In 1923, the land north of the Limpopo river and south of the Zambezi river became a self-governing British colony named the Colony of Southern Rhodesia. By the 1970s, the armed struggle between those who wanted white minority rule and those who wanted black majority rule was well under way. All of the parties involved identified theatre as an effective means to advance their political agendas, and therefore the theatre of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia in the 1970s was largely propagandistic in tone. It consisted of the Rhodesian state's use of vernacular drama, the Marxists’ use of dogmatic drama, and the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) guerillas’ use of Pungwe (chiShona) and Ukwejisa (siNdebele).
The Rhodesian state broadcast – on radio and television – vernacular drama that mocked and denigrated so-called ‘backward’ Africans in an effort to reinforce colonial propaganda under the guise of ‘development’. The central storyline was Pamberi naPasture, which contrasted the ‘developed’ Pamberi and the ‘foolish’ Pasture.Footnote 1 Marxists, on the other hand, focused on the effectiveness of theatre as an analytical and political tool that could be used to mobilize people. Consequently, the Marxists used dogmatic drama to promote their rhetoric that white colonialism was synonymous with capitalism and that neither would be as beneficial to black Zimbabweans as independence and socialism.Footnote 2 The theatrical approach of ZANU–PF's armed forces was different in that it invoked the spirit mediums of Pungwe, Ukwejisa and Mhondoro in live performance to engender political and cultural identification with rural audiences. This helped ZANU–PF establish alliances with rural people and create safe bases for their troops in the countryside.Footnote 3 Pungwe and Ukwejisa were all-night, morale-building, participatory performances of song, music, poetry, speeches and dramatic sketches that were designed to subvert colonial propaganda and transmit the propaganda of liberation culture to rural citizens.Footnote 4 ZANU–PF guerrillas also strategically enlisted the expertise of Mhondoro spirit mediums in tactically delicate areas such as the Zambezi valley, to anoint their activities with the acceptance and blessings of traditional heroes such as Chiminuka and Nehanda.Footnote 5
In 1980, the aforementioned stretch of land in Africa became recognized internationally as an independent state named the Republic of Zimbabwe. This independence marked a shift from white minority rule to black majority rule in the form of ZANU–PF in a transition in government that was fraught with brutal violence, tense negotiations and tremendous hope for the democratic state that would emerge. This is the complex environment that political-theatre practitioners in Zimbabwe have navigated since independence in their efforts to finance, produce and tour their art. This article begins with a brief overview of key political-theatre and public-arts funding practices that emerged in the 1980s and continues with an examination of an influential political play from the era by Cont Mhlanga entitled Workshop Negative (1986). It is a play that tackles post-independence politics head on – including the failed promises of racial reconciliation.Footnote 6 Workshop Negative has been described as ‘the first to critically challenge the government, pointing out double standards in the state's declared Marxist agenda. It exposed the sham of the ideology in Zimbabwe where senior government officials preached socialism while they amassed wealth’.Footnote 7 The Zimbabwean government's response to Workshop Negative’s critiques of socialism included denying the theatre practitioners clearance to tour the play in Europe and reducing government-funded aid to community theatre groups writ large.Footnote 8 This article's analysis of Workshop Negative will therefore consider how the economic pressures explored in the play mirror the precarious working conditions that arts-funding models placed on political-theatre practitioners in Zimbabwe at the time.
