Council, to set up national schools’ drama festivals in the 1950s in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, these became the focus of school drama. It is surely significant that Kenya, with very poor formal drama teaching at any level, has literally hundreds of theatre groups scattered throughout the country, and it is Kenya that has continued with its annual schools festival, elaborating it into a massive national event, taking place at local, regional and national

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levels over a period of months; while in Tanzania, where the festival was dropped in the 1970s, theatre making has been in decline over the past twenty years. A further significant fact is that from soon after their inception these festivals allowed entries in local languages, while in francophone Africa what school drama did take place was almost always in French, limiting interest to a small elite. Many texts I have consulted state in vague terms that the missionary churches had significant responsibility for promoting theatre. I have found little evidence to support this contention. A number of accounts speak of short sketches made for evangelical purposes and these were probably numerous, but more substantial theatre making seems to have been very limited. Churches were very interested in music, developing choral festivals from the second decade of the twentieth century in Uganda, way before any equivalent theatrical event, because this fitted with colonial Christian patterns of worship. Theatre seems to have been much less a focus of activity and generally small scale. The second key factor in nourishing a vibrant theatre has been state interest and investment. As I argue in Chapter 2, the most important reason behind the establishment of a raft of professional theatres in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa was that the Emperor Haile Selassie loved theatre, which he patronised and supported extensively. We see similar boosts to national theatres when the socialist governments of post-­ imperial Ethiopia, of Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and of Siyad Barre’s Somalia, as well as the guerrilla fighters of the Eritrean liberation war, all decided to use theatre, from the 1960s through to around 1990, to promote their political and social agendas. In both Tanzania and Somalia the state sponsored a raft of theatre companies, each based in a national industry or occupation such as the Tanzanian company for cotton workers or the Somali teachers’ troupe. In Ethiopia the post-1974 government of Mengistu Haile Mariam sought to spread its propaganda both through the commissioning of agitprop plays and by setting up amateur variety groups across the country; while in Eritrea the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front promoted their variety troupes at every level of the guerrilla force, from platoon to brigade, sponsored a central touring company that went as far as visiting diaspora communities in Sudan, Italy and the USA and even set up groups among displaced women, in revolutionary schools, among doctors and among Ethiopian prisoners of war. This was notably a socialist initiative, bringing the contemporary arts for the first time to many living outside the cities, but completely absent in countries like

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Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya and Rwanda that stayed on the capitalist side of the Cold War. Linked to state investment in theatre companies is the issue of investment in suitable buildings. As I travelled East Africa for this project one of the most common complaints I encountered was the problem of lack of good rehearsal and performance venues. Without shelter working during the rainy seasons, or when it is particularly hot, is quite impracticable. Moreover, without a demarcated area and control over entrance it is impossible to mount anything but free theatre performances. There are also a range of technical concerns; lighting and sound effects, for example, are much more difficult to achieve outside a suitable building and without either a raised stage or raked seating audience numbers are necessarily limited. The long-standing success of theatre in Addis Ababa is predicated on the presence of the five state-owned theatres with staff as government employees. When Siyad Barre wanted to promote theatre in Somalia he sponsored the building of a network of usable community halls around the country to supplement the two formal theatres in Mogadishu and Hargeisa (the capitals of Somalia and Somaliland). Elsewhere the countries I am considering all have only one large formal theatre, often located, as is the case in Kenya, in upmarket areas inaccessible to ordinary people.29 In Burundi and Rwanda a symptom of their weak theatre history is that there is no state theatre building. In the twenty-first century a number of theatre organisations have sought to build their own theatre spaces. In Uganda the commercially popular Ebonies have a building in downtown Kampala, while the most successful group promoting indigenous dance and music, the Ndere Troupe, has built a beautiful open-air auditorium on the edge of town. The success of these initiatives is exceptional in the region. Elsewhere theatre is characterised by struggle to keep open small, capital-based arts centres, a significant example being Phoenix Arts in Nairobi. Opening in the 1980s the difficulties of maintaining and paying the bills for a 120-seat commercial theatre led to many financially perilous moments before final closure in 2017 (Nderitu 2017). This lack of investment has only strengthened neo-colonial influences. In the present day the sponsors of, and providers of space for, theatre have often been institutions like the French Alliance Francaise, the German Goethe Institute or The British Council. All these organisations privilege plays from, or works made in collaboration with, artists from their countries. This situation makes contemporary

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lack of concern with theatre—and nearly all other cultural activity—that characterises most East African governments glaringly obvious.

Theatre Training The history of the training of East African theatre artists raises a raft of under-considered questions about what is needful or appropriate in any given situation. Throughout the period under consideration the overwhelming majority of artists have received their training ‘on the job’, that is, not in any formal teaching environment but under the guidance of the writer/directors and often impresarios who have run the various companies and projects. This approach has had both benefits and disadvantages. On the plus side it has at times enabled the development of strong, specifically culturally located, theatre forms, while also permitting a range of international borrowings: Arabic taarab and Chinese acrobatics in Tanzania; the Arab oud and Bollywood inspired music in Somalia and Congolese music across much of the region, to mention only a few ideas that have been incorporated on their own terms by various East African performance cultures. On the negative side I would list the lack of professionally trained theatre artists and theatre thinkers able to offer the full range of theatre-­ related skills and to construct training programmes that carefully consider how to bring international and indigenous performance ideas into the most fruitful and meaningful intercultural conversation in any given context; the lack of deep partnerships in many places between indigenous artists and the educated elite and the over-determined impositions (these have almost always come from the old colonial powers of Britain and France) that have sought to impose particular languages and forms, and sometimes particular imported plays, as models that East Africans should follow if they want to make ‘proper’ theatre. The problem of vocational training has concerned a range of theatre makers. A first attempt at a centre working out of the Kenya National Theatre was initiated by the first black director, Seth Adagala in 1968. However, the school failed to significantly engage with indigenous performance forms and made work only in English, closing in 1975. A similarly short-term venture was funded by Ethiopia’s leading playwright, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin in 1975. Again running out of a national theatre, this programme, staffed by a raft of Ethiopian internationally trained professionals, lasted for six years. Both initiatives closed for lack of continuing

 INTRODUCTION 

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funding. By this time universities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania had all set up theatre departments, in the latter three nations with strong ambitions to bring together indigenous and international performance forms; though Ethiopia has consistently failed to recognise folk forms as having any part in its theatre programme. All these institutions nurtured a range of major playwrights and performers and have been crucial to leadership in the arts. However, a common issue is that they have tended to fail to engage with popular forms and commercial arts and in Kenya and Uganda they have tended to produce work mainly in English. In a number of cases their initial energy has waned, with the departments in Tanzania and Uganda in recent years producing little practical work, while recent efforts to renew theatre studies in Kenya have failed to be backed up by the appointment of sufficient staff or suitable facilities. The only truly vocational programme running today in the region is the TaSuBa centre at Bagamoyo in Tanzania. There have been a range of shorter term projects run across the region, and since the 1980s a host of providers have run very short-term trainings specifically to facilitate Theatre for Development work, but everywhere we see a lack of programmes offering in-depth training in any theatre discipline or with the capacity to conceptualise and deliver training that would enable artists to think broadly and syncretically about how to make relevant theatre for national audiences. In particular there is a complete lack of training in design, technology and backstage skills.

Moving People A significant area of the transnational to take into account in various parts of the region has been the either voluntary or enforced movement of key people who subsequently cross-fertilised theatre across the region as a result of their international travels. This began notably with the establishment of Makerere University as the higher education centre for all of British East Africa promoting student literary and theatrical production from the late 1940s. Not only did many of the first generation of playwrights attend the university from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, they also mixed with others from as far afield as Malawi, Nigeria, the USA and the UK.  Annual playwriting competitions led to the establishment of the Makerere Travelling Theatre in 1964 (Cook 1965) which toured Uganda and Kenya annually and gave a practical training ground for a host of regional playmakers who then dispersed, often to teach in new universities

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in their own countries and set up drama courses there, and notably to ­initiate their own Travelling Theatres with similar initiative being set up in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. Even those who did not take active part in the theatre scene at Makerere appear to have been influenced by its activities; the most prominent example being the work of Makerere graduate and first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who chose to translate two Shakespeare plays into Kiswahili in the 1960s to demonstrate the poetic status of the language. The seed corn effect of Makerere indubitably enabled the setting up of theatre courses in universities in the other ex-British colonies, the establishment of elite intellectual theatre in those same countries and the first attempts, via the Travelling Theatre movement, to take serious modern theatre to the people. More traumatically the rise of repressive dictatorships fuelled movements of leading dramatists, particularly in the 1970s. So we see John Ruganda and Austin Bukenya, both leading Ugandan theatre figures, forced to move to, live and make their theatre in Kenya to escape Idi Amin’s murderous responses to any form of critique. And a decade later Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator Ngugi wa Mirii were in turn forced into exile from Kenya for their politically critical community theatre work in Kamiriithu. Ngugi wa Thiong’o went north to the UK and later the USA, but his colleague ended up in newly independent Zimbabwe where he became a major force behind an extraordinarily vibrant community theatre movement in that country throughout the 1980s (Plastow 1996, 168–172). As I show in Chapter 1, theatre makers in Somalia, Somaliland and Djibouti working in the Somali language freely crossed their mutual borders, feeding each other’s theatrical developments. Interviewees in Djibouti all told me that it was from their more experienced Somalian colleagues that they learned many of their skills, and some Somalis such as Hodeide and Ali Sugulle responded to specific invitations from colleagues and, post-Djiboutian independence, government requests, to go and help local artists build up their industry. Later on, as President Siyad Barre closed down freedom of expression a number of Somali artists were able to take refuge in Djibouti, while others who had perforce fled to Ethiopia became involved in the arts scene there. When the Somali theatre scene collapsed with the onset of civil war from 1990 Djiboutian theatre similarly suffered and significantly declined. The traumatic post-independence histories of Rwanda and Burundi with their cycles of genocidal violence regularly displacing large numbers

 INTRODUCTION 

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of people has meant all older artists I spoke to from these nations had international theatre experiences. A number of artists studied in the Congo with its vibrant theatre scene and in the 1980s brought back French language Congolese plays to put on in Rwanda and Burundi. They also cross-­ fertilised in that Rwandans spent time in Burundi and vice versa. The necessity to flee violence even before the horrific events in Rwanda in 1994 meant that a number of artists from both countries fled to their coloniser, Belgium and some of these have made work reflecting this influence in Belgium and France and back home. I could also mention the work of leading contemporary Rwandan theatre director, Hope Azeda, who trained in Uganda at Makerere in the 2000s and who still performs work there from time to time. Finally, as I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3 of this Volume, somewhat similarly to the ‘big brother-little brother’ dynamic between Somalia and Djibouti, early Eritrean theatre was strongly influenced by the more developed Ethiopian industry from the 1950s. A number of Ethiopian plays were translated into the Eritrean language of Tigrinya and the popular Addis Ababa variety performance form was taken up by the leading Eritrean theatre groups Ma.Te.De and subsequently Ma.Te.A. During the years when the countries were politically united theatre troupes regularly travelled between each other’s territories, and post-independence, before relations broke down from 1998, Eritrean cultural authorities visited Ethiopia to learn from their experiences and invited leading directors to come and co-direct shows in Eritrea. We can therefore see that, while few interactions have covered the entire region, where theatre makers share a language (either colonial or local) and/or significant cultural and political histories there has been much sharing of personnel, of plays and of form. Broadly this has left the region with four ‘blocks’ of shared experience, plays and people: the Somali language theatre shared by Djibouti, Somalia, Somaliland and in Southern Ethiopia; the Amharic/Tigrinya theatre of Ethiopia/Eritrea; the Anglophone theatre of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and the francophone experience of Rwanda and Burundi.

Women and the East African Stage There is a recurrent focus on women in theatre throughout this book, and each chapter has a section devoted to the subject, with a more extensive analysis of Ethiopian actresses in Chapter 3 of Volume One as an

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illustrative case study, because uniquely in that country I have been able to carry out research on women’s lives and work at intervals from the 1980s up until 2014 and have been able to talk with women who worked on the professional stage right back to the 1950s. In an industry that up until recently has been hugely dominated by men as playwrights, directors and impresarios, there is a transnational concern that women have been marginalised, misrepresented and sexualised on many East African stages, both as performers and in their dramatic representation. In every country in this study there is a general societal perception that all performers, both male and female, are not serious people and are likely to be of loose moral virtue. This has had negative impacts on men at times but has much more strongly affected women. In the early days of theatre in a number of the nations studied, women simply could not be found to go on stage because of the levels of social opprobrium and men had to take on female roles. This occurred particularly in all the nations of the Horn of Africa where we know that men took on female roles in many of the early plays while a desperate search took place to find women willing to act. It was also a problem in Burundi and Rwanda as early theatre productions were almost exclusively mounted in the male-only secondary education establishments of what was then a single Belgian colony. The first women I have been able to identify as actresses were the Ethiopians, Ketela Andarega and Aselafech Mamo who in 1932 appeared in Yoftahe’s Negussie’s, Dade Tura, a play critiquing polygamy and supporting women’s rights. The women were paid in jewellery and handbags! We then see an emerging pattern for many years across the region where women involved in theatre tended to come from either the highest or the lowest echelons of society. I think this can be relatively easily explained. High-class women had often had exposure to ‘modern’ ideas and in many cases had interacted extensively with Europeans through church or school, and occasionally through foreign travel. They often saw involvement in theatre as a statement of their modernity and liberation and the groups they worked with were often led by similar ‘modern’ young men. So, across British colonial East Africa in high schools, churches and notably in the regional university, Makerere, from the late 1940s there is considerable documentation to show that educated women were involving themselves in theatrical activity, though on a strictly amateur basis (Ntangaare and Breitinger 1999). Makerere is also important because it nurtured many of the first women playwrights through annual competitions, so that in the immediate post-colonial period we see the first play by

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a Kenyan woman, Rebecca Njau’s 1965 one act play condemning female genital mutilation, The Scar, and the first work by a Ugandan, Elvania Zirimu’s 1962 piece critiquing westernised materialism, Keeping Up With The Mukasas. Ethiopia’s first woman playwright was particularly cosmopolitan. Seneddu Gebru was born in 1916 and educated in Switzerland and France. At school she developed a love of theatre, and after a stint as a guerrilla fighter, seeking to overthrow the 1930s Italian occupation of Ethiopia, she became headmistress of the leading national girls’ high school and from there produced a stream of plays to be acted by her pupils that were often given command performances before Emperor Haile Selassie between 1947 and 1955 (Ashegrie 2012). Protected by class, educational status and often avoiding the grubby mercantilism that might be associated with the professional stage, elite women could go on to become leading national voices. So in Tanzania, Professors Penina Muhando Mlama and Amandina Lihamba have been leading actresses, dramatists and directors from the early 1970s, with Rose Mbowa of Uganda having a similar status through the 1970s and ‘80s; though elsewhere, notably in Djibouti, Somaliland and Rwanda we have had to wait for the twenty-first century for women writers and directors to emerge, something that has still not happened in Eritrea or Somalia. Professional actresses have been perceived very differently. This is of course not a situation unique to Africa. Women who transgress the domestic role society has prescribed for most of us through most of international history have often been seen as dangerously out of control; their challenge to patriarchy only being manageable by inscribing them as deviant and degenerate. The first Ethiopian and Eritrean actresses in the 1950s were recruited from bars. Bar women were sometimes professional musicians, entertaining their clients, but some also had a reputation for being willing to provide sexual entertainment and when they went on stage many saw this as a venue such women were similarly using to attract male custom. The anecdotal evidence, though no one I interviewed personally confirmed this, is that, largely because wages were so poor, some of the early Ethiopian actresses did also sell their favours. In countries that have had notable professional stage traditions, Ethiopia and Tanzania in particular, we know that many women performers, often multi-talented dancers, singers and actresses, were recruited from the uneducated classes, at least through until the late 1980s (Plastow 1996). These women were almost always poorly paid and were often expected to be sexually available to male impresarios, directors and sometimes to audience members, a situation

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that at times continues to this day. Due to their inferior social status they had little say in what they performed and little or no voice in the making of productions. Having said all this it was notable in many interviews I carried out, particularly in Tanzania and Ethiopia, that many women made considerable efforts to attain a stage career, often deceiving family and friends to take part in productions. These women commonly describe the glamour, the acclaim from audiences and the pride they feel in their skills as indisputably preferable to a life of domestic subservience (Plastow and Mahlet Solomon 2015). However, across the region, at least until the past twenty years or so, nearly all the women I spoke to were unmarried or married only men who were also in the profession. If they wanted to wed they commonly had to leave the stage. Happily the situation everywhere is slowly improving. Partly this is because more women on stage are more highly educated and partly because when they can also work for television and film they can sometimes earn better money. What I found most exciting in research for this book from 2015 was the number of young women I met who are no longer willing just to be voiceless performers. The most prolific female playwright I know of in East Africa is the Burundian, Marie-­ Louise Sizaburi, who has some seventy-five plays to her name and for a while lived entirely as a professional writer. But, in Somaliland, Rwanda, Djibouti and Ethiopia I met a raft of women who are not only acting or writing but are now producing and directing theatre, and where the male establishment refuses them space are challenging and subverting the dominant order, whether by setting up all female groups as among the female drummers of Rwanda led by Ariane Zaytzeff (Zaytzeff and Katese 2015) or by hiring unconventional spaces as in the case of Meaza Worku in Ethiopia to put on plays that are denied a stage in the professional theatres. The marginalisation of women has also affected their representation on stage. The male playwrighting gaze has seldom, with some honourable exceptions, made women the subject of drama and has tended to confine them to the classic roles of mother, virgin or whore. They have also often been forced to take on heavily symbolic roles, frequently as representatives of Mother Africa. In Somalia in the 1960s there was a raft of plays with a woman as an exploited or disputed love object, where she allegorically represented parts of Greater Somalia riven from the centre by imperialist machinations. Similarly, in Eritrea in the early days of the struggle for national independence several plays portrayed the country as a mother raped by a man signifying the oppressor, Ethiopia. The poor representation of women has sometimes been such that Ethiopia’s first graduate

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director, Jemanesh Solomon, when first given control of a state theatre in 1991 chose to put on only foreign plays and told me: ‘Women characters in Ethiopian plays are all puppets for the men. […] Most of them don’t have human characters, and it’s awful to play those parts.’ (Interview, Addis Ababa, 1992). With the rise of a new generation of female East African playwrights we are seeing more plays giving a female perspective, contesting patriarchy, sometimes, as in the work of Tanzanian, Penina Muhando-Mlama, holding women to account for their internalised beliefs in male superiority, but above all seeking to transcend stereotypical and cliched representations that have filled the region’s stages with noble mothers, sexually aggressive and money-digging good-time girls, beautiful young helpless victims and that invidious trope, the sugar-mummy.

Notes 1. Somaliland proclaimed itself a separate state in 1991, going back to old British colonial boundaries. It is recognised as such by only eight other nations and elsewhere is seen as an autonomous region of Somalia. 2. I have worked in and in relation to East Africa since I first went to teach at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia in 1984. Prior to this study I had lived, worked and researched at various times in relation to theatre in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. 3. The referendum overseen by the United Nations on independence in Eritrea was held in April 1993. 99.83% voted in favour. Elsewhere Ethiopia was allotted the Haud and the Ogaden, both Somali-inhabited areas, by the British in 1954 and 1948 respectively, while the North East Region of Somalia was given to Kenya by Britain in 1963 against the express wishes of the population and in a breaking of a United Kingdom promise. Kenya also accrued territory from Uganda in 1902 when the western highlands were transferred to facilitate European settlement. The border between Rwanda and Uganda was only formally established in 1920 and Rwanda and Burundi were ruled under first German and then Belgian colonialism as a single Ruanda-Urundi unit until their independence and separation in 1962. Internally in Uganda the ‘lost counties’ of Bunyoro caused massive discontent for seventy years after the British allotted the area to their favoured Buganda kingdom. They were only restored to Bunyoro after a plebiscite in 1964. 4. Examples would be endless but a couple of major ones might include Bugandan attempts to dominate weaker ethnic groups surrounding them over several hundred years, followed by a continuation and expansion of that role under British rule when the Europeans and the Baganda worked

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together to dominate, convert to Christianity and force acceptance of a protectorate on weaker neighbours. In Kenya inter-ethnic conflicts go back a similarly long in time but continue into the present day with elections that appeal to ethnic identities often leading to substantial violence, most notably recently in 2007, when over 1000 people died and half a million were temporarily displaced. https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/03/16/ ballots-bullets/organized-political-violence-and-kenyas-crisis-governance. 5. Somali peoples live in large numbers not only in Somalia and Somaliland but also in Djibouti, southern Ethiopia and North East Kenya. 6. Eritrea was established as a separate state by the Italians with the border with Ethiopia established in 1896 after the Italians lost a war in invasion at the Battle of Adwa. After the Second World War Eritrea became a British-­ administered area until 1952. During this time urban theatre groups in Asmara used their theatre to argue for unification with Ethiopia. However, the Emperor’s abuses of Eritrean federal freedoms and final incorporation of the country as a simple region led to a volte face from the mid-1960s with artists seeking independence. 7. For the Italian origins of classical ballet see bachtrack.com/article-balletfocus-influence-italian-virtuosity-russian-ballet-July-2017. For the origins of opera see sfopera.com/discover-opera/intro-to-opera/a-brief-historyof-opera/. 8. On the African origins of gospel music see Don Cusic, 1990, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music. Bowling Green State University. On rap see Cheryl L. Keyes, 1996, ‘At the Crossroads: Rap Music and Its African Nexus’, Ethnomusicolgy, 40:2, 223–248. On hip-hop see Catherine M. Apert, 2016, ‘Locating Hip Hop origins: Popular Music and Tradition in Senegal’, Africa, 86:2, 237–262. 9. Kwame Nkrumah was the first leader of independent Ghana, the first African nation to decolonise. He was a passionate Pan-Africanist with a vision for African nations coming together as they gained independence. 10. Julius Nyerere, the founding president of Tanganyika (Tanzania from when it joined with Zanzibar in 1964), offered to postpone Tanganyikan independence if this would facilitate joining with Kenya and Uganda, an offer that was not taken up. 11. Some of the most famous cultural dehumanisations of Africans would include the portrayal of Africans in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the book that partially inspired Chinua Achebe’s first masterpiece, Things Fall Apart and the writings of Kenyan white settler, Isak Dinesen who in her 1960 memoir, Shadows on the Grass, states unequivocally that black Kenyans could only attain the mental maturity of a European child of nine, while Somalis had ‘the mentality of boys of our own race at the age of 13–17’ (15).

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12. See Aime Cesaire, 1956, ‘Culture et colonisation’, Presence Africaine, 190–205 and 2000, trans Joan Pinkham, Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. 13. There are too many examples to be remotely comprehensive here, but one only has to consider the ancient racism of highland Ethiopians who historically enslaved Bantu Africans, seeing them as intrinsically inferior, or the attitudes of Rwandans towards their minority Batwa population both historically and in the present day, marginalising and at times killing members of this pygmy society. https://unpo.org/members/7861. 14. Poetry has long been the most revered artistic form in Somali culture. For further information on the specific hees form see Orwin, 2001. Qene is a similarly important Amharic form, developed over many hundreds of years as part of religious education in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. For further information on qene see Levine, 1965. Both forms were until recently primarily oral, required years of training and practice, and were widely revered in society. 15. The first play to emerge from what was then Ruanda-Urundi was L’Optimiste (The Optimist) in 1954 in Rwanda but few others followed in the next ten years. The first specifically Burundian play Abuzukuru ba Kimotabugabo (Grandchildren of the Whole Man) was only written in 1967. 16. See Birehanu and Plastow, 2017, ‘An Absurdist in Addis Ababa: Manyazewal Ebdeshaw’s Engida’ in eds. Banham and Plastow, African Theatre: Six Plays from East and West Africa, Oxford: James Currey. This volume also contains the English translation of the play text by the playwright. 17. Somalis say that plays are composed not written. This is because theatre developed from the work of various bands and in the early days was transmitted entirely orally. 18. See Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1986, Decolonising the Mind, London: James Currey and 1993, Moving the Centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms. London: James Currey. 19. An excellent example of the truth of this contention comes from the southern African country of Malawi. In 2016 Malawian university students who all spoke fluent English and had studied Shakespeare in English for their A levels at school, developed and produced the first ever Chichewa (a Malawian language) Shakespeare—a version of Romeo and Juliet. All the students involved said that they had hated studying Shakespeare for their exams in English but found the Chichewa version entertaining and meaningful. Similar responses were elicited when the production was taken to a rural village. (Bonsall, Amy, 2017, Exploring Intercultural Shakespeare

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Production for a 21st Century Malawian Audience, Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Leeds). 20. Universities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda all have theatre departments and teach some material on national or African theatre but specific module descriptions are not available. 21. See: Bjorkman, Ingrid, 1989, Mother Sing For Me: People’s Theatre in Kenya. London: Zed Press. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1981, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. London: Heinemann and 1986, Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey. 22. See, for example: Edmondson, Laura, 2007, Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage, Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Fiebach, Joachim, 1970, ‘On the Social Function of Modern African Theatre and Brecht’, Darlite, 4:2, 5–19; Hussein, Ebrahim, 1974, On the Development of Theatre in East Africa, (Unpublished PhD thesis) Humboldt University; Nyoni, Frowin, 1998, Theatre and Communication, (Unpublished PhD) University of Leeds; Philipson, Robert, 1989, Drama and the National Culture: A Marxist Study of Ebrahim Hussein, (Unpublished PhD thesis) University of Wisconsin; Shule, V, 2011, ‘Theatre in/for Development in Tanzania: A Neoliberal Nightmare’ In eds T.  Hauptfleisch, & K.  Igweonu, Trends in Twenty-first Century African Theatre and Performance’. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 190–215. 23. Ciarunji Chesaina, Simon Peter Otieno, Rose Komu, Amandina Lihamba, Frowin Nyoni, Sam Kasule, Evelyn Lutwama-Rukondo and Susan Kiguli all wrote their PhDs from the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds. Bantu Mwaura, Juma Bakari, Patrick Mangeni, Rose Mbowa, Fagil Maddy and Nuwa Sentogo all wrote MA theses, each under the supervision of either Martin Banham or Jane Plastow. 24. See Cook, David, ed, 1965, Origin East Africa: A Makerere Anthology, London: Heinemann, and Cook, David and Miles Lee, ed, 1968, Short East African Plays in English, London: Heinemann. 25. See ‘On National Consciousness’ in Fanon, Frantz, 1961, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. 26. See Plastow (1996, 58). 27. Ngonjera was popularised by Mathias Mnyampala as an adaptation of verse-dialogue poetry as seen in the traditions of several Tanzanian ethnic groups. It was created specifically to teach people about the messages of Tanzanian socialism. 28. ‘The seven stage’ model promulgated in Tanzania was established at Dar es Salaam University in the 1980s as the only accepted way of making TfD and has continued largely unchallenged ever since. ‘Magnet Theatre’ was developed by Oluoch Madiang in Kenya in the early 2000s as an indigenised version of Forum Theatre and continues to be applied by many

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groups as the only way to make TfD, while Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre has been taken up by a host of INGOs similarly as the only model they teach theatre makers to use in various countries not only in East Africa but across the Global South. 29. In Tanzania and more extensively in Kenya the British colonists built a series of what are known as Little Theatres in various towns. Originally these put on plays from the West for the colonists’ entertainment. Some of these theatres still exist and various amateur and semi-professional groups use them.

References Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. Afrah, Mohamed. 2013. Between Continuity and Innovation: Transitional Nature of Post-Independence Somali Poetry and Drama (Unpublished PhD) University of London. Afrax, Maxamed. 1987. Fan Masraxeedka Soomaalida. Apert, Catherine M. 2016. Locating Hip Hop Origins: Popular Music and Tradition in Senegal. Africa 86 (2): 237–262. Ashegrie, Aboneh. 2012. The Role of Women on the Ethiopian Stage. Journal of African Cultural Studies 24 (1): 1–8. Banham, Martin, ed. 1994. Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bjorkman, Ingrid. 1989. Mother, Sing For Me: People’s Theatre in Kenya. London: Zed Press. Bonsall, Amy. 2017. Exploring Intercultural Shakespeare Production for a 21st Century Malawian Audience (Unpublished PhD) University of Leeds. Breed, Ananda. 2014. Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice, Reconciliation. Kolkata: Seagull Press. Breitinger, Eckhard, ed. 1999. Uganda: The Cultural Landscape. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies. Cesaire, Aime. 1956. Culture et colonisation. Presence Africaine, 190–205. ———. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism (trans. Joan Pinkham). New York: Monthly Review Press. Conrad, J. 1899. Heart of Darkness. London: Blackwood’s Magazine. Cook, David, ed. 1965. Origin East Africa: A Makerere Anthology. London: Heinemann. Cook, David, and Miles Lee, eds. 1968. Short East African Plays in English. London: Heinemann. Cusic, Don. 1990. The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University.

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Diakhate, Ousmane, and Hansel Ndumbe Eyoh, 2017. The Roots of African Theatre Ritual and Orality in the Pre-Colonial Period, in Critical Stages, No15. Dineson, Isak. 1960. Shadows on the Grass. London: Michael Joseph. Edmondson, Laura. 2007. Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fanon, Franz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fiebach, Joachim. 1974. On the Social Function of Modern African Theatre and Brecht. Darlite 4 (2): 5–19. Gates, Henry Louis, ed. 2002. Dictionary of African Biography. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gebre-Hiwot, Asseber. 1958/9. Yenegesta Azab Tarikawi Guzo (The Historical Journey of the Queen of Sheba). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. Germachew, Teklehawariat. 1948/9. Tewodros. Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. Hassan Sheikh Mumin. 1974. A Somali Play. Leopard among the Women. Shabeelnaagood, translated with an introduction by B.W. Andrzejewski. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hussein, Ebrahim. 1970. Kinjeketile (Kinjeketile). Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press. ———. 1974. On the Development of Theatre in East Africa (Unpublished PhD Thesis). Humboldt University. Hussein Aw Farah. 1955. Cartan iyo Ceebla (Artan and Ebla). Johnson, John William. 1974. Heelloy, Heelleelloy: The Development of the Genre Hello in Somali Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kane, Thomas. 1975. Ethiopian Literature in Amharic. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz. Kapuscinski, Ryszard. 1978. The Emperor. London: Quartet. Kasule, Sam. 2013. Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre: Trends in Ugandan Theatre since 1960. London: Adonis & Abbey. Keyes, Cheryl L. 1996. At the Crossroads: Rap Music and Its African Nexus. Ethnomusicolgy 40 (2): 223–248. Kiguli, Susan. 2005. Oral Poetry and Popular Song in Post-apartheid South Africa and Post-civil War Uganda: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Performance (Unpublished PhD). University of Leeds. Kiyingi, Wycliffe. 1954. Pio Mberenge Kamulali (Pio Mberenge Kamulali). Komu, Rose. 2017. A History of Kenyan Theatre: The Intersections between Culture and Politics (Unpublished PhD). University of Leeds. Koppen, Grit. 2010. Caught between Commerce and Censorship. In Theatre in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Rolf C. Hemke, 26–28. Berlin: Theatre der Zeit. Lealem Berhanu, and Mahlet Solomon. 2014. Religious, Political and Cultural Influences on the First Ethiopian Playwright, Tekle Hawariat Tekle Mariam and his Play Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia. Journal of African Cultural Studies 26 (3): 276–286.

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Lemma, Mengistu. 1963. Yelecha Gebecha (Marriage of Unequals), Published in English. Ethiopian Observer. Levine, Donald. 1965. Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levtzion, Nehemia, and Randall L. Pouwels, eds. 2000. The History of Islam in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. Lihamba, Amandina. 1985. Politics and Theatre in Tanzania after the Arusha Declaration: 1967–1984 (Unpublished PhD Thesis) University of Leeds. ———. 2016. Nkhomanile (Nkhomanile). Liyong, Taban Lo. 1969. The Last Word: Cultural Synthesism. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. Losambe, Lokangaka, and Devi Sarinjeive, 2001. Pre-Colonial and Post-Colonial Drama and Theatre in Africa. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press. Manyazewal, Endeshaw. 2016. Engida (The Guest). Published in English in African Theatre: Six Plays from East and West Africa, ed. Jane and Martin Banham, 2017, 98–128. Oxford: James Currey. Matzke, Christine. 2003. En-gendering Theatre in Eritrea: The Roles and Representations of Women in the Perforrming Arts (Unpublished PhD Thesis) University of Leeds. Mbowa, Rose. 1994. Artists Under Siege: Theatre and the Dictatorial Regimes in Uganda. In Theatre and Performance in Africa, ed. Eckhard Breitinger, 123–135. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies. ———. 1999. Luganda Theatre and its Audience. In Uganda: The Cultural Landscape, ed. Eckhard Breitinger, 227–246. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies. Mbughuni, L. 1976. Old and New Drama from East Africa. African Literature Today, 85–98. Mlama, Penina. 1973. Tambueni Haki Zetu (Recognise Our Rights). Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House. ———. 1985. Tanzania’s Cultural Policy and Its Implications for the Contribution of Arts to Socialist Development. Utafiti 12 (1): 9–19. ———. 1991. Culture and Development: The Popular Theatre Approach in Africa. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies. Mulugeta, Seyoum. 1972. (BA History Thesis, Addis Ababa University) No title available. Nayigiziki, J. Saverio. 1954. L’Optimiste (The Optimist). Astrida: Groupe Scolaire d’Astrida. Nderitu, Alex. 2017. Kenyan Theatre, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The Theatre Times. Ngugi, Gerishon. 1961. Nimelogwa! Nisiwe na Mpenzi (I am Bewitched! I Need to Catch a Lover).

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Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1962a. The Wound in the Heart (Published as James Ngugi, 1970, in This Time Tomorrow. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau). ———. 1962b. The Black Hermit (Published as James Ngugi, 1970, in This Time Tomorrow. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau). ——— and Ngugi wa Mirii. 1977. Ngaheeka Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) (Published 1980). Nairobi: Heinemann. ———. 1981a. Maitu Njugira (Mother, Sing For Me). ———. 1981b. Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary. London: Heinemann. ———. 1986. Decolonising the Mind. London: James Currey. ———. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Curry. ———. 2016. Birth of a Dream Weaver. New York: The New Press. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Micere Mugo. 1976. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi. London: Heinemann. Njau, Rebecca. 1965. The Scar. Moshi, Tanzania: Kibo Art Gallery. Nsengimana, Joseph, and Jean-Baptiste Nkuriyingoma. 1997. Rwanda. In The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Africa, ed. Don Rubin, 236–239. London: Routledge. Ntangaare, Mercy, and Eckhard Breitinger. 1999. Ugandan Drama in English. In Uganda: The Cultural Landscape, ed. Eckhard Breitinger, 247–272. Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies. Nyoni, Frowin. 1998. Conformity and Change: Tanzanian Rural Theatre and Socio-political Changes (Unpublished PhD Thesis) University of Leeds. Nzikobanyanka, Emmanuel. 1967. Abuzukuru ba Kimotabugabo (Grandchildren of the Whole Man). Omara, Tom. 1968. The Exodus. In Short East African Plays in English, ed. David Cook and Miles Lee. London: Heinemann. Orwin, Martin. 2001. Introduction to Somali Poetry. Modern Poetry in Translation, 17. Otieno, Simon Peter. 2008. Modes and Codes: Theatre on HIV/AIDS in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa: Practice of Youth Theatre in East and Southern Africa (Unpublished PhD) University of Leeds. Outa, George. 2003. Encyclopaedia of African Literature. London: Routledge. Philipson, Robert. 1989. Drama and the National Culture: A Marxist Study of Ebrahim Hussein (Unpublished PhD). University of Wisconsin. Pinter, Harold. 1960. The Caretaker. London: Methuen. Plastow, Jane. 1996. African Theatre and Politics: The Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2014a. Domestication or Transformation? The Ideology of Theatre for Development in Africa. Applied Theatre Research 2 (2): 107–118. ———. 2014b. Interrogations of Law and State Legitimacy in the Theatre and Life of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Moving Worlds. 77–95.

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Plastow, Jane, and Mahlet Solomon. 2015. Contemporary Ethiopian Actresses. In African Theatre: Contemporary Women, ed. Jane Plastow, Christine Matzke, and Yvette Hutchison, 97–108. Oxford: James Currey. Plastow, Jane, and Birehanu Zerihun. 2017. An Absurdist in Addis Ababa: Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida. In African Theatre: Six Plays from East and West Africa, 129–138. Oxford: James Currey. Ranger, T.O. 1975. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa: 1890–1970. The Beni Ngoma. London: Heinemann. Ranger, Terence. 1983. The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, 211–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Don. 1997. World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. London: Routledge. ———. 2014. Directing Politics: Soyinkan Parallels in the Works of Uganda’s Robert Serumaga. In Syncretic Arenas: Essays on postcolonial African Drama and Theatre for Esiaba Irobi, ed. Isidore Diala. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schauert, Paul. 2015. Staging Ghana: Artistry and Nationalism in State Dancing Ensembles. Indiana UniversityPress. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. London: Routledge. Semzaba, Edwin. 1980. Tendehogo (Tendehogo). Serumaga, Robert. 1972. Renga Moi (Renga Moi). Shakespeare, William. 2004. Romeo and Juliet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Shuaib, Kidwai. 1992. A Study of Shabeelnaagood with References to the Themes of the Play. In The Proceedings of the First International Congress of Somali Studies, ed. Hussien M.  Adam and Charles L.  Geshekter, 352–357. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Shule, Vicensia. 2011. Theatre in/for Development in Tanzania: A Neoliberal Nightmare. In Trends in Twenty-first Century African Theatre and Performance, ed. T. Hauptfleisch and K. Igweonu, 190–215. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2015. Binti Leo: Women in the Arts in Tanzania. In African Theatre: Contemporary Women, ed. Jane Plastow et al., 73–84 Oxford: James Currey. Sirayi, Mzo. 2012. South African Drama and Theatre from Pre-Colonial Times to the 1990s. Bloomington: Xlibris. Solomon, Gebregzhier. 1974. Uninherited Wealth. Sondhi, Kuldip. 1968. Encounters. In Short East African Plays in English, ed. David Cook and Miles Lee. London: Heinemann. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sugulle, Ali. 1966. Kalahaab iyo Kalahaad (Wide Apart and Torn Asunder).

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Tekle Hawariat. 1921. Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals) (Private publication). Published in English in a translation by Belayneh Abune in ed. Yvette Hutchison, African Theatre: Histories. Oxford: James Currey. Tesfai, Alemseged. 1984. Eti Kal’a Quinat (The Other War). Published in English in Alemseged Tesfai, 2002. In Two Weeks in the Trenches.Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. 1965/6. Ye Kermasow (A Man of the Future). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. ———. 1966. Tewodros (Published in English, Ethiopian Observer). Walala Hargeisa. 1955. (collectively created), Soomaaladii hore iyo Soomaalilidii dambe (The Somalis of the Past and the Present). ———. 1958. (collectively created), Isa Seeg (Mutual Miss). Watene, Kenneth. 1973. Dedan Kimathi (Dedan Kimathi). Nairobi: Transafrica Publishers. Woodward, Peter. 1996. The Horn of Africa: State Politics and International Relations. London: Tauris. Wrong, Michaela. 2005. I Didn’t Do it For You: How the World Betrayed A Small Nation. London: Fourth Estate. Yoftahe Negussie. 1932. Dade Tura (Dade Tura). Zaytzeff, Ariane, and Odile Gakire Katese. 2015. Making Arts & Reinventing Culture with Women. In African Theatre: Contemporary Women, ed. Jane Plastow, Yvette Hutchinson, and Christine Matzke, 85–96. Oxford: James Currey. Zirimu, Elvania. 1965a. The Hen and The Groundnuts. In Origin East Africa: A Makerere Anthology, ed. David Cook. London: Heinemann Educational Books. ———. 1965b. Keeping Up With the Mukasas. In Origin East Africa: A Makerere Anthology, ed. David Cook. London: Heinemann Educational Books. ———. 1972. Family Spear. In African Theatre, ed. Gwyneth Henderson. London: Heinemann.

Chapter 1: Somali Theatre

Very little has been written in English about Somali theatre; notable exceptions being the work of Bogumil Andrzejewski (1974, 1978) and Mohamed Dahir Yusuf Afrah (2013).1 Yet from the mid-twentieth century through to the civil war of 1990, Somali theatre was both a popular and a socio-political cultural force. Plays toured the whole transnational Somali-speaking region, audiences queued for hours to obtain tickets, performances were taped, recorded and relayed across Somali-speaking territories and government agents attended shows to ensure that scripts—sometimes the source of high-level ministerial debate—were not modified in production. Somali theatre, quite unlike the case in any other culture I am considering, was hugely popular with the vast majority of the Somali-speaking population—rural and urban, educated and less so, old and young, men and women, in all nations where there were Somali populations. Prime Ministers and presidents attended the theatre, commanded special performances and wept when watching.2 Plays were seen to have major effects on national policy,3 while leading abwaan, the poet-­ playwrights who led the performing ‘bands’, were lauded as national sages speaking to, and educating, the national community (Kidwai 1992, 355). Even today there is ample record of Somalis at home and in the diaspora continuing to watch and listen with great enjoyment to old recordings of plays (Charmarkeh Houssein 2013, Interview Yasmin Mohamed, July 2016). In recent years, post the devastation of prolonged civil and international wars, Somali theatre in Djibouti has continued, albeit at reduced © The Author(s) 2020 J. Plastow, A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47272-6_2

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levels. In Somaliland and Somalia it has begun to try to re-establish itself, and in Europe, Canada and America diaspora groups have sought to keep the flame alive (Matzke 2016, 31–40; Charmarkeh Houssein 2013).4 Somali theatre developed from a fusion of indigenous poetry and song forms, of music utilising both local percussion and imported Middle Eastern and western instruments, of ideas of theatrical form adapted from Italian and British professional and school performances of drama and from Italian and Indian film imports. By piecing together some of the extensive research into the modern history of Somali poetry and mapping and triangulating it on to writing and interviews about music and theatre, it is unusually—in relation to the discussion of African-language theatre evolution—possible to show something of the dynamism of Somali culture over the last century (Afrah 2013; Johnson 1974; Andrzejewski and Lewis 1964). Developments were sometimes vociferously, even violently, contested. But as a result of a fascinating negotiation and embodiment of discourses of pan-Somalism, tradition and modernity, Somali-language theatre, at least between the 1950s and the 1980s emerged as a popular vessel for the expression of the voice of a people spread across a web of nations. This chapter, unlike any other in my book, concentrates on the theatre of a particular language culture. Somalis live in Somalia, Somaliland,5 Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and across the Red Sea in Yemen, as well as in diasporas flung out, as the result of decades of civil war, across the whole world. For Somalis themselves this would not even be seen as a transnational theatre. Crucially much of the work was focused around the unifying desire of the Somali-speaking population to come together as a single nation—an aim clearly signified in the five-pointed star of the Somali flag that symbolised the Somali nation as encompassing Somali populations in Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, North-East Kenya and the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. From a Somali perspective, their nation had been divided by colonial forces, both European and African, and the over-riding political and theatrical aim from the 1950s through to 1990 was reunification. Throughout this time period, borders for many Somali were administrative and political, but not cultural or often even physical divides, as this mainly nomadic people could freely cross lightly policed grazing lands. One might therefore say that while externally this might look like a transnational theatre par excellence, for Somalis it was merely a cross-border theatre, with those borders fiercely contested and spiritually rejected as denying the reality of Somali culture and destiny. At the height of the

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popularity of the theatre, companies—while centred on the then Marxist state of Somalia that encompassed present day Somalia and Somaliland— toured and performed extensively beyond national borders. This, therefore, is the history of Somali-language theatre rather than that of a nation state. I have made this choice for a number of reasons. Firstly, the non-­ Somali-­speaking world knows so little of Somali theatre that it seems important to take this opportunity to profile a rich theatrical tradition and to seek to give an overview that I hope others will subsequently build on. Secondly, many aspects of the relatively isolated Somali theatrical evolution have been unique. There are instances where experiences overlap with other East African nations, notably in the introduction of theatre by Italian and British colonists, and in the sponsorship of theatre by a socialist state, but the form of the drama developed in a uniquely Somali manner that is all to do with culture and nothing to do with national borders. Apart from some of the very earliest experiments initiated by foreign teachers, all Somali theatre is and has been produced in the Somali language. It has also utilised specifically Somali cultural forms. Most notably this meant that until recently nearly all theatre privileged poetic expression. Poetry, of many kinds, is hugely important in Somali culture, and ideas expressed through poetic means gain in significance and weight. As leading playwright Said Salah Ahmed explained to me: ‘People will give much more importance to ideas I speak to them through poetry rather than prose’ (Interview, July 2016). Moreover, Somali theatre, even more so than most African theatres, sees music as integral to performance. Many artists I spoke to were musicians or singers as well as actors. Theatre groups were largely music-based and known as bands. It is almost impossible to disaggregate the performing arts in Somali culture. There has been very little formal training available for Somali theatre artists, and the idea of separate specialists in backstage skills, or even in directing, is almost unknown. A few people have now had some opportunity for study abroad but this is exceptional. The relative isolation of Somali theatre has had both advantages, in that it has developed almost exclusively out of the popular culture of the nation and in tune with the tastes of the Somali people, and disadvantages, in that there have been few opportunities for developing specialist skills or exchanging ideas among international peers.

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Somali Political History Somali identity is generally agreed (Lewis 1961, 1988, 1998; Kapteijns 2013) to have been defined by two things: clan and Islam. The date of mass conversion to Islam is unclear, but Arab and Persian colonisers were established in the city of Mogadishu by the tenth century and from there the religion spread, assisted by subsequent waves of Arab settlement and intermarriage, until by the late seventeenth century Somali Islamic culture had reached roughly present day parameters (Lewis 1988, 22–23). Given that this Islamic people were surrounded by Christian Ethiopia to the north and west, and by Bantu peoples living in the south who were at first adherents of indigenous African religions before conversion of many to Christianity during the period of British colonialism in Kenya, it is unsurprising that Somalis have seen their religion as a prime source of identity, or that they have often looked across the Red Sea to Aden and Yemen rather than to Africa for friends and allies. Huge amounts have been written about the Somali clan structure (Fox 2015; Lewis 1961, 1988, 1998; Kapteijns 2013). Suffice it to say here that until recently an overwhelmingly pastoral people have often engaged in warlike activity among themselves in competition for wells and grazing for their camels, goats and sheep. While all Somalis are united in language and religion, allies in the struggle for the best sites for all-important livestock were seen as one’s clan members. There are a small number of major clans, but within these are many sub-divisions. Knowledge of everyone’s clan membership is of supreme importance and is usually the first thing Somalis will ask of anyone when they are introduced. An old explanation goes that a Somali will see his first allegiance as being to his full brother; these brothers will unite against everyone else. Next comes the immediate family, followed by the extended family. After this the clan will unite against all comers, and only finally will Somalis fight together against the rest of the world. The Somalis did fight all comers for many years to assert their primacy in the lands they occupy. Indeed, in Ahmed Gran (The Left-Handed), in the mid-sixteenth century, they found a champion who led such successful campaigns against Christian Ethiopia that it nearly fell to Islam and only an appeal for military aid by the then Emperor Galadewos to Portuguese co-religionists prevented the collapse of the Empire (Abir 1980). European interest in the Somali region was sparked in the mid-­ nineteenth century. At this time the Somali coast was loosely controlled by

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the Sultan in Zanzibar, but British interference arose as a result of the need to have supply depots for the fleets of the East India Company travelling between Britain and the subcontinent. In 1839 the British forcibly acquired Aden on the Arab Red Sea coast for this purpose. The new owners then found that the immediate hinterland could not provide sufficient meat for the garrison and resupplying fleets and that it had to come from across the channel in northern Somaliland. Meat was to remain the main British interest in the region known by the colonists as the ‘butchers shop of Aden’, and ‘was still the guiding policy when events had driven Britain to establish a Somaliland Protectorate in 1887’. (Lewis 1988, 41) Meanwhile France was also interested in the new sea route made available by the opening of the Suez canal in 1870 and in 1881 established a trading post almost opposite Aden in the Somali port town of Obock. This left the Italians who, coming late to colonial adventurism, sought to build an overseas empire in the Horn of Africa. From 1869 Italy began to purchase interests in the area which would become Eritrea. The primary Italian aim was to conquer Ethiopia, but acquiring land not only in the north in Eritrea, but also in the south, in Somalia, was seen as immensely helpful to wider imperial ambition (Miran 2009). In 1889 Italy concluded treaties of protection with two Somali clans. The picture was further complicated in that both Egypt and the Sultan of Zanzibar had recognised claims to parts of the Somaliland coast, while Ethiopian expansionist forces were extending their empire southwards into inland Somali-­ inhabited regions (Marcus 1995). In 1896 an Italian army’s invasion of Ethiopia launched from Eritrea was completely destroyed at the Battle of Adwa. The European powers would have to reluctantly accept the independence of the ancient empire. They would also have to negotiate terms about borders in Somali-inhabited areas of the Horn as Emperor Menelik swiftly and hugely expanded his patrimony through southern conquests (Prouty 1986). In 1897 a series of treaties were negotiated—completely ignoring Somali interests—which divided the territory they lived in along lines that would come to broadly demarcate the borders of Ethiopia, Italian Somalia, the Côte française des Somalis and the British Somaliland Protectorate. Subsequent contestation of these boundaries and Somali irredentist ambitions, repeatedly rebuffed by greater powers, have been a source of multiple wars and tragedy for Somali populations. Foreign empires had been able to carve up Somali territories by exploiting endemic divisions between clans, because of the possession of modern

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armaments and because for most of the time the pastoral herdsmen of the interior had been left relatively undisturbed. However, a perceived threat to the common cause of Islam was to change all that as massive numbers of Somalis came together across colonial borders in the first twenty years of the twentieth century under the charismatic leadership of Sheikh Muhammed Abdille Hassan, often known to the outside world as the Mahdi or The Mad Mullah, as he led his ‘dervishes’ against Christian infidels of all kinds. Sheikh Muhammed travelled widely in his younger years, including a long visit to Mecca, where he joined the strict Salihiya Order, returning to Somali territories in the 1890s urging rejection of local saints, of smoking and khat (a mild narcotic plant chewed by many, predominantly Muslims, in the Horn of Africa) chewing and an austere devotion to Islam. His jihad against Christians, according to legend, began when he met on the road a boy attending a French mission school. On speaking to the boy he was horrified to realise that he was a Christian, and that the boy declared an allegiance not to a Somali clan but to ‘the clan of the Fathers’ (Samatar 1982, 107). This was the spark for a series of wars with Ethiopia, Britain and Italy. Sheikh Muhammed was never able to unite all the Somali clans, and indeed many rejected his ‘imported’ version of Islam, but at various times he was able to raise transnational armies of up to 6000 men. One of his major propaganda tools was his powerful poetry, carried across his territories by designated reciters, and still widely remembered and recited in the present day (Samatar 1982). He forced his enemies into joint expeditions against him costing many millions of dollars, looted thousands of camels, caused heavy loss of life in various encounters and was only finally defeated in 1920. He also became a Somali hero and his exploits a powerful symbol of Pan-Somalism to be exploited in later years. The period from the defeat of Sheikh Muhammed until the Second World War saw the reinforcement of the borders that have largely divided Somalis to this day. In Italian Somalia, fascism from 1922 meant considerable investment in urban infrastructure, particularly in the capital, Mogadishu, and the development of a plantation culture in the fertile area around Villabruzzi. Italian immigration was encouraged, but while a small petit bourgeoisie arose among urbanised Somalis, the labouring classes were treated harshly, local women were often exploited for sexual liaisons and rural pastoralists saw no support for their always tough-living conditions (Samatar 1988, 50). British Somaliland continued to be

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characterised by neglect, the British remaining in small numbers, mostly coastal based and interested only in meat extraction for their Aden garrison (Samatar 1988, 43). French Somaliland (Djibouti) was valued primarily as a naval base giving access to the Indian Ocean. The small country was split between a majority Somali (Issa) population and the favoured Afar, both of which were pastoralist groups that saw little development investment (Woodward 1996, 111). This left the largely Somali-inhabited region of north east Kenya and the Ethiopian-run Ogaden6—though ownership here was open to dispute by both Italy and Britain. In all cases, the land was held largely for military advantage, with major concerns being access to profitable Indian Ocean trading routes and opportunist desires for the uncolonised lands of Ethiopia. Somalis themselves were merely pawns in imperial power struggles, their extensive but poorly watered lands valued primarily strategically and the people and their aspirations treated as insignificant. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, that precursor to World War, was followed by a brief overthrow of British rule in Somaliland in 1940 once the war proper got underway, and the very short-lived establishment of the Italian East African Empire. By 1941 the Allies had defeated all Italian armies in the region and for nearly a decade all Somali regions, with the exception of Djibouti, came under British rule (Wrong 2005). The relatively benign and somewhat more energetic British rule between 1941 and 1950 of both previously British and Italian areas of influence paved the way for the—very small scale—introduction of modern schooling and the development of Somali political movements, notably the establishment in 1945 of what was to become the leading political grouping, the irridentist Somali Youth League (SYL). This more relaxed, albeit military, rule also enabled the development of music and drama and new poetic forms that would come together later in the 1950s to create Somali theatre. However, the decade also saw the re-division of Somali territories against the wishes of the people. A UN enquiry into what should happen to Somalia was over-influenced by Italian settlers and their supporters and led to the territory being re-awarded to Italy for ten years under a trusteeship arrangement. The SYL was appalled. Then in 1954, to Somali horror and useless remonstration, the British handed over the Haud—an ill-­ defined border strip of grazing land abutting the Somali territories, and inhabited almost exclusively by Somalis—to Ethiopia. In 1958 Djibouti was offered either independence or continued French rule, ignoring

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Somali demands for Somali areas to be reunified. The final betrayal would come in 1964, when against the overwhelming wishes of the inhabitants as expressed in an official British Commission, which Somalis had understood to be binding, the British bowed to Kenyan pressure and refused to allow the northern districts to unify with what had become independent Somalia. All these events explain why, in politics and theatre, irredentist aspirations would play such an overwhelming role in the post-­independence period. The elusive imagined nation of greater Somalia has loomed large in the Somali mind since the days of Sheikh Muhammed. In 1960 the ten-year trusteeships for Somalia and Somaliland came to a close and as planned the two became independent and promptly unified as Somalia under a SYL government. The following nine years were characterised by considerable political freedoms for the population—and much political debate in which theatre took a full part. There were relatively peaceful elections and transfers of power, but effective economic development policies were lacking, and problems with unifying differing systems in north and south caused considerable tensions as the north came to feel increasingly marginalised. Above all the ruling urban group was seen to be disproportionately benefitting itself with little concern for the majority pastoral population. Throughout this period agitation for irredentist action in relation to Kenyan and Ethiopian Somalis dominated much of the political agenda with the country united, if in nothing else, in a passionate nationalist desire to win back Somali territory and peoples lost to colonial power-broking machinations. This included a Somali uprising in the Ogaden in 1963 but, as ever, the relative importance of Kenya and Ethiopia meant that western powers were unwilling to support Pan-Somali aspirations (Lewis 1993, 30). In October 1969 President Abdirashid was assassinated and a week later the army seized power without opposition. Meanwhile in Djibouti the struggle for independence was still on-­ going. In both 1958 and 1967, the French had manipulated votes on whether the tiny country would become independent, through policies of divide and rule between Afar and Somali populations and by some dubious practices of vote counting and registration (Abdi 1977, 62–3). By the 1970s it was apparent that the French could only hold on for a limited period. Campaigners for secession from France, including theatre makers, were harassed and at times imprisoned in the following years before the 1977 referendum resulted in a 99.8% vote for independence with less than 200 votes cast for remaining with France. Since independence there have been only two presidents, the second and current incumbent, Ismail Omar

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Guelleh, being the nephew of the first and having won four successive elections, with oppositions regularly boycotting the process and claiming rigging of the system.7 Djibouti, with less than a million people, is dominated by its massive port that supplies much of the Horn and northern East Africa, and hosts eight international armies. The media are state controlled, but it has to be acknowledged that Djibouti, amidst the wars that have convulsed all its neighbours, has managed a very clever balancing act that has avoided discourses of extremism. In Somalia the man who came to power in the bloodless revolution of 1969 and set up an ever more autocratic state was the army commander, General Mohamed Siyad Barre. His government was initially popular— promising to stamp out corruption, slashing bloated government wages, and taking action in relation to education, disease and poverty. He also espoused a platform of anti-clanism, women’s rights and, of course, Pan-­ Somali nationalism (Lewis 1993, 31–36). The best-known achievement of the early years of army rule was the mass literacy campaign of 1972–1975. For the first time, the Somali language gained an orthography, written in Latin script, and some 30,000 students and teachers, themselves newly literate in their mother tongue, were sent out to teach the rural population. Unfortunately, the campaign coincided with one of the worst draughts in Somali memory, and as cattle, camels and their owners starved, much of the literacy effort had to be diverted to humanitarian relief efforts. During this period, Siyad Barre’s government turned increasingly to Soviet support and a proclaimed ‘scientific socialist’ outlook (Samatar 1993, 40–42). And then in the late 1970s irredentist pressures once more exploded. Post the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, Ogaden nationalists led by the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) had become increasingly active and by 1976 had taken much land from a government also faced with a liberation war in Eritrea. At this point both sides were courting Soviet support. By mid-1977 Somali forces, with massive popular support, had taken control of all but a couple of towns in Somali areas of Ethiopia. Bogged down as a result of heavy October rains, Somali forces were running low on military supplies; and then the Soviets decided to change sides and with Cuban aid initiated a massive campaign in support of Ethiopia. Somali pleas for aid from the Arab League—of which they were members—and the USA, came to nothing in the geopolitical manoeuvring and in January 1978 ‘the Soviet Union undertook the largest airlift of armour and men ever in the area or, for that matter, anywhere in Africa’ (Samatar, 135). By March the war was over with some 25,000 Somali losses.

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Hundreds of thousands of displaced ethnic Somalis fled to refugee camps in Somalia. The country was in economic collapse and the dictator reacted to criticism with executions of leading generals and thousands of arrests. From this point a number of regional and clan-based movements began to challenge the autocratic state. Siyad Barre became ever more dictatorial, resorting himself to clan-centred politics and in particular punishing the northern regions, dominated by the Isac clan and increasingly organised in support of the insurgent Somali National Movement (SNM) with its guerrilla bases in the Ogaden. Renowned Somali scholar Ioan Lewis says that by 1985 the north looked like ‘a downtrodden colony under a foreign military tyranny’ (Lewis 1993, 68). Between 1988 and January 1991 Somalia descended into an all-out civil war, at terrible cost in lives and displacement to the Somali people. By January 1991 the SNM had thrown Barre’s forces out of the north and begun to establish the present day, relatively successful and peaceful, if internationally unrecognised, republic of Somaliland in the area of former British jurisdiction. Meanwhile Somalia entered its prolonged hell of inter-clan rivalries, only exacerbated by multiple external interventions from the USA, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the African Union, all often now seen as only adding to national problems and leaving the territory a failed state.

