Coming thirteen years after its last issue on women artists, the volume is a much-awaited addition to the research on the indigenous performance scene in Africa. One of the strengths of the book is its focus on the variety of performance-making practices and processes in Africa, such as in the groundbreaking work of groups like Binti Leo of Tanzania and Ingoma Nshya of Rwanda. The compilation is the first of its kind to classify the role of female theatre artists and revivify their localized struggles against neocolonial oppressive states and gender biases.
The introduction by Sandra L. Richards features the struggles of African artists and their communal efforts across Africa. In the first essay Dalia Basiouny charts her own journey as a theatre artist and director. Her Solitaire (2011) and Magic of Borolus (2012) depict women's attempt to overcome social invisibility through sustained efforts in politically charged Egypt. Sara Matchett and Nicola Cloete look at the relation between embodied activism and online social media campaigns, such as One Billion Rising and Bring Back Our Girls, and the political implications of this conflation informed by global activism. The writers mark Walk: South Africa (2013), created by a group of female artists from Cape Town, as a counterdiscourse against the gender-based violence and rape culture in South Africa and India during 2012 and 2013. They further explicate how these insurgencies speak out against the normalization of violence culture, generating a dialogue leading to action at the personal level and the co-creation of autobiographical experience at the collective level.
While Susan Kiguli and Jane Plastow's chapter proceeds to underline the power of poetic expressions and songs in the Theatre for Development project in Uganda, Alude Mahali evokes Nyamza's psychological reimaginings of South Africa's troubled historical past in Isingqala (2011) and after-images of 19-Born-76-Rebels (2013). The writer underscores Nyamza's performative discourse on pain and loss which, she intricately weaves with aesthetics to create a dual effect on the audience.
Marvin Carlson's chapter on experimental theatre of Tunisia traces the professional development of Jalila Baccar, one of the leading women playwrights and performers in the Arab world and the forerunner of Tunisia's post-independence artistic scene. Lebogang Disele's self-narrative shifts the focus to the women performers in Bostwana and the role of theatre in changing individual perceptions. Countering the idea of the exoticized homogeneous image, Disele highlights the representational quality of theatre in enabling the women to utilize their power through their potential subjectivities.
By exemplifying Bibi Titi's conscious-raising efforts, Vicensia Shule attends to the role of performing dance groups in Tanzania in helping women construct their identity within the wider community. Moving on, Ariane Zaytzeff's interview with Rwandan artist Odile Gakire Katese is evaluative in nature, tracing her journey from the Women's Initiative organization to founding the Ingoma Nshya (New Drum) applied project, which proposed a new political context in which women were motivated to shed their genocidal past and reimagine their identity. Despite its overgeneralized enlisting of prominent actresses on the Ethiopian stage with less focus on their artistic endeavours, Jane Plastow's and Mahlet Soloman's piece raises important themes such as the issue of social acceptance, male jealousy, sexual abuse and meagre salaries affecting the lives of artists.
Christine Matzke's write-up on the award-winning US-based Nigerian novelist and dramaturgist Sefi Atta followed by the playscript of The Sentence (2011) is a fitting conclusion to the wide-ranging review of performative resistances of female artists in Africa. Although not widely acknowledged due to the neglect of international media and scholarly recognition, the book shoulders the responsibility of bringing to light the theatre-making efforts of African artists within their local contexts. The absence of thematic coherence, however, may make the book appear as a loose collection of accounts inspired by sporadic and localized events, thus bringing to the forefront the limitations of such an approach and putting into question the performers’ efforts to break away from their local boundaries to internationalize their work.
Although the collection brews an interesting fusion of emerging artistic voices by involving female performers, playwrights, directors and theatre-makers, it leaves out some of the key figures that led the movement of self-actualization among African female artists, such as Stella Oyedepo, Osita Ezenwanebe, Julie Okoh and Irene Salami. However, individual contributions such as Carlson's absorbing chapter on Baccar, Atta's intriguing interview by Matzke, and Richards's comprehensive introduction, make the volume an invaluable resource on the African theatre scene.
