Studies in International Performance

Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research

General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton

Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders
that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interac-
tions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and
imaginations.

Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International
Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches
to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series
embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or
alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well
as intracultural within nations.

Titles include:
Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors)
VIOLENCE PERFORMED
Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict

Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS

Christopher Balme
PACIFIC PERFORMANCES
Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas

Matthew Isaac Cohen

PERFORMING OTHERNESS
Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952

Susan Leigh Foster

WORLDING DANCE

Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo

PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS
Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia

Helena Grehan
PERFORMANCE, ETHICS AND SPECTATORSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE

Judith Hamera
DANCING COMMUNITIES
Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City

Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (editors)

PERFORMANCE, EXILE AND ‘AMERICA’

Ola Johansson
COMMUNITY THEATRE AND AIDS
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec
THEATRE, FACILITATION, AND NATION FORMATION IN THE
BALKANS AND MIDDLE EAST

Carol Martin (editor)

THE DRAMATURGY OF THE REAL ON THE WORLD STAGE

Alan Read
THEATRE, INTIMACY & ENGAGEMENT
The Last Human Venue

Shannon Steen
RACIAL GEOMETRIES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC, ASIAN PACIFIC AND
AMERICAN THEATRE

Joanne Tompkins
UNSETTLING SPACE
Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre

S. E. Wilmer
NATIONAL THEATRES IN A CHANGING EUROPE

Evan Darwin Winet

INDONESIAN POSTCOLONIAL THEATRE
Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces

Forthcoming titles:
Adrian Kear
THEATRE AND EVENT

Studies in International Performance

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Community Theatre
and AIDS
Ola Johansson
© Ola Johansson 2011

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First published 2011 by

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For Amanda, Ezra and Zaza
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Series Editors’ Preface xi
Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1
Bringing the messages back to their questions 7
A festival, travelling troupes, and ukimwi 11
The fieldwork sites 16
Research hypothesis and realization 22

1 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 33

Life as epidemic mimicry 33
The parallel developments of community-based theatre
and HIV prevention 37
The development of Theatre for Development 41
The reproductive misfortune of Zakia 52

2 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 56

Topical uncertainties of traditional practices 59
The ritual function of speech acts 62
The performativity of community-based theatre 66

3 The Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and

Performance 79
Part I 80
Morbidity and commitment in Ilemera village 80
The religious predicament 86
The backstage performance of community-based theatre 90
Part II 92
The social drama of AIDS statistics 92
The social drama of focus group discussions 94
Focus group discussions as action research 104
Part III 105
A lost performance in Mumbaka village 105
A wider epidemic pattern 120
vii
viii Contents

4 A Deadly Paradox: Assessing the Success/Failure of

Community-Based Theatre against AIDS 123
CBT as epidemiological counteraction 126
The multiple lives and deaths of Neema 130
Towards a community-based theatre as a relational agency 138
Recommendations 142

Appendices
Appendix I: Focus Group Discussions: Modus Operandi 149
Appendix II: Questionnaire for HIV Preventive
Organizations in Tanzania 151

Notes 156

Bibliography 169

Index 177
List of Illustrations

Pictures

1 A poster about the increasing burden of funerals in

Botswana in 2002 2
2 The theatre troupe Red Star rehearsing music before their
show at the festival in Bagamoyo, September 2001 12
3 A widow is rescued at the last moment by a neighbour
as she attempts to commit suicide; performance by Red Star
theatre troupe in their home town Bukoba, Kagera region,
in 2004 14
4 The theatre group from the Lumesule youth centre in the
Mtwara region being transported on the back of a
pick-up truck 19
5 A ferry on Lake Victoria, close to Bukoba town in the
Kagera region 34
6 Three female characters perform before an audience in the
village of Sululu in the Mtwara region 43
7 A Joker leads a post-performance discussion in the village
of Sululu, Mtwara region 50
8 Audience at a community performance at Bunazi
market near the Ugandan border in the Kagera region 69
9 Rehearsal of a scene about circumcision in Mikangaula
youth centre, Mtwara region 77
10 Personnel at the youth centre of Ilemera village,
Kagera region 80
11 Four women from the village of Gabulanga in an ongoing
focus group discussion 85
12 A young man discusses condom use with counsellors
in a performance in Birabo, Kagera region 89
13 A community group performs a dance before the theatre
performance in the village of Kenyana, Kagera region 129
14 The older brother grabs Neema’s hand after demanding
sex from her 131
15 Audience in the village of Kenyana 133
16 A woman pushes a man after finding out about his
second wife; performance in Masasi town, Mtwara region 138

ix
x List of Illustrations

17 A young man presents a plan for a ‘youth friendly centre’ in

Muleba town, Kagera region 141
18 Mr Andrew Hamisi, a great friend and mentor, was the
research assistant I worked with most of all during my
research project in Mtwara region, as well as Dar es Salaam.
Sadly, Andrew passed away in 2005 150
19 Andrew engaged in translation work in Dar es
Salaam in 2004 150
20 Tanzanian Residence Permit 154
21 Tanzanian Research Permit 155

Figures

3.1 Mtwara and Kagera: education (category/topic) 96

3.2 Kagera: most common topics (per cent) 97
3.3 Kagera: most common topics among women vs. men 98
3.4 Mtwara: most common topics 99
3.5 Mtwara: most common topics among women vs. men 100
3.6 General living conditions in Mtwara and Kagera 101
3.7 General living conditions in Mtwara and Kagera:
development and recommendations 101
3.8 Socio-sexual relations in Mtwara and Kagera 102
3.9 Gendered proportions of categories in Mtwara and Kagera 103
Series Editors’ Preface

In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research

President, Janelle Reinelt, pledged the organization to expand the
outlets for scholarly publication available to the membership, and to
make scholarly achievement one of the main goals and activities of the
Federation under her leadership. In 2004, joined by Vice-President for
Research and Publications Brian Singleton, they signed a contract with
Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, ‘Studies in International
Performance’.
Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly
urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons
to include the comparative study of performances across national, cul-
tural, social, and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to
avoid the homogenizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to
those familiar in our home countries, but also in order to be engaged
in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and
embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the
new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly
international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies can
value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms
of performance practices, histories, and social formations. Comparative
aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception and current artis-
tic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members
through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to contribute to
an ever-changing project of knowledge creation.

International Federation for Theatre Research

Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale

xi
Acknowledgements

In the light of my five-year-long research project there is a range of

people and organizations that deserves my sincere gratitude. The
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) was
bold enough to give me a research grant that is seldom attainable for
scholars in the arts and humanities. Thankfully, SIDA also permitted
me to extend the research period of my project as it had to be coped
with alongside my new fulltime post at Lancaster University and the
birth of a child. Thus Lancaster University also deserves an apprecia-
tion. It was, however, the Department of Musicology and Performance
Studies at Stockholm University that accommodated my administrative
and financial components during the project and therefore I extend a
special appreciation to the always supportive Professor Willmar Sauter
and the two patient financial secretaries Ingrid Wennberg, and Ann
Badlund. I am also grateful for the exciting talks with and Swahili
translations by Gachugu Makini at the same department. Furthermore,
I extend my gratitude to COSTECH in Dar es Salaam for allowing me to
conduct research in five regions in Tanzania.
Palgrave Macmillan editor Paula Kennedy has shown great patience
and cooperation with my at times slow production and delivery of
results, as have the Studies in International Performance series editors
working with the same publishing company, Professors Janelle Reinelt
and Brian Singleton. The most patient editorial person was Penny
Simmons, however, whose swift work pace I could not keep up with at
times but who guided me all the way home through the final proof.
In Dar es Salaam a number of interesting personalities have guided
me through various research inquiries. Professor Augustin Hatar,
former head of my host Department of Fine and Performing Arts at
the University of Dar es Salaam, has been something of a mentor for
me as I have studied his profoundly interesting articles, films, theatre
performances, and through a number of inspiring talks. Working at the
same department is Stephen Ndibalema, a great collaborator and friend
whose knowledge and skills in applied theatre has been a continu-
ous source of fascination and motivation. May your wonderful family
always be strong!
Furthermore, I am grateful to have met and conversed with Mgunga
Mwa Mwenyelwa and Mona Mwakalinga at Parapanda Laboratory Arts.
xii
 Acknowledgements xiii

Three theatre facilitators and researchers at Bagamoyo College of Art

were kind enough to share their indisputable experience of Theatre for
Development in an interview, namely Professors Juma Bakari, Ghonche
Materego, and Herbert Makoye. At UNAIDS/TACAIDS in Dar es Salaam,
programme coordinator Henry Meena has been a pivotal catalyst and
supporter of the research project. Mr. Meena has a long experience
of development work and yet demonstrates a tireless curiosity for
innovative and sharp solutions to complex problems in the epidemic.
The same can be said about Richard Mabala (previously) at UNICEF,
although on as much creative and artistic premises as developmental
and strategic grounds.
I am deeply grateful to have worked with a number of research assist-
ants in the Mtwara and Kagera regions in Tanzania. I had the privilege
of working with mentioned Stephen Ndibalema during my fieldworks
in Kagera 2006. In 2004 I worked with Priscus Kainunula who works for
one of the most important civil services for orphans in Kagera, namely
Humuuliza. Priscus also offered invaluable help to the CNN team
I worked with in the Kagera region in 2004. When I visited Kagera for
the first time in 2003, John B. Joseph, programme advisor for Swissaid
in Muleba, accompanied me.
In the Mtwara region I am sincerely thankful to have worked with
three colleagues, namely Margaret Malenga (2003), Andrew Hamisi
(2003 and 2004), and Delphine Njewele (2006). A couple of years ago,
I was profoundly saddened by the news that Andrew had passed away.
I will always remember his indefatigable thirst for new experiences
and willingness to inform me about Mtwara and Tanzania. I will also
remember his great parents who invited me into their home and dispen-
sary along the barabara nearby Mpindimbi.
Most of all, however, I extend my profound gratitude to the young
people in the 20 plus youth/community centres that I visited and revis-
ited in Mtwara and Kagera in 2003–08. I always said it to you and I say
it again: you have been directly involved in the most important job in
the world and don’t let anybody lead you to be believe anything else.
Thank you for having accepted my presence before, during, and after
performances.
I also feel blessed for having met my greatest critic and love, Amanda.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

—What concerns you most about the response to the

epidemic today?
—What really concerns me is that while we’ve made
measurable progress on access to treatment, we
don’t have the same impact when it comes to HIV
prevention.
(Peter Piot in his last interview as
Executive Director for UNAIDS, November 2008)

We have all heard the story about AIDS. It has by now become the most
devastating pandemic in recorded history. We have also heard about
its impact in Africa, a continent that was already encumbered with
extreme poverty, undersupplied health services, and slow economic
growth prior to the first recorded case of HIV in 1982. And we have all
heard about the statistics. More than 40 million people in the world
are currently living with the HIV virus – roughly the same amount that
has died from the diseases it causes – and of these about 25 million, or
almost two-thirds, are living in sub-Saharan Africa.
Tanzania is one of the most AIDS stricken countries in the world,
more so than West African countries although less than most countries
in Southern Africa.1 Statistically, Tanzania is an average case in the con-
text of sub-Saharan Africa, which has a median prevalence rate of about
7 per cent. When I initiated my research project in 2003 the commonly
referred HIV prevalence rate for the adult population of Tanzania was
8.8 per cent (WHO World Health Statistics 2006: 33). That estimation
was recently brought down to a bit over 6 per cent by Tanzania AIDS
Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS). The statistical adjustment was due
to a different methodological approach to estimated prevalence and

1
2

1 A poster about the increasing burden of funerals in Botswana in 2002

(Photo: Ola Johansson)
 Introduction 3

incidence rates rather than an epidemiological improvement (NACP

report 2008: 5). That is good news for the country, even though any
epidemic beyond 5 per cent is considered to be ‘generalized’ and thus a
serious concern to a whole population. Statistics are unreliable, though.
The 2005 survey from the Tanzanian National AIDS Control Programme
said that 47.4 per cent of all AIDS cases in the country are unknown
(NACP report 2006: 2). The same report made clear that about twice as
many young women as young men contract the virus in the country.
That is probably an overstatement due to a wide margin of error in
the estimated data, which to a great extent rely on tests on pregnant
women in antenatal clinics. But the overrepresentation of women is,
nonetheless, a fact. It is not clear how great the quantitative gender
disparity is in Tanzania, but several years’ epidemiological surveys have
indicated that women in Africa run a greater risk than men of contract-
ing the HIV virus (UNAIDS/WHO 2005: 8–9). This epidemic dispropor-
tion between the genders was reconfirmed in two recent reports which
I discuss further down in this introduction.
Statistics pale in importance compared to direct experiences with
individuals. It is enough to see a child such as the young boy I met
in a Botswana hospital in Mochudi near Gaborone during a confer-
ence on AIDS and literature in 2002.2 He could not even have his bed
sheet rest on his slim body due to the severe state of Karposi’s Sarcoma,
a skin cancer that makes up a common opportunistic disease of the AIDS
syndrome. Around the same time I visited the Grahamstown festival in
South Africa and saw the documentary film Mother to Child in the series
of films called ‘Steps for the Future’.3 The film is about a couple of HIV
positive pregnant women in South Africa and their experiences of the
existential lottery at a hospital as their newborns will be found to be or
not to be infected. The film could not have been more topical as Nelson
Mandela, after having failed himself to put AIDS on the agenda dur-
ing his presidency in the mid-1990s, started to voice outright criticism
against the Mbeki government for its reluctance to roll out programmes
with antiretroviral drugs, such as Nevirapine which is the medicine
that prevents the transmission of HIV from mothers to children. ‘Let
the people decide for themselves,’ Mandela said and made clear: ‘I have
expressed that opinion because I believe in it and I am prepared to
defend it to the end of my days.’4 Three years later, the former president
would see his oldest son die from AIDS related diseases.
There are more than two million AIDS orphans in Tanzania alone.
I remember riding on a motorbike late one night through Bukoba town,
the epicentre of the first rampant epidemic on the African continent in
4 Community Theatre and AIDS

the early 1980s, and how overwhelming it was to see the huge numbers
of kids roaming the streets around the bus station. They were there in
daylight too, of course, but the impression of them in the dark made
their vulnerability so distinct.5 The impression of the orphans in Bukoba
engendered a reverse sense about statistics: suddenly the abstract num-
bers took on a new importance, in virtue of individual cases and social
clusters that lead up to the stratosphere of millions. It is not possible
to quantify the emotional impact of individuals, that would finish off
your sanity pretty quickly, but they yield a concrete need to do some-
thing. And so the story that we have all heard of became my own story,
prompted by personalized collections of data that indicate a chronic
state of living and dying in the parts of Africa I would select as my sites
of fieldwork, namely the Tanzanian regions of Kagera and Mtwara.
What, then, can theatre possibly do against the global onslaught of
AIDS? The question begs an initial response in terms of perspective. The
pandemic is indeed worldwide in reach while theatre can be measured
to about an individual’s vocal reach. But the global extent of AIDS is
merely an accumulation of discrete incidents and therefore a rhetorical
construct, which may as well formulate theatre as a global phenomenon
if all its varieties and instances are taken together. The epidemiological
measurement of AIDS is done through prevalence rates and incidence
rates respectively. Prevalence rates indicate, often by highly approxi-
mate estimates, the accrued number of cases of HIV-positive people in a
certain area. Incidence rates indicate the frequency of infectious trans-
missions over time in certain areas. It is thus the prevalence rates which
make up the masses of cases behind the statistics, while the frequency of
incidences pertain to series of individual cases. In order to understand
the qualitative matters behind the quantities of cases it is inevitable to
attempt to appreciate the rationale behind individual incidents in the
pandemic. There cannot be an incident that occurs in a larger situation
than the reach of, say, a voice. In most cases the infection is transmitted
through human contact. That is as theatrical as anything can be.
‘Awi!’ a leader of a theatre group shouts within that vocal scope,
and an audience responds with a collective ‘Awa!’. It is then reversed:
‘Awa!’ – ‘Awi!’. It is like testing a communal microphone on a tradi-
tional meeting ground to see if it still works. All public events in rural
Tanzania oscillate in the diachronic continuum of traditional practices
and contemporaneous modes of performance and there is no given
agreement between the poles. Urbanized young spectators may openly
mock shows that appear obsolete, while people from rural elder com-
munities can do the same at progressive performances. That is the first
 Introduction 5

auspicious premise of community-based theatre: it is a highly mobile

and challenging phenomenon which cuts through cultural layers of
time and space as well as demographic and generational differences. Far
from theatre institutions or educations, most forms of local perform-
ance can be said to be maximalist in their mixed means of oration,
drumming, dancing, singing, storytelling, poetic recitations, dramatic
dialogue, and post-performance discussions in the interactive sphere of
performers and spectators. And when the groups start up an event with
ngoma (Kiswahili for drum-based dance), many people still come gather-
ing and often respond spontaneously by joining the performers.
Theatre of this kind readily alters between registers of style, aesthetics,
and vernacular. If there is a way to bind the presence of a space with
the memory or genealogy of an audience, initiatives will be taken to
perform such visions, as, for instance, through the ritual dance Omutoro
in the Kagera region. The latter ritual dance-theatre stems from a past
royal tradition of reporting back to the king about battles in the field,
by way of a confrontational choreographic style accompanied by stan-
zas that sound like contemporary rap music. In the age of AIDS, the
depicted battles are transposed to narrative attacks on wholly different
scenarios about plebeian rather than royal affairs. A similar diachronic
performative statement can be found in the other region of my project,
the Mtwara region, where a mime enacts a tacit protest against the mul-
tiple use of one and the same knife in boys’ circumcision ritual (jando),
whose secrecy is breached in favour of the need to break through a cul-
ture of silence. In these and many other cases discussed in the book, the
alteration between traditional practices, long-established aesthetics, and
local languages meet the need of a present-day crisis which cuts across
taboos, secrecies, and tacit cultures in Tanzania. Without the backing of
applied community-based theatre from the African continent, however,
it would probably not be nearly as efficacious.
Community-based theatre is indeed the most site-specific cultural
practice used against AIDS in Tanzania today, but if its local adaptability
has to do with malleable and exchangeable elements, its overall eclectic
concept is international and even intercontinental. It started out in the
mid-1970s as Theatre for Development (henceforth abbreviated TFD),
a label I will avoid in the book due to its monetary overtones and its
typical one-time task-based project format. Apropos definitions, Cohen-
Cruz writes:

Thinking of theatre and development so broadly evokes various modes

of ‘applied theatre’ that have circulated since the late 1960s. Applied
6 Community Theatre and AIDS

theatre is the array of practices that assay to ameliorate situations

through such means as building positive identity and community
cohesion through the arts. Take, for example, community-based thea-
tre, a popular mode allied with identity politics and targeting under-
represented groups in quest of collective expression. While related
to TFD, there are important differences. Community-based theatre is
partisan, dealing with a particular group: TFD is bi-partisan, dealing
with a particular population AND a ‘civil society’ institution.6

However, in my opinion TFD is almost always engaged in a specific

developmental task, while CBT is about addressing an entire society’s
way of life. In appearance and planning CBT has a lot in common with
TFD, but its undertaking is always about overall lifestyles and longi-
tudinal social patterns, often without a clear and discrete objective in
sight. This kind of project and performance practice has also been called
Theatre for Social Change, but, as will be clarified in the first chapter,
the objective of CBT need not only or primarily be about education,
development, or change but may be about a scrutiny of or attention
toward concealed and tacit living conditions. TFD, a culture-historical
extension of instructive dialogues by colonial representatives and, after
the independence of several African nations in the 1960s, pedagogical
dramas by post-colonial playwrights and facilitators (Kerr 1995), was
elaborated as an experimental form of adult education in the 1970s
(Kidd 1973). Under the influence of Paolo Freire and Augusto Boal, the-
atre workers in countries like Botswana and Nigeria started to blend the
traditional arts and meeting forms with contemporary techniques of
participatory pedagogy and dramatic performance. In Chapter 1, three
phases of applied theatre are outlined along with a cognate develop-
ment of HIV prevention forms. Pre-written touring theatre shows distin-
guish the first phase; the agenda-driven and task-based TFD typifies the
second phase, while CBT exemplifies the third phase. It is in particular
the third phase of applied African theatre that comes to the fore in this
book. A number of intracontinental meetings and workshops during
the 1970s led to an application of theatre through which mobilized
social groups themselves took on the planning, organization, analysis,
script-writing, rehearsals, performances, evaluations, and follow-up
projects. CBT is a serious attempt in favour of people’s ownership over
their traditional practices, intellectual properties, aesthetic styles, and,
in extenso, current private and social affairs.
Even if CBT entails the label ‘efficacious theatre’, its functional fea-
tures do not ensure a successful outcome of, say, an increased awareness
 Introduction 7

of AIDS if, to be efficacious, a successful outcome requires a translation

of awareness into practice. (I remember thinking about this every time
the bus passed by a biblical quote on a building in Mwenge en route to
the University of Dar es Salaam: ‘Every promise needs performance.’)
One of the findings of the study will divulge that CBT as a form of HIV
prevention lies so close to the epidemic determinants of AIDS that it
is reasonable to assume that if a well-conducted CBT project fails, for
example, through a communicative breakdown between performers
and spectators after performances, lack of political follow-up initiatives
after the revelations of a performance, and so on, it is probably not only
a problem of the theatre or the project format but also the epidemic
determinants of AIDS. CBT is performed by the very same cohorts that
are most susceptible to HIV: young people without wealth who are
often required to meet other people’s demands in order to make their
own ends meet. A failure among these young people can very well be
indicative of precisely why HIV spreads in a culture of silence or cor-
ruption or power imbalances in a certain area. It may also be the case,
mutatis mutandi, that a project which turns out to be seemingly effica-
cious may be quite useless after its completion. Countless pilot projects
in Tanzania and other African countries affected by AIDS intervene in
schools or other controlled settings, bringing with them packages of
information about AIDS as a social and medical syndrome, holding a
meeting with teachers and pupils, testing the information material on
pupils by way of a questionnaire or something similar which the young
ones respond to accurately, and then reports are sent to the overseas
home office about the success of the project along with an additional
note about the need for further funding. It needs to be said that such
projects can be useless and without any effect whatsoever. The reason
for this is, again, that the failure and success of HIV/AIDS prevention
in most places in Africa is not about lack of information, education, or
medication, but about the possibility to renegotiate historically regu-
lated lifestyles.

