Africa - 20th and 21st Century Female Playwrights, Directors, Theatre and Drama Practitioners

Africa - 20th and 21st Century Female Playwrights, Directors, Theatre and Drama Practitioners

Sara Pinto Coelho 

Sara Pinto Coelho was born in 1913 in Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe (now the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe) who lived most of her life in Mozambique. She wrote both plays and fiction. Many of her plays were performed in Mozambique. She eventually became Director of theatrical programming on The Radio Club of Mozambique an independent radio station. She married and was the mother of the famous journalist Carlos Pinto Coelho.

Efua Sutherland

The Ghanaian playwright and poet, Efua Sutherland, was born in the Cape Coast (now Ghana) in 1924. She trained as a teacher at the Teacher’s Training College in Ghana before studying Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. When she returned to Accra in Ghana in 1955, she founded with others the literary magazine Okyeame. She also founded in 1959, the experimental theatre workshop, The Drama Studio in Accra which morphed into the Writer’s Workshop in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. The group founded through the University of Ghana, the first Ghana travelling theatre troupe. 

The experimental theatre of The Drama Studio explored the work of Brecht and Stanislavsky as well as the plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare. The Drama Studio also mounted Sutherland’s plays like Foriwa (1962) and Edufa (a 1967 based on the work of Euripides) which both are dramas which explore how old African traditions can be mixed with new ways and modern traditions. In 1975, the group produced Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa: A Storytelling Drama, a piece which examines the connection between traditional African storytelling techniques and contemporary dramatic conventions. 

Under the Artistic Direction of Sutherland the Drama Studio eventually became both an experimental workshop for Ghanaian writers and fertile ground for the development of truly Ghanaian Children’s Theatre. The style of animated rhythm plays was experimented with the 1968 children’s plays Vulture! Vulture! and Tahinta (both 1968). Her plays and poetry were broadcast on the popular Ghanaian radio program ‘The Singing Net’. It is estimated that she wrote 12-20 plays which were and are performed by many drama groups and schools throughout Ghana. One of her later plays was Nyamekye, which is a transposition of Alice in Wonderland into African story forms and contexts using African Folk Opera conventions shows the influence of the folk opera tradition and most of her unpublished plays were performed by drama groups in Ghana. Her book of Ghanaian folktales and folklore The Voice in the Forest, took 20 years to compile but was finally published in 1983. Efua Sutherland died in 1996.

Nadine Gordimer

The prominence of oral storytelling in Africa meant that the emergence of plays, theatre and drama in performance form is sometimes hard to isolate as a separate tradition. One writer who successfully made some journeying into drama was the novelist, poet and political activist Nadine Gordimer who was born in 1923. Her plays like her life, concentrated on advocating for the rights of Black South Africans, and opposing apartheid. She joined the African National Congress and much of her writings were banned at some point. She probably wrote a number of plays but her most famous play and the only one published was The First Circle (1949) which is a one-act play in which Dante and Virgil visit the first circle of hell to question a number of South Africans about their lives and why they have been consigned to hell. 

Ama Ata Aidoo

Ama Ata Aidoo, is female Ghanaian writer, social commentator and playwright born in 1942. Her earliest play The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) is a problem play and explores the dilemma faced by a Ghanaian student who brings his new Afro-American wife back to Ghana.

In 1967, Aidoo received a scholarship to Stanford University. She returned to Ghana in 1970. In the same year, she produced a short story anthology and the play Anowa, a play which explores the fight for women of individual identity against their communal responsibilities and sense of identity within a community. Much of her later work exposes the problems with the notion of Western education as a liberating tool African women and the problems that face African women who are left to run households and families when war or unemployment leaves them to raise large families.). The play is based on a Ghanaian traditional tale of a daughter who rejects her suitors and marries a stranger who is the devil in disguise. Set in the 1870''s, the play explores Anowa's doomed marriage to a Kofi Oko who is a slave trader. An old man and woman act as a Chorus to the events unfolding. Kofi demands that Anowa acts like other women. She refuses. It is revealed that Kofi is infertile and he kills himself. Anowa drowns herself. 

Hélène Cixous

The North African Algerian born feminist, playwright, poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous is prolific in her writing in all fields. Her work is sometimes considered feminist and post-structuralist but the influences on her work are quite broad including Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Arthur Rimbaud. Identity, the power of language and our relationship to language, are central concerns of her work. Some of her plays and dramatic works were La Pupulle (1971), Portrait de Dora (1976), Le Nom d'Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit (1978), La Prise de l'école de Madhubaï (1984), L'Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk (1985), L'Indiade, ou l'Inde de leurs rêves (1987), On ne part pas, on ne revient pas (1991),  Les Euménides d'Eschyle (1992), L'Histoire (1994), La Ville parjure ou le Réveil des Érinyes (1994), Jokasta (1997 opera libretto), Tambours sur la digue (1999), Rouen, la Trentième Nuit de Mai '31 (2001), Le Dernier Caravansérail (2003) and Les Naufragés (2010).

Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta was a Nigerian-born playwright, novelist and writer who grew up in Lagos in Nigeria and eventually moved to the United Kingdom in 1962. Her work concentrates on the themes of child slavery, female identity and the quest for female independence and freedom. Her writing was always contentious and her husband burnt her first writings. She died in 2017. Her first play or playscript was Juju Landlord (1975) which was taken up by Granada Television as an episode for the program Crown Court. This was followed by A Kind of Marriage in 1976. The last play she wrote was Family Bargain which was written in 1986 and was adapted by Emecheta for television for the BBC in 1987. She died in 2017.