The Ingredients for a Somali Theatre Culture Somali Poetry Our knowledge of a poetic culture that was almost entirely oral until the 1970s can be traced back only 200 years, though its riches argue for a much longer history. Scholars argue about the exact designations of particular poetic forms, but all agree that Somali poetry has to have two things—alliteration (xarafraac) and metre (miisaan) (Orwin 2001; Mohamed Afrah 2013, 232). Historically serious Somali poetry was not spoken or sung, but chanted, with individual poets, ubiquitously male, developing their own luuq or chanted rhythm. This fit with the fact that Somali musical culture was entirely percussive until the introduction of the Arabic oud, lute, or in Somali, kaman, in the 1940s, but is not dissimilar to the case for many African language oral poetic forms. Chanting assists memory in the repetition of poetry and was therefore common in many oral cultures worldwide. The chant, I am here arguing, is the root of, and the route to, modern Somali poetry, song and arguably, theatre. This is

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important because many scholars of African oratures have looked just at poetry or just at song, viewing them through divisive western understood concepts of genre that are not only irrelevant but seriously misleading when seeking to understand more holistic African performance forms. This means that in her study of Somali songs Kapteijns, for example, mentions but does not take fully into account the significance of the fact that the majority of the examples she studies were created within plays8 (Kapteijns and Ali 1999). On the other hand, the Ugandan poet and scholar, Susan Kiguli, in her study of Zulu and Buganda poetry and song shows how even in the present day oral poet-composers in South Africa and Uganda often do not differentiate between poetry or song creation (Kiguli 2005). This understanding of interconnectivity is crucial if we are to recognise the evolution of Somali theatre where poetry and song, emerging from the tradition of the chant, led to the development of a unique theatrical form that was entirely logical in the context of the earlier history of Somali oral performance forms. The ubiquity and popularity of poetry amongst the Somali has often been commented on, right back to the 1854 apostrophising of the people by the British explorer, Richard Burton, as ‘a nation of poets’ (Burton 1854). Poetry has been a force binding together the whole Somali-­ speaking population. Arguably only Islam and poetry can overcome the clan divisions that have historically been much more important to Somalis than externally imposed national borders. Notably it was only holy men and poets who were exempted from the requirement to fight in times of war, surely an indication of the pre-eminent status of the art form. It appeals to both the pastoral camel herding rural population and urban dwellers, and has often sought to debate and reconcile ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ codes of conduct. It has also been a major force in the political world, with the poet, warrior and Islamic teacher, Sheikh Muhammed Abdille Hassan, credited with fostering the spirit of Somali nationalism in the early twentieth century as much through his poetry as through his feats of arms (Samatar 1982). However, the relatively long, slow-chanted classical gabay form utilised by the Sheikh and common to much serious poetry until the mid-­twentieth century would not have been easily moulded to the dynamic needs of the stage. The poetry of Somali theatre was made possible by a series of experimentations with form from the 1930s. Mohamed Afrah argues that the crucial first step in this process was the development of qaraami poetry in the mid-1930s (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 66–68). In a culture where any

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public discussion of romantic love had been seen as culturally taboo, qaraami was an urban youth form of sung love poetry, co-created by groups of young men and originating in the then British Somaliland before spreading across the region and incurring the opprobrium of older conservative poets and religious leaders. Leading performers, however, were invited to ‘wedding ceremonies and popular parties known as gaaf to which crowds of youths were attracted’ (65). Qaraami was the precursor to belwo (or balwo or belwa), a form cited by many as closely implicated in the emergence of Somali theatre that became wildly popular for a few years in the 1940s. The crucial development of belwo was that here the love poetry began to be accompanied by the oud, whereas traditional Somali song had only had a drumming accompaniment. Belwo appears to mark a notable move to the inter-­ cultural. Prior to the development of the form, poetry had no melodic accompaniment. Poetic production was open to all but serious, gebey, poetry was almost exclusively in the hands of older men. Belwo was not only, like qaraami, an urban youth form, it was popularised through the modern means of radio and performance in cinema halls and it depended on working with the modern innovation of melody, made possible through the rapid adoption of the oud. The name synonymous with belwo is that of Abdi Deeqsi, commonly known as Abdi Sinemo (Father Cinema) because he often performed on the stages of cinema halls. He was employed for much of his life as a truck driver for the Djiboutian port authority, travelling widely but based in the border town of Zeila—between Djibouti and Somaliland—where he formed a music group named after the ancient coastal town (Kapteijns and Ali 1999, 104). The group then moved in 1944 to a larger town, Borama, where they could exploit more commercial opportunities, calling themselves Belwo. We know this in part because a song was made about the event by the Zeila community. It included the lines, ‘Oh the belwo was looted and went to the East/ Can we chase it with a vehicle?’ (Said Salah, Interview, July 2016) Melodic music had been introduced to Somalia by Mahmud Muhammed, universally known as Abdullahi Qarshe. Born in Moshe, Tanzania, in 1924, he was the son of a successful livestock trader, who moved in his youth, following his father’s death, to Aden. Abdullahi studied in both Koranic and British secular schools. It was at his British school that he first encountered theatre. He sought to become involved but was turned down for a part in a school play because he had a limp. At the same time, he was becoming fascinated by Indian films, and especially the music

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in them. He secretly—since his devout religious family would have been appalled—bought an oud and hid it until he moved independently as a young man to Hargeisa in British Somaliland where he worked as a clerk for the British administration. At this time the only melodic musicians in the country, some already involved in the belwo scene, were Indian or Arab. The largely self-taught Abdullahi teamed up with an Indian and a Yemeni and started on his mission to become the first Somali musician and composer, writing his first original song in 1948 (Hassan 2002). The musicians caused outrage amongst the local religious elite, with one Sheikh Ali Jawhar following his call to prayer with warnings to stop ‘songs of innovation’ (69). Like qaraami, belwo attracted the mistrust of elders and the Islamic establishment. Indeed a persistent problem referenced by many informants and continuing into the present day is that more fundamentalist Muslim authorities have often tried to shut down secular music and theatre as incompatible with Islamic doctrine. This only adds to the pan-­ African and to a considerable extent universal, distrust of the artist as lacking in respectability. A specific problem for belwo was in part because the term is an Arabic loan word meaning misfortune (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 60). Abdullahi Qarshe said that it had also ‘acquired the implication of profligacy in matters of sex, womanising, drinking, and so on’ (Johnson 1998, xii). He went on to explain that the way round the problem was simply to rename the form. In 1948 a teacher friend and song writer, Yusuf Haji Aden, suggested using the name heello, (Hassan 2002, 69) drawing on the traditional invitation to dance, ‘Heelloy heellelloy’. Heello would gradually differentiate itself beyond a mere name change by becoming a longer form and moving away from being solely linked to matters of love, used increasingly for social and political commentary. In the 1960s heello in turn began to be known as hees or hees-casri. The debates about precise nomenclature for poetry and song forms among Somali scholars can get somewhat convoluted and even contradictory, but the crucial difference is both relating to common usage and the fact that modern hees were songs developed in relation to theatre, utilising a much increased variety of instrumentation and range of forms of metre and melody (Mohamed Afrah, 55–70). Nomenclature would go on to be an issue in relation to the new art of theatre. When the form first appeared it was generally known as maadeys, meaning things that make people laugh (Mohamed Afrah, 218). It was seen by elders and particularly by religious leaders as a trivial form,

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produced by the same irresponsible youth who were making qaraami and belwo and as nothing to do with the serious work of the great poets who had long been recognised as voices and teachers for the people. Only later would the art become known as riwaayad (modern drama), and while many performers would continue to struggle with issues of respectability, a new term of high respect, abwaan (sage and multi-talented composer), would be coined to describe the leaders of what would become the pre-­ eminent art form in Somali territories for the next thirty years. The explosion in popularity of this new musical and poetic form was much assisted by the beginning of radio transmissions in Somali. Both Radio Mogadishu and Radio Djibouti began transmitting in Somali in 1943 with Radio Hargeisa, then Radio Somali, joining in from 1944. The stations were all desperate for local content and a series of new music groups benefitted hugely from this means of publicity, quite quickly expanding to broadcast and perform short dramatic skits. Kooxda Badda (Naval Company) was created by Maalo Nuer with a group of young aspirant entertainer friends during the Second World War in Mogadishu; while Walala Hargeisa (Siblings of Hargeisa), in the old British capital of Somaliland, became massively popular in a partnership led by Abdullahi Qarshe and Hussein Aw Farah from 1946. These groups became fixtures on Radio Mogadishu and Radio Hargeisa respectively, with many leading members also employees of the broadcasters. The publicity this ensured did much to promote the popularity of the new music and the bands producing it. Early Drama No one seems authoritatively sure of when Somalis first began to adapt and adopt the dramatic form. Andrzejewski can only tell us somewhat vaguely: Some Somalis say that the earliest plays were short dramatic sketches with songs and music, performed in the thirties in private houses in Mogadishu in imitation of the amateur plays and operas which were put on by the Italian administrators and settlers. Similar developments are said to have taken place in Djibouti within mutual aid societies. (1974, 15)

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He goes on to explain that these experiments could not have spread more widely because, as in so many African nations, colonialists were wary of large gatherings of the colonised, except for religious purposes. Drama as a separate performance form was introduced by both the Italians and the British. The Italians were the first to bring professional stage performance to the region, when in 1938 they brought an opera company to Mogadishu, the capital of Italian Somalia. (see Chapter 2 for discussion of parallel developments in Eritrea.) As in Eritrea, this art was only for Italians and no Somalis were permitted to be in the audience. In more northerly British Somaliland, the small numbers of colonial administrators and vanishingly small government investment meant that there was no recorded cultural activity prior to the Second World War. Following the temporary loss of Somaliland to the Italians in 1940, and the then re-establishment of British control over both their old protectorate and Somalia in 1941, for the first time the British began some meaningful investment in the region. Crucially the army began opening schools and training teachers.9 As elsewhere in British-colonised Africa, drama—in its western form of secular, prose-based, dialogue-dominated, embodied story telling performed on a raised platform to a seated, end-on audience—was introduced within schools. Initially western education was often equated with the notably unsuccessful attempts of Christian missionaries in the early twentieth century to convert the population and was therefore resisted by many people. British colonial government schools in the 1940s were viewed with suspicion because they were secular and promoted a colonial agenda. Teachers therefore introduced their pupils to drama largely to advertise the benefits of the schooling they were offering. My primary informant on the colonial promotion of theatre in schools has been leading Somali educationalist and playwright Said Salah Ahmed—a man who attended British-run elementary and middle schools in Somaliland in the 1950s. This does not go back to the very first schools and school plays but his experience resonates with information I have been able to glean elsewhere (Andrzejewski 1974, 16). At this time teaching was in Arabic and English. Elementary school teachers were mostly Somali nationals but at Said’s middle-level boarding school staff were Somali, English, Indian and Egyptian. The main focus of theatre was the production of plays for school opening and closing days when performances would be given for the entire school but also to parents. These were given in both Arabic and English and Said felt—in a

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situation reminiscent of the earliest school theatre in Ethiopia (see Chapter 2)—that there was an element of competition between Egyptian and English teachers as to who could produce the best plays. A range of sources were drawn on, animal fables, plays in text books and also sometimes adaptations of stories studied in school. Said remembers his first theatrical experience in elementary school as acting a horse in an Arabic play and then playing the role of the child who points out the Emperor’s nudity in a version of The Emperor’s New Clothes called, in the Arabic version he performed, The Unintelligent Pharaoh. Teachers also used acting in class to help children learn English and Arabic. This experience chimes with Andrzejewski’s claim that Arabic plays were particularly popular in the 1940s, ‘since they consisted mainly of dramatized heroic episodes taken from textbooks’ (1974, 16). Andrzejewski gives ‘around 1944’ as the year of the first Somali language school play and goes on to say that: In short dramatic sketches, teachers and pupils showed the advantages of education, attacked ignorance and superstition, and urged their audiences to follow the path of progress. The themes were always taken from contemporary Somali life, and the sketches were interspersed with poetic passages. (1974, 16)

Again this chimes with Said’s experience where teachers were also involved in facilitating an early Somali play. At his boarding school, Dayah (The Moon), the Somali technician who ran the school generator, Ahmed Sulaiman, known as Bidde,10 was also a poet. Teachers asked him to create a Somali play. He went on to ‘compose’ two works, both entirely orally, with students learning their parts by memorising his recitations. The plays, which were in support of the benefits of education, were performed not only in school, but also acted in two towns, Erigavo, in Eastern Somaliland, quite near to the school, and in Bosaso in then Italian Somalia—an early example of transnational Somali theatre production. In Somalia theatre developed in a much more overtly political context. The first Mogadishu band appears to have been Kooxdo Badda (Naval Company), founded during the Second World War by a young Maalo Now, with a name inspired by and honouring the allied forces. As elsewhere theatre grew following a musical beginning, but early on the company was adopted and supported by the Somali Youth Club, founded in 1943, which would in 1948 rename itself the Somali Youth League and become the dominant party pushing for independence. The SYL would

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largely fund and greatly influence the group until 1952 when it was taken over by the new Radio Mogadishu and became Radio Mogadishu Artists Company (Abdullah Said Hersi 1999, 217). However the link between the bands and politics was by then well established, with both seeing themselves as young, radical forces for progressive change. It appears that as in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and indeed in other African countries such as Uganda and Malawi, popular local language artists in Somalia and Somaliland got the ‘idea’ of theatre from European colonists, but because they were not products of the linguistic and cultural brain-­ washing practiced in elite colonial schools in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (see Volume Two), they were able to borrow and adapt the form to their own cultures far more easily than many more highly colonially educated playwrights across the continent who have gone through much more painful battles relating to language and form. From the late 1940s, quite unlike anywhere else in Africa, theatre became the primary vehicle for Somali popular culture. I was sometimes quite confused in the early stages of my research for this chapter because songs and poems discussed in critical literature often turn out to have been created as part of plays, actors are discussed as singers, while musicians or poets turned out to have developed their careers within theatre. Unlike the situation in countries like Ethiopia and Tanzania where popular performance has often centred around a variety show, in Somalia the variety—song, music, poetry and occasionally dance—was incorporated in to the theatre. The form developed rapidly. Sketches lengthened, informal groups came together for single shows and then disbanded, reforming to work with others in different combinations. Musicians like Abdullahi Qarshe tried out songs drawing on Somali, Arabic and Indian experiences and school shows mixed languages and forms. There were no rules for the early Somali theatre, there was only the need to explore one’s artistic desires and to draw an audience. Presumably because of the igniting spark of the form of British school drama, some of the earliest plays were in prose. But all my informants concurred that the thing Somalis really love is the poetic form, and so to hold audiences theatrical creators began to develop the poetic songs that came to characterise the heart of Somali theatre. None of these plays were written,11 and in the very earliest days creation, as for qaraami and much belwo, was a communal group affair among young men passionate to develop their art and their audience. A good example of the heterogeneous nature of the earliest productions is Abdullahi’s description of the

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first play he was involved with, a piece to which he gives no year or name, but which he credits to Yusuf Ismail Samatar and which contextually must have been performed in the early 1950s. Performed in Burao, the actors included Abdullahi and a number of junior Somali civil servants. He explains: Samatar pioneered a new genre in the production of the play. He incorporated Somali, Arabic, and English into a play he wrote. The Arabic part was about revenge. The English part commented on the British authorities and the public. The Somali section was a critique of those who were anti-belwo or anti-heello. (Hasan, 74)

This hardly sounds a very cohesive play, but what is fascinating is the pioneering energy. No one before had made this music, this form of poetry or any kind of theatre in Somali cultures. It was all an experiment among groups of usually fairly cosmopolitan and at least moderately educated young men, working together. Moreover, it is clear that these young men had things to say. They were willing to critique both aspects of the British administration and culturally conservative Somali elements. Somali theatre from its inception was about both ideas and entertainment. The early groups all started out making songs and music: indeed Somali theatre companies were commonly referred to by my informants as ‘bands’. But within a few years these groups were making theatre as well as music, lifting a concept of the form from the colonial school theatre and to some extent from film, but very much making it their own. There is little information on the first plays, but production, at least of short sketches, dates back to 1946, when the anonymous Maseer (Jealousy) and Ijo-foal-dheer (Ijo the Long Toothed) are both listed by Mohamed Afrah (165).

Somali Theatre: 1954–1960 Andrzejewski says that ‘By the mid-fifties the Somali theatre had developed into what it is today’ (17); however, I would argue that my research shows the form was rapidly evolving in the 1950s and only arrived at the format broadly followed up until the collapse of the Siyad Barre regime by around 1960. Certainly the period between 1954 and the achievement of independence for both Italian Somalia and British Somaliland in 1960 seems to have been a time of great theatrical dynamism, especially in

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Somaliland where the relative lack of controls by colonial authorities and the tradition of school drama both assisted the impetus of development. An event that galvanised activity among poets, musicians and theatre makers was the handing over of the area in present day Ethiopia, adjacent to Somaliland, known as the Haud, from British to Ethiopian control. This area was and is inhabited by Somalis and formed an important grazing area for many pastoralists. The Somaliland population was appalled and used performance as a major means of protest. The most famous play bewailing the event was the 1955 Soomaalidii hore iyo Soomaalilidii dambe (The Somalis of the Past and those of the Present) by Walala Hargeisa. Abdullahi Qarshe explained that it ‘was a lamentation of this dreadful event and other similar happenings in Somali territories still under occupation […] The essence of the play was to inform the audience how the Somalis in the past fought for their country’ (Hasan, 74). At the time Abdullahi Qarshe was still developing his musical skills so the play was mainly in prose with only a single song, Taah (Sighing), given to the female protagonist—acted by a man—who leaves her husband and children to aid her people, saying, ‘When it comes to you and the country, my heart cannot be divided. Do not come near me.’(Hasan, 74). The nationalism of the piece is typical of very many Somali plays and it is surely interesting that a work that could have been seen as incendiary by the colonialists was allowed to go ahead in contrast to the strict censorship obtaining in most of colonised Africa. I can only imagine that in a colony with a tiny British presence there was no one competent enough in Somali, or possibly aware of the political weight Somalis give to their art, to monitor the production. The group’s next piece, dated by Abdullahi Qarshe to 1955 although Andrzejewski says it was performed in 1954, was Cartan iyo Ceebla (Artan and Ebla). This was the first play credited to a particular person, Hussein Aw Farah, with the songs written by Abdullahi Qarshe and Muhammad Said Guronjire. Said Salah Ahmed told me that the play was created by adapting pre-existing poetry into dramatic form, while Abdullahi Qarshe says the songs consisted of both existing material incorporated into the play and new pieces written specifically for the production. He also confirms that even at this early stage the key ingredients of so many Somali plays, nationalism and romance, were on the group’s mind: ‘We thought about a plot that could combine love and Pan-Somali sentiments’ (Hasan, 74). Ostensibly Cartan iyo Ceebla is about two lovers who the girl’s family seeks to keep apart as they have a pre-existing arranged marriage in mind.

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She becomes very sick and both traditional and modern remedies are sought in vain to cure her, until a visiting elderly woman ‘declares that the girl is not sick but merely in love’ (Hassan, 77). Andrzejewski explains that this narrative was an early example of a work with a hidden—from colonial forces—double meaning, as ‘For the Somali audience it was obvious that the two lovers personified the two Somali territories wishing for union and freedom’ (Andrzejewski 1974, 12). The Pan-Somalism informing so much of the theatre is demonstrated not only in the theme but also in fact that, in an early example of the ease of transnational production, right from the outset the group planned to tour their play to Somalia, Aden and Djibouti. The significance of viewing Somali theatre transnationally is illustrated in Abdullahi Quarshe’s explanation of the Hargeisa group’s subsequent 1958 production, Isa Seeg (Mutual Miss). The growing musical sophistication of the plays is shown by the fact that seven new songs were written for this production, which was superficially about a series of unrequited love entanglements. Like so many Somali plays it was full of allusions which could also be interpreted politically. In this case the allusions referred to the 1958 Djiboutian election where the population were asked to choose between continued French rule or independence, with no option for any kind of reunification of Somali peoples. A key song line went: ‘Between two horrible options, I am condemned to choose’ (Hassan,75). Walala Hargeisa was at this stage making and touring major new productions every year, but it was not alone. Numerous groups came together on an ad hoc basis for single shows, either sharing any profits or donating them to charity, but there were other more longstanding companies forming. Hey Sheegsheegin (Don’t Tell Others About Me) were a collective group founded in 1954 in Mogadishu who took their rather unusual name from the title of one of their successful plays. Other early Mogadishu bands included Najmat Mogadish (Mogadishu Star) and Esood Bandir. Kooxda Bodda transmuted into the Radio Mogadishu Artists Company, while for many years Walala Hargeisa was nearly as closely linked with Radio Hargeisa, with many key players drawing a salary from the radio station that supported their artistic development. Due to a lack of any theatre facilities, most early performances were given in the open air, although from 1956 Mogadishu-based groups began hiring cinemas to perform in (Abdullah Said Hersi 1999, 217), while the Hargeisa National Cinema was similarly used in the north (Goth 2015, 11). Thanks to the

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impetus of British colonial school drama and the relative freedom of groups in British Somaliland, as independence and the unification of Somalia and Somaliland approached in 1960 theatre was in this period more advanced in the north than in the south, with Walala Hargeisa in a pre-eminent position. When Abdullahi Quarshe was directly asked about this, in relation to his company’s visit to Mogadishu for the independence celebrations, he said: At that time, in my opinion, there were no artists of our calibre in the South. Only small groups of traditional dancers participated with us in the celebrations. [Other] artists were there but their production skills were not as sophisticated as ours, nor did they compose the same standard of songs and music as we did. (Hassan, 76–7)

Similarly the great oud player and composer, Ahmed Ismail Hussein ‘Hodeide’, said that in his opinion at independence while musical skills were superior in the south, “when you compare poetic composition and looq (singing), northern Somalis and Hargeisa seemed more captivating. Hargeisa at this time was the headquarters!” (Quoted in Samatar 2009, 38)

How to Make a Play, Somali Style Initially Somali plays were given no specific author, or mu’allif. Coming out of the communal traditions of the creation of qarammi and much belwo, it is hardly surprising that the first, particularly short plays, were seen as joint enterprises, with ideas contributed by all in the group of young men engaged in the project. However, this changed quite rapidly and by the late 1950s most productions were led by a poet/playwright, a ‘composer’ or abwaan. This figure became very important, giving gravitas and great poetry to his troupe. As Mohamed Afrah explains: ‘Every drama group is normally led by an abwaan, who serves as the god-father of the company [and] is highly respected by the rest of the troupe’ (188). The primary contributions of the mu’allif were coming up with the central idea for a play, writing the key poetic sections and leading directing of the piece—there being no concept of a separate directorial role in Somali theatre. He, and it was always a he, was often also an actor. The guiding concept, along with a plot outline, would be given to the company, but the composer was not a sole creator and all concerned expected to contribute ideas.

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Mohamed Afrah explains that: In this initial session and subsequent ones the idea is collectively developed, may be changed altogether, the actual plot constructed and the role of each actor determined, all in a communal, participatory manner. After that the playwright/director begins the composition and the tape recording of the poetic parts of the play, with assistance from one or two aides. In the next step the playwright would deliver the poetic pieces on tape recording to both the music writer or rather, music composer (as he does not use written notes), known in Somali as mulaxin. (2013, 171)

This description is based on practices from the 1960s. Initially there would have been no tape recorders, so script would have been delivered orally, with actors reciting back exactly what the mu’allif told them. The poetry/song lyrics were all important because they formed the backbone of the play and were what audiences most valued and remembered. Indeed prior to the 1970s it was impossible to produce a written script due to the lack of a Somali orthography. Some more educated writers did make personal notations in various languages, but the prime vehicle for transmission of ideas was, as it had always been for Somali poetry, oral recitation. The play could continue to change substantially in the usual one- to two-week rehearsal period. Actors felt free to jump in with suggestions; the rehearsal process was certainly not seen as belonging to the playwright/director. Even when a production was officially attributed to a particular person, this often meant only that they came up with the originating concept and probably some at least of the poetry, much of which was then developed by the musicians into song form (Mohamed Afrah, 171–2). Groups might have a musical as well as a poetic abwaan and someone like Hodeide on occasion combined both roles. The strength of leading groups such as Walala Hargeisa, and later Waaberi, in large part derived from the fact that they could call on outstanding musical and poetic composers, as well as recruiting the best singers, musicians and actors with fine improvisational and comic skills—all were crucial for a great Somali play. The role of poetry and song developed throughout the 1950s, in tandem with the increasing significance of the playwright and musician roles. The first plays needed no writer because in performance they relied mainly on improvised speech following an agreed scenario. As we see from Abdullahi Qarshe’s recollections of working on some of the earliest

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productions, his first pieces had few songs and some of these he borrowed from pre-existing works. It was over the second half of the 1950s that he developed what would become the standard format of a Somali play, focused on poetic exchanges and seven or eight songs, put to music, which formed the unchanging core of the piece. These heightened moments were what audiences remembered and often learnt to recite to their friends. They carried the philosophy, ideas and central message of the play, with the songs often performed independently by singer-actor stars for many subsequent years. However, it was only ever the poetry/song that was composed. From its inception Somali theatre has relied heavily on the improvisational ability of its actors, who are true co-creators. Prose sections of plays were never scripted. They relied on the wit, acuity and humour of the performers and could vary substantially—within an agreed framework—from performance to performance. This variation was much enjoyed by theatre aficionados, many of whom have told me that they often went to see the same play on successive evenings, knowing that it would be played differently (Interviews with Abdilahi Awad and Said Salah, Andrzejewski 1974, 9). As the role of poetry in theatre grew so did the sophistication of the music. Originally a group might have only an oud player and a drummer, though Walala Hargeisa benefitted from the outset from the talents of an Indian flautist, a Mr Rao (Hassan, 73), and the flute became the third key instrument in a theatre band. Later the accordion and tambourines were popular additions followed by guitars, and a really big troupe would have saxophones and violins as well, though this was unusual. Until well into the 1960s even leading groups would only have a maximum of around five musicians. A major problem was the lack of training available and the fact that melodic instruments had only been introduced to the country in the 1940s. A skilled musician who could also compose music—again from memory as there was no Somali system of musical notation—was a great asset to any theatre enterprise. With no theatres, no training and few resources, this was a theatre that emerged concentrating on language and clever delivery of lines—utilising the traditional strengths of a culture steeped in poetic recitation. There was rarely any significant set and since nearly all plays were set in the present day, costume tended to be drawn from the actors’ own wardrobes (Andrzejewski 1974, 7–8). Moreover dramatic action has always been limited because from the beginning actors have spoken into standing microphones placed near the front of the stage. Beautiful, meaningful,

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moralising, philosophical and often political poetry, concerned with contemporary Somali life, set to music, and augmented by inventive, witty dialogue was at the heart of the creation of a successful Somali play.

Women in Somali Theatre As in so many other parts of East Africa, in the early days it was considered a disgrace for women to perform in public. Indeed performing on stage, as so often across the region, was considered problematic for the first generation of musicians, singers and actors whether they were male or female. Abdullahi Qarshe had had to hide his oud from his family in Aden, and the later revered musical virtuoso, or in Somali, fanaan, Hodeide, said in an interview that his parents were horrified at his choice of career: We were at war with each other—kick and punch became the medium of our encounters. For them, it was as if their boy was deciding to destroy his life before it even bloomed. You see, both of them hated and despised what we call fuun (artistic activity) […] They died disconsolate over what they felt to be my cursed fate. (In Samatar 2009, 34)

If this was the attitude towards men who were allowed a public life then women, expected to be modest, private and domestic, were going to have a very hard time if they chose a life in performance. Margaret Laurence says that at the time it was commonly held that ‘only prostitutes sing love songs’ (Laurence 1954, 27). Abdi Sinemo’s group had just one young woman performer, Khadija Eyeh Dharaar, commonly known as Belwo, and her father was banned from attending the mosque because of his daughter’s activities. When Shamis Abukar began to sing on Radio Hargeisa in the 1940s she was given a stage name, Gududa Arrivo, to protect her identity, and was smuggled in and out of the recording studio in a full hijab for her own protection. She eventually left in 1951 for Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to pursue her career away from Somali disparagement, returning only when the changing environment meant she could perform openly in 1963 (Goth, 7). Groups were desperate to find women performers but only a tiny number came forward before the 1960s. The first Djiboutian actress, Aishe Auade, could not survive the social opprobrium she attracted at home and went to work in Somaliland in 1960. Sahra Nuur ‘Iftin’ was an early well-known actress who gave up the stage on her marriage—as did many singers and

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actresses. She was followed by Fadumo Abdillahi ‘Maandeeq’, before the arrival of the first super star singer and actress, Halimo Khalif Omar ‘Magool’, in 1961, who ran away from a job waitressing in the town of Galkayo to join the emerging performance industry in Hargeisa (Goth 2015, 4). According to the man who auditioned her for work at Radio Hargeisa, leading poet and playwright, Ali Sugulle, the beauty of her voice meant the audition panel ‘were all frozen to our seats, every single hair of our body stood up on its end and we were covered with goosebumps’ (Goth, 5). Magool was quickly enrolled not only for radio but as an actress with Walala Hargeisa, performing first in Ali Sugulle’s 1962 play Himiladeema (Our Dreams), another play with songs written by Abdullahi Qarshe that was subsequently toured to the Somali community in Aden. (Goth, 7). However, when Sugulle’s subsequent 1962 piece, Nin lagu Seexdow ha Seexan (O Man on Whose Guard the Country Sleeps), was to tour to Mogadishu Magool felt compelled to turn down the lead role for fear of reprisals from her southern Somalia-based family. She went on to perform the lead in no less than eleven plays by Sahardid Mahamed Elmi ‘Jabiye’, and a total of seven for Sugulle, recording many hit songs from the plays that consolidated her reputation as the ‘nightingale’ of Somali music. However, Somali groups continued to struggle to secure enough female performers. The first plays of Walala Hargeisa had no female performers. In Isa Seeg three men took female roles, two of them major parts. Indeed as theatre developed, most groups had men who played the part of women—even on film. As late as the 1980s, actor Ahmed Abdulahi Wais told me that he was regularly performing the role of old women (Interview, Hargeisa, July 2016), and the actor commonly known as Huriyo was famously cast time and again as the matriarch in a career that spanned from the 1950s to his death in 1992. By this time companies could recruit women for the younger roles but there was always a lack of older female performers, so each company had designated male actors who could take such parts and this tradition became part of the performance aesthetic in Somali theatre. It is important that differently from Ethiopia where men also had to be persuaded to take on women’s roles from the 1930s to 1950s, the older male Somali actors did not see this cross-dressing as in any way disgraceful, though Andrzejewski says young men in the early days resented playing seductive love interests (1974, 17). In later years leading women performers became not only national but international stars. Magool travelled widely, being lauded particularly in

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Eygpt and Sudan, while Maryam Mursal, who began her career in 1966 at the age of sixteen, came to fame with the Waaberi band and unusually composed many of her own songs. She is often called the first Somali jazz singer, one who acknowledged a range of western influences and would go on to become an independent star even after Somalia had fallen into civil war, performing to great applause at WOMAD in the UK in 1997, developing a solo recording profile and singing with international stars such as Pater Gabriel and Nina Simone.12 It can hardly escape notice, however, that none of these women transcended the role of performer to take power in the world of theatre. It was not that women were forbidden a role in composing poetry—indeed in the more populist poetic genres of oral poetry there had always been women creators. However, this poetry was primarily domestic and did not deal with the political world of the gebey poets. Moreover, while actresses— as indeed all Somali women—were expected to be skilful, witty improvisers of dialogue, riddles and proverbial speech and often played feisty, combative roles on stage, yet in the written record they are time and again remembered only for their singing ability. A number of informants have told me that to be a lead singer, whether male or female, was the most coveted role on the Somali stage so this is not entirely surprising (Interview, Ahmed Abdulahi Wais, July 2016), but the eliding of the creative aspect of women’s theatrical performances is surely indicative of lack of valuing of women as theatre-makers as opposed to performers. My research has uncovered only Maryam Mursal as a ‘composer’ and no female playwright prior to the twenty-first century. It is surely significant that none of the male writers about Somali theatre have seen fit to comment on this issue. Women’s representation on stage has been far more interesting and diverse. It was also an area of considerable socio-political importance for many playwrights. Most eminent Somali playwrights, and notably their more intellectual leaders, Hasan Sheikh Mumin, Ali Sugulle and Hadraawi, were passionately committed—alongside campaigning for a raft of other progressive policies—to supporting a particularly Somali vision of women’s emancipation. This vision tended to be domestically conservative; women should remain at home prior to marriage, be chaste and continue in their roles as good wives and mothers. They should dress modestly and abstain from alcohol, nicotine or khat and of course they should be good Muslims. However, the progressive playwrights also espoused the cause of female education and of marriages of choice rather than parental arrangement. They believed women’s voices should be heard in the public sphere

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and that women could take on public, alongside domestic, roles. So Ali Sugulle’s 1973 play Dunidu maskaxaday magan u tahay (The World Depends on Brains for its Protection) was centrally about espousing women’s marital rights. There were of course dissenting voices. Men like Mohamed Tukaale in his 1975 play Hablayohow hadmaad gurrsan doontaan (O Girls, When Will You Get Married?) would portray women as temptresses, seduced by modern license and materialism and leading men astray before abandoning them when all their resources had been sucked dry. An older woman who betrayed the culture was the subject of particular opprobrium. In societies that venerate the female of the species primarily as mothers and carriers of culture, women who betray that vision are threatening to undercut the very basis of society. So when Tukaale gives us an old drunk woman who calls cigarettes her children he is invoking comedy but also a version of anarchic hell. Similarly in Djibouti, Hasan Cilmi’s 1986 work, Saddex baa isu faanay (Three Contestants) features a mother who urges her daughter to seduce and relieve rich men of their wealth. Here what is so fearful is that when a mother abandons her culture she may teach her children to do likewise. The old development saying argues that we should educate women because when you educate a man you educate an individual but when you educate a woman she will pass her learning on to her offspring. If what she passes on is western corruption the Somali playwrights argue there will be no wholesome ‘home’ for either men or women. This male-imposed burden helps explain why in contemporary Somalia it is normal for men to wear westernised clothing while women have been pushed back into the burka. In times of fear in patriarchal societies women are always going to have to take more extreme steps to prove their virtue than are their menfolk. The progressive pro-women playwrights were, however, also interested in presenting women as positive role models. Since nearly all Somali plays take place within a domestic, family environment, and since Somali women until very recently were generally confined to domestic roles, it is hardly surprising that women feature almost universally as wives, daughters or love interests. However, those women are by no means commonly seen as docile, passive objects; much more often they are opinionated, clever and notably diverse. In traditional nomadic Somali life, patriarchal though it may be, there is no place for the weak and passive, so women are valued for being tough, hard-working, virtuous and clever. In the analysis of Hasan Sheikh Mumin’s Shabeelnaagood below this is clearly illustrated in

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the contrasting young female leads. Diiddan is a clever, witty, riddling and opinionated school teacher held up as a model for a desirable young Somali woman, whereas the pretty, weak and ignorant Shallaayo is seduced and made pregnant by a trickster, attempts suicide and faces a future of poverty and disgrace (Andrzejewski 1974). Shallaayo has also been recognised by many as representing in part her country, Somalia. In this she is certainly not alone. Just as the continent has so often been represented as Mother Africa and embodied as a woman in plays like the Ghanaian, Ama Ata Aidoo’s, Anowa (1970), Somalia has often been portrayed as a woman in Somali theatre. Hasan Sheikh Mumin sees his country as seduced and abandoned by powerful, corrupt countrymen, while in the later—1980—play Xorriyo (Indpendence) by Mahamed Abdullahi ‘Sangub’, the eponymous heroine is abducted and forced into a polygamous marriage by four brothers representing bad Somali leadership (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 191). A variation on the theme is Ali Sugulle’s 1963 piece, Indhasarcaad (Clouded Vision). This play again has a woman personifying an abused land, but here that land is the Northern Frontier District, the land the British awarded to Kenya against the wishes of its Somali population (Andrzejewski 1978, 100). We will see similar practices in Eritrean personification of their colonised land as female (see Chapter 3)—and again all these plays were written by men. The problem is that in all these representations the—inevitably—young and beautiful woman is portrayed as a helpless victim. Interestingly, while this might be expected in societies like that of the colonising British Victorians who lauded female helplessness or, to a lesser extent, the highly patriarchal, feudal society of pre-independence highland Eritrea, the trope seems to contradict traditional Somali valuing of female strength, wit and cleverness, picking up instead on a possibly imported—from Italian, British or Indian music, theatre and film—romantic sensibility that highly problematically undermines female agency.

The Heydays of Somali Theatre: 1960–1974 Many of those involved in theatre making and as enthusiastic audience members, recall the 1960s and early 1970s as the richest period of Somali theatre. Undoubtedly a major reason was that this was the period of maximum social freedom. Prior to independence one had to beware of colonial authorities, who were certainly wary of the Pan-Somali advocacy of much theatre. And once Siyad Barre came to power censorship rapidly became

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draconian and the theatre, largely state supported, was expected to serve state agenda and encouraged to join in the increasingly obligatory adulation of the dictator. In contrast, the theatre of the 1960s is recognised as being socially engaged, politically critical and often satiric in tone. The occasion of independence and the unification of Somaliland and Somalia in July 1960 was a major impetus for artistic creativity. Hodeide, then living in Aden, was encouraged by the British Colonial Office to help create music for big celebrations being organised to celebrate Somali independence across the Red Sea. His song Dhalad (Birth) became an instant hit and Radio Hargeisa invited him to move to the city, which he did (Samatar, 35). Meanwhile many artists from Hargeisa were heading south to celebrate independence in the new national capital of Mogadishu. Walala Hargeisa had already created a play, Gardid waa Allah diid (He Who Refuses Justice Refuses Allah), credited to Sahardiid Mohamed Elmi ‘Jabiye’, predicting the outcome of the election, and the band took a road trip to join southern Somali musicians in playing for the achievement of independence. The unity of Somali artists could now be demonstrated by free movement and cross fertilisation of artistic talent (Fig. 1). Interestingly it is apparent that even at this early period there was some political anxiety and jealousy regarding the popularity and influence of performing artists. When the young Hodeide arrived to celebrate his popularity at the invitation of Radio Hargeisa, he was sent not to the northern capital but to join other artists in what he describes as an educational exile. During those days, there was a cohort of young educated and professional Somali men who dominated social life in Hargeisa. To cut down on their uppity prominence, they were exiled to the remote outpost of Dayaha [Dayah], near Erigavo. Among them were Abdisalaam Haji Aden, Hassan Ali Henery, Ku Adeyeh, Nine, and others. […] They were posted by the new Somali political and business leaders who became somewhat envious of this educated group’s popularity among the denizens of Hargeisa. The assignment was for the cohorts to teach at the new intermediate school. (Quoted in Samatar, 35–6)

Dayah had been built by the British in the 1950s and has already been mentioned as the school attended under colonialism by Said Salah Ahmed, and the place of production of an early play by Ahmed Sulaiman ‘Bidde’. Indeed there was a close connection between schools, teachers and northern Somali theatre running right through from the 1950s to the collapse

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Fig. 1  Hodeidi playing his oud in 2013. (Source: All three Somali images came from net sources that are multiply available—i.e. not owned by a particular site.)

of the tradition in 1990. Foreign staff may have introduced the form, but they also encouraged Somalis to take it on for local language audiences, and then many Somalis who had been educated in these schools in turn became both teachers with interests in making theatre and leading voices in major theatre groups. This on-going connection helps explain the keen concern with education in many Somali plays. At Dayah Hodeide responded to a request from his colleagues to compose a play, Magaalo (Town) which was put on to coincide with the Eid celebrations—a common time for play making. The actors, alongside a football team, then took their work to the larger town of Burao, some 300 miles away by road, where they enjoyed great success. Qarshe offers a rarely admitted example of artistic rivalry here, when he says that the admiration of ‘the professionals and the young people’ (Samatar, 36) led

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to such jealousy among other performers that some poured ghee into his oud. This probably helps explain why he promptly left in 1961 for seven years working with musicians in Djibouti. The increasing popularity of theatre is demonstrated by the creation of Golaha Murtida iyo Madadaalada (Hargeisa Theatre for Performing Arts and Entertainment), the first dedicated Somali performance building, in1963. This project, with leading forces Osman Gacanloo, Ali Faynuus, Ali Dheere Da’ar and star women performers Magool and Sahra Badhbadha, involved taking over an abandoned garage which the performers cleaned before building a stage and buying chairs for the audience. Again key players were employed by Radio Hargeisa, though freelancers were also brought in, with one of them, Jabiye, who had only recently arrived in Hargeisa, becoming a hugely prolific playwright for the new venture (Goth, 11). However, throughout the 1960s the centre of gravity for artistic production inexorably moved towards the new capital and the Somali Republic’s largest city, Mogadishu. Artists were increasingly drawn there, where Radio Mogadishu was for many years the centre of theatrical and artistic patronage, with many performers working as broadcasters for the station. This employment was hugely important as right up until the establishment of Siyad Barre’s state bands theatre was essentially an amateur activity. No one could live on theatre alone, so steady employment with supportive employers like the main radio stations was key to the sustained activity of the theatre makers. The concrete symbol of the massive popularity of theatre at this time was the building, in 1967, of the Somali National Theatre, a gift from the Chinese that seated 2,500 people and regularly attracted capacity audiences. The theatre was not home to any one particular company but was regularly used by groups such as the Radio Artists Association, the Diinlow Kabirow Company, and Ex-bana Estro, which was associated with the youth wing of the Somali Youth League (Fig. 2).

Going to a Theatre Performance There were variations in how plays were performed. Some had more or fewer songs, some had a greater amount of prose to poetry, and occasionally there was a pure dance drama.13 The plays also varied in length. However, overall they followed a similar format. The following description is based on an account given to me by Abdilahi Awad (Interview July

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Fig. 2  The Somali National Theatre

2016), a great fan of Somali theatre in the 1970s and early 1980s before he left the country in 1985, embellished by details given by other informants and observation of online recordings. An audience of several hundred would begin forming at around 6pm for a performance typically beginning at eight. Andrezejewski says that the ‘huge crowds’ encompassed ‘both men and women, and among them one can find members of the new educated elite just as easily as persons who have had no formal education’ (1978, 88). Schoolboys were immensely keen on theatre. Abdilahi recalled to me climbing trees to gain entry to a show as a boy when he did not have money. While in his 2016 autobiography, The Mourning Tree, Mohamed Barud Ali speaks of how a group of his teenage friends and he were so eager to get to Hargeisa to watch a play that they took a night-time lorry ride on a poor road that ended in a disastrous accident (56). For many entry was facilitated in that a ticket cost not much more than the price of a cup of tea. The stage would be set with two or three microphones on stands. The musicians would assemble and begin

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to play the particular band’s signature tune. The most famous was that belonging to Waaberi and derived from a song from Hassan Sheikh Mumin’s phenomenally popular 1968 Shabeelnaagood. The central line, as translated by Andrzejewski, went: ‘We guide the public rightly, we entertain them and we lead them by the hand to profitable things.’ The actors would enter to musical accompaniment and the announcer would give out all their names—both the name of the actor and of the character they were playing. The actors would recite or sing a significant snippet from their role to introduce their part and exit. Mohamed Afrah explains that All these various artistic elements combined in a beautiful harmony were certain to get the Somali audience into a highly receptive mood, as they actually confirmed through their explosive applause. (2013, 204)

The play proper would begin with the band, when not actually playing the key songs at the heart of the performance, accompanying it with mood music. Most full length plays also had both Prologue and Epilogue, generally musical and with powerful whole cast choruses devoted to driving home the message of the production. The actors utilised the on-stage microphones which they clustered around to be heard across the auditorium. The most popular part of a play would be the poetic songs, which also carried the weight of the ‘message’ of the piece. However, Andrezejewski argues that even here it was the poetic message that was most valued: Somali audiences pay great attention to the songs in a play, but it seems their interest is principally in the words […]. It is a common practice for actors to sing each line or stanza twice so that the audience can fully understand the words, since many people are accustomed to memorizing the passages they like so that they can sing, or more often recite, them in private to their friends and families. (1974, 9)

Plays and Playwrights of the 1960s It is impossible to discuss all the plays and playwright/director/actors of this period as literally hundreds of pieces had been performed prior to the military overthrow of the Somali democracy. Significant names not brought in to focus below would include Abdi Hassan Sugub, Abdillahi

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Yusuf Farey, Ahmed Artan Hange, Ahmed Ismail Hussein ‘Hodeide’, Sahardid Mahamed Elmi ‘Jabiye’, Ahmed Warsame ‘Baribari’ and Mahamed Jaamac ‘Iika-case’. For the purposes of helping understanding of the concerns and tenor of theatre in the period I have chosen to focus on three popular plays and their ‘composers’, prior to a discussion of some of the common factors playwrights took into consideration when creating their theatre. Ali Sugulle. Kalahaab Kalahaad (Wide Apart and Torn Asunder): 1966 Ali Sugulle (1936–2016) was one of the most famous of all the Somali playwrights. Born, like so many of the first generation of theatre artists in Somaliland, in the town of Buroa, he attended primary school in the old port of Berbera. Sugulle quickly gained an international reputation with his very first song being recorded and played on Ethiopia’s Radio Addis Ababa (Goth, 37). He became a key player in the 1960s Somaliland development of theatre, employed by Radio Hargeisa and writing for Walala Hargeisa, of which he was a key member. He later moved with many Walala Hargeisa members to the new capital of Mogadishu where he was associated with the super-group, Waaberi. Ali Sugulle was well known for his committed progressive political stance which was to get him into trouble with Siyad Barre’s military government, but he never lost sight of the need to engage with, and be sensitive to, the perspective of ordinary Somalis, arguing that ‘You can only gain the interest of the public if you make your work tuned to their tastes and needs’ (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 223). He has a range of much-loved 1960s plays to his name. His Indhasaracaad (Clouded Vision) (1963) was apparently so moving that the Prime Minister ‘who attended the play more than once, wept with emotion during the performance’ (Johnson1974, 169). Other works from this period include Gobannimo (Independence) (1962), Himiladeena (Our Dreams) 1966 and Kalahaab Kalahaad (Wide Apart and Torn Asunder) 1966. I am going to look in more detail at the last of these. As in Ali Ibrahim Idle’s play, Dhulkeenna dhibaha ka jooga (The Troubles in Our Land), considered below, the central character of Kalahaab Kalahaad is a civil servant—a growing and important group in newly urbanising, independent Somalia—but unlike Idle’s character this man, Ina Caateeye, is destroying his family and his prospects in his pursuit

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of modern, immoral pleasures—notably his womanising, patronage of nightclubs and his highly un-Islamic drunkenness. Ina is married to a delightful and respectable young woman, Deggan, who continues to love him even when he deserts her to go off with a prostitute who is happy to join him in his ‘imported’ modern pleasures (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 155–6). Andrzejewski describes this a play as ‘a rake’s progress’ (1974, 7), and it is one that brings Ines’ respectable parents, as well as his wife, huge unhappiness. Ali Sugulle expiates on the evils of modernity as represented especially in his portrayal of nightclubs. He sets a major scene in a club where we first see the dissolute dancing to western music before they are interrupted by a group of traditionalists who urge them to take part instead in a Somali folk dance. The clubbers apostrophise the intruders as ‘country hicks’ (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 159), while the proud Somali youth accuse the drunkards of blindly following foreign customs ‘like donkeys’ (159). Afraah explains that the tone of these comic exchanges ‘indicates that he [Sugulle] takes sides with the defenders of tradition’ (159). As in so many plays, traditional Somali life, though recognised as hard, is also seen as meaningful and full of beauty, something often brought out by referencing imagery from rural life. This is exemplified in an exchange between Ina’s parents—his father, Caateeye, and mother, Cutiya. Caateeye: We have suffered a lot from thirst and from hunger, Yet we did not have bad luck. Life is full of trouble And as short as a journey needing only one night’s rest. Often we had meagre fare Yet we also ate meat and drank milk in plenty And there were nights and there were days one does not forget. You remember them, don’t you? If God allows it Other wonderful things like that are still in store for us. Cutiya: Oh, Caateeye, those nights and days one does not forget, That is what the bond between us, and our first homecoming together, were all about. Caateeye: (Aside) Ah, how right she is! Cutiya: The rain clouds that thundered, the lightening that flashed And the sight of fresh grass engendered from them on the horizon, and wild fruit that ripened,

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Higlo that put forth berries, and the hohob that we picked together. (Andrzejewski 1978) However, in a theatre culture that both Mohamed Afrah and Andrzejewski have seen as characterised by negotiations between tradition and modernity, with both having positive and negative aspects, not all that is ‘traditional’ is good. Caateeye is a bullying, authoritarian man, whose wrath only further alienates his son. He is also greedy. A sub-plot follows the respectable love affair between Ina’s sister, Marwo, and her would-be husband, Mohamed Ahmed, where Caateeye threatens to thwart the match because of his excessive demands for bride wealth payments. Even younger people are shown to have regressive views about marriage. Mohamed’s friend argues against modern ideas of companionate marriage, love and beauty as determining factors in choosing one’s partner, urging instead investigation into the girls’ family, ancestry and intelligence (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 226–7). Marwo is fortunately able to triumph on all scores, including in a battle of riddles—always a popular sign of intellectual and verbal ability in Somali culture—and wins her man. This containment of multiple plotlines is common to many plays, but Sugulle’s mastery is shown when he pulls both strands together. Ina is redeemed by the protective love of his mother and the patience of his wife that eventually brings him to his senses when contrasted with the ‘demanding aggressiveness’ and ‘self-pity’ (Andrzejewski 1974, 7) of the nightclub girl—while the father finally relents and allows his daughter to marry her loving suitor, giving both couples a happy ending. As we see elsewhere the pro-women trope (so long as she is a ‘good’ woman) is an important aspect of the playwrights’ ‘modern’ thinking. Hassan Sheikh Mumin. Shabeelnagood (Leopard among the Women): 1968 Hassan Sheikh Mumin (1931–2008) was born in the ancient coastal town of Zeila in Somaliland and raised there and later in the inland town of Borama. His father was a relatively middle-class trader who sent his son first to Quranic school and then for a colonial elementary education. As a young man Hassan joined the Somali Youth League and it was for the ninth anniversary celebrations of the establishment of the SYL in 1957 that he was first inspired to write poetic patriotic songs. He then began

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writing poetry and short radio dramas for both Radio Hargeisa and Radio Mogadishu as well as for the BBC Somali service. He came to fame particularly for his 1966 short play, Hubsiino Hal baa la Siistaa (Certainty is Exchanged for a She-Camel), a story of a daring elopement (Andrzejewski 1974, 10). He was then formally employed as a writer, broadcaster and producer of cultural programmes by Radio Mogadishu between 1968 and 1976. From 1968 he also worked for the Cultural Department of the Ministry of Education (Andrzejewski 1974, 28). This was the period of Hassan’s greatest fame and productivity in which he wrote four significant plays; Shabeelnagood, Gaaraabidhaan (Glow-­ worm) (1968)—his personal favourite, sometimes credited with having ‘inspired the military coup led by Siyaad Barre in 1969’,14 Ehlunaarka Adduunka (The Damned of the Earth) (1971) and Dunidu maskaxday magan u tahay (The World Relies on Brains for its Protection) (1973) (Mohamed Afrah 2008, 68–70). Relatively educated compared to many of the first generation Somali playwrights, Hassan was passionately committed to building a socially and politically just society. When disappointed in the corruption of the SYL after they came to power at independence, he left them and became a leading member of the opposition, the Somali Democratic Union. The repressive regime of Siyad Barre meant Hassan could no longer openly voice his criticisms and he moved to Djibouti before returning quietly to his home town of Borama. There he continued to write both poems and plays privately before the Somali civil war forced him to flee to Norway for his final years. Shabeelnaagood (Leopard Among the Women) is by far the most extensively analysed play of the whole Somali canon. This is primarily because it is the only play to have been both fully transcribed from performance and then published in 1974, by Andrzejewski, in both Somali and English, with an accompanying commentary. Extensive analysis of the same text forms a central part of Mohamed Afrah’s 2013 unpublished PhD thesis. The play was so popular that the neologism, Shabeelnagood, became accepted into Somali speech as describing a predatory young man looking to seduce innocent girls. When it was first performed in Mogadishu at the National Theatre by the Radio Mogadishu Troupe, with the playwright in the role of the Judge, crowds besieging the box office caused traffic jams and police had to be drafted in to control them. The play was put on three times with runs of over a week each time (exceptional when the normal

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run was three or four nights). It was also taken on a long provincial tour, serialised on local radio—an honour given to only the most popular plays—and transmitted by the BBC Somali service (Andrzejewski 1974, vi). A description by Mohamed Afrah of his feelings on watching the play as a school boy indicates the popularity of the play. He says that at the close of the final song: I remember how we, the audience, were totally taken away by emotions, most of us hysterically and continuously clapping, others overwhelmed by tears, while dozens of young people, both men and women, including myself, rushed up the stage, awarding gifts (our watches etc) [these would usually be returned by actors after the show] to the members of the cast, or enthusiastically embracing the actors and the singers one after the other in a virtually involuntary expression of overwhelming appreciation. (2013, 211)

The central plot concerns the eponymous Shabeel, whose life mission, aided by equally immoral friends, is to seduce as many young women as possible by tricking them into performing fake, private, wedding ceremonies and then abandoning them. His eightieth victim is to be the girl we see in the play, the naïve young Shallaayo (She-who-repents). Totally innocent of the facts of life, Shallaayo is taken in by the Leopard’s blandishments. When she falls pregnant she does not even know what is happening to her. Shabeel subsequently denies any knowledge of this supposed wife and her life and honour are consequently ruined in a culture where to have an illegitimate child is the ultimate disgrace for a woman who could be called wacalla-dhala (she-who-gives-birth-to-bastards) and might be subject to family honour killing (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 179). The sub- or counter-plot, as for Sugulle’s Kalahaab Kalahaad, is provided by a contrasting couple, Diiddane and Diiddan. These clever, knowing school teacher friends, devoted to their nation and its improvement through education, meet up accidentally after having not seen each other for years. In a country where people expect to marry young both are relatively old, the man, Diiddane, being thirty and the woman, Diiddan, twenty-five—something that becomes the source of continuing banter between the two as they mutually mock each other for being undesirably ancient. By the play’s conclusion justice has been done. Shabeel is finally, unrepentantly arrested. Shallaayo, ruined, runs away from home facing an unknown but surely desperate future. While Diiddane and Diiddan,

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having taken on responsibility for an abandoned, illegitimate child, finally agree to marry. The hugely serious purpose of what is often a comic play is established in the opening song, where our heroine, Diiddan, explicitly states the purpose of play and playwright. Night and day we fashion our words, In depth we help in advancing our mother-tongue, We lead it, we always guide it, we set it right, We never shirk, we toil for it, we kindle the old wisdom, We winnow it, we satisfy its needs, we strive for it. We guide the public rightly, we entertain them and we lead them by the hand to profitable things. (Andrzejewski 1974, 45)

This last line, situating the company as moral and intellectual guides and simultaneously as entertainers, goes a long way to explaining the purpose and the success of Somali drama. It is driven by a need to meaningfully engage with the contemporary problems of society, but never forgets that its audience also want to enjoy themselves. Because this is a Somali play it is also hugely aware of its linguistic responsibilities in this land of oral poets; and it is aware of the importance of ‘the old wisdom’. But, this wisdom must be ‘winnowed’, a term key to this opening poem-song, and returned to in the final Epilogue where the cast repeat the refrain: ‘We are winnowing right from wrong’ (215). The whole concept of winnowing, of separating useless chaff from life-­ giving grain, explains the thought processes and mission of the play. There will be no unquestioning acceptance here of either ‘the old wisdom’ or of new ideas, no Manichean division into tradition good, modernity bad; rather the play will examine, will test, how society operates through the live action of the performance. The play is a positively Freirean experiment in dialogic education.15 The audience will vicariously experience the agency of particular actions, ideas and philosophies on the lives of the key players, and then will be urged through the commentary of the Prologue’s opening glee and the Epilogue, to reflect on what they have learned through the ‘winnowing’ process of the play. As so often in this national drama, the greatest warning, personified in Shabeel, is against the dangers of an urban life untethered to ties of society

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and morality. The abandoned child whom our hero and heroine adopt is a further symbol of the evils of selfish, immoral urban life. But tradition is also questioned. Bringing up Shallaayo so innocent and ignorant makes her vulnerable to the Leopard’s wiles. Mohamed Afrah argues further that, as in a number of Somali plays, the vulnerable virgin is representative of the Somali nation and that her downfall is a coded condemnation of the corrupt government of the time which is ruining its people (191). Diiddane and Diiddan are both modern educators who seek to enlighten future generations of children and who have rejected traditions of early marriage as they seek to create a new kind of nation, one that will encompass even the outcast child. As we see in other plays discussed, the playwright seeks a thoughtful negotiation between honoured rural tradition and the opportunities and dangers of embracing various aspects of more urbanising modernity, while covertly condemning what he sees as contemporary mismanagement of the state. For the final part of this brief analysis I want to look not at the scripted poetic and song elements that are so often the focus of discussion of Somali theatre, but at the partly devised, partly improvised, prose sections of the text as it has been given to us—while remaining well aware that this was only the ‘script’ on the particular night Andrzejewski recorded and actors would have used different words in each performance. Since I cannot speak or read Somali this text is the only opportunity available to interrogate the skills of these oral performers in nightly re-creating their play. It is particularly important as other East African performing traditions; notably the early Ethiopian popular theatre of such as Iyoel Yohannes (see Chapter 2) and the Tanzanian popular professional variety troupes (see Volume Two) utilised similar scenario-based theatre making techniques that relied on the improvisatory skills of actors, but barely any recordings exist of these productions so it is usually difficult to assess how the actors performed their craft. While the poet/playwright generally wrote seriously and philosophically, the actors, as we see in Shabeelnagood, were expected to provide witty comedy in the improvised sections. In this instance the feisty comedy is almost invariably located not in soliloquy but in mocking exchanges between characters, particularly between couples. Indeed given the microphone-­bound world of Somali theatre and the focus on language it is unsurprising that this is linguistic rather than plastic comedy. With the sole, sad exception of Shallaayo, it is also a world where women are quite the equals of men in oral combat. And it is a world full

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of sexual banter. Mumin, like so many of his fellow dramatists, was an advocate of women’s emancipation, but he shows us a world where both ‘traditional’ women such as Shallaayo’s mother, Shammado, as well as the modern Diiddan, are well able to hold their own in verbal sparring with their men. The exchanges can also be raunchy, with women quite as lusty as their menfolk, as for example in this conversation between Shallaayo and her husband Guuleed who is preparing to set off on a trading trip. He tries to touch her in bidding her farewell and she responds: Shammado: Guuleed: Shammado: Guuleed: Shammado:

Keep your hands off me, Guuleed. Goodbye, I’m going. Come now, when a man becomes old… What then? And reaches your age… [hesitating]… and reaches your age, his eyes are weak, and as for his mind, don’t even speak about it! Guuleed: Insults are carried in one’s memory! Shammado: Well, I’ve finished. Now if a man breaks his spine, unless someone sets it firmly for him— Guuleed: What do you mean by that? Shammado: Unless someone sets it firmly for him, firmly, and does it well, can he raise himself up? […] Guuleed: Now about a man breaking his spine and not being able to raise himself up unless someone sets it firmly for him—all that talk you were ladling out—now that I have turned my intelligence and my wisdom to it again it looks to me…it looks to me like…Let’s go inside! (53) Not only older women have a voice. The hugely popular scene 14 (of 16) sees Diiddan warning her female pupils against the wiles of the Leopard. When these same girls subsequently encounter Shabeel in the street he finds they are well armed against his blandishments, mocking him as “tormentor of maidens”, “clandestine schemer”, “woman-hunting leopard” and most damning of all; “old bachelor” (189), in a scene that reminds me of the market girls mockery of the colonial policeman, Amusa, in Nigerian Wole Soyinka’s masterpiece, Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). Their exposure leaves Shabeel utterly discomforted and is the precursor to his arrest—a leopard whose claws have finally been drawn.

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Mumin provides the ideas, the philosophy and political critique through his poetic compositions, but the feisty, earthy comic life of Shabeelnagood is rooted in the wit and repartee of the acting company. Ali Ibrahim Idle. Dhulkeenna dhibaha ka jooga (The Troubles in Our Land): 1968 Ali Ibrahim Idle (1940–??) was born in Berbera in Somaliland and like a number of early theatre artists became a school teacher. He went on after the military revolution to study at Lafoole College of Education and by the mid-1970s was on the staff of the Adult Education Department of the Ministry of Education. Several of his plays were highly popular and toured throughout Somalia and Djibouti. He is probably most famous for Dhulkeenna dhibaha ka jooga (The Troubles in Our Land). This is one of a raft of plays that deplore inter-clan rivalries, but also warn of the dangers of urbanised selfish life, especially symbolised by over-indulgence in khat chewing and chasing women. The young hero, Dhirran, is a patriot who is pitted against his dissolute peers, epitomised in the character of Dhamac, but also against negative forces in the older generation, namely his father and uncle. Dhirran is a civil servant and his older relatives try to pressure him to embezzle government money to fund an inter-clan war. Ultimately Dhirran is successful in acting as a role model to the young men he criticises, reforming their dissolute lifestyle, but he fails to halt the inter-clan rivalry that leads to an armed engagement where his uncle is killed alongside many of his clansmen (Andrzejewski 1974, 12). As in so many plays the ‘troubles’ referred to are both backward looking—divisive clannism—and modern—the lure of a dissolute selfish lifestyle. The play is also an excellent example of some of the key poetic techniques employed by many writers. Alliteration is important here not only in the poetry at the centre of the play but also in naming. Andrzejewski says that ‘Usually at least those who are deeply involved with each other in the plot have alliterative names’ (1974, 6) but Idle takes this to an unusual, though by no means unique, extreme, giving his characters the names Dhamac, Dhiiran, Dhiillaside, Dhalanteed, Dhimaye, Dhadacir, Dhaxalmaal, Dhogor, Dhakhaar, Dharaar, Dhuxul, Dhudi and Dhaqde. The play features poetic debate, often used between poets in public life, but also invoked by many playwrights. Dhirrad and Dhamac have a poetic dispute from which I take a portion of Andrzejewski’s 1978 translation.

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I have contempt for you, oh Dhamac! You live in a dream And practice no reflection. Around and about, you just talk Of frolicking with the girls And tearing off the khat leaves for yourself. Idle, you look down on What the young men of our country And the whole nation Used to boast of. Do not these things fill you with concern? If you proclaim, Oh Dhirrad, that dew is rain, That a mirage is water And that a man who is alive will not die And tell people to listen to you, Shall we regard it as true Unless we get the water from you? It is you who are dreaming And God made you restless. Stop censoring The youth of our country And keep in with your people!

As we have seen in the other brief play analyses, exchanges in Somali plays are not characterised by romantic sighing, sweet nothings or introspective musings. This is a place where the prevailing pastoral life is tough and tough-minded acute exchanges, whether between life partners, rivals or enemies are what are looked for, respected and enjoyed. Somali theatre may be poetic, but it is also vigorous and combative.

Considerations in Writing a Play Most Somali playwrights were poets before they became playwrights, and in the 1960s and 1970s it was assumed that those who aspired to the title of abwaan would have superb command of Somali language and great compositional ability, as well as important things to say. Moreover various specific aspects and techniques had to be taken into account. Many of

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these related to demonstrating one’s deep knowledge of Somali culture and orature. The name of a play was considered important in attracting an audience. The general admiration for alliteration was often extended to titles as in Idle’s Dhulkeenna dhibibaha ka jooga, with its alliteration on the ‘d’, subsequently extended to the naming of all his characters (Andrzejewski 1974, 6). A further option was to either reference a popular proverb—and the use of proverbs is widespread within play texts—or to coin a title that sounded proverbial. Hodeidi’s 1969 play, Macal cune ma mouqandowne sounds most unprepossessing in its English translation, (He Who Eats the Sheep’s Dewlap Cannot Hide), but is a warning against cheating and greed, since this part of the local mutton is a delicacy with a high fat content that might show on the sneaky secret eater’s waistline, especially in a society where pastoralists are typically slim and sinewy. Another Hodeidi play from 1961, Arawailo, utilises a further tactic, referencing another aspect of Somali culture. Hodeidi invokes a mythical Somali queen of the same name. She was famous for her cruelty to men and her modern namesake is equally unpleasant to her suitor from whom she demands excessive bride wealth (Andrzejewski 1974, 6). Finally, as in the case of Shabeelnagood, the coining of similar neologisms was a popular practice, wittily demonstrating one’s mastery over language. Very many plays featured riddles and proverbs, both highly valued means of showing linguistic and cultural knowledge and intellectual acumen. To return to Ali Sugulle’s Kalahaab Kalahaad, riddling is used, as in a number of other plays, as a device to show wit in a woman. Here the heroine of the sub-plot, Marwo, is posed a riddle by her lover’s traditionalist friend as he seeks to test both her intelligence and her understanding of male/female mores. The man asks Marwo to explain the ‘three things/ That are shameful to women/Yet appropriate to men’ (1966, Scene 16). Fortunately she is well able to respond, the three things being, eating first and fast, taking multiple partners in marriage and being the first to initiate a relationship—though interestingly Marwo, while accepting the first two, rejects the third in a modern challenge to the old understanding of female submissiveness (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 226–8). The most extreme case of riddling in plays appears to have been Abdillaahi Yusuf Farey’s 1959, Miyi iyo magaalo (Town and Country), a comic piece centred round riddling exchanges between a townsman and a village maiden he is seeking to woo (Andrzejewski 1978, 95).

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Somali plays from the late 1950s through to 1990 tended to seldom depart from accepted plot rules. These included: 1. The play should be set in contemporary Somali communities and deal with contemporary issues in a broadly realistic manner. 2. The play will have a broadly domestic setting, though this may be an allegory for political or nationalist concerns. 3. The play will praise traditional Somali culture, but many playwrights will also debate what aspects of modernity it is desirable for Somalis to adopt. 4. The play will have a moral and a message. 5. The play will have its key sections given in verse/song. 6. The play will combine serious issues, romance and comedy. 7. The play will normally have two—sometimes more—sub-plots, but they tend to speak in different or complementary ways about the same issue and ideally come together by the end of the performance. 8. Characters will be clearly divided between the good and the evil (Mohamed Afrah seeks to argue that many characters are internally divided (2013, 203–4) but this tends to be in seeking to work out whether to follow modern ideas or traditional values rather than whether they are essentially good or bad.) 9. The play will have a happy ending. Compared to any other theatre tradition I am considering Somali theatre evolved to be extraordinarily formulaic, not in thinking but in the aesthetics of creation. This is not a criticism. The constraints that came to be imposed on playwrights were embraced just as had been the rules of particular kinds of poetic creation. Originality would flower within a set of generally accepted rules of form which would hold once they had been established from around 1960 up to the fall of the Somali republic in 1991. It is evident that this form spoke particularly strongly in this period to a great range of Somali people. The foundation was undoubtedly a unifying passion for the Somali language, for outstanding command of rhetoric, and for its supreme form of alliterative poetry/song.16 A central argument for Mohamed Afrah in his 2013 thesis is that the form appealed to so many because it spoke to a ‘transitional’ people, that is, a society transitioning from living as primarily nomadic oral livestock herders to one that supported urban settlements, literacy and engagement with an international world. Here he is speaking largely about the concern of so many

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plays to engage with widespread anxiety about how to conserve identity and values of family, Islam, female modesty and sexual propriety while negotiating increased access to seductive foreign imports that enabled young people in particular to access alcohol, foreign languages and musics and a more individualistic lifestyle. The more intellectual playwrights are concerned beyond pitting stereotyped ideas of modernity against tradition with teasing out what new ideas can be helpfully embraced—secular education, a limited emancipation of women, political democracy and work in service to the state—and what older ideas might need to be reviewed— most commonly the excesses of patriarchy and clannism. Certainly this palate of social concerns comes up time and again and obviously spoke to a range of national anxieties. While I think there is considerable value in much of what Afrah argues, it is important to recognise the dangers of reifying immutable ideas of tradition. Many have written about how quickly tradition can be accepted as historical truth. Terrence Ranger for one has discussed the invention of tradition in colonial Africa and especially invented folk cultures (2012). The invocation of tradition is all too often an expression of fear of change based on inadequate historical knowledge of how societies are always in transition. Certainly transition continues to be evident in contemporary Somalia, Somaliland and Djibouti. This most obviously evidences in the fall out of civil war but also in cultural matters such as the enforcing of new conservative dress codes for women in Somalia and Somaliland, the repression of music, and in the huge influences of people travelling between the massively expanded Somali diaspora and their homelands. It is easy to forget that the so popular new poetic forms, the introduction of melodic music and theatre itself were all seen as abominations and evidence of un-­ Somali corruption of tradition by conservative voices when they were first introduced. A major factor driving the popularity of theatre until 1991 was not only that it was often highly political but that it continually spoke to nationalist and irredentist longings. Somalis came together repeatedly throughout this period in their aspirations for a greater Somali nation. These plays represented and embodied aspirations nearly everyone subscribed to prior to the convulsions of civil war and allowed old and young, urban and rural, rich and poor to celebrate a rare sense of unity and hope in a uniquely safe, communal and democratic space. It seems to me that this nationalist glue was equally important to the tradition/modernity trope and the language factor in making theatre such a strong medium for expressing

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popular thought. It also leads to interesting questions about whether, post-civil-war, it will ever be possible to re-establish a Somali theatre with equal relevance to so many of the Somali population.