Political theatre in the 1980s
Once ZANU–PF took office at independence in 1980, it responded to the colonial regime's misappropriation of public funds with the inception of the Division of Culture, which operated under the Ministry of Education. The political theatre that emerged in the 1980s, by those who had been exploited throughout the white minority rule of previous decades, was a means for communities to channel their deep frustrations into staged public critiques that had few other non-violent means of expression.Footnote 9 By 1984, the University of Zimbabwe had begun to establish a drama programme that aspired, according to Robert McLaren, to ‘be in keeping with the process of democratization, Zimbabweanization, Africanization and socialist transformation’.Footnote 10 McLaren worked on some of the key plays of the early era of independence, including Katshaa! Sound of the AK (1985), Samora Continua (1987) and Mandela: The Spirit of No Surrender (1990). Other plays of the time were Takaitora neRopa/Won by Blood (1983) and Rivers of Blood (1985).Footnote 11 Themes that emerge in some of these plays are the suffering of black men, the presence of white oppression, and the existence of black self-determination.Footnote 12 Stylistically, the political theatre of the 1980s was deeply rooted in ceremonial dances, praise ceremonies, music, poetry and prose, and also incorporated aspects of the philosophies of the sarungano, who was someone, usually a woman, who depicted the beliefs held by the community and ‘erected the ethical principles that ultimately defined the moral consciousness of the time’.Footnote 13
ZANU–PF's efforts to support the arts at independence included making Kenyan-born Ngugi wa Mirii the first director of the Zimbabwe Foundation for Education and Production in 1983. This was also the year that Zambian theatre veteran Stephen Chifunyise oversaw government-sponsored alternative theatre and performance in his role as Zimbabwe's minister of youth, sports and culture. During Chifunyise's term, the country sponsored events including the annual Independence Anniversary Cultural Gala. By 1987, wa Mirii had also led the formation of the state-sponsored Zimbabwe Association of Community Theatres, which ‘attempted to encourage, coordinate and represent the new theatre groups, many of which were full-time, that mushroomed in cities and towns all over Zimbabwe’.Footnote 14
By the end of its first decade in office, the ZANU–PF government had used tactics of political hegemony to manage the repercussions of the ending of the Cold War, the emergence of civil-society organizations, economic structural adjustment programmes, and the domestic impacts of neo-liberalism and trade liberalization. Political-theatre practitioners’ ability to manage the impacts of the state's tactics was informed by the experience of those among them who had also been armed combatants and/or foreign-theatre practitioners. This experience meant that theatre practitioners were familiar with the many ways in which post-colonial societies in the region had failed to develop or implement a vision that united the various members of society.Footnote 15 They produced plays that criticized the state, staged social injustices and mobilized people.
The ZANU–PF government perceived dramatists’ ability to create work with critical content that engaged people to be a threat and the government sought to mitigate that threat by making the working conditions of the artists difficult. This was done not only through censorship but also notably through the bureaucratic processes involved in accessing public arts funding and the restrictions placed on the content of publicly funded art. Elements of these practices were mirrored by foreign donor agencies once they too identified theatre as a means to advance political agendas. Within this complex environment, experienced and informed political dramatists in Zimbabwe expressed their concerns and those of their communities through the formation of theatre groups that produced plays with content that was relevant to their majority black audiences.
Workshop Negative
Workshop Negative is perhaps the best known of the plays of the 1980s in Zimbabwe. In it, playwright Mhlanga critiques the blatant contradictions between the state's socialist Marxist rhetoric at independence and the ruling party's capitalist rhetoric a few short years later. Set in a tool-making workshop in Zimbabwe five years after independence, Mhlanga provocatively states in the stage directions that the exact location ‘could be any part of the country’.Footnote 16 In the world that Mhlanga creates there is no part of Zimbabwe that has been shielded from the contradictions in the government's rhetoric and practices – instead, Mhlanga stages a masculine, violent and stagnant Zimbabwe.
Workshop Negative was produced by Amakhosi Theatre Productions, a company formed by young members of the Dragons Karate Club from the Makokoba Township in Bulawayo in the year of Zimbabwe's independence. At that time, young Zimbabweans they were not allowed to access performance spaces, ‘due to residual colonial age restrictions (Mhlanga interview 2016)’.Footnote 17 Mhlanga, Workshop Negative’s playwright, was a member of the Dragons Karate Club and a founding member of Amakhosi Theatre Productions along with others, including Thokozani Masha, Sihlangu Dlodlo and Mickey Tickays.Footnote 18 Amakhosi Theatre Productions is one of the most influential drama groups in Zimbabwe – it has long been established as a contributor to political theatre in Zimbabwe, and it has at times involved upwards of 150 artists working in theatre, dance, film and video. It is also a company that has, since its inception, emphasized the professional training of young people in the township communities of Bulawayo. However, in the company's early years access to training was restricted along the same gender lines that informed the communities’ cultural context. According to Nkululeko Sibanda, this context was informed by Ndebele culture, which ‘dictated that the place of the woman in the community was in the kitchen and to bear children’ and considered it ‘taboo’ for females to perform onstage.Footnote 19 Young women in township communities were only allowed to participate in fashion, cookery clubs and the like in preparation for the domestic roles they were expected to fulfil.Footnote 20 In the 1980s, Amakhosi Theatre Productions drew from their previous iteration as a karate club and integrated karate training into their theatre-training model, and even though it was a form of martial arts that was only practised by males in the region, the theatre company allowed women to participate. The ability of female theatre trainees to successfully meet the physical and mental demands of the theatre training challenged patriarchal culture within the theatre company and the wider community, and the end of the decade marked the introduction of the first group of female trainees into full-time performance.Footnote 21 In subsequent decades, the company went on to use open rehearsals, gendered games, performances and the development of a gender policy to integrate women into a range of influential performance, creative and administrative roles.Footnote 22
Workshop Negative reflects the onstage gender dynamics of its era – there are no females in the play and women are only mentioned twice. Instead, the play features three male characters who are all Zimbabwean: Mkhize, who is the black owner of the tool-making workshop; Ray Graham, who is a white thirty-year-old who has worked there for six years; and Zulu, who is a black tool-maker hired by Mkhize at the beginning of the play to work with Ray. Workshop Negative is rife with stage directions that call for the actors to physically communicate the volatility of the political tensions and racial stakes that formulate the dynamics of each character's relationship with themselves and each other. All throughout the play, the men deliver hard kicks and hard blows to each other; and they head-butt, rush each other, and hit one another in the belly with wood. While the emphasis on stage combat certainly references the armed struggle of the era, it is also indicative of the theatre company's historical roots as a karate club and their performance style that emphasizes agility and physicality.
