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Chikwakwa Remembered – Theatre and Politics in Zambia 1968-1972
by Michael Etherton and John Reed
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 20th October 2011
ISBN: 978-1-908477-31-6
Price: €25.00
This insightful memoir takes us deep into Zambian university life and politics at the close of the 1960s, a time of great hopes for the new nation, when President Kenneth Kaunda himself took a keen interest in the teachings of his country’s first university. The colonialist language of English is now – reluctantly – that of the state and the authors, who teach English here, John the head of the department, Michael a young drama lecturer have to grapple with the contradictions and dilemmas of teaching drama through English to Zambians with several different mother tongues. They begin to nurture home-grown drama and, to showcase it, the students create the beautiful Chikwakwa Theatre to generate new Zambian drama, the first of its kind in the country. From here they take the plays deep into the countryside, to the ordinary people of the townships and the remote rural areas. But as tension in white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa mounts, and the students demonstrate against France’s sale of arms to the apartheid regime, the Zambian government takes violent action, closing the university, expelling some students and deporting Michael and his fellow drama lecturer Andrew Horn for ‘activities dangerous to the Republic’. Though this signals the ultimate demise of Chikwakwa Theatre, its legacy of popular drama continues to this day in Zambia and in the rights-based drama and Theatre for Development all over the world.
About the authors:
Michael Etherton and John Reed first met in 1963 at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, where Michael was a postgraduate student and John, a lecturer in English. In 1967 they became colleagues in the English Department at the University of Zambia and over the years that followed, the Chikwakwa Theatre was set up. After Michael left Zambia, he taught theatre in England and in Nigeria; then worked with NGOs in Bhutan, Viet Nam and Nepal. He subsequently developed Child Rights theatre in Africa and South Asia. He has written extensively on African theatre and has published a book on modern Irish drama. John Reed continued in Zambia until 1975 and has since taught in China, Japan and Zimbabwe. Over the years they kept in touch by long airmail letters. Now both retired, John to Manchester, Michael to rural Ireland, they have got together to write about how the Chikwakwa Theatre came about and what happened afterwards.