Theatre Under the Revolutionary Government of Siyad Barre The Early Years: 1969–1975 When the military takeover happened it was initially greeted by many with great enthusiasm, including by all theatre activists I have heard of. Hodeide said that he greeted the bloodless coup with ‘a strange mixture of sorrow and total exhilaration’ (Samatar 1982, 40), while Abdillahi Qarshe told his interviewer: ‘I was in favour of the change and I fully supported it’ (Hassan, 81). Any sorrow at the failure of the civilian government was overshadowed by a sense of hope that corruption and the evils of the self-­ serving ruling clique would be swept away. A raft of plays were written in the early 1970s supporting various initiatives of the new government. One such innovation was the establishment in 1970 of a revolutionary orientation centre, Halene, ‘where civil servants, and students returning from abroad, are given military training and taught the theory of revolution and the practice of hard physical work’ (Andrzejewski 1974, 13). The intention was to close the growing gap between educated urban intelligentsia and the mass of the people, and two plays were quickly written in its praise. Ali Hussein’s 1970 Dheriga karka makaa ka keenay? (What Brought the Pot to the Boil?) envisaged scenes at the centre before it was actually built. When it was complete an early group sent included many theatre artists from both the Radio Mogadishu Artists Company and other companies who came together to create Waaberi (Dawn), a play ‘depicting life there and glorifying the whole scheme’ (Andrzejewski 1974, 13), while laughing at how the physical side of camp life rejuvenated middle-­ aged men as they lost their paunches engaging in rigorous exercise. Waaberi was subsequently taken up as the name of the most famous and largest of the state supported ‘bands’. Another early action was the establishment of the Somali National University so that students would not have to travel abroad and be ‘infected’ by degenerate, un-Somali ideas. There was also support for the Lafoole Teacher Training College which had been established just before

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the revolution with American funding. Said Salah Ahmed, an existing teacher who had developed a keen interest in theatre through his colonial school education, was one of the first batch of fourteen, all male teacher training students, who were crucially joined at Lafoole in 1971 by a man sometimes called the Somali Shakespeare, Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame ‘Hadraawi’. Hadraawi, ‘arguably the most popular living Somali poet’ (Jama Musa Jama 2013, 9) was born in Somaliland in 1943 but raised in Aden, and already a poet when he fled the Somali community in Aden in 1967 because of growing violence there as the population agitated for independence. His first play, Hadimo (1968), in which he also starred, was a popular success at the National Theatre (Jama Musa Jama 2013, 9). Hadraawi joined Lafoole full of revolutionary and educational zeal, along with others at the College, notably Mohamed Haashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’ and Musa Abdi Elmi, who would both continue with careers in theatre. These men collaborated on a 1972 play, credited to Hadraawi because he wrote the song lyrics for it, called Aqoon Iyo Afgarad (Education and Understanding), though the concept for the work was by Said Saleh. The play strongly advocated for mother tongue education before the official government promotion scheme was developed (Said Saleh interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). It argued for agricultural investment and reform and was also supportive of the idea of a local university so that trainees could be educated within a Somali cultural ambiance. Afraah argues that Hadraawi’s work was different from his predecessors in that it was idea, rather than character, led. The following quote seems to demonstrate some of this tendency. Andrzejewski explains a particular scene from Aqoon Iyo Afgarad where there is a Confrontation between a traditional elder and a group of young educated men, all but one of them trained abroad, who are keen on helping the country on its journey towards progress. They all at one point stand under a galool tree, a species of acacia highly revered in the Somali tradition. The elder asks the young men its name, testing their knowledge of Somali, since he claims that one can only help the country if one understands the language of the people. Only the man who was trained at home can tell the name of the tree, while the others confess ignorance—each in the foreign language of their studies. Upon this the tree shakes its branches and recites a poetic lament in the traditional style; it complains that it has served the country for countless years, giving its people shade and wood to make

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water-troughs, headrests and stools, and now the young men have even forgotten its name. (1974, 14)

Although the play was supportive of a raft of initiatives the government wished to progress, it was seen as contentious as it assumed the right poets had come to take for granted in the 1960s, that they could offer social and political critique. Said also claimed that the new ‘scientific socialist’ government was suspicious because Lafoole was US-supported and they feared American influence. The company was also criticised for not providing a written Somali script. The first night was attended by a raft of senior government officials, including the Vice President, who agreed the play should go ahead, but there were then complaints that the production had not been subjected to official censorship and it was temporarily halted. When Aqoon Iyo Afgarad was finally seen by the public it was hugely popular and toured the country. It also sparked a whole cycle of poetic debate—the Sinlay poems—as a consequence of one of Hadraawi’s songs. The lyrics took the form of a message from a lover, still at the time studying abroad, who writes to his girl saying ‘I am coming, I am coming with something, please be patient’. The exchange that ensued, with dozens of contributing poets, centred on speculation as to what it might be that the lover would bring from abroad. This form of discussion was by no means unique in Somali culture, and indeed continues in the internet age with key topics sparking long chains of debating poetry17 (Johnson 1998). The debate Hadraawi began obviously touched a nerve as to what might be the future of change in Somalia and what might be brought into the country, either positive or negative, from abroad. In this case a chain of thirty-four poems was created, exploring many possibilities as to what the foreign ‘gift’ might be, with voices joining in from Djibouti as well as Somalia. Such ambiguity was not to government taste and only added to the state distrust of both Hadraawi and Aqoon Iyo Afgarad. The Lafoole group were not the only ones warning of the danger of external influences. Between 1970 and 1973 Ali Sugulle wrote three major plays in support of the new government and the first of these, Gaarabidhdhaan (Glow-worm) (1970) also features a young man who has been abroad. In this case he returns with a foreign wife. The play is not overtly xenophobic but it does centre round a series of resulting culture clashes, and takes the opportunity to praise ‘the traditional virtues of Somali womanhood’ (Andrzejewski 1974, 28). The tone of both the above plays would have come as no surprise to Somali audiences. There

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was a general suspicion of external influences—understandable in view of the recent colonial past. One notable area of suspicion was linguistic. In his earlier work, Shabeelnaagood, Sugulle had already made mock of those who included foreign words or phrases in their speech, and other writers had taken up the same theme (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 223). As Andrzejewski explains (1974, 24) there is a dislike even of the adoption of foreign loan words in this culture that takes such pride in its linguistic identity. Sugulle’s second post-revolution play picked up on the government land reforms. The terrible circumstances of Somalis employed on agricultural plantations largely run by Italian interests in the south of the country were well known, and this next play took its title from the condition of the workers, calling them Ehelunaar adduunka (The Damned of the Earth) (1971). This key reform is strongly supported by Sugulle who follows the lives of the exploited workers (Andrzejewski 1974, 28). The most renowned of the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) reforms was the literacy programme. Having agreed a Somali script the language was promptly adopted as the vehicle of government, but barely anyone at the time could write it. Between 1973 and 1975 a series of campaigns were run, first to train the teachers, then the urban population and finally, in 1974, 30,000 newly literate school children and teachers were sent out into the rural areas where the majority of Somalis lived to teach them to read and write their mother tongue. The project was exceptionally well developed and supported by the people. Sugulle’s final ‘revolutionary’ play, Dunidu maskaxday magan u tahay (The World Depends on Brains for its Protection) written at the start of the campaign in 1973, while also about women and children’s rights in relation to marriage, ‘contains several scenes in which he depicts, with enthusiasm, the impact which the introduction of written Somali has on the life of the nation’ (Andrzejewski 1974, 29). All this activity was part of what Hodeide described as ‘a national burst of creativity’ (Samatar, 41), driven by exhilaration at the reforming programmes instituted by the SRC to curb corruption, promote equality and develop the nation in a specifically Somali manner. The final play I want to mention in this group is Siad Salah’s Iftinka Aqoonta (The Light of Education), written in 1974, to celebrate the end of the literacy campaign, known as Alif la kordhebey (Writing the A). Said was commissioned to create this piece and travelled widely to see the impact of the work before writing his play. He told me of how deeply he was moved by his experience

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of walking into a mudul (a traditional Somali hut) and seeing young girls with books, pencils and recorders—modern instruments of education that had never previously reached the countryside (Interview, July 2016). The play produced for the occasion of welcoming the return of the literacy teachers had as its central theme the idea that the light of education was moving from urban centres out across rural Somalia. It told the history of Somali education, going right back to the thirteenth century when Arabic was first translated into Somali and informal Islamic education was introduced, a moment seen as the dawning of the light. The song about this ‘first light’ became the most famous number from the production and is still widely known. The essential love story element was drawn from real life experiences of romances blooming between young teachers working on the campaign. If playwrights and actors were supporting the state in these early revolutionary years, the state was also investing in performance. Waaberi, established after the sojourn of leading performers at Halene training camp, became something of a super-group numbering up to fifty people at any one time. They were headquartered at the National Theatre and were to be prolific and massively popular in the coming years, creating new plays on a generally monthly basis, utilising the skills of many leading composers and regularly taking month-long tours to bring their work to small towns across the country. Hugely importantly band members were being paid a regular, if modest, wage, so that for the first time there developed a group of professional artists. In the mid-1970s a separate Waaberi group was set up to operate out of the Hargeisa State Theatre, built in 1974. The government also set up other bands, each linked to a major arm of the state. So there was a military band, a police band, a band attached to the Ministry of Education and even a prison guards’ band. Abdullah Said Hersi says that there were eighteen state-supported bands in total (1999, 219). Rashid Sheikh Abdullahi, the editor of cultural magazine Halgen in Mogadishu during this period, told me that all were tightly controlled except the trade union band, Husus, which retained a semi-­ independent status, and the sole independent company of the period, the Banadir Lions, which focused on productions based on folklore (Interview. Hargeisa, July, 2016). These bands needed places to perform if they were to fulfil their envisaged role of speaking to the whole nation and so smaller theatres and cultural centres were constructed by the government in each region (Fig. 3).

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Fig. 3  Waaberi (The Dawn). The most famous Somali ‘band’ in the 1970s

The Iftin Band By the mid-1970s the various state bands had become the focus of theatrical activity. Apart from the larger Waaberi, troupes each had a company of around thirty members drawn from workers in the industry concerned, with some specialising in music and song and others chosen to be actors, though leading playwrights continued to move between groups. The most prized role was always to be a lead singer. Each company had a director, but they often invited leading poets to write plays for them. Much of the bands’ work was commissioned for special state occasions. National Revolution Day in October was a major focus for all, but they could be called upon to produce a commissioned work for any number of events. Even work developed outside this framework had to be approved for performance by the state censor who wanted companies to stick meticulously to the agreed text. The government hatred of even a hint of challenge to increasingly autocratic rule led to an unending series of negotiations given that Somali theatre was predicated on the idea that only parts of a play

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were usually scripted. The improvisational traditions of the acting companies meshed uneasily with state desire for total control. I am going to focus here on the story of the band of the Extra-Curricular Department of the Ministry of Education, the Iftin (Light) Band, as an example of the history of the state bands. I do this because I have been able to have extended interviews with the man who founded and directed Iftin from its inception in 1975 to the day it closed in December 1990. Said Saleh is one of Somaliland’s most famous educationalists. When he celebrated the fiftieth anniversary—he is still teaching—of his involvement with the profession in 2013 he was honoured with celebrations not only in Somaliland, but also in the UK, where many diaspora members of the Iftin Band regathered, and in Minnesota in the USA, where he currently lives. The Iftin Band began life in 1975 as one part of the Department of Extra-Curricular Education. Said ran not only the band but all Ministry extra-curricular activities. At first it was purely a musical band. It performed predominantly on the western instruments—guitars, saxophones, western drums, harmonicas and keyboards that had been a gift from China. To get around the problem of a lack of trained musicians Said set up extra-curricular music teaching in schools and established eleven centres to which children were brought to learn how to play. He also began writing plays for the band to perform. In the first five years he was the only one writing material for the group. He was then joined by an old elementary school classmate who was an existing member of the band, Basha Musa Jama ‘Soyel’, and subsequently by other young protégées. The payment structure for all state ‘bands’ was the same. Performers got modest wages and the state underwrote each production with a loan. If a show made a profit then the loan had to be repaid plus interest of 1%. If no profit was made the loan was simply written off (Abdullah Said Hersi 1999, 218). This state financial endorsement was hugely important. For the first time a significant number of performers could concentrate just on their art. It also contributed to the rising status of the artist. I have already demonstrated just how abominable some conservative forces found both music and theatre—a strand of thinking that never entirely went away and has resurfaced in the new, Wahabi-influenced, Somalia with some force. However, the huge popularity of leading performers and the respect felt for the abwaan meant that the popular conception of artists changed markedly in the 1970s and 1980s. State support and employment protection went a long way towards changing attitudes. Said found it

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increasingly easy to recruit girls, testifying to parental convictions that their daughters could be morally protected in a state band, and from a position of having to persuade families to allow their children to take part in any artistic production he began to be approached by brothers and fathers asking him if their relatives could be considered for employment by Iftin. I was told that while performers had initially been called ‘rubbish’, they were later characterised as ‘flowers’—an infinitely preferable designation (Interview, Siad Saleh, July, 2016). To join Iftin one had to be a teacher. From 1974 the Ministry had set up music competitions between schools at both elementary- and middle-­ school level. When Said spotted a particularly promising musician he made sure that he or she was enrolled in the six-month, basic primary school teachers’ course. Then when they graduated they were eligible to be recruited either as music teachers or for Iftin. Over time, the Department of Extra-Curricular Education came to have a staff of 234 artists—200 music teachers working across the country and 34 members of Iftin. Everyone working as a music teacher or performer had to take a basic music course, and second- and third-level courses were developed for more senior musicians. Over the years it existed Iftin was a leading, popular band, but also a source of training, particularly for musicians who could then go on to work as either teachers or performers. Performing Soft Diplomacy A coveted opportunity available to leading performers was to be part of international tours. These had taken place under the civilian government but were much expanded by the military regime. The significant support from China—building the National Theatre, donating instruments and providing music teachers—had been partly instigated by a 1966 cultural tour of Somali artists to China. Music was at the centre of this presentation, but Somali artists later created whole dance dramas, with Waaberi travelling abroad telling stories without any need for dialogue and profiling indigenous dance and music traditions. By 1966 the civilian government was sending Ali Sugulle and leading singers such as Magool to Sudan. Apparently this invitation came after a Sudanese band played in Hargeisa in 1964 and fell in love with the Somali singer. Magool would go back many times to Sudan where fans called her the Star of East Africa. The connection with the Arab League was seen as important by Somali governments and as early as 1970 the revolutionary government sent a

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troupe to Egypt. In the coming years performers would be sent to Arab countries and to major African events such as the 1977 pan-African FESTAC celebrations in Nigeria. The Somalia entry here, The Drum, about the cultural traditions of the nation, focusing on the role of the drum, composed by Said Salah, amazed fellow Africans by how different it was to most entries which had been more influenced by Western colonial theatrical concepts. In particular the integral nature of song and music to Somali theatre made many dub this ‘musical theatre’ (Said Salah interview). At the two-month event the Somalis signed up to joining the newly formed African Theatre Artists Association. Somali troupes were also sent regularly at this period to major communist backers, China, the USSR and to Korea. As Hodeide explains, culture was increasingly expected to serve its government paymasters. Culture as a source of nationalism—to give the new regime in Somalia an image of a cleansed nationalism—was a main objective, and the Soviets were masters in underscoring the deployment of cultural resources to consolidate the power and legitimacy of the SSRC [Somali Supreme Revolutionary Council]. (Samatar, 40)

Theatre Training Very few Somali theatre artists have had any formal training, a factor which might be seen as beneficial in so far as it allowed space for a uniquely popular and culturally relevant form of the art to evolve without being over-­ influenced by foreign ideas of what might constitute ‘proper’ theatre. This question of appropriateness in cross-cultural training is both vexed and often under-considered. All too often arts training, in whatever discipline and across Africa, has imposed alien ideas of what might be deemed excellent or desirable without any consideration of how to work in sympathy with local cultural forms. In very many cases such cultural imposition has led to art forms being developed in ways that then only appeal to small elites. The most obvious area where international training made a huge impact was with the introduction of melodic instruments. I have discussed above how young men such as Abdullahi Qarshe and Hodeide introduced the Arab oud and made it the ubiquitous instrument accompanying Somali language song and theatre. Here there were problems enough in finding teachers, though proximity and exchange with Arab exponents greatly

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helped. We have also seen how a few foreign musicians such as the Indian flautist, Mr Rao, were crucial in introducing the idea of wind instruments. The enthusiasm of local audiences first for musical bands and then for theatre that integrated music and song quickly overwhelmed the conservative and religious voices that sought to hold back this cultural tide. However, due to lack of instruments and tuition bands stayed limited to a handful of performers until the gift from the Chinese of a whole boatload of string and brass instruments in 1971. The gift brought into focus the acute lack of both teachers and players, but led the Ministry of Education to come up with an innovative strategy. The Iftin Band and the Ministry’s Extra-Curricular Department set up not only a main band that incorporated guitars, saxophones, western drums, harmonicas and keyboards, all initially taught by Chinese instructors, but also extra-curricular music training centres to which children were brought to learn how to play a variety of instruments. The problem of expertise with these new instruments that were lusted after by all the big state bands did not go away. In future years Chinese, Arab and Russian visiting musicians were inveigled to stay in the country to pass on their skills. The programme obviously worked, for later in the 1980s the larger bands such as Iftin and Waaberi would commonly have over a dozen musicians accompanying a play. Specific actor training was never widespread. Most Somalis have always learnt their skills ‘on the job’, as indeed have most actors across East Africa, at least until relatively recently. At times certain companies have put more emphasis on supporting the development of younger colleagues, and certainly key figures such as Ali Sugulle, Said Salah and Hadraawi saw this as part of their role as they became senior leaders of Somali theatre. There have also been ‘hothouse’ moments and companies. In the 1960s Walala Hargeisa played this role, being the nursery for a whole raft of musicians, composers, singers and actors. The early years of Lafoole were another time of huge creative energy with a group of immensely talented young men, led by Hadraawi, fired by both artistic and ideological vision. Indeed Said Saleh told me that in his work with Iftin he sought to keep the spirit of his Lafoole years alive (Interview, July 2016). By the 1970s certain abwaan were definitely also seen as trainers and here we can take the example of Sheikh Mumin who, following Djiboutian independence in 1977, was invited—and took up the invitation—to go to Djibouti City to help the new state supported bands in their development.

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In 1984 the Somali government set up the one and only formal theatre training programme ever run in the country, a two-year diploma, housed in the Somali National Academy of Sciences, Arts and Literature (also known as the Somali National Academy of Culture) in Mogadishu that ran until the collapse of the state in 1990. Actor Ismail Aw Aden Jama spoke to me of his experiences as a young man as one of the first group of twenty students (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). He was taught by a mixture of local staff from the University of Mogadishu and Italian teachers brought in courtesy of an inter-government scheme of co-operation. At the time he participated Ismail was only twenty-one. He had previously composed poems, songs and stories at school but had no professional performing experience. The others who joined the course had a motley variety of backgrounds. A small theatre was constructed at the Academy and training covered a whole range of vocational skills—acting, scriptwriting, voice, lighting (although they had no lights) and sound. Ismail told me that the Italians, teaching in English, introduced the idea of pantomime and used many animal characters in their plays—presumably seeking to link to ideas of Somali folklore. As he discussed Ismail demonstrated his training, morphing instantly into the most terrifying and fabulous portrayal of a drooling hyena it has been my pleasure to witness. He also said that the training did not seek to re-make Somali theatre in a European image but nurtured a syncretic understanding of how the traditions could work together. After the course, which had no formal follow up, Ismail was retained by the Academy, the premiere institution promoting Somali language and culture, until the fall of the Barre regime in 1990. Here he wrote plays and acted in his productions which performed in various venues around Mogadishu, including the National Theatre, the Ministry of Education hall, the Academy and the French and Italian Cultural Institutes. Only a few Somalis have been abroad for training. Raschid Sheikh Adullahi spent six years in Egypt in the late 1960s where his great interest in theatre led to an informal education (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). Said Salah went to Sweden on a study visit where he was amazed at the poor audiences for plays he was taken to (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). Abdirahman Yusuf Artan, probably the most well-known contemporary playwright, and currently an MP, trained in Kiev in theatre and cinema and has a doctorate which before he took up politics full time he put to good effect while working at the Somali Academy of Arts. Others I have heard of include Ismail Aw Aden Jama ‘Jaa Jumod’, who in 1991 became a refugee in London where he took a one-year access course in theatre and stage

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craft (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016), and Ali Suleiman who has a degree in design. These men are all important cultural figures but their foreign influences have not made radical impacts on Somali theatre form or content.

Somali Theatre in Djibouti The cultural exchange between Somalis in Somalia and in Djibouti has been ongoing throughout history, with the border a freak of colonial imposition rather than any real social division for Somali populations. Ismail Abdi Ahmed (Interview March 2017) says that in the period up to 1960 theatre was slow to develop in the country but grew in popularity thanks to transnational exchanges between artists from Somaliland and the French colony which led to the first indigenous experiments, with a number of ad hoc groups coming together to create small plays about religion, the importance of Somali tradition, the division of town and rural society and concerns about love and marital relationships. At this time there were no female Djiboutian performers. From 1960 up to the achievement of independence in 1977 the popularity of the form grew rapidly, though it remained centred on the capital with few tours into the hinterlands. As in Somalia and Somaliland the establishment of a Radio Djibouti service broadcasting in Somali in 1944 was a major boost to artistic production. Local theatre was also stimulated by tours from groups such as Walala Hargeisa who regularly travelled to Djibouti, supporting independence aspirations with plays such as Isa Seeg. Moreover a number of composers spent time living in Djibouti and collaborating with local artists. After his falling out with Somaliland artists in the early 1960s, Hodeide, for example, lived for the next seven years in Djibouti, until the French authorities kicked him out for his pro-­ independence artistic agitations. The French authorities were deeply suspicious of artists with independence aspirations, frequently harassing and censoring their work and occasionally imprisoning those linked too closely to political agitation. One of these, and a man who worked with Hodeide in the 1960s, was one of the most famous Djiboutian poets and playwrights, Aden Farah, who honed his poetic skills in jail, protesting about French occupation, and when he emerged from his incarceration immediately turned to theatre as the best way to communicate with the most people, revelling in the creation of Somali language production as a key ingredient of the cultural struggle involved in seeking political liberation.

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As he explained: ‘People through theatre celebrated their freedom to express themselves in their mother tongue’ (Halabuur 2008). The power of language, especially in a culture so in love with its poetic traditions, was a major factor in itself, above and beyond the content of plays, in urging support for liberation and the Pan-Somali dream. All my informants agree that agitation for independence, which the Somali population felt had been unfairly thwarted in two plebiscites, became the major topic for Djiboutian theatre from the mid-1960s and men like Ismail Abdi Ahmed who were deeply involved argue that the theatre at this time was a major force in the Djiboutian Somali struggle for independence (Interviews. Abdalla Haji, Mohamed Abdillahi Qirash and Omar Said Bille. All Djibouti City, March, 2017). However, problems could be internal as well as anti-colonial. There was competition between artists, often exacerbated by clan tensions. So for example, Aden Farah, an Issa, had good musical instruments, while Ibrahim Garlé, an Issac, had many talented friends from Somaliland who would come and perform in his productions. For a number of years the supporters of each group boycotted each other. The situation was only finally resolved when these rival groups agreed to come together and form a single group, Djibouti’s best known company, Gacan Macan, in 1970 (Interview Omar Said Bille. Djibouti City, March 2017). A further problem, as in the early days in Somaliland, was that artists were often seen as disreputable people. They were—and are—particularly criticised by the religious establishment, often being seen as poor Muslims. In a bid to improve their image Gacan Macan decided that they would perform mawlid before each show, an Islamic ritual that involved the sacrifice of a sheep. The strategy was apparently successful. Gacan Macan was then able to mount several productions a year. Initially plays often had to use coded language and allusion to make their point while evading French controls, but informants told me that by the mid-1970s it had become apparent to the colonial masters that independence was inevitable and theatre companies were able to express themselves more openly. During this period three types of theatre emerged. Full-length shows could last two to three hours, while gogos were shorter one-hour performances. In schools students, though taught in French, were sometimes encouraged by teachers to create short ten-minute sketches in Somali as part of extra-curricular drama clubs. School promotion of Somali theatre was never as strong as in Somaliland as, as was common in francophone Africa (see Chapter Six), there was only ever colonial support for plays

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made in French. The only purpose-built theatre space for many years was the large French-built Théâtre des Salines constructed in 1964, but theatre groups would often also hire the local Cinema le bari to put on live shows. As in Somalia once independence was achieved the state sought to harness the propaganda value of performance. Most notably they set up two state-funded companies, Quatre Mars, and the army funded troupe, Harbi. A key difference, which would in due course have a significant detrimental effect on Somali theatre in Djibouti, was that the government retained French as the language of education so that many Djiboutian Somalis would grow up unable to read their language or be encouraged to value it in the same way as were their relatives in Mogadishu or Hargeisa. The energy driving artistic efforts would also be split. In such a small and poor country groups were variously seeking to work in French, Arabic, Somali and Afar, and inevitably this fractured the potential audience and funding bases (Interviews; Abdalla Haji and Mohamed Abdillahi Qirash. Djibouti City, March 2017).

The Rise of Autocracy As the authoritarian tendencies of governments in both Somalia and Djibouti became ever more apparent in the late 1970s the power of theatre to speak for the people began to wane. Indeed artists themselves had to increasingly make the choice as to whether to openly confront the state with what they saw as its short-comings, to begin to again carefully code their work, hoping to slip critical messages past the censor, to go along with state agenda or, as a last resort, to flee the country and in the most extreme cases to begin to turn their artistic talents against the state as part of forces seeking to overthrow increasingly intolerable regimes. The first and most famous confrontation was promulgated by Hadraawi as early as 1973. He had been asked to go and work with Waaberi, but the students at Lafoole pressed him to stay in his position as teacher at the demonstration school there.18 It was at Lafoole, working with his previous collaborators, that he wrote Tamaawax (Lament). Knowing that the government was averse to critique Hadraawi sought to use covert means by writing more symbolically than he had previously. However, the state argued that the court scenes at the beginning and end of the play implied that Hadraawi was ‘trying’ the state. The play was not approved for performance, but trouble erupted when an actor got hold of the songs Hadraawi had written and released them privately. Despite Hadraawi

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arguing that this release meant his ideas were being seen out of context the government was not convinced, and the uproar caused by these songs on top of the disquiet the earlier poetry chain from Aqoon Iyo Afgarad had provoked, led to the abwaan being designated anti-revolutionary and exiled from November 1973 to 1978  in the remote village of Qansax Dheere where he spent his time trying to promote local development initiatives (Interview with Said Salah. Hargeisa, July 2016). Of course not all theatre at this time was controversial. The mid-1970s, given all the state-sponsored theatre groups, was certainly the most prolific period in Somali history. Not all of these texts were particularly progressive. So, for example, Mohamed Tukaale’s popular 1975 play Hablayohow hadmaad guursan doontaan (O Girls, When Will You Get Married?), staged at the National Theatre, follows the familiar trope of critiquing urban modernity as a corrupting influence, but here there is little balance with no interrogation of possible negative aspects of tradition. Moreover, in denial of the pro-woman stance of writers like Ali Sugulle and Hassan Sheikh Mumin, here women are seen as the destroyers of culture, breakers of marriage, and as liable to selfish materialistic corruption. Cawo is a young wife obsessed with modernity, foreign holidays and conspicuous consumption who drives her husband to bankruptcy and then abandons him—while at the beginning of the play the audience are offered an awe-full warning in the shape of an encounter with an elderly, homeless woman, Cirradaba. When she is questioned she reveals that she has sunk to this pitiful state because rather than following the prescribed role of a good Somali woman as mother, daughter and wife, she has spent her time indulging in sinful pleasures (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 159–160). She explains: Cirradaba: [Points to scattered leaves of khat] This is my home, my dear khat; then [Lifts a half-empty bottle of alcohol] here is my husband, my soothing rum and gin! [Lights two cigarettes simultaneously] And here are my children; you can see me burning them two by two! Despite the comedy the moral stance and world outlook here is unremittingly traditional, and the consequences of sin illustrated as vividly as in

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any orthodox Christian Ethiopian play of the 1950s (see Chapter 2) or indeed in any British Victorian melodrama. Generally criticism of the state was muted until after the failure of the 1977–78 war in the Ogaden and Siyad Barre’s refusal to take any responsibility for the outcome. The reforms of the early SRC rule had been popular with nearly everyone, and the build up to what seemed so likely to be a major step forwards in the achievement of the pan-Somali dream by bringing Somali regions of Ethiopia into the national fold, engendered massive nationalist support. For this period most people were prepared to tolerate increasingly authoritarian rule if it would benefit Somali unity and development. Intellectuals like Hadraawi and Ali Sugulle might raise warnings but the majority spoke their criticisms only privately. The state bands were expected to promote government policies: they urged people to become educated, to look after their natural environment, to come together across clan lines in peaceful unity and, ironically given the Marxist dictatorship, they promoted ideas of a particular vision of democracy. However, as the Sayid Barre dictatorship progressed the state sought ever more focus on propaganda and came into ever more conflict with both abwaan and performers. Throughout the SRC period, to varying degrees, the theatre sought to evade the iron grip of the censorship process by allusively critiquing the state. In extreme cases a play might be banned, as was the fate of Mahamud Abdulahi ‘Sangub”s Xorriyo. Government objected to a show that had four men, equating to four competing ideas of the future, and four evil leaders, kidnapping and forcing polyandrous marriage on the eponymous heroine, implicitly Somalia (Mohamed Afrah 2013, 191). Interestingly though Xorriyo was forbidden to be shown in Mogadishu it was allowed to go on in Hargeisa. A short 1980 play, Muufo (Bread), put on by Husus, the Trade Union band, and written by Abdi Muhamed Amin, dared to criticise worker’s conditions— including the line, ‘I work hard, after work I need bread, otherwise I cannot work’. This lyric comes from a song at the heart of the play which became enormously popular until a furious Siyad Barre banned it, as well as arresting the playwright after he saw a performance at the National Theatre (Interview, Raschid Sheikh Abdullahi. Hargeisa, July 2016). And then Hadraawi was imprisoned for four years alongside Ali Sugulle, who also ‘had to spend many years in jail for lyrics and plays that were interpreted by the […] censorship board as anti-government propaganda’ (Goth, 16). The bravery of the leading abwaan in seeking to use their art against dictatorship is undeniable and many think it had a direct effect in

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the political world. My final example of politically critical theatre comes from as late as 1988 and was by the creator of Muufo. Abdi Amin had gone into exile for some years from 1982 but he returned to produce with Waaberi Lancrorlusal (Land Cruiser), a particularly pointed political attack that discusses a general shutdown in the electricity supply in May of that year and the strange coincidence that at the same time a number of top government officials appeared driving round town in new Land Cruisers. Again Abdi was arrested, this time with his leading actress Saado Ali, but the play made a big impact and ‘Many Somalis believe ‘Land Cruiser’ contributed to the downfall of Barre’ (Gates 2002, 209). My informants differed in their opinions as to how critical many plays actually were. Hodeide says that from around 1980, and presumably following the terror imposed by the arrests of dissenting playwrights, ‘the overwhelming direction of Fuun composition became the lionization of Siyad Barre’ (Goth, 42). Abdilahi Awad told me that in his opinion most of the plays of the Barre period contained elements of criticism of the state, but that because these were always hidden behind allusion, metaphor and imagery, only some were picked up on by the authorities (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). In contrast Said Saleh argued that while there were certainly productions that criticised the state, relatively few did this at all openly. He told me that in his own work he would slip in small criticisms where possible; but he also thought that in a number of cases the audience read critique into plays where the composer had never intended it.19 What is crystal clear is the growing disillusion from the late 1970s, particularly as artists were required not only to support government programmes, but increasingly to glorify the dictator himself. Abdillahi Qarshe explains the sad trajectory of many artists’ relationship with the military government. As you must know, this joy about the military take-over, which I shared with many Somalis, did not last. My last songs prior to the collapse of the Somali state were all banned from being broadcast. (Hassan, 82)

Artists in Exile Along with other Somalis the artists began to flee, some for overtly political reasons, some because they could not stand to make work in such a repressive atmosphere, and many in increasing fear for their well-being and their lives. The committed included Hadraawi, Garriye, Rashid Sheikh

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Abdullahi and Mohamed Afrah, all of whom fled during the early to mid-­ 1980s to Somali National Movement (SNM) camps in Ethiopia, lending their talents to the opposition to Siyad Barre’s now appalling, brutal and ever more divisive, narrow clan-based strategies for survival. Rashid, who had lived in Cairo in the late 1960s and become very interested in Eygptian theatre, had returned to Mogadishu and edited the Party cultural magazine, Halgen, throughout the 1970s. He told me of how he fled Somalia in 1982 to join an SNM camp in Ethiopia (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). At this time the guerrilla organisation, only established in 1981, which would in due course take power in Somaliland, was not looking for northern secession but was seeking simply to oust Siyad Barre. Numerous camps were established in Somali-speaking areas of Ethiopia. With other artists including composer Hasan Geni, actors Mohammed Yusuf and Sara Helgan and Djiboutian poet Ibrahim Sheikh Sulaiman, Rashid spent the late 1980s making shows that toured the camps. The group mostly made music and shorter sketches, encouraging the SNM fighters, speaking of freedom, criticising the Siyad Barre dictatorship and interestingly, in a return to Somali theatre’s original questioning role, critiquing problems within the SNM. However, there was one full length production brought together by a host of leading artists. The play colloquially known as Robbers was unsurprisingly a propaganda piece seeking to encourage the morale of those in the various camps scattered around southern Ethiopia, but it also portrayed the shock and horror of the company at the phenomenon of robbers seeking to steal from refugees fleeing the devastated towns of Somaliland (Interview, Abdilahi Awad. Liverpool, October 2019). Abdi Mohammed Magan ‘Abdi Falash’ and Ismail Abdi had both been Waaberi artists. But as the troupe fell apart they fled to Ethiopia in 1988 where they ended up in some of the sprawling refugee camps. Here they revived the idea of Walala Hargeisa and put on a series of performances with plays advocating peace (Interview, Abdi Mohammed. Hargeisa, July 2016). Singing superstar Maryam Mursal lost her job with Waaberi overnight when in 1986 she performed Ulimada (The Professors), ostensibly a love song, that all too many were able to read as covertly critical of the state. Using one of her few remaining assets, her car, the singer became a taxi driver and later a lorry driver for two years before the collapse of the country into civil war led to her trekking, often on foot, with her five children for seven months across four countries to safety in Djibouti (Brinkhurst 2012).

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Even after Somaliland had begun to re-establish itself in the early 1990s not all the activists and dissenting artists could go home. Somalia was still in disarray and forcing people to flee. Ahmed Abdilahi Wais, born in 1963, had left school early and was possessed of a great singing voice. In 1980 he joined the Danan (Ringing Out) state band belonging to the Revolutionary Union of Somali Youth as a singer, before expanding into acting and even learning technical skills. Ahmed only fled Somalia in 1993, just as the northern Somalilanders were beginning to head home. He made his way to Jijiga, the largest town in the Ogaden and there joined the multicultural Ethiopian Elias police band—just one of many such bands sponsored by the state (Interview, Ahmed Abdilahi Wais. Hargeisa, July 2016). This group, made up of Somalis as well as Ethiopian Oromos and Amhara toured Ethiopia for the federal government. This was a variety band putting on music and dance from various Ethiopian cultures and short plays. Ahmed told me that he and Somali Ethiopian Abdi Kani devised the short plays required, many commissioned by the government to promote the new democracy and ideas of inter-cultural co-existence. Hodeide, who left the National Theatre in 1983, returned to Djibouti. Even those who did not create but only performed, like Magool, were driven out after she ‘clashed with the military regime because the sarcasm and satire in the themes of the character roles she played were unpopular with the regime’ (Goth, 15). Magool fled in the early 1980s first to Abu Dhabi and then to Sudan from where she was deported in 1986 to Djibouti. By the late 1980s the Siyad Barre government was in trouble and the Somali economy largely bankrupt, but the state bands were still struggling on on ever more unreliable wages. This was partly because as a government employee one was not allowed to simply resign. The story of the last days of the Iftin band is illustrative here. Said Saleh told me that quite a number of the satellite music teachers simply disappeared, either into the informal economy or into exile. For others Said worked to gain the necessary release forms. Since by this time performances were more sporadic and state oversight distracted by struggles for survival many members were informally allowed to seek other employment opportunities on the understanding that they would continue to make themselves available for major performance occasions. By 1987 Iftin was largely surviving on external contracts. For a number of years, they were commissioned by UNICEF to make educational plays and without any government money coming in this income was shared between all members. The end was

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sudden. On 30 December 1990. Said set out for his office but fighting in the streets of Mogadishu meant that he fled, first the city and then the country. Iftin would never perform again. Contemporary Somali Theatre in Somalia The hugely culturally important National Theatre in Mogadishu was destroyed in 1991  in an act of iconic violence,20 signalling as it did the effective end of public cultural life in the Somalian capital, though a single attempt at artistic defiance was made in the staging, in the same year, in the roofless building, of a play called ‘You Destroyed the Roof, so don’t look up’. The only other play I have been able to find from this period put on in Mogadishu was a fruitless plea for peace by Abdi Muxumud Amin from the late 1990s called Qoriga Dhig Qaranka Dhis (Put down the Gun, Build the Nation).21 The space was then lifeless until in 2011 Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle, director of the Somalia Centre for Research and Dialogue, brought together a group of artists to plan for the building’s revival. With much ceremony and publicity, the partially repaired building hosted the production of Dardaarwin Walid (Parents’ Advice) in March 2012. Only four weeks later the space was hosting a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of Somali television when Al-Shabaab struck, again bombing the building and killing ten people.22 The Somalis have not given up. In the on-going attempts to rebuild their country the status of the National Theatre has often had great significance. In 2013 the government signed an agreement with the Chinese to rebuild a number of key buildings in the capital, and one of them was the National Theatre.23 However, the Chinese say they cannot undertake the work in the fragile security atmosphere. By far the most publicised event to take place in the theatre in recent years has been Hirgeli Hamigaaga Faneed (Awaken Your Inner Artist), an annual event widely seen as a kind of ‘Somali Idol’ that gained huge popularity with resident and diaspora populations.24 However little theatre is currently being made in Somalia and in an atmosphere where Wahabi hard-line Islamic ideas are now pervasive social conservatism means that many religious authorities frown on the very idea of a revival of theatre and music.

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Contemporary Somali Theatre in Somaliland There is only one existing theatre in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, which had to be almost entirely reconstructed after the devastation unleashed upon it by Said Barre. It is a tiny space, walls lined with matting and with seating for maybe 80 people. It exists at the Hargeisa Cultural Centre, established in 2014 as an offshoot of the Redsea Cultural Foundation which began work in 2008. The central figures behind both of these and the premier annual cultural event in Somaliland, the Hargeisa International Book Fair, which has grown stronger and stronger in the decade it has been running, have been academics, publishers and cultural activists Jama Musa Jama and Ayan Mahamoud. The Redsea Cultural Foundation argues that ‘Reclaiming public space for art and culture is crucial in the current post-conflict climate, and vital to the rebuilding of a free and vibrant country.’25 The subtext behind this seemingly uncontentious statement is that hard-line conservative Muslim voices imported in the form of Wahabi- and al-Shabaab-influenced ideologies have had massive influence over Somali dress and cultural codes in the past two decades, driving women into burkhas and seeking to expunge secular music and entertainment. The Book Fair, the Cultural Centre and the Foundation all provide a bulwark behind which many Somalilanders take shelter, celebrating their culture in events that take place throughout the year but culminate in the Book Fair that brings together writers, poets, singers and performers both living in Somaliland and from across the diaspora. The event draws many thousands to hear its talks, view the new Somali books on sale, and each year to see a play—in recent years the only live theatrical offering available other than NGO-sponsored Theatre for Development. I visited the Bookfair in 2016 and spent quite a lot of time with a unique Somaliland voice, the young female playwright featured at the event, Yasmin Muhammed Kahim, who had taken over the commission for the yearly play from Dr Abdirahman, who had offered a series of social reformist plays in the immediately preceding years. Like many of her contemporaries, Yasmin has had an upbringing massively disrupted by the consequences of civil war, but also influenced by a strong inherited sense of the importance of Somali culture. Since she is the only young Somali playwright I have spent significant time with, I here provide a portrait to illustrate some possibilities for future directions in Somali theatre.26 Yasmin was born in 1989 in the Ethiopian border town of Jijiga where her parents were taking refuge from civil war. When she was only two

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months old her father moved to Germany, and when she was two she and her mother moved back to Hargeisa, before her mother went on to Djibouti, leaving Yasmin to be brought up for the most part by her grandmother. Yasmin’s parents were highly cultured and had many artist friends. Her paternal grandmother who lived in Canada had a PhD and was a friend of Hadraawi. Throughout her youth her mother bought her many books and CDs in French, Amharic and Somali, as well as tapes of Somali plays to which she spent many hours listening and re-listening. Yasmin attended primary school in both Hargeisa and Jijiga and went to secondary school in the Ethiopian town. (Like many of her contemporaries she has Ethiopian and Somali passports.) She remembers starting to write poetry from the age of fourteen and says that the oral heritage of her grandmother was a great influence on this work. She also had a growing awareness of social injustice, corruption and that the courts weren’t working properly; she wanted to find a way to change her world for the better. Yasmin’s first introduction to making theatre was in her Ethiopian school in Jijiga where she acted, got involved with coming up with ideas for improvisations and helped her teachers, at their invitation, in putting on school plays. When she graduated from high school in 2005 her parents wanted Yasmin to go to university in Germany, preferably to study to be a doctor or an engineer. She did go as far as moving to Addis Ababa for a while to study German, but at age seventeen she returned to Hargeisa. She had wanted to go into arts but, as for so many young people I have met across the region, her parents wanted something more prestigious, secure and highly paying for their daughter. Yasmin chose to study law as an acceptable non-science option. Many Somali women can be freer in marriage than single. When she was in her first year in university, Yasmin decided to marry and told me she wanted a husband working in the arts so she chose a journalist. By the time she was eighteen she had her first child and by the time she graduated her second had just been born. BBC Somali is a hugely popular radio station and in the year Yasmin graduated they announced a competition for playwrights. She did not win. However, the call was repeated the following year and this time she was victorious. As a result Yasmin was recruited into a three person writing team to create a soap opera, Maaimo dhaama maanha (Better Days Than Today), that ran for two years from 2014 to 2016 putting out fifteen-­ minute episodes every Friday. The soap was aimed primarily at Somali youth and focused on issues relevant to that age group including

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questions of identity, problems surrounding migration and on-going pressures in relation to early marriage. Since graduating Yasmin has written ten plays, looking at a range of social issues. Unlike her predecessors, she writes in prose, though she does always include songs in her work. Her most significant independent project was a play she created in 2014, Hiil Baan u Baahnahay (I Am in Need of Help), that argued the need to develop Somali language and literacy. With the help of mover and shaker Jama Musa Jama who paid for fuel for touring, and with amateur actors, the play put on free performances in all regions of Somaliland. Her biggest problems came seeking to put on her work in Hargeisa. Yasmin tried to put on her first play at Hargeisa University, but the administration said they had to consult the Islamic society before agreeing to a performance. The society said the play could not go on if it contained any music, any traditional dance or if boys and girls would watch together. As a result the play was moved to a private hall, before three other, private, universities put in requests for performances. The play I saw Yasmin rehearsing for performance at the 2016 Hargeisa Bookfair was a re-staging of Hiil Baan u Baahnahay and it was the first time she had been asked to work for this highest profile cultural event. Interestingly this play, almost entirely performed by young, inexperienced volunteer actors, harked back, thematically, to a host of pre-civil war productions in its focus on how young people could, or should, negotiate the pulls of tradition or modernity—encapsulated most sharply in a scene where the actors performed a traditional dance and a piece of hip hop. The greatest problem identified was linguistic. This is a concern for many contemporary Somalis, who fear that both Arabic and English are taking over in the lives of many younger people. Given that many have lived abroad for at least part of their lives this is not surprising, but parents worry that their children may grow either not speaking the language or failing to appreciate its complex riches. Yasmin’s theatre was strongly in support of the need to cherish the Somali tongue, but also sought to find means of reconciliation and mutual appreciation for those with different views and life experiences, against a background of a fear of Wahabi fundamentalist action that has been trying to shut down the space for any artistic activity. There are some other important, if small-scale performance interventions going on in Somaliland, particularly for young people. One of those leading this endeavour is Abdi Mohammed Megan ‘Abdi Falash’. A

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one-time member of Waaberi who fled the country in 1988 Abdi Falash was an early returnee in 1991. His children so loved his story-telling that they begged him to turn his pieces into plays. Since that time he has worked as both a story-teller and a one man theatre troupe. He has been employed in this capacity by Radio Hargeisa since 1994 but he also sells videos of his work and for occasions such as Eid he rents a hotel reception room and puts on shows for children, charging $2 per person (Interview. Hargeisa, July 2016). Not dissimilarly, Ahmed Abdilahi Wais and Abdi Kani who had come together in the Ethiopian government Elias band returned home in 2004. They have become a two-person ‘band’ with Abdi writing plays and stories which the two perform on television and for NGOs who ask them to adapt their traditional folklore-based work for use in campaigns for health and children’s rights (Interview with Ahmed. Hargeisa, July 2016). Finally Said Saleh’s very popular children’s story book, Qayb Libaax/ The Lion’s Share (2007) has been adapted for theatre and put on in both the USA and Somaliland.27 I think there are a number of reasons for this concern with performance culture for children. Firstly, it is relatively uncontentious. Most of the work is drawn from the corpus of animal-based folklore that the performers grew up on. It is therefore unlikely to attract much concern from hard-­ line Islamic authorities, especially if human beings are not being portrayed on stage. This is the practical consideration, but one cannot over-­emphasise the concern of many Somalis, those living at home and those in the diaspora, that their children grow up not only speaking Somali but also imbued with a love of Somali culture. The civil war destroyed so many conduits of culture that activists feel a great need to provide their children with specifically Somali cultural opportunities. Certainly at the 2016 Hargeisa Book Fair a number of events were focused on children and culture and projects were discussed from around the globe aimed at giving young Somalis access to their cultural heritage. Contemporary Somali Theatre in Djibouti All my informants agreed that there has been a decline in Djiboutian Somali theatre since the 1990s, and indeed in theatre in all national languages, since Djiboutians have also had theatre traditions to varying degrees in French, Afar and Arabic (see Volume Two).28 A number of reasons have been given for this decline. Veteran Djiboutian poet and

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playwright Aden Farah says a major reason is that with the on-going war in Somalia there ceased to be the exchange of performance and performers that had been such a vital vivifying force for the Somali population in Djibouti. Undoubtedly the theatre traditions had had a symbiotic cross-­ border relationship. With less than half a million Somalis in Djibouti— accurate numbers are hard to find but the entire national population is estimated at anywhere between 500 and 800,000 people and some 60% are thought to be Somali—and competition from French and Arabic speaking groups, once the far larger and more vibrant Somali theatre collapsed it was always going to be hard for the Djiboutians to maintain a dynamic theatre culture. However, I was given a range of other reasons for the decline. Unlike the case in Somalia and Somaliland, Somali has never been taught in state schools in Djibouti which continue to use the old colonial language of French. Some people have learned to read and write their mother tongue, but this has to have affected the status and vibrancy of the culture. Moreover, schools in Djibouti have throughout history paid little attention to culture, with none of the full-scale productions discussed in relation to Somaliland. There are some extra-curricular arts clubs but everyone seemed to concur that these only put on short, ten-minute sketches, and more often in French than in Somali. Even the flagship Institut Djiboutien des Arts (IDA), opened in 2005 and intended to offer two-year training courses to young people in a number of art forms including theatre, generally only puts on short sketches. Hasna Maki, director of IDA for three years until 1916, spoke of the vibrancy of the Institute’s music programme but argued that good theatre required a complex variety of skills for which there is a lack of teachers—most IDA teachers are foreign and cannot work in Somali—to teach the craft (Interview. Djibouti City, March 2017). A newspaper review of a major event at IDA in 2013 to celebrate the International Day of Arts speaks of fine art, dance, calligraphy and music, but when it comes to theatre there is only a ‘passage’ from a dramatised folk story and a scene from Romeo and Juliet (La Nation, December 17, 2013.29 No significant performances or theatre groups have emerged from IDA. An undoubtedly important factor is the repressive government that clamps down on all critical media and arts and regularly arrests anyone daring to speak out against it.30 Given that Somali theatre has always been hugely concerned with politics this in itself massively discourages playwrights and performance groups, and the problem is compounded because

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the state gives so little support to drama. Where it does offer state aid it tends to be for propagandistic events, often focusing on ‘traditional’ dance and music, in support of national days. In 2017 I met playwright Ali Idris, one of a rare breed of younger Somali ‘composers’ whose most recent production in 2016 had been a piece, sponsored by the state-owned Radio Djibouti, commissioned for the Djibouti army on the theme of the need to ‘assist’ Somalia, where it is part of the contingent sent to endeavour to promote peace by the African Union (Interview. Djibouti City, March 2017). Both invested cultural commentators and members of the wider Djibouti public expressed views that there was a lack of contemporary good actors and felt that most of the good composers were now elderly and not creating theatre. They also discussed the low social esteem of performers which put people off considering getting involved in the arts, and how the rise of television—which does air both Somali and Afar dramas— as in many other African nations—was seen to be a force keeping people at home and hence not patronising live performance. Aden Farah also argues that the old love of poetry has been fading in Djibouti, and all I spoke to agreed that it was hard in recent years to fill large spaces such as the Théatre des Salines (Halabuur 2008, 87–94). Nonetheless theatre has continued sporadically and at a reduced level, created mostly by those for whom it is a private passion. Both the state-­ created Troupe artistique 4 mars (usually known as 4 mars) and Degaan, a company formed in 1999 as the consequence of a major conference on Somali art that year, regularly put on performances for occasions such as Eid, New Year and Independence Day and both have travelled abroad to Yemen, Libya and Ethiopia with productions. Because of the dangers of being politically engaged, these productions tend to be about social, and particularly family issues, often discussing problems within marriage and relating to divorce, though when commissioned they will also support government initiatives. A good example of a socially conservative play would be Saddex baa isu faanay (Three Contestants) (1983) by Hasan Cilmi. Maxamed Afraax31 says this was ‘the most popular Djibouti play of the 1980s’ (2007, 78). It advocates holding strongly to tradition and excoriates those who support what are construed as the alien ‘modern’ values of the pursuit of wealth and sexual pleasure. The particular villain of the piece is the mother, Naado—who according to all usual tenets should be a pillar of conservative rectitude. Naado turns traditional values on their head praising girls as ‘brave’ who seek to seduce rich and

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powerful men for personal advancement and urging her daughter to join their ranks (78). One of the few progressive narratives, which also featured strongly in Somalia, is the joining in by Djiboutian artists in the sadly apparently hopeless task of getting Somalis to move beyond lives dominated by considerations of clan. Abdi Miggane—who also led 4 mars—could not have been clearer regarding his concerns than when he named his 1985 play, Qaran iyo Qabil (Nation and Clan). In this work a massive state enterprise, possibly representing the state itself, collapses because the CEO, Samadiid, despite an elite international education, cannot look past concerns of clan and runs the company purely for the benefit of his clansmen. Predictably this leads to national disaster (Afraax, 81). More recently a number of Djiboutian companies have been venturing into what would be known in the outside world more as Theatre for Development, with agencies such as UNICEF commissioning work, particularly about the situation of women and the promotion of women’s rights. So the Association de la Jeunesse pour l’Evolution Culturelle portrays itself as a theatre for social action, working in French and Somali making plays for the Ministry of Health and UNESCO, and a number of other organisations, working in a range of local languages—and French— nowadays gain most of their income from development agencies.32

Contemporary Theatre Contemporary Theatre in the Diaspora So many Somalis were forced to flee their homeland in the 1990s that there are now diaspora communities of over 100,000 in Yemen, the USA, the UK and South Africa and smaller groups spread across the world. For many of these people, keeping the Somali language and culture alive is crucial to their sense of identity. Many countries with larger Somali communities have annual cultural Somali weeks and smaller events, often focused around music and poetry, are widespread.33 Charmarkeh Houssein speaks of how many Somalis in Canada have kept hold of the old cassette tapes they owned of Somali plays and still replay them with great fondness and nostalgia (2013). However, it has been hard to get together the skills and resources to make new works. The group that for many years most strongly kept the flame alive was Waaberi. So many artists had worked for the super-group at one time or another that in the 1990s musicians and singers were able to come together in the USA and Europe for performances in music festivals and to make

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recordings. More recently in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali population in the USA, great efforts have been made to commission performances by former superstars and to create new bands.34 In recent years a range of new initiatives have been undertaken. In 2013 there was the announcement in Vienna of the establishment of a National Theatre of Somalia in Exile. The most significant theatrical collaboration to date has been with German theatre makers Daniel Schauf and Phillip Scholtysik who made Blickacte (Acts of Viewing). This piece takes as its starting point the bombed National Theatre in Mogadishu, before going on to ask a range of questions about international linkages, identities and cultural perceptions. The theatre makers are not themselves Somali but started to call themselves ‘The National Theatre of Somalia in Exile’ when their work gained the support of Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle, the man responsible within Somalia for seeking to restore the theatre. This in turn led to increasing Somali audiences and media interest in the project and the wrecked theatre (Matzke 2016). The play moved from Vienna to a German tour in 2014, and then the collaborators worked on a new piece, I Very Much Understand The Idea, though I have been unable to find if this project ever came to fruition. There have also been a series of plays written and performed for British Somali week, one of the larger of the annual festivals that diaspora Somalis organise around the world to celebrate culture and identity. Giulia Liberatore has written about the play put on for the 2011 festival, The Muted Cry, as an example of intergenerational conflict over culture (2016). This one act play by Abdirahman Yusuf Artan, currently the best-known practising Somali playwright, was originally written in Somali and translated into English for Somali week in London. It was also filmed and subsequently shown elsewhere to promote discussion on its key topic, female genital mutilation (FGM). Dr Abdirahman’s play is a didactic piece of propaganda, framed in three scenes of debate.35 Like all the new, diaspora drama, it is written in prose, but is still word as opposed to action based. The young woman who has suffered female genital mutilation, performed on a visit to Somalia, is never seen. However, she had a terrible traumatic reaction to the operation and has been rushed home to England to seek medical treatment. Just like the plays of the 1960s The Muted Cry puts old accepted concepts—in this case female genital mutilation as a means to purify and make a young woman a desirable marriage prospect—against new ideas that

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decry the practice as a barbaric remnant of ill-informed ‘cultural’ thinking. The play explicitly pits the older generation, much criticised as ignorantly in thrall to the idea that this practice is Islamic and bound by concepts of family honour that make the father reluctant to seek medical aid for his daughter if this will expose him to public scrutiny, against the youth who understand that this is a dangerous, abusive, unIslamic practice. The central scene features a Somali Sheikh, who appears on stage holding a Quran. The stage lights are dimmed and a spot light highlights his upper body as he informs the audience that FGM is a non-religious, cultural, and traditional practice: there is no Islamic evidence for the practice, except for a “weak hadith.” The Sheikh continues: “The way Somalis practice female circumcision… is traced back to ancient cultures and traditions, and religion is very much opposed to it.” (49–50)

Interestingly the old tradition of an epilogue driving home the didactic message of a play, so common to pre-1990 texts, is essentially upheld as the final scene features a group of young relatives of the abused girl, Hodan, coming together to condemn FGM. Other plays take a more cohesive view of Somali society, looking at harassment of Muslim communities and explicitly seeking to unite the generations—though interestingly both the other examples I have accessed are also female-centred. In 2015 a Somali-British woman, Firdos Ali, became a pioneer for her gender and people when her play Struggle, was picked up for development by black British theatre company Talawa, and subsequently performed in Bristol for Somali Week. Loosely based on multiple experiences of women in the British Somali community the play looks at anti-Muslim harassment and at pressures put on the heroine to join MI5 to report on her community. Firdos had previously co-written a piece for The Royal Court and continues to develop new writing.36 Her work has been followed up by another Somali play that garnered strong reviews in 2017. In this case Hassan Mahamdallie wrote a show for a one-­ woman performance. The Crows Plucked Your Sinews is a piece that, accompanied by an oud soundtrack, brings into conversation two characters: a young Somali woman in London watching the assassination of Osama Bin Laden on the television and her formidable great-grandmother, a fearsome

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Dervish warrior defending her native soil in British Somaliland a century earlier. The two women are connected in an electrifying exchange that intimately explores the violence of empire and the poetry of resistance.37

It is too soon to say what the future of Somali theatre will be, and how it will negotiate the international exposure, and indeed life, of so many younger Somalis in relation to the rich indigenous heritage, but certainly in both the diaspora and in Somaliland attempts are being made to create a new, relevant drama.

Conclusion Somali theatre is an extraordinary, unique African performance form. It is also probably the most significant African theatre that I am aware of to have been so little researched. The pioneering work of Andrzejewski took place in the 1970s, while Mohamed Afrah’s 1987 book is little known because it was self-published in Somali. Elsewhere there is indeed research on some of the poems and songs that featured in the plays, notably by Johnson and Kapteijns, but these have been studied completely eliding their dramatic provenance. The turmoil in which Somalia was consumed from the late 1980s and the lack of significant contemporary cultural centres or universities helps explain the lack of more recent study, but this is not to assume that Somali theatre has been forgotten by Somalis. My visits to Somaliland and Djibouti enabled me to meet a host of informants eager to discuss their art form. Of all the theatres I study in this project Somali theatre is the most clearly transnational, uniting a language and not a national culture, wherever that language was spoken. It is also singularly important because it demonstrates so strongly what an African theatre could become if left to the imagination and creativity of a people who freely chose, as opposed to having imposed, the way their theatre would develop, and as result made an art form that for forty years transcended barriers of class, nationality, education and gender—and even that most knotty issue for Somalis— transcended clan, to communicate to a people. Quite evidently it spoke not only to a cultural imagination but was simultaneously popular entertainment and a focus for intellectual and political debate. The recognition by the abwaan ‘composers’ and the theatre troupes that they needed to both entertain and debate a range of national issues is very different from how theatre was seen in many more heavily colonised spaces. Without

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anxieties about Western form or linguistic supremacy, and confident in its fabulous poetic heritage, Somali theatre could experiment and come up with a performance culture that resonated linguistically and in terms of both form and content. This was an indisputably ‘modern’ art form that linked back to a thousand years of cultural heritage. We should also note that, once it had been established by around 1960, Somali theatre became peculiarly fixed in a popular performance format; the actors clustered round their microphones, the prologues and epilogues, and above all the mixture of poetic song and improvised dialogue, while never set as any kind of rule, was the accepted mode of production right up until the collapse of the Somali state. It seems evident as Somali theatre seeks to re-establish itself that this old cohesiveness will not return. The alliterative poetry is being abandoned, and while playwrights in Somali territories are still using music and song, the necessarily internationally influenced diaspora are writing much more realist scripts. The few new plays I have been able to access are still, however, being driven by a desire to discuss big national questions—about language, cultural practices and the Somali identity in the wider world. Since coming to appreciate this exceptional theatre I have frequently joked with friends that the Americans would have been better off employing a few abwaan rather than investing in attack helicopters if they wanted to make a positive impact when they sought so disastrously to intervene in Somalia in the early 1990s. There was a serious point behind this comment. For many years theatre mattered in Somali-speaking areas. It was attended by presidents. It helped put in place and depose presidents. It was widely seen as a powerful educative force, and it was a source of Somali pride. As I will show in other chapters there have been times and places where East African theatres have been cultural and social drivers far too often overlooked by historians, economists, political and social scientists, let alone the literature—and orature—scholars who so easily ignore or overlook the power of performance.

Notes 1. Mohamed Afrah has also written the only book-length study of Somali theatre. It is written in Somali, was published in 1987, and is called Fan Masraxeedka Soomaalida (Somali Drama: Historical and Critical Study). 2. In 1962 the then prime minister, Abdirashid Ali Shamarke, being deeply moved after seeing Ali Sugulle’s Indhasarcaad (Clouded Vision) about the

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desire to incorporate Somali-speaking areas of Kenya within Somalia, requested a performance for the entire diplomatic community and the chief of police commissioned a show for the police force. (Hassan, 77–8, Johnson, 169). 3. Abuallahi Qarshe says of Indho-sercaad, ‘It is often said that this play was a source of inspiration driving the war between Somalia and Ethiopia over the Ogaden territory in 1964’. (Quoted in Hassan, 77–8). 4. https://smgbristol.com/category/media/press-releases. 5. Somaliland is currently not recognised by the United Nations but has been operating as an independent nation since 1991 and is currently recognised by eight other countries. 6. The Ogaden, named after the dominant Somali clan of the same name, is a large tract of southern Ethiopia adjacent to Somalia. 7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35971744. 8. In her later 1999 book, Women’s Voices in a Man’s World: women and the pastoral tradition in Northern Somali orature c1899–1980, Heinemann: Portsmouth, Kapteijns offers us a range of quotes from plays but considers them only as poetry. Indeed she is disparaging about the theatre—uniquely in my experience—writing it off very briefly on Page 106, where, referring to later plays, she dismisses it all as propaganda appealing only to women and children. 9. It is notable that even in 1952 the state ran only seventeen schools in the territory, only one of which was a secondary establishment http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1952/nov/12/ education-british-somaliland. 10. The reader will notice that many people mentioned in this chapter; i.e. Hodeide or Hadraawi, are, after an initial formal naming referred to by one word tags or nicknames. These are widely and commonly utilised as an accepted form of address among all Somalis. 11. The first fully scripted play, Samawada, unusually an entirely prose piece, was written by Ahmed Artan Hange in 1968. It features the eponymous heroine (She-who-works-for-the-good-of-the-country) who dies in nationalist street fighting and is unusually a historical play looking at the struggle for independence immediately after the Second World War. (Andrzejewski 1975, 13). 12. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35971744. 13. For an example of dance drama created for a tour to China in the Siyad Barre period by Waaberi see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= JfjV0a_4aco. 14. http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/towards-culture-peace-poetry-dramaand-music-somali-society.

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15. See Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which argues that true education comes only through a dialogic process of action and reflection. My argument here is that the performance provides a vicarious action on which the audience are explicitly asked to reflect in the prologue and epilogue to the play. 16. Poets are so revered that they, along with holy men, are commonly exempted for the normal duty of Somali men to take up arms in pursuit of clan or national interests. 17. Sisilaad, (poetic chain combat) is described by Johnson as follows. ‘Somali poets challenge each other to poetic duels in the classical genres. The most admired poem composed in answer to another is not only in the same genre but also in the same alliteration’ (Johnson 1998). 18. A demonstration school was one attached to a teacher training college where students practiced their skills and staff also taught. 19. For a similar discussion of playwrights seeking to evade state control in Ethiopian-colonised Eritrea see Chapter 3. 20. http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/towards-culture-peace-poetr ydrama-and-music-somali-society. 21. https://vimeo.com/207320753 22. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / w o r l d / 2 0 1 2 / a p r / 0 4 / somalia-theatre-suicide-bombing-shabaab. 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2kKJ-xP_dI. 24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRz7L0QZ_aI. 25. http://www.hargeysabookfair.com/2014/the-r edsea-onlinecultural-foundation. 26. Yasmin kindly acted as my liaison and, when necessary, interpreter, setting up a series of interviews for me with visiting artists. She also allowed me to see rehearsals of her play and to interview her extensively regarding her artistic life. I am most grateful. 27. http://www.wardheernews.com/the-lions-share-qayb-libraax-abook-review/. 28. I met a number of people who had worked in Djiboutian theatre when I visited Somaliland in July 2016, but I subsequently travelled to Djibouti in March 2017. 29. http://www.lanationdj.com/institut-djiboutien-des-arts-les-artisteslhonneur-lida/. 30. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/djibouti. 31. Afraax is the same person as Afrah as listed in the bibliography. I have given the spellings according to how they are listed in publications. The issue is that the Somali spelling of a name is often different from its Anglicised equivalent, so Afraax is the Somali form as given in a Somali publication, whereas Afrah is the Anglicised form given for the PhD written in the

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UK. I have elected for the most part to use anglicised spellings for ease of international access. 32. http://acpculturesplus.eu/sites/default/files/2015/04/01/djibouti_-_ rapport_final.pdf. 33. Somali weeks have become the accepted main means for diaspora Somali communities to come together in particular countries to celebrate their culture. Festivals are held annually from Australia to Scandinavia and from the UK to the USA. 34. https://d3gxp3iknbs7bs.cloudfront.net/attachments/1f9a8f3db914-4317-9aff-3e3538a3bd61.pdf. 35. http://www.wardheernews.com/the-muted-cry/. 36. https://smgbristol.com/category/media/press-releases/. 37. https://www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk/event/crows-plucked-sinews/.

References Abdi, Said Yusuf. 1977. Independence for the Afars and Issas: Complex Background; Uncertain Future. Africa Today 24 (1): 87–94. Abdi Miggane. 1985. Qaran iyo Qabil (Nation and Clan). Abdi Muhamed Amin. 1980. Muufo (Bread). ———. 1988. Lancrorlusal (Land Cruiser). Abdi Muxumud Amin. 199?, Qoriga dhig qaranka dhis (Put Down the Gun, Build the Nation). Abdillaahi Yusuf Farey. 1959. Miyi iyo magaalo (Town and Country). Abdirahman Yusuf Artan. 2011. The Muted Cry. Abdullah Said Hersi. 1999. Somalia. In The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: The Arab World, ed. Don Rubin, 216–222. London: Routledge. Abir, Mordechai. 1980. Ethiopia and the Red Sea: The Rise and Decline of the Solomonic Dynasty and Muslim European Rivalry in the Region. Abingdon and New York: Frank Cass. Afraax, Maxamed Daahir. 2007. Theatre as a Window on Society: Opposing Influences of Tradition and Modernity in Somali Plays. Halabuur 2: 74–84. Ahmed Ismail Hussein ‘Hodeide’. 1959a. Magaalo (Town). ———. 1959b. Arawailo (Arawailo). ———. 1959c. Macal cune ma mouqandowne (He Who Eats the Sheep’s Dewlap Cannot Hide). Aidoo, Ama Ata. 1970. Anowa. London: Longman. Ali Hussein. 1970. Dheriga karka makaa ka keenay? (What Brought the Pot to the Boil?). Ali Ibrahim Iidle. 1968. Dhulkeenna dhibaha ka jooga (The Troubles in our Land). Ali Sugulle. 1962a. Himiladeenna (Our Dreams).

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———. 1962b. Nin lagu Seexdow ha Seexan (O Man on whose Guard the Country Sleeps). ———. 1963. Indhasarcaad (Clouded Vision). ———. 1966. Kalahaab iyo Kalahaad (Wide Apart and Flown Asunder). ———. 1971. Ehelunaar adduunka (The Damned of the Earth). ———. 1973. Dunidu maskaxaday magan u tahay (The World Depends on Brains for its Protection). Andrzejewski, B.W. 1974. Introduction. In A Somali Play. Leopard Among the Women. Shabeelnaagood, 1–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1975. The Rise of Written Somali Literature. Transcript of Lecture given at the Somali Institute of Development and Management. Mogadishu. ———. 1978. Modern and Traditional Aspects of Somali Drama. In Folklore in the Modern World, ed. Richard Dorson, 87–101. The Hague: Mouton. Andrzejewski, B.W., and I.M.  Lewis. 1964. Somali Poetry: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Anon. 1946a. Ijo-foal-dheer (Ijo the Long Toothed). ———. 1946b. Maseer (Jealousy). ———. 2008. Interview with Aadan Faarax.Halabuur, Vol 3, 87–94. Djibotui. ———. 2012. Dardaarwin Walid (Parents’ Advice). Ben-Ghial, Ruth. 2001. Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945. University of California Press. Brinkhurst, Emma. 2012. Music, Memory and Belonging: Oral Tradition and Archival Engagement Among the Somali Community of London’s King’s Cross (Unpublished PhD). Goldsmiths: University of London. Burton, Richard. 1854. First Footsteps in East Africa. London: Tylston and Wards. Charmarkeh Houssein. 2013. Diaspora, Memory and Ethnic Media: Media Use by Somalis Living in Canada. Bildhaan 12: 87–105. Firdus Ali. 2015. Struggle. Fox, M.J. 2015. The Roots of Somali Political Culture. London: First Forum Press. Gates, Henry Louis, ed. 2002. Dictionary of African Biography. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goth, Bashir. 2015. Magool: The Inimitable Nightingale of Somali Music. Bildhaan 14: 1–24. Hasan Cilmi. 1986. Saddex baa isu faanay (Three Contestants). Hasan Sheikh Munin. 1966. Hubsiinya hal baa le siistac (Certainty is Exchanged for a She- Camel). ———. 1968a. Shabeelnagood (Leopard Among the Women). ———. 1968b. Gaaraabidhaan (Glow-Worm). ———. 1971. Ehlunaarka Adduunka (The Damned of the Earth). ———. 1974. Translated with an Introduction by B.W. Andrzejewski, A Somali play, Leopard Among the Women. Shabeelnaagood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hassan Mahamdallie. 2017. The Crows Plucked Your Sinews. Hussein Aw Farah. 1955. Cartan iyo Ceebla (Artan and Ebla). Jama Musa Jama. 2013. Maxamed Ibraahim Warsame, Hadraawi: The Post and the Man. Pisa: The Poetry Translation Center. Johnson, John William. 1974. Heelloy, Heelleelloy: The Development of the Genre Hello in Somali Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998. Music and Poetry in Somalia. In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, ed. Ruth M. Stone. New York: Garland Publishing. Kapteijns, Lidwien. 2013. Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kapteijns, Lidwien, and Maryam Omar Ali. 1999. Women’s Voices in a Man’s World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature. London: Heinemann. Kidwai, Shuaib. 1992. A Study of Shabeelnaagood with References to the Themes of the Play. In The Proceedings of the First International Congress of Somali Studies, ed. Hussein M.  Adam and Charles L.  Geshekter, 352–357. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Kiguli, Susan. 2005. Oral Poetry and Popular Song in Post-apartheid South Africa and Post-civil War Uganda: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Performance (Unpublished PhD). University of Leeds. Laurence, Margaret. 1954. A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Levtzion, Nehemia, and Randall L. Pouwels. 2000. The History of Islam in Africa. Ohio University Press. Lewis, I.M. 1961. A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1988. A Modern History of Somalia: Nations and State in the Horn of Africa. London: Westview. ———. 1993. Understanding Sonalia: Guide to the Culture, History and Social Institutions. London: Hann. ———. 1998. Saints and Somalis. London: Haan. Mahamed Abdullaahi ‘Sangub’. 1980. Xorriyo (Independence). Marcus, Harold. 1995. The Politics of Empire: Ethiopia, Great Britain and the UnitedStates. Red Sea Press. Matzke, Christine. 2016. Introducing Blikacte—“Acts of Viewing”. In African Theatre: China, India & the Eastern World, ed. James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, 31–40. Oxford: James Currey. Miran, Jonathan. 2009. Red Sea Citizens and Cosmopolitan Change in Massawa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mohamad Barud Ali. n.d. The Mourning Tree (No publisher given).