Bringing the messages back to their questions

My first thoughts of a research project on African theatre against AIDS

came into view at a theatre festival in Bagamoyo, Tanzania in the
fall of 2001. At the time I had just started a post-doctoral position at
Stockholm University, besides holding a freelance contract as a theatre
critic with the daily paper Svenska Dagbladet. When I suggested writing
an article about the festival in Bagamoyo for the paper, the editor of
8 Community Theatre and AIDS

the culture section said it was a great idea so long as I did not expect
any compensation on top of the ordinary pay for the text and pictures.
Swedish papers do not send out critics or correspondents to cover thea-
tre festivals unless they take place in Avignon, Edinburgh, or Berlin. But
I already had the journey funded by the prize money that I had been
lucky to win the previous year for my doctoral dissertation at Stockholm
University.
By coincidence I had a couple of interesting shows to review the
week before I took off. One was Bernard Koltes’s Back to the Desert at
the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the other was Jean Genet’s The Blacks
at Stockholm City Theatre. Both plays had built-in thematic connec-
tions to Africa, but I was particularly excited about the latter with
its visiting performance by South African Market Theatre since I was
familiar with the reputation of the legendary Johannesburg company.
The experience did not turn out as I expected though – in fact, I barely
remember seeing the show at all. The date was the 11 September 2001
and when the lights went up on stage all I could think about was the
jet liners that flew into New York’s Twin Towers killing thousands of
people. When I arrived in Dar es Salaam four days later, I found an
edgy political climate with street demonstrations in anticipation of the
upcoming election that year. I also became aware of a public opinion,
at least among young adults on the buses to and from the university,
which spoke of an America that had brought 9/11 upon itself. At this
point, just a few days after the events in New York and Washington,
everybody was talking about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida. It may
seem odd that people in Dar es Salaam of all places would even come
close to tolerating bin Laden’s actions; his first major terror plot was
after all executed in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam only three years earlier.
The bombs were directed at American embassies and many more peo-
ple had died in Kenya than in Tanzania, but the casualties were almost
exclusively Africans and the rationale and methods of the deeds could
hardly be justified by anyone. But the reaction in Tanzania, like many
other places outside the Northern hemisphere, has to do with other
things than specific facts in contemporary plots. A major blow to the
core of a superpower by a fringe rebel movement is perceived as a quite
sensational and heroic act in a country that has been subjugated for
centuries by foreign slave traders, colonial imperialists, Cold War super-
powers, and global agencies and corporations.
Later on in September 2001, I became engaged in readings and dis-
cussions about another catastrophe: AIDS in Africa. This was a much
slower tragedy and one whose sensationalism took much longer to put
 Introduction 9

into perspective. Like everyone else I had once associated ‘African AIDS’
with truck stops along murky roads where crowds of prostitutes estab-
lished shantytowns with names but with no location on maps. In an
article published in 2001 called ‘Killer on the Road’, Kevin Toolis writes
about one such place on the highway between Kenya and Uganda called
Salgaa where 300 prostitutes invite truck drivers to stop for sex:

Inevitably, Salgaa and the other truck stops like it are an engine of
an epidemic; an amplifier of the Aids holocaust that has infected an
estimated 14 per cent of Kenya’s population. The trucks barrel down
the highway carrying tea to Mombasa, machinery to Uganda, exotic
flowers and vegetables to Nairobi for overnight airfreight to Europe.
They also carry the Aids virus circulating in the bodies of the drivers
and their assistants. But blaming the men for buying sex is naive and
simplistic. Many Kenyan drivers spend two weeks on the road driving
in harsh conditions and sleeping in squalid hotels. Inevitably, some
men will, through drink, loneliness or lust, buy themselves sex – and
some comfort – on their endless journeys across the African savan-
nah. It’s not sex, commercial or otherwise, that is killing Kenyans,
but a tiny piece of genetic material, the HIV virus. Trying to change
private sexual behaviour is almost impossible.7

I remember reading articles like these and sensing a resemblance with

adventure stories from wild and exotic places outside the law. Toolis
uses the word holocaust, while many other journalists and commenta-
tors make comparisons between AIDS and the plague (‘black death’ is,
of course, a favourite simile), warfare, and other spectacular analogies.
This is not surprising in the light of the enormous death toll associ-
ated with AIDS; in sub-Saharan Africa alone the syndrome kills twice as
many people as the 9/11 tragedy every day. It is just that the apocalyptic
analogies risk standing in the way of an understanding of the actual
causes and effects of the epidemic if their rhetorical impact takes over
the motifs of reports or, indeed, political speeches. In his article, Toolis
goes on to say that it is understandable to buy sex when you are spend-
ing weeks on end on the road as a truck driver and that it is not, after
all, sex or the prostitutes that kills them but the virus. Toolis also points
out that changing behaviour, despite the fact that ‘everyone in Kenya
knows about Aids’, is ‘almost impossible’. This is where the article needs
to be called into question. It is hard to fathom a holocaust attributable
to a virus without holding fully aware carriers of the virus responsible.
It is understandable to have sex on the road under alienating working
10 Community Theatre and AIDS

conditions, but it is not reasonable to have sex without responsibility

(i.e., protection) given an understanding of the risks involved. This ‘pri-
vate sexual behaviour’ is an act with life-threatening consequences not
only for the truck drivers and prostitutes but also other sex partners as
well as the spouses and children of the drivers and sex workers. Hence,
under the given circumstances, sex can hardly be perceived as a private
act, if it ever could.
Only later did I realize that it is scenarios in a much more mundane
reality that actually drive the epidemic. I got a strong suspicion of such
a scenario when I read a different kind of article, namely in the Dar es
Salaam based newspaper The Guardian (and its weekend edition Sunday
Observer) right before the festival in Bagamoyo:

A total of 93 teachers in Dodoma Urban, Kondoa and Mpwapwa

districts in Dodoma Region have died of AIDS since September last
year. The Dodoma Regional Chairman of Tanzania Teachers Union
(TTU), Abel Maluma, said deaths caused by AIDS related diseases
had been on the increase in the region, affecting academic perform-
ance in the area. According to statistics, out of the 93 teachers who
have died, 52 came from Kondoa District and six from Mpwapwa.
Maluma said that Dodoma Rural District, whose statistics were not
immediately available, had lost the largest number of teachers to
AIDS. He said most of the victims were female teachers who he said
were being used as sexual machines to entertain public officials who
visit their areas. Maluma said one of the reasons why the disease
was spreading among the teachers was due to the fact that most of
them do not practise safe sex. He said TTU in the region had started
a campaign to educate the teachers on how to avoid the disease, lest
they all perish.8

The Tanzanian Sunday Observer is not a sensationalist tabloid, nor an

anti-governmental newspaper, it simply reported this story as a sim-
ple fait accompli in a rural district of the country. I remember being
shocked over the tiny cameo strip in the margin of the paper’s inner
section. Ninety-three teachers in one region in one year? Had it been
sex workers along a murky route in East Africa it would have been com-
prehensible, but teachers used as concubines for public officials in the
same district as the country’s capital?9 I wonder if it was possible at all
for these teachers to raise the awareness of their pupils about sexually
transmitted infections while being used as call girls for politicians and
other very important people. And how can politicians expect teachers
 Introduction 11

to be role models if they are not even allowed to play the role of them-
selves? The predicament in the Dodoma region exemplified a moral
double bind since it appeared to be at once both an official affair and
confidential routine. Many people, from the grassroots all the way up
to governmental headquarters, are outspoken in private and quiet in
public about these kinds of affairs. Exactly that crossing point between
public and private issues is a site to explore for applied community thea-
tre. So how can the theatre negotiate the double bind in its capacity as
cultural event? Perhaps the Bagamoyo festival could offer a clue?

A festival, travelling troupes, and ukimwi

The five-day festival at the Bagamoyo College of Art offered a range of

interesting types of performing arts from most Tanzanian regions as
well as some international places. Students from the college presented a
mixed bag of stylistic abilities in a performance that depicted AIDS from
downright hilarious to doomed scenarios. Some dance performances
were hypnotizing; gigantic drums carried on the heads by performers
from Burundi were beaten so hard that the whole town’s soundscape
trembled; there were acrobats that made me seriously worried about
the health and safety of the performers; and there was choir music that
pitched inspirational passions alongside profound dirges about the epi-
demic, the zeitgeist of the country, and the future of its children.
The host troupe, Bagamoyo Players, put on a strong performance
called Wewe na Mimi (‘You and I’). It was about a woman called Mofa,
who becomes stigmatized by her employer, her boyfriend, and her fam-
ily respectively when it is established that she suffers from AIDS related
diseases. It proved to be the first of many performances with similar
themes on stigmatization. A wide variety of additional themes were
also spotlighted at the festival, such as the use of condoms, promiscu-
ity, polygamy, circumcision, widow inheritance, orphanhood, money,
witchcraft, ignorance, and nonchalance. Just to organize a several day
long festival on AIDS is, of course, an important statement in itself. At
a closer look, however, it was really more than a statement in the literal
sense of the word, for most performances went beyond their enunciated
objectives by saying that speech is not enough and that action must
follow upon every word. In an extended sense, then, the act of looking
at the shows involved a tacit pledge that implied doing what one can
to prevent further harm and loss.
As soon as I thought of commencing a research project on theatre
against AIDS I decided to direct my attention to its preventive capacity,
12 Community Theatre and AIDS

2 The theatre troupe Red Star rehearsing music before their show at the festival
in Bagamoyo, September 2001
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

as opposed to its informative, explanatory, illustrative, or invocatory

depictions. Many people and texts repeated the same thing over and
over: as yet there is no model or practice of HIV prevention that has
proven efficacious. Just as many people and texts, however, spoke
of theatre as a great mobilizer and catalyst for preventive actions for
young people, who make up the most vulnerable cohorts of the epi-
demic. It seemed clear that cases worthy of note would be such where
the theatre goes up against genuine challenges of AIDS control, to the
point where it proves to be either efficacious or ineffective. Only one
full-length book had been written on the subject at that point, namely
Marion Frank’s doctoral dissertation AIDS Education through Theatre:
Case Studies from Uganda (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1995).
The book explored early types of campaign and festival theatre in the
1980s, very much in line with what I saw at the Bagamoyo festival and
which will be described in Chapter 1 as the second phase of theatre for
development.
Most of the performances at the Bagamoyo festival exhibited sce-
narios which one could either sympathize or disagree with. One show
divulged a peculiar conflict beyond its scripted dramaturgy though. It
was not necessarily the best piece of the festival, but what made me
curious about the show by the company called Red Star from Bukoba
was an unexpected occurrence towards the end of their performance. It
occurred at a high-pitched intrigue in which a brilliant comedy actor
portrayed an elderly man who ran into a series of misunderstandings in
company with younger women. Since my Kiswahili was nonexistent at
the time and since I could not always hear what my fellow interpreter
 Introduction 13

was saying, I could not quite grasp what happened on stage, let alone
what transpired between the performers and the spectators. A whole
section of the audience suddenly became noisy, some left the arena,
while numerous remaining spectators continued to throw comments
at the stage throughout the show. Verbal remarks from the audience
are very common in African theatre and a vital and dynamic quality
of live performances, but in this case I sensed an almost hostile atmos-
phere in the audience. The day after, I found the leader of the group,
Michael Kifungo, and asked him what had happened the night before.
With an embarrassed smile he explained that the Bagamoyo audience,
which is more urbanized than their own audiences in Bukoba in the
north-western corner of Tanzania, did not approve of the way the group
depicted crude misunderstandings about things like condom use.
It is of course an advantage as well as a limitation of festivals to
accommodate visiting performances that pertain to spectatorial views
elsewhere. I took an interest in the Bagamoyo festival not as a self-
contained event, but as an entry point to a theatre whose place and
function I had to follow back to from where it came. Many groups at the
festival were travelling troupes with ambitions to become professional
or semi-professional companies. I certainly enjoy watching the reper-
toire of travelling theatres and have nothing against their commercial
aspirations, but they do not meet the optimal interest of the research
in this book, which has to do with the function of community-based
theatre (CBT). Before I go into detail about the latter form of theatre
and my fieldwork, I will describe my acquaintance with some travelling
companies that helped me to define the research project.
In Bagamoyo I promised Kifungo that I would travel to Bukoba and
see his company perform theatre on its home turf sooner rather than
later. Since then we have in fact met several times and become close
friends. Kifungo’s group operates in an area whose modern history has
been drastically shaped by the AIDS epidemic. With great flexibility,
they can travel from fishing communities on Lake Victoria to interior
agricultural villages to provisional market places with one and the same
play, adapting the plot to the respective target audience and their local
context. Sometimes during such journeys, I imagined that this must
have been what the post-Independence travelling theatre of the 1960s
felt like, both playing and seeing.
The strongest piece I witnessed by Kifungo’s company was a play
about a woman who loses her husband to AIDS and thus all her belong-
ings in the ‘property grabbing’ that ensues after his death. This form
of cultural and personal misfortune is quite common for widows in
14 Community Theatre and AIDS

3 A widow is rescued at the last moment by a neighbour as she attempts to

commit suicide; performance by Red Star theatre troupe in their home town
Bukoba, Kagera region, in 2004
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

the Kagera region and a frequent theme in performances on AIDS, as

will become clear below. Kifungo himself, arguably one of the greatest
comedy actors in Tanzania, again enacted an old man who personifies
promiscuous lifestyles of old, preferably with younger women. He even
hits on a nurse in a hospital scene who works for a doctor who has just
informed him and his family about the risks of HIV. The performance
I captured on video, and have subsequently used in several lectures
and seminars, took place near a major intersection on the outskirts of
Bukoba town. If the group took on a challenge with the urban audience
in Bagamoyo, this was no less daring. The loud cacophony of the nearby
traffic culminated in a collision between two lorries, which stole the
attention of the audience for a moment, but the company managed to
draw them back into the drama. Audiences in market places and other
public spots are restless and on the move, but in this case Kifungo and
his company made at least a hundred people stand still for almost an
hour thanks to a performative register of intensity suggestive of comme-
dia dell’arte. The remarkable turn of the performance, however, came
 Introduction 15

towards the end of the show when it all turns to something as uncom-
mon as a tragedy.
The husband is dead and buried, the widow is emotionally heartbro-
ken, materially ruined, and probably also infected by the virus that will
bring her to a slow and painful death. So she attempts to do something
that is frequently spoken of behind the scenes of the epidemic reality,
but almost never performed in scenes of African theatre: suicide. With a
scarf as prop the woman puts the rope around her neck and is about to
fall to her death when a neighbour runs into her house and saves her.
A doctor is called in to support the miserable woman and he arrives at
the same time as the same extended family that deprived the bereaved
woman of all her belongings. The doctor says that there is hope for AIDS
widows (even though this was before the distribution of anti-retroviral
medicines in Bukoba and Tanzania), that she should go to the Kagera
regional hospital down the road, get a test done, and that there is a
free counselling service. The doctor then turns 90 degrees on his heel,
while delivering his informative lines, away from the woman to face the
audience. He asks if they recognize what they have just seen and if they
have gone for a test. ‘What about you?’, someone responds from the
audience. The challenge takes the actor by surprise and all he can do is
to return the question: ‘Na wewe ye?’ In the next moment Kifungo re-
enters, now in ordinary clothes, and takes up a well-known song about
the perils of AIDS to which the rest of the group responds in the mode
of a gospel choir. After the song Kifungo takes over the role as Joker by
recapturing the key themes of the performance and then turn them into
a participatory audience discussion.10 He invites people to comment on
specific characters for the purpose of making the comments and ques-
tions direct and concrete. The post-performance discussion turns out
well and gives several spectators a chance to speak out. Everybody gets
reminded about something that must never be forgotten and that must
turn from discourse to practice, or, put differently, from rehearsal to
performance at the end of the day.11 The difference in atmosphere and
response could not be greater from that which the group experienced
in the amphitheatre of Bagamoyo the year before.
Well-performed travelling shows can be very imposing and entertain-
ing and lend themselves perfectly to the camera lens. That is partly why
I instantly suggested revisiting Kifungo’s troupe in Bukoba when the
television network CNN offered me the chance to produce a short docu-
mentary film about theatre against AIDS in Africa.12 However, I wanted
to do more than just make a stunning display of the opportunity. First
of all, I decided to have no voiceover, but let Kifungo and a female
16 Community Theatre and AIDS

co-performer do the talking. Second, I wanted to include scenes of con-

dom use from performances since Kifungo’s group was brave enough
to promote contraceptives against the official agenda of his group’s
patrons, namely the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCT) of Tanzania.13
Third, I realized that the CNN piece would not make a difference on
the ground in Africa unless I actively brought the production down to
an interpersonal and communal level. Therefore I introduced the com-
ing broadcast by email to development organizations and aid agencies
that I knew held a vested interest in Tanzanian HIV prevention. Some
of them reacted positively to our film and maybe, just maybe, the
television feature made it a little easier for Kifungo’s group to land a
long-term contract with a major international donor organization the
following year. In the film, we also showed the previously mentioned
warrior dance called Omutoro performed by an orphan group who sub-
stituted the old belligerent lyrics with stanzas about the contemporary
enemy called AIDS.14 Moreover, we interviewed regional AIDS coordina-
tor Dr Mussa at Kagera Hospital. He described the frustration as a doc-
tor of seeing people die (i.e., in the fall of 2004 about a year before the
first antiretroviral medicines were allocated to the region), but he also
expressed his conviction that applied theatre can be an effective means
against AIDS. Regrettably, the latter comment never made it through
the final cut of the documentary.
It is clear that many people invest heavily in modern media rather than
traditional modes of communication such as live community perform-
ances. For the present research context it needs to be said that to employ
television, video, newspapers, the internet, and other new media for HIV
preventive purposes is out of touch with the experience of most rural
people in Tanzania where most HIV positive people (in absolute numbers)
reside. Very few people among the most susceptible strata have access to
modern media. While radio is completely dominant when it comes to
electronic mass media, the best chance of communal intervention is still
through interactive performance. No participant among the theatre groups
I have studied in the Kagera region saw the CNN piece, except those who
I notified and who went to public places such as bars to see the broadcast.
Hence the TV production functioned more or less like a communal per-
formance for those who got invited by the producer of the show.