Nokugcina Elsie Mhlophe

The eclectic and varied contributions of women to the dramatic and performing arts is nowhere captured so well as in the life and work of South African writer, anti-apartheid activist, storyteller, playwright, director, poet and actress, Nokugcina Elsie Mhlophe. Born in 1958, her work as a writer and storyteller has kept alive African storytelling and drama in Africa in Zulu, Xhosa, English and Afrikaans. Her style often is seen to combine traditional storytelling and folklore with contemporary events and song. She began her life in drama as an actress performing in Umongikazi: The Nurse (1983) and Black Dog: Inj'emnyama (1984). She then wrote and performed in the autobiographical play Have You Seen Zandile? (1986). This was followed by Born in the RSA (1987) along with her performances at a number of storytelling festivals internationally as she campaigned more vigorously for an end to Apartheid in South Africa. From 1989–1990, she was resident director at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg as well as coordinating READ, a national literacy organization. Her work was then featured on a number of music and video initiatives including Music for Little People (1993), Not so fast, Songololo (1993), The Gift of theTortoise (contributed to the Ladysmith Black Mambazo album in 1994) and Africa at the Opera (1999). Some of her other work includes Fudukazi's Magic (2002), The Bones of Memory (2002) and Mata Mata (2003). performance, family musical).

Latifa Ben Mansour

Latifa Ben Mansour is an Algerian playwright, writer, psychoanalyst and linguist born in Tlemcen in Algeria in 1950. Her writings and plays deal with the complex roles which Algerian women play in modern Algerian society dealing with themes of social expectations, extremism, memory and the role of storytelling in healing. Her most famous play was written in the 1990's but performed in 2004 and is titled Trente-trois Tours à son Turban (Thirty-three Towers in his Turban). The play is written as a satire of the hypocrisy of religious extremism in Algeria. In it the central scholar character's turban gets bigger and bigger as he lies and deceives more people. He is undone by a poor woman who receives a letter from her son who is overseas which a literate woman translates. The play shows how educating women can help end ignorance and exploitation.

Amy Jephta

Amy Jephta is a South African playwright, director and screenwriter who was born in Cape Town in South Africa in 1989. After finishing a BA in Theatre and Performance and then an MA in Theatre-making at the University of Cape Town, Jephta started to write and direct a number of plays. As a playwright her plays include This Liquid Earth: A Eulogy in Verse, Kristalvlakte, Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story, Other People's Lives, All Who Pass, Flight Lessons, Sonskyn Beperk, While You Weren't Looking, Free Falling Bird, Damage Control, Kitchen, Interiors and Pornography.

Some of Jephta’s plays are Brechtian in their style and influence. Kristalvlakte is a modern transposition of Mother Courage and Her Children where Priscilla is a mother peddling stolen goods and becoming involved in a world of gangs and junkies. Others like Free Falling Bird explore how women is South Africa can reclaim their voices and spaces in a modern South Africa. The play is an eclectic mix of elements like the Ancient Greek tragedy The Trojan Women and free-form jazz and spectacle.

Jephta has also written short scenes and monologues such as Shoes which was directed by Danny Boyle as part of compilation show at England’s Royal Court Theatre in 2015. She predominantly works now as a director ans a screenwriter for television while also lecturing at university. 

20^th and 21^st Century African Female Playwrights, Directors, Theatre and Drama Practitioners

References

Adams, A.V. & Sutherland-Addy, E. (2007). The legacy of Efua Sutherland: Pan-African Cultural Activism. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing.

Beadle, D. (2006). Strategies of resistance in Dramatic Texts of North African Woman: A Body of Words. By Laura Chakravarty Box. New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp xi 258. Theatre Research International, 31(2).

Burness, D. (1981). Critical Perspectives on Lusophone Literature from Africa. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press.

Da Silva, T.S. (2011). Lusophone African Women’s Writing: A Brief Introduction. Retrieved from http://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/FEMECintroLU.html

Daymond, M. et al. (eds.) 2002. Women Writing Africa: the southern region. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Gibbs, J. (2009). “Efua Sutherland: The ‘Mother’ of Ghanaian Theatre”, in Nkyin-kyin: Essays on the Ghanaian Theatre (Cross/Cultures 98), Rodopi. Retrieved from "Efua Sutherland: The 'Mother' of the Ghanaian Theatre".

Jephta, A. (2015). "On familiar roads: The fluidity of Cape coloured experiences and expressions of migration and reclamation in the performances of the Kaapse Klopse in Cape Town." Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp.164-179.

Misra, A. (2012). “Death in Surprise: gender and Power Dynamics in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa”. Journal of Drama Studies, Vol.6, No. 1, 2012, pp.81-91.

Odamtten, V.O. (1993). The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neocolonialism. University of Florida Press. 

Vogel, E.A. (1993). Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Retrieved from Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer

Williams, L.R., Wilcox, H., McWatters, K. & Thompson, A. (1990).The body and the text: Hélène Cixous: reading and teaching. New York: St. Martin's Press.