Performing the subversive: censorship and theatre making in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Studies on the history of censorship in Zimbabwe are very scarce. When Zimbabwe attained her independence from Great Britain on 18 April 1980, she chose to follow a socialist system of economic and social development. Even though this programme had the best intentions, like most programmes for the future, it was used, together with the recuperation of denuded indigenous culture, as a tool for restricting national debate and for censorship. After the failure of neoliberal policies that had begun in 1990, Zimbabwe plunged into a crisis which began in 1998 and ended in 2008. Protest theatre artists who voiced their displeasure with the underperforming economy and bad politics were censored, politically controlled and sometimes detained by the Zimbabwean Government. I seek to document this stifling of creativity through the method of thick description. I will specifically study the theatre and creative activities of Dambudzo Marechera and take a panoramic view of censorship and political control of theatre, of several key theatre companies of Zimbabwe, during the crisis period.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.