The fieldwork sites

In 2002, I revisited Tanzania to look into the possibilities of conduct-

ing a meaningful research project down there. At that point I relied on
 Introduction 17

advice from two individuals in Dar es Salaam. One was Agustin Hatar,
at the time head of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at the
University of Dar es Salaam, who had written a series of highly sig-
nificant field reports and essays from applied projects that he had led.
Hatar suggested that I visit a paralegal group that he had trained in the
region of Morogoro. It turned out to be a very rewarding first visit to a
group who put their own living conditions and its connections to AIDS
in play. I visited a rehearsal of a new play outside the group’s counsel-
ling office in Morogoro town. It started with a choir for the purpose of
giving the occasion an inviting atmosphere and mobilizing people to
the performance site. A group member told me that she wished they
could summons people by drum-based dances, like people do in places
like Mtwara region in southern Tanzania, but Morogoro does not have
such a repertoire of drum-based dances.15
In the performance a schoolgirl becomes pregnant by a fellow stu-
dent, but she does not know which one until she takes a test which
indicates a boy who also happens to be an intravenous drug addict.
The girl also shows signs of illness. The girl’s parents become devastated
when notified about the pregnancy and ill health, to the point where
the father threatens to beat the mother for her leniency toward their
daughter. After some convincing the father agrees to join the mother
and daughter for a counselling session. On recommendation by a
female friend, the mother decides to consult the locally based Faraja
Trust Fund since they combine diagnosis and counselling. The latter
organization is an actual partner of the theatre group in Morogoro. At
once I noticed the difference of ‘being there’, within the field of refer-
ences in the presence of a theatre whose messages are intended to be
acted upon, as opposed to the remoteness of the appeals at the festival
in Bagamoyo the previous year. Just like Kifungo’s group in Bukoba, the
paralegal group in Morogoro oscillated between naturalism and comedy
with a good amount of improvisation to boost both styles. The father
refuses to even get close to the daughter in a way that brings out laugh-
ter, despite the harshness of the paternal attitude. His hostile stance is
about to spill over into ferocity as he gets the message that his daughter
has contracted HIV. Again, he threatens his wife physically. The father
had thought that it was a matter of tuberculosis (TB) when it actually
turned out to be AIDS. (TB is the most common cause of death for
AIDS patients in Tanzania, so the girl could very well be suffering from
the disease, which is part of the range of opportunistic diseases of the
syndrome called AIDS.)16 The counsellor manages to calm him down
and he eventually accepts the situation. What remains after this intense
18 Community Theatre and AIDS

intermezzo is a brief epilogue by the counsellor, who emphasizes the

importance of caring for HIV positive people in a loving manner. She
then leaves the subject open for audience discussion.
The other person who advised me on an entry point to an eventual
research project was Henry Meena, programme associate at UNAIDS,
who suggested that I look into the conditions of community theatre
and HIV prevention in Mtwara region as a comparative geographical
example to more established activities in the Kagera region. Both sites
turned out to be decisive for my project. It was only natural to make
the Kagera region one of the comparative sites of fieldwork. This is
the region where the country recorded its first AIDS case, namely in
Ndolage hospital on the hilly slopes of Muleba district in early 1983,
just a few months after the continent’s first case had been recorded
across the border in the Ugandan Rakai district. Kagera is a coffee and
banana producing region with a fishing industry as it is situated on Lake
Victoria. The region does not have critical food shortages but this well-
being is eclipsed by the fact that it also has the lowest GDP per capita
in Tanzania. Kagera borders Rwanda and in connection to the genocide
in 1994, along with the continuing warfare in Burundi, the Kagera
region has received almost one million refugees. The ensuing social
instability and personal insecurity makes parts of the region unsafe
to travel through and I have personally been on some stretches where
a police escort has been necessary. Kagera also has a long history of sex-
ually transmitted infections (STIs) and high infertility rates after serious
syphilis epidemics in the 1930s and 1950s (Killewo 1994). The determi-
nants behind the historic epidemics as well as the contemporary AIDS
epidemic make up a combination of cultural and biological rationales.
The region, especially with its largest ethnic group called Haya, is a pat-
rilineal area where the economy has been controlled almost entirely by
men and where women have long had a national reputation of prostitu-
tion, most likely due to a heavily unbalanced gender division of labour
(I account for this in greater detail in Chapter 1). Another contributing
risk factor in the AIDS epidemic is that the region exemplifies a very
low rate of male circumcision (Hanson 2007: 6). Kagera is, moreover, a
region with lots of functioning theatre groups under the aegis of vari-
ous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governmental AIDS
coordination, which makes it an interesting comparative case to the less
prolific theatre region of Mtwara. In Kagera I have conducted research
in two districts, namely Muleba and Bukoba rural.
In Mtwara region, in southeastern Tanzania with borders to the
Indian Ocean and Mozambique, I have also carried out fieldwork in two
 Introduction 19

4 The theatre group from the Lumesule youth centre in the Mtwara region
being transported on the back of a pick-up truck
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

districts, Masasi and Mangaka. Small-scale farming dominates the dis-

tricts, with cashew nuts and simsim as major cash crops. It is considered
to be utterly poor and inaccessible even by Tanzanian standards. A book
presents the geographical area as follows: ‘This corner of the country is
officially one of the poorest corners of the world and is always presented
as a peripheral area’ (Seppälä and Koda 1998). A socio-economic report
puts it even more bluntly: ‘The southern zone as a whole and Mtwara
in particular is unattractive to the new generation who move out in
search of greener pastures elsewhere in Tanzania. They are economic
“refugees”. To stem this outflow means a lot of work in making the
region and the zone economically attractive to young people’ (Mtwara:
Socio-Economic Profile 1997: 29). Seppälä describes the geographical
remoteness of the region well:

The relative isolation of the southern regions needs to be placed

under closer scrutiny. First […] the sense of isolation is increased
by the fact that on all sides the immediate neighbouring areas are
equally poor and marginalized. Thus short-range trade and interac-
tion does not function as a substitute for poor communication with
20 Community Theatre and AIDS

Dar es Salaam. Second, the physical characteristics of the surrounding

areas make the area more isolated. The area is bordered by uninhab-
ited forests in the north and the Indian Ocean in the east. The barrier
of forests in the north functions as a frontier not just in real terms but
also in the formation of perceptions. When one enters the area from
the north by car, one travels for several hours through the wilderness,
interrupted by a few small settlements. The dominance of nature over
human construction is striking. Thus the existential experience of a
traveller is like a rite of passage: first you leave one situation, then you
are thrown into a frightening transitional phase and only when you
have passed through it are you initiated into a new situation.
(Seppälä and Koda 1998: 12)

Even though the region has a fairly dense population, its population
growth rate is the lowest in the country (ibid.: 10–11). Even colonial
personnel tried to steer clear of the area and it is said that the unpopu-
lar ones down the ranks got stationed in Mtwara. There are researchers
who believe, on good grounds, that the population growth will stay
low,17 but the trend may in fact turn upwards in the near future due to
a major infrastructural reform programme in the so-called Mtwara cor-
ridor, linking the interior parts of East Africa from Zambia and Malawi
to the harbour in Mtwara town, and, not least, linking the region with
neighbouring Mozambique by means of a proper bridge. Up until now,
one has had to enter the bordering country by small boats, or even by
wading in the dry season, across the Ruvuma river.
The marginality of Mtwara may appear to be quite obvious today,
but the region has been subject to pivotal events in the history of
Tanganyika (former mainland Tanzania). Masasi district is located
along the Arabian slave route that reached from the ancient harbour of
Kilwa to the area of Malawi. The Maji Maji uprising against the German
colonizers took place here in 1905, which has its most renowned depic-
tion in Ibrahim Hussein’s drama Kinjekitile (1974). One ethnic group
from the Malawi area who allegedly were on their way back home after
escaping the slave traders in Kilwa remains in Masasi, namely the Yao
(or Wayao in Kiswahili plural). Other ethnic migrations have brought
the Makua and, to a lesser extent, the Makonde, with their widely cele-
brated wood carvings, from Mozambique to Masasi. As usual when it
comes to the division of tribes, it is important to remember that such
an ‘invention of Africa’ (Mudimbe 1988) with reference to the ethnic
labels ‘have been given as a by-product of the colonial administration
and research’ (Seppälä and Koda 1998: 28).
 Introduction 21

The mentioned ethnic groups, along with a smaller number of the

Mwera, were traditionally organized in matrilineal societies, meaning
that, for instance, marriages entail:

the husband’s moving to the wife’s premises, and the children

are named after the woman’s brother, the maternal uncle who is
responsible for important rituals and ceremonies and has to be
informed of them before they can be arranged. The bride wealth
is handed to him when the sister’s daughter gets married and he is
responsible for bringing up the sister’s children.
(Shuma 1994: 174)

These are observations of matrilineality among Mwera by Shuma (1994),

but they may as well be ascribed the other mentioned groups – or, at
least they probably could in the past. Today the kinship systems are
far from intact and may be characterized as a demographic-historical
bilineal hodge-podge after ethnic displacements, interethnic marriages,
colonial interventions, superimposed national laws and regulations,
and current lifestyle changes. The gradual disintegration of social organ-
ization has had a very detrimental impact on women and youth, who
‘fall in between the systems in many different ways’ (Swantz in Seppälä
and Koda 1998: 175; Shuma 1994). The collapse of defined social roles
has had an even more damaging effect on vulnerable groups since
AIDS entered the geopolitical scenario of the Mtwara region in 1986.
Concrete cases of this will be described and analysed below, not least
in connection to a performance from Likokona village. While a positive
aspect of the interrelated ethnicity is its relatively peaceful coexist-
ence; there are religious tensions, especially between some Christian
and Muslim factions. As always in Tanzania, however, there is a tacit
agreement hindering tribalistic or ideological interests from develop-
ing into violent conflicts. Land conflicts are more serious than clashes
over politics or religion (Seppälä and Koda 1998: 195–221). It is perhaps
pertinent to describe the interethnic relations in Masasi in terms of
Mbembe’s post-colonial discourse, which supplements the dichotomy
of resistance and collaboration by what is called ‘illicit cohabitation’
(Mbembe 1992: 4).
The traditional societies have been radically remodelled by interven-
tion of world religions like Islam and Anglican and Roman-Catholic
branches of Christianity, as well as superimposed socialist programmes
such as the so-called ujamaa (‘villagization’ in translation) scheme
whereby villages were uprooted and forcibly moved into greater farming
22 Community Theatre and AIDS

communes in locations that were meant to, but seldom did, offer suf-
ficient means for a sustainable livelihood. This political leap combined
with periods of drought has created regular bouts of food shortage and
famine in Masasi.18 These aspects and many more will become impor-
tant parts of the subsequent discussions of theatre and its deployment
against HIV/AIDS.

Research hypothesis and realization

My research project was motivated by an initial hypothesis which

had the following convoluted phrasing: Given that the most critical
problems with AIDS have to do with communicative taboos, social
predicaments, and gender troubles for young, poor, rural people that
existed before the biomedical syndrome of HIV/AIDS, it ought to be fair
to assume that CBT is an auspicious, and thus potentially efficacious,
mode of HIV prevention since it is primarily organized and performed
by young, poor, rural people, and that it is very popular, and that it has
built-in problem-solving techniques, and that it uses traditional as well
as contemporary means of social mobilization, interactive practices,
and follow-up programmes. The hypothesis pointed to correspondences
such as the following:

• Young women and men are the prime risk groups in the AIDS epidem-
ics of Tanzania as well as many other parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
• More than 50 per cent of the sub-Saharan population is under 20.19
• In many rural places, CBT offers the only means of critical discourse
on AIDS and public opinion for young people.
• It is extremely popular in Tanzania (as well as many other sub-
Saharan countries).
• It is in line with state-of-the-art HIV prevention philosophies.

The question is not, however, what theatre can do to counteract AIDS

so much as how realistic it is to assume that something communicative,
social, and gender oriented can be fulfilled in the politicized, religious,
and conservative conditions of Tanzania. CBT is about much more than
a breakthrough in a culture of silence. CBT is about the preparation,
organization, and performance of HIV/AIDS scenarios that are seldom
or never spoken of, let alone acted upon in order to be thrashed out in
communal post-performance meetings. I would go as far as to assume
that CBT is about exemplifying the very conditions of local AIDS epi-
demics insofar as it coincides with its social and performative modus
 Introduction 23

operandi, through the ones who are at greatest risk.20 The book explores
the potential efficacy of CBT as an eclectic form of HIV prevention
in Tanzania, with a few additional references to comparable sites and
activities in Africa. The exploration entails research into assessments of
community-based theatre (performance analyses), epidemiology (area
studies and interviews), ethnography (culture-historical accounts of the
areas in question), and young people’s shared and private experiences
(focus group discussions and interviews). Examinations and correlations
of both official top-down and communal bottom-up approaches lead to
decisive interpretations of culture-specific epidemics, HIV prevention
schemes, and the relational functions of theatre within such frame-
works. The diachronic links between contemporary CBT, traditional
practices and communal meetings, as well as the hybrid associations of
theatre, popular culture and art, everyday discourse, and internation-
ally developed methods of participatory performance make it possible
to compare CBT with performative functions in political speech, formal
ritual, and informal communication, as well as various forms of HIV
prevention.
The book is written in three successive chapters which lead up to a
fourth chapter where the limits and prospects of CBT against AIDS are
evaluated. Each of the three ‘explorative’ chapters assumes a special
angle of approach towards the hypothesis that was mentioned above.
Moreover, all chapters exemplify case studies which epitomize their
thematic orientations respectively. The first chapter is about the corre-
sponding developments of community-based theatre and HIV preven-
tion. The second chapter compares the eclectic qualities and functions
of CBT with the invariable forms and authoritative mandate of ritual
by comparing their potential efficaciousness through the concept of
performativity. As it turns out, the HIV prevention schemes of the first
chapter and the ritual regimens of the second chapter have trouble
reaching and bringing out the ‘backstage reality’ of the epidemic. The
third chapter takes into consideration such backstage factors by weigh-
ing the official accounts of HIV prevention and the ritual legacy against
focus group discussions and interviews with the 20 theatre groups and
village dwellers residing close to the groups. The research hypothesis,
based on the modal assumption of CBT’s qualities as potentially effica-
cious means of HIV prevention, is thus driven into three blind alleys
that all end with a variation of the following paradox: despite the fact
that CBT arguably meets more ‘best practice’ criteria than any other
form of HIV prevention;21 and despite that it can be perceived as more
ritual than initiation rites and rites of affliction under contemporary
24 Community Theatre and AIDS

living conditions; and despite that it actually brings out the backstage
discourses and practices in critical and participatory ways, it may not
be possible to assess, let alone ascertain, its efficacious facility as HIV
prevention. There are a couple of rationales behind this paradox. First
of all it is, and will always be, impossible to ascribe or estimate a specific
measure of success to a discrete practice in a complex situation (like an
epidemic) in which efficacious actions require several concurrent and
coordinated schemes. Second, it is my conviction that CBT can only
attain its optimal cogency or influence if it is openly and legitimately
backed by political and other authoritative advocates.
Chapter 1 introduces the performative and epidemic scenarios in the
Kagera region. The chapter describes retrospective developments where
increased epidemiological pertinence and democratic representation in
HIV prevention as well as community theatre eventually brought the two
forms of actions together in the 1990s.22 HIV prevention programmes
and applied theatre started out as expert driven activities in Africa, but
gradually had to adhere to local knowledges and lifestyles. Three succes-
sive phases of African community theatre are outlined: (1) the travelling
theatre of the 1960s; (2) the theatre for development movement of the
1970s; and (3) contemporary modes of community-based theatre which
were established during the 1980s and that have been enhanced since
then. The parallel trajectory in HIV prevention is more recent but similar
in its successive phases and kinds as it went from: (1) white-collar KAP
(Knowledge Attitude Practice) studies in the 1980s; (2) NGO sponsored
IEC (Information, Education, Communication) campaigns in the 1990s;
and, finally, (3) community-based programmes, often in the name of
BCC (Behaviour Change Communication) and sometimes aligned with
inclusive multi-sectoral and ‘mainstreamed’ schemes, in recent years.
In Tanzania, Penina Mlama, Amandina Lihamba, and Eberhard
Chambulikazi from The University of Dar es Salaam lead the way to
topical community-based theatre projects around 1980, which meant
that the planning, performance practices, and follow-up components of
projects were gradually handed over to local residents, even if the latter
were initially facilitated by artistic outreach workers and supported by
external donors. A case study signals a warning, however, already in the
first chapter of the book. A seminal theatre project facilitated by Mlama
in 1982 is analysed in detail, with the result that a state-of-the-art com-
munity project on the reproductive health conditions for young women
right around the epidemic outbreak of AIDS in the neighbouring region
of Kagera did not differ essentially in either themes or outcome from
most of the present-day theatre projects against AIDS. One explanation
 Introduction 25

of this matter is coincidental; many of the risk factors behind AIDS

are generic insofar as the determinants of the syndrome share various
characteristics with cognate sexually transmitted infections as well as
related social problems in terms of, for example, gender inequities.
However, the fact that a theatre project on the sexual conditions for
young women almost three decades ago functioned and ended in the
same manner as contemporaneous theatre projects against AIDS also
indicates a problem with the use of theatre.
In response to the predicament of generalized use of community-based
theatre, I argue that projects do not always adapt enough site-specific
features in current and epidemic conditions, which has to do with, first,
obsolete notions about the function of community theatre stemming
from the days of agenda-driven and task-based TFD projects predicated
on, and aiming for, rapid change and/or a self-reliant group interest
as a means in itself, and, second, with Western cognitive notions of
individual behaviour change by the organizations that deploy and fund
outreach theatre. The combined fallacy has left many theatre groups
physically isolated and psychologically defeatist. There are, of course,
exceptions and I will devote as much interest to auspicious initiatives
as critique against flawed ones.
The predicament is analysed further in the second chapter.23 The new
complex challenge of AIDS necessitates a fresh view and deployment of
community-based theatre. The reconsideration is motivated by specific
comparisons with traditional practices, such as initiation rites and tra-
ditional health practices, but also contemporary outlets, like alternative
prevention practices and public political discourse. In this chapter a
variety of performance practices that underpin community-based theatre
are considered. In Tanzania, like many other sub-Saharan countries, rural
people still gather when they hear the cue for meetings in the form of
drumbeats and local dances (ngoma) in public hubs. Audiences enjoy cho-
ral songs (nyimbo), poems (mashairi), and acrobatics (sarakasi) as well as
theatre (michezo ya kuigiza) in numerous stylistic and aesthetic registers.
In Mtwara region the initiation rites for male (jando) and female
(unyago) youth are still defining gender roles to the detriment of domes-
ticized women. These rites are compared with the initiation rites called
Nkang’a (female) and Mukanda (male) of the Ndembu that Victor Turner
analysed, again with less attention to the relatively submissive forma-
tion of social female identities. In Mtwara, the average age for initiates
has gone down from 13 to below ten years, which is indeed detrimen-
tal for the health of children and youth. The theatre, controversially,
reveals secrets from initiation rites when necessary, for example, when
26 Community Theatre and AIDS

young people’s lives are at stake due to the multiple use of blood-stained
knives in male circumcisions, or when old fashioned educations on
sexuality and marital conduct carry on anachronistically for young
women. In both regions of the study, far more people go to traditional
doctors than modern health facilities for treatment, also with AIDS
related opportunistic infections and diseases.
When it comes to comparisons with alternative prevention schemes,
it is by now clear, as mentioned earlier, that one-way communicative
modes of information such as TV and other audiovisual media has a
limited influence on young people in both regions since so few have
access to such outlets. Some youth centres that I have visited have been
given video players and information tapes from donor agencies, but in
Tanzania almost all people are by now aware of the essential informa-
tion about HIV/AIDS as a health risk. An exception as regards modern
media is the wide ranging and much less expensive radio, through
which, for instance, hip-hop artists (playing so-called bongo flava) in
Tanzania have proven to take great responsibility as role models in terms
of depictions of AIDS. Radio can also be used as an interactive compo-
nent if people gather round broadcasts and then discuss and even act
upon or re-enact shows, which was what the organization CARE did in
Ethiopia when I was there in 2003. Such community initiatives, as well
as the CNN feature I took part in, are covered under my definition of
community-based theatre. However, what is needed today, rather than
media campaigns, is inclusive projects involving interpersonal life skills
in sexual negotiation backed by income-generating activities, gender-
balanced household economies, and a political support that becomes
known in whole districts and regions. This is where the social mobil-
ization, transethnic familiarization, participatory methods, and public
interactivity of community theatre come in.
Political speeches have proven to be deficient if enunciations remain
isolated from pragmatic efforts on the ground. Many leaders have talked
about the ‘war on AIDS’, but never identified who the enemy is. A more
serious aspect of political speech is when it implicates a hidden religious
agenda, despite the fact that religious dogmas consistently contradict
the National Policy on AIDS (2001) in Tanzania. The gap between
rhetoric and deed lends itself to a discussion geared by the concept of
performativity. The comparison concentrates on the mode of influenc-
ing interpersonal or societal changes through speech and other modes
of action (rather than simply knowledge, information, education,
or communication). Traditionally social scientific dichotomies have
ascribed performative functions of social change to ritual, while theatre
 Introduction 27

has been degraded to serve as entertainment, reflection, and statement.