If read as the play's protagonist, Mkhize is a complex and illustrative character. The audience learns that Mkhize purchased the workshop from Mr Rowland, a white Zimbabwean who left for South Africa with his family after the sale. One of the central issues in Zimbabwe at the time of the play's creation was land policy – namely control of and access to underused land that had been redistributed from white large-scale landholders to new medium- and small-scale black landholders. The execution of land redistribution policies was further complicated and undermined by corrupt large-scale commercial farmers working in cahoots with the state to transfer underused and marginalized land to poor and small farmers, in order to extract new forms of financial and political capital.Footnote 23 In the mid-1980s, when Workshop Negative was written, one of the pressing political questions was that of ownership and the transference of ownership from the white minority to the black majority. Within this context, Mhlanga's decision to have Mkhize – a black Zimbabwean man – own a successful business that he bought from Mr Rowland – a white Zimbabwean man – is noteworthy. In addition to being an entrepreneur, Mkhize is also the chairman of multiple organizations and a shareholder in multiple others. He estimates that he has amassed sufficient social and economic capital that he can afford to be dismissive of Zulu (one of his workers) when Zulu threatens to lodge labour-condition complaints against Mkhize because of the length of hours and the days Zulu and Ray are expected to work. Zulu concludes that Mkhize is ‘swelling with luxury and wealth’.Footnote 24 Mhlanga emphasizes his portrayal of a black Zimbabwean man's abuse of his privilege and power through the inclusion of a stage direction that calls for the actors to ‘demonstrate the swelling bellies’.Footnote 25
Furthermore, the audience learns that Mkhize was part of the armed black liberation movement at Zimbabwe's borders and that he then went on to Cuba to learn how to be a socialist political commissar. Mkhize has a public profile that includes him delivering impassioned speeches at rallies about the merits of socialism. However, Mhlanga also establishes very early in Act I of the three-act play that the socialist beliefs that Mkhize champions at public events and to his employees are rhetoric alone, with no commitment to action. Not only does Mkhize incessantly demand throughout the play that his employees increase their productivity, he also insists that they (Ray and Zulu) address him using the socialist rhetoric of ‘comrade’. However, when Mkhize is alone with Zulu (who is also black), Mkhize instructs Zulu to call him ‘sir’ instead of comrade. Mhlanga portrays Mkhize as a former liberation movement fighter who has unequivocally become a capitalist and will pursue economic wealth regardless of the impacts of his pursuit on white or black Zimbabweans. Towards the end of Act III, Mhlanga stages a moment where all three men – black and white – discuss what they can each contribute to a joint effort to build a more equitable future for the company and metaphorically for the country. Mhlanga is unflinching in his assessment of the impact that access to money had on a post-independence Zimbabwe under a then increasingly authoritarian ZANU–PF black majority rule.
ZULU: And how do I fit in?
MKHIZE: How will you fit in? The problem with you, Zulu, is that you don't have money. All you have are socialist theories. And the odd thing is that they also need capital to be implemented.Footnote 26
Similarly, political-theatre artists were also facing the conundrum that precarious funding posed to their ability to create theatre with content that matched their political beliefs. In this regard, when Mkhize identifies the challenge that is socialist rhetoric's need for funding in Workshop Negative, Mhlanga is mirroring the severe funding constraints that his own theatre company, Amakhosi Theatre Productions, and others were facing. A particularly frustrating funding problem for theatre artists was the extent to which funding was fragmented. Funding for artistic work at the time was inefficiently handled over three separate ministries – Information, Home Affairs and Education, and Sports and Culture – and at least three separate state-funding bodies – the Zimbabwe Foundation for Education and Production, the National Arts Council, and the Division of Culture.Footnote 27 However, when ZANU–PF abandoned socialist theory, it withdrew funding from the arts, which meant that by the mid-1980s political-theatre practitioners, and other cultural workers, were forced to solicit all of their funding from private and foreign entities. These entities were national and foreign non-governmental organizations, namely domestic and foreign financial institutions, foreign social institutions and foreign donor agencies – all of which were just beginning to value theatre specifically for its ability to communicate with citizens.