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Mohamed Dahir Yusuf Afrah. 2008. Farewell Xasan Shikh Muumin an Abwaan of Singular Stature. Halabuur 3: 68–70. ———. 2013. Between Continuity and Innovation: Transitional Nature of Post-­ Independence Somali Poetry and Drama 1960s-present (Unpublished PhD Thesis). University of London. Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame ‘Hadraawi’. 1968. Hadimo. ——— ‘Hadraawi’. 1973. Tamaawax (Lament). Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame ‘Hadraawi’, Mohamed Haashi Dharmac ‘Gaariye, Said Saleh Mahmed, and Musa Abdi Elmi. 1972. Aqoon iyo Afgarad (Knowledge and Understanding). Mohamed Tukaale. 1975. Hablayohow hadmaad gurrsan doontaan (O Girls, When Will You Get Married?). Mohamed-Rashid Sheikh Hassan. 2002. Interview with the Late Abdullahi Qarshe (1994) at the Residence of Oblique Carton in Djibouti. Bildhaan 2: 65–83. Orwin, Martin. 2001. Introduction to Somali Poetry. Modern Poetry in Translation, 17. Prouty, Chris. 1986. Empress Taytu and Menelik II: Ethiopia 1883–1910. London: Ravens Educational and Development Studies. Radio Mogadishu Artist’s Company (collectively). 1970. Waaberi (Dawn). Ranger, Terence. 1983. The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, 211–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sahardid Mohamed Elmi ‘Jabiye’. 1960. Gaardiid waa Alla diid (He Who Refuses Allah Refuses Justice). Said Salah. 1974. Iftinka Aqoonta (The Light of Education). ———. 1977. The Drum. ———. 2007. Qayb Libaax (The Lion’s Share). St Paul: Minnesota Humanities Commission. Samatar, Said S. 1982. Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayyid Mahammed Abdille Hasan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. Historical Setting. In Somalia: A Country Study, ed. Helen Chapin Metz, 4th ed. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division. Samatar, Ahmed I. 1988. Socialist Soalia: Rhetoric of Reality? London: Zed Press. ———. 2009. A Virtuosic Touch: Hodeide, a Life with the Oud and More. Bildhaan 8: 31–51. Schauf, Daniel, and Phillip Scholtysik. 2013. Blickacte (Acts of Viewing). ———. n.d. I Very Much Understand the Idea. Shakespeare, William. n.d. Romeo and Juliet. Somali National Movement (collectively). n.d. Robbers. Soyinka, Wole. 1975. Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Methuen. Walala Hargeisa (collectively). 1955. Soomaalidii hore iyo Soomaalilidii dambe (The Somalis of the Past and those of the Present).

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——— (collectively). 1958. Isa Seeg (Mutual Miss). Woodward, Peter. 1996. The Horn of Africa: State Politics and International Relations. London: Tauris. Wrong, Michaela. 2005. I Didn’t Do it For You: How the World Betrayed A Small Nation. London: Fourth Estate. Yasmin Muhammed Kahim. 2014. Hiil baan u Baahnahay (I Am in Need of Help).

Weblinks http://acpculturesplus.eu/sites/default/files/2015/04/01/djibotui_-_rapport_final.pdf. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35971744. http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/towards-culture-peace-poetry-dramaand-music-somali-society. http://www.hargeysabookfair.com/2014/the-redsea-online-culturalfoundation. http://www.lanationdj.com/institut-djiboutien-des-ar ts-les-ar tisteslhonneur-lida/. http://www.wardheernews.com/the-lions-share-qayb-libaax-a-book-review/. http://www.wardheernews.com/the-muted-cry/. https://africasacountr y.com/2017/05/take-me-to-your-leader-eritreasisaias-afwerki. https://d3gxp3iknbs7bs.cloudfront.net/attachments/1f9a8f3db914-4317-9aff-3e3538a3bd61.pdf. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/djibouti. https://smgbristol.com/category/media/press-releases. https://vimeo.com/207320753. https://www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk/event/crows-plucked-sinews/. https://www.last.fm/music/Maryam+Mursal. https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=National%20Theatre%20of%20 Somalia&item_type=topic. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/04/somalia-theatre-suicidebombing-shabaab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRz7L0QZ_aI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfjV0a_4aco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2kKJ-xP_dI.

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Interviewees Abdalla Haji, Djibouti City, March 2017. Abdilahi Awad, Hargeisa, 20th July, 2016 and Liverpool, October 2019. Ahmed Abdulahi Wais Hargeisa, 18th July 2016. Ali Idris, Djibouti City, March 2017. Hassan Dahu Ismail, Hargeisa, 19th July 2016. Ibrahim Suleiman, Djibouti, 2017. Ismail Abdi Ahmed, Djibouti, 2017. Ismail Aw Adan Jama, Hargeisa, 19th July 2016. Jama Musa Jama, Hargeisa, 20th July, 2016. Mohamed Abdllahi Qirash, Djibouti City, March 2017. Omar Said Bille, Djibouti City, March 2017. Rashid Sheikh Adullahi, Hargeisa, 21 July 2016. Said Salah Ahmed Hargeisa, 17th and 21st July 2016. Yasmin Muhammed Kahim, 20th July 2016.

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Chapter 2: Ethiopia and Eritrea: The Imperial Theatre—1921–1974

An Imperial, Orthodox Heritage Ethiopia and Eritrea are nations containing multiple ethnic and language groups, with widely divergent cultures and populations containing nearly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians—besides various other religious constituencies.1 Historically the core highland regions were part of a single empire, though in modern times they have had complex histories that mean at times theatre making has been transnational while at others artists have taken full part in fierce debates as to whether the population want to, or do, constitute a single or multiple political entities. However, I group them together here for a number of key reasons. Firstly, the theatre traditions of the empire/nations have been dominated by members of the Christian ruling ethnicities—in the case of Ethiopia, the Amhara, and for the Eritreans, the Tigrinya.2 Moreover, the particular form of Christianity common to these peoples has been significant in shaping their culture in myriad ways, including their developing theatre cultures. The highland areas of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea were Christianised in the fourth century AD. In the fifth century the Council of Chalcedon saw Christianity split on a fundamental matter of dogma concerning the nature of Christ, and the highland Africans joined the Eastern Orthodox Christians, taking their lead from Constantinople rather than from Catholic Rome.3 Orthodox Christianity was, and is, hugely important, not only spiritually but also culturally to believing Ethiopians and Eritreans. In its © The Author(s) 2020 J. Plastow, A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47272-6_3

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isolation the church developed a number of unique aspects which would impact on the subsequent development of national theatres. The ancient language of Ge’ez, dating back possibly some 4000 years,4 has been for many years a purely liturgical tongue but it gave birth—in a manner strikingly similar to the relationship Latin has with the Romance languages of southern Europe—to the highland vernaculars of Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, which have many similarities.5 This church developed a high regard for rhetoric and particularly for complex poetic forms. The qene beitoch— poetry houses—of the sixteenth-century capital at Gondar, in the north of Ethiopia, had hundreds of neophyte priests, studying for up to seven years, to master the multiple poetic forms encompassed in the qene tradition (Levine 1965), and most particularly the ability to utilise samena worq (wax and gold), the composition of poetry that has completely different apparent, outer meaning, and inner, esoteric content.6 Nearly all the early Ethiopian playwrights had varying amounts of church education and I have lost count of the number of those playwrights, and commentators on them, who have told me that their qene training was key to their ability to write well. The visual languages of the Orthodox Church also had a huge effect on early Ethiopian theatre. Until very recently most believers were illiterate and so—as throughout Christendom, but in Ethiopia/Eritrea to glorious excess—the churches were decorated—often top to bottom and covering the entire inner walls of the area open to the congregation—in art works in jewel-like colours, replete with visual symbolisms, telling the key stories not only of the life of Christ, but of the Old Testament and of a number of Books of the Bible unique to the Ethiopian/Eritrean Orthodox Church.7 And then there is the ritual of church performance. The service requires multiple priests and deacons, with chanting, incense and stately processions.8 On yearly occasions such as timket the demonstrated power and magnificence of the church is overwhelming. Each church brings out its copy of the Ark of the Covenant—otherwise hidden in the inner sanctum—and the clergy parade in rich robes sheltered by ornately embroidered umbrellas, before joining together in larger centres to dance to the drums and sistrums which make up the musical accompaniment to religious devotion.9 The stately and heavily symbolic nature of church art and ritual has profoundly affected Ethiopian theatre up to the present day, with a utilisation of particular colours, modes of movement and staging to signal to the audience how they are intended to ‘read’ characters and situations (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1  Priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church dancing and playing drums and sistrums for the yearly festival of Timket (Epiphany). (Source: Photo by the author. Addis Ababa, 1985)

Inseparably linked to the Orthodox Church, and equally key to the development of the theatre, was the imperial state. Ethiopian emperors claimed (a claim easily debunked by the historical record) an unbroken line of descent through thousands of years from Menelik I to the final incumbent, Haile Selassie (1930–1974).10 The actual power of the emperors varied widely over those years, at times encompassing large parts of the Eritrean highlands, while during other periods such as the mesafint (1769–1855), the great lords and sub-kings governed their vast territories with the merest nod to the titular authority of the imperium.11 What is apparent is the mutual reliance on each other of church and state, with the latter’s claim of divine right making it heavily dependent on a church which came to own some 15% of the nation (Parker 2003, 54). These highland peoples were linked through religion, culture, empire and related languages, but in the late nineteenth century European

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expansionist colonialism would divide them when, after years of gradual encroachment, in 1889 Italy defined and proclaimed the territory of Eritrea as an Italian possession.12 As a result of European colonisation, Eritrean theatre culture has a very different history from that of Ethiopia. At the same time the cultural similarities and linked histories of these nations mark them out as radically separate from any other culture in East Africa, and nearly all highland Ethiopians and Eritreans I have spoken to recognise their neighbours as relatives, often referring to them as cousins or brothers. Subtle cross-fertilisation of theatre cultures has continued, and Ethiopian and Eritrean theatres are far more like each other than they are similar to any other dramatic tradition. It is for these reasons that I group them together.

An Overview of Early Ethiopian and Eritrean History In the case of the area sometimes seen as ‘Greater Ethiopia’13, history is particularly deep and rich. It is also well recorded, in both its more factual and mythical elements, largely due to the fact that the region has had written scripts that date back to the tenth century BC.14 The founding national myth, the Kebre Negast (Glory of Kings), claims the Ethiopian state goes back some 3000 years to the time of the Jewish King Solomon and the Ethiopian—or more likely Yemeni—Queen Makeda of Sheba15 (Budge 1932). According to myth, Makeda visited Solomon and conceived a child by him—Menelik I—who founded an Ethiopian Jewish dynasty and who, when he brought the Arc of the Covenant back to his native country, also brought God’s favour and made Ethiopians God’s chosen people.16 Moving from myth to more verifiable history the Axumite civilisation centred on present-day north-eastern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea flourished from the first to the end of the sixth century AD. King Zoscales in the first century was literate in Greek and by the fourth century the great inscribed and intricately carved stellae of Axum were erect, demonstrating that the highland state had its own written forms (Abir 1980). Ethiopia was Christianised in the fourth century and the powerful church not only developed the still important liturgical language of Ge’ez, but also its own system of musical notation. In the following thousand years the church would go on to develop the fabulous architecture of the churches of Lalibela17 and the extraordinary artwork of the medieval circular churches

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on Lake Tana.18 All would be dedicated to the glorification of church and crown as they co-existed in an often tense but always symbiotic relationship. When Ethiopia was Christianised it was just one of a whole arc of nations that followed suit across north-east Africa. However, the rise of Islam would first strip Ethiopia of its Arabian Peninsula possessions and then see the surrounding nations, and indeed large swathes of lowland areas of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, converted to Islam between the seventh and fifteenth centuries (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000, 1). By the early Middle Ages, highland Ethiopia/Eritrea was a Christian island in an Islamic sea. As a result the culture became ever more inward-looking and cut off from international intellectual currents. This siege mentality was conducive to a pervasive sense of conservative exceptionalism, where any change was viewed as potentially subversive and the surrounding peoples were characterised as inferior and barbaric. Medieval Ethiopia suffered many vicissitudes, being nearly wiped out in the sixteenth century by the Somali Islamic leader Ahmed Gran. However, by the seventeenth century a resurgent Ethiopian state established a capital in Gondar, facing the shores of Lake Tana, where the Emperor Fasiladas began a great building programme of major castles and churches (Berry 1976). In 1648 the Yemeni ambassador, Hasan ibn Ahmad al-Haymi, was ‘transfixed with amazement’ (Hancock et  al. 1983, 80) at the magnificence of the court and Fasiladas’ son and grandson continued the beautification of their city. It was a centre of learning and culture. Architecture flourished as never before, as did the decorative and costume arts. The church had great schools for sacred aquaquam (dance), zema (music) and qene (poetry). In the reign of Iyasu II (1730–1755), the aquaquam beit (dance school) in Gondar reportedly had 276 masters (Levine 1965, 26). Iyasu was the last of the great Gondarine kings, and by 1769 Ethiopia had entered the zemana mesafint which, lasting up to the accession of the great re-unifier, Tewodros, in 1855, was a period where the great lords held regional sway and the Empire had little more than titular significance (Abir 1968). Emperor Tewodros (1818–1868) was a true national hero— a man who rose from obscurity to unite and revivify his nation, challenging the nobility and clergy, promoting the vernacular Amharic over Ge’ez as the language of Ethiopian literature, reforming the military and actively seeking contact with foreign nations and modern technologies. The next great emperor was Menelik II who came to the throne in 1889. Menelik engaged in expansionist wars to the south, increasing the

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area ruled by Ethiopia by around a third in his lifetime, reaching down into Somali Muslim and Oromo heartlands. By the time he had finished his empire encompassed some seventy ethnic groups, but only highland Orthodox Christians had any voice or credence and the rulers heartily despised most of those they ruled over (Marcus 1968). One place where Menelik was forced to make concessions was in the northern region which would become Eritrea. Only the highland Tigrinya and Tigre-speaking regions of the territory had historically been part of the Ethiopian Empire. The western lowlands had long been Muslim and had close links with Sudan, while the coastal region around the seaport of Massawa was a possession of first the Ottoman Empire, from the sixteenth century and later, from 1846, was controlled by Egypt (Miran 2009). In 1869 Italy declared imperial aspirations in the region and in 1880 the first Italian settlers arrived, taking control of the port of Assab in 1882. Since Menelik had sought Italian help in his final, successful bid for the crown, he was obliged to make concessions to them. Fighting for land in the south and against the Mahdists to the west, Menelik concluded the Treaty of Wuchale, or in Italian the Trattato di Uccialli in 1889 (Erlich 1996, Miran 2009). This granted the Italians rights over what would become Eritrea. However, the colonists exploited differences in the Italian and Amharic wordings of the document to, in 1895, assert a claim over the whole empire. In 1896 Menelik, uniquely among African leaders, decisively beat a European army and at the Battle of Adwa forced the Italians to accept the previously agreed borders of the colony of Eritrea. This was the end of the feudal concept of a fluid, porous empire linking the territories and the beginning of contestation as to whether they would be one or two nation states. Back in Addis Ababa, now the new capital, Menelik wanted his people to join the modern world, putting up the first western-style schools and hospitals, building roads and a railway, importing cars and machinery and encouraging skilled foreigners to visit his country. All these innovations touched only a tiny elite and in no way challenged the absolute power of the monarch. From 1906 the emperor was increasingly incapacitated by illness and then a series of strokes (Marcus 1995a, b; Prouty 1986). His grandson, Lij Iyasu, was controversially named as his heir in preference to his daughter, Zauditu. Menelik only died in 1913, but the young emperor designate was never formally crowned and was overthrown by nobles loyal to Zauditu, after his erratic behaviour and most particularly his favouring of Islam appalled his advisors. After Zauditu became empress she appointed

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the powerful young modernising Ras (Lord or Prince) Tafari Makonnen as regent. He ascended the throne in 1930 with the crown name of Haile Selassie I. Meanwhile in the now separate country of Eritrea the Italians were investing heavily. They had come late to imperialism and desperately wanted to catch up with European rivals. Eritrea was the first Italian African colony, followed by Somalia and Libya, as the government in Rome continued to seek ways to capture what it saw as the major prize of Ethiopia. From the early 1900s splendid buildings began to be erected in the new capital of Asmara, including the opera house that marked one end of the Via de Re (Way of the King), as part of a major city plan that was echoed on a smaller scale for other towns (Plastow 2017). In the early years there was considerable contact and intermarriage between Italians and Eritreans. However, all that changed once Mussolini came to power in 1922. As part of his fascist ideology, money continued to pour in, industry grew and the country became relatively developed, but the beautiful city of Asmara19 was developed along apartheid lines. The races were strictly segregated, Eritreans had to live in particular areas, were limited to only four years education and could not enter Italian places of art and recreation. By the early 1930s Mussolini was building up troops in Eritrea, provoking Ethiopia by incursions into its territory and seeking to ensure—which it did successfully—that no Europeans would support Ethiopia against Italian aggression. Despite Haile Selassie’s attempts to warn the League of Nations about what would happen if Europe did not stand against fascism, Italy was allowed to invade Ethiopia in 1935 with almost no international protestation. The woefully outclassed Ethiopian forces, many armed with spears, were overrun despite fierce resistance and where they sought to hold out they were subject to gas attacks. In May 1936 Haile Selassie fled to England and his country was occupied. The Italian empire now claimed ownership of the vast majority of the Horn of Africa and when the Second World War broke out they briefly took control of British and French Somalia. These gains were short-lived. In 1941 Allied forces led by the British liberated all Italian-held territories in the Horn. Haile Selassie returned to his throne and Eritrea was given to Britain as a mandate territory until the United Nations could work out what should happen to it.

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The Early Ethiopian Theatre: 1921–1937 Tekle Hawariat The first Ethiopian play was written and performed by an aristocrat, for an aristocratic audience, in a leading hotel in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, in 1921. Empress Zauditu was so incensed by reports of the covert meaning of the play that she not only banned further performances but sought to have all 3000, privately printed, copies of the play script destroyed. Ethiopian theatre would be politically engaged from the outset (Lealem Berhanu and Mahlet Solomon 2014; Plastow 2010). The play was called Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals) and was written by a man called Tekle Hawariat. Uniquely in this history the idea of modern theatre was not brought to an African nation by a European missionary or school teacher, but by an elite Amhara nobleman who had spent nearly twenty years in his teens and twenties in Europe. Tekle Hawariat was born in 1884 into a clerical family. His father died just before his birth, and his uncle and elder brother became responsible for his upbringing, enrolling him in an Orthodox Church school when he was six years old. Within a remarkably short three years, the boy completed the initial education that fitted him to become a deacon in the Ethiopian Church, learning Ge’ez and many key church texts. He was then consecrated as a deacon and taken by his eldest brother, Gebretsadik, to Addis Ababa where he was introduced to the latter’s patron, Ras Makonnen, a cousin of the then Emperor, Menelik II. Tekle Hawariat continued his ecclesiastical education, particularly studying qene and church music, zema, alongside the vernacular Amharic. The boy became a favourite of Makonnen who took him on many of his journeys, including most importantly to the Battle of Adwa. Gebretsadik had been killed in a battle a few days previously and Ras Makonnen decided to help the young orphan who he now considered as his own son. He would entrust the boy to a Russian ally—as fellow Orthodox believers, Russians were especially trusted by many Ethiopians and the Russians had supplied artillery to Ethiopia—Count Nikolay Leontiev, to take to Europe and learn about Western cultures. In his memoir Tekle Hawariat claims Makonnen told the Russian:

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Now that I found you whom I trust, I give you this boy to take him to Russia and to educate him. The boy is extremely bright. (Teklehawariat Teklemariam 1997, 77)

In Russia, Tekle Hawariat apparently hoovered up knowledge, amazing his teachers at the St Michael military academy and learning much about European culture and agriculture from his adopted Russian family. After a short return home, Tekle Hawariat went back to Europe to travel in France and England, where he used theatre attendance as a means of learning the relevant languages (Lealem Berhanu and Mahlet Solomon 2014, 280). He finally returned to Ethiopia in 1912. For the rest of his life, Tekle Hawariat would be a moderniser, deeply concerned by what he saw as the problems of Ethiopia: ‘intransigent feudal oligarchy on the one hand, and an equally dogmatic clergy on the other, with, as subjects, an illiterate citizenry.’(Yohannes Admassu 2010, 68). Most immediately he was worried about the young Emperor designate, Lij (child) Iyassu. The historian Harold Marcus describes Iyassu as: ‘bright, but also impulsive, cruel, lascivious, prone to depressions and egocentricities, and politically inept.’ (Marcus 1995a, b, 251). In 1913 Tekle Hawariat decided he would seek to get close to the young ruler through literature. He would write a moral tale in the form of an animal fable, since fables had been one of the first things he himself enjoyed reading in Russia. This first, prose version of Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia utterly failed in its objective and Tekle Hawariat instead became one of those who plotted to overthrow the Emperor. Some years later the playwright in waiting tells us he received an invitation letter from the mayor of Addis Ababa to a ‘theatre performance’. He was excited. There had never been a play in our country before. Therefore, I went eagerly and in a hurry to see how they had managed to stage the performance. What I saw was a band of singers and dancers […] I had been saddened observing the upbringing of Lij Iyasu. Now I got more sad watching how Ethiopians had been led to the road of modernity. I immediately realized the need to straighten up such leadership. I wished there and then to write an exemplary play. (Tekle Hawariat 1921, trans to English 2010, 155)

Watching serious drama in Europe in the early twentieth century would have meant plays dominated by dialogue and certainly not including the

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music and dance forms central to nearly all African performing traditions prior to the colonial period. (It would be fascinating to know just what plays Tekle Hawariat saw but sadly he gives no details in his memoir.) The intercultural struggle between dialogue-based drama and indigenous music-oriented performance traditions has played out in differing ways in all the countries I discuss in this book. Usually it was Europeans asserting the superiority of text-based drama, but here we see a European-educated Ethiopian negotiating his understanding of the relative values of different cultural traditions and coming up with some fascinating judgements based on elements of both cultures which would profoundly affect the future course of Ethiopian theatre. The play, with the same name as the prose work, though updated in its content, was presented at the Hotel de la Terasse in 1921 to a largely invited audience of influential citizens. Fabula is a political allegory of the recent history of Ethiopia, castigating what Tekle Hawariat saw as the ineptitude and backwardness of the contemporary administration. The play is told through the convention of using animal characters which Tekle Hawariat says he adapted from works he had read while living abroad— the fables of La Fontaine and the Russian, Ivan Krylov. The disguised nature of the narrative that this allowed also links with the conventions of having differing inner and outer meanings so familiar to Ethiopians in poetic samena worq. Indeed, like many early Ethiopian plays Fabula is written in poetic from. To explain the plot in brief, a group of sheep—representing the ordinary Ethiopian people—are peacefully grazing under the happy protection of their shepherd and his dogs. They are threatened by various rapacious animals: a wolf, a snake and a crow, and eventually the snake bites and kills the shepherd. This early part of the play represents the history of the failed attempt by Italy (wolf) to conquer Ethiopia, the success of the army (dogs and herdsmen), and the death of Emperor Menelik II (shepherd) in 1913. The final section, Act IV, turns to the present day. A short extract in translation gives a flavour of the work: Goat:

(Moving among the sheep) Hello, sheep! How are you? Have you any news, which you have heard lately? Forget it. Let me share mine with you. Listen attentively. The rats had discovered all the hidden knowledge And got organized, seeing the advantage

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Then for their new union, they wanted a leader. They chose to be in agreement, avoiding conflict, discussing together. They have got such a system, from those overseas, And my friend python has told me all this. Sheep: Haa! Haa! What a funny tale you’ve told us today. Ha! Haa! Kingdom of Rats! Nobody will believe that. Who the hell had the guts to get them this level? As to being able to form a state, who wrote the constitution? When we first heard it, we thought it a joke Because rats had no law, or a good social system, Never knew agreement, or had any rules. (Act IV, Scene II) (Translation by Belayneh Abune 2010, in ed Yvette Hutchison, African Theatre: Histories 1850–1950, Oxford: James Currey, 151–167) This is the section where Tekle Hawariat is controversial. The rats represent the ministers of Empress Zauditu, and Tekle Hawariat mocks their inability to either properly understand or implement modern ideas of governance ‘from overseas’: that is, Europe. The playwright continues in the same vein, mocking what he sees as the ineptitude and disarray of Zauditu’s government. If he had hoped his allegory would enable him to avoid trouble he was sadly misguided. Zauditu was furious when she heard about, and possibly read, the play. She ordered all scripts to be collected and destroyed—an edict Tekle Hawariat only partially obeyed as he hid some copies. Tekle Hawariat’s play is intensely ‘modern’, read European, in some ways, but in others it is profoundly Ethiopian. The writer’s modernising zeal is represented both in the form of play—a narrative divided into acts and scenes in line with those he had seen in Europe and written for a proscenium-style stage—and in content, advocating Western-style constitutional rule. The use of poetry and the animal allegory takes elements from both Europe and Ethiopia. Many of the classic plays Tekle Hawariat would have seen in Europe would have been in poetic form and qene was the most admired literary form in Ethiopia. The writer says he drew on Western fabulists for his story but the play is heavily influenced by the parables of Ethiopian Christianity. The choice of animals—sheep, wolf, snake and rats—is redolent of the symbolism of both the Bible and Ethiopian folk stories.

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Finally, the way in which the play was produced was definitely Ethiopian. The playwright was also the director and his actors were schoolboys who would have had no voice in developing the play. What was all important in this theatre, in line with Ethiopian perceptions about the relative statuses of writing and action, was the words. One of the first European commentators on an early Ethiopian play, Lanfranco Ricci, confirms this view. In this theatrical production, the stage action was rudimentary if not non-­ existent, the characters two-dimensional symbols of collective nouns designating a class or social type or ethical concepts for names, not those of real people. All the force of the play is concentrated in the vivacity of the dialogue. (Ricci 1969)

The Reign of Haile Selassie: 1930–1974 Born in 1892 the then Tafari Makonnen was the son of Emperor Menelik’s cousin, the governor of the strategically important region of Harar, Ras Makonnen. He was given both a traditional church-based and a modern French language education and, following deaths of both his father and his elder brother, at age nineteen he took over the governorship of Harar. Here the young lord established a reputation for being both just and progressive, making himself unusually available to the ordinary people. When Zauditu became empress the leader of the most important region of the country was awarded the role of regent. Here he continued his progressive policies, supporting the building of schools, roads and hospitals, abolishing slavery and joining the League of Nations. Zauditu was deeply conservative and had little interest in the outside world. Over time she increasingly left the running of her domains to Tafari, and having no children of her own she reluctantly made him heir apparent. On her death in 1930 Tafari was well placed to successfully enforce his claim to the throne (Markarkis 1974, 196–201). The man who came to power was a cool, highly intelligent man, with an astonishing memory, who sought to bring his nation into the twentieth century and to international esteem without in any way compromising the old idea of the emperor as the semi-divine embodiment of the nation. Haile Selassie centralised power to an extraordinary degree. What he valued above all in his courtiers was loyalty. Every day he saw supplicants, he ran rival spying agencies that reported only to him, and no expenditure of more than ten dollars could take place without the Emperor’s personal

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approval (Kapuscinski 1978, 43). Markarkis, writing at the very end of his reign, explained the extent of his obsession with absolute power. ‘To say that Haile Selassie has promoted a cult devoted to his personality would be an under-statement. The entire state has been subsumed in that personality’ (1974, 227). The Italian invasion of 1935 was an appalling blow to Ethiopia and many atrocities were committed by the Italians in the seven years of their occupation (Pankhurst 1999). However, the Emperor was able to resume his throne in 1941 with considerably enhanced international prestige, his warnings given to the League of Nations about the dangers of their failing to support Ethiopian sovereignty having been borne out by the rise of international fascism and the Second World War. The period from the restitution of the monarchy through the 1940s and 1950s was the long summer of the emperor’s reign. The beginning of the end for Haile Selassie is usually dated to 1960, when the liberal, elite Neway brothers, Germame and Mengistu, led an attempted coup, involving even members of the emperor’s own bodyguard. Crucially the uprising was prompted not by individual motives of power seeking, but by demands for increased political democracy and accountability (Markarkis 1974). The rebels were defeated by loyalist forces, but the revolt marked what then became an increasingly common event, with various groups protesting about their living and work conditions and/or in support of political reform. Students were in the forefront of these protests but theatre staff also struck on a number of occasions in the 1960s for better conditions. By the late 1960s unrest was widespread amongst the more ‘modern’ sectors of society. Notably returning students brought socialist, even Marxist, ideas into Ethiopia, and foreign workers spread new liberal ideas to the schools and colleges they taught in. Historian of Ethiopia, Christopher Clapham, has compared conditions at the time as analogous to immediately pre-revolutionary France and Russia (1988). The aging emperor was increasingly unable to deal effectively with threats motivated by desires for more than personal gain. The School Master Playwrights: Yoftahe Negussie and Malaku Baggosaw Theatre in Ethiopia only took off due to the patronage of Haile Selassie, as he supported both western-style education and drama. In the years

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following Fabula the focus for the development of theatre moved to the country’s few secular schools and notably the Lycée Menelik II, which had opened its gates in 1907. This school was originally staffed by Coptic Egyptians and taught in French. But in 1924 English and French staff were employed to teach their own languages. Since these employees were not Orthodox believers there was some anxiety that they might lead children away from the paths of righteousness. As a result in 1925 two Ethiopians were employed as assistants to the language classes. They were Yoftahe Negussie and Malaku Baggosaw and we have quite extensive material about the former both because he wrote a memoir and because various Ethiopian writers have commented on his works.20 Like Tekle Hawariat, Yoftahe had a traditional church education, was an outstanding scholar and had particular ability in both church music and qene. He was quickly recognised as exceptional in his home village of Muza Elias, was employed by the church and represented the community in delegations to the local nobility. After his father’s death he moved to Addis Ababa where he attracted the patronage of Empress Zauditu and took a variety of jobs before accepting the post at Lycée Menelik. Here the two Ethiopian staff members quickly became important. In a situation strikingly similar to that experienced by early Somali teachers in British Somaliland colonial schools in the 1950s, they soon became much more than mere language assistants, teaching Amharic, Ge’ez, music and moral education. It was the music teaching that led to the development of a theatrical career. Yoftahe, often working with Malaku, started to compose and get his students to perform songs that drew on a combination of church music, folk and contemporary songs. This work quickly became enormously popular with audiences. Mulugeta (1972, 27) tells us that some of these songs are still performed today. The move into more formal theatre came because the European teachers wanted their students to put on drama, particularly, as elsewhere in Africa, for school beginning and end-of-year ceremonies. However, unlike most other parts of the continent where students were made to act in metropolitan languages, here it was recognised that the performance language needed, at least sometimes, to be Amharic—presumably both because students would have lacked sufficient fluency in English or French and because very few audience members would have understood these languages. There were some productions in French and English but it was Amharic theatre that made the impact. Yoftahe and Malaku were therefore essential in translating the plays. An early effort was a translation of

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Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1926) which would be the first of many popular productions of Shakespeare in Amharic that have continued to be mounted in Ethiopia. However, the Ethiopians were not content to merely assist with others’ productions. Yoftahe came to embrace the idea of building on his popular music to make his own theatre. He explained his thinking in a radio interview. Those Egyptian teachers translated Shakespeare’s play and other historical playwright’s work but their language was not good. They begged me to correct the language. In the process of editing their play script I understood the content of the books and the overall idea of theatre. After that I thought to write just like they did. I thought that by looking at the overall situation of the country and the things I believed should be changed in the future I could write theatre through qene. (Radio interview with Belete Gebre Yoftahe in Mulugeta 1972, 30)

Yoftahe makes the religious link quite explicit, discussing how the ritual elements of church services could be utilised in making theatre. He also explains the particular appeal to him of the theatrical form, explaining that most people at this time were illiterate so that although he also wrote opinion pieces for the newspapers he thought he could reach more people through the stage. Many of Yoftahe’s plays have been lost, but in the following years he would become a prolific playwright, writing and producing some twelve plays between 1927 and 1934, when the Italian invasion halted all cultural activity. The plays were all performed by students, initially at Lycée Menelik, but then at the Teferi Makonnen School and from 1932 at St George’s School where Yoftahe was appointed principal. Given that immediately prior to the Italian invasion there was a modern school population of only 8000 pupils in twenty-three western-style establishments; this means that theatre was reaching a significant proportion of those who would become the country’s leaders (Shinn and Ofcansky 2013, 135). In 1934 a purpose-built theatre was erected at Lycée Menelik, described by the journalist Ladislas Farago in 1935. The Menelik School […] possesses the only theatre in Abyssinia, a big zinc shed; and the pupils performed a folk piece in English for my benefit. We sat quite alone in the auditorium, and could only follow the play with difficulty, because the stage of this unusual theatre is not lit. Though the building is

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wired for electric light, there is no money for fuel to work the dynamo. (Farago 1935, 170)

Unlike Tekle Hawariat, Yoftahe had no compunction about bringing music and song into his plays. I find it fascinating that this route of combining religious music—always apparently from one or other branch of Christianity—with folk forms, and using vernacular languages, combined with material that allows for both comedy and serious moralistic messages, has proved a combination that led to some of the most popular theatre productions in countries across Africa in the mid-twentieth century. In Nigeria the enormously successful actor-manager and director, Hubert Ogunde, used very similar strategies, developing from a mission church choir master into the man running a massively popular Yoruba language touring theatre between the 1940s and 1970s (Clark 1979). And in Uganda Byron Kawadwa performed a similar magic in Luganda, utilising religious, court and folk forms and drawing on an elite colonial education to make operatic productions in the 1960s and 1970s with his Kampala City Players that were still being revived twenty years later (Mbowa 1994). No scripts exist for any of Yoftahe’s first four plays as he was robbed while fleeing the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Two of these, Miseker and Tequem Yallabat Chewata (Vain Entertainment), appear to have been presented in connection with Haile Selasie’s coronation, as well as at Lycée Menelik. They certainly, as with all Yoftahe’s work, drew heavily on biblical references, with the playwright explaining that Miseker ‘was written with Bible references to be a witness for good deeds’ (Mulugeta 1972). This play, like Fabula, criticised Ethiopian backwardness, while Tequem Yallabat Chewata heaped praise on the new emperor, celebrating him as a moderniser, a label Haile Selassie greatly relished. While working as a teacher Yoftahe also seems to have been the unofficial crown playwright. After the coronation plays Yemare Melash (The Wedding Party) was presented in July 1932 for the ceremony of the marriage of the Emperor’s daughter, offering advice to the newlyweds on how to conduct a good marriage. This was followed in the same year by Yehod Amlaku Qetat (The Punishment of Bellyworshipper) for Haile Selassie’s birthday. The play pitted Begu Sew (The Right Man), representing the Emperor, against Hod Amlaku (The One Who Lives for Food), a portrayal of Ras Hailu, a noble who had been imprisoned for attempting to assist Lij Iyassu in escaping gaol. Also in 1932 Yoftahe produced a triple bill, two pieces that he wrote and a revival of Tekle Hawariat’s Fabula. The

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most interesting was Dade Tura (the name of the main female character). The play challenged polygamy and the lack of women’s rights in Oromo— the largest population group in Ethiopia—society. It utilised prose, poetry and song, with men and women arguing in a sing-off. It has been generally thought that there were no women on the Ethiopian stage until the 1950s but this play had two women actors, Ketela Andarega and Aselafech Mamo. In an interview in the 1970s Ketala said she performed in four of Yoftahe’s plays and that for their performances in Dade Tura both women were rewarded with gifts of silver watches and handbags. As war loomed Yoftahe, Melaku and Tekle Hawariat and a prominent government official, Makonnen Habte-Wold, came together with a group of azmaris, a caste grouping of hereditary singers and musicians,21 to set up the Hager Fikir Mahber or Love of the Country Association, and for several months in 1935 they organised free open-air performances of short plays, music and kinet—traditional music and song—to inspire the citizens of Addis Ababa to defend the motherland, prior to the seven-year close of all theatrical activity under Italian occupation (Plastow 1996, 54–55). The similarities and contrasts in Tekle Hawariat and Yoftahe’s approaches to making theatre were hugely important to the development of the form in Ethiopia. Both men drew extensively on their religious training for form and content, but whereas Tekle Hawariat with his direct European experience disdained music, song and dance as not constituting proper theatre, Yoftahe employed a far more syncretic methodology—also collaborating with various colleagues in producing scripts. The two approaches heralded a post-liberation split in Ethiopian theatre when elite, aristocratic playwrights would opt for the more stately script-based form, while a more populist tradition, based at what became Ethiopia’s first— and still operating—professional theatre, retaining the name Hager Fikir, embraced both traditional and modern music-based performance as well as scenario-based dramas devised with azmari actors.

A Theatre for Eritrea If Ethiopia’s first theatre was built in 1934, Teatro Asmara easily predates it as one of the earlier purpose-built theatre buildings in East Africa. The Italian architect and head of colony’s Engineering Office, Odoardo Cavagnari, designed and supervised the building of the opera house in 1918 (Plastow 2017) (Fig. 2).

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Fig. 2  An early postcard image of Teatro Asmara—later known as Cinema Asmara—built 1918

The building of the beautiful 750-seat theatre was not only a sign of Italian aspiration for its premiere African possession, but also a reflection of the popularity of live performance in Italy at the time. In the 1920s in Italy ‘theatre was the principal mass entertainment medium’ (Berezin 1991, 639). It came in many forms, from full scale opera to operetta and musical evenings of popular classics, to formal dramas, immensely popular involvement in amateur dramatics, vaudeville and avanspettacolo—a series of acts featuring music, ballet and comedy. In the early 1920s, 1000 new plays a year were being produced in Italy, many semi-improvised from a dramaturg’s scenario (Berezin 1991, 640). There appear to be no records of the Italian production history of shows put on in Teatro Asmara, but we do know that there were touring productions from the motherland, amateur shows and an Italian Theatre Association which mounted three shows a week for paying audiences. However, none of this was for Eritreans. Asmara was a segregated city. When Mussolini took power in 1922 the previously common practice of inter-racial relationships was frowned on and an apartheid-style regime operated which

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included forbidding Eritreans access to Teatro Asmara except as backstage and service workers. In Italy and her colonies from the early 1930s there was a spectacular rise in the presence and popularity of cinema, which led to an inverse decline in theatre. At the same time there was a massive build up of Italians needing entertaining in Eritrea as the preparations were made for the invasion and then the occupation of Ethiopia. In 1938 there were 66,000 Italians registered as living in Asmara and it is estimated that 300,000 military personnel passed through the city in the years following the 1935 invasion (Anderson 2015, 102). The state response beautifully illustrates their hierarchical and racist view of the world. Nine cinemas were built, each with a designated audience—some for officers, some for ‘first class’ Italians, and so on, including two with carefully selected films for Eritreans. Teatro Asmara did not give up putting on live performance but it was converted in 1937 to also be able to show films, losing its fresco of Eritrean dancing maidens in the process (Plastow 2017). After the Italians: The First Eritrean Theatre In 1941 the Italians were driven out of Eritrea by the British, who would go on to liberate Ethiopia (Wrong 2005). It was unclear whether the territory should now become independent, be joined to Ethiopia, or be split—with the highlands going to Ethiopia and the Islamic western regions joining Sudan. While the United Nations deliberated Britain was given a ten-year mandate to oversee the country. It was during this time that Eritreans began making their own theatre. The widely recognised ‘father’ of Eritrean theatre was Alemayhu Kahasai. Born in 1924 Alemayhu first attended an Orthodox Church school before going on to four years of Italian schooling—the maximum then allowed to Eritreans. When he was 17 he got a job in the box office of what from now on was widely known as Cinema Asmara and here he was exposed to Western theatre and film. He was particularly fond of the slapstick comedies of the Italian equivalent to Charlie Chaplin, Antonio de Curtis Gagliardi Griffo Focas, known more manageably as Toto, who made some 100 films. In later years Alemayhu was often referred to as the Eritrean Toto. In order to feed his love of performance, Alemayhu became a stagehand for the Italian Theatre Association and his break appeared to arrive when he stepped on stage to show an Italian actor, who kept getting it wrong, how to perform a stage fall. The Italian director immediately

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sought to offer Alemayhu a job, but company managers would not countenance an African working as an equal with Italians. In disgust at his treatment the would-be actor left his job and took up employment as a lawyer’s clerk. British administration meant that performance spaces became available to Eritreans. As a good Orthodox Christian, Alemayhu, like very many highland Eritreans had, in the mid-1940s, joined the Unity Association of Eritrean with Ethiopia which was campaigning for the territory to be, as they saw it, reunited into the Ethiopian empire. In 1946 Alemayhu united his theatrical and politics interests by forming Mahber Tewaseo Deqqabbat (The Native Dramatic Association), widely known by the acronym Ma.Te. De. The company formed by sixteen men had the avowed intent of making artistic propaganda in support of the unity campaign. As in Ethiopia, Eritrean theatre had a troubled political inception (Matzke 2003, 96–103). The first play the group performed, by one Berhe Mesgun, which was immensely popular with local audiences and remained in the groups’ repertoire for several years, was Z’halfene N’bret Eritrea (The Way Eritreans’ Lived). The very title, as with so many Ethiopian plays, invoked Orthodox Church training in the double entendre techniques of samena worq. It literally means ‘Eritrea’s Past Property’, but refers to Eritrean life under Italian colonialism. This was not a well-made play, but a series of loosely connected scenes illustrating ways in which Italians mistreated their colonial subjects. Some scenes were played for comedy, as when Alemayhu acted the role of a stableman with little Italian trying desperately to explain to a horses’ owner why the horse is dirty by throwing himself on the ground and rolling around to imitate the behaviour of the animal. Others were far more serious, including one where a senior Eritrean colonial soldier, a Shumbush, enters a segregated cafe and orders coffee. He is given his espresso in an empty tomato paste tin and when he protests an Italian customer intervenes saying, ‘Cosa vuoi pretender, tu sei un nero?’ (‘What do you want, you are black?’) (Matzke 2010) (Fig. 3). Z’halfene N’bret Eritrea played to large local audiences over three weekends. Its politics concerned the British who confiscated the script but took no further action. Ma.Te.De. continued to make political theatre written by a variety of eager new playwrights in the run up to the UN decision on the future of the territory. They both campaigned for incorporation with Ethiopia with plays like Aden Gualn (Mother and Daughter), which allegorically portrayed Eritrea as the child of Ethiopia, and against closer links with Arab neighbours, as with Ali ab Asmara (Ali in Asmara)

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Fig. 3  Image from 1955 revival production of Z’halfene N’bret Eritrea (The Way Eritreans Lived) by Berhe Mesgun. (Source: Asres Tessema. Reproduced by kind permission of Christine Matzke.)

which inveighed against Arab commercial and cultural incursions into the capital. In an example of interactions that sought to assert not transnational links but the perceived unity of Eritrea with Ethiopia, Ma.Te.De. put on a number of Tigrinya translations of Amharic plays. This is perhaps not surprising. Ma.Te.De. was seeking unity with Ethiopia. Ethiopia had a considerably more developed theatre culture and many Eritreans had been to Addis Ababa for higher education studies, commerce or work. Alemayehu Kahasai seems likely to have translated Makonnen Endalkachew’s 1947 play, Yedam Dems (The Voice of Blood) into Meswaati Abuna Pedros (The Matyrdom of Abuna Petros) (Matzke 2003, 98). The work was one of several written in Ethiopia about the Italian murder of the Abuna and therefore an obvious point of unifying outrage for all Orthodox Christians in both countries. They also put on Makonnen’s Old Testament play, Dawitna Orion (David and Orion) as Negus Dawit (King David) and in

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1955 May T’nbit Kotsera, from Kebede Mikael’s Yeketat Maebal (1948/9) (Prophetic Appointment), a highly xenophobic play encouraging fear of the outside world and foreign ideas (Plastow 1996, 59). All were works appealing to Orthodox and Ethiopianist nationalist sympathies, but they were also verbose, slow and several hours long and could no more entice mass audiences in Eritrea than they had in Ethiopia. Instead, the company found that the most lucrative and popular form of performance was the variety show. Increasingly, they turned to the format of a three-hour event, incorporating traditional and ‘modern’ (i.e. using Western instruments) music and song, traditional and modern dance, comedy and shorter plays. Original and often highly political songs were at the heart of these entertainments, which mostly drew an audience of younger citizens and especially young working men. Central to all this work—as actor, director, producer and accordion player—was Alemayhu Kahasai (Matzke 2003, 100–103). It is undoubtedly true that Ma.Te.De. drove the development of Eritrean theatre in this post-Italian period but, though records are scarce, a number of other groups were involved in theatre-making in the territory in the 1950s. Amongst them were various foreigners. Just because they had lost the war, not all Italians left Eritrea. Throughout the 1950s until declining numbers did finally lead to its closure in 1958, Al Circulo Universitario Asmara, more often known as CUA, operated as a sporting and cultural organisation regularly mounting Italian plays, mostly of a light nature, in cinema halls and in Cinema Asmara. The Americans, at Kagnew Base, similarly put on amateur dramatics; Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was offered to the general public in 1954 (Plastow 2017). Other ‘modern’ Eritrean groups also put on plays, amongst them schools, teachers’ groups and every year in the long vacation a production was mounted by Eritrean students studying at Addis Ababa University. We also know that the touring schedules of the Ethiopian theatres such as the Hagar Fikir included visits to Asmara, even if sadly details seem to have been lost.

Post–Occupation Theatre in Ethiopia Throughout the 1940s and 1950s two main strands of Ethiopian theatre developed. One was an elite, aristocratic form, intended more as a literary exercise than for mass performance—indeed many of these plays were never, and some arguably could not ever, have been put on stage. The other strand was more populist, centred on the Hager Fikir

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Theatre—initially a converted Italian officers’ recreational club before the Emperor donated an exhibition hall, which remains the theatre’s home to this day, which was established in 1942 as Ethiopia’s first professional theatre under the patronage of Makonnen Habte-Wold. Makonnen and his brother Aklilu were protégées of the Emperor, with Aklilu serving as the powerful Minister of the Pen for many years before becoming Prime Minister in 1961 (Bahru Zewde 2002, 81–82). For Makonnen, the Hagar Fiker was more than just a theatre company. It was ‘to function as a spearhead of social and cultural development of the nation […] while trying to hold aloft the rich and worthy traditions of the country’s past’ (Ethiopian National Patriotic Association 1970, 5). Indeed, when it first opened it also had a craft operation making cups and glasses and supporting local cotton and carpet manufacture. However, these activities were not commercially successful and performance became the raison d’être for the company. The main business of the theatre in the early days was not formal theatre but kinet. The term kinet is loosely translatable as art or culture, but (very similarly to the widespread use of the Kiswahili term ngoma in Kenya and Tanzania) it is generally synonymous with the performance of traditional dance, music and song. Originally kinet meant the folk dances of Ethiopia’s multitudinous ethnic groups and the Hagar Fikir was the first centre to deliberately collect this cultural material and assemble a performance troupe. The theatre put on performances every Sunday. What the patrons saw was essentially a variety programme of music, song and dance by a cast of around forty performers. It also included short dramas which were put on early in the programme because otherwise the audience would leave—the music being the prime draw for attendance (Plastow 1996, 55). The theatre was not scripted because a new piece was required each week and the performers were generally illiterate. Makonnen Habte-Wold would outline the situation and with minimal rehearsal the actors would improvise on the theme. Most of the plays were comedies and an actor of the period Kebede Wolde-Giorgis explained why. ‘When tragic plays were performed, the actors felt that they did not entertain the audience and then some comic actors would present or improvise something comic to make the audience laugh.’ (Quoted in Abebe Kebede 1980, 12). However Makonnen, who had also written with Yoftahe Negussie, had aspirations to produce more formal drama. He therefore started to recruit a separate literate group of actors directly from church schools and to put on his own

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and others’ plays. He was an apparently dictatorial director, known to stop a play in mid-performance to re-direct an actor if they were not doing as he wanted, but he had created the first professional drama troupe. Makonnen also acquired a star assistant in Iyoel Yohannes, who came up through the company, originally working as a child actor, but who would go on to become possibly Ethiopia’s most prolific playwright.22 Born in 1922 in Addis Ababa, Iyoel’s father wanted his son to have a life in the church. He was enrolled in a church school and began singing in the church choir where he first attracted admirers. However, Iyoel loved not only church but also secular music, to the disappointment of his father who confiscated his son’s radio in order to prevent such earthly distractions. It was a vain attempt for Makonnen Habtewold heard of this child virtuoso and enrolled him in his company in 1934, where he quickly became a major draw and even became, in a sense, the voice of Ethiopia since his was the voice recorded singing the national anthem that was played every day at the beginning and end of the day’s broadcasts. After the restoration of the monarchy, Iyoel, often known as ‘The Kid’ because of his youthful brilliance, became ever more ubiquitous at the Hagar Fikir. He was a singer, a dancer, an actor and soon began to write play concepts. In the early days he even took up the challenge of a lack of female performers by acting women’s roles. His fame grew commensurately and many attended shows primarily to see Iyoel in action. His first acting role was in 1942. In 1947 he wrote, acted in and directed his first play, Acha Gabicha (A Marriage of Equals). The piece was so popular that in 1948 the Hagar Fikir took it on a national tour, travelling to every major town in the country, even going in to British-run Eritrea. Iyoel would remain based at the Hagar Fikir for twenty years. He worked as poet and songwriter, as choreographer and performer, he led the acting company and recruited and mentored new members and generally he busied himself directing productions in the day and planning new shows in the evenings. This phenomenal energy was necessary because the theatre demanded weekly new dramas for its populist audience. Unlike the aristocratic playwrights, or even the educated writers who would emerge in the 1960s, Iyoel’s plays were for mass audiences—often short pieces for inclusion in the weekly variety show, though he also wrote full-length plays and musicals. At the Hager Fikir at this time the workers only got paid if enough punters came through the doors and Iyoel had a huge sense of responsibility towards his staff, so he constantly drove himself to provide the material that would appeal to the people. He expected

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commensurate commitment, as Kebede Adey, the Head of Human Resources at the theatre, explained: Iyoel is a much disciplined professional and used to make many artists literally covered with sweat during rehearsals. And they respect him for that. And by the way, if a performer wants to leave early or go outside, they make sure that Iyoel is not around. They usually check out his desk, and if his coat is hanging over his seat, nobody leaves. (Quoted by Mahlet Solomon in personal correspondence, October 2017)

In his approach to making theatre Iyoel Yohannes was much closer to Malaku Baggosaw and Yoftahe Negussie than to the elite writers. Like them, he drew on church music forms, but also on popular secular culture and he claimed he learned most of his theatre craft from watching films as a young man. Here there was no concept of a rigid divide between drama and performance, between script and staging, and while Iyoel was very much in charge for much of his life, rising to become assistant manager in 1953 and general manager from 1964 to 1967, his background was not far removed from many of his performers. He seldom wrote full scripts. Rather he came up with stories which he shared with actors, allotting each their roles and telling them the major moments to be covered, though he would write down key lines and especially the opening and ending of the play. Then it was up to the improvisational skills of the cast and a few days’ rehearsal to prepare the week’s offering. Iyoel Yohannes is credited with creating some seventy plays; many conveyed conventional moral messages and followed closely religious teachings—though packaged using comedy, music and dance. Others were love stories; however, he could also provoke uneasiness in the censor with some of his plays that promoted human rights and the need to fight to achieve these. His most famous work took the form of a ten-week series, Zetegn Fetena Yalafe Jegna (A Hero Who Passed Nine Dangers), which involved fifty performers, a significant financial investment and played out over consecutive Sundays. Official Hagar Fikir publicity says of this period: By and large the writer [sic] of the dramas and plays presented at the Ager Fikir Mahber were of humble educational background. This being so, though the dramas did not perhaps have much of technical sophistication, they appealed greatly both to the common man and as well to the educated.’ (Ethiopian National Patriotic Association, 17)

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Iyoel Yohannes was not the only writer at the Hagar Fikir in this period but he was by far the most prolific and popular, widely written about and revered in his lifetime and eulogised in outpourings after his death in 1981. With the restitution of the monarchy, Yoftahe Negussie also returned to Addis Ababa. Working with his old collaborator Makonnen and in conjunction with the city Municipality, in 1946 he opened an Institute for Music and Drama with a purpose-built theatre in the Municipality buildings. Actors and musicians were advertised for on national radio and sixty performers were recruited. As at the Hager Fikir there would be kinet and drama groups, and as there, the lack of literate women who were willing to act meant the drama group was entirely male. In a hugely patriarchal, sexist culture this was a humiliation for the female impersonators and in a 1992 interview one of the men who played female roles at the Municipality, Awlachew Dejene, refused to discuss the roles, saying only, ‘I don’t want to remember and talk about the bitter and unpleasant side of my life’ (Quoted in Aboneh Ashegrie 2012, 2). The Emperor demonstrated his support for the venture by allocating an annual budget of 18,492 Birr. This was never actually paid, possibly because Yoftahe died the next year and running costs fell to the city. Yoftahe had aimed to run a rather more up-market venture than the Hager Fikir and a 1950 survey showed that his audience were more middle class. Many aircrew from the national Ethiopian Airlines attended, along with merchants from the city’s huge Mercato market—and a good number of prostitutes. What both venues had in common—as in many other parts of Africa—was that the audience was extremely vociferous, freely and loudly expressing views about both the performance and the performers. The final theatre to open in this period was the Haile Selassie I, which has operated since 1974 under the name of the National Theatre. The building had been begun by the Italians, planned as a cinema at the bottom end of what is now Churchill Avenue, very close to the National Bank and other major state offices. The Italians had left the site in disarray, where it languished for several years before the Municipality put forward plans for a lavish, large new theatre. Work progressed slowly until the Emperor decided he wanted to complete the project as the centrepiece for his silver jubilee celebrations in 1955. No expense was then spared in rushing through the 1400-seat theatre. Modern technical equipment was brought over from Austria, as were a bevy of technicians to teach local staff and to run the auditorium (Mamitu Yilma 1987).

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Throughout the late 1950s the space was run as the Emperor’s pet project. Aristocratic playwrights had their works put on for command performances and costumes would be purchased from abroad, with lighting and design by the European employees. The space was so large that a special kind of declamatory acting was resorted to in order for actor’s voices to reach out across the auditorium (Information from conversation with Manyazewal Endeshaw. Addis Ababa, 2015). Tickets for these plays were enormously expensive and runs were short, but the point was really the court showing. For such events the Emperor would arrive attended by his courtiers in imperial pomp. If he liked the work all concerned could expect lavish gifts, but if displeased he would either stop the show or sweep out in mid-performance, leaving playwright and actors terrified as to what might befall them.

Plays and Playwrights The 1940s and 1950s saw some leading Ethiopians try their hand at theatre, which became a fashionable, patriotic matter. Some had more idea about writing plays than others. One of the most popular and still well remembered plays was Yoftahe Negussie’s Afejeshign (The Woman in Contention). It was written in exile in Sudan and performed at court to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday in 1941 with numerous subsequent revivals. It speaks of the conspiracy by Europeans to fool the Ethiopians and steal their nation, the woman in contention, but also of traitors who collaborated with the Italians and have not been punished with the return to independence. The play concludes by calling for a new social order where all will work together for development and prosperity. The most elite man to try his hand at playwriting was less adept. Makonnen Endlakachew was a leading aristocrat who would rise to become prime minister and had the title of Ras-Bitwodded (Lord-Beloved), a title an emperor could bestow only once in his lifetime. Some of his works mix narrative and dialogue to such an extent that one cannot really designate them plays and a number were never performed. These pieces were intensely moralistic and religious and many drew on imperial Ethiopian history. They were essentially sermons, constantly reiterating the message of the church: life is vanity, pleasure is sinful and the only way to salvation is through prayer, humility and repentance (Plastow 1996, 56–58). A brief look at two of the plays will illustrate the kind of work Makonnen and his peers were producing.

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Dawitna Orion (David and Orion) (1954/55) is a biblical piece. King David is smitten by the beauty of the Bersabeh, the wife of his war-lord, Orion. He therefore arranges Orion’s death in battle, seduces his wife and the couple proceed to live in wedded bliss. All is well until the prophet Nathan arrives. He harangues the King and threatens him with God’s wrath. David immediately repents. He casts off Bersabeh and spends his time repenting until an angel appears to tell him he is forgiven. Of course Orion is still dead and Bersabeh has no voice in the matter, but all is well in the patriarchal worlds of the Old Testament, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and in the mind of the playwright. Salaswi Dawit (King David III) (1955) deals with an eighteenth-­ century Ethiopian monarch. The King was a lover, not of church, but of folk music and built a hall in his capital of Gondar so he could enjoy being entertained. The King’s son, Jacob, is horrified at his father’s secular tastes. The young man wants to live as a holy hermit and much of the play is taken up in moralistic discussions between Jacob and his friend Lidj Mesfin. Reluctantly persuaded to attend his father’s coronation, Jacob falls ill at the sight of such worldly enjoyment and slowly, amid much sermonising, dies for sorrow at the ways of the world and, most particularly, those of his father. As a result we are told that the King and Queen ‘Came to hate music, regarding it as the principal cause of the untimely death of their son.’ (Selaswi Dawit, 1955). Thomas Kane, whose 1975 study of Amharic literature seems to have been something in the nature of a penance, says of the plays of this period: ‘Most authors are so innocent of the art of drama writing that the stage directions are not separated from the dialogue and in one case have even been put into rhyme. Plays of twelve and thirteen acts are known.’(Kane 1975, 21). Nearly all these early ‘serious’ plays were based on historic events, many relating to the recent war with Italy and certainly some writers seem to have had minimal idea about what writing a play actually meant. The most extraordinary examples include the 1955 work by Yesowaworq Haylu, Nesannet Kebre (Independence is my Honour) which in eight acts told of the story of three guerrilla fighter heroes. Kane tells us the play ‘does not offer any items of interest’ (Kane 1975, 153). However, Yesowawork was beaten in the epic stakes the following year when Te’ezagu Haylu produced a thirteen-act play, with accompanying essay, about the exploits of the eponymous patriot fighter, Haile Mariam Mamo (Plastow 1989, 85).

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There are two playwrights who need special mention at this point. The first is Ethiopia’s earliest—and still one of only a small (though recently growing) group—woman playwright. Seneddu Gebru had been educated in Switzerland and France where she took part in school plays. When she returned to Ethiopia in 1933 she collaborated with Yoftahe Negussie, helping him with his school dramas. During the occupation Seneddu was a guerrilla fighter who was caught and spent several years as a prisoner of war before returning on liberation to teach at, and from 1945 to run, the elite Empress Menen Girls’ Boarding School. Between 1947 and 1955 Seneddu Gebru would write and produce over twenty plays with all schoolgirl casts, many of which were performed for the Emperor (Aboneh Ashegrie 2012, 2–3). As with other playwrights of the time many of her subjects are historical, but she also dealt with more social issues of love, marriage and social harmony. The plays were not only performed in school but were regularly requested at the palace and were occasionally given public performances at Cinema Ethiopia, which at times doubled up as a theatre. In 1956 Seneddu Gebru took up a seat in parliament and was subsequently appointed to several government posts. She continued to write plays as a leisure activity, but theatre-making at Empress Menen School rapidly declined. Another cosmopolitan playwright was Kebede Mikael, described by Amharic literary scholar Albert Gerard as Ethiopia’s ‘first modern playwright’ (Gerard 1971, 281). Kebede had travelled widely in Europe. He spoke French and Italian and was a renowned poet as well as a playwright. He was a great admirer of Shakespeare, translating and publishing his Romewana Julyat Teater (Romeo and Juliet Play) in 1953/4, probably from a French version. Pankhurst says ‘The translation, in something approaching Alexandrine verse, was written in words which everyone could understand, but nevertheless attained a high level of poetic melody’ (1986, 179). It was a most popular translation, being reprinted the following year and becoming a school textbook, as well as seeing numerous performances by professional and school groups. Kebede Mikael’s most famous play was Hannibal, which was produced in 1956. Though many dramas of this time dealt with history, this instance was unusual in that it concerned not Ethiopia but the history of the second Punic war between Carthage and Rome. Hannibal is portrayed as the daring, much-loved young leader who takes on and defeats the might of Rome. However, his initial victories, having marched his elephants over the Alps, relied on support being sent from Carthage. This support never came because the

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senate in Carthage was jealous of Hannibal’s achievements and popularity and was consumed by internal wrangles. The covert message, about the need for the Ethiopian government to overcome internal divisions for the greater good, has remarkable resonances with Tekle Hawariat’s Fabula, though this time the message is that Ethiopia needs to align with the rest of Africa to resist European hegemony. An ordinary citizen explains as the Africans of Carthage await an assault from Rome. It [the battle] is also a question of race and the future. If the Romans are victorious the white men will take control. They will have wealth and knowledge, and their Empire over the world will endure. Europe will long be mistress of the universe; she will have prosperity, science, power. When our magnificence, intelligence and greatness are transported to another continent our race will become decadent […] This war between Rome and Carthage, this merciless struggle, is not just a matter of two cities. The victory of one or the other will decide the fate of all the peoples of the world. (Hannibal, Act 3)

Other plays followed the usual formula of celebrating Ethiopian kings and upholding the teachings of the church. Purely fictional plays were unusual at this time and Kebede Michael’s only attempt in this direction— a tragedy of the evil fate of an Ethiopian who travels abroad and returns to try to spread his misguided liberal ideas—was Yeketat Maebal (The Storm of Retribution) (1948/9).