However, apart from the fact that the latter dichotomy is categorically
flawed, culture-historical changes, partially due to AIDS as such, have
altered the functions of cultural practices. Community-based theatre
is a more interactive, variable, adaptable, and democratic forum than
traditional rites and can be said to hold possibilities of contemporary
‘ritual changes’ for HIV preventive purposes. I show this by site-specific
examples of community theatre as an eclectic type of performance with
diachronic and syncretistic qualities from the continuum of formal
ritual (initiations, circumcisions, dances, etc.), semi-formal communal
meetings (political speech, church choir songs), and informal everyday
life (scenes of domestic life, risk behaviours in public spheres). Hence
the predicament identified is not a necessary flaw of community-based
theatre as HIV prevention per se, but has rather to do with a narrow
understanding of AIDS as a modern societal syndrome and, moreover,
of a questionable attitude to theatre as a democratic mode of public
opinion and life skills.
Methodologically, it should be clear that I have no direct part in the
theatre activities I am studying, but in fact try to minimize the reactive
effects of my presence among the informants. This matter is, of course,
worthy of a study in its own right and cannot be exhausted here. I have
worked as a teacher in community, political, and educational theatre
at Lancaster University (2005–09) and performed in a few productions,
although not in Africa. A recurrent mode of study is performance analy-
sis with the cultural and interdisciplinary scope pertaining to perform-
ance studies and epidemiology. Hence the analyses of performance may
be described as studies in an extended field of methods and references.
The examples are mainly taken from my fieldwork sites in Tanzania,
but also from a few other African countries.24 I start with quite com-
mon examples of community theatre, where it breaks the silence on the
epidemic, depicts taboo-laden situations in public, and involves audi-
ences in post-performance discussions. In particular, more contentious
performances that challenge the communicative and political limits of
public events are examined. A few case studies from both corners of the
country lead the way. One is taken from Likokona, where a woman gets
disinherited by her own brother, despite living in the matrilineal belt of
southern Tanzania. She takes the case to court but is framed by incon-
siderate politicians, a corrupt judge, and defeatist community members.
The Likokona performance is highly controversial, which may turn out
to be counterproductive in its conservative context and thus indicative
of the limits of CBT as public opinion and political instrument.
28 Community Theatre and AIDS

The book investigates a field of extended performative practices where

three scopes of epidemiological studies are correlated, namely (1) official
versions of the epidemic; (2) the theatre group members’ version of the
epidemic; and (3) the site-specific depictions of the epidemic in theatri-
cal performances. The first aspect is by now thoroughly researched by
epidemiological studies of the countries in Africa and the districts in
Tanzania, even if the Kagera region is much more mapped out than
the Mtwara region. The second aspect has been dealt with by means of
focus group discussions (FGDs) and interviews with 20 theatre groups in
Tanzania, which are modes of activities that are treated as performances
in their own right in Chapter 3. The third aspect has already been men-
tioned in terms of an extended discourse of performance analysis.
My contribution to a more generalized study of official attitudes and
opinions on AIDS is to keep track of the relations of themes among the
groups I am analysing in performance but also by conducting semi-struc-
tured talks. The distribution of topics that group members themselves
propose for focus group discussions reveal culture-specific inclinations
and, not least, gender-specific preferences that make me look upon sta-
tistics as an interpretive material. I devote the first part of Chapter 3 to
the explication of statistical relations, which in turn is a pre-stage to the
performance of focus group discussions. A decisive step towards a fuller
assessment of the efficacy of theatre against AIDS is to interpret so-called
backstage situations and their relations to front-stage versions of the epi-
demic, that is, what is enunciated and enacted behind closed doors and
in public respectively. As discussed in the second chapter’s comparative
typology of performance variants, CBT does the opposite of initiation
rites, namely it turns social order inside out by familiarizing taboos
that are being defamiliarized in public. Focus group discussions and
interviews behind the scenes, as presented and evaluated in Chapter 3,
divulge sensitive revelations about religious, ritual, political censorship,
and a defeatist attitude towards the gender tragedy of having many more
young women exposed to HIV than men through transactional sex.25
The taboo-laden backstage performances often relate indirectly to
CBT. What is said in private is not always enacted communally but
underlies metonymic scenarios that audiences are let in on surrepti-
tiously or through other forms of dramatic allusion, or just by appeal-
ing to conscious local residents. Focus group discussions (FGDs) and
interviews with theatre groups and spectators/villagers offer exclusive
insights to various risk situations. After a performance about the com-
munal stigmatization of an HIV positive man, a focus group discussion
with young women in Mumbaka stagnates from the start as they giggle
 Introduction 29

in embarrassment over the silence. But my FGDs are based on topics

suggested by the interlocutors themselves. I ask them to mention the
three most precarious risk factors when it comes to HIV in their com-
munity. My tactic is to await responses to the proposed topics, even
when silence reigns for a minute. In the presence of a shy group, I either
start with an easy topic (usually related to the epidemic implications
of poverty), or else take a chance and start with a peculiar topic. In
Mumbaka I asked about a topic that was suggested by one person
only, namely rape. Eventually a young woman crossed the narrative
threshold and cautiously told a story about how men regularly come
up to unfamiliar women along the road and demand sex, with little or
no possibility for women to say no. Eventually all women join in the
discussion and revealed a range of critical risk factors caused by gender
inequity that may lead to violent incidents.
In most cases FGDs and interviews confirm that community per-
formances actually dramatize the most sensitive issues in the epidemic.
Every so often, however, I have discovered discrepancies in the relation
between, for example, epidemiological surveillance reports in a cer-
tain area and the discursive representations of AIDS among people, or
between performances and backstage talks. No quantifiable, discursive
or performative mode of communication is privileged in my study,
but they are rather compared with one another in order to consolidate
a shared epidemic reality against which to work out interpretations
and recommend follow-up actions. Some stories are incredible in their
own right as individual statements. Most stories support the notion of
gender problems as the root cause behind the cross-cultural epidemic
determinants.
After seeing African CBT for six years and formalizing fieldworks for
four years I can say with confidence that my project gravitated towards
the conclusion that gender predicaments are generating the most
prevalent epidemic determinants, even behind such disparate cultural
regimes as the clan systems of the Kagera region, the matrilineal kin-
ship systems of the Mtwara region, the fishing industry demographics
around and in Lake Victoria on the border to Uganda, and in rites of
passage in societies along the Ruvuma river on the Mozambique border.
Everywhere I go, see, listen, and analyse public as well as backstage
performances there are striking gender inequalities in play. This was
recently reconfirmed in a report from the World Health Organization
(WHO 2009) and the statement after the fifty-fourth session of the
Commission on the Status of Women by the Joint United Nations
Programme on HIV/AIDS and the United Nations Development Fund
30 Community Theatre and AIDS

for Women (UNAIDS/UNIFEM 2010). The WHO report established that

AIDS is now globally, ‘the leading cause of death and disease in women
of reproductive age’ (WHO 2010: 43).

Globally, women represent about 50 per cent of all people living with
HIV, and over 60 per cent of HIV infections in Africa. In Southern
Africa, prevalence among women aged 15–24 years is on average
about three times higher than among men the same age. […] Gender
inequality and discrimination, including violence against women
and girls, are a key driver of women’s and girls’ increased vulner-
ability to HIV infection and to the disproportionate impact of the
epidemic. This is further exacerbated in situations of humanitarian
crisis. Mobile populations also often become vulnerable to HIV. We
know that lack of economic, social and legal autonomy of women
and girls limits their capacity to refuse sex or to negotiate safer sex
and to resist sexual violence and coercion, including transactional
sex and early forced marriage.
(UNAIDS/UNIFEM 2010: 2)

Most of these risk factors will be exemplified and analysed in the

chapters ahead. Rather than merely stating ‘what we know’, however,
CBT and its backstage social dramas also offer viable ways of counter-
acting risk factors. That is the difference between the social science of
epidemiology and the practice-based research of performance: the first
observes, calculates, and makes analytical inferences while the latter
observes, analyses, and acts out interpretable key incidences. This book
is an attempt to combine the merit of both the social scientific and the
performative approach to HIV prevention.
The most widely stated risk factor in performances I have seen, among
people I have talked with, as well as in official reports, is undoubtedly
poverty and its links to sexual lifestyles. This generic rationale carries
comparative possibilities to past epidemics of sexually transmitted
infections in a global perspective, which in turn prompts an impor-
tant disclaimer. There is no reason to believe that AIDS is a primarily
African predicament, just as there is nothing particularly African about
the sexual habits that spread the virus. One good way of testing the
validity of myths is to turn one’s attention to one’s own circumstances.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Sweden had a comparable
economic standard as Tanzania has today and similar patterns of syphi-
lis epidemics as Tanzania has with AIDS epidemics today. Stockholm
had the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections (SDIs) among
 Introduction 31

European cities and just as with serious levels of AIDS, outbreaks of

syphilis indicate a social condition in which more men than women
had casual and transactional sex, while the ensuing SDIs, and espe-
cially the then deadly syphilis were embedded in a taboo-laden culture
of silence (cf. Holmdahl 1988). The myth about an ‘African sexuality’
(Arnfred 2004) as a cause of AIDS has been disproven, for example, in
terms of a so-called coital frequency in epidemiological studies, which
show a similar regularity of sexual intercourses pretty much all over
the world (Caldwell and Caldwell 1996; Pickering et al. 1996), Tanzania
included (Konings et al. 1994).
Politicians, academics, NGO workers, urban feminists, teachers,
religious leaders, and community people know that AIDS is driven by
gender imbalances, but they are also aware of the fact that women have
gone through a series of revolutions in social and political status in vari-
ous parts of the world. With an apparent risk of victimizing Tanzanian
women, which can only be mitigated by referring directly to African
women’s own discourse and actions, besides justifying it through femi-
nist and postcolonial discourses, an inevitable outcome of my studies is
to report the fact that being a housewife is the most hazardous position
to occupy in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa (excepting that of being
under five years old with the risk of contracting malaria). The most
common type of HIV incidence is quite undramatic, namely marital
sex in family households. Two general, and often overlapping, scenarios
dominate the epidemics: either mobile men bring home the virus via
more or less established extra-marital affairs (associated with epidemic
patterns in southern Africa), or women engage in transactional sex, not
seldom to support their children (associated with certain epidemic fac-
tors in eastern Africa). Within one and the same household moderate
and extreme poverty may coexist, again in favour of men. Poverty is
not only too generalized a concept to translate and apply in prevention
programmes, but also as an ethnographic premise for interpretation.
Hence gender, not poverty, is the lowest common denominator in my
understanding of AIDS in the areas of study, or, put differently, the
interpretive plot closest to the ground which most pertinently captures
various local facts and values in a way that makes it possible to do
something about.
In the forth and final chapter, an accumulation of arguments based
on case studies in previous chapters sustains my decisive interpretation
of gender predicaments with special attention to post-performance
commitments and (a lack of) follow-up programmes.26 If applied theatre
is assessed as a relational means of action research within the framework
32 Community Theatre and AIDS

of aligned prevention schemes rather than, quite naively, as a means

in itself or a means for rapid social change, or as a means to simply
deliver messages for health promotion, there are viable grounds for a
theatre with real impact and sustainability. In the light of the tripar-
tite correlation of official, communal, and private perspectives toward
the epidemic through the combined methodology of epidemiological
studies, performance analyses, focus group discussions, and interviews,
the attempt of the study is to evaluate the efficacy of HIV prevention
through theatre. In virtue of my findings, I put forth a few best-practice
cases and attempt to vindicate their worth by demonstrating a cul-
ture-specific relevance, an ethical soundness through gender-balanced
organization, a cost-effective feasibility by means of their voluntary
basis and social mobility, and a commitment by young people to organ-
ize epidemiologically relevant counteractions. It is thus my goal to go
beyond, on the one hand, anecdotal evidence and, on the other, far-
fetched cultural interpretations and instead combine macro- and micro-
perspectives in order to substantiate a realistic and applicable concept of
efficacy when it comes to CBT as HIV prevention.
1
HIV Prevention as Community-
Based Theatre

AIDS became known in the Kagera region in 1983 and in this

geographical location it is fair to assume, in virtue of correlations
between outreach projects and statistical data, that travelling theatre
troupes in conjunction with community-based theatre groups have had
a certain impact on declining mortality rates, from a devastating quarter
of the population in parts of the region some twenty years ago to a few
odd per cent of the general population today.1 In this chapter, I will
discuss the capacity of theatre to counter the epidemic challenges by
offering a culture-historical retrospective of the epidemic as perceived
in performances, and later by approaching contemporary quests for HIV
prevention through a discussion of efficacious CBT. In order to show
what HIV prevention and community-based theatre are up against, it is
important to avoid a simple narrative about ‘AIDS in Africa’ and instead
identify by way of concrete examples the many AIDS epidemics in the
region and indeed in Tanzania as well as other parts of the world.

Life as epidemic mimicry

AIDS epidemics disseminate like global economies across cultural

boundaries and national borders, incognito and yet intimately incor-
porated in peoples’ metamorphoses from local to global ways of living.
The syndrome took on epidemic proportions in central Africa and in
the urban centres of the North American coasts about the same time.
Before that it is reasonable to suppose that it had meandered up the
Congo basin to the highlands of Rwanda before reaching Lake Victoria
on the border of Uganda and Tanzania where large numbers of people
fell ill in the early 1980s. There are good reasons to assume that the

33
34 Community Theatre and AIDS

source of the epidemic is to be found in western equatorial Africa, due

to the vast range of viral subtypes detected in that area (Iliffe 2006:
ch. 1). It is assumed by many experts today that the human immuno-
deficiency virus (HIV) originally ‘jumped’ from simian species (carrying
SIV, simian immunodeficiency virus) to humans in Cameroon, where
it is not uncommon to hunt and eat chimpanzees.2 However, since
the virus is constantly changing, the challenge to understand how and
where it spreads and to prevent that incidence rate is of much greater
importance than to know where it came from.
When HIV became an epidemic in the Kagera region it was alien to
everyone. A macabre spirit sneaked into people’s lives like a myth from
nowhere and haunted them seemingly by quirks of fate, took possession
of their bodies, one by one, invisibly, hollowly, silently, until wearing
them down in a slow, unbearable loss of life. Despite complex epidemio-
logical surveys, it is still hard to know where AIDS came from, where
it is going, and how to prevent it from getting there. The syndrome is
generally acquired in sexual relations and causes a set of symptoms to
transpire through quite familiar ways of living and dying.

The distinctive features of HIV as a virus were that it was relatively

difficult to transmit, it killed almost all those it infected (unless

5 A ferry on Lake Victoria, close to Bukoba town in the Kagera region

(Photo: Ola Johansson)
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 35

kept alive by antiretroviral drugs), it killed them slowly after a

long incubation period, it remained infectious throughout its
course, it showed few symptoms until its later stages, and when
symptoms appeared they were often those common to the local
disease environment. This unique combination of features gave a
unique character to the epidemic, ‘a catastrophe in slow motion’
spreading silently for many years before anyone recognized its
existence.
(Iliffe 2006: 58)

AIDS was and still is a ‘ghost disease’ (Hanson 2007a: 28), which has
gradually come to be recognized via corporeal signs that bear various
taboo and stigma laden code names, sometimes with sexual overtones
(Mutembei 2001: ch. 4). An informant in southern Tanzania portrayed
an inconvenient truth about the ominous ghost with a Kiswahili
aphorism: ‘umekaa pakunoga’, roughly meaning that it is ‘situated in
a delicious place’. AIDS is a performative double that imitates people’s
lifestyles – it does what people do. It travels with people, stays in their
houses, goes to rendezvous with them, has sex with them, has kids
with them, becomes sick with them, and dies with them. Apparently,
AIDS has no traceable origin or fixed identity, it shadows people and
mocks scientists in an epidemic mimicry – just like syphilis, the ‘great
imitator’ of old – whose transmutations can only be pursued and inter-
preted in the nomadic choreography of changing locations, identities,
and lifestyles.3
In Africa, cultural changes have been historically induced by
geographical and violent political circumstances. The continent is
in many areas sparsely inhabited, which means that people have
always had to travel long distances for various purposes. Low popula-
tion density makes services arduous and costly, curbing an effective
health care system.4 The geographical predicament was intensified
during the long history of the slave trade which displaced ethnic
and demographic groups, and through the colonial division of
labour as male workforces were allocated to distant production sites
while women were left behind in village households (Barnett and
Whiteside 2002: ch. 5; see also Iliffe 1995: 269–70). The gender dis-
ruptive colonial order, with spouses absent from each other over long
periods of time, caused a number of epidemics of sexually transmit-
ted infections (STIs) and has been one of the crucial causes behind
the rapid spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. In more recent
times, women are carrying out considerably more work than men in
36 Community Theatre and AIDS

Tanzania and other parts of Eastern Africa, while men still control
the household economy and hold the outreach function of selling
and buying merchandise.
On and around Lake Victoria in the beginning of the 1980s the
historical traces of AIDS were among fishermen, lorry drivers, and
blackmarket racketeers involved in the so-called magendo economy
(Barnett and Blaikie 1992: ch. 5), who unknowingly carried the loom-
ing epidemic further into Africa via truck stops, bars, and marketplaces
populated by penniless local women offering transactional sex. A few
years later, a similar transnational epidemic emerged in southern Africa,
where contact between prostitutes and migrant workers such as miners
would threaten about a third of the adult populations in countries like
Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and South Africa.
Early in the epidemic, people in Kagera region suspected witchcraft
and incriminated the Ugandans (and vice versa). They refused to believe
that they got fatally ill from having had sex a decade ago, shunned
the sick like the plague (which it was), and were wary of conspiracies
among modern doctors with their useless ‘international’ medicines.
Political leaders declared war on AIDS, but never identified the enemy.5
Religious leaders blamed people for amoral promiscuity, but could not
avoid contracting the virus themselves. Health researchers eventually
held a retrovirus responsible, but offered no hope for a cure. At the
end of the day the authoritarian speculations, advice, and judgments
meant little, and so people on the ground had to look for more precise
and pragmatic questions and solutions amongst themselves. Within a
few years in the 1980s, the epidemic became generalized in many parts
of Tanzania and East Africa, that is, with prevalence rates exceeding
5 per cent in adult populations. The syndrome cut through the social
fabric of ethnicities, interests, sectors, and social strata; the major risk
groups were no longer sex workers and truck drivers, but traders, farm-
ers, teachers, students, politicians, clerics, housewives – in short, each
and everyone. By 1990 it was obvious that AIDS was much more than
a health issue. Yet most governments, including the Tanzanian, del-
egated the lion’s share of their preventive resources to the health sector.
This deferred an adequate response by about ten years. Not until New
Year’s Eve in 1999, when about one in ten Tanzanians were infected,
did president Benjamin William Mkapa declare AIDS a national disaster
in a speech (TACAIDS 2003: 10). Since then there have been genuine
attempts to address the immediate epidemic concerns, even if the dis-
cursive openness and political willingness has mostly been manifested
on a national rhetorical level, while the coordinated responses by
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 37

governmental agencies at district and village levels have been much less
open and efficient.6