The challenge to secure funding post-independence was confounded by theatre practitioners who suspected that the motives of foreign donors were self-serving and calculated. This atmosphere of doubt also affected the internal dynamics of the communities of theatre practitioners. It created a division between those who were thought to have chosen to appease state censorship and/or foreign donor interests and those who were perceived as being complicit with the state and/or foreign donor agencies. Amakhosi Theatre Productions were accused of complicity with the state when the company agreed to depoliticize versions of some of their plays so that they could be aired by the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.Footnote 28 The state controlled all of the radio stations and television channels, therefore the only way to access radio and television outlets – and thus a very broad audience – was through the state. Consequently, some theatre practitioners and citizens doubted Amakhosi Theatre Productions’ ideological integrity because of the company's decision to alter its political content to gain access to wider audiences. In an interview at the time, Mhlanga seemed to make an attempt to bridge the divide in his artistic community after his company's work aired on television, ‘We [Amakhosi Theatre Productions] are always protesting, we've always been protesting, the difference is just the form of media’.Footnote 29
The combined pressures of a lack of state funding, increased state censorship and constraints of foreign non-governmental funding led some theatre artists (who had previously created political content) to create work that was politically ambiguous. Theatre practitioners experimented and collaborated to create theatre that was referential to traditional Zimbabwean theatrical forms and attentive to the aesthetics of Western theatre.Footnote 30 These plays placed equal blame on the state, the oppositional Zimbabwe African People's Union party and disenfranchized citizens. The plays were produced and performed in factories, beer gardens and public places, very often for free, under the funding bodies’ premise that campaign plays were meant to emphasize education and the development of conscience.Footnote 31 Often the themes of these plays were Western imperialist machinations, such as the ‘progressive’ Western doctor and the ‘ignorant’ traditional healer. It is worth noting how closely this storyline matches that of the colonial Rhodesian state's vernacular drama in the 1970s that used the Pamberi naPasture model to contrast the developed Pamberi and the foolish Pasture.Footnote 32
The themes of who is the developed Pamberi and who the foolish Pasture persist in Workshop Negative. In one sequence in particular in Act II, Mhlanga underscores the contradictions explored through the character of Mkhize. At first, Mkhize, Zulu and Ray demonstrate toyitoyi (a war dance) as Mkhize calls himself ‘Ex-freedom fighter. High command’, ‘Ihlale gangeni (living in the forest)’, ‘Idle – capitalist’.Footnote 33 Then the three men take turns sitting in a chair as they recite the names of a breadth of organizations for which Mkhize is chairman. After that, Zulu and Ray use shovels to heap money into a pile as they shout the names of the organizations of which Mkhize is a shareholder.Footnote 34 With each title called, emphasis is placed on the meaninglessness of the titles themselves and the ease with which they can be accumulated and their attendant social capital amassed. This sequence of action in the play concludes with the declaration, by Ray and Zulu, that Mkhize is ‘the money mountain’ who owns three farms,Footnote 35 a mansion, two Jaguars and two Mercedes, and employs twelve domestic servants.Footnote 36 The list of Mkhize's possessions includes ‘One wife’.Footnote 37 This is the first of the two times that Mhlanga mentions women in Workshop Negative. The other time is in Act III during a moment when Zulu tells Ray that he refuses to work the long hours that Mkhize routinely demands. Zulu says, ‘Right, Ray, you are working till ten p.m. today. Me, no! After five I go womanising and drinking’.Footnote 38 It is important to note that Otrude N. Moyo and Saliwe M. Kawewe caution against analyses of women's lives in Zimbabwe that identify patriarchy as the primary or sole source of oppression.Footnote 39 Instead, Moyo and Kawewe assert through their research that ‘gender, race, ethnicity, and class are intricately used to exclude African women from mainstream political economy and thus relegate them to the lowest socio-economic status’.Footnote 40 In both instances where women are briefly mentioned in Workshop Negative, they are used to assert a male character's heterosexuality and virility in ways that render the women objects of property (as in ‘One wife’) or as perennially available for recreational sex (as in ‘womanising’).