The ‘Modern’ Theatre in Ethiopia: 1960–1974 In the early 1960s, three men, still seen as giants of Ethiopian theatre, would lead a radical change in the form and content of the national drama. They were Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, Mengistu Lemma and Tesfaye Gessesse. They would be followed later the same decade by a group of reinforcements that included Debebe Eshetu, Wogeyehu Negatu, Abate Mekuria and Getachew Debalke The key event that led to all these men having a new outlook on both theatre and Ethiopia from that of their predecessors was that they all left the country as young men to study theatre in Europe or America (Plastow 1989). Tsegaye, born in 1936, is the most renowned of Ethiopian playwrights both at home and, largely because he is the only one to have written or translated more than a couple of plays into English, internationally.23

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Unusually he did not come from an elite, or even a wholly Amharic, family. His mother was Amhara but his father came from the despised Oromo ethnic group. Like the older theatre makers, Tsegaye too had an early education in Ge’ez and qene, but he then won a scholarship to the only English-medium school in the country. Named after Orde Wingate, the man who led the British troops that helped liberate Ethiopia in the Second World War, The Wingate School ran with much the same ethos as elite colonial high schools in British East Africa and here Tsegaye got involved in drama activities, acting in both English and Amharic, notably in Kebede Mickael’s Amharic version of Romeo and Juliet (Interview, Jan 1988). He also wrote some pieces for performance at the school and by the time he left, Tsegaye knew he wanted to be a playwright. He also felt he had to get to the West for further training, so he took every step he could think of to help himself. He enrolled for courses at the local commercial college so that he could work in theatre in a business-like way and he worked for both The Wingate School and The British Council to try to gain their support. He also wrote two plays, both produced at the Commercial School to a warm press response. After spending most of the late 1950s in unsuccessful manoeuvring—whilst also completing a University of Chicago law degree by correspondence because he was interested in ‘ideas of justice’ (Interview Jan 1988)—Tsegaye finally, with the support of Kebede Mikael who was helpfully Minister of Education at the time, got a UNESCO scholarship to study theatre in England and France. He spent a year in 1959–60 moving between The Royal Court in London, The Theatre Royal in Windsor and the Parisian Comédie-Française. He told me that the Western playwrights he admired, apart from Shakespeare who was listed as a major influence by all the Ethiopian playwrights of this period whom I interviewed, were the ‘angry young men’, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. The enduring appeal of these left wing, socially questioning writers would be further demonstrated when Tsegaye went on to write one of his most renowned plays, Yekerma Sow, (A Man of Tomorrow), loosely based on Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, which had premiered in Britain during Tsegaye’s 1960 visit. By late 1960, Tsegaye was back to take up the position of vice-director and to effectively run the Haile Selassie Theatre for the next decade. He used his opportunity to put on a string of plays as he wrote them, a mixture of gritty realist shows privileging the life of the underdog and discussing the future of Ethiopia, and translations of classics by Shakespeare and Moliere: Othello, Yekule Lelit Hilm (Midsummer Night’s Dream),

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Macbeth, Lear (King Lear), Hamlet, Awonabai Debtera (Tartuffe) and Yefez Doctor (The Flying Doctor). Mengistu Lemma, in contrast to Tsegaye, came from an elite Amhara family (Interview, May 1987). His father was an important Alaka or head priest, and his brilliant son had an excellent education in both ecclesiastical Ge’ez and in Amharic learning and Western knowledge. In 1952 Mengistu was one of only two Ethiopian students to successfully enter the London matriculation examination and he left to spend seven years in Britain, studying first at Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the London School of Economics. In England the young man had a rich intellectual life that had little to do with his studies. He began to gain his considerable reputation as a poet. With an expert knowledge of qene he became renowned, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s and 1940s evolution of Somali poetry (see Chapter 1) for breaking with the old rigorously intellectual and religious uses of the form and for turning it instead to a vehicle for both sensuous love poetry and social criticism. He also spent much time reading Ethiopian literature and attending western films and plays. Mengistu’s evolving artistic and political thought became increasingly that of a liberal reformist, and he expressed his ideas in a journal for Ethiopian youth in the UK that he edited, The Lion Cub. The Emperor was not impressed and he eventually recalled the intellectual rebel to Ethiopia (Interview with Mengistu Lemma. Addis Ababa, 1987). Soon after his return, Mengistu was summoned to the palace to be told he was to go to India as First Secretary to the Imperial Embassy. This was not an assignment he felt he could refuse. However, in India there was nothing to do and, he told me, he rapidly sank into a whisky-fuelled life, sometimes spending evenings with the equally unhappy Sudanese ambassador who would recite Shakespearean poetry to him before bursting into drunken tears (Interview. Addis Ababa, November 1987). In order to break the alcoholic cycle, Mengistu decided he must acquire an interest, so he looked out a half-written playscript. This had originally been intended as a wedding gift for a friend when they were both back in Addis Ababa but the writer, always a perfectionist, had not felt happy with the result. As with his poetry, Mengistu did not wish to follow the models of previous Ethiopian playwrights whose work had no appeal for him. Instead he spent much time reading books from the US embassy library. In secret Mengistu wrote his play and sent out various copies to friends in Ethiopia. He also sent one to Tesfaye Gessesse who wrote back asking for permission to put the play on for Ethiopian Christmas24 at the Haile Selassie

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Theatre. The first Mengistu knew of the outcome was when the ambassador summoned him and showed him rave reviews in the Ethiopian newspapers. Champagne was sent for and a career began. From now on Mengistu would establish a reputation as Ethiopia’s leading comic, satirical writer. He was never prolific and would hone his work over many months, continuing to read widely and edit meticulously. Unlike the other major figures in Ethiopian theatre, he did not direct or become involved in acting or administration. He told me the only time he acted was in a school nativity play when he was the Angel Gabriel, but being terribly shy he never wanted to go near a stage again. Before the 1974 revolution his reputation was built on just two plays, Telfso Bekisse (Marriage by Abduction) (English translation 1962) and Yelacha Gebecha (The Marriage of Unequals) (English translation 1963). The third member of the key reformers was Tesfaye Gessesse (Interviews. Addis Ababa, May 1987 and Jan 1988). Born in 1937 in southern Ethiopia Tesfaye was an orphan by the age of two, and he moved to Addis Ababa when he was seven to be brought up by his aunt.25 At the Teferi Mekonnen School he became involved with annual school plays and was a keen attender at the Hagar Fikir Theatre. However, he also liked sports and was not initially an ardent student. When he went to university he took a General Arts degree, being unsure whether he might finally pursue law or theatre studies. Tesfaye’s future was decided when he took part in a student production of The Book of Job. At that time, in the late 1950s, the Haile Selassie Theatre often did not have a full schedule of its own so student groups could hire it. The Emperor attended the show and was so impressed with Tesfaye’s performance that he summoned him and gave him a gold watch. He also arranged a scholarship for this protégée to take an MA in Theatre Studies at North-Western University in the USA. At North-Western, Tesfaye was influenced by the black rights movement, attending the rally where Martin Luther gave his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, but most of his time was given up to study as he felt inadequately prepared compared to many of his American peers. It was in the USA that he wrote and produced, in 1960, his first play, Legach and Her Pot. When he returned to Ethiopia in 1960 it was to work closely with Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin at the Haile Selassie Theatre. His first engagement was to direct and take the lead role in Tsegaye’s love story, Yeshoh Aklil (Crown of Thorns). Unlike Tsegaye and Mengistu, Tesfaye never saw himself primarily as a playwright. He told me he thought he was more ‘an

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actor and a practical theatre man’. In coming years he worked closely with Philip Caplan at the Creative Arts Centre, directed a raft of plays at the Haile Selassie Theatre and wrote and directed his first Amharic play, Yeshi, a piece focusing, in a highly judgemental fashion, on the eponymous prostitute protagonist. Like his peers, Tesfaye was interested in socially engaged theatre that would move away from the earlier declamatory style and explore more realistic characters. He said to me that he did not see himself as a particularly innovative writer but one strongly influenced by the concept of the well-made play which he wanted to use to talk about contemporary Ethiopia.

Philip Caplan and the Creative Arts Centre The troika discussed above undoubtedly had a profound effect on Ethiopian theatre in the 1960s, but their innovations were fortuitously backed up by the work of the only foreigner who travelled to Ethiopia and made theatre in the country in anything but a school context prior to the establishment of the University Theatre Arts Department in the 1980s. The American, Dr Philip Caplan, in 1962 had applied for a position as a Fulbright lecturer but was astounded to be told he was to be sent to Ethiopia, a country of which he knew almost nothing (Caplan manuscript—unpublished and undated).26 He travelled to the only university in the country, which had only been established in 1950 and had a hugely international faculty, but no facilities or courses in theatre. For some months Caplan had almost nothing to do and was sorely tempted to head home. The students didn’t seem interested in an extra-curricular drama club and resented Caplan himself as a representative of US power, while professional actors greeted him ‘with intense suspicion and distrust’ (p. 2). Only after months of a softly-softly diplomatic approach did Caplan manage to convince forty students to meet him at home to discuss a possible theatre project. They agreed to work on an adaptation—in English— of the Roman, Plautus’ comedy, The Braggart Soldier, renamed The Comedy of Love. The process of rehearsal was evidently tense at times. There was a threatened strike, only ‘averted by an honest discussion of their criticism of me as a director and what I expected of them as a visitor to their country’ (p. 3). There were also problems in getting actresses, which was only overcome when the US-educated daughter of the Minister of Finance, Sophia Yilma, volunteered and led the way in persuading other young women to take part. However, Yonas Ademesu, who acted in the

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play and went on to become an academic, remembers it as a tremendous success (Letter). It was shown for three or four days at the university and then went on to tour Addis Ababa high schools, before a final performance at the Haile Selassie Theatre. Caplan then went on to work with the young Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin on his English version of his historical masterpiece, Tewodros. Tewodros was the tormented, brilliant and ultimately apparently mad emperor who in the mid-nineteenth century reunited Ethiopia after the years of the zemana mesafint, challenging clerical dominance and ending up by taking on the British army—committing suicide as they over-ran his mountain-­ top fortress. A number of writers have interpreted the story with its enigmatic hero27 and Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin would re-write his version several times over the coming years, ending up with a ‘red’ Tewodros after the Marxist revolution that saw the emperor as a proto-socialist. It seems likely that Tsegaye would have felt a particular empathy with this character who, like himself, rose from fairly humble beginnings to challenge the old conservative aristocracy and church. Caplan says that he and Tsegaye worked ‘very carefully’ (p. 4) together on the English language script and then, with Tesfaye assisting, created a major production. Ethiopia’s premier, UK-trained artist, Afewerk Tekle, contributed the design and US composer Halim el-Dabh, who trained the first Ethiopian orchestra, wrote a score to link the scenes. Tsegaye was able to persuade actors at ‘his’ Haile Selassie Theatre to act for free, while a number of expatriates offered their services for the British roles and authentic costumes came from the museum cases of the Institute for Ethiopian Studies. The performance was given in the State Room of the old Ras Makonnen Palace28 in a traverse production. Caplan calls his production a Spectacle for it included not only the intimate scenes of conflict involving Emperor Theodros [sic], unifier and father of modern Ethiopia, but ritual dance, marriage pageantry and traditional song. (4)

The play was attended by Haile Selassie and acclaimed in the local press (Fig. 4). By now Caplan had won over the students who petitioned him to remain and evidently the Emperor also approved for the American was asked to set up the country’s first arts centre at the University. The Center was a multi-arts space working with artists, musicians, theatre and film makers. Caplan used his American international contacts to invite all sorts

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Fig. 4  Philip Caplan meeting Emperor Haile Selassie at the Addis Ababa University Cultural Centre after a performance in the early 1960s. Precise date unknown. (Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Melissa Havard, Philip Caplan’s daughter.)

of visiting artists to show their work and share their skills. He directed Tesfaye’s English language play Legach and her Pot and a number of international works, Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and Sunrise at Campobello by Dore Schary. He even attempted to set up a theatre company. Beginning with twenty students who were paid 50 Birr a month, Caplin hoped that this group might lead to the eventual establishment of a theatre department at the University. However, within six months, he was down to just two young men remaining, Debebe Seifu and Wogayehu Negatu, who would both subsequently win scholarships to study theatre in Hungary and return to become major figures on the Ethiopian scene. His finale was his only attempt at directing an Amharic play, with Tesfaye Gessesse, when he took on Mengistu Lemma’s, Yelacha Gebacha (Marriage of Unequals). Yonas says that the production was a ‘hit’ and that emperor came to the Creative Arts Center to see the play ‘and his response equalled (if not surpassed) that to Tewodros’ (Letter).

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Caplan stayed in Ethiopia only two years but he made a notable contribution to a theatre that was then ready to experiment and to explore aspects of the intercultural. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, for example, would go on to talk extensively about his work, particularly in English, as being ‘total theatre’,29 but it was the production he made with Caplan that seems to have paved the way for his unifying of music, art and drama in subsequent plays such as Oda Oak Oracle (1965) and Collision of Altars (1977). Tesfaye Gessesse would continue to develop his work as Ethiopia’s leading director. He has spoken warmly of his collaborations with Caplan (Interview. Addis Ababa, Jan 1988). Many students were won over to the idea of being involved with theatre and apparently beguiled by an American who would sweep floors and do dirty jobs, challenging ideas of the practical theatre making as being only for azmaris and of members of the elite being above taking on manual tasks. Above all, he established the Creative Arts Center, which Dr Yonas says ‘gave theatre arts in Ethiopia […] a totally new face’, and which has continued almost uninterruptedly as an important, if now gravely dilapidated, performance space.30

The New Ethiopian Theatre The innovations in form and content of plays, rehearsal techniques and acting style required by the new theatre makers were not easily absorbed in Ethiopia. With Tesfaye and Tsegaye in leading positions at the Haile Selassie Theatre it was here that the impact of the new realism was most strongly felt. At this time kinet was still the most popular entertainment form in the theatres—audiences for a new style of drama, focused not as before on the lives of kings and heroes but on the lives of ordinary people, would grow only slowly. Moreover, actors were reluctant to take on the new kinds of roles. Tsegaye told me that both the theatre administration and the actors were initially resistant to his innovations (Interview. Addis Ababa, Jan 1988). Actors liked dressing up in splendid robes and declaiming noble speeches; playing indigent beggars and prostitutes was far less appealing and at first no leading performers would take on these roles. They also found the move from rehearsing for just a few days to a process that could stretch over months for a major production strange and disconcerting. One has to take into account when writing about theatre in Ethiopia that right up until the 1980s there was, to an extent quite unique in the region, a huge gulf between actors and writer/directors. The 1960s might

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have seen a move from the theatres being dominated by aristocratic playwrights to far more socially engaged young graduates, but the divide between minimally educated actors and elite producers, both socially and financially, remained immense. The first high-status professional actor only started working full-time on stage in the mid-1960s. Wogayehu Negatu was one of the two young performers who had stuck with Philip Caplan’s training programme and had gone on to study theatre in Hungary. However, he was an exception—most actors of this period earned a precarious living, often subsidising meagre wages by offering private musical and dance performances for various events. The Emperor might have loved drama, but though he periodically promised to support the theatres, money was often not forthcoming. Above all, the gulf between actors and elite theatre personnel was enacted in the unique payment structure that still essentially persists in Ethiopian theatre. Apparently the custom of paying the playwright 50% of all gate money was established in the 1950s to encourage the writing of new plays at a time when both the Hagar Fikir and the Haile Selassie Theatre were struggling for material (Interview with Tesfaye Gessesse, Addis Ababa, 1987). Initially playwrights usually directed their own plays, and indeed this has remained a quite common practice; however, when a play was directed by someone else they got 10% and the writer 40%. For a translation the remuneration was 25%. In contrast even when actors did receive their pay, it was a pittance. Actors were still generally viewed as inferior azmaris—mere tools for delivery of the play rather than partners in artistic creation. In 1959 day-to-day running of the Haile Selassie Theatre was moved from the Addis Ababa Municipality and put under the control of the Ministry of Education and Fine Art. At the insistence of the new Director of Arts, Seyoum Sibhat, supported by Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, newly returned to Ethiopia who was appointed his vice-director, all foreign staff contracts were terminated. Seyoum also restructured the performing company, which was now formally divided into two groups in much the same manner as was practiced at the Hagir Fikir, with one group for kinet and one for drama. Leading actor and director Debebe Seifu explained the relative popularity of deployment at the time thus: ‘If a musician made a mistake he was sent to the theatre section […] as a penalty.’ (Kebede 1980, 32). The restructuring threw the theatre into financial chaos because funding which had previously come from the Municipality was not replaced with state support. Box office income was insufficient—especially after 50% had gone to the playwright—to sustain the other theatre staff

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who were frequently going unpaid. Haile Selassie was forced to intervene with a grant from the Ministry of Finance and an order to the Municipality to restore at least minimal funding. A final category of theatre makers to mantion are two men who made attempts to set up purely commercial companies. In 1953/54 Mathewos Bekele, who had previously been involved in organising tours for the Hagar Fikir, set up his own company, Yeandnet Theater Kifil (United Theatre Company), which sought to make a living purely from touring popular performance and slapstick comedy in the market (mercato) area of the capital. Conditions on the road were often basic in the extreme and eventually Mathewos rejoined the Hagar Fikir. Melaku Ashegrie subsequently set up a touring group, Tewodros Theatre Group, which ran from 1969 to 1976. He was a teacher who had previously worked as an actor and he wrote slapstick plays that his students toured in the holidays and at weekends. The actors were all volunteers and many went on to work in fully professional theatre though they often had to hide their hobby from disapproving parents. This group paved the way for many subsequent, post-revolution, semi-­professional groups that have been a route for many contemporary performers into the profession (Plastow 1989, 114). By the early 1960s actors began to join in the general discontent in the city and for the first time started making demands—principally in relation to their appalling wages. In 1961/2 the actors and musicians at the Hagar Fikir asked for a wage rise. Thirty-three of them were promptly dismissed. Two years later further demands were made and Hager Fikir staff were joined by actors at the Haile Selassie Theatre asking for their unpaid wages. This time forty-three Hagar Fikir staff lost their jobs along with thirty-five from the state theatre. Various strategies were now employed to seek to raise funding. The Hagar Fikir hired out some of its office space for commercial use, the Haile Selassie started hiring itself out for events such as beauty contests and conferences and both theatres became part-time cinemas. The theatre companies also started going on tour. Kinet was particularly popular in the provinces and both theatres found it worthwhile to take companies out to major towns for a month or two each year. As the 1960s went on more popular plays would start to do better at filling at the theatres, with plays usually showing on a once-a-week basis, but the build­up in revenues was slow and theatre staff pay and status remained poor throughout the period.

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The Leading Playwrights and their Plays The key influence that the playwrights refer to time and again is that of qene. Mengistu Lemma is interesting here. In a 1973 article, ‘From Traditional to Modern Literature in Ethiopia’, he captures what seems to me the essence of the cultural positioning of the new generation of internationally exposed, but fiercely Amhara-nationalist playwrights. So, when talking about the previous generation, he says: None of these writers were really fully modern. True, they wrote in the vernacular, dealt more or less with secular problems and subject matter; and although they all had a sound traditional background in qene poetry they lacked that intimate contact with world literature and consequently could not quite manage to break away completely from the fetters of the earlier tradition as far as the open moralizing and didacticism were concerned. (Mengistu 1973)

However, Mengistu was concerned that modern theatre, while learning from the foreign, must not mean an aping of it. Rather, as with his re-­ forging of traditional qene in his own poetry, Mengistu seems to seek the renewing and reviewing of Ethiopian cultural forms. On the whole, the post-war generation of writers are technically better equipped than their elders, mainly because of the easier contact with foreign literature that modern education provides […] but there are drawbacks as well: the indiscriminate absorption of foreign influences, lack of depth, divorce from and irrelevance to the real life of our own people are the dangers we have to guard against. The antidote of course is a good classical background of our own. (Mengistu 1973)

The playwright who did toy with a more inclusive concept of theatre was Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. Possibly due to the influence of Caplan we know that his first, English language, version of Tewodros embraced the notion of the utilisation of music and spectacle. He then wrote a string of more naturalistic plays before increasing political tension at home led to him taking up the opportunity in 1970 to travel to Senegal. Here he was heavily influenced by Leopold Senghor’s negritude movement, and apparently by more inclusive West African performance forms. He came home to carry out research into Ethiopia’s ancient history in order to provide evidence for his new theories about the past greatness of Africa. As a result,

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and because ever more stringent censorship was closing down avenues for exploratory or critical Ethiopian theatre, Tsegaye wrote a series of plays in English that moved towards embodying what, surely in a borrowing from Nigeria and Soyinka, he was calling ‘total theatre’. Collision of Altars and Oda Oak Oracle are both intensely poetic mythical plays, calling on ritual performance elements, while in his one-act play Azmari (1964), Tsegaye celebrated the music and dance forms of the despised popular performance caste. This experimentation with theatre as opposed to drama was, however, just a phase for Tsegaye, whose art has constantly changed and developed in response to new artistic and political influences. By the time I interviewed him in 1988 his views were much more in line with the literary mainstream, significantly contradicting his earlier ideas. He claimed that Mathewos Bekele had turned his back on qene because it is an intellectual questioning form and instead had ‘reverted’ to folkoric forms which were ‘mere entertainment’. He admitted to despising folk art forms, and said that Iyoel Yohannes had also compromised his art in order to win popular acceptance. Tsegaye’s argument was that music and drama could not mix. In a possibly contradictory argument he said that music takes over from language in performance but that what Ethiopian audiences really admire is fine language. He backed up this contention by claiming that the twenty-­ minute soliloquy at the heart of the Amharic version of Tewodros was the most popular piece of writing he ever undertook. The playwright’s hard line at this time even extended to expressing doubts about the value of investing in costume, décor and special effects. He argued that in the early days of the Haile Selassie Theatre, the imported foreign staff had used these peripheral elements to cover up the weakness of the plays being put on with the gilding of theatrical spectacle. For the older playwright, the word was indisputably the essence of great Ethiopian drama. Despite various experiments from time to time with forms such as the musical and various renewed attempts at the incorporation of folk elements post-­ revolution, Amharic theatre remains language dominated. Certainly what commentators refer to time and again in relation to the plays, particularly of Tsegaye and Mengistu, is their fine, subtle and poetic use of language. It is also important that all these writers were passionate about the importance of retaining Amharic as the medium of their work. In discussions with other African writers, Mengistu Lemma came down heavily on the side of those supporting local-language publication. In the mid-1960s he was militant. ‘I myself am not inclined to translate anything of mine

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into English on the ground that my primary responsibility as an Ethiopian writer is to my own people’ (1965). He held the same views in 1973, explaining himself in terms resonant of the arguments of the Kenyan, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. ‘The language of the people is very much more than a mechanical means of expression or communication. Embedded deep in its collective consciousness, it has emotional and spiritual roots that may not be visible to the foreign observer’. Of course what is elided here is that Amharic is only the language of around one-quarter of Ethiopian citizens. The complete ignoring of this issue and the constant equation of Ethiopia with the Amhara speaks volumes both for the focus of the theatre, centred entirely on Amhara experience, language and culture and for the way the empire was seen from Addis Ababa. Ethiopia was conceived as an Amhara construct which others could join by learning Amharic—the lesana negus (language of the king)—and taking on Amhara values. However, the valuing of other constituent cultures was entirely absent. Some cultural dances from other groups were included in the repertoire of kinet groups but there was no encouragement to promote any kind of writing in any other language.

The Plays of the 1960s The men I have been discussing above were of course not the only playwrights working during this time. Between 1960 and the 1974 revolution, ten playwrights had a single production put on at the Haile Selassie Theatre, as did Tesfaye Gessesse and Mengistu Lemma, while Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin was responsible for twelve shows. None of those other writers would go on to develop a substantial career in play writing, though on the directing side, alongside Tesfaye and Tsegaye, Abate Mekuria and Getachew Debalke both had numerous credits. Abate was another major figure who began his theatre career working with Caplan and went on to study theatre in Glasgow in the mid-1960s and film in Germany in 1969–70 before returning to London for a directing course. In 1976 he became the general manager of the City Hall Theatre where he remained for many years working almost exclusively on plays by Tsegaye.31 The primary concern of the new theatre was to engage with the lives of ordinary people and to debate the state and possible future of Ethiopia. Three examples, two from Tsegaye, Yekerma Sow (1965/6) and Tewodros, and one from Mengistu, Yelacha Gebecha, will serve as illustrations here.

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The title of the first of Tsegaye’s plays I am considering comes from a common Amharic saying, Yekerma sow yebalachehu, which wishes someone well for the future. However here Tsegaye twists meaning to instead ask what kind of men there will be in the future. The play is set in the slums of Addis Ababa where two adult brothers, Mogus and Tekola, share a shack. Mogus is a respectable man, a poor, divorced, middle-aged clerk. The twenty-three year old Tekola, officially a student, spends his time lazing around, going to bars, smoking and drinking and pursuing girls. The brothers are then visited by their rural, ultra-traditionalist uncle, Abiye, who has come to town both to look for medication for an unspecified complaint and to seek to persuade his nephews to return with him to the country. This sets the scene for a discussion of the rival merits of town and country, modernity and tradition, a trope that runs through much pre-­ revolutionary Ethiopian theatre. As Tsegaye himself explained: ‘The theme raises the burning issue of the socio-economic gap between the old and the young rising generation. It looks back at the old class structure […] It raises the bitter and avoided question of what the future should be’ (In Debebe Seifu 1980). In Yekerma Sow the city is portrayed as the site of modern corruption while the countryside is the cradle of ancient but possibly stultifying and superstition-ridden Ethiopian values. Tekola is partly corrupted by watching western films, as well as by western-style nightclubs with their drinking and debauchery. The city also corrupts women. Mogus’ ex-wife left him for another man with their only son, Degafe, when the child was only two. When her second husband dies she turns to a life of prostitution and her son becomes a street child. In disputes between Tekola, representing the city, and Abiye as the voice of the country, Mogus, a weak failure of a man, is an ineffective arbiter. By the end of the play he is also utterly alone. His uncle has died and his brother is in prison for assault. However, if Mogus is the man of the future, he is a profoundly unattractive model. Indeed Tsegaye’s major criticism is reserved for Mogus, whose major faults are seen as being his passivity and his weakness in giving up the fight to forge a meaningful path between the Scylla of anachronistic traditionalism and the Charybidis of thoughtless embrace of alien modernity. In its representation of the city and concern to find a meaningful way forward for an inevitably changing society, Yekerma Sow is hugely reminiscent of the concerns of many Somali plays of the same period—where it differs is in the downbeat ending. The tone of the play was certainly displeasing to the Emperor. Haile Selassie

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walked out of the premiere and ordered the characters of the wife and son to be cut from future performances. Mengistu Lemma’s hugely popular Yelacha Gebecha has been revived numerous times in different theatres and put on both pre- and post-­ revolution. Here is offered, in comic vein, a different slant on the conflict of tradition and modernity. The play centres round the character of Baharu, a ‘been to’: one who has been partly educated in the West. He brings to mind a raft of similar characters from African theatre of the period, perhaps most notably the Ghanaian, Ama Ato Aidoo’s, Ato Yawson in her 1964 play Dilemma of a Ghost and Wole Soyinka’s Lakunle from his 1959 hit, The Lion and the Jewel. At this time when only a tiny number of Africans had had the chance of receiving an advanced level of western-style education, and even fewer had been given the opportunity to learn in Europe or the USA, the intellectual classes were much exercised by considering the duties of this group to their less-favoured fellow citizens and the dangers of the group being alienated from the peasantry. In East Africa the best known example of writing on this theme is not a play but the Ugandan, Okot p’Bitek’s long poem, Song of Lawino (1966). Mengistu’s Baharu is a benevolent member of this group. He has studied in the West and been influenced by the kinds of liberal and socialist thought that affected his creator. He is also an ardent nationalist and has returned to Ethiopia, full of ideals about promoting democracy and serving the nation. Baharu’s idealism has taken the form of leaving the corrupt city and going to live as a teacher in a village, dwelling in a traditional tukul, and happily—but secretly—married to Belete, a lively, pretty, but poor and uneducated young woman. In the village Baharu is valued as an educator but the villagers find his egalitarian behaviour extremely odd, and even though he has confided in the local priests that he is married to Belete they refuse to believe that such a social misalliance can really have taken place. All is jolly and happy until Baharu’s aunt, Lady Alganesh, arrives on a visit. Lady Alganesh is symbolic of all that is most conservative, elitist and ignorant in the Ethiopian aristocracy. She is hugely arrogant, expecting unquestioning and grovelling subservience from all in the village. She is massively superstitious, constantly consulting both a Christian priest and a Muslim ‘haji’, and utterly unable to see that both are equally ignorant and self-serving. She has come to inform her nephew that she has arranged a marriage for him with a suitably high-status young woman in Addis Ababa. When she realises Baharu is married to a mere village girl, Lady Alganesh

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conspires with the priest to play on Belete’s superstitious nature and drive her to flee her marriage. Baharu is utterly distraught; however, her false advisors give Belete such contradictory council that she finally sees through their plot and the couple reunite to live happily ever after. The comedy in Yelacha Gebecha derives from a series of misunderstandings. Lady Alganesh cannot understand that her nephew has no interest in status or riches. Belete for a while cannot believe that religious and aristocratic figures would lie to her. The villagers cannot comprehend that an educated nobleman would be willing to live on a basis of equality among them. And Baharu cannot recognise how deeply embedded are villagers’ beliefs in custom, tradition and superstition; above all he cannot conceive that the rationalism he thought he had taught his wife can be so easily overthrown by the fear-mongering of the priest. Mengistu’s primary target here is the traditional aristocracy who are portrayed as both stupid and parasitic, though the clergy, Muslim and Christian, are also seen as venal and ignorant. Moreover superstition is an evil that riddles the world of the play. The city, as for Tsegaye, is the epicentre of corruption, but here it is a distant evil. Baharu seeks a rural idyll, but the playwright shows how the domination of the interconnected power nexus of aristocracy and church have polluted the peasantry, driving them into deeply ingrained habits of subservience and superstition. Baharu is a true hero, but he is also a naïve young man to be gently mocked. His cheerful faith in the ability of rational education to transform the lives of the people, and of his wife, is sorely shaken in the course of events. As with so many plays of the period, in so many African nations, Mengistu is seeking to tease out not only how a balance can be found between tradition and modernity, but what aspects of the old and the imported it might be desirable to keep or to discard. What is unusual in Mengistu’s work in relation to the previous history of Ethiopian theatre is that in his social comedies he abjures the role of preacher. In the place of didacticism Mengistu offers more of a dilemma. Lady Alganesh may be unmitigatedly a force for evil, but Baharu most certainly does not embody a solution; rather the audience is left asking itself how best to seek for a positive way forward in enabling new knowledge to benefit the ordinary people of Ethiopia. Yelacha Gebecha was premiered at the Creative Arts Center in 1962 and as so often, Haile Selassie attended. The Emperor allowed the cast to be presented after the performance but he very obviously refused to meet the playwright. Overt criticism of the aristocratic system the Emperor embodied unsurprisingly failed to meet his approval.

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While plays examining the contemporary fabric and dilemmas of Ethiopian society dominated this period, the older tradition of historical dramas continued and Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’s Tewodros, in particular, was popular. Tewodros is not a figure who could ever easily fit in with the 1930s and 1940s pattern of writing historical plays as a means of reinforcing the monarchy. He is hugely honoured in Ethiopia as the man who re-united the nation after a prolonged period (1769–1855) of purely nominal kingship. However, as with so many historical national heroes, fact and myth have become widely mixed in the popular understanding of the Tewodros story, and this left Tsegaye with the scope to reinterpret the story in the light of his own sensibilities. Born Kassa—Tewodros being a crown name—Tsegaye’s hero is the son of a humble purgative dealer, very much a man of the people. He is spurred to militaristic action by the desire to avenge a Muslim raid on a Christian school. So, the young man is immediately established as of the masses, a devout Christian hero and the defender of the weak. Throughout the play he remains personally humble, motivated by a semi-divine sense of mission to reunite Christian Ethiopia as God’s chosen nation. His struggle is with vain, arrogant aristocrats and a power-seeking church as well as against the fear of Islamic jihad. He is also ardently anti-European colonialism, describing colonists as ‘white lice’, ‘crawling on the shoulders of the peasant’. Tewodros’ progress is via a series of seemingly unending wars, even after he has ascended the throne. His son asks him why he cannot seek peace and the Emperor gives this passionate reply. They make me do it! The petty, selfish, lustful priests make me do it. They force me to shed the blood of the very people I would be more than willing to give my life for! I have been angered too long. It is as if I had been born with a cross of anger around my neck. While fighting for safety against foreign aggressors for this lonely Christian land is an everyday inevitable event, the fools from within do not hesitate to make me sacrifice innocent souls to exploit their own wicked ends. Maybe they too are destined to make progress impossible, both for the people and themselves; these centuries old leeches! These stubborn powerful puppets! And, AND blaspheming monstrous priests! Those interwoven evil webs! Those eye-piercing, cheap candle-­lights. They make me angry, my son. They make me do it to my beloved people.

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The rhetoric here, coupled with his powerful use of imagery, is a good example of the poetic use of language for which Tsegaye is renowned and revered in Ethiopia. Throughout the play we see a tormented hero and his chief tormentors are a series of women who act as the externalisation of Tewodros’ doubts about his all-consuming sense of mission. First his mother wishes to ‘purge’ her son of his dreams and predicts his actions will lead only to bloodshed. Then his arch-enemy, the Empress Menen, whom he overcomes in battle, torments him with the idea that he can never be a proper king because he does not come from the divine Solomonic line. ‘How about the ocean deep history of Ethiopia’s ruling blood? […] You need to have that blood […] You don’t have the blood for it, fortune hunting boy! You don’t have the blood.’ The imagery of blood haunts the play, both literally as in the spilling of blood in war and as in the idea of the blood-­ line of legitimacy, as the play asks questions all too relevant to the time of writing about whether a leader is validated through heredity or through service to his people. The woman who most torments the Emperor is his beloved wife, the grand-daughter of Menen, Tewabatch. Tewabatch is a most sympathetically drawn character, conflicted by the calls of personal love, duty and what she owes to her rank in society. She longs for Tewodros to prioritise their personal love and torments herself and her husband in her doubting of his divine purpose. After she dies the final interrogator is Tewodros’ second wife, Tru-Worq, a creature of the church who represents religious casuistry in conflict with her husband’s simple Christian faith. Tewodros’ death is a matter of historical fact. Increasingly handicapped by his flaring temper, when Queen Victoria omitted to reply to an 1862 letter he sent her as a fellow leader of empire seeking an alliance, the Emperor imprisoned both the British consul and various other Europeans. This led to several years of diplomatic exchanges. Tewodros repeatedly averred his love and admiration for his prisoners but continued to hold them until, with imperial prestige under threat, the British sent a hugely expensive, 32,000 strong army of liberation to Ethiopia. After months of marching the armies finally confronted each other at Tewodros’ mountain fortress of Magdala where massive disparities in technology led to an inevitable outcome. Tsegaye’s Tewodros dies at his own hand, still tormented but unable to see that he could have taken any other course in service to his sacred land (Marsden 2007).

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Censorship and Impending Revolution Right from his coronation Haile Selassie had run a regime of strict censorship. Nothing could be published in the Empire without official approval. As Joanna Mantel-Niecko explains: ‘It is well known that many novels, short stories and plays remained unpublished during the Emperor’s reign and that more than one writer lost the possibility of publishing his works as a direct result of censorship restrictions’ (1985, 319). This rigour extended to theatre performances which all had to be passed as acceptable prior to going on stage. Before the 1960s there is little record of problems with censors. Nearly all plays were written by either elite men heavily invested in supporting the status quo or by people like Matthewos Bekele, dependent on imperial patronage. However, the new generation of playwrights would have a different experience. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin had both his early plays, Askeyami Ligagered (The Ugly Girl) and Kosho Cigara (Cheap Cigarettes) subjected to cuts by the censor. The same fate befell Joro Dagif (Goitre),32 but the play also led to its writer spending a day in jail. Joro Dagif tells the story of a poor peasant, forced by his village chief to work on Easter day while the local notables feast on the goat whose hide he is turning into a traditional skin bag. As he works the peasant upsets his ‘betters’ with the songs he sings, disturbing their enjoyment. This same man has a goitre on his neck which means that he is forced to turn his head to the left. Tsegaye was briefly imprisoned when the Addis Ababa chief of police heard an understudy from the play quoting what he considered incendiary lines in a bar they were both drinking in. The censor then queried the turning of the peasant’s head to the left—something construed as a potentially socialist signification. It would probably have been simpler, though not so interesting for a historian, if the Emperor had not played a major role in both promoting and suppressing theatre during this period. In his interview with me, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin was quite sure that some of his scripts were returned with comments in the Emperor’s own hand, and moreover that some of the comments amended adverse remarks from the official censor, meaning that Haile Selassie allowed plays to go on at times even when they could be seen as contentious. His desire for control would lead one to expect that any even remotely critical theatre would be shut down, but this is not what one sees in the early 1960s. For much of the 1960s the Emperor and the playwrights were playing guessing games about how much criticism Haile Selassie would allow and how overt a play could be

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in its critique. Mengistu Lemma told me that he thought comedy could often get away with more than serious drama, and certainly the initial showing of his first play, Telfso Bekisse in 1961 was positively received by the Emperor. However, only a year later, Yelacha Gebecha would receive the much more nuanced response of actors being received, presumably to praise their good performance, while the playwright was ignored. Apparently what was seen as most controversial was the very name of the evil Lady Alganesh. Amharic is renowned for its multitudinous double meanings, something played upon in much poetic writing, and while Alganesh could be more innocently seen as implying ‘You are a bed’, it could also be construed as ‘You are a throne’, something much nearer to a direct critique of the imperial person. Tsegaye told me that a similar interpretation led to the same result in relation to his Yekerma Sow. The old, dying uncle spends much of his time lying on a bed, and again some saw this as a statement about a ‘dying’ throne. It is apparent that playwrights, knowing that their words might be subject to censorship, were sometimes at least seeking to sneak in criticism either through physical embodiments—the left turning head or the bed, or through conceits such as allegorical names. By the late 1960s the Ethiopian political situation was becoming ever more tense and artists became increasingly wary about making controversial comments on stage. Tsegaye turned increasingly to the translation of foreign classics, a tactic Ethiopian playwrights have often used subsequently when they feared original work might be scoured for subversive political innuendo, but also to writing in English. As he explained in a 1980 interview with Debebe Seifu, ‘English comes in my writing when I have no way out and when I feel the situation is completely blocked’. The playwrights also retreated from the theatrical front line from time to time. Tesfaye Gessesse came from quite a wealthy family and when things got too theatrically ‘hot’ he would simply stop working for a while. Mengistu Lemma, who had a series of government posts, wrote scripts but offered no new plays for production in the late 1960s and early 1970s,33 and in 1970 Tsegaye took up an invitation by the Senegalese president and poet Leopold Senghor to travel to Dakar, motivated both by the increasing atmosphere of fear in Addis Ababa and, he told me, by his experiences of jealous abuse from elders who resented him winning, in 1965, at the age of only twenty-nine, the country’s premiere artistic prize, the Haile Selassie I Prize for Amharic Literature.

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A key signal of increasing state control was the 1967 appointment of a military man, Captain Atnafu Makonnen, to take charge of both the Hagar Fikir and the Haile Selassie theatres. A final sign came in the early 1970s. After returning from his training in Hungary Debebe Eshetu had been appointed to re-open the Creative Arts Centre which had lapsed into inactivity a few years after Caplan departed. Debebe put on a number of foreign plays in translation and then opted to revive what he must reasonably have thought was a safe bet given its initial reception, directing Mengistu’s Telfso Bekisse. No issue was raised by the censors but on the morning the show was due to open a government van arrived. Workmen proceeded to remove all the chairs in the auditorium. Debebe took the hint. He resigned his post, working for the next few years as a salesman and broadcaster and the Creative Arts Centre once more closed its doors.

Key Factors in the Creation of Ethiopian Theatre Because Ethiopian theatre developed with minimal direct European influence, it was up to Ethiopians, having taken on the idea of the proscenium stage, the playwright and the acting company, to decide all key concepts regarding dramatic story-telling in relation to their own cultural understandings. This may seem obvious, but the dominant tone of international dramatic criticism would argue that the point still needs to be made. Historically international—read vastly predominantly western—critics applaud innovation, but only within sets of cultural parameters that they can easily comprehend or which tell stories of which they approve. So, for example, the Nobel prize winning Wole Soyinka tells Nigerian stories, invoking Nigerian spirituality and Nigerian understandings, but international critics can appreciate him because he writes in beautiful complex English, drawing strongly on internationally recognised structures such that his most famous play, Death and the King’s Horseman, is a classic five-­ act tragedy with a structural through line that would have been recognisable from ancient Greece to Shakespeare to the present day. What often happens even in such transcultural instances is an eliding of aspects that are uncomfortable viewing for Western audiences. So, for example, in the British National Theatre’s 2009 production of Death and the King’s Horseman, the director cut a key section in which the playwright critiques the way the British behaved during the Second World War; he also failed to engage visually with Soyinka’s significantly important point about the

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tawdriness of British ‘borrowed’ culture in contrast to the riches of Yoruba arts and spirituality. In Ethiopia the dominant prism through which theatre developed, at least up until the 1960s, was that of Amhara Orthodox Christian and imperial culture. This meant that action on stage was seen as far less important than words. Where action did take place it was highly symbolic of class. I remember seeing a historical tragedy in Addis Ababa as late as the mid-1980s where the upper-class elite tended to strike and hold grandiose poses, while the ‘fools’—in this case both a lower-class Ethiopian and a white diplomat—ran around the stage and fell foul of a variety of ‘pratfalls’. This iconography relates directly to the rich art of the Ethiopian church. The Christian churches in Ethiopia told biblical and moral stories on the walls of their buildings in pictographic form. They also developed a series of codes in order to enable the people to clearly understand their messages. The bad, for example, were usually shown in profile, while the virtuous were always shown with both eyes in the image even if they were not facing fully forwards. A heroic upright stance was often contrasted with crouching or deformity in the bad, weak or foolish, and certain colours also had specific significations—purple for kings, blue for devils and so on. These widely understood conventions could be easily adopted and adapted by the early theatre-makers and made for a heavily symbolic, as opposed to realist, theatre tradition. What elite Amhara and Orthodox Church cultures did admire, again similarly to very many predominantly oral cultures, was fine poetic rhetoric. Just as I argue in relation to Somali theatre, which similarly came from an oral route, the greatness of the theatre tradition was seen to be rooted in the complex, poetic language the playwrights were able to invoke. I have discussed how all the early playwrights saw their work as crucially linked to the qene tradition. Such historic traditions meant Amhara culture was sophisticated in its appreciation of fine language, with a particular love of double meanings. All the early playwrights I know of went through a church education which inculcated linguistic virtuosity through qene training. They may have written their words down, but they were working with the oracy of a theatrical performance and in the spirit of the Amhara oral poetic tradition. It might not be stretching a point too far to suggest that for the early playwrights, and even for their audiences, what was created on stage could be seen as a polyvocalisation and embodiment of an extended qene poem.

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Certainly whenever I ask Ethiopian friends questions about why they admire the work of a particular playwright or a certain play, I now expect the answer to centre on matters of language. Character, even plot, and certainly acting ability, come in as poor seconds to a love of linguistic virtuosity. Often this has led to Ethiopian theatre being ideas- and philosophy-­ led, as in Makonnen Endalkatchew’s sermon pays of the 1940s or the great Emperor’s speech at the centre of Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’s Tewodros. Elsewhere what is admired may be lighter, the tripping wit of Mengistu Lemma’s comedies, or even the absurdities of Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida (The Guest), a play centred on a tangled web of possibly true or possibly lying stories that the audience is constantly seeking to unravel, that was the sensation of the Addis Ababa theatre in 2016, demonstrating that linguistic game playing remains a powerful force in contemporary Ethiopian theatre (Plastow and Zerihun Berhanu 2017). I would emphasise here that in neither of the above examples does invoking the absurd or the comic mean the playwrights are not concerned with profoundly serious ideas about social organisation. To be seen as significant in Ethiopia a play must above all engage with important thought. It is of course to be regretted that so few of these plays have been translated into international languages. However, the translation of theatre cultures can be hard because where a tradition has emerged from a strong indigenous culture, as is the case for Amhara theatre, not only may literal translation convey only faint shadows of the power of the original, but the manner of the speaking may present significant barriers to the appreciation of those from other cultures. As an example of this contention one can consider Tekle Hawariat’s Fabula as quoted from at the beginning of this chapter. Here the words in translation are easily comprehensible, but the gold of the inner message about poor governance in Empress Zauditu’s court would be entirely incomprehensible to the average English language reader, who without an explanation would be left floundering in the outer wax of a tale about sheep, rats and wolves. Moreover, the poetic, fable form of the play is likely to be off-putting to many readers unused to such a style of playwriting. The understanding of alien theatre forms has often required specialist interpretation and training. One has only to think of the problems in teaching Shakespeare texts to generations of school children around the world to realise that deeply culturally imbricated dramatic texts often need deep understanding to appreciate what is locally seen as greatness.

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Understanding the elevated status given to the rhetorical element of drama in Ethiopia helps to explain why the status of playwright has often been highly regarded while that of actor was until relatively recently extremely low. However, actors have not suffered simply because they did not always write the words they spoke. Class has also been a polarising factor. To be an actor, in its root meaning necessarily involves taking action, and we know that for the Amhara action—with a few notable exceptions— was to be avoided if at all possible. Therefore, culturally one who acted had to be of low status. In the early days this was achieved by either working with powerless school children, who had to do what their teachers told them, or with the very low class caste group of the professional entertainers, the azmaris. In both cases the actor was seen by the playwright as their tool. There are numerous stories of early playwrights such as Tekle Hawariat and Makonnen Habte-Wold stopping performances in mid-flow to re-direct actors, actors were often re-cast time and time again in similar roles and the disrespect accorded them is demonstrated by the repeated evidence of miserable levels of payment. Essentially it would appear that for the most part actors were not seen as performers, but simply as a means of conveying the all-important words of the writer. We know from commentators such as Debebe Eshetu that performers in the theatre companies also disliked acting in the early days. Abebe Kebede (1980) has documented how performers in the big theatre companies would be demoted from the music or kinet groups to acting companies as a punishment, while Welala Assefa in an interview for me told how in the 1950s she had longed to be a singer but because all positions in that troupe were taken she had to instead become an actress (Plastow and Solomon 2015, 100). The contrast in status between writer/director and actor was in Ethiopia the most extreme I have encountered anywhere in the world and it was evidenced in public regard: with leading playwrights esteemed by Emperor and public alike while actors, and especially actresses, were seen initially at least as being somewhat on a par with sex workers. It is, however, important that in the early days of Ethiopian theatre it was by no means clear that the literary form would come to dominate as much as has subsequently been the case. Initially a case was made for a much more performative, total and improvisational theatre. Mattewos Bekele and Yoftahe Negussie came from the church training that included music as well as poetry and like a number of mid-twentieth century African playwrights, they created plays which were much more performative spectacles than dialogue oriented drama. Haile Selassie greatly appreciated this

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work, repeatedly commissioning new works and a popular audience was created, subsequently developed by the azmari-based kinet companies at the Hagar Fikir and the City Hall theatres, particularly through the semi-­ improvisational plays of Iyoel Yohannes. The commercial theatres of Matthewos Bekele and Melaku Ashegrie used similar populist forms of theatre-making. It is interesting that this popular, spectacular and improvisational strand gradually lost ground to the literary theatre. I would argue that his move was significantly informed by the Western theatre training of the new playwrights of the 1960s. When Tsegaye, Tesfaye, Mengistu, Getachew and Debebe were training in the West serious mainstream theatre was dominated by scripted, dialogue-only, plays. Like Tekle Hawariat at the beginning of the century, they seem to have taken on board the idea that this was the way to make ‘modern’ drama, ignoring the folk performance forms of the people as ‘mere’ entertainment. This also fitted in with their Westernised early education at schools such as the Wingate, where dramatic literature was increasingly being taught through such vehicles as Kebede Mikael’s translation of Romeo and Juliet, with more syncretic performance coming to be seen as the province of the less sophisticated. Elite qene influences were retained; even when these new playwrights wrote in prose it was often of a heightened kind playing with the double entendres so beloved of samena worq. Music and dance forms, however, lost out, consigned to kinet performances, as Ethiopian upper-class veneration of rhetoric as opposed to acting came together with the desire to learn from what was perceived as a more advanced Western theatre, to create a form that was increasingly influenced by non-indigenous and non-African dramatic forms.

The Influence of Haile Selassie on Ethiopian Theatre In order to understand how it is that Ethiopia, alone of all the countries I am considering in this book, has been able to create and maintain a professional theatre industry for over seventy years, it is essential to acknowledge the unique role of Haile Selassie. One of the unsurprising findings of this book will be that without state support it is very difficult for a vibrant theatre culture to grow and develop, but Haile Selassie is a special case because of the level of his personal interest in drama. The nature of his interest also led to the development of dramatic culture in Ethiopia being almost exclusively confined to work made in Amharic, with the particular

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exception of the case of Eritrea which was only controlled by the Emperor in the latter years of his reign, and to the vast majority of plays emanating from the capital of Addis Ababa. I will be discussing in the following chapter how a Marxist military dictatorship saw temporary benefit in spreading theatre as a national propaganda tool in the 1970s and 1980s, but without the foundation of a theatre culture that employed the energies of many of Ethiopia’s premier writers and had become by the time the military took over a recognised aspect of the capital’s intellectual and cultural life, it is doubtful that any of these later state-supported developments would have taken place. Since Haile Selassie never made any public speeches concerning his thinking in relation to theatre culture, the case for his evident passion for the art form has to be deduced from his actions. The first of these concerns the country’s first play. Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia and its author, Tekle Hawariat, were patronised by the then Ras Tafari Mekonnon from the time he returned to Ethiopia in 1912. This was not surprising as both young men saw themselves as modernisers in contrast to the courts of first Lij Iyasu and later Empress Zauditu. However, it has to have been possible that the prince would have been put off theatre because Fabula showed how critical the form could be of the state. There seems to be no evidence as to whether he attended the first showing of the piece, though given what an occasion it would have been and that he was a patron of the playwright it must be probable that he was in the audience that night. What is apparent is that he in no way supported his aunt’s actions in censoring the play. Throughout his regency the school operating in his name, the Tafari Mekonnen School, was putting on school plays. As soon as he ascended the throne Haile Selassie started commissioning theatre, and in 1932 he supported Mattewos Bekele in putting on a troika of plays that included a revival of the very piece his aunt had sought by to eradicate. It seems clear that the Emperor, through his patronage, sought to turn theatre from being a forum for dissent to a voice supporting the crown, the church and the status quo; but it also seems clear that his actions were more than a clever piece of political manoeuvring. Haile Selassie commissioned original performances from Yoftahe Negussie and Mathewos Bekele consistently in the period before the Italian invasion for a series of high-profile events—to celebrate royal anniversaries, birthdays and weddings. There are a plethora of other ways that could have been chosen to mark these occasions, so the repeated choice of a command performance has to

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indicate the Emperor’s love, not only of excessive flattery, but also of a good stage play. One then has to take into account the extraordinary fashion among the nobility for play writing in the 1940s and 1950s—notwithstanding that most of them had very little idea about quite how to go about penning— let alone producing—a play. The leader, and most prolific, of this group was Ras Bitwodded Mekonnen Endalkatchew. Given that the lord wrote half a dozen plays I think one must assume that he had a genuine interest in his work, but this in itself is significant. Many commentators agree that effectively the Emperor was the state and that loyalty and flattery were key ingredients demanded of his courtiers. It is surely significant then that such a key official knew that spending time writing plays would be looked upon kindly by his patron. The fact that so many others tried, with even less apparent understanding of theatrical form, to imitate his activities, argues strongly that playwriting was seen as way to curry favour with the all-powerful Ethiopian leader. The extent to which theatre was unique among art forms in attracting the royal patronage is also significant. Haile Selassie did not support novel writers, also emerging at this time, or artists or architects, he did not even show particular favour to poets in a land where oral poetry (qene) had been the reified above all other cultural forms for hundreds of years. Only theatre seems to have been singled out for imperial favour. I am going to argue, on the basis of largely circumstantial evidence, that Haile Selassie appears to have had a discriminating taste and considerable aesthetic sensibility in relation to the theatre he chose to watch. Undoubtedly his favourites in the early years were the school master playwrights. He chose to patronise professional craftsmen, the men who could pull together music, poetry, dance and spectacle in the crafting of a play. Nor was he above watching a good school show. The female pupils of Seneddu Gebru’s Empress Menen School were issued with repeated invitations to show their work to the court in the late 1940s. In contrast watching the turgid pontifications of the court writers may have been an occasional, reluctant duty. A number of Ras Mekonnen’s plays, despite his power and status, never reached the stage. For the official opening of the centre piece of his silver jubilee celebrations at the Haile Selassie I Theatre, the Emperor had said that part of the programme could be a production of the prince’s Dawitna Orion. However, as the play was in performance, the Emperor cut it short to bring on stage instead the French ballet company he had brought to Addis Ababa (Plastow 1989, 103)

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The aesthetic interest is only more strongly evidenced in the 1960s. By this time the school master playwrights were dead and the nobility eclipsed by a rising generation of, for the first time, professionally and internationally trained playwrights. Given how reluctant Haile Selassie was to send students abroad for studies, for fear they might start thinking and learning about alternative ideas for running a state, and that he personally authorised and interviewed every scholar on leaving and returning, it is remarkable that he not only let someone like Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin take up a scholarship, but actively organised for Tesfaye Gessesse to study theatre in the USA. As soon as they returned to Ethiopia the new playwrights started to produce work critical of the state that began to attract growing commercial audiences on a weekly basis. Ethiopia’s censors were well used to repressing critical texts, but Tsegaye’s experience of receiving playscripts amended by Haile Selassie to allow material marked for cutting by the censor suggests that the Emperor had a most particular and unusually liberal love of theatre. It would not have been hard for the Emperor to silence the new young playwrights long before they became popular heroes, but it was not until the very last years of his reign that he signalled serious displeasure with their work. In the early and mid-1960s, Haile Selassie was not only allowing fairly obviously critical plays on stage; he was attending performances and congratulating actors even if on occasion he shunned the playwrights. I see no other explanation than that this was a man who loved the theatre to such a degree that he allowed it to flourish, for love of a good performance, even when it was undermining his power base. The final and important contribution of the Emperor was in supporting the establishment of performance spaces. In all too many east African countries a real and on-going problem has been the lack of places to put on theatre. Haile Selassie was involved in the making and sustenance of all the theatres that emerged in his reign, the Hagar Fikir, the Haile Selassie, the Municipality and the University Performing Arts Center. He drove the theatre professionals crazy because he so often failed to fulfil his financial promises in relation to the companies working in these theatres, but without his support, both moral and financial, none of the theatres would have come into being and once established he always did just enough to ensure that they never closed. Put together these interventions, over some forty years, were sufficient to create a culturally vibrant and at times politically important, capital-­ based theatre culture that continues to flourish more than forty years later. The emperor supported theatres and theatre-makers as they learned,

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experimented and grew their craft into a uniquely Ethiopian theatre form attended regularly by many thousands of urban dwellers. He provided theatre spaces for the companies to work from; he understood, even when he only sporadically supported, the idea that theatre professionals need good, even international, training, and he laid the foundations for the idea of state-subsidised theatre that continues into the present day. Without an Emperor who loved and patronised theatre above all art forms and throughout his reign, I do not think the Ethiopian stage would have had the time or infrastructure to grow into the important art form it became.

Theatre in Eritrea from 1952 In 1952 the United Nations controversially decided to join Eritrea to Ethiopia as a federated state. This was the outcome many highlanders sought but which few lowland Muslims had wanted. Alternatives had been independence or division between Sudan and Ethiopia. Many have thought the decision was swayed because the Americans wanted to establish a major radio listening post in this geo-strategic area, overlooking the Red Sea and close to the Arabian Peninsula, and Haile Selassie was sympathetic to the erection of what became Kagnew Base. The original agreement gave Eritrea considerable autonomy over internal decisions. However, the autocratic Emperor had no interest in such an arrangement. Over the following decade he gradually chipped away at the independent powers of the Representative Assembly and coerced its members until in 1961 they voted to dissolve the body and make Eritrea simply a region of Ethiopia. This decision directly gave rise to the liberation struggle which continued for thirty years (Araya Tseggai 1988). Culturally none of this coming trauma was immediately apparent. The Opera House, from now on widely known as Cinema Asmara, was acquired by a relative of Haile Selassie’s. It was open for rental from a wide range of groups and indeed plays were also mounted in various of Asmara’s numerous cinemas, though all had to be subjected to the same censorship rules as operated in Addis Ababa. The group which would lead the development of modern Eritrean performance from 1961 until war convulsed the country and forced its closure in 1973 was the Mahber Theatre Asmara (Asmara Theatre Association), or Ma.Te.A. Ma.Te.De. had run out of organisational steam in 1957, to be briefly replaced by Mahber Memhiyash Hagherwawi Limdi (Association for the Improvement of National Customs), which lasted only a couple of

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years. Ma.Te.A. again featured Alemayhu Kahasai, who had been living for a while in the regional town of Mendefera, and his key creative allies, guitarist/playwright Tewolde Redda and playwright/director Asres Tessema. All the founding members were male and Alemeyhu at least had been involved in the pro-Unionist Ma.Te.De (Fig. 5). Right from the outset the men who founded the association were agreed about the format of their shows. Central to the group were the band and the singers. Sometimes this group played alone, but the main mode of performance was the variety show. Showing mainly in cinema halls, and usually beginning after the last film closed at 8 pm, the entertainment would last three to four hours. Christine Matzke has described the component parts of the performance. Essential ingredients included modern Eritrean music (mostly a blend of Tigrinya, Tigre, Amharic, European and Sudanese pieces (Falcetto, 2001, 72), a thirty minute play, stand-up comedians or comic sketches, an acrobatic act (performed by three boys), ‘traditional’ (Eritrean) and ‘modern’ (European) dances. The latter included the boogie, the samba, the twist,

Fig. 5  Mahber Teyatr Asmera (Ma.Te.A.) (Asmara Theatre Association members in 1961). (Source: Reproduced with kind permission from Christine Matzke.)

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and the cha-cha-cha and allowed women to show off the latest fashions, with costumes mostly belonging to Ma.Te.A. (2008, 68)

I have no conclusive evidence but it would appear that the idea of the variety show in both Ethiopia and Eritrea was most probably appropriated from Italian culture, where the popular avanspettacolo, a form of entertainment that featured a mixed series of acts accompanying an often romantic drama, was hugely popular in the 1920s (Plastow 2017). The Ma.Te.A. version would certainly have built on the structure of popular kinet performances as shown by the Hagar Fikir from the early 1940s, given the regular visits of Eritreans to Ethiopia, and of course Ma.Te.De. had gradually laid the foundations for what came to be seen as the archetypal variety show in Eritrea. There may seem some contradiction in my explanation of the company being founded solely by men, but featuring women in ‘the latest fashions’, but the members put considerable efforts into recruiting female performers. This was not easy because of the way society saw women on stage. When Ma.Te.De. began making plays they had no women and men were forced to take on female roles. Matzke says one young man, Abebe Iyasu, was talent scouted for Ma.Te.De. in the late 1940s after his performance as a woman in a school Shakespeare production (2003, 101). Only in 1953 did the group manage to recruit four women, all of whom had unusually high levels of education and had been involved in either school or YMCA drama (Matzke 2003, 101).34 However, families often disapproved their daughters taking to the stage. Up until this time the only professional women entertainers had been singers in  local bars, often linked in the public mind with loose morals and even prostitution, so there was a considerable barrier to be overcome. Ma.Te.A.’s initial actresses were mostly friends of male company members, though Ethiopian Medhanie was a divorced singer who had her own bar. No woman performer was married, and throughout its existence Ma.Te.A. saw a continual turn-over of female artists, with many leaving as they wed (Matzke 2003, 117). Women’s participation was hugely valued. As founder member Tekabo Woldemariam explained: Women were kept as gold and their artistic skills were precious. If a play has no woman, it is non-existant. If there is no woman, there is no light. (Interview in Matzke 2008, 65)

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However, no woman in any of the Asmara companies ever had a role other than as a performer. Indeed the Eritrean theatre has been singularly lacking in women playwrights and directors. The group sought to portray themselves as modern, fashionable young urbanites, dressing in up to the minute sixties fashions, with matching two-tone suits for the men and smart skirt and blouse ensembles for the women in the main group, while lead singers wore short dresses in imitation of what might be seen in Rome or London, often topped with a trendy beehive hairdo. However, they also sought to be moral and educational leaders of society, urging restraint and respectability. Matzke tells a story that illustrates how these dual ambitions sometimes came into conflict. At one time the group had an anti-smoking song about ‘Miss Cigarette’ which featured cigarettes being abandoned and ground out on the stage. However, apparently when the curtain went down at the end of the song there was always a rush to reclaim and smoke the offending articles (Matzke 2003, 129). Ideologically, Ma.Te.A.’s identity was possibly equally problematic. Key members had been involved in supporting unity with Ethiopia, but as the 1960s went on separatist nationalist feeling grew ever more strongly in support of the guerrilla liberation struggle. A mid-1960s female member, Tegbaru Taklai, explained the early company positioning thus: They founded the association in order to develop the language [Tigrinya], to practise our culture, to express nationalism and to assert identity. (Interview in Matzke 2008, 64)

As time went on the group became increasingly seen as centrally Tigrinya and more widely Eritrean nationalist. A number of songs were widely interpreted as covertly critical of Amhara military rule and as conflict became more open in the late sixties and early seventies the authorities certainly saw the Association as problematic, increasingly frequently summoning them to account for their work. An example of the cat and mouse game that seems to have been played in the late 1960s was recounted by blogger Yemane Mhtsun. One day the police arrested the entire cast of the Asmara Theatre Company for using a blue curtain on the stage [The Eritrean flag is blue]. When they arrived in the prison, the police officer interrogated them subtly. Finally, he asked them to sign their names for hanging the blue curtain which had a

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symbolic implication, of course, the forbidden Eritrean flag. In his response, Ato Alemayhu said, ‘You threw us to jail for spreading the blue curtain on the stage, but at the same time, you are asking us now to sign our name with BLUE pen. It sounds strange?’

Theatrically by all accounts the group lacked subtlety in either theatre creation or performance. Alemayhu was always primarily known as a comic performer. In a film I saw in the early 1990s but have subsequently lost all record of, he recreated some of his old performances which all tended heavily towards slapstick comedy of a fairly crude nature. This comic material was what audiences expected of ‘theatre’ from Ma.Te.A. who entirely abandoned the long-format serious plays of Ma.Te.De. Indeed, as in Ethiopia the theatre was by no means the favourite element of the variety show—music always held pride of place. The playwrights were mainly Alemayhu and Asres Tessema and the plays mostly dealt in comic fashion with what might broadly be designated social issues. Asres Tessema’s somewhat cumbersomely entitled The Effect of Traditional Funeral Ceremonies in Our Country (1964/65), for example, castigates excessive money and effort expended on following funeral traditions, with a child nearly dying after its parents take her on a long journey to a commemoration ceremony leaving themselves without funds to pay for medicine when she gets sick. Matzke points out that many of the plays represent women as ‘greedy, gullible and antisocial’ (2003, 126) and she gives the example of Alemayhu’s play Nuruszu Kufu Nuruszu which features a misanthropic woman who seeks to poison the drink of a thirsty traveller, only to have her child die instead when he ‘steals’ the drink. There were some attempts to experiment with form and certainly not all the theatre sought to be realist. Negussie Haile’s, A Fair Verdict, about immoral modern urban life, featured personifications of angels and devils in the traditions of church art and early Amhara theatre. A particularly popular performance appears to have been Alemayhu’s Atum Kilu (Don’t Touch Me), a musical drama romp featuring a woman who is tempted to leave her husband for a suitor of greater economic means (Matzke 2003). At its height Ma.Te.A. was enormously popular, not only in Asmara but also on tour. The company regularly took its programme to quite a range of Eritrean towns, the second city of Keren and the major port of Massawa, but also to smaller, more inaccessible places such as the western lowland towns of Agordat and Tessenai. On three occasions they went to perform

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in Addis Ababa, participating in the then intra-national exchanges that had been pioneered by the Ethiopian Hagar Fikir taking their shows to Asmara. The first was in 1966 when one of Haile Selassie’s ministers, Hargot Abbay, came to Asmara. He was so impressed by the Ma.Te.A. band that he promised to help them make a tour through Ethiopia. The company travelled south, performing en route in Gondar and Nazareth before arriving in Addis Ababa where they played twice at the Haile Selassie, four times at the Hagar Fikir and once, in a free show at the University Cultural Center for Eritreans studying at Addis Ababa University who had helped organise and publicise the tour. The status of the company at the time is demonstrated by this description of the arrival in Addis Ababa by Asres Tessema. The Haile Selassie Theatre Group had also come! They came with their cars, with flowers, and they welcomed us when we were just approaching the town. Then we went to Addis with songs. Everywhere we saw our pictures on the wall. Even in town, in Churchill Road, there was a written banner with ‘Welcome Ma. Te. A!’. (Interview in Matzke 2008, 70)

The shows were hugely popular, enabling the company to return home with enough money to, for the first time, hire prestigious premises right on Asmara’s main road, Haile Selassie Avenue. Interestingly they were compared favourably by many to the professional kinet troupes of Addis Ababa, a particular point of praise being that the Asmara troupe were more slick in making quick transitions between acts to maintain the dynamism of the show. Of course a large part of the audience was always made up of Eritreans living in the capital, and this was where tensions started to build. Controversial songs such as Abi Hidmo (The Big House) spoke of the building being infected with lice and bedbugs, often read as Ethiopians living in Eritrea. The performance of the song by Tebereh Tesfahunei led to her being draped in an Eritrean flag by one spectator, while another sprayed insecticide in a symbolic demonstration of what he thought should happen to the occupiers, as others began to reveal guns they had brought to the show. The Ethiopian authorities had evidently not expected such fervour or such anti-Ethiopian sentiment. Action had to be taken, and half the songs were promptly ordered to be cut from the show, though the tour was allowed to proceed (Matzke 2008, 72). A second tour was organised in 1971 and the group again travelled to perform at the Haile Selassie in 1973/4. By this time there was massive ill

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feeling between Eritreans and Ethiopians, Asmara was effectively an occupied city and the guerrilla armies held sway in much of rural Eritrea, so the atmosphere was by no means as welcoming as it had been in the mid-­1960s. Audiences were again dominated by Eritreans. All the more impressive then was this glowing review of the later show at the Haile Selassie by the Amhara journalist, Mengistu Gedamu. There were thousands of people crowded around the entrance to the hall. Some were saying it was sold out, others that the chairs were full. Women who had paid 25 Birr for their hairstyles found their hair disordered by the crush. The entrance fee was 5 Birr but many were willing to pay 25 Birr to enter the hall […] On this Sunday afternoon even though I could not understand the language (Tigrinya) or the message, I enjoyed the way the play was performed and the music enormously. In fact, it was the best I ever saw.

This high praise, considering the strength and depth of Ethiopian theatre as opposed to the amateur origins of the Eritrean group, is somewhat surprising. One factor, which I imagine may be the key to perceived qualitative differences, surely lies in the different ways the groups organised themselves. The Eritreans were a passionate group of committed amateur partners, certainly with differences of status within the company, but seeing themselves as working together. When the company first established itself they met every evening as a matter of choice, though the practicalities of life later reduced this to three times a week (Matzke 2003, 120). The members were highly disciplined, with new recruits having to demonstrate their commitment. They were a group of friends and volunteers. In contrast the Ethiopian performers were badly paid, low status tools in a highly stratified profession. One might draw an analogy between a volunteer and a conscript army. The warlike metaphor holds even further in that in their forays into Ethiopia Ma.Te.A. was increasingly a covert propaganda organisation whipping up support among exiles for the liberation project, and challenging through songs, plays and symbolism, the legitimacy of the Ethiopian state. Hence a heightened tension and energy was all too likely to characterise these shows in stark contrast to the weekly kinet offerings of the Addis Ababa professionals, who could not even guarantee that their work would feed their families.