The parallel developments of community-based

theatre and HIV prevention

By delineating the parallel developments of community theatre and

HIV prevention, the reciprocal needs of the practices will become quite
evident and be assessed in the light of certain case studies. Tanzania
has taken a leading position in the implementation of sustainable and
locally owned theatre projects, but the challenges of AIDS have proven
so vast that previously supposed purposes of community theatre must
be called into question. Rather than being viewed as a means in itself,
or a means for rapid change, CBT will be considered as a relational
means in coordinated programmes against AIDS. However, in spite of
functioning as an exceptional relational agency for the most exposed
cohorts in the epidemic, the social, gender, and epidemic predicaments
will persist as long as policy-makers do not fully recognize the status of
young people and the capacity of community theatre.
Some phenomena are so big that they need to be made smaller to
be fully comprehended. The global implications of AIDS rupture any
conceptual definition and cultured imagination. It is now clear that it
is the most devastating epidemic in recorded history and that it con-
tinues to plague populations in sub-Saharan Africa who struggle with
extreme poverty, societal discontinuity, and scanty health services.7
Yet the substance of the epidemic is found in a drop of blood, semen,
or even a tear.8 Reducing the epidemic to microscopic sizes, however,
brings discourses into a mise-en-abyme of medical taxonomy. To grasp
the practical issues of AIDS, a halfway point of view needs to be estab-
lished, from which the macro-statistics and micro-samples coalesce in
life-size interactions. Coincidentally, that perspective involves scenarios
about as big as a theatrical production from a performance researcher’s
point of view.
In the light of the complex pathological make-up, social secrecy and
sexual taboos, I have found CBT to be more expressive than clear-cut
medical information on HIV and AIDS, more accurate than epidemio-
logical statistics, and more relevant than scientific analyses of its causes
and effects. The syndrome, which few talk about but most people
cannot help but watch when acted out, is a communicable disease
primarily in the social sense of the word. Its routes of transmission are
38 Community Theatre and AIDS

statistically estimated in vast incidence rates, but theatre shows just

how complicated one such incidence is for affected people.
Medical prevention research approaches the syndrome objectively,
but the lack of a cure 25 years into the epidemic performances show
how biased the impact of AIDS is, especially for young women and
widows. It is more dangerous to be a housewife than a soldier in Africa.
In some parts of southern Africa, young women are up to five times
more likely to contract HIV than men. In Tanzania, the gender inequity
is slightly less striking in statistical terms but still highly significant in
real-life situations. These are statistical facts that have been verified
consistently over the past five to ten years (cf. UNAIDS/WHO 2004;
WHO 2010; UNAIDS/UNIFEM 2010). Theatre is the mode of testimony
and dissent that reveals such complex, biased and inequitable condi-
tions on a community level and, as long as it is not fully recognized by
policy-makers, community theatre will continue to fail as no other HIV
prevention dare fail.
In what follows I will provide a brief historical background by show-
ing how HIV prevention schemes and CBT projects have been devel-
oped in parallel and gradually converging trajectories, from top-heavy,
expert-driven campaigns to bottom-up approaches increasingly owned
and run by community residents. After that it will become clear what
a pivotal role theatre can actually play in HIV prevention. But just as
the virus has an eerie ability to evade a medical solution by mutating,
neither discrete nor generic preventive practices are sufficient in the
complex and heterogeneous epidemic. In the light of past and current
cases in Tanzania, I will suggest that CBT can make a difference in an
advancing epidemic only if its own modus operandi is open to culture-
specific variations of the epidemic. Seen as a relational means of change
rather than a means in itself, or a means for rapid imposed change,
theatre against AIDS can be fully appreciated and applied as a participa-
tory prevention practice in an epidemic that ultimately hinges on social
interactions rather than pills or money.9
Catherine Campbell poses fundamentally complex and difficult
questions about the social impetus of the epidemic in her acclaimed
book ‘Letting Them Die’: How HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes often Fail
(2003): ‘Why is it that people knowingly engage in sexual behaviour
that could lead to a slow and painful premature death? Why do the
best-intentioned attempts to stem the tide of the HIV epidemic often
have so little impact? To what extent can local community mobil-
ization contribute to a reduction in HIV transmission?’ (ibid.: 183)
Quite naturally, Campbell does not have ready answers for her radical
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 39

questions. The reason for this is simply that there are still more ques-
tions to test than answers to apply on the syndrome. The major chal-
lenges concern the gap between knowledge and practice among general
populations. How is it possible to prevent life-threatening behaviours
among people who are aware of the risks (how HIV is transmitted), situa-
tions (where and when it happens), means (how to protect oneself), and
consequences (the slow and painful death) of AIDS? The most troubling
thing about this question is perhaps not that it is still unanswered, but
that it took such a long time to pose to people who may hold answers.
Instead of asking questions, so-called experts and aid workers for a long
time brought what they thought were answers to affected people, while
it should have been the other way round.
HIV prevention campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa were for a long
time predicated on biomedical information and rational-choice theo-
ries pertinent to Northern societies (Freudenthal 2002). Models such
as the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen 1980), the health belief model
(Conner and Norman 1996), and social learning theory (Ormrod 1999)
are all based on generalized ideas on how individuals attain preven-
tive conduct through cognitive, observational, or behavioural skills,
intended to predict positive outcomes of future decisions. The favourite
methodology for the models comprises surveys conducted after certain
doses of information, sometimes mixed with heuristic exercises to
inculcate the achieved knowledge. In the 1980s particular risk groups’
knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP studies) were mapped out, fol-
lowed by a distribution of pamphlets and other mainly written material
in information, education, communication (IEC) campaigns. The most
renowned example in the ‘invasion of acronyms’ (Nugent 2004: ch. 8)
is the World Health Organization’s ABC model, spelled out as abstain,
be faithful, use condom.
The problem with the generic prevention models is that HIV trans-
missions can seldom be avoided by virtue of individual decisions or
discrete behaviour. It does not really matter what you know or opt
for if you do not know who your partner last had sex with and if it is
considered unsuitable or even unsafe to ask about it, even if he suffers
from a noticeable sexually transmitted infection and you are not in a
position to say no to sex, or propose to use a contraceptive, since that
would make him suspicious of whom you last had sex with, which may
well be a legitimate concern as that affair may be your only chance to
put food on the table for yourself and your children while your husband
is away working, or looking for a job, or spending time in his nyumba
ndogo (‘little house’, a metonym for mistress in Swahili).10 Even if this
40 Community Theatre and AIDS

scenario – pointing to some of the most common routes of HIV trans-

mission in sub-Saharan Africa today – involves stock characterization in
a seemingly foreseeable plot, its preventive raison dêtre cannot be boiled
down to a level of individual decision making in a controllable setting.
Geopolitical, cultural and ethnic variations must always be taken into
account as they involve gender roles in social systems that have likely
developed in other places, times, and circumstances than the present.
This is one of the crucial challenges in HIV prevention schemes, namely
the double-edged understanding of the culture-historical backgrounds
of various ethnic groups and, correspondingly, the way their cultures
have been geographically displaced and structurally disintegrated over
time (Barnett and Whiteside 2002: ch. 5). Some of the driving forces
behind gender imbalances and generational clashes lie embedded in the
historical and political discrepancies of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-
colonial times. The question is how to cope with them in a viable way
today. This is, as will be clear below, where the diachronic and eclectic
praxis of community theatre enters the epidemic scenario.
In the 1990s prevention workers gradually realized that HIV and AIDS
are not merely a medical, moral, or behavioural challenge, but a syndrome
which cuts through the cultural fabric of whole societies. Prevention pro-
grammes were thus designed to incorporate cultural underpinnings and
local participation in behaviour, culture, communication (BCC) cam-
paigns based on interactive processes and tailored messages through
a variety of communication channels to effect individual as well as
communal behaviour changes. In recent years community programmes
have turned former objects, or ‘target audiences’, of projects into col-
laborating and ultimately self-reliant subjects, a ‘paradigm drift’, as it
were, from expert information to grassroots participation (Campbell
2003: 9).
Hence the answer to the question of why people knowingly engage
in life-threatening sexual behaviour has little to do with risk factors as
such. Solutions must be pursued beyond abstract categories like ‘knowl-
edge’, ‘attitudes’, and ‘behaviour’, which are only effects of underlying
causes. The degree of risk-taking implicated in the spread of HIV relates
to social groups lacking a livelihood which would allow them to make
safe choices in life. The most vulnerable group, women aged between
15 and 24, is trapped in a vicious circle where the lack of resources
often leads to interrupted schooling, early marriages, and pregnancies,
and ensuing transactional sex. According to the most recent statis-
tics in Tanzania, 47.4 per cent of all AIDS cases are unknown (NACP
Surveillance Report 2005: 2) and many more women than men are
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 41

tested (primarily in antenatal clinics), but the existing data, nonethe-

less, speak volumes about gender-specific susceptibilities.
Among the cumulative AIDS cases in the country between 1987 and
2004, 1.6 per cent of males aged between 15 and 19 were found to be
infected, while the same age cohort for females reached 4.5 per cent.
Among males aged between 20 and 24, 7.4 per cent are estimated to
be HIV-positive, while the rate for women is 16.5 per cent (NACP
Surveillance Report 2005: 3). When it comes to absolute numbers of
people living with HIV or AIDS in the period from 2000 to 2006, the
estimated number is 40,000 for males aged between 15 and 24 and
100,000 for females of the same age. The same statistics for persons
aged between 20 and 24 indicate that 80,000 men versus 220,000
women are infected (ibid.: 45). A similar gender deviation is found in
surveys of infections transmitted sexually, the main physical cause of
HIV transmission. About twice as many AIDS cases come from married
couples than single people (ibid: 6). These statistics disprove previous
notions about AIDS as a medical problem among certain risk groups
engaged in certain risk behaviours; rather, the data says that AIDS is a
generalized syndrome that reveals social issues, in particular for female
strata, that have been around for much longer than the epidemic itself
and have to be coped with by means of culturally inclusive and inte-
grated prevention schemes. Community theatre takes on a crucial place
in HIV prevention with regard to the mobilization of young people,
gender-balanced programmes, and a communal examination of tradi-
tions through past and present cultural practices.

The development of Theatre for Development

With the acknowledgement of local knowledge as an untapped resource

for HIV prevention programmes, a mixed practice of culture-specific
conflict- and problem-solving leads into the AIDS scenario: CBT. African
applied theatre, signifying a syncretistic mix of traditional and contem-
porary modes of performance, has been used in various forms and for
various purposes since pre-colonial times. Quite a few reports and books
have been written about theatre as a developmental phenomenon.11
Some researchers hold doubts about the potential of applied theatre
as an instrument for social reform,12 while others tend to be overly
optimistic about its capacity to instigate social changes.13 A few studies
have put community theatre in relation to AIDS, but they are either out
of date14 or limited in scope,15 or lack epidemiological pertinence on a
communal and interactive level.16 The most probing texts on theatre
42 Community Theatre and AIDS

and AIDS have been written in the form of reports by researchers and
outreach workers such as Augustin Hatar (2001; 1998).
In the 1960s, the decade of independence in most African countries,
the so-called travelling-theatre movements were deployed by university
scholars aiming for cultural revitalization.17 European-style ‘well-made
plays’ toured and became a mobile vehicle geared towards rural audi-
ences by university-based African artists. Like most development work-
ers at the time, however, the plays did not pay a great deal of attention
to local traditions or languages, let alone the gender issues that lurked
behind societal predicaments.
In a second phase, theatre projects were brought closer to their tar-
get audiences. In 1974 the Laedza Batanani movement was launched
in Botswana, marking the start of so-called Theatre for Development.
This was also an academic project with built-in problems of involving
local audiences in projects about communal challenges, but under the
influence of Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ project facilita-
tors paid increasing attention to situational and political conditions.18
About the same time, the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaira, Nigeria,
took on similar projects, now also inspired by Augusto Boal’s ‘theatre
of the oppressed’.19 Artistic outreach workers dwelled amid villagers
or urban squatters, composed skits and role-plays based on characters
and scenarios as narrated by the locals, performed the result for them,
and then invited the audience to alter the resolution of plots by way of
simultaneous dramaturgy and post-performance discussions. The devel-
opment of community theatre spread across Africa via international
workshops and eventually led to a third phase of community theatre,
elaborated in countries such as Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania.20
At this point most of the creative and edifying modus operandi were
entrusted to the community subjects themselves, who participated
directly in the planning and performing of the theatre. Community
theatre went from being a social event to becoming a social process.
The third phase of community theatre coincides with the outbreak
of the AIDS epidemic and yet it would take many years before the full
potential of theatre projects would be employed in prevention pro-
grammes. When the first community-owned theatre projects were tried
out in Tanzania in the 1980s, aid organizations such as WHO circu-
lated Northern-style information and education on how the epidemic
occurred, while religious organizations took care of the moral expla-
nation of why it occurred (Iliffe 2006: 90). Not until the recognition
of culture-specific communication in the 1990s would people’s local
knowledge and practices have a bearing on programmes dealing with
their own predicaments.
6 Three female characters perform before an audience in the village of Sululu in the Mtwara region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

43
44 Community Theatre and AIDS

The ultimate objective of TFD and other HIV preventive schemes is

to effectuate perlocutionary acts, or reciprocal performative speech acts,
that not only express matters in a convincing way, but also persuade
interlocutors to take subsequent action for their own and others’ sake.
Ironically, this objective does not seem attainable either by result-
oriented performances or by didactic methods. I would not go so far as
to say with Setel that preventive actions ought to be ‘service oriented
rather than educational’ (my emphasis), even if it is fair to assume that
‘the impact of targeted interventions such as those promoting condom
use may be very limited’ and that the notion of ‘behaviour change’ is
subject to manifold ‘situational constraints’ (Setel 1999: 245–6). It is
clear that superimposed educational projects rarely reach the cultural
profundity of behaviour change. AIDS has forced development work-
ers to realize that cultural changes can only transpire through people’s
own initiatives and actions. Some CBT practitioners appreciated this
epidemiological fact long before most aid workers and thus altered their
interventions from being nomadic and ephemeral to be culture-specific
and long-lasting.
In the 1980s so-called Theatre for Development (TFD) spread across
sub-Saharan Africa through annual international workshops, which
gradually improved its initial methods. The Laedza Batanani projects
conceptualized and implemented its prototypical model, but also met
with criticism on a number of counts. A few crucial elements had been
overlooked, such as the use of local languages, indigenous performance
traditions, and gender issues (Mlama 1991; Kerr 2002). Byam (1999) has
also criticized the participatory deficiency in the early projects, especi-
ally in terms of Freire’s idea of a gradual ownership of learning projects
on behalf of poor and oppressed participators.21 ‘Conscientization’,
a key concept of Freire’s, claims that liberating changes can only come
to pass if subjects actively relate a critical awareness and dialogic praxis
to the societal and historical conditions of their environment. Artistic
development workers dwelt amid villagers or urban squatters, composed
skits based on characters and scenarios narrated by the locals, and then
performed them before the community for discussion and, ultimately,
for action. However, the ethnographic pertinence of their perform-
ances needed further consideration, as the indirect depictions of local
scenarios and participants took an unnecessary detour via academically
informed rewritings instead of adhering directly to the culture-specific
circumstances of the subjects of the narratives and performance prac-
tices. This led to the mentioned advanced phase of sustainable TFD
which developed in countries like Lesotho (Mda 1993) and Tanzania
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 45

(Mlama 1991), which still typifies the crucial methodology of theatre

projects on AIDS.
Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and Boal’s ‘forum theatre’ had
built-in methods and techniques for audience participation (Kerr
1995: 161 ff.) and made a big impact on TFD. Combined with African
performance traditions, these practices created serious theatrical sites
at the interface of artistic and social actions where interchangeable
role-playing could take place (Feldhendler 1994). To work well, the
process should not only be long-lasting, but also involve a considerable
segment of the concerned community. One project in the Tanzanian
region of Iringa went on for several years (Nyoni 1998). Another
18-month project in the Mwanza region, which will be the focus later
in this chapter, focused on older men impregnating young women,
‘which precipitated a crisis in the village leadership (because the story
cut so close to the bone), leading to the dismissal of the chairman and
secretary of the […] drama core group’ (Kerr 1995: 158).22
The Boalian ‘shift of emphasis from theatre as a finished “product” to
theatre as a continuous and alterable “process”’ (Kerr 1995: 160) became
crucial for TFD programmes. Ross Kidd writes that it is ‘the drama-
which-is-never-finished, constantly being restructured to extend the
insights of the participants. Nothing is presented as a final statement:
each new scene is questioned, challenged and probed for deeper mean-
ing’ (Kidd 1984b: 13). The critical turn from pre-encoded performative
events to open participatory community processes eventually coincided
with an analogous alteration in AIDS interventions. After a long period
of largely unsuccessful prevention programmes in sub-Saharan Africa,
a paradigm shift transpired in the late 1990s whereby self-reliant com-
munity development programmes displaced policy driven by experts
and biomedical campaigns. Previous efforts had suffered from miscon-
ceptions about the complexity of the syndrome and thus the premises
of countermeasures. Conveying information on behaviour change
predicated on rational choice models from geopolitical contexts in
the North brought about a fundamental distrust in target communi-
ties and had little effect as the epidemic spread to general populations.
Ultimately the gap between expert knowledge and conventional behav-
iour compelled a change from information campaigns to action pro-
grammes that streamlined prevention projects with broader agendas on
poverty alleviation, gender equity, and lifestyle negotiations (Kalipeni
2004: ch. 1; Campbell 2003; Holden 2003). And in order to cope with
these challenges, it turned out to be unfeasible not to hand over more
managerial responsibility to people within the communities.
46 Community Theatre and AIDS

Early on in the epidemic it was urgent to ‘break the silence’. In her

studies on Ugandan campaign theatre of the 1980s, Frank testifies that
there were always two types of characters involved, those who knew
about AIDS and those who did not (Frank 1995: 147). Almost like an
extension of ‘the old Mr. Wise and Mr. Foolish formula inherited from
the colonial didactic theatre’ (Kerr 1995: 160) or the Medieval morality
plays of northern Europe, the campaign theatre against AIDS exempli-
fied stock characteristics of ‘human genus persona’ (Frank 1995: 137),
often targeting illiterate spectators who were themselves commonly
depicted as promiscuous characters in need of pre-colonial moral values
(ibid.: 90). The amateur actors were well aware of popular performance
styles and local vernacular, but the topics were geared by international
organizations with an:

organizational framework to both acquire factual information

through research as well as to pass the information on to the next
element in the chain. In the workshops, however, the communica-
tion is made to appear symmetric. The artists are encouraged to ask
questions and discuss the information conveyed to them by the
workshop organizers. An asymmetric situation is thereby transferred
into a symmetric one by giving the impression of arriving at conclu-
sions in a joint effort.
(ibid.: 100–1)

As a fastidious semiotician, Frank is actually in favour of the explica-

tory process whereby performances correct bad behaviour by reducing
it to clear-cut personal traits (ibid.: 117). Even if the Ugandan cam-
paign theatre was part of a national scheme that reduced incidence
and prevalence rates, it now seems clear that such an instructive
theatre misses various concerns of the epidemic. A cognate form of
decontextualized performance can be found in the controlled work-
shops of process drama which functions as ‘an affective engagement
with the human dimensions of situations – an essential stage in any
effort to encourage safe behaviour in a time of HIV/AIDS’ (Simpson
and Heap 2002: 94). This is suggested in opposition somehow to the
public performance-based theatre for development. However, given
the volatile sociality and poverty that underpin AIDS, drama in educa-
tion and therapeutic workshops may work as discrete components in
intervention schemes, but they are insufficient as outreach activity.
As much as drama in education and therapeutic workshop models
are worth for people under epidemic stress, there is still a need for
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 47

performances with a wider communal appeal. Didactic theatre and

workshop training primarily address behaviour change, but AIDS
is about wider challenges of gendered and other ingrained culture-
political lifestyle metamorphoses.
This is where the advanced forms of CBT meet the contemporary
criteria of HIV prevention. Theatre mobilizes the most vulnerable risk
groups, namely young people who represent more than half of the new
infections in Africa. It activates these people in gender-balanced groups
and allows them to express their experiences of AIDS through dialogues,
which, in turn, invites spectatorial participation. Furthermore, CBT
initiates a responsive space for local languages, habits, stories, humour,
traits, issues – mimetic qualities which are integral in traditional rites
and storytelling (Vansina 1985: 35), but which are also put in critical
perspective by post-performance activities. For many young Africans,
CBT offers a unique bottom-up approach to AIDS, especially if it is
accommodated in community centres with connections to out-of-
school youth. By entrusting them with this creative and edifying modus
operandi, those most at risk become the subjects rather than objects of
projects, which is exactly what is required in HIV prevention. An up
to date implementation of effective community-theatre projects thus
involves:

• social mobilization of local participants

• seminars lead by specialists on target issues
• training of dramatic skills lead by artistic facilitators
• ‘community mapping’ and other forms of situation analysis by virtue
of the participants’ local knowledge, preferably in gender and age
specific groups
• script writing or agreement of scenes based on scenarios as analysed
and propounded by the stratified groups
• practical rehearsals of the scenarios, involving traditional as well as
contemporary performance styles
• presentations of performances between the groups and to the
community
• post-performance discussions among actors and with present
spectators
• follow-up programmes for the purpose of a sustainable forum – in
the case of AIDS projects, preferably in cooperation with parents,
schools, orphan groups, people living with HIV or AIDS, elders,
health facilities, other non-governmental organizations, local gov-
ernments, regional and national policy-makers.
48 Community Theatre and AIDS