Much of Workshop Negative focuses on illustrating and emphasizing the great extent to which Mkhize's socialism is rhetoric alone; that is, until the latter part of Act III where the audience is presented with the possibility that Mkhize could match his actions as a businessman with the socialist ideals he espouses in public. It is here that Mhlanga can be read as a playwright posing a question to his audience: is it possible that Mkhize has not in fact lost the ideals of the liberation movement and not been completely corrupted by his exposure to and pursuit of capital and social stature? Mhlanga chooses to have Mkhize return to his socialist ideals. He vows to work together with Ray and Zulu and they all declare that they are ‘New men!’Footnote 41 This is immediately followed by their sudden and simple death. After this unexpected, unexplained murder, three new characters are introduced in the form of disembodied voices – Voice One, Voice Two, and Voice Three. Each voice poses a rhetorical question about whether or not becoming ‘New Men’ is easy.Footnote 42
(They all cross the line and just then there is a loud sound (of a drum) and the actors collapse dead. Three different strong voices are heard.)
VOICE ONE: People of this land be for unity, but is it easy?
VOICE TWO: People of this land be for reconciliation, but is it easy?
VOICE THREE: People of this land be for peace, but is it easy?
(Curtain)Footnote 43
The future Zimbabwe that Mhlanga stages at the play's conclusion is chilling. The men are all dead, the women remain omitted. When the curtain draws on Workshop Negative the audience is left to contemplate a way forward for Zimbabwe that is profoundly unclear.
Conclusion
The decades since Workshop Negative’s sombre assessment of the future of a newly independent Zimbabwe have been marred by a government that has become increasingly authoritarian, dictatorial and violent. For artists and arts funding, this has meant that the government has compromised the effectiveness of the administration and allocation of cultural funding in ways that have further threatened and limited public discourse and dissent. In addition, up to the turn of the millennium, when the Zimbabwean economy crashed, and into the early 2000s, foreign donor agencies have set clear restrictions on the content of plays they commission to minimize the risk of critique of themselves or the government. In some cases, the consequences of governmental critique included non-governmental organizations being threatened by the state with closure, dismissal and banishment.Footnote 44
These are not idle threats. They come from a government that has, during electoral processes, for example, sought to diminish the impact of civic organizations by using brutal state-authorized forceFootnote 45 and passing repressive legislation such as the Public Order and Security Act, the Access to Information and Privacy Act and the General Laws Amendment Act.Footnote 46 This is a government that has intimidated its citizens through policies such as Operation Murambatsvina (which translates into English as Operation Clear the Filth), which according to Human Rights Watch caused a level of destruction that was ‘unprecedented in Zimbabwe. Indeed, there are few, if any precedents of a government so forcibly and brutally displacing so many of its own citizens in peacetime’.Footnote 47
The state has also increased pressure on dissenting voices in the public sphere, yet political-theatre practitioners and others have continued to express their concerns, despite the consequences.Footnote 48 For example, the theatre company Rooftop Productions produced Walter Muparutsa and Raisedon Baya's play Rags & Garbage (2002), which critiques the ruling and opposition parties and discusses land policy and land use. State personnel called and questioned the actors and producers involved in the production about their objectives and threatened to ban it. Rooftop Production's subsequent production, Super Patriots and Morons (2004) – which is an acrimonious satire of then ZANU–PF president Robert Mugabe – was also banned after it played at the Harare International Festival of Arts in 2004.
This article has provided an overview of the political-theatre and arts-funding challenges that emerged in the new post-independence Zimbabwe of the 1980s. It continued with an analysis of how the issues of ownership and capital raised in Workshop Negative mirrored the arts-funding challenges that political-theatre artists and theatre companies like Amakhosi Theatre Productions faced at the time. One review of a 2016 production of Workshop Negative by Tangle at Gate Theatre in London in the UK said that despite script and directorial issues, ‘the message is relevant’.Footnote 49 Workshop Negative is a message from a time when political-theatre practitioners were learning to be acutely aware of the interconnectedness of art, politics and funding as they navigated a newly independent black-majority-rule government whose practices contradicted its socialist rhetoric. There are lessons, for a transnational audience, embedded in the perseverance and pragmatism of political-theatre practitioners in Zimbabwe. Through an analysis of the confluence of political, economic and artistic pressures that have informed the conditions of political theatre in Zimbabwe, meaningful insights can be gained into the fragility of democracy, the speed at which a state can become authoritarian, and the many politically impactful roles that theatre can play in society.