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Notes 1. Contemporary Eritrea has nine ethno-linguistic groups: Afar, Bilen, Hedareb, Kunama, Nara, Rashaida, Saho, Tigre, Tigrinya; of these the Tigrinya (50%) and the Tigre (31%) are far the largest. Ethiopia has some eighty ethnic groups, with the largest being the Oromo (34%) and the Amhara (27%). In each country there is a roughly equal split of Christians and Muslims with smaller numbers following various indigenous religious practices. 2. Amharic and Tigrinya have been the dominant languages of theatre because they are the major languages of the peoples of the respective capital cities, Addis Ababa and Asmara, from whence theatre grew. In the case of Ethiopia Amharic was also the exclusive language of the state until 1991. 3. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD determined that Christ had two natures: human and divine. However, the Ethiopian and Alexandrine Coptic churches rejected this conclusion and upheld the monophysite belief that Christ has only one, divine, nature. This led to a profound schism in Christianity. 4. It is impossible to date Ge’ez with any confidence. Similar languages are thought to have been spoken in the region up to 4000 years ago. Written Ge’ez dates back to the fifth century BC, but the language has not been used except for church purposes since, probably, around the first century AD. 5. Amharic is the mother tongue of just over a quarter of Ethiopians living in the area around Addis Ababa. Tigrinya is the language of a similar percentage of Eritreans but is also the language of the north-western Ethiopians in Tigray. Tigre is the second most widely spoken mother tongue in Eritrea. 6. The Ethiopian church had training and at times formal schools in three church art disciplines: qene (poetry), aquaquam (dance and chanting) and zema (music). At times these could be very elaborate with students working with a master for up to ten years at a time. Besides the use of Ge’ez as a literary form the Ethiopian church also developed its own musical written form, created by St Yared in the sixth century AD. 7. The full Ethiopian Bible has nine books not present in any other tradition. 8. The celebration of the Eucharist requires two priests and three deacons. Some large churches may have dozens of priests attached to them. 9. Timket is the Ethiopian celebration of the Epiphany. It takes place in January each year and is the holiest day in the Ethiopian calendar. On this occasion priests bring out their copy of the Ark of the Covenant, which is normally kept in the inner sanctum of the church out of public view, in a great gathering of religious parade, service and ceremony including priests dancing to the church instruments of drum and sistrum.

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10. Haile Selassie (ruled 1930–1974) was the last Ethiopian Emperor and claimed to be in unbroken descent from the biblical King David. The historical record demonstrates this myth to be quite untrue as there were numerous dynasties that ruled Ethiopia over the centuries. 11. The zemana mesafint (Era of the Judges), from 1769 to 1855, was a period when the Emperor had minimal authority and regionalism and advancing Islam threatened to tear the country apart. It was ended by the unifying Emperor Tewodros. 12. Italian commercial interests first moved into the area around the port town of Assab in 1869. The first Italian settlers arrived in 1880, but it was only in 1889 after a number of armed incursions and negotiations with local leaders that the colony was proclaimed. 13. The Greater Ethiopia label has been used both by nationalists and by scholars claiming a measure of culture coherence for an area considerably greater than the current boards of the nation. See, for example, Donald Levine, 1999, Greater Ethiopia: the evolution of a multi-ethnic society, University of Chicago Press. 14. It is impossible to date such early written languages exactly but a few inscriptions have been found from between the tenth and fifth centuries BC in an early form of Ge’ez that concern the realm of Dm’t, the precursor to the Aksumite Empire. 15. Makeda was according to myth the name of the Queen of Sheba, seen by Ethiopians and Eritreans as related to the Aksumite Empire; she was possibly born in Yemen which was then under the rule of Aksum. 16. Ethiopians, especially Orthodox Christians, believe that the transference of the Arc equated with the transference of God’s favour. 17. The twelve churches of Lalibela are hewn horizontally down into the rock. The extraordinary buildings, linked by deep trenches and still in use, were created between the seventh and thirteenth centuries but are commonly ascribed to the reign of King Lalibela (1181–1221). Today they constitute a World Heritage site. 18. The fifteenth century churches on various islands on Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia are particularly fine examples of religious fresco art. 19. Asmara is a spectacularly beautiful city, its central areas built by the Italians in various styles but with a dominance of modernist architecture. In 2017, 400 buildings in the centre were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. See Sean Anderson, 2015, Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea. An In-Visible Colony. 1890–1941, Farnham: Ashgate. 20. My major sources of information on Yoftahe Negussie were, Yohannes Admassu, 2005EC, Kenge eta Yoftahe Niggussie acher ye hiwotu ena ye tsehufu Tarik, Addis Ababa University Press, and Mulugeta Seyom, 1972,

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(BA History Thesis, Addis Ababa University) (No title available) both kindly translated for me by Mahlet Solomon. 21. Azmari is the name given to Ethiopia’s caste grouping of musician/ singer/entertainers. Historically all nobles would have such entertainers in their retinue, while others travelled, providing music for events such as weddings and anniversaries. The vocation was historically hereditary, but while azmari skills were much desired as a group the entertainers were despised and often forced to live apart. 22. My in-depth information on Iyoel Yohannes was sourced for me by my Ethiopian research assistant, Mahlet Solomon from a range of Amharic newspapers and interviews with people who knew him. 23. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’s English language plays are Oda Oak Oracle (1965), Azmari, (1966), Tewodros, (1966) and Collision of Altars (1977). 24. The Ethiopian and Eritrean calendars are different from those operating elsewhere in the world, having twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth month of five. This is because when the rest of Christianity adopted the Gregorian calendar the Ethiopian Orthodox Church retained the old Coptic calendar. This means dates, generally given as EC, are seven or eight years behind those given elsewhere, with New year currently falling in what is seen as September elsewhere and Christmas being approximately three weeks later than in the Western Christian tradition. 25. http://allafrica.com/stories/201609250181.html. 26. Caplan’s recollections of working in Ethiopia and a copy of the letter to her from Yonas Ademesu were kindly sent to me by Caplan’s daughter, Melissa Havard, who after reading some of my earlier writing had thought I would be interested. I am most grateful to her. 27. A number of other plays have been written about Emperor Tewodros. The first, Tewodros, by Tekle Hawariat’s son, Germachew Tekle-Hawariat, was a successful verse drama in 1949/50. Makonnen Endalkachew’s Taytu Bettul (1954/55) portrays the Emperor as violently abusive, with his victim, the eponymous heroine, only saved from rape thanks to heavenly intervention. 28. Haile Selassie gave the old palace and its grounds for the foundation of Addis Ababa University. The University Arts Center is housed in an old imperial dining hall. The main palace has been left as a museum and as the home of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. 29. The mix of visual spectacle, ritual, exquisite poetic language and a frequent musical, often drumming accompaniment, that Soyinka and other notable Nigerian playwrights such as Duro Ladipo or Femi Osofisan have often brought together, appealing to all the senses, the emotion and the intellect, is often referred to as total theatre. The term would have been in wide

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use in West Africa at the time Soyinka travelled there, though it originates from Europe and the description of Wagnerian opera. 30. The University Arts Center has been poorly maintained and is currently in danger of collapse, with numerous makeshift repairs holding it together. Despite this it is currently the main performance space used by the Theatre Arts Department. 31. https://www.diretube.com/etv-sunday-surprising-artist-abate-mekuriaon-his-birth-day-part-1-video_2ddf0e339.html. 32. These plays were all very early in Tsegaye’s oeuvre but I have been unable to find production dates and none of them were ever published. 33. Mengistu wrote his play originally entitled Kassa in 1973, but it only went on stage in 1980 under the title Tsere Kolonialist (Anti-Colonialist). The problem was that the play was set in Eritrea and discussed Mengistu’s childhood memories of the Ethiopian occupation. Anything mentioning fascism or Eritrea was seen as suspect, hence the name change to appear more in line with Marxist thinking. However even in 1980 the play was stopped by the censor. Mengistu who was then a Member of parliament had to appeal to the Prime Minister to get it put back on which it was, but removed from the Sunday prime time spot and relegated to a less desirable Friday showing. 34. These women who had all previously been involved in drama at school were seen as daring and modern. One of them, Hiwot Gebre, was a teacher who refused to marry, wore trousers and was the first Eritrean woman to enter a bicycle race. She brought along a pupil and neighbour called Amete Solomon who was also encouraged by her teacher brother. The third woman, Lemlem, was similarly encouraged by Hiwot Gebre and had already performed for the YMCA theatre group. She had to lie to her parents who as strict Catholics felt such activity was inappropriate for their daughters. The fourth member of the group was Mebrat Gebru. All the women were teachers and part of the most progressive elements of Asmara society.

References Abebe Kebede. 1980. In Pre-Revolutionary Ethiopian Theatre: The Published work of Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin (Unpublished senior Paper). Addis Ababa University, Theatre ArtsDepartment. Abir, Mordechai. 1968. Ethiopia, The Era of the Princes. London: Longman. ———. 1980. Ethiopia and the Red Sea: The Rise and Decline of the Solomonic Dynasty and Muslim European Rivalry in the Region. Abingdon and New York: Frank Cass. Aboneh Ashegrie. 1996. Popular Theatre in Ethiopia. Ufahamu 24 (2–3): 32–41.

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———. 2012. The Role of Women on the Ethiopian Stage. Journal of African Cultural Studies 24 (1): 1–8. Aidoo, Ama Ata. 1995. Dilemma of a Ghost. London: Longman. Alemeyehu Kahasai. Meswaati Abuna Pedros (The Matyrdom of Abuna Petros). ———. Negussie Haile (King Haile). ———. Atum Kilo (Don’t Touch Me). ———. Nuruszu Kufu Nuruszu. Anderson, Sean. 2015. Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea: An Invisible Colony. 1890–1941. Farnham: Ashgate. Anon. 1970. Ethiopian National Patriotic Association. Oldest and [sic] Popular Cultural Institution in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa. Araya Tseggai. 1988. The History of the Eritrean Struulge. In The Long Struggle of Eritrea for Independence and Constructive Peace, ed. Lionel Cliffe and Basil Davidson, 67–84. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press. Asres Tessema. 1964/65. The Effects of Traditional Funeral Ceremonies in Our Country. Bahru Zewde. 2002. A History of Modern Ethiopia (1855–1991). Oxford: James Currey. Belayneh Abune. 2010. (Translation of Tekle Hawariat) Introduction to Fabula Yawreoch Commedia. In African Theatre: Histories, ed. Yvette Hutchison, 153–167. Oxford: James Currey. Berezin, Mabel. 1991. The Organization of Political Ideology, State and Theater in Fascist Italy. American Sociological Review 56: 639–651. Berhe Mesgun. 1946. Z’halfene N’bret Eritrea (The Way Eritreans Lived). Berry, La Verle Bennett. 1976. The Solomonic Monarchy at Gondar, 1630–1755 (Unpublished PhD Thesis). Boston University. Budge, Sir E.A. Wallis. 1932. The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menelik I. London: Oxford University Press. Caplan, Phillip. n.d. Undated Manuscript. Clapham, Christopher. 1988. Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Ebun. 1979. Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Debebe Seifu. 1980. Interview with Tesfaye Gebre-Medhin. In Ethiopian Literature in English (Unpublished MA Thesis). Addis Ababa University. Erlich, Haggai. 1996. Ras Alula and the Scramble for Africa: A Political Biography. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press. Farago, Ladislas. 1935. Abyssinia on the Eve. London: G Putnam & Sons. Gerard, Albert. 1971. Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hancock, Graham, Richard Pankhurst, and Duncan Wiletts. 1983. Under Ethiopian Skies. London: H & L Communications.

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Ionesco, Eugene. 1960. Rhinocerus. New York: John Calder. Iyoel Yohannes. 1947. Acha Gabicha (A Marriage of Equals). ———. Zetegn Fetena Yalafe Jegna (A Hero Who Nine Dangers). Kane, Thomas. 1975. Ethiopian Literature in Amharic. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz. Kapuscinski, Ryszard. 1978. The Emperor. London: Quartet. Kebede Mikael. 1948/9. Yeketat Maebal (The Storm of Retribution). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. ———. 1953/4. Romewana Julyat Teater (Romeo and Juliet Play). ———. 1956. Hannibal. Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. Lealem Berhanu, Terega, and Mahlet Solomon. 2014. Religious, Political and Cultural Influences on the first Ethiopian Playwright, Tekle Hawariat Tekle Mariam and his Play Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia. Journal of African Cultural Studies 26 (3): 276–286. Levine, Donald. 1965. Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multi-ethnic Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levtzion, Nehemia, and Randall L. Pouwels. 2000. The History of Islam in Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Ma. Te. De. 1955. (No specific author known), May T’nbit Kotsera (Prophetic Appointment). ———. (No specific author known), Negus Dawit (King David). ———. (No specific author known), Aden Gualn. ———. (No specific author known), Ali ab Asmara (Ali In Asmara). Makonnen Endalkachew. 1947. Yedam Dems (The Voice of Blood). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. ———. 1954/55. Dawitna Orion (David and Orion). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. ———. 1955. Sealswi Dawit (King David the Third). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. Mamitu Yilma. 1987. The History of the Ethiopian National Theatre (Unpublished Senior Paper: History Department). Addis Ababa University. Mantel-Niecko, Joanna. 1985. In Literature in African Languages: Theoretical Issues and Sample Essays, ed. B.W.  Andrzejewski, S.  Pilasze, and W.  Tyloch, 301–335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manyazewal Endeshaw. 2017. Engida (Published in an English translation by the author as The Guest. In Six Plays from East and West Africa, ed. Martin Banham and Jane Plastow. Oxford: James Currey. Marcus, Harold. 1968. Menelik II. In Leadership in Eastern Africa, ed. N.R. Bennet, 3–62. Boston: Boston University Press. ———. 1995a. A History of Ethiopia. University of California: Press.

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———. 1995b. The Politics of Empire: Ethiopia, Great Britain and the United. States: Red Sea Press. Markarkis, J. 1974. Ethiopia: Anatomy of a Traditional Polity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marsden, Philip. 2007. The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy. New York: Harper Press. Matzke, Christine. 2003. En-gendering Theatre in Eritrea: The Roles and Representations of Women in the Performing Arts (Unpublished PhD Thesis). University of Leeds. ———. 2008. The Asmara Theatre Association, 1961–1974: Mahber Teyatr Asmera. In African Theatre: Companies, ed. Martin Banham et  al., 62–81. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 2010. Looking for “Eritrea’s Past Property” (1947): Archives and Memories in Eritrean Theatre History. In African Theatre Histories 1850–1950, ed. Yvette Hutchinson, 1–22. Oxford: James Currey. Mbowa, Rose. 1994. Artists Under Siege: Theatre and the Dictatorial Regimes in Uganda. In Theatre and Performance in Africa, ed. Eckhard Breitinger, 123–135. Bayureuth: Bayreuth African Studies. Mengistu Lemma. 1962. Telfso Bekisse (Marriage by Abduction). Published in English translation, Ethiopian Observer. ———. 1963. Yelacha Gebecha (Marriage of Unequals). Published in English translation, Ethiopian Observer. ———. 1965. Modern Amharic Literature. Voice of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. ———. 1973. From Traditional to Modern Literature in Ethiopia. Zeitschrift fur Kulturastausch, Stuttgart. Miller, Arthur. 2009. All My Sons. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Miran, Jonathan. 2009. Red Sea Citizens and Cosmopolitan Change in Massawa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Moliere. 1969. The Flying Doctor. London: Heinemann. ———. 2018. Tartuffe. London: Oberon Books. Mulugeta, Seyoum. 1972. (BA History Thesis, Addis Ababa University) No title available. p’Bitek, Okot. 2013. Song of Lawino. Longrove, IL: Waveland Press. Pankhurst, Estelle Sylvia. 1955. Ethiopia: A Cultural History. London: Lalibela House. Pankhurst, Richard. 1986. Shakespeare in Ethiopia. Research in African Literatures 17 (2): 169–196. ———. 1999. Italian Fascist War Crimes in Ethiopia: A History of their Discussion, from the League of Nations to the United Nations (1936–1949). Northeast African Studies 6: 83–140. Parker, Ben. 2003. Ethiopia: Breaking New Ground. Oxford: Oxfam. Pinter, Harold. 1960. The Caretaker. London: Methuen.

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Plastow, Jane. 1989. Ethiopia: The Creation of a Theatre Culture (Unpublished M Phil Thesis). University of Manchester. ———. 1996. African Theatre and Politics: The Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2010. The First African Play: Fabula Yawreoch Commedia and its Influence on Ethiopian Theatre. In African Theatre: Histories, ed. Yvette Hutchison, 138–150. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 2017. Teatro Asmara: Understanding Eritrean Drama through a Study of the National Theatre. Journal of African Cultural Studies 29 (3): 311–330. Plastow, Jane, and Mahlet Solomon. 2015. Contemporary Ethiopian Actresses. In African Theatre: Contemporary Women, ed. Martin Banham et  al. Oxford: James Currey. Plastow, Jane, and Zerihun Berhanu. 2017. An Absurdist in Addis Ababa: Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida (Engida in italics). In Six Plays from East and West Africa, ed. Jane Plastow and Martin Banham, 129–138. Oxford: James Currey. Plautus, T.M. 2011. The Braggart Soldier. Harvard: Loeb. Prouty, Chris. 1986. Empress Taytu and Menelik II: Ethiopia 1883–1910. London: Ravens Educational and Development Studies. Ricci, Lanfranco. 1969. Letterature dell’Etiopia. In Storia letterature d’Oriente, ed. Oscar Botte, vol. 1. Milan: Casa Editrice Dr Francesco Valladi. Schary, Dore. 1998. Sunrise at Campobello. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Sergew Hable Selassie. 1972. Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270. Addis Ababa: United Printers. Shakespeare, William. 1794. Macbeth. London: C. Lowndes. ———. 2004. Romeo and Juliet. New York: Simon & Schuster. ———. 2006. Hamlet. London: Thomson Learning. ———. 2007. Othello. New York: St Martins. ———. 2011. The Tempest. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. London: Bloomsbury. Shinn, David, and Thomas Ofcansky. 2013. Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Soyinka, Wole. 1962. The Lion and the Jewel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1975. Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Methuen. Te’ezagu Haylu. 1956. Haile Mariam Mammo (Haile Mariam Mammo). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. Tekle Hawariat. 1921. Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia (Fable: The Comedy of Animals) (Private publication). (Published in English in a translation by Belayneh Abune. In African Theatre: Histories, ed. Yvette Hutchison. Oxford: James Currey. Teklehawariat Teklemariam. 1997. Autobiography. Addis Ababa UniversityPress. Tesfaye Gessesse. 1960. Lagech and her Pot.

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———. Yeshi (Yeshi). Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. 1960. Yeshoh Aklil (The Crown of Thorns). ———. 1965a. Oda Oak Oracle. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1965b. Yekerma Sow (A Man of the Future). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. ———. 1966a. Tewodros (Tewodros), EthiopianObserver. ———. 1966b. Azmari (Azmari), EthiopianObserver. ———. 1967. Literature and the African Public. Ethiopian Observer 2: 63–67. ———. Askeyami Ligagered (The Ugly Girl). ———. Kosho Cigara (Cheap Cigarettes). ———. Joro Dagif (Goitre). Ullendorf, Edward. 1960. The Ethiopians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Tennesee. 2011. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions. Wrong, Michaela. 2005. I Didn’t Do it For You: How the World Betrayed A Small Nation. London: Fourth Estate. Yesowaworq Hailu. 1955. Nessannet Kebre (Independence is My Honour). Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam Zerihun. Yoftahe Negussie. 1930a. Tequem Yallabat Chewata (Vain Entertainment). ———. 1930b. Miseker (Miseker). ———. 1932a. Dade Tura (Dade Tura). ———. 1932b. Yemare Melash (The Wedding Party). ———. 1932c. Yehod Amlaku Qetat (The Punishment of Belly-Worshipper). ———. 1941. Afejeshign (The Woman in Contention). Yohannes Admassu. 2010. What Were They Writing About Anyway? Tradition and Modernization in Amharic Literature. Callaloo 33 (1): 64–81. Yonas Ademesu. n.d. Unpublished letter.

Interviews Mengistu Lemma. Addis Ababa. November 1987. Tesfaye Gessesse. Addis Ababa. May 1987 and January 1988. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. Addis Ababa. January 1988.

Chapter 3: Ethiopia and Eritrea: 1973–2016

Ethiopia Under the Derg The overthrow of Haile Selassie, the forming of the military conspiracy of junior officers known as the Derg (Dergue) (Committee) that engineered his demise, and the eventual rise of the ruthless military dictator hiding under the cloak of socialist reform, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who would lead a reign of terror until his fall in 1991, have all been much written about (Clapham 1980, Markarkis and Ayele 1978, Halliday and Molyneux 1981, Kapuscinski 1978, Lefort 1983). The rottenness at the heart of Empire was illustrated by the lack of resistance to what became known as the Creeping Coup, as army officers imposed reforms and removed courtiers with scarcely a murmur from an Emperor who, with hindsight, can be seen as probably entering some form of senility in his final months. Revolt prior to the military takeover had been widespread, encompassing the armed forces, but also students, organised labour and a growing number of small but vociferous alternative political movements. A crucial moment was the showing, in October 1973, of David Dimbleby’s, The Unknown Famine, that exposed the extent of a terrible famine in northern Ethiopia that the Emperor had chosen to entirely ignore (Cowcher 2018). This revelation provoked a deep anger in many ordinary citizens that finally swung them into support for the overthrow of imperial government. In the early days those who formed the Derg had little political knowledge. Clapham claims that © The Author(s) 2020 J. Plastow, A History of East African Theatre, Volume 1, Transnational Theatre Histories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47272-6_4

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Overwhelmingly the most important channel through which […] policies were put onto the official agenda, at least in the early days, was through personal contacts between radical intellectuals and individual members of the Dergue. It was in this way that Dergue members became familiar with Marxist ideas. (Clapham, 43)

Between 1974 and 1976 it was unclear what direction future government would take and most hoped for a handover to civilian rule, with many groups—notably the equally Marxist-influenced urban groupings of Mei’son and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP)—contending to build an ideological power base. It was only in 1977 that Mengistu would emerge as a murderous, ruthless dictator. He successfully played off the civilian organisations against each other, wiped out internal Derg competition—culminating in the execution of the Vice President and forty-six other members in September of that year (Prunier 2015a, b, 218–19), and then unleashed the horror of the Red Terror. This was a vastly disproportionate response to opponents turning to armed tactics that led to the arbitrary killing of thousands, including school massacres and the gunning down of citizens as they walked the streets. The Terror continued until the end of 1978, traumatising a generation (Prunier 2015a, b, 220). Also in 1977 a range of ethnically based rebellions were contending to break away from Ethiopian rule—most seriously those emanating from Somalia and Eritrea. President Said Barre sought to take advantage of Ethiopian disarray to launch a massive armed assault on the Ogaden as a major step in Somali irredentist ambitions, while in Eritrea the guerrilla movements of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (EPLF) took control of nearly all of the country and threatened the capital of Asmara. Up until this moment the USSR had been giving substantial support to Somalia, but faced with a choice between their old allies and wooing from a newly communist Ethiopia, Moscow chose the larger power and sponsored a massive import of forces—backed up by Yemeni and Cuban allies—that decisively routed Somali forces before turning to Eritrea, causing the ELF to flee in disarray while the EPLF withdrew to the northern mountains where they would repulse seven huge assaults over the next decade (Prunier 2015a, b, 226–7). From this time forward Mengistu ran a terrorist dictatorship. He conscripted hundreds of thousands into his armies as ill-trained canon fodder, while when a new famine raged a decade after the 1974 event that had so

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helped propel him to power, in a horrible mirroring of the Emperor’s vainglory, he spent millions in 1984 on a spectacle to launch his Workers Party of Ethiopia. His response to famine was to ship thousands of people from their homelands in the north to supposedly empty country in the south where they died of malaria and starvation and to force many more into villages where they could not access their lands and where grazing for animals was quickly exhausted (Fig. 1). By the late 1980s a universally reviled regime was unravelling. Many conscripts simply surrendered or fled in the face of the utterly committed fighters (tegadelti) of Eritrea, and in 1988 the Eritreans won a game-­ changing victory at the Battle of Afabet where they captured sufficient tanks and armaments to, for the first time, enable them to act as a conventional army, with enough military hardware left over to let them offer substantial resources to their cousin-revolutionaries, the northern Ethiopian, Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), who then began an irresistible push towards Addis Ababa (Alemseged Tesfai 2002a, b, 99–128; Prunier 2015a, b, 227). War on many fronts was ultimately

Fig. 1  A section of the massive 1984 parade ordered by President Mengistu Haile Mariam for the occasion of the launch of the Workers Party of Ethiopia in what was then known as Abiot (Revolution Square). (Source: Photo by the author.)

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unsustainable because by this time the USSR was going through the perestroika process led by Gorbachev and gave warning that support for the Derg was going to be drying up. In May 1991, as the TPLF marched into Addis Ababa, the EPLF similarly took Asmara without a shot and Mengistu fled ignominiously to Zimbabwe.

Theatre and the Ethiopian Revolution: 1973–1990 Theatre in relation to the revolution and the Derg can, I think, be best understood by dividing it into two kinds and three time periods. The two kinds are the art theatre located almost exclusively in the professional playhouses of Addis Ababa and the propaganda performances promoted by the Derg, but also and in opposition by rebels, notably from movements based in Eritrea and Tigray and among Somali nationalists seeking first to bring Somali-speaking parts of Ethiopia back within the Somali polity and later to overthrow their own dictator, Siyad Barre. The three time periods run, firstly, from 1973, when it became evident that the Emperor was losing his grip and power and prospects for positive change appeared imminent, until 1977, when The Red Terror rapidly snuffed out cultural as well as nearly all other forms of overt dissent. During this time the theatres of Addis Ababa were a vibrant hub of ideological debate and experimentation with artistic form. The latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise of Derg propaganda theatre in both the professional theatres of the capital and increasingly spreading out across the country to be performed by a host of government sponsored—and supervised—mainly amateur groupings. It was accompanied by fierce censorship which would continue until the Derg was overthrown and saw the professional theatres turning, when not playing socialist propaganda, to long-running productions of uncontroversial classics and a wide-range of Russian plays in translation—evidently a move approved of by a state receiving massive Soviet support. The final phase was characterised by a rejection of propaganda plays in Addis Ababa and the rise of domestic and social comedy. This was driven by both a need to evade rejection by the censor and by an understandable desire for escapism in a traumatised urban population—something one can see paralleled in, for example, Uganda, as a response to the equally horrific regime of Idi Amin (see Volume Two, Chapter 2). Elsewhere propaganda art continued to dominate and became increasingly sophisticated and important among liberation groups, especially in Eritrea.

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Addis Ababa Theatre: 1973–1977 The dynamism of the theatre in Addis Ababa, from 1973 up until the Red Terror of 1977, was extraordinary. During this period the audience was transformed. Instead of appealing to a predominantly entertainment-­ seeking group, theatre was suddenly the place where one found intellectuals and urban citizens concerned with the changing state of Ethiopia. Time and time again older informants spoke to me of the importance of theatre at this time as a unique space for debate about past evils and possible futures. This was because not only was censorship in abeyance, at least for most of 1974 and 1975, but although the military did get a quick hold on the press and the radio, for some while they did not meaningfully control the theatres. The man who would have the greatest influence over what was put on in the theatres of Addis Ababa in those tumultuous years was undoubtedly the arch-manipulator, Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. When Tsegaye returned from his West African travels in 1973 he wrote, in just thirteen days, his first pro-military play, Ha Hu Ba Sidist Wore (ABC in Six Months). Like many of Tsegaye’s plays, Ha Hu is highly episodic and almost as confused as the political events in Addis Ababa at the time. It centrally concerns a young teacher whose multiple problems of love and money are driving him towards insanity. In this chaotic world hope is represented by a soldier relative of militant revolutionary sensibilities. While the play may not have had a coherent message its clarion call was for change, a cry that mirrored the desires of the citizenry, and for an unprecedented six months Ha Hu filled the massive auditorium of what was soon to be renamed the National Theatre (Plastow 1996, 149–150). It also led to the theatre staff successfully demanding the removal of the bureaucrat, Captain Atnafu, and his replacement with Tsegaye, while Tesfaye Gessese was simultaneously appointed to run the Hagar Fikir. It is fascinating to see the differences in thinking and style of the two theatre managers. Tsegaye had been a productive playwright throughout the 1960s, but a number of those works had been translations and we know he had increasingly felt unable to express in Amharic his true thoughts for fear of censorship or worse1. In the two years he would now be in charge at the National Tsegaye put on only his own plays in what he billed as a series of revolutionary dramas. Ha Hu was followed by Abugida Keyisso (Learning to Read), discussing corruption and arguing against excusing any who stood in the way of the revolutionary, pro-peasant project of national

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transformation. His final play at the National was Enat Alemu Tenu (Mother Courage), though only that central character was lifted from Brecht’s play of the same name. The play looked back to the Italian occupation, denouncing Haile Selassie’s failure to recognise and honour the Ethiopian resistance fighters when he resumed his throne. Enat Alemu Tenu marks the high-water point of the playwright’s engagement with the idea of total theatre (Plastow 1996, 150). The play utilised a film montage, song and movement sequences alongside the signature highly poetic writing style. It was just after this, in his 1977 Preface to his English language piece, Collision of Altars, that Tsegaye most clearly explained his dramatic thought of the time. I would like […] to point out my preoccupation with the idea of an illustrative total theatre, functional dance, mime, incantation, incense burning, Ethiopian wigs and African type masks and rituals, old Ethiopian type Orthodox Church chant, music, praise singing and of course verse drama, which I hope will bring together that original sense of the theatre’s craft, the dance-actor, director-designer and author relationship to a close effort of combined imagination.

While Tsegaye’s pro-military nationalist plays were enormously popular with the Derg and the people, at the Hagar Fikir, Tesfaye took a very different line. He mounted plays in a range of genres and all by different playwrights. What unified the productions was that they tended to be both looking back to past abuses of power and asking questions about what kind of future government Ethiopia might aspire to. Several of the plays had been written before the revolution but could only be performed as imperial power collapsed and the new regime sought to establish its rule. The first of these was Mengistu Lemma’s Balekabara Baledaba (The Mighty and the Lowly), which appeared in 1974, prior to the overthrow of Haile Selassie. Set in the immediate past, the play featured the kind of highly educated young men who had also been at the centre of Mengistu’s earlier plays. In this case the drama centres round two friends who had studied abroad together and returned home full of zeal to reform the motherland. As the play begins, a number of years have passed and they come together in a chance encounter. One has sold out, joined the system, built up a myth of a heroic background that has involved rejecting his peasant father and become an imperial minister. The second has remained a radical, but at considerable personal cost, living in poverty and losing his

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aristocratic girlfriend. The play is a temptation drama as the successful man seeks to beguile the idealist. It operates mostly through the kind of verbal debate so widely popular, but includes stylistic innovations, such as flashbacks to the abandoned peasant father. The moral positioning of the playwright is left in no doubt, but in this play the corrupt remain in power and Mengistu warns of how difficult it is for the idealist to protect more than their own integrity (Plastow 1996, 149). The other three plays put on in 1975 show further angles on the range of socio-political thought at the time. Tesfaye Gessesse’s Iqaw (Thing) was written prior to the revolution but could not be staged until after it happened. It is a surreal play, reminiscent in many ways of Kafka’s The Trial. Iqaw purports to be set in ‘Southern Africa’ and focuses on the life of Zaki Eeqaw after he wakes in a prison cell to be accused of an unspecified crime he has no knowledge of. His guards insist on calling him ‘Iqaw’—thing— as opposed to his given name of Eeqaw. As the play progresses the situation gets more and more extreme. A travesty of a trial is held before what Tesfaye obviously sees as the representatives of oppression in Africa—a white lord, senile tribal leaders and a sinister security chief, Lieutenant Smiley. Ultimately Zaki ends up in a futuristic prison where he is placed in a helmet that appears to keep him functioning when for all ‘real’ purposes he is either dead or insane. (Analysis from English language manuscript of the play given to me by the author). Next came Abe Gubegna’s Yedakamoch Wotimed (The Trap of the Weak). Abe Gubegna had been a radical voice for many years. He had cut his teeth as a populist scenario writer for the Hagar Fikir, before turning to novels and poetry, and he went on to write plays in both Amharic and— somewhat painful—English2. Yedakamoch Wotimed is a denunciation of corruption and intrigue in court circles, though the specific court is not named. The plot concerns a lord’s retainer who falls in love with his patron’s daughter. Other minor nobles are jealous of the favour given to this commoner upstart; they undermine him in a web of lies and finally force him to flee to the forest in fear of his life. When he tries to return to tell his lord how both of them have been the victims of a campaign of deception he is killed and it is left to his brother to expose just what has happened. The play is tightly constructed, working at a sharp and dramatic pace. Finally Tesfaye promoted a new writer, Taddele Gebre-Hiwot, whose Man Now Etiopiawe? (Who is the Ethiopian?) utilised musical form to question what kind of government Ethiopia wanted and to advocate for the country taking up an international non-aligned position.

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What is interesting in this series of plays is not only the cautionary, even fearful, content, alongside an obvious yearning for the overthrow of imperial government, but the significant experiments with form. New ideas are going hand in hand with new ways of thinking about making theatre. It is as though imagining alternative futures is pushing the playwrights to try to find radical means to represent their thought. Realism and naturalism tend to give us the impression that they are showing the world as it is; arguably if one is trying to discuss change then new forms might seem appropriate to embody this challenge to deeply entrenched conservative beliefs about how the state did and should operate. During this same period a number of cultural moves were made by the new government, which appears to have been much influenced by Tsegaye. Certainly in an interview with me he claimed responsibility for persuading the new government to set up, in 1975, the Ministry of Sport and Culture (Interview. Addis Ababa, January 1988). Although this would be a very small ministry and most of its energies would go on sport, the move did mean that for the first time the government officially recognised culture as something the state should be involved with and support. With government blessing, Tsegaye also invested some of the profits he made from Ha Hu in setting up a practical actor training school at the National Theatre. He told me that this had been a long-held dream of his. The course was to run for two years and the first intake was of thirty students. Since neither the government nor Tsegaye put any further money into the scheme it lasted for only six years in total. Teaching was carried out by a bevy of younger foreign-trained theatre professionals whom Tsegaye took under his wing and who also worked as directors of his plays. Pre-eminent among the group was Abate Mekuria. Abate had trained in theatre for six years in the UK and Germany in the later 1960s. He directed Ha Hu but then joined forces with Haimanot Alemu who had trained in the USA and the two men together worked on Abuguda Keyisso and Enat Alem Tenu. The two others in the group were Getachew Abdi who trained in Moscow and Sahalu Assefa who had studied in Cairo. In August 1975 the first move was made to rein in theatre freedoms when Tesfaye Gessesse was detained and sacked by the military government. I have not been able to ascertain who was behind this or what action apparently justified the sacking, though Tesfaye had taken an independent initiative to spend money on some much-needed renovations at the Hagar Fikir. It is hard to over-emphasise how unusual this would have been. Under the Emperor initiative had been the last quality he wanted his

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officials to show; all new things had to appear to originate from the Imperial source. The hierarchical nature of Ethiopian culture has long militated against independence of thought or action, and change has often been slow precisely because so many officials are wary of being seen to be responsible for making decisions that might possibly either backfire or be seen as presumptuous. Even when I first went to the country in 1984 it was extremely difficult to start something new or elicit decisions from officials because the culture of deferring endlessly to higher authorities was so deeply ingrained. It is hard to imagine that Tsegaye did not have some role to play in the sacking. He was certainly able to extend his patronage to ensure that his protégées, Sahalu Assefa and Getachew Abdi, were brought in to replace Tesfaye at the Hagar Fikir. This was the high point of Tsegaye’s influence. In a demonstration of the volatility of life in Addis Ababa at this time, and of the comparative strengths of different forces, the beloved of the military would be brought low by those he had so long exploited, the ordinary workers of the National Theatre. Tsegaye had been brought to power by the theatre staff who expected that he would work to improve their conditions. However, he appears to have done nothing at all to assist either performers or backstage staff. Meanwhile urban workers of all kinds had become radicalised. Many had been politicised by the various socialist civilian organisations that targeted urban workers, encouraging industries to unionise and press for labour reform. The revolt was carefully planned. It took place in April 1976, the day after a major government pronouncement of the Programme of the National Revolution. Over one hundred staff took part in a peaceful march demanding guaranteed wages, job security, pensions and the right to unionise. They also demanded the removal of Tsegaye. Indeed, this was a focal point of the event. Protesters chanted slogans: ‘Down with Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’; ‘Tesgaye is a bourgeois at heart’. As they marched through the centre of town they passed the Hagar Fikir and were joined by actors there. They approached the government headquarters where soldiers waited. Shots rang out. A musician fell dead. No less than eighty protesters were arrested as the others fled. Later the same day troops knocked on Tsegaye’s door and took him also into custody (Plastow 1996, 152–154). The subsequent actions of the Derg evidence significant levels of uncertainty and ambivalence. Most of those arrested were released without charge within a few days. Tsegaye was held for a few weeks, while ten suspected ring leaders were imprisoned for six months. Debebe Eshetu,

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one of the ten, told me that his interrogators tried to get him to confess that he was working for the CIA to overthrow Tsegaye—a hypothesis that speaks to Derg paranoia and hubris (Interview. Addis Ababa, October 1988). No one was ever charged with anything, and essentially the workers won. Nearly all of their demands were acceded to as they established the right, maintained ever since, to be seen as civil servants, on a government pay scale and with union representation. It is very hard to get people to talk openly about conflicts, especially when they involve important people, but the military government obviously realised some justice in the workers’ arguments. They sacked Tsegaye, replacing him with his old frenemy, Tesfaye Gessesse3. By 1975 it was increasingly clear that the military government was taking control and the plays began to deal with this new reality. At the National and the Hagar Fikir they aired a number of productions that broadly supported the government socialist agenda while still feeling able to poke some fun at ‘revolutionary’ politicians. Two plays that fitted this category were Negash Gebre-Mariam’s Yedil Atibia Arbegnoch (The Opportunist Patriots) and Abe Gubegna’s Poletikanna Poletignoch (Politics and Politicians). It appears that despite his very public sacking Tsegaye was still overtly supporting the new government and they him. In 1976 he told me he was influential in gaining government backing for two new theatres in the capital4. The City Hall (or Municipality) was put under the directorship of Tsegaye’s protégée, Abate Mekuria, and he began his reign by putting on the last two parts of his ‘master’s’ ‘revolutionary’ trilogy. Melikte Yohannes and Mekdim are both highly colloquial titles, difficult to translate, but which refer to the process of learning to read, following on from Ha Hu Ba Sidist Wore, and by allusion to the peoples’ growing understanding of Marxist revolution. They were both extremely popular. The former was centred on the war in Somalia and the latter on that in Eritrea and both appealed to nationalist sentiments (Plastow 1996, 158). Abate would hold power at the City Hall uninterruptedly until the overthrow of the Derg in 1991, and until he argued with Tsegaye in 1988 he would put on only Tsegaye’s plays. In contrast to Tsegaye’s whole-hearted engagement with the Derg’s revolution, Mengistu Lemma told me that in 1976 he was ordered by the military to produce a play in their support (Interview. Addis Ababa, November, 1987). Tayaki is an adaptation of J.B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. The first version, though set in Ethiopia and critical of the bourgeoisie, was insufficiently revolutionary for Derg tastes. Mengistu, in a

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calculated performance of dumb insolence, therefore revisioned his final scene. Instead of the Inspector simply exposing the moral/criminal guilt of the middle-class family, soldiers march on stage and arrest the guilty— however, the playwright had them do so in complete silence. Director Debebe Eshetu told me that the government saw through the implicit criticism and contempt of this ploy, and though the play was popularly shown at both the National and the second new theatre, the Ras, it was after Tayaki that compulsory censorship of plays was reintroduced (Interview. Addis Ababa, October 1988).

Propaganda and Repression: 1977–1980 In Ethiopia the EPRP had employed agitprop prior to the Red Terror to educate urban populations largely ignorant of socialist political theory. The Derg went on to arrest and execute many of these activists, with Aboneh Ashegrie telling us that ‘some were gunned down in Addis Ababa, Jimma and Gobba while performing on stage’. The military subsequently appropriated the agitprop idea to facilitate mass dissemination of its policies to a national audience vastly predominantly illiterate and without access to mass media. They first tried out their propaganda art in the theatres of Addis Ababa, with some of the earliest pieces, dating back to 1974, being made by young writers who probably were, at that stage, genuinely in support of the new regime. Undoubtedly the most famous of the propaganda playwrights and the darling of the Derg throughout their time in power was Ayalneh Mulat. Born in 1949, Ayalneh won a scholarship to Russia and came back with an MA in journalism just as the revolution was beginning in 1973. The depth of his identification with the military government is demonstrated in that, among a host of other state positions, in the 1980s Ayalneh became ‘deputy head of the department of ideology in the Central committee [sic] of the Worker’s party [sic] of Ethiopia’ (Balashova 2012, 127). Ayalneh is credited with some twenty-five plays over a long career lasting up to the present day, but few have been recognised as having much artistic merit. Some of his most interesting work was made in the mid-1970s by Ayalneh in partnership with Tesfaye Gessesse and the man who was apparently the driving force for experimentation with form, Haimanot Alemu5. The trio produced a number of dance/mime shows at the National Theatre celebrating the new regime; the tone of their content being evidenced in titles such as Becommunistoch And Enat (By the Unity of the

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Communists), Guzwachin (Our Journey) and Tiglachin (Our Struggle). One of the few Ayalneh plays of the period about which I have managed to find any information beyond a title was his 1979 Ye Menta Enat (Mother of Twins) which was subsequently published in a Russian version. Following in the footsteps of Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin’s Melikte Yohannes, Ayalneh’s play also focused on the successful repulsion of the Somali invasion of the Ogaden in 1977–78. A pair of Somali twins find themselves fighting on different sides in the struggle, but their mother ‘is the embodiment of Mother Ethiopia; she glorifies her heroic offspring fighting for her freedom, and passes the death sentence to the traitor’ (Balashova 2012, 128). Audience appetite for crude propaganda increasingly failed to fill the Addis Ababa theatres, but this left the management in a dilemma. After the Red Terror, censorship and fear rapidly silenced critique. Mengistu Lemma’s Tsere Colonialist (Anti-Colonialist), directed at the National Theatre in 1978 by Tsefaye Gessesse, was set in Eritrea and looked at how Ethiopians and Eritreans resisted Ethiopian colonialism. Mengistu had sought to appeal to the Derg by changing the title from his preferred Kassa, the name of the trickster tragic hero, but he retained a certain ambiguity in the play, rejecting heroic stereotypes as he showed many Ethiopians as extremely concerned to protect their material wealth (Interview with Mengistu Lemma, Addis Ababa, November 1987). When censors reversed an initial decision to allow the play to be shown, Mengistu had to appeal to the prime minister to get the judgement overturned, though planned performances were reduced from two to one a week. It was becoming evident that even the most beloved and famous of Ethiopian playwrights would be silenced if their work did not entirely conform to state expectations. This was spectacularly reinforced in 1978 when even Tsegaye Gebre-­ Medhin incurred official wrath. Gammo had its single performance at the City Hall in 1978. Interestingly Tsegaye also set his play in Eritrea, the site of his preceding work, but notably the two scripts were written either side of the Red Terror. In Gammo Tsegaye’s previously unquestioning gung­ho, militaristic tone is transformed. The play centres on two brothers who find themselves on opposite sides of the war. They meet on the battlefield and try to save each other. Such a questioning of the Derg’s intention to crush Eritrean revolt just as they were engaging in the first great joint offensive with massive USSR support was always going to be seen as subversive. The play was immediately banned.

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An ingenious partial solution to the censorship problem was to choose to put on translations of Russian classics that might been seen as having relevance to the Ethiopian situation. So Balashova tells us that in 1979 Addis Ababa theatres put on Gogol’s The Government Inspector, Gorky’s The Lower Depths and The Philistines and even Anton Chekhov’s decidedly non-political The Proposal (129). Evidently Russian classics got an easier pass from the censors than works by writers from capitalist nations.

Addis Ababa Theatre in the 1980s Theatre had become a truly popular urban entertainment form in Addis Ababa from the early 1970s and this trend continued in the 1980s. Up until the mid-1980s most theatres showed plays only at weekends with films covering the week-day slots. However, when Debebe Eshetu took over running the Hagar Fikir in 1984 he began to expand the theatre’s offerings. The weekly variety kinet show, the Hager Fiker’s most reliable staple, continued and an original production would be given in the prime Sunday afternoon slot, but now short plays would be aired on a Tuesday and Thursdays given over to revivals (Interview with Debebe Eshetu, Addis Ababa, 1987). Gradually other theatres followed Debebe’s lead until today when one can see different plays seven days a week in all the state theatre houses. This continuing rise in popularity is a little surprising when one realises how severely artistic output was being curtailed. Analysis of productions from two major theatre houses, the Hagar Fikir and the City Hall in the decade from 1976 to 1986 makes the point. At the Hagar Fikir between 1976 and 1980 eleven plays were produced, all new and original. In the same period at City Hall eight new plays were put on. Between 1981 and 1986 only four original shows were performed at the Hagar Fikir, plus revivals of two pre-revolutionary pieces and a Moliere translation. At City Hall just two plays had enormous runs. One was Tsegaye’s ‘Red’ Tewodros—a socialist inflected rewrite of his earlier play, the other his translation of Othello (Balashova, 131). This is perhaps a fitting place to discuss what happened to Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin subsequently, not least because he never again took an active role in running a theatre or directing, though he did continue to write. Essentially for the rest of his life, up until his death in 2006, the country’s foremost playwright became an eminence gris. A number of my informants in the 1980s thought that the position he coveted was that of

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Minister of Culture, but when he was released from prison it was to take up a much more nebulous role as first Permanent Secretary and later as ‘advisor’ to the Ministry where he would remain until he was retired in 1993, prior to leaving for America in 1998 due to a need to access dialysis unavailable in Ethiopia. After the Red Terror Tsegaye’s enthusiasm for the military, like most other peoples’, waned, but he would make a very good living, becoming reputedly enormously wealthy off the income of three-­ year runs of his translations of Othello, of Moliere’s Tartuffe and of Tewodros. Tsegaye was a man whose thinking and playwriting changed notably over time as he was influenced, first by radical European playwrights, secondly by the negritude and the Pan-Africanist ideas of Leopold Senghor and the early West African post-colonial intellectuals, then by hopes for a radical transformation to Ethiopia to be ushered in by a peoples’ military government, before in his later years he, while retaining a highly Africanist sensibility, became both disillusioned with Derg rule and increasingly returned to a conservative sense of Amhara theatre that harked back to the poetic-realism, dominated by soaring rhetoric, of his plays from the 1960s (Interview. Addis Ababa, January 1988). I see no hypocrisy in any of this. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin lived through times of huge upheaval in both Ethiopia and Africa. His changing ideas reflected an actively engaged and for many years a cautiously hopeful figure, who longed to see his people move from a state of feudal superstition towards intellectual and national liberation. The problem, and arguably the hypocrisy, was shown in that when given the opportunity he made no move to live the egalitarian ideas his theatre promoted. Tsegaye held jealously on to power and patronage and amassed a considerable personal fortune while failing to promote any equality or opportunity for most of those working in theatre. The man I met in his later years fitted the stereotype of an elite Amhara—proud, reserved, speaking carefully and often obliquely. He was also obviously enormously intelligent and thoughtful, and unreservedly an African and Ethiopian nationalist. A major reason for the decline in new plays was the ever-intensifying censorship regime. From 1983 theatre managements were not trusted with play selection which came under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture. At first this only applied to full-length plays, but from 1987 the regulation was extended even to shorter works (Plastow 1996, 218). Even a Marxist like the South African, Robert McLaren, who taught theatre at Addis Ababa University from 1980 to 1984 (see below), decried the paranoia

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behind censorship which he saw as driving the theatres to put on only ‘safe’ political classics or comedies, arguing that: ‘Such activities are destructive for a truly revolutionary theatre and serve only to justify the actions of reactionaries’ (McLaren 1980, 24). Many theatre artists additionally saw the Ministry officials as purely political apparatchiks with no cultural knowledge (Debebe Eshetu 1987a, b, 52–53). Secondly, many of my informants in the late 1980s agreed that a small cabal, led by Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, had massive control of the theatres and their output. Even when new young directors were employed by the theatres they might get minimal opportunity to practice their craft (Interview, Bekele Tafara. Addis Ababa, October 1987). Partly this was a power-play, but it was also a matter of finance. In a country with limited mass entertainment options, live performance was popular and the theatres were large. A director took home 15% of all takings and a playwright between 25% and 35%, depending on whether the work was a translation or original. The rest went straight to the Ministry of Culture with actors paid somewhere between 200 and 600 Birr a month (up to the equivalent of $300) from the state depending on seniority. Given that a ticket for a show cost 5 or 6 Birr one can see that directors and playwrights of popular, long-running shows could do very well indeed and Tsegaye was widely seen as extremely interested in money. The gradually emerging answer to fear and stagnation was the development of non-political comedy. Even then, social commentary could be seen as politically controversial. In 1984 Debebe Eshetu, who was also at the time the theatre representative on the Shengo, or parliament, wanted to put on a play by Negash Gebre-Medhin, a romantic comedy with some commentary on the lives of older people in Addis Ababa called Ye Azawintoch Kebeb (The Pensioners’ Club). The Ministry had rejected the piece but Debebe stuck his neck out, got permission and produced a massively popular play that ran for two and a half years (Interview. Addis Ababa, October 1987). A couple of outstanding playwrights emerged in the 1980s experimenting with comedy to great popular acclaim. Fikre Tolossa, who studied literature in Moscow, would flee the country towards the end of the Derg regime but has continued to write plays, poetry, songs, books and make films. Undoubtedly his most famous play, repeatedly re-performed since the mid-1980s, is Mekabir Kofariuma Yeressa Satin Shachu (The Coffin Maker and the Grave Digger). The piece takes the form of a conversation between the two protagonists as they debate—unsurprisingly given their

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occupations—the fragility of human life. The writing is poetic, witty and philosophical in a tradition much beloved of Ethiopian audiences. My own favourite Ethiopian comic playwright is Fisseha Beley, an early graduate of the University of Addis Ababa Theatre Arts Department (See below), who sadly died, much too young, in 2002. Fisseha was most unusual in that he had a rural background and set his social comedies deep in the Amhara heartlands. Many have spoken of the deep-rootedness of his colloquial Amharic which makes it extraordinary difficult to even begin to translate6. Fisseha rose quite quickly to enormous popularity with a string of rural comedies that commented on society and particularly on the plight of women. Hoda Yifejew (To Keep the Secret), Alkash na Zefegn (The Mourner and the Singer), Ashegrie Meseret (Ashegrie Meseret) and above all Simen Sintayehu (Simen Sintayehu) which many see as a modern classic, were all written in the 1980s. Unusually Fisseha often wrote from a woman’s perspective. So in Simen Sintayehu, named after the female protagonist, Simen finds herself at the centre of a traditional court case between two men, each of whom claims that he is her husband. This gives obvious space for farce, and the plot grows only more complex and hilarious as in the course of the play two more men appear also saying that they have married our heroine. Eventually Simen acknowledges that she indeed married all these men, but goes on to explain that she did so simply because she wanted a husband who would treat her well and not as the kind of chattel Ethiopian patriarchy has generally viewed as the position of women. Hoda Yifejew also focuses on an abusive marriage. Taking another common rural trope—this time the woman has been forced into marriage against her will to a wife-beater. Once more the play looks at the situation from the point of view of the woman. No sympathy is spared for the abusive spouse. Instead the focus is on the woman and her plan to run away with her lover. This could have been a very serious play but Fisseha, as ever, addresses the most serious of subjects through the medium of farcical, quick-moving comedy. In this case much is made of the fact the lovers will escape with the man disguised as his lover’s female cousin and he spends most of his time in drag. However, the moment of both comic climax and revenge is when the wife, with the help of a sympathetic friend, manages to convince her husband that the only way they can bring children to their so far barren marriage is if both of them submit to a ritual beating whilst tied to the central pole of their traditional tukul home. The wife goes first, receiving only a largely symbolic whipping. She then gets

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to tie her husband up and has the delicious revenge of not only giving him a thorough beating but also revealing to him how he has been tricked and then running away to leave him to the humiliation of being found by his fellow villagers in his ridiculous situation (Fig. 2). In more recent years many have bemoaned what they see as the increasing dominance of banal comedy, and undoubtedly the theatres have sought to slake an apparently insatiable appetite for light theatre in the mass urban audience, but it is important to recognise that the best Ethiopian comedy created in response to the repressions of the 1980s was subtle, beautifully written and spoke widely to Ethiopian concerns and sensibilities.

The Politics of Propaganda: Amhara, Eritrean, Somali and Tigre The latter half of the 1970s and the 1980s saw an Ethiopian polity convulsed by war. In this conflict, to a unique degree in East Africa and, I think, exceptionally across the continent, many of the warring parties invoked performance as an important propaganda tool. In Ethiopia a primary means by which the Derg spread many of its reformist ideas in relation to land and governance was mass propaganda theatre, while similarly in Eritrea the EPLF used theatre as a major tool encouraging its agenda for independence, the overthrow of feudal values and the emancipation of women. In the war between the Derg and the revolutionary movements of the Somali National Movement (SNM), the ELF, EPLF, the Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the EPRP all used theatre and performance as a way to mobilise populations in support of their war aims, in the case of the EPLF to an extraordinary and highly elaborated degree. Apparently, although the form was utilised transnationally, most of the organisations came to the idea of using theatre for propaganda purposes through a variety of independent routes. So, the accepted wisdom is that the Derg stole the idea from the revolutionary organisation they eliminated in the Red Terror, the EPRP (Aboneh Ashegrie 1996, 34). The Somalis, as I show in Chapter 1, developed an entirely indigenous mode of theatre, though under Said Barre theatre organisations were pushed into more overt propaganda. Matzke says the ELF got the idea of propaganda art from the Chinese during a cultural exchange (Matzke 2003, 139–140). And the EPLF developed their work from practices previously

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Fig. 2  Image from April 1986 production of Hoda Yifejew by Fisseha Belay by students at Addis Ababa University. (Source: Photo by the author.)

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taking place in Asmara, gradually over-taken by the socialist-realist ideas promoted most particularly by Alemseged Tesfai (Matzke, 205). The only one of the revolutionary groups that directly lifted its thinking about the use of propaganda theatre from another transnationally was the influence of the Eritrean EPLF over the setting up of similar, though not so elaborately run, troupes by the Ethiopian TPLF. This was enabled by the former touring work into Tigray because both groups shared the Tigrinya language and—albeit sometimes uneasily—ideas, resources and propaganda. Given that we know Eritreans forced to work on Derg cultural propaganda fled to the ELF and EPLF, and that all these groups of peoples were porous, living and moving across national borders, one imagines performance propaganda ideas must have moved with them, but the spread of the propaganda arts movements was a complex business with different inflections in all the participating organisations. Ethiopian Propaganda Theatre Under the Derg I have discussed how propaganda performance came to the metropolitan theatres above. However, when promoting agitprop the Derg did not rely predominantly on professional urban theatre groups. Following its assertion of a totalitarian grip on power the government sought to organise the people via a series of mass organisations it set up, for youth, for women and for workers. One of the things these organisations were strongly encouraged to do was to set up kinet groups which would provide entertainment for national celebratory days and perform simple agitprop-style short plays to inform the people of government policies. Groups were intended to be supported by arts graduates employed on a very poorly resourced Rural Arts Programme7. In 1987 the representative of the Ministry of Culture in the relatively small region of Arsi claimed that he had thirteen hundred kinet groups registered (Plastow 1988, 12). Even given that many of these probably had little more than a titular existence it is undoubtedly somewhat ironically true that it was the philistine Derg that led to performance culture gaining state support in villages across the empire, even though much of this amounted to little more than promoting performances of local ethnic dance and music for state-sponsored days of celebration. Many of the Cultural Officers charged with promoting arts in the regions were starved of resources, though there were exceptions.

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Yet Nora was one such example, a model village heavily supported by the Derg in Gojjam region to illustrate the potential of farmers’ cooperatives. In 1987 a young theatre graduate, Ephraim Bekele, was sent to the community to work for six months developing amateur theatre as part of the Rural Arts Programme. I was the sole foreigner present at the opening performance which formed the centre-piece of a high-level event for hundreds of government cadres, followed by the most extravagant feast I have ever attended8. The village chairman had suggested ‘a play that would praise the revolution and mention the success of his leadership’ (Aboneh Ashegrie 1996, 37). However, Ephraim had ignored this guidance and created a piece, Ye Inbuay Kaab (Thorn Apple Pie), discussing the social problems the actors identified as infesting their community, particularly those of drunkenness and wife-beating. The resulting, beautifully acted and conceived, production cannot have been to the taste of the elite who politely applauded, but it was ecstatically received by villagers moved to tears, including the chairman who told me, ‘This is our life’. (Plastow 1998, 107–8) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3  Image from Ye Inbuay Kaab (Thorn Apple Pie) as performed by the community in the model village of Yet Nora. December 1987. (Source: Photo by the author.)

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Elsewhere the Derg also sought to press pre-existing groups into service, sometimes with similarly ambiguous results. My evidence here comes from Eritrea, where a number of theatre professionals were coerced into putting on productions in support of the Derg. One of these was Solomon Gebreghzier, who by the early 1970s was well known in theatre circles in Asmara, having worked on various shows with Almayehu Kahasai and Ma.Te.A. In 1973 Solomon put on a play of his own, Uninherited Wealth, which played on an allegorical trope widely invoked by Eritrean writers of the time. The play portrayed a mother (Eritrea) with nine children (symbolic of the nine ethnic groups in the country) who was forced into an arranged marriage where she suffered for many years before her children murdered their father. In the subsequent trial they plead self-defence. As with other allegorical writers Solomon hoped to conceal his message from the Ethiopian authorities while encouraging his fellow Eritreans to support the independence cause. He was already used to conflict with the Amhara authorities. In an interview describing his work under Haile Selassie he explained: There were political songs and theatres always, but they had to be performed on the theme of love or of admiring the beauty of nature. We were always being thrown in prison, the prison was like a second home to us. We were visiting there all the time, once or twice a week sometimes. Whenever we performed they would call us and remove us for it. (Interview with Solomon Gebreghzier. Asmara, September 1995)

The tone here is of almost gamesmanship. The Eritrean nationalists, like the radical playwrights in Addis Ababa, seek to outwit the Ethiopian censors and accept the inconvenience of regular short arrests as a price they are willing to pay. However, gradually the tone of the censors changed. Uninherited Wealth was very popular and Solomon took it on tour. He was in Decemhare, not far from the capital, when he says an informant betrayed the true meaning of his play. As a result he was arrested and all his papers were confiscated and burnt. For a while no Tigrinya play was allowed. Then the Derg came to power. As in Addis Ababa, the censorship process was initially in disarray and Solomon sought to take advantage of this by re-staging his play in 1974 at Cinema Asmara. Unfortunately for him while the play was showing Eritrean guerrilla fighters attacked an Ethiopian air base in Asmara9. Solomon claimed 2000 people were squeezed inside

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(Plastow 1997a, b, 153). The audience was threatened. Many suspected dissidents were arrested. Solomon was taken to the edge of the city, where in a field his captors shot him and left him for dead. In fact he had only fainted and managed to get to a house where they took him to hospital and found he had been hit by 24 bullets. The Derg was evidently working according to an entirely different rulebook from that used by Haile Selassie. They went on to close Ma.Te.A., claiming that it owed taxes it could not pay and then seizing its property in recompense. Independent urban theatre came to a standstill. A year later the Derg was back with a new theatre strategy. Ma.Te.A. members were ordered to reconvene and to now start producing work in support of the state, operating as the renamed Eritrean Provincial Cultural Assembly. When he had recovered sufficiently Solomon sought to lie low by taking a teaching job in the southern coastal port of Assab, but the Derg found him and ordered him to establish the Red Sea Theatre Group. In all major towns the authorities sought to create such companies. It may seem peculiar that the government would employ known subversives to make propaganda for them, but evidently they believed that they could control the outputs tightly enough to serve their purposes. It is also interesting that they put so much effort into ensuring that the propaganda performances went on even when they knew the actors had no belief in their material. One can only conclude that some high officials were placing significant emphasis on the importance of using the theatre as a major tool of propaganda. In Eritrea at least Solomon argued that the work did little to advance the cause of the Derg. It was part of the government’s policy that theatre associations be established in every town […] It was thought I was a dangerous man who needed to be controlled carefully, but that I would also make a good propaganda weapon. So I prepared everything under strict control, but sometimes I relaxed things a little in Tigrinya. These plays were mostly in favour of Ethiopia, but also I would sneak in some Eritrean politics and people would understand them. (Interview. Asmara, September 1995)

We also know that this pressure to perform for the Derg was one of the drivers that led artists to run away and join the liberation fronts (Plastow 1997a, b, 153–4). Gebrehiwot Haule told me how an attempt to set up a group in the second city of Keren in 1978 led to several young ‘pressed men’ running away to the EPLF (Interview. Keren, September 1995),

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while a few years earlier, in 1975, musicians from Asmara had already fled to the ELF. The Theatre of the Eritrean Liberation Fronts The most complex performance organisation of any liberation army I have heard of in Africa was developed by the EPLF in the mountains surrounding the northern Eritrean town of Nakfa in the 1980s. The engine of that culture was built on experiments that date right back to the late 1960s and were initiated by the prior liberation movement, the ELF. They had sent fighters to China in 1968 for advanced military training. When they returned the trainees reported that the Chinese saw bands as an essential tool of mass mobilisation, and that the ELF could surely similarly use cultural propaganda (Matzke 2003, 139–40). So in 1969 a group was set up, led by Ramadan Gebre from Keren, a man who had worked with Alemayhu Kahasai under British rule and then gone home to set up his own company, Abna Keren (Sons of Keren), in the second city. At first the group was purely musical but before long they were mounting dramas. Civil war between the ELF and EPLF meant cultural work took a back seat between 1972 and 1975, but by 1975, buoyed on both fronts by influxes of recruits from Ma.Te.A. and other professional urban bands, the ELF set up the Eritrean National Theatre and Music Revival Troupe while the EPLF established its first Bahli Wab (Cultural Troupe). At this time both fronts were battling with internal fissures as well as civil struggle. The cultural troupes operated almost exclusively as bands and lacked a real sense of ideology and unity when it came to anything besides the desire to expel the ‘Amhara’ from their land. What would really galvanise the organisation of revolutionary culture, including theatre, was somewhat ironically the Strategic Withdrawal of 1979. Pummelled by the newly invigorated Ethiopian army with its massive USSR support the ELF essentially ceased to be as a fighting force and the EPLF took the radical decision to withdraw from all the large lowland areas it had previously held and to establish itself behind hundreds of miles of trenches in the mountains of the extreme north. By now the leadership of the EPLF had developed their Leninist communist thinking, had become highly organised and crucially, deciding that their struggle was likely to take many years in the face of such strong opponents, they strategised how best to create the new society they sought, invoking the cultural tool as an instrument to be embedded at every level of the

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revolutionary struggle. Solomon Tsehaye, who worked for many years for the Cultural Division, explained the thinking. The EPLF thought that cultural activities, cultural preservation, revitalisation of our cultural values were important to strengthen the Eritrean people’s endeavour to achieve freedom. The entertainment aspect was also taken into consideration. So, in every Platoon, in every fighting force, cultural activities were encouraged. Guidelines were sent out that every person who can contribute to the arts and culture should get involved: as a writer, as a singer, as an actor, as a painter, as a sculptor, whatever. So theatre groups, theatre performances, regardless of their quality and depth, sprouted. Starting from Platoon, you pick the best ones, then from a Battalion, you take the most talented performers to establish Brigade cultural troupe. (Interview in Matzke 2003, 176)

This was the situation in 1979. As time went on the web of cultural activity became ever more elaborated, with at its apex the Central Cultural Troupe which from 1981 garnered the best of tegadelti talent and operated from a semi-permanent headquarters complete with an underground theatre painstakingly dug out of the mountainside over a six-month period by the cultural staff10 (Matzke 2003, 192–3). Many fighters did not choose to become involved in cultural activity, especially at the higher levels that took them away from the frontline. But the EPLF leadership were adamant. All assigned activity in support of the struggle should be accorded equal status and gradually, as actress Tseage Hagos explained: ‘You accepted and adopted the idea because you had been told that it [culture] was part of the struggle’ (Matzke 2003, 178). At the grassroots this came to mean that unless the demands of war prevented it all fighting groups would put together some form of ad hoc entertainment, usually centred on song, for Tuesday nights, prior to the Wednesday ‘day of rest’, decreed so as to break with any apparent adherence to religious (holy) holidays. At higher levels by 1980 full scale, if somewhat rough and ready, variety shows were being mounted. Just under the Central Troupe came the Brigade Troupes; in both cases performers were pretty much full time, resorting to their guns only when a really big offensive by the enemy demanded all person-power be mobilised. The model for these productions was once again the variety show. Performers were required to take on multiple roles and a show might last from three

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to six hours, in the early days lit only by flaring bonfires before generators permitted the stringing of lights and deployment of sound systems. The variety show would remain the ubiquitous model of formal entertainment throughout the decade the EPLF spent in the mountains. Always music was at the heart of the programme; initially more indigenous instruments dominated—the small harp-like kraar, backed by hand drums and possibly the wind instrument, the washint. Over time the bigger troupes acquired more western instruments and the big band sound became very popular. By the mid-1980s these ‘modern’ bands were kitted out in smart two-tone uniforms, often with the lead singer in reversed colours. There was never any lack of song writers and popular singers and propaganda songs were composed in great numbers. Traditional performances were also ubiquitous and as time went on the troupes sought as much as possible to include music and dance from all nine of the Eritrean linguistic groups11. The theatrical elements of these shows gradually grew. Initially what was seen as theatrical performance tended to be a comic skit of the sort popularised back in the 1940s by Alemayehu Kahasai. For many fighters this was what they initially understood theatre to be, while most audience members from rural backgrounds had never encountered the form before and had to be helped to understand what a play might look like. However, during the years of being based in Nakfa, the Cultural Division, led by Alemseged Tesfai, a lawyer who turned his hand first to educational reform and then to leading theatrical development despite no prior experience of the area, made extensive efforts to educate performers and audiences (Matzke 2003, 192–5) (Fig. 4). Alemseged, who wrote the only Eritrean book about theatre, a field-­ manual simply called Drama, in 1983, was a strong advocate of soviet Russian-style socialist realism even if he did not give it that label. In his text he criticises a number of then extant forms. Comedy is seen as problematic primarily because too often it reinforces reactionary stereotypes; symbolism and allegory are suspect because it is difficult to control the meanings audiences might read into them; while propaganda theatre is critiqued because it is often-long, over-didactic, overloaded with multiple messages and rambling. Plays in the field up until this time had always been developed from scenarios but Alemseged sought to promote scripted, realist theatre that combined propaganda with thoughtful discussion of Eritrean society and the aims of the revolution. His thinking was to become enormously influential.