The basic idea is to empower vulnerable groups by letting them sug-

gest social changes through self-reliant action research and perform-
ance practices. They must ultimately take redressive action so that all
concerned become involved, including those who cause the crisis and
pose the risks. Needless to say, this does not always work out as planned.
I will not go into detail about all the possible pitfalls, but a few examples
will help show how performances can drive the experimental process to
the limits of a fair local democracy and genuine prevention strategies.
When young people have a sanctioned space for licensed criticism,
they arguably come closer to the driving forces of the epidemic than
any other group. The main reason for this is that they share a window
of opportunity to convey first-hand experiences before being cast in
rigid gender roles, taboo inhibited speech behaviour, or defensive social
rivalry. In most places, the epidemics are driven by sexual routines
framed by blurred kinship regulations, prohibitive church directives,
biased gender obligations, transactional agreements on sex and, not
seldom, coerced sex. This is difficult to bring to light for older genera-
tions, particularly for men, due to their close association with prevailing
sexual regimes (Foreman 1999). It is also difficult for foreign stakehold-
ers due to the risk they run of stereotyping ‘African sexuality and AIDS’
(Arnfred 2004). Young people get involved because they usually have
little to lose in terms of social status or political rank. They are by no
means innocent with regard to sexual experiences or lifestyles, but they
are the first ones to admit this while making attempts to work out nego-
tiation skills across communal divides.
In Tanzania, like most other sub-Saharan countries, people gather
when they hear the abiding traditional cue for meetings, that is, drum-
beats and local dances (ngoma) in public hubs. The audience will likely
enjoy choral songs (nyimbo) and perhaps also poems (mashairi) and
acrobatics (sarakasi) before the theatre (michezo ya kuigiza) is announced.
A leader may open the meeting by declaring the purpose of the occa-
sion. There follows one or several performances that are well known
to the audience, probably in the farcical vein of vichekesho or vivunja
mbavu, perhaps a local form of satire (tashtiti; for more on specific forms
of the in Tanzania, see Salhi 1998: 115–33), or a dialogic verse drama
in the vein of ngonjera (Banham 2004: 242), which is every so often
swapped for its contemporary stand-in, hip hop.
The format of these occasions resembles minor festivals. Once the
open-ended performances lead to debate, however, the event turns
toward a community meeting. This is also where it should become
clear that the dramaturgical research on plot and action engages each
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 49

and every spectator. For every laugh, sigh, snort, glare, shout, and
comment there is a tacit answerability, which should be spelled out in
discussions after the performances. These talks sometimes last longer
than the shows and may involve local fundraising for widows and
orphans. Various techniques and methods can set off a post-performance
discussion, but two decisive questions generally trigger audience
response: Is it true that what we have just seen is happening here
among us? And, if so, what can we do about it?
The appreciation of the plays obviously hinges on more than local
performance styles. Spectators identify with the familiarity of the plots,
since both the actors and their behavioural patterns are usually well
known in the local setting. This is a rough theatre with stories based
on collective impressions and received ideas, with the sequencing of
events agreed on spontaneously and always with plenty of room for
improvisation. The liminal interface of the social and artistic is enacted
with a negligible representational distance. It is as though particular
strips of daily behaviour are grafted onto a shared arena and set into
play at a slightly elevated tempo and heightened mood: the manner of
speaking, the allusions, the jokes, the clothing, the props, the intrigues,
the site and all the rest of the elements are, to say the least, lifelike –
a situation where and when people play people, to paraphrase Mda
(1993). There is indeed public agreement on the fictional frame, some
actors are no doubt very talented, and there are lots of ingenious uses of
Swahili proverbs and other witty colloquial expressions in the plays. At
the end of the day, however, the familiar theatrical qualities are less sig-
nificant than the open-ended performative effects, which entail a demand
for a progressing social drama with the spectators. According to Mead
(1964: 310) ‘acting in the perspective of others’ is a central principle in the
organization of social life, a third-person perspective on the interpersonal
qualities of identity. Such perspective conflates with the performative con-
dition of enacting personal identities in CBT against AIDS, which may be
a very sensitive undertaking in the presence of fellow villagers insofar as
a young theatrical actor/social agent often performs quite realistic charac-
terizations of scenarios that puts him or her in harms way by people that
may very well be among the onlookers. Hence the aptness of a theatrical
role distance, which may be coextensive with what may be called a social
safety distance in the act of presenting one’s self as other.
CBT appealed to and mobilized men and women aged between 15
and 24, who suddenly were wanted as aid workers in the most impor-
tant projects in Africa. (When I meet youth groups, I usually tell them
that they are involved with the most important job in the world and
50 Community Theatre and AIDS

that I am visiting them to look, listen, and learn.) In their formative

years, youths have a chance to alter traditional gender roles before
being fashioned into normal citizens. This is a challenge as CBT taps
into the local traditions of ritual, dance, poetic storytelling, and dia-
logue-based performances, at the same time as it combines these prac-
tices with contemporary modes of pedagogy and interactive theatre.
At an initial stage of projects, groups are given funds at least for the
pilot phase, including training by artistic facilitators and health-care
personnel. Performance skills are then combined with analytical com-
ponents like body and community mapping, a non-linguistic scrutiny
of intimate and societal risk factors. Scenarios are discussed, preferably
in gender-divided groups, before being rehearsed and performed in
public meeting places. This is yet another advantage with community
theatre as HIV prevention, namely that young people are able to break
the silence on taboo-laden issues of sexuality, sickness, and death before
and with audiences that have gradually become willing to ventilate
their own private views in post-performance discussions. With the
help of good drama instructors, the plays are followed by ‘joker’-led

7 A Joker leads a post-performance discussion in the village of Sululu, Mtwara

region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 51

discussions as intricate as the plays themselves. With the help of good

donors and local politicians, the projects may even be enhanced by
sustainable follow-up programmes. This is all too rare, though, and an
issue that I will resume towards the end of this chapter.
Hence the crucial activities of the social process are the performances
which take place in public hubs such as marketplaces, schoolyards, or
traditional meeting grounds. The events are commonly announced with
hard beats on drums accompanied by whistles, horns or shouts, which,
in turn, prompt a dance that community residents can take part in.
I have seen about a hundred performances in rural African settings and,
at almost every occasion, a decent number of spectators have turned
up spontaneously. After the initial dances, the theme of the theatre is
announced by the group leader. The mere word ukimwi (AIDS) may scare
off a fraction of the crowd, but more often it sharpens the attention of
the bystanders.23 Short plays follow, resembling the comical verve in
the tradition of Roman farce, commedia dell’arte, Molière and Dario Fo.
The actions are based on improvisation influenced by local dialects,
jokes and performance styles. When familiar characters are portrayed as
villains in intrigues that everybody knows all too well, a peculiar aliena-
tion effect kicks in, which can be sensed like an uncanny echo after the
roaring laughter. The conflicting emotions thus prompt the need for a
communal meeting after the high-spirited events. The worth of an effec-
tive social mobilization of key epidemic risk groups, of a culture-specific
employment of prevention practices, and of a persuasive appeal to the
large numbers of local residents, made community theatre a serious
factor in the fight against AIDS in Tanzania and several other African
countries. There are good reasons to assume that it has had at least a
contributing effect in three sub-Saharan areas with epidemic declines,
namely Uganda and the Tanzanian regions of Kagera and Mbeya.24
After looking at, listening to, and learning from theatre groups in five
African countries (although predominantly in Tanzania) over the past
few years, I am convinced that community theatre potentially is the
most efficient form of HIV prevention for young people. I am equally
convinced that it is the least efficiently used form of HIV prevention.
This has to do not only with money-driven non-governmental organ-
izations, religiously myopic patrons, or corrupt local politicians, but
also with the theatre practitioners and researchers themselves. To clarify
the misuse of community theatre, I will now revisit a theatre project
in Tanzania which took place in 1982 and 1983, at the time when an
advanced mode of community-based theatre became established and
when the first AIDS cases in the country were recorded.
52 Community Theatre and AIDS

The reproductive misfortune of Zakia

The seminal ‘Malya popular theatre project’ got its name after a village
in Mwanza region at the southern tip of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. It
lasted for more than a year and epitomized what Penina Mlama calls the
‘Tanzanian model’ of popular theatre (Mlama 1991: esp. ch. 7). What
made the project unique, according to Mlama, was that (1) community
members participated in all stages, from the social mobilization to the
resulting follow-up actions; (2) the elements of the projects emanated
not from preconceived ideas, but from local modes of discourse and per-
formance; and (3) it drew on an already established national movement
of dance and theatre in Tanzania. (Mlama 1991: 95–6)
In her book Culture and Development (1991), Mlama opens with an
intricate pan-African background to her work. Colonial history and
Western capitalist contemporaneity are blamed for Africa’s macro-
political problems, while European missionaries are liable for imposing
a culture of silence through implementations of Christian doctrines
onto the micro-political grassroots. These ideological contraventions
have had repercussions in post-colonial times through autocratic
African politics as well as top-down Western development programmes.
In the same breath, however, Mlama celebrates the Chinese Cultural
Revolution as an exemplary social mobilization and uprising, a
propagandist delusion promoted by Tanzanian authorities in Mlama’s
formative years as an artist (Mlama 1991: 11, 24). In order to infuse an
independent spirit in Tanzanians, Mlama puts faith in the ideological
role of pre-colonial performances. This was a time when ‘children [sat]
by their grandmothers’ feet’ on ‘moonlit nights’ and got ‘entertained
and educated’ by performances that served as ‘a tool for instruction
and transmission of knowledge, values and attitudes in initiation rites,
marriage, death, religious rituals or public forums for behavioural
appraisal, criticism and control’ (Mlama 1991: 26–7). With a pseudo-
Brechtian stance against entertainment, Mlama argues for an ideo-
logically conscious theatre in schools and other public institutions and
spheres, but comes to the realization that Tanzanian authorities were
and are rather indifferent to theatre except as a mouthpiece for the
ruling party (ibid.: 103).25
The Malya project took on the burning issue of schoolgirl pregnan-
cies with triggering factors such as poverty, male-dominated schooling,
political corruption, and the ensuing premature marriages, divorces,
and prostitution.26 It is interesting to reread Mlama’s book in light
of the AIDS epidemic for two reasons: first, because the first cases of
AIDS-related deaths were recorded in Tanzania in the bordering Kagera
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 53

region at the very time of Mlama’s project (see Iliffe 2006: 23; Iliffe
1995: 223–4) and, second, because the project dramatized predicaments
associated with social life in general, and gender in particular, which
have later been dealt with as key epidemic risk factors. A performance
that took place in 1982 about the schoolgirl Zakia, her friend Josephine,
and the businessman Mandanganya is a telling case in point. He gives
her presents and Zakia agrees to meet him. Zakia takes the presents home
and sneaks out to go and meet the businessman. She returns to find that
her mother has discovered the gifts. Zakia lies that the gifts belong to
Josephine. Josephine comes to say hello to Zakia, but is reprimanded
by Zakia’s parents for corrupting Zakia. Then Josephine discovers that
Zakia has taken away her suitor, so when the parents leave the two
start fighting. The unemployed boys come to pacify them and offer to
sell the gifts at the blackmarket. In the next scene, it is discovered that
Zakia is pregnant but the businessman refuses to take responsibility.
Josephine is also pregnant and is subjected to the same treatment by
the businessman. Zakia’s parents take Mandanganya to court, but he
gets away with a very light sentence because he bribes the judge. The
parents are infuriated and decide to seek justice at the village council.
The play ended here because this became the entry point for the post-
performance discussion with the audience on the issues raised (Mlama
1991: 118).
The discussion that followed this performance is still going on in
Tanzania 25 years after the event, but now with even greater urgency
as it directly involves life-threatening calamities and not ‘only’ endur-
ing poverty, inequity, and social alienation. However, at the time of
the Malya project epidemic issues were already embedded in the sce-
narios, albeit tacitly. In the section cited above, Mlama mentions the
unemployed boys’ dealing with goods on the blackmarket. This trade
cut across the borders of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya following a war
between the former two countries and a severe economic crisis for all
three countries by the end of the 1970s. The blackmarket was operated
by young males relying ‘for food, drink and sexual services, on cafés,
teashops, and bars, largely run by women’ (Appleton 2000: 23). The
grim historical irony is that Zakia, after becoming pregnant and being
abandoned by Mandanganya, barred from her school (pregnant female
pupils still get expelled without discretion), and probably driven away
from home by her poor parents, quite likely ended up as a barmaid at a
time when fishermen, truck drivers, and racketeers carried the looming
and invisible epidemic across and around Lake Victoria.
The post-performance discussion in Malya also forestalled topical
debates on AIDS by relating schoolgirl pregnancies to the paradoxical
54 Community Theatre and AIDS

stance of, on the one hand, reproaching youth for their drinking hab-
its, bad work morals, and disrespect for traditions that used to prohibit
promiscuous lifestyles, and, on the other, acknowledging the failure of
the community and parents to supervise the youth, let alone engage
them in income-generating activities or other meaningful initiatives
(Mlama 1991: 119–20). In the early stages of the project, parents
thought that the girls, especially, would be corrupted by participating
in the theatre. Furthermore, the village core group got into trouble with
the African Inland Church, who protested against theatrical depictions
counter to Christian conduct. The dispute was eventually toned down
as the Church admitted that the performances reflected realistic rather
than sinful scenarios. A much more serious critique arose when the
misbehaviour of the village leadership itself was divulged. The village
chairman was forced to resign after it became known that both he ‘and
the secretary had been responsible for several unwanted pregnancies in
the village’ (ibid: 125).
When it comes to epidemic risk factors, two phenomena were antici-
pated in the Malya performance. One was the ‘sugar daddy’ dilemma,
that is, transactional sexual relations between young females and older
men by means of cash or alluring gifts – for example, clothes, jewellery,
holiday trips. This still poses a widespread risk in today’s AIDS epi-
demic.27 Another epidemic topic is corruption, a vast problem that not
only conserves political pecking orders but also discriminates against
people in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. The combination of
poverty, corruption and traditional gender ideologies reproduces dis-
astrous conditions for young women and men as frequently today as
when AIDS broke out.
Zakia reappears everywhere I go in Tanzania 25 years after the Malya
project, from the Kagera region on Lake Victoria near the Ugandan and
Rwandan border, to the Mtwara region deep down by the country’s
south-eastern border with Mozambique. Confirming statistical pat-
terns, young women are regularly depicted as sexual objects, prostitutes,
scapegoats, victims, and, quite literally, femme fatales. In Mangaka vil-
lage (18 September 2003), I saw a performance about a businessman
who seduces a secondary-school girl and convinces her to marry him.
When she gets pregnant he immediately abandons her, with the out-
come that she cannot go back to school or to her family and will have
problems finding a new partner for future support. It is like a reincarna-
tion of Zakia and her fate.
In Sululu village (11 September 2003), she staggers around drunk in a
red dress on market day and hits unashamedly on men who happen to
 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre 55

pass by on the barabara (main road). The performance is witnessed by

a couple of hundred bystanders under a mango tree, while elders enjoy
the action on a bench.
In Kenyana village (19 March 2004), she is coerced into having
sex with the man who hired her as housemaid – and his two opium-
smoking sons. At least half the village watches on, in company with
politicians, religious leaders, and schoolchildren. The post-performance
discussion lasts twice as long as the theatre performance and ends with
an agreement to collect money for schoolchildren with surviving single
parents (an analysis of this event is done in Chapter 4).
On the outskirts of Masasi town (17 July 2003), a bunch of spectators
linger until dusk to see her put up resistance by punching her hus-
band for leaving her and the children for days on end without enough
money. At a marketplace in Bukoba town (30 August 2003), before a
huge crowd of marketplace visitors, she gets deprived of all her property
by her deceased husband’s family and tries to hang herself. A neigh-
bour saves her in the last second. A similar scenario occurs in Likokona
village (19 September 2003), where she gets disinherited by her own
brother, despite living in the matrilineal belt of southern Tanzania. She
takes the case to court only to be double-crossed by a corrupt judge (for
a more detailed account of this performance, see the end of Chapter 2).
The story is frighteningly similar to Zakia’s 20 years earlier.
Mlama’s vision of an ideological pan-African theatre informed by
the cultural regimes of traditional societies does not promise epidemic
solutions, and almost certainly involves more risk than mitigation
for young rural people. This will be a crucial theme in the chapter
that follows. The pre-colonial order of kinship-regulated societies has
waned almost everywhere in Africa by now and the social regularity
and continuity of initiation rites involving tutored life skills for youth
are, again, often particularly detrimental to young females. In order to
go to the bottom of this predicament, the crux of preserved obsolete
social regimes, generalized health models and HIV prevention schemes
need to be clarified. In this chapter, the described gradual confluence of
CBT and HIV prevention has revealed not how the two developments
have come to be mutually stronger, but, paradoxically, how the similar
lack of efficacy in the implementation and outcome of theatre projects
today and almost thirty years ago indicates a fundamental resistance
to change, both regarding HIV prevention and CBT. In order to probe
deeper into the resistance to change, the next chapter will put certain
types of CBT and ritual on a par and analyse the performative efficacy
in the respective practices.
2
The Performativity of
Community-Based Theatre

The romantic notion of a pre-colonial Africa, where rites and cer-

emonies guided communities into harmonious lifestyles and infused a
democratic spirit before democracy existed, needs to be put into slightly
more realistic perspectives through an examination of the conditions
and functions of ritual-like performances today. Along with further
empirical case studies, there is a concept which advances the discus-
sion of efficacy in Chapter 1 but also offers a means of typological
comparison between theatre and ritual regimes, namely performativ-
ity. Performativity indicates (the study of) possibilities to instantiate
notions and rules through intersubjective actions. Even if the concept
of performativity is not always used in anthropological studies on ritual,
the latter set of cultural practices is regularly ascribed functions and
meanings that meet the criteria of performative acts. The dichotomy
that will be thrashed out in this chapter cuts between ritual and theatre
like a diachronic fault line between practices that may have conflated
in function but always exemplified different meanings and values, at
least for the ones assessing their roles in various cultures. Concisely,
the dichotomy can be spelled out as a postulation: ritual does things
with social relations while theatre merely comments on them (cf.
Rappaport’s stance below). This description sounds like a paraphrase of
the definition of speech acts, the precursor of performativity, insofar as
it inculcated the semantic capacity of words to do things rather than
just describe things. The self-sufficient efficacy of ritual versus the more
passive referentiality of theatre will be questioned in this chapter by
means of, on the one hand, a discourse analysis of ritual theory and
performance studies, and, on the other hand, examples that show that
applied theatre against AIDS can be considered a ritual of affliction with
greater efficacious potential than ritual regimes when it comes to coun-
teracting contemporary epidemic crises.
56
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 57

To avoid cultural generalizations, it is best to situate the critique

within a familiar typological field. Victor Turner, more than any
other anthropologist, has allowed theatrical and ritual functions to
be compared in the continuum that has come to be called perform-
ance studies, primarily in his book From Ritual to Theatre: The Human
Seriousness of Play (1982). In order to understand his views on ritual
efficacy, however, it is necessary to go back to his earlier research in
Africa which, ironically, gave witness to the gradual disintegration
of societies with ritual routines and functions, not least in regard to
colonial interventions:

In many parts of Zambia the ancient religious ideas and practices

of the Africans are dying out through contact with the white man
and his ways. Employment in the copper mines, on the railway, as
domestic servants and shop assistants; the meeting and mingling of
tribes in a nontribal environment; the long absence of men from
their homes – all these factors have contributed to the breakdown of
religions that stress the values of kinship ties, respect for the elders,
and tribal unity. However, in the far northwest of the Territory, this
process of religious disintegration is less rapid and complete; if one
is patient, sympathetic, and lucky one may still observe there the
dances and rituals of an older day.
(Turner 1967: 2)

This passage from Turner’s The Forest of Symbols bears witness to a

transition period when Zambia, along with many other African coun-
tries, underwent its first years of emancipation from colonial rule, and
thus faced the consequences of a complex cultural shift from tradi-
tional indigenous practices to modern intercultural customs. Relatively
unharmed by British authority, the Ndembu had been able to retain
their tribal unity, at least during the time that Turner conducted his
famous fieldwork a good ten years earlier in what was then Northern
Rhodesia (Turner 1957).1 The anthropologist himself had the opportu-
nity to observe continuous and still efficacious rites of affliction and
life-crisis rituals; the latter type has subsequently become a paradig-
matic example of anthropological discourse in line with Van Gennep’s
(1960) master trope, rite de passage. From a contemporary perspective,
it is remarkable that precisely those geopolitical changes Turner associ-
ates with the waning conditions of tribal life today are perceived as
key factors in the spread of HIV in Africa. Increasing demographic
58 Community Theatre and AIDS

movements and cultural displacement have uprooted and fragmented

local communities since the periods of slave trade and colonial strate-
gies of labour division, but has of course accelerated in postcolonial
times with modern transport systems, urbanization, and decentralized
job opportunities (Iliffe 2006; Barnett and Whiteside 2002; Nugent
2007; more specifically on Tanzania, see Setel 1999). In the power vac-
uum that corresponds with this development, it is not always clear what
function elder communities and traditional health practitioners retain.
This is certainly the case in many places in Kagera and Mtwara, where
contemporary party politics may have implemented civil rights and
imposed restrictions in traditional practices (prohibiting, for instance,
initiation rites from taking place during term-times of schooling), but
where governmental laws and local rulings sometimes clash and con-
flict. In general, however, it seems clear that traditional authorities and
practices are abating in social efficacy, leaving societies, not least young
people, in a state of social limbo between vanishing traditions and pre-
mature policies.
The virus challenges the cultural dynamics of modernity like an ill
spirit of old and yet no instituted or otherwise known form of policy
or practice has been capable of tracing or pursuing its complex muta-
tions in contemporary African societies. Stemming the onslaught of
HIV/AIDS has been impeded by a number of social and authoritarian
factors: an official reluctance to acknowledge its existence, an inter-
personal hesitancy to speak about its risk factors, a difficulty in seeing
its asymptomatic bodily condition, a widespread discrimination and
stigmatization of the sick, a resistance among governmental and non-
governmental organizations to coordinate prevention programmes, and,
for more than a decade, a corporate aversion to allocate biomedical
means to treat opportunistic diseases. The result has been a paralysis
before the spread of the disease. Hence, the AIDS syndrome at once
thrives on traditional life and expands through modern life. And yet,
as long as no vaccine is in sight and the anti-retroviral drugs are too
expensive or difficult to distribute on a sustainable basis, prevention
work through social changes and behavioural counteractions are the
only ways out of the maelstrom.
In this chapter I will argue that, in light of ritual traditions and dis-
courses, community-based theatre not only invents new ways of act-
ing out and then talking about hushed up and hidden aspects of the
epidemic, but also represents a viable alternative to former ritual prac-
tices as well as to daily discourse. In fact, its most auspicious qualities
probably lie in combining these formal and informal practices through
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 59

social mobilization, group consolidation, and certain modes of perfor-

mative actions.

