Participatory popular theatre: the highest stage of cultural underdevelopment.

Abstract

T he question mark at the end of my title indicates my own doubts about participatory popular theater in Africa, even as I remain a practitioner of it. This dialectical component in the title echoes a recent revalorization of culture in development policies. Kwame Nkrumah's Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism was an attempt to show how Lenin's analysis of imperialism needed to be updated in a post-colonial world; it was necessary, he argued, to relate the economic dynamism of capitalism to post-colonial structures such as multi-national companies and international merchant banks, which, in turn, had to be related to political, social, and cultural links still maintained between the newly independent African nations and their former colonial masters (23947). The question mark in my title is meant to raise doubts in the minds of those who, like myself, have been enthusiastic practitioners of participatory popular theater-doubts about whether such drama forms might not sometimes be abetting the same process of dependency noted by Nkrumah, rather than helping delink African societies from Northern dominance. What imperatives have led international agencies to court African popular theater workers? What movements in African theater practice have paved the way for a marriage with the development agencies? The revalorization of African culture in recent years is related to the discrediting of modernization

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