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Fig. 4  An EPLF cultural troupe performs. Note the two-tone outfits with the lead singer in reversed colours to the rest of the group. (Source: Photo from the personal collection of the author.)

The format of performances was fairly uniform in all the Cultural Troupes and was firmly based on the concept of proscenium arch theatre, despite the fact that nearly all these shows were performed in the open air and often in remote or mountainous locations. The theatre companies carried with them—often on camel back in the early years—the means to create a raised stage, usually an arrangement of barrels and planks. Fighter-­ artists would paint a backdrop—either an image of war or a more sentimental evocation of the beauty of Eritrean landscapes. In its latter years the Central Cultural Troupe would put up a flying roof with lights and a backstage area for performers to change in, but this was the exception (Matzke 2003, 184). Whenever possible all the groups showed devotion to the idea of theatre curtains, frequently going to considerable lengths to rig up red curtains that could be opened and closed by offstage rope arrangements. There was generally little set and few props, but more effort was put into costume; not only did bands aspire to the kind of outfits common to western big-bands of the 1950s, but for plays considerable ingenuity was exercised in creating realistic clothing and hair. This was no easy

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matter. Posters of tegedelti frequently show both men and women in skimpy shorts and shirts and wearing only rubber sandals. This was not a matter of choice. The EPLF was the poorest of armies, surviving for many years with minimal resources. Some of early uniforms were made out of grain sacks and this also applied to costumes. A particular problem was hair. In contravention of hundreds of years of tradition, women tegadelti cut their hair and then allowed it to grow in a natural Afro. However, many female characters in plays were mothers or rural women who would wear their hair long and braided. Early wigs were sacking dyed with highly toxic battery powder. Leading costume and wig maker, Fatuma Suleiman recalled that: ‘Later, we used cloth for gun cleaning which was made of black thread’ (Matzke 2003, 183). When a time came that they could buy proper wig hair from Sudan and make more realistic creations life became a little easier for a woman who spent much of the 1980s making costumes, but also supplying fighters with home-made uniform items and even fashioning gas masks (Matzke 2003, 183). Throughout the 1980s making performance was serious business for the EPLF. Recognised as playing a major part in boosting morale of both fighters and civilian populations, it made not only war propaganda but also promulgated the ideological teaching of the EPLF, castigating the old feudal dispensation and most particularly challenging the oppressive structures of society for women. In an army where a third of the combatants were female it was seen as essential to re-value women as important and active participants in the liberation struggle. The larger cultural troupes came to spend much of their time on tour, performing to audiences that might vary from a few hundred to several thousand at major EPLF gatherings. Matzke discusses a tour of Brigade 23 Cultural Troupe—a renowned company—that extended for eighteen months between 1981 and 1983 and saw the group cover some 4000 kilometres (2003, 185–9). They travelled carrying weapons because they passed through both semi-liberated and enemy-occupied zones and used pack camels to carry their equipment, moving for the most part only at night. In support of fellow Ethiopian Tigre liberation fighters, the group even carried their performance into the Tigrinya-speaking north of Ethiopia. At the time civilian morale was low because in 1982 the Ethiopians launched a massive sixth of seven concerted efforts they made to destroy the liberation front, utilising gas and napalm as well as a huge propaganda campaign against many ordinary Eritreans while simultaneously sending in three waves of troops to smash on the slopes of the EPLF mountain defences (Araya Tseggai

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1988, 81). The Brigade 23 Troupe put on over sixty shows during their tour, deliberately spending time in the communities they would perform for, finding out about peoples’ lives and including swiftly created songs, poetry or even short sketches in the show so that the audience could identify with the fighters, the struggle and the show. Other tours by various troupes frequently went into Sudan where a large Eritrean diaspora had fled the fighting, and by the late 1980s groups were being flown out to the more widely dispersed Eritrean diaspora that was a crucial source of finance to fund the war. Groups went several times to Italy, but later also to communities in the USA. The story of the EPLF Cultural Troupes is extraordinary enough, but what is, I think, unique, is the extent to which supporting groups also created significant troupes, some of which were recognised as playing a highly important propaganda role. The most well-known of these were probably the childrens’ groups, Keyahti Embaba (The Red Flowers), and the all-­ female troupe Bana Harnet (Rays of Liberation), composed of civilian women, some wives of fighters and some displaced by war, who lived up in the mountains as internal refugees. Keyahti Embaba dated back to before the Strategic Withdrawal and were a product of the revolutionary schools the EPLF had established in liberated areas. The idea originated in the first such school in 1977 where two teachers, Alemseged Tesfai, mentioned above and Tsega Gaim, started using song and poetry to help teach children for lack of sufficient formal materials. They then came up with the idea of making a performance group from the most talented children and wrote poems and songs while devising ‘short didactic sketches on education, illiteracy and Eritrea’s future’ (Matzke 2003, 173). When the group, which included children as young as seven and eight, started public performances people were deeply moved. Nothing like this had ever been seen in Eritrea before and the children were huge motivators and symbols of hope. As more schools opened they too wanted their own performance troupes and all these groups were known as Keyahti Embaba. With the Strategic Withdrawal many Keyahti Embaba fled north with the fighters. When they reassembled ambitious plans were made to teach some of the children formally on modern instruments and the new group of forty-plus young people featured a full big band. The Red Flowers were once more an important tool of propaganda, making a huge tour in 1982–83 of all liberated areas before many were killed in surprise attack on the town of Halhal where they just happened to be at the time. As they grew up Keyahti Embaba joined the fighting forces, with some moving on

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to adult Cultural Troupes, while new children were given musical educations at the revolutionary school behind the EPLF lines. Bana Harnet grew out the first of the EPLF-run refugee camps, Camp Solomuna, inhabited by women, children and the elderly displaced by war and, perforce, mainly run by women. As elsewhere this group had engaged in informal cultural activity since the camp was first set up in 1975, but the 30+ strong Bana Harnet was established only in 1983; its motivation being ‘having an all-women’s band [though] its aim was like that of any other cultural troupe, namely to play its role against Ethiopian colonisation’ (Akberet Feshaye, Bana Harnetkraar player, as quoted in Matzke 2003, 246). The group really took off from 1985 when it was assigned a tegedalai who had attended the revolutionary music school. Atsede Mesfin ran musical training six hours a day for her women, who then went on to academic classes. The group ranged in age from their twenties to sixties and was revolutionary in that being seen as ‘mothers’ these women were socially expected to be purely domestic beings. Their work was enormously popular for they brilliantly embodied both the emancipation of women—through performing in public—and the continuation of culture, appearing in traditional dress and framing themselves as unthreatening and nurturing. Atsede Mesfin explains the composition of a Bana Harnet performance. If we had 25 songs there would be one drama and one comical skit. Since the group was made up of women they took on male roles whenever a play required. […] there was no need to call male actors from outside. It was really attractive and interesting. (In Matzke 2003, 248)

Other groups included a troupe of disabled fighters, a medical performance group (Matzke 2004, 26–40) and, perhaps most extraordinarily, a troupe of Ethiopian prisoners of war, who, having the opposite problem to Bana Harnet, performed their plays with men in drag for all female roles. Drama was also important on the radio. The EPLF station, Dimtsi Hafash (The Voice of the Masses) was a crucial propaganda tool. Weekly drama programmes like ‘The Sweet Nun’ were enormously popular. The conceit was that the nun in question travelled the country and reported on the strength of morale in the Eritrean population, discussed military victories and advocated for EPLF social programmes such as education and women’s emancipation. Unusually since nearly all live drama was scripted

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by men, the major writer of these radio dramas was a female journalist, Manna Kidane, who also played the part of the travelling nun and got many encouraging letters and gifts from fans who believed she really was the character she incarnated. (Solomon Dirar 2003, 22). Three Plays from the EPLF EPLF collective ideology sought to eschew individual ownership, even of intellectual and creative property, so most plays were not ascribed to anything other than the Cultural Troupe from which they emanated. Over time this ruling was gradually relaxed and of course a little research allows one to find out who wrote which key works. Matzke lists eleven EPLF plays in her 2003 thesis (291). This is a far from comprehensive list and does not attempt to engage with the many shorts skits troupes at all levels were regularly producing. Here I am going to briefly look at three texts, two of which I have also seen in production, to show something of the range of both form and subject matter in EPLF productions. The first play, Kemsie Ntezechrewn Nehru (If It Had Been Like This), was an early work, created in 1980 by Afewerki Abraha specifically for the 8th March, International Women’s Day (Plastow and Tsehaye 1998, 38). Afewerki came from the renowned Brigade 23 Cultural Troupe. Like the other writers I discuss he was exceptionally highly educated, holding an MA in chemistry from Russia, from whence he made his way to the EPLF in 1975. His exceptional level of report writing was noted and he was seconded to cultural activities, where he wrote plays and poetry and performed as the Troupe’s Master of Ceremonies. This background is not unusual for EPLF cultural figures. They had no trained artists and in interviews people often speak of learning through ‘trial and error’. What theatre knowledge did exist was either from western sources via education, from contact with Ethiopian theatre or from the era of Alemayehu Kahasai and slapstick comedy. Hence it is that EPLF theatre, while it celebrated both indigenous cultural forms and ‘modern’, or more western, music and theatre modes of production, never came to put them together in any form of ‘total’ performance. Kemsie Ntezechrewn Nehru worked by combining the popular farce tradition with the urgent, radically new message promulgated by the EPLF, with its one-third of frontline fighters being women, that women now had rights and domestic abuse could no longer be tolerated. It was a play low on plot but high on breaking cultural barriers. The central premise was

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that the audience were introduced to a domestic set up that looked identical to patriarchal urban Eritrean society, except that here women and men had reversed roles. In Kemsie Ntezechrewn Nehru the woman works, drinks and bears illegitimate children as of right, while the husband takes on all the domestic roles. Afewerki pulled no punches. He showed women beating men, made grandmothers community leaders, silenced male participation in decision making and named children after female forebears. The pill was only sweetened through the use of comedy. Husband and wife were deliberately contrasted, with a small woman and an exceptionally tall man so that the beating scene, for example, provoked howls of laughter as this giant cowered before his tiny wife. Similarly, the neighbouring husbands acted as a kind of twittering chorus, meeting over coffee to discuss the relative kindness or abuse handed out by their wives. No explanation was given for where or how this society came to be— Afewerki simply introduced his play by asking the audience ‘If it was like this…?’and letting events unfold. What he sought, of course, was to expose not only the injustice but also the absurdity of gendered inequalities. He said he was particularly provoked to write the play by hearing conservative women colluding in maintaining the very system that oppressed them (Interview. Asmara, July 1997). He wanted to use his play as a radical jolt to established thinking. In this he succeeded. The play toured for two years and everyone wanted to see it. Even in the 1990s many recalled it as a sensational drama. But watching was not always an easy experience for audiences. Afewerki said in any given performance there were in fact two plays going on, one on stage and one among stunned audiences. Fighters would have been somewhat prepared by the pro-women education programmes of the EPLF, but for civilian audiences the society portrayed was so inconceivably alien that laughter was mixed with profound unease. In rural areas both men and women commonly upbraided the actors for so vilely transgressing gendered norms. Some found the play incomprehensible and suggested it might be reflecting life in Europe or in outer space! Others latched on to the most obvious critique and simply said it was a play opposing domestic violence (Plastow and Tsehaye 1998, 41). The play offers no resolution. Audiences were left to debate and discuss whatever they made of it. The second piece I have chosen is undoubtedly the most famous of all the EPLF plays. Eti Kal’a Quinat (The Other War) was written by Alemseged Tesfai in 1984 for performance by the Central Cultural Troupe12. It was third play he wrote between 1981 and 1984, and like his

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first, Luul (Luul), it focuses on the situation of women living in the capital, Asmara (Plastow 1999, 57). In form Eti Kal’a Quinat is very much a well-made play, with five short acts and a running time of around an hour. It tells the story of Letiyesus, an Asmara widow and her family as they make choices and struggle to survive in the context of liberation war and enemy occupation. Letiyesus has two children: a son who we never meet, Mikael, fighting with the liberation forces and a daughter, Astier, who at the beginning of the play has returned to her mother’s house after many years living in the Ethiopian capital. Astier has not returned alone. She brings with her a teenage daughter from an early, forced marriage to an older Eritrean, a baby son and his father, an Ethiopian government man called Assefa, whom she has married for love. Letiyesus is delighted to see her granddaughter but has no time for either her daughter or her half-Ethiopian grandson, and while Assefa seeks to ingratiate himself, Letiyesus can barely bring herself to acknowledge him. The sophistication of this play lies in the multiple levels of guilt and responsibility it exposes. Letiyesus is an attractive figure, motherly, devout and just back from a visit to her son in the liberated areas, but because Astier has married the ‘enemy’ she is as stone to her daughter and abusive towards the innocent child brought into her house. What is more we learn that when Astier was herself little more than a child her parents compelled her into marriage with an older Eritrean just because of his relative status and wealth. They then ignored her pleas for their help when he was drunk and abusive, repeatedly raping his young wife. Astier: You married me off to Zecharias. That’s when you lost me. Yes, Mother, you and father gave me to a drunkard, just because his parents had money and some fancy titles. […………….] I spent my youth lying in bed, crying endlessly, waiting for him to come back drunk and use or misuse me, as he saw fit. […] Zecharias locked me behind bars, Assefa opened the door and my eyes to the world. My heart was full of hatred, Assefa filled it with love. I was ignorant, today I am a chairwoman. […] Now, what do you have to say? Who are my people? You or them? (As published in Two Weeks in the Trenches. Act 2. 183) So far all the justice seems on Astier’s side. But then we find that she has become a hard, vengeful woman, happy to fine or imprison Eritreans for

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Fig. 5  Image from the filmed version of Alemseged Tesfai’s Eti Kal’a Quinat (The Other War). Solomie talks to her grandmother, Letiyesus

minor infractions of Derg rules. We also find that Assefa’s fine words have all been part of a plot to lull Letiyesus into betraying the whereabouts of the tegadelti. When the Ethiopian forces fail in a major offensive against the EPLF Assefa turns really nasty, threatening his mother-in-law with a pistol and demanding she confess her links to the ‘terrorists’ (Fig. 5). Letiyesus decides to flee to the liberated areas taking her ‘pure’ Eritrean granddaughter, Solomie, with her. Unlike her grandmother Solomie adores her baby half-brother and begs for him to be taken too. This child is central to the play. Assefa has named his son Kitaw, meaning ‘Punish Them’. Here Alemseged is drawing on real experience. As a young man he had taken his law degree at Addis Ababa University and then worked for the government for a short while. As part of his job he accompanied a minister to the southern Somali ethnic regions where he was profoundly shocked to hear discussion of encouraging Ethiopian forces to impregnate local women in order to ‘breed out’ their Somaliness. Later he would find the same tactics being used in relation to Eritrea (Plastow and Tsehaye 1998, 58). However, in Eti Kal’a Quinat Letiyesus turns the child-­ weapon against his Ethiopian father. Not out of love, but in order to hurt

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the father and her traitor daughter, she will take the baby with her and she will rename him Awet (Victory). This she does and at the conclusion we see Assefa and Astier driven apart, with Assefa wrongly believing his wife to be in league with her family and turning his gun on her as we hear via the radio that Letiyesus, Solomie and Awet have won through to join the tegadelti. While external readers and audiences may feel ambivalent about the using of a baby by both sides and may see Letiyesus as unacceptably harsh towards her daughter, Eritrean audiences were unequivocally on the side of the grandmother in her choice to flee with the child. Interestingly Alemseged says some of his peers did not want him to bring up the issue of Astier’s parents having imposed an early forced marriage on her, even though this was widespread practice in feudal Eritrea. They wanted a more straight-forward, propagandistic play, but the playwright resisted and the more nuanced text was toured for a year before later being filmed so that it could reach even wider audiences (Plastow 1999, 25). What is also notable is that the play is entirely centred on women. Assefa is little more than a cipher provoking the drama that takes place between the rich and complex characters of mother, daughter and granddaughter. The final play I consider was never performed in Eritrea and has only been shown and published in English, years after Eritrean liberation had been achieved. Aster was written by Esaias Tseggai in 2002 in Leeds, UK, as part of a Masters degree submission13. However, it is a version of a Tigrinya language script he wrote in the 1980s after he had spent time recovering from serious injury in the disabled fighters’ camp in Sudan, but which he was not able to stage. Esaias was the son of an Asmara teacher and bookshop owner who went to school from the age of twelve to an American Anglican missionary school in Ethiopia (Plastow 2005a, b, 14). He joined the EPLF when he completed school in 1977, but after a year as a frontline fighter he was severely injured and spent eight months recuperating. Unable to take part in further combat, Esaias was assigned a research job and it was here he began creative writing. In 1982 this led to a transfer to the Central Cultural Troupe, for which he wrote many song lyrics, poems and several plays. Aster is unique amongst plays emanating from the EPLF in that it speaks of despair. In total contradiction to official propaganda Esaias shows what can happen mentally and physically to a severely disabled fighter. In six scenes, over a mere ten pages, the play tells the story of the end of a marriage between the tegedelti lovers, Dawit and Aster.

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It opens with Aster seeking the whereabouts of her husband, lover and platoon leader. Both partners were injured in the same battle but Aster has now recovered and is trying to find out what has become of her husband. We then move to a hospital where Dawit is in a wheelchair. He reveals the central quandary of the play—how can one both love the cause of liberation that demands commitment unto death and the commitment to life involved in loving another person? Dawit:

I know she loved me, but she also loves the cause. She loves them both, do you understand? Can you understand loving both a husband and a war? We are living in a heroic age, Mensur. I loved a fighter girl. But I realise now it is not the right time. You see we cannot make two choices at a time. It is a saying of the heroic age. Mine. I know it is odd, but the heroic age tells me either I should love the war or love Aster. (In Three Eritrean Plays, ed Plastow 2005a, b, 56)

Aster finally reaches her husband in his hospital in the Sudan six months after he has been injured. He is now paraplegic. She has brought their wedding gift from the platoon, but Dawit says he would rather she had brought their child. It turns out that he had wanted her to give birth but she had put it off because she did not want to appear a coward, evading frontline duty. However, she now says she is ready to be a mother. The scenes with Dawit and Aster are juxtaposed against the burgeoning love of two shy young tegadelti who look up to the older couple as heroes. The irony of this is only fully realised in the last scene. Dawit can no longer have sex as he is paralysed from the waist down. Aster desperately proclaims that it doesn’t matter, she still loves him. Dawit also still loves his wife but he hates his new reality and the fact that because of Aster’s earlier choice he will never have a child. His final line is utterly bleak. Aster: I love you. Dawit: I love you too. Don’t make me nervous. We are at the junction of love and hate, Aster, we can’t reconcile them, we are not special. I am empty. I am lost. Ciao14. I love you, but ciao. (Blackout) (63)

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This fundamental questioning of the incompatibility of love and war, of killing and procreation, even of the notion of the hero so central to tegadelti thought, brought about by Esaias’ experiences of being with severely disabled fighters, was utterly antipathetic to the propaganda function of EPLF theatre. Esaias never told me whether he tried to get the play staged in Eritrea or whether he had just written it and put it in a drawer, but the conviction with which he played the role of Dawit in the staging of the play in Leeds made it a riveting and chilling exposition of the despair he had witnessed in Sudan. It is also important that this short play is intensely poetic in its use of heightened language and in the contrasting scenes of the growing and the death of great loves among those who have dedicated their lives to an all-consuming vision of national liberation. Theatre in the Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Somali National Movement (SNM) While the propaganda theatre of the Derg and the Cultural Troupes of the EPLF were by far the most important, organised and extensive utilisations of theatre in the years of convulsion that characterised the period of Marxist military rule, by the mid-1980s no less than twelve of the fourteen Ethiopian regions groups were engaged in armed combat against Amhara domination and both the Somali National Movement and the Tigre People’s Liberation Front created variety troupes for propaganda purposes. Research into these performance histories has been minimal and I have only been able to scratch the surface in conducting interviews for this book. For information on the SNM, see Chapter 1. The TPLF, which operated from northern Ethiopia as it sought to overthrow the Derg, eventually successfully replaced it with a Tigre-led government, but often had a fraught relationship with the EPLF. On many occasions the groups collaborated, sharing military, ideological and cultural plans and ideas. In the Tigre capital of Mekelle informants agreed that it was the EPLF who in the early days inspired and demonstrated to the TPLF a model for cultural troupes which they borrowed for their own use. (Interview, Abraha Tadesse. Mekelle, March, 2016). EPLF groups on several occasions toured to TPLF areas—the lack of linguistic barriers being a significant factor. The Tigrayan forces had a central cultural troupe, now diminished to a Police Band, which worked in a manner closely analogous to that of the parallel EPLF group, but my detailed information is minimal. Apparently

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the most popular form of theatre was musical and I was told of a particularly popular play Etemerat (That Land), by one Iyazu Berhe, but this is an area that cries out for more local investigation.

The Theatre Arts Department The Theatre Arts Department of Addis Ababa University, the first long-­ term theatre training institution in either Ethiopia or Eritrea, has been enormously influential since its inception in 1978, with nearly all contemporary leaders in the field having studied there. The birth of the department was not without its problems. A key supporter was Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin who was expected to be the founding chairman. I was unable to find out just why Tsegaye withdrew at the last minute, though it would not be unreasonable to imagine it was to do with disagreements about control and possibly about workload and money. Nonetheless there was then a void since so few Ethiopians had any academic credentials in the area. As a result the first chairman was an elderly New Zealander, Haydn George, who had been teaching English at the University for many years, but had a very old qualification from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama (Interview. Addis Ababa, October 1987). He had no Amharic and would specialise in elocution and stage make up! George was joined by Haimanot Alemu and Tesfaye Gessesse who both agreed to work on a part-time basis, but it was evident that local expertise was lacking for academic theatre study. As a result over the next decade there would be a succession of expatriate staff up until the early 1990s, each of whom stayed for between two and four years. The majority were British but the most significant was the South African, Robert McLaren, who taught between 1980 and 1984. It is interesting that at no point was there any discussion of approaching the by then plentiful Black African departments of the continent; indeed very little non-Ethiopian African theatre has been taught or shown in the country. The tragedy of Ethiopian racism towards the blacker inhabitants of the continent has long flourished and precluded any desire to share learning across the continent15. None of the expatriate staff had any previous knowledge of Ethiopia and the Ethiopians had little up to date knowledge of contemporary Western theatre practice, so creating an appropriate curriculum was always going to be a tricky matter. After the first few years any plans to put on work in English were dropped and all plays have subsequently been performed in Amharic16. The department benefitted greatly when in 1980 it

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was given the theatre in the state-requisitioned former German International School. The key appointment in forging an identity for the Department was that of Robert McLaren. McLaren was a South African Marxist who had put on much anti-apartheid devised theatre at home, before writing his PhD at Leeds University in the UK17. He at least knew much about other African and radical contexts and he learned fluent Amharic within a very few months. His cornerstones in developing the curriculum were, firstly, that the course would gradually widen out from an Ethiopian focus to encompass Western plays and theories—there was supposed to be an African stage in the middle but this was less popular and quickly largely discontinued. Secondly, there would be an extensive amount of practical work and, finally, popular culture would be seen as important in teaching and learning. The first two areas have remained central. Embracing popular culture was much more challenging for hierarchical Ethiopians. The British Peter Harrop sought to support McLaren’s aims by introducing a senior paper that required students to research their local cultures; and he began some more anthropological theatre work with the first junior local staff member, Aboneh Ashegrie18. However, when McLaren wanted the University to employ a teacher of Ethiopian dance the authorities were adamant that he needed to hold a degree, something which no professional dancer had (Plastow 1996, 210). This holding of the academic line was also instanced when the South African tried to set up a diploma course so that professional actors could get some academic training. When I went to teach in the Department in 1984 and ran a course adapting folktales and taking them into the community, I was encouraged, but no local staff member wanted to get involved or take on the work which lapsed after I left (Fig. 6). What did begin to slowly gain acceptance was the idea of more active involvement in all aspects of theatre making. Getting students to embrace more active acting styles was one challenge, as opposed to striking grand poses and making declamatory speeches. It was also ground-breaking to expect students to undertake backstage roles. These had usually been delegated to inferior technical staff and there was minimal knowledge of, or interest in, stage design, lighting and sound; indeed the technical equipment in the theatres was sadly dilapidated and could do little more than offer a general state of lighting. An interesting convention that arose as a result and continues to the time of writing was that major characters are

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Fig. 6  Image from Addis Ababa University student production of an adapted folk story, The Thief and The Chair on tour to local primary schools. 1986. (Source: Photo by the author.)

often picked out with follow-spots to ensure both audience attention and that they can be properly seen. Where students were often enthusiastic was in relation to playwriting. This had long been a respected and profitable occupation and the Department has nourished a number of important playwrights right from its early years. Here the cross fertilisation of employing leading local playwrights—Tesfaye Gessesse was followed by Mengistu Lemma who offered generous support to students on playwriting courses— and study of leading international figures, began to pay off as new voices and styles of writing slowly emerged. In its early days the Department had few students and low status. Both acting and backstage work were seen as being hugely inferior occupations. Indeed, in the 1980s there were problems in recruiting students. On applying to the University students were asked to list a number of preferences of subjects to possibly study. When I enquired in the mid-1980s I found many of those allocated Theatre Studies had put it last on a list of possible preferences. An average year would have around twenty students but only a handful really wanted to be there. The problem was exacerbated for female students. As throughout the continent a woman on stage

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was until very recently seen as little better than a prostitute. I had female students who never told their parents they were studying theatre until the time came to graduate because they knew they would never accept their daughter’s choice. Throughout the 1980s the Department gradually Africanised. Students with top grades were taken on as junior lecturers and by the 1990s, as the subject grew in popularity, it had become an entirely Ethiopian concern. The Influence of the Theatre Studies Department on Directing, Playwriting and Acting In the 1980s all University students were guaranteed government employment on graduation. This meant that from 1981 a new elite group began to permeate the profession. At first this was just a trickle. All the theatre houses with the exception of Abate Mekuria’s City Hall began to take on both graduate actors and directors. Abate stubbornly resisted throughout the 1980s. His staff told me that he had a particularly dictatorial style of both direction and running his theatre; he was also partial to making use of the casting couch, so employing young educated people was seen as a threat to his undisputed control and pleasure. The introduction of the new graduates was not a comfortable process. As discussed above many young directors were intensely frustrated that they were shut out from working on significant productions, often only being allowed the very occasional one-acter for many years (Interview, Bekele Tafara. Addis Ababa, October, 1987). Moreover, when they tried to introduce new directing styles that were more participatory than the old way, which was generally simply a read through followed by a few weeks of occasional run throughs with the director shouting instructions as took his fancy (they were all male), they were met with resistance both from performers who wanted nothing new and from management who resisted the idea of a longer rehearsal process. Performers were also difficult to assimilate. The older, generally less-educated actors, were used to being seen as mere tools of production. When I interviewed her in 1987, veteran actress Zenebech Tesfaye had been working at the National Theatre for nearly forty years. Throughout that time she repeatedly and only played the role of a maid. She found this neither problematic nor strange (Interview. Addis Ababa, August 1992). Actors wages may have been poor but they often had to do little to earn their money other than

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obey their bosses. Over-staffing meant performers were often under-­ employed and the new recruits complained that older actors were reluctant to take on new styles of working, new responsibilities or longer, more involved rehearsal processes. In contrast the older staff saw the new graduates as arrogant and elitist, seeking to boss their elders and impose their thinking on them. Negotiations and change were often slow and painful. Western tutors in the 1980s generally promoted more realist acting styles than the often highly stereotypical, exaggerated modes previously favoured. In particular whenever a major piece of rhetorical speech was approaching heroic characters had had a tendency to strike a pose and declaim—often to the immense satisfaction of the audience who sometimes demanded a reprise. Such presentational and often melodramatic acting styles are widespread not just in Ethiopia but can be seen to varying degrees transnationally across East Africa. I think it is important to avoid any suggestion that such a statement might be seen as pejoratively judgemental. The sophisticated poetic styles that have been the indigenous bedrock of much local language, African theatre have often included declamatory styles—heroic recitation as practised in many of the Great Lakes societies being the most obvious example19. These styles are deeply rooted and widely popular, as indeed they have been across the globe in many eras; one only needs to look back to the mid-twentieth century acclaim given to Laurence Olivier’s melodramatic acting of Shakespeare for a recent European example20. It is also important that we recognise that the tendency towards naturalism tends to go along with an introspective focus on the complex individual psyche as privileged in the majority of modern Eurocentric theatre. This is not the case in many more communalist societies—or indeed in much political theatre (think only of the work of Bertolt Brecht). Here instead of a focus on the individual, the playwright and audience are more interested in representative types. They are also less interested in nuanced portrayals of complex internal angst than in the outcomes of battles between vice and virtue or between a progressive or regressive political attitude. Hence acting styles which are often outward looking and presentational and which seek to leave no doubt in the audience’s mind as to who represents good or evil. A problem arises when it appears actors are deliberately playing for populist appeal above all other considerations, or when they fail to recognise the mode in which they are playing as being of a particular style. Certainly, when I was teaching in Addis Ababa in the mid-1980s this was a difficulty.

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Students claimed what they did was realistic or naturalistic acting when to my eyes it was evidently tending towards the melodramatic and presentational, but for lack of previous teaching relating to acting styles this was sometimes a difficult, even heated, locus of debate. More recently one can still see a range of acting modes on the Ethiopian stage. Writing in 2010 both Grit Koppen and Aron Yeshitila saw the majority of Ethiopian acting as exaggerated. Koppen speaks of ‘Addis Ababa melodramas’ seeking ‘to win over the audience with elements of slapstick, over-exaggerated gestures and facial expressions bordering on the grotesque’ (27); while Aron Yeshitila says ‘comedy is mostly slapstick, featuring cliched comic characters’ (32). However, both agree that certain directors—they mention Getenet Eneyew and Manyazewal Endeshaw by name—encourage actors to work against this trend. Broadly the division goes back, as it did in the 1940s, to a question of whether the major concern is pleasing a populist audience at all costs in order to make the largest possible income from any given play, or if playwright and director are more concerned with making great art and important political or philosophical observations. In both cases the word rather than the acting will be the driving force behind the drama and the acting is likely to be somewhat heightened, but the difference in degree of that heightening is marked from production to production.

Contemporary Ethiopia and Eritrea Since 1991, though both nations said they were going to set up multi-­party, democratic states, both have been run exclusively by the organisations that won their respective liberation struggles, now turned into governing parties; in the case of Eritrea the Eritrean People’s Revolutionary Front (EPRF) became the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), while in Ethiopia the TPLF transmuted into the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The latter began by talking big talk about democratisation and allowed other parties to form with whom they said they intended to work in alliance, but this lasted only a very few years. Elections have been held every five years, but by 2000 opposition politicians were suffering significant harassment and elections processes were being manipulated so that the EPRDF won 88% of the vote (Vaughan 2015, 301). The EPRDF then put massive efforts into boosting its recruitment after relatively poor poll showings in 2005 so that it attained an alleged membership of six million (304). In Eritrea much effort was put in immediately after

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liberation to drafting and publicising a carefully thought out progressive constitution. That constitution has never been promulgated, and in both countries for much of the time there has been extremely poor separation of state and party, with power being held increasingly in the hands of the president—in Ethiopia until his death in 2012 by Meles Zenawi and in Eritrea by Issayas Afewerki, both previous war leaders21. These cousin countries, with overlapping Tigrinya (Tigrigna) speaking populations, a history of mutual support in running their liberation struggles and at least in the highlands an ancient linked history of religion and feudal organisation, have in other ways radically diverged and so argued that between 1998 and 2000 they ended up fighting a border war, hugely costly in lives and money, over an insignificant area of land around the village of Badme, which remained substantially unresolved until 201822. Prunier argues, in a line of reasoning that many others broadly agree with, that the falling out occurred largely because of the arrogance and misconception of Issayas Afewerki that post-independence Eritrea should be the senior partner in any transnational dealings (2015a, b, 250–1). Under colonial rule, Eritrea had been far more developed industrially, educationally and politically than Ethiopia. Moreover, the Eritreans had begun their liberation struggle fourteen years before the TPLF started operations and had substantially aided and tutored those they saw as their ‘little brothers’ in developing an effective guerrilla army and socialist revolutionary organisation. However, given the relative sizes of the nations23 and the much greater geo-political significance of Ethiopia, Issayas’ understanding was always going to be fallacious. One has also to take into account that, despite a UN-validated poll that showed 99.8% of Eritreans voting for independence, very many Ethiopians found it almost impossible to accept that their northern neighbours either wanted to or had the right to secede from their almost sacred idea of Greater Ethiopia24. The reality of the nations’ differing clout was concretely demonstrated monetarily when in 1998 Eritrea, which had up until that time been using a common currency with Ethiopia, decided to set up its own currency, the Nakfa, which contrary to Issayas’ expectations rapidly devalued relative to the Ethiopian Birr. With considerable international backing and a national policy geared to development, first of agriculture and more recently of business and the cities, Ethiopia has powered ahead economically. The national policy of ethnic federalism has led to much argument and bitter disputes between ethnic groupings over relative power, status and rights to independent decision making; the economy has continued to be massively controlled

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by a state which distrusts market forces and real democracy, but government policies have substantially decentralised power and sought successfully—albeit with many hiccups—to benefit a huge and growing population economically and in the provision of services such as education, health care and infrastructure. The accuracy of government figures that regularly report growth rates of around 10% per annum might be disputed but all agree that economic growth has been almost uniquely and continuously high compared to any other nation in Africa, leading in 2007 to Ethiopia being declared a middle income nation (Lefort 2015, 357–8). In contrast Eritrea has stagnated and become a country paralysed by rigid state control. Up until the 1998 border war the state was relatively liberal with substantial numbers of diaspora Eritreans returning in the hope of a bright future. However, Issayas and his cabal took the opportunity of national crisis to impose a military draft that has since been expanded to effectively turn Eritreans into a state slave force. From an initial period of eighteen months that combined military and civil national service for eighteen-year-olds and was generally willingly accepted to rebuild a ravaged nation, the state expanded the time it could extort service to include all citizens aged from eighteen to forty. During this time one can be directed to any service on derisory wages, and as result at least half a million out of a total population of around six and a half million have chosen to take the huge risks entailed in fleeing the country in search of any kind of self-determined future. Despite the recent opening of much vaunted mining operations and attempts at large-scale state agricultural enterprises in the west of the country Eritrea has become a state almost entirely dependent on remittances from citizens living abroad from whom money is often extorted in fear of reprisals against family members still at home (Gaim Kibreab 2017).

Theatre Under the EPRDF The Addis Ababa theatre scene under the EPRDF has come to be dominated by populist comedies, such that at one point in 2012 all nine shows being played in repertory at the Hagar Fikir Theatre were comic as were five out of six plays at the National Theatre (Lealem Berhanu and Mahlet Solomon 2012a, unpaginated). Theatre professionals and intellectuals commonly bemoan this situation, but there are a number of reasons that explain it. Firstly, there have been on-going tensions between the EPRDF government and the Amhara-dominated Addis Ababa theatres. The EPRDF had

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an ambiguous welcome into the capital city. Everyone was happy to see the overthrow of Mengistu’s Derg but the EPRDF was a Tigrayan, not an Amhara organisation and Addis Ababa and the government for hundreds of years had been totally dominated by the Amhara who were wary of losing power. For their part the EPRDF had little interest in the arts unless they were explicitly being utilised for propaganda purposes. After a very short honeymoon period it became clear that the new government would tolerate no political discussion in the theatres of the capital and saw their only use as being a cash cow. Consequently, the EPRDF government expects theatres to maximise profits and the theatres have large wage and building costs to cover, not least because all the main theatre organisations have over a hundred employees, with more than two hundred working at the National Theatre (Aron Yeshitila 2010, 32). Many performers and directors are under-­ employed but once on the state books they continue to draw a salary— albeit a modest one—indefinitely. The demographic for Addis Ababa audiences has long been dominated by young working people, mostly without a higher education. They attend the theatres in large numbers. Queues snaking down the road for a popular production are not uncommon and would be the envy of theatre professionals in most nations. But time and again these audiences have demonstrated that their desire is to be entertained, and Lealem Berhanu and Mahlet Solomon say that ‘the audience would whistle and shout if the play doesn’t incur laughter after a few minutes’ (2012b, unpaginated). An unquantifiable factor that may also have driven the demand for populist drama in the early 1990s was the rise of popular video films. For a while this caused a drop in theatre audiences, from which they have subsequently recovered, possibly by overtly encouraging purely entertainment-based productions (Information from numerous informal conversations). Secondly there is the on-going problem of censorship, both state-­ imposed and self-censorship. The official requirements for plays are vague, including that: ‘the play should reflect valuable (historical, cultural, up-to-­ date, societal, multi-dimensional) subject matter to the society: the theme should address the problems of many people: the play should be in line with the Ethiopian press law: the subject matter should make us think, entertain, enjoy: if is a work of translation; the theme should offer some benefit for Ethiopian audiences’ (Chanyalew Woldegiorgis 2016, 117). Such statements leave plenty of room for interpretation and nervousness about incurring the displeasure of the government means many writers

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self-censor rather than risk a play being rejected (Lealem Berhanu and Mahlet Solomon 2012b). Moreover, before a play can get on stage it has to penetrate multiple levels of state surveillance. Firstly, theatre managers are appointed by the government; those who seek to be innovative in terms of either form or content are not likely to last long. Plays to be performed are then selected by a committee which includes the manager and an official from the Ministry of Culture, which will further reinforce conservatism and conformity. The theatre directors employed by the various theatre houses themselves have no say in the choosing of plays (Koppen 2010, 26). They will be offered a project already selected by the management and the only freedom they have is to reject the job, but since this will mean losing the opportunity to be paid 15% of ticket receipts per performance there is a great incentive not to refuse. Both playwrights and directors have huge financial incentives to put on popular plays, since they know that once a production is in performance it will run for as long as it is profitable. With the playwright pocketing up to 50% of the gate and successful plays being in repertoire not uncommonly for multiple years there is an obvious incentive to pander to populist tastes. Notwithstanding political and public pressures to stick exclusively to light entertainment, many leading professionals have fought for space, with more or less success, for more challenging fare. The immediate aftermath of the overthrow of the Derg was a time of cautious optimism in Addis Ababa. In 1991 the company at City Hall successfully requested the removal of long-term director/dictator Abate Mekuria and he was replaced by Ethiopia’s first female theatre director, the young, feminist, Theatre Arts Department graduate, Jemanesh Solomon. Because she so abhorred the stereotypically negative portrayal of women in so many Ethiopian plays, Jemanesh (see below) turned to uncontroversial Western plays that she saw as containing more interesting roles for women and her first two productions were translations of Agatha Christie’s The Mouse Trap and Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Jemanesh was also a close associate of radical, absurdist theatre director, Manyazewal Endeshaw and together with a small group of like-minded graduates they worked in 1993 on a production of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, a work that baffled the tiny audience group it attracted. Not long after Jemanesh took on the City Hall in 1992, Manyazewal himself accepted the running of the National Theatre on the

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understanding that he would have considerable artistic autonomy. It was not a good experience. It was the worst time of my life. I was wrong. I thought I would create a fertile ground for talented actors to perform, and encourage young writers and directors. But I was mistaken. Honesty and good will alone doesn’t help. There were lots of bureaucratic entanglements of which I had no experience. If I had a chance to live again, I would have cancelled that part. The only things I did in four years were directing Hamlet and Balekabara Baledaba. (Quote from interview in Plastow and Zerihun Berhanu 2017, 130)

A particular point of conflict arose in 1992 when Tsegaye Gebre-­ Medhin wanted the National to put on his latest play, Ha Hu Wayim Pa Pu (ABC to XYZ). This successor to his earlier ‘alphabetical’ plays has as its hero the son of Ha Hu’s protagonist who is a fighter for the EPRDF. The old machinator was evidently seeking to curry favour with the new regime which apparently also valued the support of the country’s leading playwright. In direct contravention of their assurances the Ministry of Culture ordered Manyazewal to find a space for the play. A row ensued with the theatre manager demanding an artistic evaluation of the play which came back with ambiguous findings, his suspension when he refused to schedule the play and an eventual climb down which saw the production go ahead and Manyazewal reinstated, though Pa Pu played to notably weak reviews with many claiming it was unsubtle and that the playwright had lost his poetic brilliance (Plastow 1996, 230–231) This is not to say that there have not been a few attempts to make plays that challenged government, but they have not had good outcomes. A notable example was a play by Getenet Eneyew, one of the earliest Theatre Arts graduates and long time director at the National Theatre (Grit Koppen, 27) when he sought in 2004 to direct Wey Addis Ababa (Oh, Addis Ababa), a play looking at the history of the city and comparing its various administrations. After six months of rehearsals, on the opening night, Getenet was summoned to be told, without any explanation, that the play had been banned (Mahlet Solomon and Plastow 2015, unpaginated). What is clear is that not only is political criticism not tolerated, but critique, discussion and commentary are equally beyond the permitted remit of the state theatres. While not encouraging experiment with form, the government has been less prescriptive in this area. The man commonly associated with the

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most radical breaks from accepted genres of comedy, tragedy, historical drama and the musical is undoubtedly Manyazewal Endeshaw, whose particular interest in the absurd was sparked, he says, by his experiences during the Red Terror when life or death became a matter of terrifyingly arbitrary chance (Plastow and Zerihun Berhanu 2017, 130). Building on a series of earlier experiments with Amharic versions of western absurdist classics in 1998 he made adaptations of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s The Birthday Party with students and colleagues at the Theatre Arts Department. These were televised and then audience members were asked their opinion of the pieces. The lack of comfort or familiarity with any form that blatantly eschewed the realist is demonstrated in that, ‘Most of the viewers had considered the plays a mockery of the audience’ (Aron Yeshitila, 33). Outside Addis Ababa the EPRDF has continued a reinvented version of the Derg Rural Arts Programme. Given the strong commitment to ethnicised devolved rule espoused by the state it was to be expected that a certain amount of money would go into regional cultural groups. It is perhaps more surprising that there seems to have been little drama in other Ethiopian languages resulting from these investments and that most groups remain focused on folk-based kinet forms, performing predominantly as organs of the state for nationalist celebratory occasions. The state has also invested substantially in providing theatre arts training beyond the capital. The first new university theatre department was established in the government’s heartland in the city of Mekelle, complete with a splendid if old-fashioned proscenium arch theatre, and in the twenty-first century this has been followed by some dozen departments in new universities across the country. Many are poorly equipped, have few resources and there is a great lack of suitably qualified instructors given that to my knowledge Ethiopia has only one theatre lecturer anywhere in the country with a PhD, though there has been investment in equipping lecturers with MAs, offered in Addis Ababa for over a decade. My enquiries have not resulted in any information about local language productions emanating from these new universities, most of which are, perforce, staffed by Amhara.

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A Snapshot of Contemporary Ethiopian Theatre: One Week in Addis Ababa Accepting that in Ethiopia theatre making is still defined largely by repertory activity in the large playhouses in the capital, in April 2016, I undertook a survey of the twenty-one plays then showing25. In the chosen week eight plays were being performed at the National Theatre (some are performed as matinees at 11.30 am as opposed to the prime afternoon slot), six at the Municipality, six at the Hagar Fikir (both the Hagar Fikir and the Municipality were showing the same production of A Doll’s House on different days of the week), and one each at the Ghion Hotel and at Adote Cinema. Twelve of the original plays were comedies: there was one historical, one absurdist, two detective and one tragic drama on stage. There were four western plays being put on in Amharic translation/adaptation— Albert Camus’s Caligula; a translation of a Russian play based on Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov called Brother Aloyosha; an adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s early tragedy, The Ermine (Yefikir Meabel) and an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; notably all these are serious plays with at least some tragic elements. This balance of genre and of the local and the international is entirely typical of what has been a norm on the Ethiopian stage for several decades. The only unusual feature in this listing is that with the exception of the production of Caligula none of the plays were revivals. The practice of frequently reviving popular works is unique to Ethiopia among all theatre cultures I have studied for this project. Elsewhere there has been the occasional example, but in Ethiopia it is a regular practice and many theatres will be showing at least one revival in their weekly repertoire. This will often be a Mengistu Lemma or a Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin classic, but more recent plays are also regularly revived and reinterpreted. Amongst Ethiopian theatre lovers there is definitely a canon of ‘great’ plays in a way that simply does not exist elsewhere in the region. This is all the more surprising since only relatively few plays get published; more often directors are working from the playwrights’ manuscripts. However, the phenomenon is largely explained by the fact that Addis Ababa theatre has always been a playwright-led culture. As a literary theatre it is relatively easy to preserve the script so that it can be revived later on, whereas relatively few of the plays I am looking at in Somali or Anglophone East Africa were ever formally scripted in full, making them much more difficult to recuperate in later years.

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The comic form has been hugely popular on the Ethiopian stage since the 1950s and the Hagar Fikir variety kinet shows where audiences demanded a preponderance of comic skits and short plays. Intellectuals and many serious makers of theatre may bemoan the situation but the theatre houses know that their audiences, still majoritatively young adults looking for a fun outing, want above all to be entertained and to laugh. The most popular plays are romantic comedies and most of those on stage in April 2016 came into this category. In demonstration of how such plays can attract significant audiences Elibate (Resolution), by Daniel Mulunehe, had been on stage in weekly repertory on Friday afternoons at the City Hall for two years at the time of the research. Like a number of other productions, Elibate is concerned with diaspora Ethiopians returning to Addis Ababa. It is a one-act play with just four characters. Beza and Luel are a married couple who have been living in Canada. However, Beza has fallen sick and Canadian doctors have been unable to diagnose her illness. Her father and husband arrange to bring her home in the hope of a cure from holy water. What Luel does not know is that Beza has been performing being ill precisely so that she will be taken home where she wants to reunite with her former lover, Samuel. She plans to surprise him on the evening of his birthday. What she, in turn, does not know is that while she has been away Samuel has taken a new fiancée, Bethlehem. On the birthday evening Samuel and Beza meet and make love, but are surprised by Bethlehem, an air hostess. She had told her lover she would be flying on his birthday evening but in fact hides at home to celebrate his ‘special day’. The following morning Luel arrives, looking for his wife. At home he finds only Bethlehem. As they discuss their partners, in an extraordinary act of mutual self-denial, they decide that Samuel and Beza are meant for each other. Samuel feels very badly that he has betrayed his fiancée whom he took up with only when Beza left for Canada without explaining why she was abandoning him. The final twist that brings the original lovers back together is when Beza explains that she married Luel solely because her father had threatened to kill Samuel if she rejected her richer suitor. The twists and turns, reveals and surprises are typical of farce and of the rom-com genre. What is unusual, and possibly one of the enduring reasons for the appeal of the play, is that all the characters are good people and that the trials endured and selflessness of Luel and Bethlehem give great scope for sentimental empathy in the audience alongside the desire for a happy ending. Over many years of conversations with Manyazewal

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Endeshaw, we have discussed his admitted love of sentimental music, theatre and art in general and how this is a strong trope on the Ethiopian stage. I remain unclear as to why this is particularly the case, but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Amhara culture has not traditionally endorsed open discussion of feelings and prizes reserve. The release offered by a vicarious experience of strong emotion may go some way to explaining the revelling in the sentimental. There are a number of plot elements in Elibate that come up again in other comedies. Six other plays feature diaspora characters. In each of these plays the American or Canadian Ethiopians represent the opportunity for riches, but simultaneously they demonstrate an emptiness, particularly a lack of love, that can only be found in Ethiopia. In Mabeda New (I am Going to be Crazy) by Binyamin Worku—performed at the time of research in the prime Sunday afternoon slot at the National Theatre—Teri has come home for the wedding of his friend. It is only in Ethiopia that he finds his true love to take back to the USA. Zekariyase Berihanu’s Yebeale Enegedoch (The Holiday Guest), running at the Hagar Fikir on Saturday afternoons, was even more explicit in that it featured a marriage broker whose main business was finding wives—mostly looking for money—for American Ethiopians looking for love. The Ethiopian diaspora in the USA and Canada is huge, with millions driven abroad by poverty and misrule over many years. The great majority living in Addis Ababa will have friends or family living in the West and it has a great lure. However, we also see in these plays a sense that true happiness and authentic Ethiopian identity can only be found in the homeland, and I would argue that the comedies are one way for citizens to engage with these contradictory anxieties. Interestingly, the recently published first book-length study of Ethiopian cinema, Cine-Ethiopia (2018), includes not only an excellent essay on genre by Michael Thomas that reveals cinema as well as stage is dominated by the trope of romance, but also an analysis of Ethiopian films looking at migration by Alessandro Jedlowski confirming this is a cross-media concern full of stereotypes asserting the moral and cultural superiority—while acknowledging the probable relative poverty—involved in choosing to reject the West and remain in the fatherland. Money anxieties come up not only in relation to ambitions for a life in America. Tewodros Tekele-Aregay wrote Ketedar Balaye (Beyond Marriage), showing on Fridays at the National. In this play Kiberu failed, before the play began, to marry his love, Mehreat, because at the time he was poor. The lurking jealously of the couples’ later spouses provides the

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context for the drama. Sometimes linked to issues of jealousy are male fears about women gaining economic power, alongside some welcome assertions of the rights of women to resist lazy and exploitative male behaviour. Mado Lemado (Parallels) (City Hall, Thursday mornings, by Tigist Alemu), for example, sees a housemaid and her employer gradually reversing their relative status, with the lazy rapist Tarikue ending up as a janitor while the woman he mocked and exploited, Bayushe, secretly studies at night school and somewhat incredibly rises to become Tarikue’s manager. Finally, there were a few non-romantic comedies running. Yebier Seme (The Pen Name) (By Alemayhu Tadessa. National Theatre, Thursday mornings) is centrally about corruption and sexism in the offices of a magazine. Jealously and greed are the most common evils in these plays, while love, endurance and self-sacrifice are the virtues praised. The private, one-­ man show, Eyayu Fungus (Seeing the Fungus) running at Adote Cinema Hall, written by Berekate Belayna and unusually both directed and acted by Girum Zeneba, was more of a satiric shaggy-dog story-telling session. The actor critiqued a whole range of the city’s social problems—from the problems with the new city rail system to unemployment, erratic electricity supply, water problems and even dared to joke that the rich and the government were exploiting and tricking ordinary citizens out of their money. In the post-Derg period a considerable number of both serious and more comic dramas have been performed in translation, often with quite long runs. A number of theatre intellectuals have had a great interest in bringing international drama into the country over many years. The Doll’s House, The Ermine and the Dostoevsky-derived play Brother Aloysha were adaptations rather than simple translations, but Camus’ Caligula was a straight translation. I attended the opening night which was well attended, although filling the cavernous National Theatre is always a challenge. The play fitted well the Ethiopian tendency to love grand speeches. The set was intended to represent imperial Rome, but in a country without specialists in scenic design as usual it was an arrangement of painted flats that could only suggest rather than transport the watcher, while the costumes similarly spoke of intention as opposed to achievement of the authentic. The detective format seems a new one in Ethiopia and is not as yet locally categorised as a recognised genre. However, to an external eye both Kiteltile Kokeboch (A Chain of Stars) (By Wodenahe Kefela, at the National Theatre on Saturday evenings) and Yaleteqoch (Unsolved) (By

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Alemtsehay Ejugu. Hager Fikir, Thursday afternoons) would qualify as detective dramas. The first concerns a group seeking to find evidence about a hospital scam that sees poor citizens being unknowingly operated on to remove kidneys for sale to the rich. Yaleteqoch, though structurally confused is in essence a more classic police drama with a police inspector following a rambling trail to arrest both a rapist and a group of illegal emigration brokers. Both speak to social anxieties and topics of current concern to their metropolitan audiences. Only two playwrights had two productions running in my snapshot week, Tewodros Tekle-Aregay and Manyazewal Endeshaw. Possibly surprisingly Manyazewal’s status has changed over the years from that of a despised enfant terrible to something approaching national treasure. He retains his interest in the absurd and his productions still cause controversy and anxieties about just what they mean, but he admits he has softened from antagonism towards what he saw in the early 1990s as an audience too stupid to understand his work to a position where he is somewhat more willing to try to make his theatre accessible (Plastow and Zerihun Berhanu 2017). Manyazewal’s prime interest is in directing, alongside engaging with a range of international playwrights and reinterpreting their work for Ethiopian consumption. His original absurdist domestic drama, Engida (The Guest), became a major hit for the City Hall Theatre and has been much discussed in newspapers, on radio and television. The play centres around a married couple, who, looking to keep interest in their lives and relationship, invite a succession of ‘guests’ to their house with whom they play an uncomfortable series of mind games. Engida focuses on one such occasion. As the couple toy with their unnamed visitor the audience are left equally disconcerted as to what might constitute any vestige of ‘truth’ in the relationship, discomforted about the lurking mental abuse that seems to characterise their marriage, and questioning about ideas of middle-­class love that are at the centre of so many contemporary Ethiopian plays. At the climax of the one-act piece the couple play a deadly game of Russian roulette (Manyazewal Endeshaw 2017) (Fig. 7). The historical play Ye Qaqe Woredewoti (Qaqe’s Daughter) (National Theatre. Sundays 2 pm) is an interesting exception to the general theatrical fare. As discussed in the previous chapter, historical dramas have long been popular in Ethiopia, especially among intellectuals and playwrights. However, Ye Qaqe Woredewoti is unusually not about Amhara, but Gurage, history26. Written by a man I taught in the mid-1980s in the Theatre Arts

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Fig. 7  Image from 2016 production at the City Hall theatre of Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida (The Guest) (Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Manyazewal Endeshaw.)

Department, Chanyalew Woldegiorgis, the play was commissioned by the Gurage Regional Association and researched by the National Theatre. In April 2016 it had been running for some 15 months. Woredewot lived in the mid-nineteenth century and married a man, Bulcha, whom she freely chose. Hers was a polygamous society, but Woredewot had warned her husband she would not tolerate him taking another wife and is therefore shocked to find he had married two women before her. With the support of her family our heroine forms a movement of women who go to the council of elders and demand that if men can marry more than one woman then wives should be allowed multiple husbands. They also demand the right to divorce on the same terms as their husbands, as previously women leaving a marriage were ritually cursed. The elders are stunned by the strength of the women’s movement and ask for time to come to a judgement. During this period they search desperately for solutions to resolve the problem. Eventually they persuade the reluctant husband to divorce his wife so that, when she comes back to the court, they can dismiss her case on the grounds that since she is not now married the complaint is no longer valid. Woredewot is also stunned to

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find that she is alone at court. All the women who previously supported her have been intimidated or beaten by their spouses and are now too afraid to stand up to patriarchy. The play ends when, after rejecting many suitors, Woredewot finally accepts a man who agrees both to a monogamous marriage and to his wife’s right to seek a divorce if ever she is unhappy in their union. Given the usual stranglehold of Amhara-centric plays on the professional stage Ye Qaqe Woredewoti represented a real moment of innovation—though the play was still given in the Amharic language. Indeed, it led the National Theatre to subsequently take the lead in developing a further play Ye Asha Lij (Asha’s Child) drawing on research into the tiny minority Menit culture27. It was also innovative in terms of form, for with an exceptionally large cast of forty it drew on the music and dance cultures of the Menit people to present a musical spectacular in place of the usual speech-dominated dramas (Zerihun Birehanu 2019. 105–117). The final play in this roster was another private production. All the theatres are occasionally available for private hire, but usually only on less popular early week days, so some more entrepreneurial producers and those who do not have an inside track to get their work accepted for prime slots in the state theatres hire commercial spaces to mount performances. Foremost in a small group of emerging female dramatists is Meaza Worku who wrote the experimental feminist tragedy, Keselameta Gare (Desperate to Fight), performing at the city centre Ghion Hotel on Sunday evenings. Desperate to Fight has a highly unusual production history. It was originally written, in English, as a one-act play for an East African theatre writing competition in 2011. Picked up by the influential Sundance Institute it has since had readings in Kenya and the USA before its first full performance in Sweden in 2012 and subsequent outings in Kenya, Uganda and Germany. The Ethiopian version is a more recent development (Desperate to Fight programme. Undated). The play has just two characters, a woman and a single male actor who plays the three husbands she has divorced. Divorce is not uncommon among the urban population, but here Meaza is examining the problems she perceives women have in finding companionate partners. In flashback she tells her story. Her first husband was a jealous drunkard, the second said shortly after they wed that he no longer loved her and the third was obsessively concerned about controlling her spending. By the end of the play her mother, who is desperate for her daughter to achieve the respectability of a stable marriage, is lining up a new candidate, a man whose wife

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has died leaving him with six children to care for. The conceit of using the same man for all the male roles demonstrates the playwright’s apparent contention that all men are similar in their lack of care for their wives. Innovatively scene changes are indicated through dance interludes expressing both the passing of time and the feelings of the woman. It is surely more than a coincidence that Keselameta Gare significantly mirrors the themes of both Ye Qaqe Woredewoti and the earlier phenomenally successful Simen Sintayehu. The comic plays on offer, though featuring an evolving social narrative, would have been broadly recognisable to audiences at any time in the past thirty years. Safe, crowd-pleasing comedies dealing with domestic topics, and particularly romantic problems, have been the staple fare on the Ethiopian stage for decades (Lealem Berhanu and Mahlet Solomon 2012a), supplemented by comic productions looking at a range of aspects of urban life but often focused on problems of poverty, corruption, greed and the need for decent work. However, what seems to me a particularly interesting finding from reviewing these plays is the growing focus on issues around women’s rights. A Doll’s House was a major joint production between the Hagar Fikir and the Municipality showing mid-week in the former and in the early Sunday slot at the town hall venue. Ye Qaqe Woredewoti is a project that not only engages with Gurage culture but chooses a topic that centres on a historical fight for women’s rights, while Meaza Worku’s play is the latest in a line of shows she has written examining life for women in Ethiopia. The slow rise of women playwrights and directors in recent years has definitely begun to impact on the Ethiopian stage, but this interest in the female situation in what has been a highly patriarchal culture must also reflect both audience engagement and state endorsement that women’s rights is a ‘safe’ area for the theatres to work with.

Women in Ethiopian Theatre Throughout this book I discuss at various points problems women have experienced, in being seen as sexualised objects, in a lack of agency in relation to playmaking and in poor pay and working conditions. The problem has obtained, to somewhat depressing degree, similarly in all countries under consideration—at least until very recently when status and opportunities for women are slowly beginning to improve in most places. This is a truly transnational concern, relating to patriarchy and the anxieties men

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experience about feeling the need to control their womenfolk when women begin to claim public as opposed to domestic space. Data concerning women’s experiences of working in theatre is lacking across the region. However, I conducted research into women’s experiences of working in theatre in Ethiopia in both 1992 and in 2014. These unique data sets enable me to speak in some depth about female work on stage and I do this here bearing in mind that while no two situations are directly analogous some of the insights from Ethiopia speak also to the situations of women transnationally across East Africa. As in several other nations, the first plays in Ethiopia were male-only affairs. A woman on stage was considered to be utterly unacceptably flaunting herself and her performance analogous to soliciting for sex. In part this was because, as in Eritrea, the only professional female performers—as opposed to entirely acceptable dancing in indigenous cultural settings—usually played and sang in bars that doubled as brothels. The first women to act were Ketela Andarega and Aslagech Mamo for Yoftahe Negussie’s 1932 production of Dade Tura, followed by a similarly one-off appearance by a popular bar owner, Asgedech Alemenew, in his 1948 play Afajeshin (Asnakew Alemu 2015). No details exist concerning their feelings about going on stage, reception or any consequences of the experience. The first, and for many years the only women playwrights were Romanawork Kasahun and Sennedu Gebru (Plastow 1986, 84–87; Aboneh Ashegrie 2012a, b). As in all the other countries I consider the first women playwrights were from very small educated elites, often with international experience in their youth that had made them think writing for the stage might be an acceptable activity. By virtue of their status and because they generally stayed off stage they, unlike actresses, were not seen to be compromising their virtue28. Women were first employed more commonly on stage in the dance troupes of the kinet companies, first of the Hagar Fikir and then of the Municipality and the Haile Selassie/National theatres. In 1992, I conducted questionnaires and interviews with thirty-six women working for five different theatre organisations, while in 2014 six women were interviewed (Plastow and Mahlet Solomon 2015). The senior actresses were Belatu Atnafu and Zenebech Tesfaye, whose careers, both at the Haile Selassie/National Theatre, dated back to 1953 and 1960 respectively. These women were drawn to perform against all social mores and explained that they began by pretending to their families that they were going to school when in fact they were at the theatre. Both families were furious

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when they found their daughters were on the stage and sadly Zenebech said that even her children disliked their mother being an actress (Interview. Addis Ababa, August 1992). In those early days performing roles were not as strongly differentiated and while the women were mainly dancers they also sang and appeared in theatrical sketches (Interviews. Zenebech Tesfaye and Beletu Atnafu, Addis Ababa. Both in August 1992). Interestingly both women independently said that their first and greatest mentor was the Austrian, Franz Zwieker, who directed at the theatre prior to the takeover by Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. Zwieker had previously been the coach of the music section of the Austrian imperial bodyguard and was officially music rather than theatre director at the Haile Selassie Theatre (Mamitu Yilma 1987), but Zenebech said he taught her all she knew, while Beletu called him her ‘teacher and father’ and claimed Ethiopian theatre went backwards after he left. Neither woman had any formal training. Zenebech had spent nearly all her career playing the part of a maid— in a kind of extreme type-casting unique to Ethiopia—but claimed to have been happy in her work. Beletu had had a more high-profile life. She had performed internationally as a dancer, travelling to Uganda and Sudan in Africa and as far afield as Canada and Mexico. She had performed in plays from Makonnen Endalkachew’s Dawitna Orion right through to revolutionary productions under the direction of Abate Mekuria. In a very reserved society neither woman was prepared to speak openly of problems they had experienced as females working on stage. Beletu argued that things had got better as theatre became more popular, but that men and women were essentially equal in the profession. Zenebech hinted that in the past she had had to offer favours to men but said that the situation was now improving. The most senior of the actresses interviewed in 2014 had a career that overlapped with those of Beletu and Zenebech. Welala Assefa started working at the Municipality in 1975. She had answered an advertisement for performers hoping to be a singer but was taken on as an actress as a full complement had already been recruited for the kinet troupe. Welala’s discussion of how her life has changed over time explains much about the social tribulations experienced by the first generation of professional women on stage. In this generation things are very easy for actresses. I feel sorry for those [of earlier generations] who really wanted to be an actress, but they couldn’t face the challenge of their family members and society. This is the reason I

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see myself as a lucky person; because those bad days have passed. […] Now I receive much love and respect from society […] but when I was young theatre was seen as shameful work. Society saw us as bad mannered and actresses as people not fit to marry. They were considered to be people who couldn’t stay at home and be loyal to a husband, but would be easily ­persuaded to sleep with anyone. […] They considered anyone working as an actress as trash. (Quote from interview in Plastow and Mahlet Solomon, 2015, 100–101)

This problem of social status haunted my interviews with women. Twenty-two of the women interviewed in 1992 said that society and families looked down on women working in theatre, and given the social pressure not to speak of intimate details, this was probably an under-reporting. Various reasons were given. Many spoke of the public despising of all performers, with one describing it as a ‘cursed profession’. Several said that actresses were equated with the outcast azmaris. I was told actresses were seen as prostitutes who drank and smoked and their work was seen as trivial, simply concerned with making people laugh. A recurrent and still persisting problem, which is again transnational, is that performers are often equated with their roles. This has often made actors reluctant to take on ‘bad’ characters because they rightly fear they may be publicly reviled on the street. Domestic problems included suspicion from both parents and partners. One early interviewee said her family saw her as working in ‘a degraded and shameful job’. The vast majority of my interviewees, in both investigations, initially deceived their families as to their involvement in theatre, pretending they were at school or at various evening classes while actually attending drama clubs. Parents and grandparents share common anxieties, both about the respectability of their daughters’ performing in public and in relation to doubts as to whether this work will ever provide a decent income—though the later concern has diminished in recent years with the growth of more lucrative film and TV work. However, the greatest and most enduring problem has been in relation to husbands and lovers. In a 1992 interview with Elsabet, a graduate actress at the Municipality, she told me: ‘One of my friends said, “No one will marry you. And if he does he is the craziest person in the whole world”’ (Interview. Addis Ababa, August 1992). The depth of the antipathy was demonstrated by Theatre Studies lecturer Aboneh Ashegrie who, when he heard I was conducting a study of actresses, told me he would

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never consider going out with such a woman as they couldn’t be trusted. When I returned to the research in 2014 most of the women were married but they all, to varying degrees, spoke of the jealousy, suspicion and difficulties of their position. Some of these are purely practical and have been a real barrier throughout history and across the world for women performers. When women are expected to care for the house and above all for the children, how can they do this if they are regularly absent, especially in the evenings when all ‘respectable’ women are supposed to be at home? In the contemporary world Ethiopian actresses are often seen as glamorous, especially if they have appeared regularly on television. This makes them desirable as girlfriends, but objects of intense suspicion once they become wives. Hiwot Arrage, who had been on stage for seventeen years in 2014, said her husband was jealous of her, partly because she is often recognised in public while he is ignored, but more strongly because his friends speak to him about their doubts of her sexual fidelity. Hiwot put the blame firmly on Amhara culture. She referred to Ethiopian men as abesh wend, meaning they are all equally oppressive, wanting their wives to lurk forever in the domestic shadows (Plastow and Mahlet Solomon 2015, 101). Other actresses confirmed that friends and family repeatedly stir up suspicions of fidelity in husbands. Even my youngest informant, Adisalem Merga, who was only twenty-five in 2014, said that society refers to actresses as dureya—vulgar people of easy virtue (Plastow and Mahlet Solomon 2015, 102). The final word on social perceptions I give here to Jemanesh Solomon from a 1992 interview. They think we are out of the culture. A bold woman, they don’t like a bold woman. A woman who talks in the crowd and who eats in the crowd. That’s the most disgusting thing I think for the society.