Topical uncertainties of traditional practices

When Turner compared theatre with ritual in his last book, From Ritual
to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, he contrasted the Ndembu
rituals with Western theatre (Turner 1982: ch. 2). Rituals are heeded
as the ‘work of gods’, obligating ‘communal participation’ in liminal
passages of the whole society through crises, while the leisure habit
of theatre pertains to ‘liminoid genres’ of industrial societies where
‘great public stress is laid on the individual innovator’ (ibid.: 43). This
distinction would not be very useful in a comparison of ritual and
African community theatre under the present circumstances, at least
not in general terms. Ritual is, of course, still a sacred and consolidated
practice as compared with the more temporal and eclectic theatre, but
when it comes to preventive efforts in the AIDS crisis, it is far from cer-
tain which performative practices serve more efficient communal and
redressive functions.
Turner somehow anticipates this situation, not by referring to African
theatre in his later work, but by recognizing the breakdown of ‘ancient
religious ideas and practices’ in a book like The Forest of Symbols. The
best-known ritual in Turner’s research is, of course, the Ndembu boys’
initiation rite called Mukanda, which belongs to a class of puberty rites
in various Bantu-speaking communities of sub-Saharan Africa. This
category of life-crisis ritual is indeed still performed, although on a
more syncretistic foundation in most places. If Turner’s analyses of the
Ndembu rituals hinge on the ‘tribal unity’ of their society, yielding a
‘total system’ for the anthropologist to ‘work out’ (Turner 1964: 21, 29),
as opposed to the more or less ‘rapid and complete’ geopolitical changes
affecting most other communities in ‘the world’s fast disappearing
‘tribal’ societies’ (Turner 1982: 44), then his prime example of a life-
crisis ritual may accurately be understood as a historical instance –
perhaps even an ‘extreme case’ in a contemporary ritual typology
(Gerholm 1988: 196) – rather than an exemplar of how cultural predi-
caments arise and are coped with in cognate African societies today.
In his introduction, excerpted above, Turner links external factors to
the religious disintegration that leads indigenous people to ‘nontribal’
places.2 Long absences from homes due to migrant male labour oppor-
tunities along busy routes in densely populated regions have given the
spread of HIV alarming prevalence rates in nations such as Botswana,
60 Community Theatre and AIDS

South Africa, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, and indeed Zambia. In the

1980s it became clear that

AIDS was characteristically a disease of modernity, apparently

unaffected by the natural milieu but responsive to the man-made
environment of the twentieth century. This was because it was
mainly transmitted sexually, often in association with venereal
diseases, and therefore correlated with towns, transport routes, and
labour migration networks where sexual partners changed rapidly.
(Iliffe 1995: 270)

Some commentators have thus proposed nostalgic ideas about

going back to traditional forms of sex education and other life skills
informed by tribal regulations (Iliffe 2002: 224; Roth Allen 2000:
Eyoh 1986: 17). However, while particular ethnic regimes could possibly
gain temporary control of local epidemic varieties, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to generalize the long-term prospects of such a restoration
on a large scale, and, moreover, to know how severe the civic backlash
would be for particular social strata. A crucial argument against the
traditionalists is that many communities not only face an unsettling
external form of communicable syndrome, but that some of their tra-
ditional practices function as social vectors for the viral transmission.
In discussions of HIV and AIDS, a variety of traditional customs have
been criticized, such as the multiple use of bloodstained knives in cir-
cumcision rites, unreliable witchcraft, sexual cleansing of widows, and
the gender-biased commands of sexual and marital conduct in rites of
passage. The latter criticism has also been levelled, albeit not specifically
relating to AIDS, against Van Gennep and Turner due to their sparse
attention to girls’ initiation rites, that is, in Turner’s case, the Nkang’a
as opposed to the Mukanda of the Ndembu (Bynum 1984; Lincoln
1991).3
It needs to be considered, however, that condemnations of traditional
practices often mask power motives of political and/or religious estab-
lishments that seek to win people over to their own particular agendas.
In the AIDS context, traditional doctors are ignored by Western medi-
cal practitioners as well as by their African associates, as well as deni-
grated by churches, and marginalized by governments who advocate
progressive modernity. Dilger emphasizes, along with Gausset (2001),
that decontextualized criticism against cultural practices ‘is not only
unethical but also counterproductive’ as it risks ‘alienating the target
communities’ (Dilger 2002: 2) in AIDS campaigns.
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 61

Moral-religious discourses and practices may build the foundation for

blame, stigmatization, and exclusion – and often for further HIV infec-
tions. However, they may also be a path for maintaining the dignity
of the sufferer and his or her family in coping with the strong stigma
attached to HIV/AIDS. In addition, cultural conceptions of illness may
offer hope of being healed to HIV-infected individuals, and they have
also become a means for families and communities ‘of pulling together
local worlds that are increasingly in danger of falling apart’ (Dilger
2001: 11).4 Whether informative discussions take place in/as theatre or
through other public forums, ritual elements are in fact almost always
part of social gatherings and, in extension, prevention programmes.
They serve as a means to gather people together with drum-based songs
and dances, which everyone recognizes as a summons to a public meet-
ing. Ritual elements generally function as parts of, rather than as the
monolithic agency for, such assemblies, and thus figure as ‘multivocal’
and ‘polysemic’ symbols, although not ‘dominant symbols’ to speak
with Turner (1964: 32–5). It has become increasingly clear that no
particular kind of action can assuage or resolve the complex issues of
the AIDS epidemic. Multi-sectoral approaches are necessary to meet the
challenges of contemporary pluralist societies, just as multidisciplinary
approaches are needed in research about culture-specific epidemics.
Ritual theorists such as Van Gennep and Eliade tended to overlook
the critical gap between cosmic and societal factors when attributing
all-inclusive cultural values to ritual. Thus a long-lasting disciplinary
fissure was established between ritual phenomena and other modes of
cultural performance. Grimes argues that imposed patterns of cultural
orders and practices were ‘treated as if they were discovered,’ which
gave way, in turn, to prescribed models functioning ‘as if they were laws
determining how rites should be structured’ (Grimes 2000: 107). ‘Rites
of passage can seem perfectly magical,’ he writes, ‘but only if you keep
your eyes and ears trained on what transpires center stage. Backstage,
there often seethes a morass of spiritual stress and social conflict (ibid.:
11). In a similar manner Moore and Meyerhoff state that ’ritual is a
declaration of form against indeterminacy, therefore indeterminacy is
always present in the background of any analysis of ritual’ (cf. Layiwola
2000: 118). The question here is not only how the identity of individu-
als is transformed, or mystically transfigured, by being guided through
transcendental passages in initiation rites, but also how such metamor-
phoses conform to the conceptual means of access of onlooking visitors.
Seen through the ideological screens of Clifford’s ethnographic allegory,
where fieldwork is recognized ‘as a performance emplotted by powerful
62 Community Theatre and AIDS

stories’ (Clifford 1986: 98), one is lead to examine the secular stage to
which novices return and upon which the ethnographer stands waiting,
as it were, to interpret their stories. Bloch (1992: 6) considers this return,
from separation to reintegration, to be a quite violent step that displays
the political outcomes of religious action.
Viewed in a critical perspective, ritual studies are predicated on the
same secular conditions as performance studies, just as ritual perform-
ances are set on the same societal stage and in relief against the same
circumstantial setting as are theatrical performances. The significance
of this shared scene of inquiry is not a disciplinary issue per se; in the
AIDS epidemic, it is crucial that all performative actions are assessed
by equally critical means. Before suggesting the merits of community-
based theatre, something more needs to be said about the justifications
of comparing theatre and ritual.

The ritual function of speech acts

Rites of passage certainly represent a venerable case of how changes in

one’s personal status can be instantiated through communal events.
Ritual does not merely show and tell, it makes things happen in the
local and cosmic world. A comparable, yet somewhat more discreet,
example of such changes is established in speech acts, or what John L.
Austin (1962, 1979) first called explicit performatives. The constitutive
utterance ‘I do’, enacting wedding ceremonies, is a case in point, and
is analogous to the notion of rites of passage insofar as both cases deal
with situations where people’s official status is changed through the
performance of certain ceremonies. However, Austin’s speech act theory
does not deal with ritual per se, but with the possibilities for speakers
to perform various social functions with language in particular circum-
stances. This eventually gives way to implicit performatives where less
ceremonial statements like, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow!’ bring about a com-
mitment by binding the interlocutors to an impending event.
To realize the social pertinence of implicit performatives, consider a
speech act exercise in a recent school workshop in KwaZulu Natal, South
Africa. The goal of the workshop was to promote the ability of female
students to say no to casual sex through forum theatre techniques.5
The speech act in question turns on the proposition, ‘I’ll see you at 7’,
uttered by the male student Sipho, to which the female student Hazel
replies, ‘Oh! No, Sipho, my father would kill me.’ Nevertheless, Sipho
manages to convince Hazel, and she eventually gets pregnant, a fact
that rules out further schooling for female students in South Africa
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 63

(as well as in many other African countries such as Tanzania). The

point of the exercise, then, is to go back to the proposal and find out
how to turn down sex for one’s own reasons. However, the project title
of the workshop (instructed by the local organization DramAidE) was
‘Mobilizing Young Men to Care’. Thus being able to counter an implicit
performative is still contingent on the assertive interlocutor’s willing-
ness to rethink his subjective turn of phrase into a negotiable action.
Hence, speech acts may be ‘highly developed affairs’ (Austin 1962:
32) or quite ordinary events where someone wants to influence, warn,
or encourage someone else, or perhaps just wants to ‘let off steam in
this way or that’ (Austin 1979: 234). Austin views language as a binding
means of intersubjective knowledge and trust, made to be performed for
various purposes on the basis of more or less established habits (doing
philosophy is incidentally only one of those habits). Like Wittgenstein’s
language games, Austin’s speech act theory presupposes a culture-
historic ‘stage-setting’ (Wittgenstein 1996: § 257) for utterances to take
effect, even if the spoken performances appear mostly on the common-
place stages of daily life. With this return of the everyday voice into
philosophical discourse (Cavell 1994: ch. 2), performative utterances
can be perceived as ‘a rare verbal form’ (Barthes 1977: 145) only if the
ordinary is somehow excluded from philosophical inquiry. Something
similar can be said about the way theatre has been disregarded in
anthropological discourse, even if a performance theorist like Richard
Schechner (1988: 2002) has attempted to prove otherwise.
Very roughly, then, the idea of speech acts indicates a common
ground of the ordinary, theatrical, and ritual inasmuch as all three areas
of routine are more or less contingently based on, and geared to, per-
formative conditions in particular situations.6 As with all conventional
states of affairs, any form of use can be abused or used abusively. The
credibility of performatives depends on factors such as who the utterer
is, in whose interest he or she is speaking, where and when the speech
acts take place, how it is done, and, not least, what possibilities address-
ees have to respond to, or act on, the appeals the speech acts addressed
to them contains. All these factors, each of which has the potential to
impair the political and ethical reliability of a speech act, pertain to the
cross-disciplinary field of performativity, which in the wake of speech
act theory has elaborated analyses of power-laden regimes nestling in
bodily and discursive practices, not the least of which pertain to speech
act situations (cf. Butler 1997).
Speech acts are highly relevant to discuss in African CBT, even if what
will be argued in favour of such an application does not sit easily with
64 Community Theatre and AIDS

some theorists of bordering disciplines. Theatre appears to have become

stuck in a functional continuum between the stream of direct interac-
tions of daily life and the repetitive, more closed structures of formal
ritual. For anthropologists and sociologists respectively, theatre seems
to have something in common with both fields and yet not enough of
either to qualify as a genuine disciplinary example. On the one hand,
a sociologist like Goffman makes a distinction between face-to-face
interactions (Goffman 1974: 8, 133) in daily situations in opposition
to theatrical events, a distinction which hinges on a highly generalized
theatrical frame (ibid.: ch. 5). On the other hand, an anthropologist like
Rappaport (1999) separates ritual from theatre on account of an equally
rigid opposition based on a presupposition that has been summarized
as follows: ‘While theatre confines itself to saying things about social
relationships, ritual also does things with them; and what it does is to
reinforce or change them’ (Green 1995: 923). In other words, ritual does
things with social relations, just as speech acts do things with words,
while theatre is merely capable of commenting on people’s status and
relations.7 In an additional move away from both everyday situations
and theatrical events, Rappaport claims a prominent status for rituals by
using Austin’s taxonomy:

[I]f performatives are understood to be conventional acts achiev-

ing conventional effects then ritual is not simply performative, but
meta-performative as well, for it not only brings conventional states
of affairs into being, but may also establish the very conventions in
terms of which those conventional effects are realized.
(Rappaport 1999: 278–9)

Rappaport is right in saying that ritual establishes its own conventions

for performative effects, but he is incorrect in suggesting that this also
makes it meta-performative, for that would mean that it could control
the need and effects of its actions. That is, of course, up to people to
decide over time and in reciprocity with their current living conditions,
given that they reside in a democracy. It is obvious that a performance
cannot (re)establish its own action more than an explicit performative;
to enunciate and concurrently enact the conventions of a speech act is
the very idea of Austin’s doctrine.8
Schechner agrees with Turner on the dichotomy of theatre as enter-
taining leisure versus ritual as efficacious action, even if he makes sure to
add that ‘[n]o performance, however, is pure efficacy or pure entertain-
ment’ (2002: 622). ‘[I]n all entertainment there is some efficacy and in
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 65

all ritual there is some theatre’, Schechner states (1988: 138). Schechner
is also in agreement with Rappaport’s view that ‘[p]erformances of ritual
regulate or even create economic, political and religious relations among
people who are ambivalent about each other.’ Rappaport is quoted as
saying that ‘ritual, particularly in the context of a ritual cycle, operates
as a regulating mechanism in a system, or set of interlocking systems’
(Rappaport 1968: 4, quoted in Schechner 2002: 620). There is no doubt
about ritual ruling as long as it controls the conventions and state of
affairs it enacts. Trouble arises, however, when traditional systems lose
coherence and validity in major crises. Examples are colonial rule,
times of warfare, demographic shifts leading to multicultural societies,
or, when rites of affliction not only must cope with ‘internal changes’
(Turner 1982: 21) but with the very endurance of districts and regions
as in the AIDS epidemic. Even Turner, who outlines in great detail the
anti-structural order of creative processes in the subjunctive mood of
communitas during the liminal phases of initiation ceremonies (Turner
1969), acknowledges that there are limits to what ritual can change.
Innovations in ritual societies can take place in legal and customary
spheres, ‘but most frequently it occurs in interfaces and limina, then
becomes legitimated in central sectors’ (Turner 1982: 45). In reference to
what Turner calls ritual of affliction, Lange compares the social function
of the Ukala ritual dance as it has entered into the post-colonial context
of nationalist interests:

Ukala fits well with the type of rituals among the Ndembu which
Turner labelled ritual of affliction. In its nationalized form, how-
ever, Ukala is no longer a ritual of affliction, as it does not relate to
‘abnormalities’ or conflicts in the society. It is performed at any ran-
dom time by national or commercial troupes to entertain a (paying)
audience, miming a hunting expedition and the women who come
to collect the meat. When the commercial groups address conflicts
of today’s urban society, they do this through the performances of
theatre plays, not by traditional dances.
(Lange 1995: 145)

For many societies, AIDS has entailed a critical discontinuity, which in

turn motivates a need for what may be called ‘ritual change’ (Bell 1997:
ch. 7). Theatre, on the other hand, can also be efficacious according to
Schechner. In a graph Schechner (1988: 122) shows how contemporary
paratheatre, experimental performance, political theatre, and performa-
tive psychotherapies exemplifies performances of efficacy more than
66 Community Theatre and AIDS

entertainment. In comparison with ritual, however, it is not entirely

clear whether this notion of efficacy holds. In order to consider the
idea of an efficacious theatre I believe a crucial means of assessment and
comparison is found in the concept of performativity.

The performativity of community-based theatre

Due to its junctions betwixt and between the sacred and the pro-
fane, orality and the written word, theatre is, according to Ousmane
Diakhaté, ‘one of the cultural elements that best exemplifies Africa’
(Rubin 1997: 17). As Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi has put it, theatre
is ‘the best artistic medium for Africa because it is not alien in form’
(Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 8). Yet drama with a fictional plot and
narrative closure is a relatively new mode of public performance on the
continent. Up until the independent states adapted its forms for their
own purposes, spoken theatre was perceived as a colonial habitus. In its
‘Africanized’ styles, theatre has been and still is used in combination
with a number of traditional expressions containing many ritual con-
nections. Dialogues between characters as well as between characters
and spectators have been an integral part of traditional gatherings, as,
for instance, at the indigenous community forum of kgotla in Botswana
(Banham 2004: 292). Village meetings have been narrated by clan lead-
ers and elders, while fictional dramatizations have been performed
through ritual mimes and skits or by storytellers impersonating mythic
characters. In a sense, then, Africa had theatre before ‘theatre’ was
brought to Africa. Regardless of questions of typology, the reality is that
theatre is a forum for popular struggle both in national freedom drives
and as a shaper of public opinion in post-colonial circumstances.
CBT is commonly described as a set of varied performative practices
predicated on communal initiatives free from any consensus or author-
ity beyond popular participation. It is certainly not a substitute for
ritual, but it may be considered as a complement to it in some places
and an alternative to it in other places. This is because it copes with
communal issues by identifying the immediate needs of local popula-
tions prior to the hardening of public policy decisions. Theatre as a
forum for redressive actions allows community members themselves
to renegotiate the validity of policies and practices, even if this comes
down to substituting new actions for traditional rituals.
When Theatre for Development (TFD) was first tried out in the
1970s, it was in the wake of historical influences as disparate as colonial
propaganda theatre, the travelling theatre movements of some newly
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 67

independent states, and Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’

(1970). The pioneering Laedza Batanani movement (Kerr 1995: ch. 8)
in Botswana was well aware of which historical misconducts to eschew
and which good practices to pursue when it facilitated projects with
rural communities. As mentioned in the first chapter, the basic concept
of TFD was established by the mobilization of local residents around
public performances that would trigger audience discussion and lead to
their active participation in site-specific resolutions of social and mate-
rial predicaments. Kerr understands the start of the movement in light
of a post-colonial aftermath, and calls the performances an

‘induced’ popular theatre in that they have often been created in

cultures like that of Botswana and Zambia where the migrant labour
system or rapid urbanization has eroded most ‘organic’ forms of
indigenous popular theatre, creating a vacuum which popular thea-
tre ‘induced’ by intellectuals has been able to fill.
(Kerr 1995: 152)9