Within the profession itself the situation for women has slowly improved. It appears that overt abuse, from directors and playwrights demanding sex from women in return for giving them roles in their productions, has somewhat abated. In 1992 I was told bluntly that, ‘Women are forced to have intercourse with people whom they don’t like’, and that actresses could lose their jobs if they refused sexual favours to their bosses. The less educated women were particularly vulnerable to this pressure which women graduates seem to have been much more able to resist. However, it still exists. Adisalem Merga who is a graduate, finds some directors expect she will be available for sex.

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They will give me a script, and the next day when I go for rehearsal there is no rehearsal but the director’s or the producer’s hands will be all over my body, touching me. They don’t hesitate to ask for sex, and when I refuse, they say: “I’m not asking you to marry me, just to make love for one day. What is your problem?” (Quote in Plastow and Mahlet Solomon 2015, 104)

No male member of a theatre company has ever, to my knowledge, been held to account for his abuse of women. Notwithstanding this condoned criminality, the movement into the professional theatres by graduate women since the mid-1980s has been the most empowering development for actresses. The status of having achieved higher education at least to some degree offsets the disadvantages of being female and importantly as civil servants women graduates are on a higher pay scale than others. This latter factor has driven many actresses in recent years to pursue higher education as adult learners. In 2014 a reasonably experienced actress without a degree would earn only 1400 Birr per month (around $40) whereas a graduate could expect 1000 Birr more. Both wages are low and Addis Ababa is an expensive city to live in. The first female director of a state theatre was the early graduate, Jemanesh Solomon, in 1991. Jemanesh was the first Ethiopian woman to write critically about the female experience on stage, both for her senior paper and then for a conference in 1992. She explained to me why she felt the need to critique male characterisation of women. Women characters in Ethiopian plays are all puppets for the men. They are all less human. Most of them don’t have human characters, and it’s awful to play those parts. [That was] the reason I did this research, and it has offended a lot of men writers. They don’t look like women. They are always characterised in a very narrow way, not as a human being. Most of them are only emotional beings. They don’t have brain. They don’t think. And most of them who are modern, and who have a position in modern society are as cruel as Satan himself. (Interview. Addis Ababa, August 1992)

Jemanesh left the theatre when her husband took up a foreign diplomatic posting. Since her work, a small but ever increasing number of women have directed plays, and more recently there has been an encouraging growth of women playwrights with Asnakew Alemu able to list fourteen names in 2015 (Asnakew Alemu 2015). In 2006 Ethiopia saw the first all-female acted, directed and produced play when Azeb Worku put on a successful comedy, Semintu Setoch (Eight Women) translated from a

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French piece by Robert Thomas, that ran for eighteen months at the National (Aboneh Ashegrie 2012a, b, 5). Probably the most prominent female playwright today is her friend Meaza Worku. Meaza graduated in Theatre Arts in 2000 and has gone on to a career in acting, directing and writing, for the stage, radio and television. She has also been a journalist, television producer and comic book writer, illustrating the flexibility many creative artists have to employ to succeed in the arts in contemporary Addis Ababa. She reminded me of many young, entrepreneurial women working in theatre across the region whom I met when researching this book29. These women are increasingly not waiting to be invited to join the establishment, but are creating opportunities, often looking to make links with the outside world. In an interview in 2016 Meaza told me that she felt excluded from the inner circle of establishment directors. Since she was not invited to put on her plays in the prime slots in the state theatres she had taken matters into her own hands and hired private, non-theatre, spaces. Most unusually for an Ethiopian she has sought out and embraced opportunities to work internationally, including in Black Africa. As a direct result of this international outreach, and with the support of the Sundance Institute, Meaza then took the lead, alongside Azeb Worku, in organising an international performance festival, Crossing Boundaries, in 2015, that featured works from eleven countries. In 2017 she launched a new radio series and in 2018 her television series, Derso Mels (Round Trip), was aired. Meaza is prime example of an emerging breed of East African female theatre makers who when marginalised refuse to accept the judgement of the patriarchal establishment and find other ways to achieve their aims. Given all the difficulties involved, it seems important to account for why an ever-increasing number of women are going into Ethiopian theatre. Taking into account the high status and potential remuneration accorded to playwrights and directors it is not difficult to see why these are attractive areas to enter, especially as many women I spoke to felt they had a mission to correct the historically stereotypical and often derogatory representations of women in most male-authored plays. The attractions of acting are maybe less obvious. With the recent growth of film and television production there has been a growth in the perception of fame, glamour and even income associated with the profession. Many of my interviewees told me this was attractive particularly to many untrained, pretty girls, who were also the women most vulnerable to sexual exploitation. However, the terms used most commonly by my interviewees in describing the positive benefits of their work were the ‘love’ and ‘respect’

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accorded to them by audiences. Given how unrespectable performers are widely perceived as being these are interesting choices and must, I think, reflect an element of wishful thinking in some. It is true that leading performers are well known in the city and may be both loved and admired in the popular imagination, but respect is not a term I have heard being used in relation to either male or female actors. Nonetheless, while many actresses deplore the attitudes of husbands and society towards their profession, I have not interviewed any who regretted their choice. In a strongly patriarchal society that still prefers to confine women to domesticity the life of a public performer is a radical alternative that evidently appeals strongly to some women seeking a life with public profile and recognition and a space for expression and realisation, however constrained, not easily available elsewhere.

Contemporary Eritrean Theatre Post-independence theatre in Eritrea has to be divided into work that was produced in the honeymoon years of independence, from 1991 to 1998, and the ever more negligible output in the years thereafter. The key event that produced this watershed was the tragically unnecessary renewed border war over the disputed village of Badme and the opportunity this gave the military leadership of the liberation forces and notably the president, Issayas Afewerki, to clamp down ever more fiercely on the forces of democracy and freedom of speech in the name of protecting the motherland (Prunier 2015a, b, 250–253). It is hard to over-emphasise the optimism, even euphoria, that possessed Eritreans in the aftermath of their independence after a thirty-year liberation war. This attitude extended to the artistic world. I recognise that the following discussion somewhat privileges my own engagement with Eritrean theatre in the post-liberation period, but with a lack of alternative published material the work and research developed by myself and my associates, notably Christine Matzke and Richard Boon, was particularly significant in the years between 1994 and 2008, and I think this approach gives some useful insights into the trajectories of national arts practice. I was invited to the country after a chance meeting with the then head of the Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Alemseged Tesfai, in 1993 in Addis Ababa during the all too brief honeymoon period of conciliation between the new TPLF-led Ethiopian regime and the liberated Eritreans. Alemseged invited me to visit the country with a view to becoming involved in theatre

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training. So, later that year I went (Plastow 1997a, b, 387). I had numerous meetings in official offices and at the homes of artists; and then I was invited to give a talk about African theatre. I agreed, not thinking more than a small group would meet. The country was devastated by war. The roads, for example, were bombed to destruction a few miles out of the capital, burnt-out tanks hung at improbable angles in the ravines surrounding the city and accommodation and food were in scarce supply. My hotel room offered a mattress with the springs sticking out. I would give my talk in the old Italian officers club and that morning I heard the event being announced on the radio. This announcement gave me some trepidation—maybe it was more significant than I had thought. However, I was still entirely unprepared for the elegant colonial reception hall being packed with maybe 400 Eritreans. Why would so many people come to a talk, in English, a language spoken by relatively few—on African theatre when they had so many more pressing matters to deal with? The answer was that Eritreans had been cut off from the outside world for so many years that they were desperate to hear new voices. Mine was by no means the only one. Alemseged, and his assistant, Solomon Tsehaye, who soon took over at Cultural Affairs as Alemseged moved on to lead discussions on land reform, were inviting as many international cultural voices as they could to open up the Eritrean cultural space. Both the Norwegian Playwrights Union and I became involved in the first ever formal theatre training programmes in Eritrea. The Norwegians ran both theoretical and practical workshops in 1992 and 1993 and in 1995, 1996 and 1997 the Leeds, UK-based, Eritrean Community-Based Theatre Project (ECBTP) ran three-month practical training workshops in Asmara and the second city of Keren for groups of tegedelti who had worked with the EPLF cultural groups and for young amateur arts activists, working with Tigrinya and Tigre speakers. My pre-condition for running the ECBTP in Eritrea was that the participants should be able to make theatre without censorship and this was not only acceded to but the Eritrean government paid all the expenses of all the trainees, leaving me only to find funding for the teams of UK trainers who came out for the summer months. It was clear to me that leading cultural authorities and government were committed at a high level to both the arts and to international engagement. The programmes explored a whole range of approaches to making theatre, from naturalism to the ideas of Bertolt Brecht and sought for the first time to integrate indigenous dance and music forms within the drama.

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Interestingly this was initially—though briefly—resisted by trainees whose background in Ethiopian/Eritrean theatre had taught them that dance and music were folk forms separate from the ‘modern’ literary form of drama30 (Plastow 1997a, b, 391). Also interesting to me was that the first group I worked with, made up of long time tegedelti, had no interest in working with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed model31. As recent victors in Africa’s longest liberation war they entirely rejected any notion that they could be constructed as ‘the oppressed’. As in many places where I have run training programmes participants had huge anxieties about being ‘right’ in relation to any given exercise, and having no theoretical or international background in theatre they found it difficult to debate and decide what forms of performance they wanted to include in the final plays. This is a common issue transnationally given the regional lack of comprehensive actor training in either indigenous or international modes of performance and often holds back innovation or experimentation. In the Eritrean case, however, the local organisers, Alemseged and Solomon, had initiated the training programmes specifically because of an awareness of the lack of engagement with the wider world. Alemseged in particular was delighted to see the bringing together of international acting and Eritrean folk performance forms saying that in his own work during the liberation struggle; ‘I knew in my mind that if Eritrean theatre was to develop it had to go back to Eritrean culture and folklore […] and develop from there. But I didn’t have that kind of capacity’ (Plastow 1999, 57) The process of devising, as opposed to scripting, plays for final performance was entirely new to the participants and represented a break with the dominant Ethiopian/Eritrean mode of playwright and word-­ dominated theatre, as was the idea of a collective selection of the final topics for play-making. However, these processes were enthusiastically embraced. The final plays in the first round concerned the vexed subject of getting more girls into education, the emerging issue of HIV/AIDS awareness and a piece discussing post-war reconciliation between tegedelti, those who had been displaced by war and those who had remained on the land, including collaborators with the Ethiopian occupiers. These productions were then taken on a major national tour and attracted the largest audiences it has ever been my pleasure to witness. Everywhere we went we were unable to perform in the pre-planned indoor spaces because of the sheer number of people wishing to watch. Sometimes we had to get police to control the crowds. The largest audience of over 5000 people gathered on a hillside on the edge of a village and we found people had walked for

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hours to attend the show in a space delimited by a simple rope circle and lit by two floodlights powered by a noisy generator (Plastow 1997a, b, 393–394). I think the explanation was that Eritreans saw these works as part of a celebration of their still new independence, a concrete manifestation of culture and ideas freely available in contrast to the repressive propaganda of the long years of Derg control. The commitment of the state was exciting. Indeed in the mid-1990s cultural plans abounded. The Bureau of Cultural Affairs was responsible for cultural policy and international links. Besides the Norwegian and British partnerships the French supported Tigrinya language productions of two Moliere plays in 1995 and 1996 (Matzke 2003, 275). The Bureau also sought to work with Ethiopians, recognising the far greater development of professional theatre across the border and the close cultural correlations that could facilitate partnership. Two shows were directed by Ethiopians in the mid-1990s. Teferi Alemu led a production of Oedipus and then in 1997 Manyazewal Endeshaw put on a Tigrinya translation of Mengistu Lemma’s Teyaki, itself an adaptation of J.B.  Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. In both cases the productions were popularly received and Manyazewal told me he was even offered Eritrean citizenship on the strength of the show. (Personal communication, Jan 2019). A second cultural organisation was set up by the EPLF as transformed into the political party the Peoples’ Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ). PFDJ Cultural Affairs, which deals with internal performance and theatre training, has been headed throughout its life by ex-fighter (all government and party offices are headed and mostly staffed by now aging tegedelti, a source of increasing frustration for marginalised ‘civilians’), Abrahim Ali ‘Akla’, under the guidance of one of the handful of men commonly believed to be really running the state, and member of the central executive committee, Zemhret Yohannes. After liberation the PFDJ quickly moved many members of Cultural Troupes into new state performance companies—seven ‘modern’ bands, a traditional performance group, S’brit, and the theatre groups, one performing in Tigrinya, Arag, and a Tigre language company, Abbot. The new government also set up a very active mass organisation for youth, The National Union for Eritrean Youth and Students (NUEYS), and began running training programmes in both theory and practice of theatre for large groups of young people under the NUEYS banner. Matzke accessed listings of some nineteen plays that were produced by these state companies between 1993 and 2000 (2003, 274) and says that: ‘though few manuscripts were available to me,

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interviews and summaries suggest that most plays continued to follow the tenets of ‘revolutionary culture’. Many productions looked back on the achievements in the field, others hoped to further the process of nation-­ building; all of them were patriotic in content.’ (275) Throughout this period a series of plans were put forward to formalise and institutionalise theatre training. This was an ambition of Alemseged’s from the early days of liberation and he held many high-level discussions on the topic. A few years later I was also involved in helping develop quite detailed plans for a community arts training programme in conjunction with Zemhret Yohannes, but somehow none of these ever got beyond the stage of discussion and preliminary working papers32. What also needs to be taken into account in this ‘golden age’33 of the mid-1990s is the number of amateur groups that were making plays. By 1996 we have knowledge of some twenty registered groups in Asmara, and evidence from the trainees who attended the ECBTP showed that many other towns had enthusiastic groups. Possibly one of the most significant and productive was the Mahber Fikri Sine-Tibeb (Arts Lovers Association) set up by a group of ex-fighters as early as 1991. They were mostly intellectuals, teachers, lecturers and journalists, and put on nine full-length plays in the 1990s besides smaller pieces for government campaigns and being involved in a range of other cultural activities (Matzke 2003, 274). Sadly we have little information on any of these productions. In addition many urban schools were putting on plays for parents’ days and graduations and churches often put on small religious performances, mostly by young people, for church festivities. A final youth group to be mentioned was Sewit Children’s Theatre. For many years this unique training and performance centre was led by Esaias Tseggai, arguably the most original and innovative of Eritrea’s theatre makers. Whilst maintaining close links with government cultural offices, Esaias was one of the first cultural figures to seek to work independently of the state. At independence he had been appointed head of the state Tigrinya theatre group but he found government constraints irksome and in 1994 he set up Sewit with his friend, the journalist Feshaye Yohannes (who was arrested in 2001 and subsequently died in state custody), with eighteen children aged ten to sixteen. At Sewit he roped in many artist friends to train young people for free in music, dance and theatre and constantly experimented with new ideas and forms, working closely and supportively with teenagers on a range of projects, some independent, some funded by NGOs or the state, until Sewit became famous and some of its television

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productions, notably a series based on folk history, Milenu, became required national viewing and its young actors popular stars (Matzke and Plastow 2006). This tentatively burgeoning theatre scene was stopped in its tracks in 1998 when border war broke out between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the militaristic government of Issayas Afeworki not only built up its army but took the opportunity to suppress any movement towards democracy and to silence any possibly dissenting voices. State paranoia about dissent has meant that increasingly independent arts organisations have been shut down and only hagiographic crude representations of the government outlook, and especially valourisations of the tegedelti, have been seen in performance. The direction of movement was evident to me in 1997. That year was the third iteration of the ECBTP, and training and production was taking place in Asmara, Keren and with a whole community in the village of Sala’a Daro (Campbell et al.1999). Not only were all the male members of the cast in Keren rounded up and, temporarily, carted off on the day of dress rehearsal to check that they had completed military service, but in the village on performance day when many senior officials attended, rumblings of disquiet were heard about villagers critiquing government’s lack of provision of water and electricity, thereby going against official line of promoting self-help (though how villagers were supposed to themselves install electricity was not something officials chose to engage with). Two performance groups had been working and taking plays of their own making on tour on the back of earlier training with state support and Oxfam now stepped in, offering three years funding to continue the project. My joy was short-lived. As tension stepped up, international NGOs were no longer welcome in the country, being seen as agents of foreign interference. The promise of freedom for theatre making was disappearing and when war broke out in May 1998 the work of the ECBTP and the free community theatre movement came to an abrupt end. Matzke argues that self-censorship had been damaging even prior to 1998. She quotes Karl Hoff, the leading member of the Norwegian partnership who spoke to her of peoples’ ‘fear of expressing critical or different opinions’, and Sebastian Saad who ran a project with returnees from Sudan in 1996 said ‘participants were reluctant to voice their views for fear of offending the authorities’ (Matzke 2003, 279). Since most of those I worked with directly were ex-tegedelti, it is perhaps not surprising that I was much less aware of such tensions. However, post-1998 opportunities

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for creative and independent or quasi-independent theatre groups gradually closed down. Fear of state displeasure is not the only reason for this. So many young people have been drafted into military service or have fled the country for fear of being trapped for a life time into state servitude that the human resources for creative activity are difficult to muster. Some training continues. Graduate of the ECBTP and the Leeds University MA programme Efriem runs a training programme for youth sponsored by the PFDJ, that when I interviewed him in February 2015 taught 120 students for two-hour sessions, five days a week for five months. At the time he had worked with five such groups. The training closely mirrored that provided by the ECBTP and was intended to help young people who would go back into their schools and support school theatre clubs. His fellow Leeds graduate, Yakim Tesfaye, teaches and makes drama at the only international school, the Rainbow. He told me that he made four shows a year which were enormously popular with parents (Interview. Keren, February 2015). At the state tertiary arts college at Adi Quaye the literature department offers some theoretical courses by Indian staff in theatre and script writing (Information from Yakim Tesfaye interview). Sewit Children’s Theatre managed to survive until the death of Esaias in 201534, but it was a matter of huge frustration that the group was continually having to recruit and train new members as older cohorts were drafted for the indeterminate fate that is compulsory military service. The closing in and closing down of theatrical freedoms and opportunities did not take place overnight. For example, the most active international partnership, between Bureau of Cultural Affairs and a group centred round me and the University of Leeds, would last for several years into the twenty-first century and take a variety of forms. Between 1998 and 2005 seven Eritreans studied at The Workshop Theatre in Leeds—six on an MA programme I ran in Theatre Studies while Solomon Tsehaye of the Bureau of Cultural Affairs came on a Research Fellowship. The first three MA students were all young men and products of the ECBTP chosen by the teaching team. Notably none of these were given posts of any responsibility on their return because they were not tegedelti. The senior figures who came later, Mesgun Zerai ‘Wad Faradai’, Esaias Tseggai and Solomon Dirar, were all chosen by the PFDJ, had been long-term fighters and already had established reputations as playwrights and directors, and all returned to leading cultural posts. They also all wrote plays while at Leeds, subsequently published as Three Eritreans Plays (Plastow 2005a, b), first at Leeds and then in a reprint by the Eritrean government printing press.

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For the occasion of the millennium and for a major international cultural conference, Against All Odds: African Languages and Literatures into the Twenty-First Century, a host of senior African cultural figures were brought together and I was invited to direct, with Mesgun Zerai, a new Tigrinya translation by Alemseged Tesfai of the Kenyan socialist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s major play, I Will Marry When I Want. The Eritrean government funded this piece with a cast of some seventy actors from state cultural troupes and at my request significantly revamped Cinema Asmara for the event (Plastow 2005a, b). The play included music and dance from many of Eritrea’s ethnic groups and was a uniquely ‘total’ performance in a country where nearly all productions have been purely end-on and dialogue-­dominated unless they were slapstick comedy, with actors coming through the auditorium and a musical finale that featured musicians and singers appearing in the balconies while dancers filled the aisles and the stage. The play continued to show for two months with many performances being shown free to school children and the production being televised, while the Tigrinya script was published for educational use. In 2003 I flew to Eritrea again at the invitation of the state to co-direct with Mesgun Zerai a translation of Macbeth. The curse of the play hit us and the production was never made, so I diverted to work with Esaias Tseggai on a delightfully playful and imaginative piece with Sewit Children’s Theatre—Gesa, Gesa, which looked at fathers’ attitudes to parenting through the eyes of their offspring (Matzke and Plastow 2006, 146–147). My final work in the country, after I had decided I could no longer collaborate directly with such an oppressive state, took place in 2005–06. Again focussing on children this inter-disciplinary partnership with educationalist John Holmes allowed me to work with senior-year children in two rural primary schools, and while he explored the experiences of teachers I got the young people to make short plays for teachers and staff from the Asmara Teaching Training College showing what they both appreciated and disliked in their schooling (Plastow 2011)35. My colleague, Richard Boon, who had travelled with me in 2003 and undertaken some playwriting workshops, returned for a more significant playwriting programme in 2008, one that built on an earlier Norwegian writing project undertaken in 2000 (Matzke 2003, 277). In his 2013 chapter, ‘Neither Peace nor War: The Role of Theatre in Re-Imagining the New Eritrea’, Boon discusses the range of enthusiastic young would­be playwrights he worked with. Unsurprisingly given the dominant modes in Ethiopian and Eritrean playwriting he says that ‘Overall, the tendency is

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for word-based naturalistic forms, with agit-prop elements’ (429), and many of the scripts he discusses focus on either literal or symbolic struggles for identity and belonging by the younger generation in the face of an heroic past and oppressive present bequeathed them by their elders. As far as I am aware none of the scripts worked on in either the Norwegian or British workshops have in any way been supported into full production. Within the country the state cultural troupes increasingly failed to make any live work other than the crudest symbolic propaganda for national festival days, and these not in theatres but for outdoor public spectacles. Where a dramatic project has been realised in recent years it has more often been for video film or television release, though even here all works have been by older stalwarts re-visiting the glory days of revolution (Information from private discussions with artists such as Mesgun Zerai, Alemseged Tesfai and Solomon Dirar). The voices of the younger generations have failed to make it on to the Eritrean stage. There is a National Student Festival that includes drama made by younger people as well as on-going NUEYS-supported training and productions, and quite a number of urban secondary schools have extracurricular drama clubs (Matzke 2003, 280–82) but I have no data on activity in recent years. Even radio drama has been curtailed. In 2008 I carried out research into Ethiopian radio drama, being particularly interested in how the state education radio station, Radio Bana, was seeking to promote radio drama in a wide range of Eritrean languages. My research looked into emerging efforts to encourage new dramatists in minority languages, particularly in Blin, a tongue spoken by under 100,000 people and with an orthography only agreed after Eritrean independence. The team at Radio Bana were running competitions and seeking to mentor new writers and my questionnaires completed by some hundred households indicated that these plays—often only around fifteen minutes long—were hugely appreciated by the Blin community (Plastow 2013). However, in 2009, nearly all the Radio Bana reporters were arrested with thirteen held without trial for some five years36. Radio drama was an immediate casualty. This leads to a final story of an independent production mounted in 2008, an anomaly that caused huge public interest and unusually led to articles in the international academic press by an unprecedented three commentators, Christine Matzke (2011), Richard Boon (2013) and Tedros Abraham (2015). Weg’i Libi (Heart to Heart Talk) by novelist, artist, sculptor and management consultant, Beyene Haile, is the most recent Eritrean play on which I have information. Beyene was never a

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liberation fighter, but in 2006 he presented his playscript to the PFDJ for their consideration. Unable to make much sense of the play the party rejected it, but it was taken up by the final group of students at the then closing University of Asmara37. Working in discussion with the playwright they slowly developed a production which they took to a Party committee since all shows must have official approval. Interestingly at this stage Party and students reached a rapprochement. The students agreed the play was too long and cut it by around half, while the Party allocated director Misgun Zerai and designer Demoz Russom to work with the amateurs for a show to be performed at Cinema Asmara. It was finally shown in 2008 and unusually ran for two weeks with several audience members coming back for repeat viewings (Matzke 2011, 180). It was necessary to the play that it be shown at Cinema Asmara for it takes place precisely on the main street, Godena Harnet (Liberation Avenue) in front of the theatre where every night Asmarinos perform their passeggiata38. Matzke explores the idea of Beyene’s unnamed characters including, for example, a chorus called only ‘The Tall’, ‘The Short’ and ‘The Medium’, as flaneurs, observing and exploring their world, both externally and internally as they observe and interact with each other. (Matzke 2011, 182–3). This is not a play with a plot; rather it is a philosophical exploration, particularly interested in the spiritual/social role of the artist but also in the relationship between individual and society, as acted out so clearly every evening on Godena Harnet. Beyene touches on a host of issues from the role of women to the arrogance of the political North, but this is not primarily a political play, rather it is an exploration of the human condition from within the context of contemporary Eritrea. Above all Beyene says he wishes to speak to young people and encourage them to fulfil their human potential. There is nothing I do not ask the young to do. I have set my high hopes on them. In my play, Wegi Lebi, (Heart to Heart Talk) I have told them a lot of things. It would give me pleasure if the play has increased their courage to dare point their fingers at themselves and begin to fly high with great ideas that help them reach heights of grand identity. I am happy to be a witness when the young actors were embracing and stretching truth and beauty to assimilate the characters of Heart to Heart Talk. (‘A Chat with Beyene Haile’, Hidri, April 2008)

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As Boon explains, and like many plays seen as great works in Ethiopia and Eritrea, ‘To western eyes, Weg’I Libi might seem a cumbersome, wordy piece’ (435), but the experimentation appealed to a wide range of the Asmara intelligentsia who might have found it somewhat opaque but were stimulated by the challenge of its form and ideas. The philosophical in art, in novels, poetry and theatre, including the political and spiritual but refusing to be constrained within narrow categorisations of form or thought, is a strong minority transnational tradition across Ethiopian, Eritrean and Somali culture, surfacing in the works of writers such as Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, Manyazewal Endeshaw, Haadrawi and Sheikh Hasan Mumin as well as in Beyene’s play. Indeed, ongoing tensions between philosophy, education and entertainment in the theatres of the Horn of Africa recur time and again. Beyene Haile is firmly in the philosophical/aesthetic experimental camp, but the greatest plays as seen by local populations and critics might be said to triumph precisely where they bring all three considerations into creative praxis.

Conclusion The theatres of Ethiopia and Eritrea grew out of a largely shared sensibility, common to highland, Orthodox Christian inhabitants of the region. Indeed, their theatre has commonly spoken to and for this group, excluding majorities in both nations, often Islamic or at times animist, who do not see the world through the same religio-cultural prism and who notably do not speak the dominant languages of these theatres—Amharic in Ethiopia and Tigrinya in Eritrea. There have been notable periods of overlap in their evolutionary histories. Very many Eritreans prior to independence spent time in Ethiopia and a number of leading cultural figures were substantially educated there. The most significant early Eritrean theatre company, Ma.Te.De. evidently put considerable effort into translating and producing a number of Ethiopian plays that they saw as having a ‘Greater Ethiopia’ significance, and during the period of unification we see leading companies touring works, particularly variety shows, with considerable success into each other’s territories. As they moved into open conflict, both sides recognised to an exceptional degree the potential value of propaganda arts in disseminating information and advocating for particular nationalist agenda. Theatre and song were seen as particularly important here because the vast majority in both nations were at the time illiterate and without access to mass media.

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Live art was recognised as being the most powerful propaganda tool available and huge efforts were put into engaging performers and audiences in home and enemy territories—even in the Eritrean case extending into tours to the international diaspora. However, by the end of time period of this study there is a huge divergence in activity levels. While Addis Ababa-based Ethiopian theatre powers ahead, with more productions being shown in any given week in the past decade or so than at any time in the past—notwithstanding regularly voiced fears about competition from film and television39—with a slowly growing number of theatrical experiments engaging other cultures and with an explosion of university theatre departments across the country, theatre in Eritrea has been stifled almost to death. The paranoid, sclerotic, totalitarian state presided over by Issayas Afewerki, as he lives in his time-­ warp, constantly looking back to the glories of the liberation struggle, has been unable to provide any kind of meaningful future vision for young Eritreans and is the primary reason for the effective death of the art despite its popularity at least with urban citizens40. However, Ethiopia, particularly under Mengistu Haile-Mariam, but also to a lesser extent under the government of Meles Zenawi, also experienced extremely repressive rule that sought to stifle any critical artistic voices. The key difference, I think, is that thanks to the support and promotion of drama at the highest level by the last emperor, Haile Selassie right through from 1930 to the early 1970s, the theatre, and particularly the leading playwrights, had come to be seen as both nationally culturally important and as an established aspect of urban life. When playhouses became state enterprises and actors government employees, although this led to many tense disagreements between artists and the state as to the purpose and freedoms of the arts, the new order demonstrated acceptance that the theatre was part of the fabric of Addis Ababa life. As with all the theatres discussed in this volume the outside world knows far too little about Ethiopian and Eritrean art, primarily because it is produced in national languages, but also because the form and content is aimed squarely at a local, not an international, audience. However, the Eritrean example gives us a history of the most powerful and elaborated use anywhere on the continent of arts being structurally incorporated into a successful liberation struggle, while the Ethiopian theatre must be the currently most prolific and popular capital-based movement in Africa. These are surely significant theatrical achievements that can be usefully studied internationally. Moreover, the leading playwrights in both

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countries have been seen as beloved, powerful voices, with the Amharic writers in particular recognised as masters of beautiful, complex language. These have been, and in Ethiopia at least, still are, theatres that profoundly matter.

Notes 1. For his unpublished 1980 MA Thesis, ‘Ethiopian Literature in English’, Debebe Seifu interviewed Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin who told him that: ‘English comes in my writing when I have no other way out and when I feel the situation is completely blocked’. 2. Abe Gubegna wrote The Savage Girl in English in 1964. The play, about an innocent maiden successfully resisting capitalist and imperialist thought is written in excruciatingly bad English (Plastow 1989, 133). 3. Mengistu Lemma and Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin were well known to be hostile to each other. Tesfaye Gessesse, however, a fairly independent liberal in his practice, worked on productions by both men and seems to have managed not to fall out with either. 4. The other theatre was the Ras, a converted cinema hall, deep in the Mercato, the commercial area of the city. It continued to work as a parttime cinema but from 1978 also had an acting company. Subsequently the government would open one more space, the Children’s Theatre, in 1988. This has had a patchy and sporadic history and made little impact on the wider theatre scene. For more information see Aboneh Ashegrie, 2012, ‘Children’s Theatre in Ethiopia’, Aethiopica 15. 105–117. 5. Haimanot defected to the USA when he became disaffected with the Derg regime so I have been able to find little information on his work. 6. Some years ago I commissioned friends and ex-colleagues at Addis Ababa University, Belayneh Abune and Manyazewal Endeshaw, who are also both fans of Fisseha’s work, to begin an English language translation of one of his plays. After some weeks they came back to me saying they found the task impossible because of the deeply colloquial nature of Fisseha’s writing. 7. The Rural (sometimes Amateur) Arts Programme was established in 1983. It grew out of the Derg campaign to get rural communities to make propaganda arts in support of their aims and became a way to absorb arts graduates guaranteed work by the state. Graduates in literature, music and theatre were sent to all regions to promote local cultural activity but were often poorly resourced and supported and had little effect outside regional capitals. 8. The feast included as its high point a feature I had read about but thought belonged to a feudal past. Sharp knives were distributed to those of us at

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the high table and then two men brought in something large carried on two poles. When a red cloth was drawn back the object was exposed as a cow, cut lengthways in half and still steaming from its slaughter. Guests were invited to cut the great delicacy of slices of raw, newly butchered, meat. 9. h t t p s : / / w w w. c i a . g o v / l i b r a r y / r e a d i n g r o o m / . . . / C I A RDP85S00317R000300050001-2.pd10. 10. One huge problem for the EPLF was that they had no aircraft whereas, thanks to the support of the USSR, the Ethiopians had access to many military aeroplanes. As a result many facilities were dug out underground— not only the theatre but offices, workshops and even, at Orota, a whole hospital in a two-mile-long network of tunnels. 11. The nine ethno-linguistic groups recognised in Eritrea are the Afar, Blin, Hidareb, Kunama, Nara, Rashaida Saho, Tigre and Tigrinya. These groups are of very varied size, but as part of the promotion of the idea of ‘Unity in Diversity’ the EPLF cultural troupes sought to profile music and dance from all nine. 12. The Central Cultural Troupe was based at Nakfa. It brought together a range of leading talents in the early 1980s under the leadership of Alemseged Tesfai who not only wrote plays but spent considerable time researching drama, writing the first ‘textbook’ about it and teaching dramatic principles to his actors. 13. All three of the established playwrights who studied for MAs at Leeds wrote English versions of plays they had first written in Tigrinya and two of these were performed at the University. They were all then published in a volume I edited, Three Eritrean Plays (2005),which the Eritrean government then requested permission to reprint to make available in all Eritrean high schools. 14. The Italian term ciao has been widely adopted and indigenised by Eritreans. 15. Highland Ethiopians, Amhara and Tigreans, have often not seen themselves as African and historically referred to darker skinned, Bantu races, by derogatory names. 16. I think mine was the last attempt to make a play in English. Our 1984 production of Strinberg’s Miss Julie was halted when students begged not to do it as they were aware they could not act with feeling in English. 17. See Robert McLaren, 1984, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, London: Zed Press. 18. This partnership resulted in a publication. Harrop, Peter and Aboneh Ashegrie, 1984, A Preliminary Investigation of Dramatic Elements within traditional Ceremonies among the Anuak, Majengo, Nuer and Shako Nationalities of Illubabor Administrative Region, Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.

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19. See Volume Two for more on the Great Lakes societies which make up present day Rwanda, Burundi and parts of Congo and Uganda. 20. Laurence Olivier was a pre-eminent British actor of great international fame in the period between the 1930s and the early 1980s. Filmed recordings of his performances today often look hugely exaggerated. 21. It is beyond the scope of this study, and possibly too recent to analyse, but in 2018 the most recent Ethiopian president, Abiy Ahmed came into power. The first Oromo leader, he has been greeted with popular delight, opening up society in a range of ways. Many theatre professionals are hopeful that his regime will usher in a new liberalism. 22. This conflict was resolved when Abiy Ahmed convened a peace summit with Eritrean President where Ethiopia agreed to abide by the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration that gave most of the disputed land to Eritrea and diplomatic relations were opened between the two countries. 23. Ethiopia has a population of over hundred million people and covers 426,400 square miles. Eritrea is home to an estimated 6.5 million citizens and covers just 45,410 square miles. 24. Greater Ethiopia would include areas, notably in present day Eritrea, once seen as part of Ethiopian territory. It is an emotional idea that has had a strong hold on many Ethiopians who in the years after Eritrea voted for independence, and despite more than 99% of Eritreans voting to secede, still found it extremely hard to believe that people either would want to or had the right to leave Ethiopia. 25. I am greatly indebted to my research assistant, Mahlet Solomon, for this section. She attended all the plays showing and provided invaluable notes on each one. Mahlet has also helped me greatly in researching a number of key Amharic documents that have informed my writing on Ethiopian theatre, particularly the work on Mathewos Bekele and Iyoel Yohannes in Chapter 2. The plays showing on our ‘snapshot’ week were as follows: Hagar Fikir Yedawit Enzira (David’s Harp), by Tilahgun Zewga. Mondays, 5.30 pm. Keras Belay Rase (Egotist), by Hailu Tsegaye. Tuesdays, 11.30 am. Yetelekech Jemeber (The Abortive Dawn. Orig The Doll’s House), by Henrik Ibsen, trans Atinafu Mekuria. Wednesdays, 5.30 pm. Yaleteqwach (Unsolved), by Alemtsehey Ejegu. Thursdays, 5.30 pm. Yegude Ken (The Day of Unexpected Shame). Fridays, 11.30 am. Yebeale Enegedoch (The Holiday Guest), by Zekariyase Abagaze. Saturdays, 2 pm. City Hall

Mado Lemado (Parallel), by Tigest Alemu. Thursdays 11.30 am.

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Konjowochu (The Beautiful One) (orig Brother Aloyosha from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov), by Victor Rozov trans Zewedu Abagaze. Thursdays, 5.30 pm. Sosetegnawe Ayen (The Third Eye), by Tewodros Tekle-Aragay, Thursdays, 5.30 pm. Elibate (Resolution), by Daniel Mulunehe. Fridays, 5.30 pm. Engida (The Guest), by Manyazewal Endeshaw, Sundays, 11 am. Yetelekech Jemeber (The Abortive Dawn. Orig The Doll’s House), by Henrik Ibsen, trans Atinafu Mekuria. Sundays, 2 pm. National Theatre

Caligula, by Albert Camus, trans Getachew Tarekegn, Tuesdays, 5.30 pm. Ketedar Balaye (Beyond Marriage), by Tewodros Tekle-Aregay. Wednesdays, 5.30 pm. Yebier Seme (The Pen Name), by Alemayhu Tadessa. Thursdays, 11.30 am. Babylon Besalon (Babylon in the Salon), by Wodenehe Kefela. Fridays, 11.30 am. Kiteltile Kokeboch, (A Chain of Stars), by Wodenahe Kefela. Saturdays, 8 pm. Yefikir Maebel (The Storm of Love) (orig The Ermine), by Jean Anouilh, trans Manyazewal Endeshaw, Sundays, 11.30 am. Yekaki Wordote (Wordote, Kaki’s Daughter), by Chanyalew Woldegiorgise, Sundays, 2 pm. Mabeda New (I am going to be crazy), by Binyamin Worku, Sundays, 5.30 pm. Adote Cinema

Eyayu Fungus (Seeing the Fungus), by Berekate Belayneh. Tuesday 11.30 am; Thursday 11.30 am; Friday 11.30 am; Saturday 2 pm. Ghion Hotel

Keselameta Gare (With Greetings. Orig English title Desperate to Fight), by Meaza Worku. Sundays, 7 pm.

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26. The Gurage originate from South-West Ethiopia but have spread widely throughout the country and roughly equally split between following Christianity and Islam. They are the third largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. 27. The Menit are a small minority ethnic group who live in South-Western Ethiopia, near the border with Sudan. 28. I use the term actress in this discussion rather than the gender neutral term actor, more generally utilised these days in the Global North, because across East Africa actress is the term understood to refer to women on stage. 29. One of the most pleasant surprises of this research was the number of women I met, many of them quite young, in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Somaliland in particular, who seemed to be the most energetic and innovative contemporary voices engaged in theatre today. 30. After a month of work on different Western forms of theatre I invited local musicians and dancers within the training group to lead some sessions on local performance forms. A number of actors initially refused to participate, apparently seeing this as not proper theatre. I had to seek support from the Bureau of Cultural Affairs and within an hour everyone was very happily involved in the dance activities. However, this does show something of the deep-rooted perception that theatre was not part of local culture. 31. Theatre of the Oppressed has become a hugely popular model worldwide for projects working with marginalised peoples. Developed by the Brazilian, Augusto Boal, his best known book is called Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) and gave rise to a theatre movement of the same name. 32. Zemhret Yohannes was a longstanding executive member of the PFDJ until 2010. He always made himself available to discuss cultural initiatives and was personally committed to the arts, asking myself and others to come up with ideas for performance training initiatives. He was censored by the president when performances he organised for the celebrations of the anniversary of independence displeased Isaias, (See https://africasacountry.com/2017/05/take-me-to-your-leader-eritreas-isaias-afwerki) though he remains an important public apologist for the regime. 33. Matzke, Boon and I have all heard the period referred to in this way by a number of Eritrean friends. 34. Esaias was arguably the most restlessly innovative theatre maker of his generation. A man who also wrote songs, poetry and prose, in later years he became very interested in film. Esaias was often seen as a controversially independent voice but when a production he had developed was heavily criticised by the Party in 2014 his battle with alcoholism and depression deepened, leading to a premature death.

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35. The educational research plays were taken very seriously by education officials and the teacher training college. When children showed scenes of excessive physical violence by teachers an investigation was mounted that resulted in the sacking of the head teacher. 36. https://rsf.org/en/news/radio-erena-independent-voice-eritrea. 37. The University ceased admissions in 2003 and the government opened five colleges dispersed around the country to replace it. This has been widely seen as a political move to better control students. 38. The habit of this social evening stroll originated in the Italian tradition. So many people come out to walk and talk on Godena Harnet; progress can be slow and involve many stops for small cups of tea or coffee, or perhaps a glass of beer with friends. 39. In the second decade of the twenty-first century the greatest perceived threat has been an influx of telenovela serials dubbed into Amharic which a number of observers claim has led to reduced numbers attending the theatre (Personal communications). 40. Boon, in his 2008 article, refers to the many Eritreans he encountered casually in Asmara who discussed with him their love of theatre and previous involvement with it (427), and this mirrors my own experience, particularly in the capital, but also when I have travelled more widely in the country.

References Abe Gubegna. 1964. The Savage Girl. Addis Ababa: Berhanena Selam. ———. 1975a. Yedakamoch Wotimed (The Trap of the Weak). ———. 1975b. Poletikanna Poletignoch (Politics and Politicians). Aboneh Ashegrie. 1996. Popular Theatre in Ethiopia. Ufahamu 24 (2–3): 32–41. ———. 2012a. The Role of Women on the Ethiopian Stage. Journal of African Cultural Studies 24 (1): 1–8. ———. 2012b. Children’s Theatre in Ethiopia. Aethiopica 15: 105–117. Afewerki Abraha. 1980. Kemsie Ntezechrewn Nehru (If It Had Been Like This). Albee, Edward. 1960. Zoo Story. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Alemayhu Tadessa. 2016. Yebier Seme (The Pen Name). Alemseged Tesfai. 1981. Luul (Luul) (Published in English, 2002 in Two Weeks in the Trenches, Laurenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press). ———. 1983. Drama (Unpublished) Nakfa. ———. 1984. Eti Kal’a Quinat (The Other Warpublished in English). ———. 2002a. Two Weeks in the Trenches. Laurenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press. ———. 2002b. Two Weeks in the Trenches. Laurenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press. Alemtsehay Ejugu. 2016. Yeleteqoch (Unsolved). Anon. 2008. A Chat with Beyene Haile. Hidri.

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———. 1999. Alemseged Tesfai: A Playwright in Service to Eritrean Liberation. In African Theatre in Development, ed. Martin Banham et al., 54–60. Oxford: James Currey. ———, ed. 2005a. Three Eritrean Plays. Leeds: Alumnus. ———. 2005b. Making Theatre in the Opera House, Asmara, Eritrea. Moving Worlds: Postcolonial Cities. Africa 5 (1): 132–143. ———. 2011. Finding Children’s Voices: Using Theatre to Critique the Education System in England and Eritrea. In Literature of Commitment, ed. G. Collier, 321–335. Rodopi: Amsterdam. ———. 2013. A Modest Plant; Easily Crushed. Radio Drama in Blin, Eritrea. In African Literature and Beyond, ed. Gordon Collier et  al., 89–102. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2014. Domestication or Transformation? The Ideology of Theatre for Development in Africa. Applied Theatre Research 2 (2): 107–118. ———. 2017. Teatro Asmara: Understanding Eritrean Drama through a Study of the National Theatre. Journal of African Cultural Studies 29 (3): 311–330. Plastow, Jane, and Zerihun Berhanu. 2017. An Absurdist in Addis Ababa: Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida. In Six Plays from East and West Africa, ed. Jane Plastow and Martin Banham, 129–138. Oxford: James Currey. Plastow, Jane, and Mahlet Solomon. 2015. Contemporary Ethiopian Actresses. In African Theatre: Contemporary Women, ed. Martin Banham et  al. Oxford: James Currey. Plastow, Jane, and Solomon Tsehaye. 1998. Making Theatre for a Change: Two Plays of the Eritrean Liberation Struggle. In Theatre Matters: Performance and Culture on the World Stage, ed. Richard Boon and Jane Plastow, 36–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Priestley, J.B. 1947. An Inspector Calls. London: Heinemann. Prunier, Gerard. 2015a. The Ethiopian Revolution and the Derg Regime. In Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia:Monarchy, Revolution and the Lagacy of Meles Zenawi, ed. Gerard Prunier and Eloi Ficquet, 209–232. London: Hurst Publishers. ———. 2015b. The Eritrean Question. In Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Lagacy of Meles Zenawi, ed. Gerard Prunier and Eloi Ficquet, 233–256. London: Hurst Publishers. Prunier, Gerard, and Eloi Ficquet, eds. 2015. Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi. London: Hurst Publishers. Rubin, Don, ed. 1997. World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. London: Routledge. Schauf, Daniel. 2016. Blickacte. In African Theatre: China, India & the Eastern World, ed. J. Gibbs and F. Osofisan, 41–60. Oxford: James Currey. Shakespeare, William. 1794. Macbeth. London: C. Lowndes.

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———. 2007. Othello. New York: St Martins. Solomon Dirar. 2003. Theatre during the Eritrean Liberation Struggle: A Vehicle for Promoting Nationalism. An Analysis of the Play ‘Raesi Wolde-Michael’ (Unpublished MA Thesis). University of Leeds. Solomon Gebreghzier. 1973. Uninherited Wealth. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strindberg, August. 1988. Miss Julie. London: Methuen. Taddele Gebre-Hiwot. 1975. Man Now Etiopiawe? (Who is the Ethiopian?). Tedros Abraham. 2015. Fresh Form to suit Myriad Ideas in Beyene Haile’s Heart to Heart Talk. Journal of African Cultural Studies 27 (1): 71–83. Tesfaye Gessesse. 1975. Iqaw (Thing). Tewodros Tekele-Aregay. 2016. Ketedar Beleye (Beyond Marriage). Thomas, Michael. 2018. Whether to Laugh or Cry? Explorations of Genre in Amharic Fiction Feature Films. In Cine-Ethiopia The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa, 93–118. East Lansing: University of Michigan Press. Tigist Alemu. 2016. Mado Lemado (Parallels). Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. 1966. Tewodros (Tewodros) (Published in English, Ethiopian Observer). ———. 1973. Ha Hu Ba Sidist Wore (ABC in Six Months). ———. 1974. Abugida Keyisso (Learning to Read). ———. 1975. Enat Alemu Tenu (Mother Courage). ———. 1976a. Melikte Yohannes. ———. 1976b. Mekdim. ———. 1977. Collision of Altars. London: Rex Collings. ———. 1978. Gammo (Gammo). ———. 199?. Ha Hu Wayim Pa Pu (ABC or XYZ). Vaughan, Sarah. 2015. Federalism, Revolutionary Democracy and the Developmental State. In Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi, ed. Gerard Prunier and Eloi Ficquet. London: Hurst & Company. Wodenahe Kefela. 2016. Kieltile Kokeboch (A Chain of Stars). Yoftahe Negussie. 1932. Dade Tura (Dade Tura). ———. 1941. Afejeshign (The Woman in Contention). Yohannes Admassu. 2010. What Were They Writing About Anyway? Tradition and Modernization in Amharic Literature. Callaloo 33 (1): 64–81. Zekariyase Berihanu. 2016. Yebeale Enegedoch (The Holiday Guest). Zerihun Birehanu. 2019. Performing the Nation: Incorporating Cultural Performances in to Theatre in Ethiopia. In African Theatre, ed. Chukwuma Okoye, vol. 18, 100–120. Woodbridge: James Currey.

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Zerihun Birehanu, and Jane Plastow. 2017. An Absurdist in Addis Ababa: Manyazewal Endeshaw’s Engida. In African Theatre: Six Plays from East and West Africa, ed. Martin Banham and Jane Plastow, 129–138. Oxford: James Currey. Zewde, Bahru. 2002. A History of Modern Ethiopia (1855–1991). Oxford: James Currey.

Interviews in Ethiopia Abraha Tadesse. Mekelle, March 2016. Adisalem Merga, 2014. Bekele Tafara, October 1987. Belatu Atnafu, August 1992. Debebe Eshetu, November 1987b. Elsabet—August 1992. Haydn George, October 1987. Hiwot Arrage, 2014. Jermanesh Solomon, August 1992. Manyazewal Endeshaw (Many discussions between 1987 and 2018). Meaza Worku, 2016. Mengistu Lemma, November 1987. Tesfaye Gessese, October 1987. Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, January 1988. Welala Assefa, 2014. Zenebech Tesfaye, August 1992.

Interviews in Eritrea Afewerki Abraha, Asmara, July 1997. Alemseged Tesfai, Many discussions 1993–2019. Efriem, February 2015. Esias Tseggai, Many discussions 2003–2015. Gebrehiwot Haule, September 1995. Mesgun Zerai, Many discussions 2003–2015. Solomon Dirar, Many discussions 2003–2015. Solomon Gebreghzier, September 1995. Solomon Tsehaye, Many discussions 1993–2019. Yakim Tesfaye, February 2015.

Index1

A Abdi Muhamed Amin, 112 Lancrorlusal, 113 Muufo, 112, 113 Abdi Sinemo, 62, 74 Abdirahman Yusuf Artan, 107, 124 The Muted Cry, 124 Abdullahi Quarshe, 70, 71 Abe Gubegna, 217, 220, 285n2 Yedakamoch Wotimed, 217 Abwaan, 51, 64, 71, 72, 93, 103, 106, 111, 112, 126, 127 Acrobatics, 9, 17, 34, 195 Addis Ababa University/Theatre Arts Department, 14, 41n2, 158, 170, 172, 199, 203n28, 204n30, 224, 226, 228, 243, 247–250, 256, 258, 264, 285n6 Aden Farah, 108, 109, 121, 122 Afewerki Abraha, 240, 241 Kemsie Ntezechrewn Nehru, 240, 241 Agitprop, 32, 221, 229

Ahmed Gran, 54, 141 Alemayehu Kahasai, 18, 155, 157, 158, 195, 231, 233, 235, 240 Luul, 242 Alemseged Tesfai, 7, 213, 229, 235, 238, 241, 243, 273, 280, 281, 286n12 Eti Kal’a Quinat, 7, 241–243 Two Weeks in the Trenches, 242 Ali Ibrahim Idle, 84, 92–94 Dhulkeenna dhibaha ka jooga, 84, 92–93 Ali Sugulle, 23, 36, 75–78, 84–86, 88, 94, 99, 100, 104, 106, 111, 112, 127n2 Dunidu maskaxaday magan u tahay, 77 Gaarabidhdhaan, 99 Gobannimo, 84 Himiladeema, 75 Kalahaab iyo Kalahaad, 23 Nin lagu Seexdow he Seexan, 75

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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300 

INDEX

Allusion, 70, 109, 113, 220 Amharic, 4, 12, 37, 43n14, 118, 138, 141, 142, 144, 150, 151, 157, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 172, 177–179, 185, 190, 195, 201n2, 201n5, 203n22, 215, 217, 226, 247, 248, 258, 259, 265, 283, 285, 287n25, 290n39 Apemanship, 11, 24 Ayalneh Mulat, 221 Azeb Worku, 271, 272 Azmari, 153, 173, 174, 189, 190, 203n21, 269 B Bana Harnet, 238, 239 Barre, Siyad, 12, 27, 32, 33, 36, 59, 60, 68, 78, 81, 84, 87, 97–102, 107, 112–115, 128n13, 214 Battle of Adwa, 42n6, 55, 142, 144 Belgian/Belgian colonialism, 10, 38, 41n3 Belwo, 62–64, 67, 71, 74 Berhe Mesgun, 156, 157 Z’halfene N’bret Eritrea, 156, 157 Beyene Haile, 281–283 Weg’I Libi, 281, 283 Britain/British colonialism, 54 Burundi, 2, 3, 10, 14, 29, 33, 36–38, 41n3, 287n19 C Caplan, Philip, 170–174, 176, 178, 186, 203n26 Censorship, 21, 69, 78, 99, 112, 177, 184–186, 194, 214, 215, 221–225, 231, 255, 274 Central Cultural Troupe (EPLF), 234, 236, 241, 244, 246, 286n12 Chant, 60, 61, 216 China, 103–105, 128n13, 233

City Hall Theatre/Municipality Theatre, 178, 190, 263, 264 Cold War, 2, 26, 33 Colonialism, 25, 79, 140, 156, 182, 222 Comedy, 9, 17–20, 23, 30, 77, 90, 95, 111, 152, 154–156, 158, 159, 161, 170, 175, 181, 185, 188, 198, 214, 225–227, 235, 240, 241, 252, 254, 258–262, 266, 271, 280 D Debebe Eshetu, 166, 186, 189, 219, 221, 223, 225 Derg, 211–214, 216, 219–222, 224, 225, 227, 229–233, 243, 246, 255, 256, 276, 285n5, 285n7 Djibouti, 2, 3, 14, 21, 27, 29, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42n5, 51, 52, 57–59, 62, 64, 70, 77, 81, 87, 92, 96, 99, 108–110, 114, 115, 118, 120–123, 126, 129n28, 289n29 Double entendre/s, 156, 190 E Eritrea, 2–4, 7, 9, 12–14, 17, 19, 27, 29, 32, 37, 39, 40, 41n2, 41n3, 42n6, 55, 59, 60, 65, 67, 78, 129n19, 137–200, 201n1, 201n5, 204n33, 211–285, 286n11, 287n22–24 Eritrean Community-Based Theatre Project (ECBTP), 274, 277–279 Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), 212, 227, 229, 233–240 Eritrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (EPLF), 212, 227, 229, 232–246, 274, 276, 286n10, 286n11 Esaias Tseggai, 244, 246, 277, 279, 280, 289n34 Aster, 244

 INDEX 

Ethiopia, 2–4, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 25–27, 30–32, 35–37, 39, 40, 41n2, 41n3, 42n6, 44n20, 52, 55–60, 66, 67, 69, 74, 75, 112, 114, 115, 122, 128n3, 128n6, 137–200, 211–285 Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 21, 22, 43n14, 139, 164, 203n24 F Fanon, Franz, 24 Fascism, 56, 143, 149, 204n33 FESTAC, 105 Fisseha Belay, 226, 228, 285n6 Alkash na Zefegn, 226 Ashegrie Meseret, 226 Hoda Yifejew, 226, 228 Simen Sintayehu, 226, 266 French/French colonialism, 2–4, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 21, 29, 31, 32, 37, 56–58, 70, 107–110, 118, 120, 121, 123, 148, 150, 165, 192, 272, 276 G Gacan Macan, 109 Ge’ez, 138, 140, 141, 144, 150, 167, 168, 201n4, 201n6, 202n14 Germachew Tekle-Hawariat, 25, 203n27 German/German colonialism, 25, 41n3, 118, 124 H Hagar Fikir Theatre, 169, 254 Haile Selassie, 3, 21, 32, 39, 139, 143, 148–149, 152, 162, 171, 172, 175, 179, 181, 184–186, 189–194, 199, 200, 202n10, 203n28, 211, 216, 231, 232, 284

301

Haile Selassie Theatre/Ethiopian National Theatre, 167, 169–171, 173–175, 177, 178, 268 Halimo Khalif Omar ‘Magool,’ 75 Hasan Sheikh Mumin, 11, 76–78, 83, 86–92, 106, 111, 283 Dunidu maskaxday magan u tahay, 87 Ehlunaarka Adduunka, 87 Gaaraabidhaan, 87 Hubsiino Hal baa la Siistaa, 87 Shabeelnagood, 11, 86–92, 94 Heello, 63 Hees, 9, 43n14, 63 Hodeide, 36, 71, 72, 74, 79, 84, 97, 100, 105, 108, 113, 115, 128n10 Arawailo, 94 Magaalo, 80 I Iftin, 102–104, 106, 115 Improvisation, 118 Institut Djiboutien des Arts (IDA), 121 Islam/Islamic, 54, 56, 61, 63, 96, 101, 109, 116, 119, 120, 125, 141, 142, 155, 182, 202n11, 283, 289n26 Issayas Afewerki, 253, 273, 284 Italian/Italian colonialism, 17, 18, 26, 39, 42n6, 52, 53, 55–57, 64–66, 68, 78, 100, 107, 140, 142, 143, 149, 151–159, 162, 163, 165, 191, 196, 202n12, 202n19, 216, 274, 286n14, 290n38 Italian Theatre Association, 154, 155 Iyoel Yohannes, 90, 160–162, 177, 190, 203n22, 287n25 Acha Gabicha, 160 Zetegn Fetena Yalafe Jegna, 161

302 

INDEX

J Jama Musa Jama, 98, 117, 119 Jemanesh Solomon, 41, 256, 270, 271 K Kapere, 18 Kawadwa, Byron, 9, 152 Kebede Mikael, 11, 158, 165, 167, 190, 242 Hannibal, 165 Romewana Julyat Teater, 165 Yeketat Maebal, 158, 166 Kenya, 2, 3, 8, 12–15, 19, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35–37, 41n2–4, 42n10, 44n20, 44n28, 45n29, 52, 54, 57, 58, 60, 67, 78, 128n2, 159, 265 Keyahti Embaba (The Red Flowers), 238 Kikuyu, 12, 13 Kinet, 153, 159, 162, 173–175, 178, 189, 190, 196, 199, 200, 223, 229, 258, 260, 267, 268 Kiswahili, 4, 8, 12, 36, 159 L Lafoole Teacher Training College, 97 Luganda, 4, 12, 23, 152 Lycee Menelik, 150–152 M Mahber Tewaseo Deqqabbat (Ma.Te. De), 37, 156–158, 194–196, 198, 283 Mahber Theatre Asmara (Ma.Te.A), 37, 194–200, 231–233 Makerere University, 21, 22, 35 Makonnen Endalkahew, 22, 157, 188, 203n27, 268

Dawitna Orion, 157, 164, 192, 268 Salaswi Dawit, 164 Yedam Dems, 157 Malaku Baggosaw, 9, 149–153, 161 Manyazewal Endeshaw, 11, 163, 188, 252, 256–258, 260–261, 263, 264, 276, 283, 285n6, 288n25 Engida, 11, 188, 263, 264, 288n25 Maryam Mursal, 76, 114 Mau Mau, 22, 25 McLaren, Robert, 224, 225, 247, 248 Meaza Worku, 40, 265, 266, 272, 288n25 Keselameta Gare, 265, 266, 288n25 Meles Zenawi, 253, 284 Menelik II, 141, 144, 146, 150 Mengistu Haile Mariam, 27, 32, 211, 213, 284 Mengistu Lemma, 23, 166, 168, 169, 172, 176–178, 180, 181, 185, 186, 188, 190, 204n33, 216, 217, 220, 222, 249, 255, 259, 276, 285n3 Balekabara Baledaba, 216, 257 Tayak, 220, 221 Telfso Bekisse, 169, 185, 186 Tsere Colonialist, 222 Yelecha Gebecha, 23 Missionary/ies, 32, 65, 144, 244 Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame ‘Hadraawi,’ 76, 98, 99, 106, 110, 112, 113, 118, 128n10 Aqoon Iyo Afgarad, 98, 99, 111 Hadimo, 98 Tamaawax, 110 N Nationalism, 24, 59, 61, 69, 105, 197 Negritude, 8, 176, 224 Ngoma, 8–10, 159 Nyerere, Julius, 8, 26, 27, 32, 36, 42n10

 INDEX 

O Oud, 9, 34, 60, 62, 63, 71, 73, 74, 80, 81, 105, 125 P Peoples’ Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), 252, 276, 279, 282, 289n32 Poetry, 9, 22, 43n14, 44n27, 52, 53, 56, 60–64, 67–69, 71–74, 76, 81, 87, 92, 95, 99, 111, 118, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128n8, 138, 141, 147, 153, 168, 176, 189, 192, 201n6, 217, 225, 238, 240, 283, 289n34 Propaganda, 24, 29, 32, 56, 110, 112, 114, 124, 128n8, 156, 191, 200, 214, 221–223, 227–229, 232, 233, 235, 237–239, 244, 246, 255, 276, 281, 283, 284, 285n7 Proverbs, 94 Q Qene, 9, 43n14, 138, 141, 144, 147, 150, 151, 167, 168, 176, 177, 187, 190, 192, 201n6 R Radio Djibouti, 64, 108, 122 Radio Hargeisa, 64, 70, 74, 75, 79, 81, 84, 87, 120 Radio Mogadishu, 64, 67, 81, 87 Redsea Cultural Foundation, 117 Red Terror (the), 212, 214, 215, 221, 222, 224, 227, 258 Riddles, 8, 76, 86, 94, 181 Rwanda, 2, 3, 10, 14, 28–31, 33, 36–40, 41n3, 43n15, 287n19, 289n29

303

S Samena worq, 138, 146, 156, 190 School theatre/drama, 29, 31, 32, 66–69, 71, 165, 279 Second World War, 42n6, 56, 64–66, 128n11, 143, 149, 167, 186 Seneddu Gebru, 39, 165, 192, 267 Serumaga, Robert, 7, 9, 28 Renga Moi, 7, 28 Sewit Children’s Theatre Company, 277, 279, 280 Shakespeare, William, 6, 11, 36, 43n19, 151, 165, 167, 186, 188, 196, 251 Hamlet, 168, 257 King Lear, 168 Macbeth, 168, 280 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 167 Othello, 167, 223, 224 Romeo and Juliet, 43n19, 121, 167, 190 The Tempest, 151 Sheikh Muhammed Abdille Hassan/ The Mahdi/The Mad Mullah, 56, 58, 61 Siad Salah Ahmed, 100 Iftinka Aqoonta, 100 Solomon Gebreghzier, 27, 231 Uninherited Wealth, 231 Somalia, 2, 3, 9, 14, 21, 27, 29, 31–34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41n1, 41n3, 42n5, 52, 53, 55–60, 62, 65–68, 70, 71, 75–79, 84, 92, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114–116, 121–124, 126, 127, 128n2, 128n3, 128n6, 143, 212, 220 Somaliland, 2, 3, 9, 14, 21, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41n1, 42n5, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 79, 84, 86, 92, 96, 98, 103, 108, 109, 114, 115, 117–121, 126, 128n5, 129n28, 289n29

304 

INDEX

Somali National Movement (SNM), 60, 114, 227, 246–247 Somali National Theatre, 81, 82 Somali Youth League (SYL), 57, 58, 66, 81, 86, 87 Soyinka, Wole, 7, 8, 91, 177, 180, 186, 203–204n29 Death and the King’s Horseman, 91, 186 T Tanzania, 2–4, 8–10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 22, 26, 28, 30–32, 34–37, 39, 40, 41n2, 42n10, 44n20, 44n28, 45n29, 62, 67, 159 Teatro Asmara/Cinema Asmara, 153–155, 158, 194, 231, 280, 282 Tegedelai/tegadelti, 213, 234, 237, 243–246 Tekle Hawariat, 12, 21, 144–148, 150, 152, 153, 166, 188–191, 203n27 Fabula Yawreoch Commedia, 21, 144, 145, 191 Tesfaye Gessesse, 166, 168–174, 178, 185, 190, 193, 215–222, 247, 249, 285n3 Iqaw, 217 Legach and her Pot, 169, 172 Yeshi, 170 Theatre for Development (TfD), 2, 3, 15, 20, 28–31, 35, 44–45n28, 117, 123 Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), 214, 227, 229, 246–247, 252, 253, 273 Tigrinya, 4, 12, 37, 137, 138, 142, 157, 195, 197, 200, 201n1, 201n2, 201n5, 229, 231, 232, 244, 253, 274, 276, 277, 280, 283, 286n11, 286n13

Total theatre, 9, 173, 177, 203n29, 216 ‘Toto,’ Antonio de Curtis Gagliardi Griffo Focas, 155 Transnational/ism, 2–4, 13, 14, 17–20, 22, 30, 35, 38, 51, 52, 56, 66, 70, 108, 126, 137, 157, 253, 266, 269, 283 Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, 11, 26, 31, 34, 166–169, 171, 173, 174, 176–179, 181–185, 188, 190, 193, 203n23, 204n32, 215, 216, 218–220, 222–225, 247, 257, 259, 268, 283, 285n1, 285n3 Abugida Keyisso, 215 Askeyami Ligagered, 184 Collision of Altars, 173, 177, 203n23, 216 Enat Alemu Tenu, 216 Gammo, 222 Ha Hu Ba Sidist Wore, 215, 220 Ha Hu Wayim Pa Pu, 257 Joro Dagif, 184 Kosho Cigara, 184 Mekdim, 220 Melikte Yohannes, 220, 222 Oda Oak Oracle, 173, 177, 203n23 Tewodros, 26, 171, 172, 176–178, 182, 188, 203n23, 223, 224 Ye Kermasow, 11 Yeshoh Aklil, 169 U Uganda, 2–4, 8, 9, 12–15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30–33, 35, 37, 39, 41n2, 41n3, 42n10, 44n20, 61, 67, 152, 214, 265, 268, 287n19 Ujamaa, 26 Unity Association of Eritrean with Ethiopia, 156 USSR, 105, 212, 214, 222, 233, 286n10

 INDEX 

V Variety shows, 67, 158, 160, 195, 196, 198, 234, 235, 283 W Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, 8, 12, 15, 22, 25, 36, 178, 280 The Black Hermit, 23 Maitu Njugira, 27 Ngaheeka Ndeenda, 13, 27 The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, 25, 27 The Wound in the Heart, 21, 22 Waaberi, 72, 76, 83, 84, 97, 101, 102, 104, 106, 110, 113, 114, 120, 123, 128n13 Walala Hargeisa, 64, 69–73, 75, 79, 84, 106, 108, 114

305

Y Yasmin Mohamed, 51 Hiil Baan u Baahnahay, 119 Yemen, 2, 52, 54, 60, 122, 123, 202n15 Yoftahe Negussie, 6, 9, 22, 38, 149–153, 159, 161–163, 165, 189, 191, 202n20, 267 Afajeshin, 267 Dade Tura, 38, 153, 267 Miseker, 152 Tequem Yallabat Chewata, 152 Yehod Amlaku Qetat, 152 Yemare Melash, 152 Z Zanzibar, 3, 42n10, 55 Zwieker, Franz, 268