It is interesting to note that the geopolitical changes, which Turner

relates to the breakdown of religious life, and which I, in turn, associ-
ated with contemporary epidemic patterns of AIDS, reappears here in
the 1970s as a need for community theatre. Given waning indigenous
traditions and weak civil societies of centralized post-colonial states,
alternative local forums were required to raise awareness and encourage
participation on governmental land reforms, youth unemployment,
health problems, and so forth. These are, of course, immense devel-
opmental challenges and eventually the themes of the projects took
on more manageable proportions suited to post-performance discus-
sions and follow-up actions. Since then it has been common to view
TFD as means for pragmatic solutions, a quite confident opinion that
had to be reconsidered in the case of AIDS. Digging a latrine in a TFD
project is one thing, changing family structures and social relations, as
in long-lasting CBT processes, are quite different. Even to implement
a seemingly simple procedure like using contraceptives against sexu-
ally transmitted infections, which motivated some of the early Laedza
Batanani projects (Kerr 1995: 152), has proven to involve highly intri-
cate cultural ordeals in HIV prevention programmes.
Due in part to local needs for cultural regeneration and in part to the
complex challenges of AIDS, two different modes of applied theatre
have been deployed concurrently in AIDS campaigns: the first may
simply be described as performance events, characterized by one-time
68 Community Theatre and AIDS

performances of visiting theatre troupes or by individual appeals for

particular media, occasions, and audiences. The second kind may be
called community-based theatre processes and is distinguished by long-
lasting collective projects involving local participants in social change.
It is especially the latter mode of theatre that will be argued for as an
alternative to ritual in contemporary African communities. However,
the first mode, that is, the performances of group or individual appeals
to people at risk, have played and continues to play an important role in
certain epidemiological circumstances, especially in areas that have not
yet broken the silence on AIDS. In what follows, I will give a few exam-
ples of performative events which have served to inform, persuade, and
warn people of the dangers of HIV and the sorrows of AIDS,10 only to
conclude by elaborating on the merits of community processes as a
viable succession to former ritual and syncretistic performances.
Individual appeals are not necessarily bound to theatre events, but
may be expressed in classrooms, town halls, in bus stands, on murals,
and through various media. Hence they could be a lyrical depiction of
private experiences, like Philly Lutaaya’s ‘Alone and Frightened’, a song
that broke the AIDS taboo on the radio and gave the affliction a human
voice in 1989 when Uganda was at the epidemic’s epicentre (Frank 1995:
152–5). Sadly, the artist died of AIDS-related diseases later the same year.
Invocations like Lutaaya’s are cases of performative speech acts offered
in the first person and the present tense by an individual who is living
through that of which he speaks, that is, someone who embodies the
status of doing things with words.11 Due to widespread stigmatization
and discrimination, few African countries have had prominent people
willing to reveal their positive status.12 Still, there have been a few in
South Africa, for example, the young boy Nkosi Johnson and the AIDS
activist Zackie Achmat. Achmat refused to take anti-retroviral medicine
until it became available in public hospitals in the autumn of 2003.
However, there have also been reports of violence against individuals
who have announced their positive status, such as the activist Gugu
Dlamini who was stoned to death by a mob after World AIDS Day in
December 1998. In contrast, Lutaaya’s lyrical testimony was encouraged
by the uncommonly open and tolerant attitude of President Museveni’s
government in Uganda.
More commanding pleas have been voiced with illocutionary force
through belligerent metaphors by political leaders such as Nelson
Mandela and Kenneth Kaunda,13 both of whom have lost sons to AIDS.
Ensuing the death of Kaunda’s son, the Zambian president declared
‘total war’ on HIV/AIDS, claiming that it ought to be ‘not a national
8 Audience at a community performance at Bunazi market near the Ugandan border in the Kagera region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

69
70 Community Theatre and AIDS

war that only appears in speeches at conferences and meetings but a war
that becomes part and parcel of the life of this continent’ (Sithole 2002;
Nugent 2004: 358). The epidemic has indeed killed more people than all
the wars combined on African soil in the twentieth century. If rhetorical
artillery is fired too often and forcefully, however, there is a risk that it
may avert attention from the already subdued voices and complex dis-
courses among the most vulnerable social strata of the epidemic. One
example of such complex and vulnerable discourse can be found in a
performance I witnessed in the Tanzanian town of Kamachumu, where
an orphan group performed the Omutoro, an aggressive warrior dance
with spears that was once performed after battles for leaders in the old
kingdoms of the Kagera region. Today the choral lyrics of the dance
take on an emotional dimension when voiced by orphans in the local
language Ruhaya, who cry out phrases like ‘We have to kill AIDS!’ Even
if few of those who use belligerent metaphors spell out what kind of war
is being waged, let alone who the enemies or allies may be, it somehow
makes sense to see orphans piercing an imaginary enemy of old in the
streets of Kamachumu.
President Kaunda’s reference to conferences also makes sense, as they
constitute a special performative site for valuable updates on research
and policy making, but just as often come down to nothing but exces-
sive spectacles of inert politics and detached science. In a number of
counter-performances, action groups of HIV-positive people have inter-
fered in meetings with demands for anti-retroviral drugs, as at the 2002
National AIDS Conference in Uganda (Wendo 2002). More recently,
the 2004 World AIDS Conference in Bangkok, entitled ‘Access for all’,
was recognized more for its disruptive protests than for its authorita-
tive reports. A more subtle protest occurred at an international AIDS
meeting in Dar es Salaam in 2002 by Frowin Paul Nyoni’s play Judges
on Trial. In line with traditional parables, the virus was invoked in this
play as a supernatural entity that is constantly dissected and discussed
by experts. In the end, the analytical paralysis of the scientists appears
as a pathological side-effect of the syndrome itself. Like most pieces on
AIDS, the performance gravitated towards a tragic end as the characters
ponder whether anything can be done at all, although with an unex-
pected twist as the final question addressed directly to the experts in the
auditorium was: ‘But what should be done?’ (Nyoni 2000).
An equally burning and open-ended performance took place at an
AIDS conference at the University of Botswana in 2002, where Ghetto
Artists staged a play by Vuyisele Otukile called Salty Minds. The perform-
ance begins with the rape of a young woman and her vain attempts to
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 71

seek consolation from her father. Torn by generational conflicts, it is

not until his daughter has died of AIDS that the old man regrets his
conservative views in the face of his grandchild, who was spared at birth
owing to a medicine (and a little luck) that prevents a mother-to-child
transmission of the virus. Although the play reflected mainly male per-
spectives in critical scenes of attitude changes and decision-making, it
did manage to cut across legal, religious, and cultural patterns through
its daring depiction of risky behaviour in a country with a prevalence
rate of almost 40 per cent HIV positive adults. The thematic accuracy
of the drama was substantiated in the UNAIDS/WHO epidemic update,
which reports that ‘young women aged 15–24 years […] are about three
times more likely to be infected than young men of the same age’
(UNAIDS/WHO 2004: 7). It is increasingly clear that these data are par-
tially explained by sexual coercion or violence (ibid.: 7–18).
In countries with limited official information channels and media
outlets, long-standing public events such as drama contests and cultural
festivals have played important roles in raising HIV/AIDS awareness.
A typical drama contest took place in 2003 at the Bahir Dar Cultural
Centre in Ethiopia. The event brought together four so-called Anti-AIDS
Clubs from as many Ethiopian cities to compete for a place in the finals
on World AIDS Day. Four themes had been specified by the organizers
of Save Your Generation and UNICEF: HIV prevention, stigma and
discrimination, promotion of voluntary counselling and testing, and
community care and support. Adopting a blend of comical skills from
the Ethiopian tradition of kinet, each performance was given 20 minutes
and a minimum of stage props. What struck me was how Ethiopian
community theatre corresponded in plot, style, and characterization to
performances at various youth centres elsewhere in Africa.14 Ethiopian
theatre does not derive from a ritual tradition as is the case in many
other sub-Saharan countries (cf. Rubin 1997; Plastow 1996) and yet
popular theatre becomes clearly recognizable across ethnic divides and
national borders when young people relate its depictions to actual epi-
demic risk scenarios. One difficulty with Ethiopian theatre, however, is
that it is tightly bound by authoritarian restrictions, which is detrimen-
tal to any theatre on AIDS. Restrictions are due to an entrenched alli-
ance between the orthodox church and the government (arguably the
most passive AIDS regime among the hardest hit countries of Africa). At
the drama contest in Bahir Dar, sexuality and other taboos were con-
spicuously absent on stage. Despite a good act by a group from Debre
Marcos that intertwined all of the optional themes, a troupe from Dessie
came first with an unsuitably optimistic performance about a group of
72 Community Theatre and AIDS

people who decide to take a test together and come out of the clinic
HIV negative.
The political-religious fallacy is also a problem in Tanzania. In Mtwara
region, where I conducted part of my fieldwork, it is not unusual too
see Catholic public posters with explicit messages like, ‘Don’t Use
Condoms!’. At a convention in Dar es Salaam in 2002, 70 representatives
from a variety of religious faiths – not only Catholics but also Lutherans,
Anglicans, and Muslims – made a joint public statement asserting that
they will continue to discourage people from using condoms. This runs
counter to Tanzania’s national policy on AIDS, which emphasizes ‘the
overwhelming evidence about the efficacy and effectiveness of con-
doms’ and the need for making them ‘easily available and affordable’
(National Policy on HIV/AIDS: sec. 5.10, 2001). Meanwhile, Tanzanian
politicians are making statements that advise people to observe reli-
gious leaders. In September 2002, President Benjamin Mkapa gave a
speech in Masasi in which he stressed that ‘the disease could be avoided
if people observe traditions, religious teachings and change behavior’
(Mkapa in The Guardian in Dar es Salaam, 21 September 2002). It is quite
understandable that politicians advocate religious organizations since
the latter possess both the compassion and the medical facilities to care
for people living with HIV/AIDS and for orphans. Their moral stance on
HIV prevention is, however, the cause of misfortune, and this ought to
be made perfectly clear when national AIDS programmes are designed
and coordinated. Apart from the informative undertaking, then, an
important task of community theatre is to clarify ambiguous official
policies on HIV prevention.
To show and speak about the most precarious behaviour of the epi-
demic means to lay open closeted and intimate situations in the very act
of underscoring their ramifications for a general tragedy. Theatre that
enjoys freedom of speech and freedom of assembly often offers critical
ways of perceiving intimate acts in performative stagings against multi-
layered strata of historical and societal censorship. The presentation of
sensitive topics – which has been and still is vital in areas with negligent
governance, high rates of illiteracy, little or no access to impartial public
opinion – by their very enunciation provides the conditions for what
Austin calls illocutionary and perlocutionary effects on those who are
ready to respond to the epidemic risk scenarios.
Despite the grim topics and motives, performances in community
settings are regularly enlivened by eager audience comments and roar-
ing laughter. One can always hear the spirited events from a distance.
To a Northern spectator, they resemble comedies in the tradition of
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 73

Menander, Plautus, Molière, and Dario Fo, except for the mournful
conclusions they engender when what appear to be stock characters
run into economic and amorous trouble after challenging communally
accepted ethics. Uncharacteristically for classical theatre, this leads them
to existential crises, weakening bodily states and, ultimately, to scenes
of death and funerals. Frank testifies that the plots of the so-called ‘cam-
paign theatre’ of Uganda in the 1980s were almost always motivated by
themes such as promiscuity, alcohol, and alienated women and men in
urban settings. These issues indeed had an effect on the present onlook-
ers, even if it is fair to assume that the reactions were ephemeral due to
the cultural distance between audiences and the visiting troupes.
The travelling performances have promoted a shared sensibility for
what lies behind abstract relations found in the extreme AIDS statis-
tics, both for outside aid workers and local audiences. This sensibility
is engendered by intimate love scenes wrapped up in burning political
scenarios and the private experiences of profound anxiety and sorrow.
Urgent issues of human and women’s rights are embedded in local
pockets of such intense depictions in ways that reports or papers seldom
convey. It is a matter of ingenious inventions of action research – tender
explorations in applied ethics.
Long-term CBT projects make use of both daily situations and ritual
practices to entertain genuine speech act circumstances. Dialogues are
taken from face-to-face encounters in daily life, yet with a role distance
that permits critical depictions of public affairs and officials. Thus
taboos can be opened up. At the same time an organized process is
established, epitomizing site-specific features of particular communities
not by means of a prescribed order, but rather by a participatory popular
command in which self-reflective discussions develop through actors as
well as spectators. CBT may not possess the ruling order of traditional
ritual or engage the variable course of everyday life and yet this may
not in fact be a disadvantage if the preventive prospects of intervening
and redressing the afflictions of AIDS lies in negotiating changing living
conditions. Both CBT and rites of passage set secrets in play, although
in reverse ways. In initiation ceremonies, liminal phases turn social
order upside down in a carnivalesque manner by including ‘subversive
and ludic (or playful) events’ where ‘people “play” with the elements
of the familiar and defamiliarize them’. Here ‘[n]ovelty emerges from
unprecedented combinations of familiar elements’ (Turner 1982: 27),
whereas CBT turns social order inside out by familiarizing taboos that
have been defamiliarized in public. Hence the performativity of CBT, or,
put differently, the coinciding effects of artistic innovations and social
74 Community Theatre and AIDS

regulations, enact contentious negotiations on authoritative ruling and

lifestyle options. The latter room for negotiations will prove to be the
quality which is most difficult to establish and thus evaluate in the last
chapter in regard to the implementation of long-term and comprehen-
sive CBT processes.
All this is quite obvious in Masasi district today. On the one hand,
traditional practices have gradually lost authoritative legitimacy in the
multi-ethnic Masasi, but on the other hand, the very same practices
can still be seen to play important roles in local affairs and are still
practised in southern Tanzania more than any other part of the country
(Mabala et al. 2002). In connection to celebrations, ceremonies, and
other festivities performances, southern Tanzania offers most retained
ritual dances in the country (Lange 2002). Few people would move
into a purchased house without calling in a witchdoctor to bless the
property from threats of, for example, jealous neighbours and relatives.
There are still conflicts between local governmental branches and elder
communities in the district about when initiation rites can and cannot
take place. ‘Traditionally jando used to be carried out at the onset of
puberty, however nowadays parents often send children to the bush
prior to enrolment in primary schools to avoid conflicts with the school
system. The cutting of the foreskin is then done later during school
holidays’ (Görgen, 2002). The premature initiations are also consider-
ably motivated by poverty, but in addition they have the detrimental
subsidiary effect of very early sexual experiences among children and
youth in Masasi.
Several people I have interviewed or had informal discussions with
have confirmed that it is not uncommon with early sexual debuts,
which increase the risk for sexually transmitted infections significantly.
In connection to a project visit to Masasi, Mgunga Mwa Mwenyelwa,
one of the most frequently consulted theatre facilitators by organiza-
tions like UNICEF, told me in an interview (Dar es Salaam, 7 August
2002) that an old woman in Masasi town had described the changes in
initiation protocols for him. The woman had been initiated at the age of
13, but nowadays it often happens at the tender age of 8. Later on dur-
ing the same visit, Mgunga got this confirmed when he started working
with youth. One boy said that he had sexual experiences with about ten
women at the age of 13. Mgunga also confirmed that elderly people in
villages where the church is strong openly protested the divulgence of
ritual secrets by the youth at theatrical events.
Moreover, widow inheritance is a traditional regulation which still
exists and poses an epidemic risk in Masasi. In practice it means that
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 75

a husband’s brother takes over his wife when he dies. If the husband
dies of AIDS-related infections, the latter will likely be passed on to his
brother and, in effect, the brother’s first wife, and so on. Furthermore,
circumcisions are performed in the district in connection to initiations.
In Masasi a matrilineal order is meant to protect women and their
children from patriarchal control but this is also a regimen which is
steadily waning. The latter system, along with some of the other above
mentioned traditions, were exemplified in one of the most telling per-
formances that I saw during my fieldworks in southern Tanzania.
The performance took place in the village of Likokona (19 September
2003) and divulged a notoriously vicious circle of epidemic risk factors
relating to traditional regulations, topical policy-making, and youth,
as well as women at risk. A widow has just endured 40 days of mourn-
ing, but still shows signs of distress. It turns out that her brother – the
lawful guarantor in what was once a functioning matrilineal kinship
system – has appropriated the inheritance to the detriment of his sister’s
welfare and her children’s prospects for a decent education. The drama
thus wanders between instances of legal and personal encounters. The
widow knows that the law is on her side, but she is also well aware of
the dilemma of taking legal action against a man with cash.
In an attempt to solve the conflict in person, the children are sent to
their maternal uncle to explain their need for school fees and uniforms.
The uncle maintains that their mother went to school for seven years
to no avail, and that he will instead arrange marriages for the boy and
the girl (Likokona is located in a Muslim part of Masasi district). The
affair is then brought to a civil court, although the chances of winning
the case comes down to who is bribing the judge with the most money.
The brother offers the judge a half month’s salary, while the destitute
woman is not even familiar with the idiomatic jargon of approaching
him with ‘long sleeves’. What follows is a pig show where litigation
is declared settled at a higher governmental level, and so the brother
is cleared. Some senior people suspect corruption, but do not openly
voice their protest. This taciturn attitude at the end of the performance
is intended as an entry point to the post-performance discussion. But
there never was a discussion in Likokona, most likely because the per-
formance came too close to the communal predicament of corruption,
or, put differently, to the impasse of being onlookers at an ongoing
social drama that implicated political leaders.
Even if the performance in Likokona could be described in greater
culture-specific detail, its basic course of events, nonetheless, points
to a number of performative conditions of HIV-preventive theatre.
76 Community Theatre and AIDS

Performances do not have to spell out the issue of ‘AIDS’ for spectators
to see that women and children are put in harm’s way by being sub-
ject to unreliable governance. It is not just any kind of poverty that
will force the mother into transactional sex and the children onto the
streets, it is also a lack of legal and civil rights. The erratic order of
things is, in turn, indicative of a disintegrated kinship system, negligent
law practice, corrupt politics, and a defeatist stance towards education.
Without trust in education (again, the leading proposal for discussions
about AIDS among the focus groups in Masasi), the social status of
young people is likely to perpetuate the status quo, which moreover
sustains discriminatory gender relations.
Paradoxically, the vicious circle of the Likokona performance comes
back to the theatre initiative as such, since the redressive possibility of
CBT is to provoke a public response with a perlocutionary efficacy that
can eventually lead to social change. In lack of a public discussion and
official reaction, the double-bind with the man who buys his liberty
with appropriated means, overrules his sister, and refuses schooling
for the children, epitomizes a performative quandary of CBT, namely
its difficulty in changing a social order despite, or rather owing to, its
way of staging decisive problems in the very place and by virtue of the
people at issue. If CBT goes far enough in its own undertaking it will
enact its own subjugation – hence it indicates in this way both the pos-
sibilities and limits of HIV prevention for young people.
Much like Rappaport, Turner and Schechner, Hilda Kuper maintains
that ritual is not theatre: ‘It instructs through involvement, not enter-
tainment. In ritual everyone must participate; no one can walk out or
object to the subject. The participants are the audience. Though ritual
is not designed as art, it is a sort of art – of masks, song, music and
dance’ (Kuper 1968: 90). Layiwola responds to Kuper by saying that
‘it is difficult to draw the line between what constitutes a residuum of
ritual, and what constitutes real-life theatre. […] [T]he same elements
“of masks, song, music and dance” which Kuper sees in ritual are the
same for the total theatre event’ (Layiwola 2000: 123). A ‘total theatre
event’ in the age of AIDS should, to my mind, involve not only a form
against indeterminacy and affliction but actually involve indeterminate
and pathological factors in the challenge of given forms against a
societal, ritual, and political backdrop. A total theatre brings out what
Grimes mentioned as a ‘morass of spiritual stress and social conflict’ in
the backstage of ritual performances. It is also worth mentioning a case
of ritual theatre. In a community centre in the village of Mikangaula
(17 September 2003) a rehearsal of a mime showed a male circumcision
 The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre 77

being carried out by an ngariba in the forest during an initiation (jando).

One boy novice after another is forced down on the ground and cut
without crying out load since that belongs to the test of endurance in
the ritual. The brief performance was quite simple since it goes without
saying that the use of one and the same knife for multiple operations
poses an overwhelming infectious threat among the young boys. But
the great achievement of the act is to show it at all in public. It is a text-
book example of how a CBT performance can turn a social order inside
out by familiarizing taboos that are otherwise defamiliarized in public.
Just as in the first chapter, the second chapter ends in a paradoxical
vicious circle, an authoritative double bind. In the first chapter it was
a matter of political unwillingness, while the second chapter indicates
a cooperative reluctance on behalf of elder communities and, indeed,
all too institutionalized academic scholars. Despite all the qualities that
make CBT apt to offer an alternative to, or even a stand-in as, rites of
affliction in the age of AIDS, it does not have the cultural or political
support to reappear as such an alternative and to bring about real effects

9 Rehearsal of a scene about circumcision in Mikangaula youth centre, Mtwara

region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
78 Community Theatre and AIDS

or changes. CBT thus risks being hollowly performative since, as Austin

rightly points out, several crucial conventions need to be met and sat-
isfied for speech acts and more complex performatives to take effect.
Local performances may even work as HIV prevention by site-specific
instantiations, or, put in an epidemiological lingo, as counteractive
incidences, and yet fail to set off further ramifications due to its cultural
and political seclusion. This is not due to a lack of autonomy or any
other integral quality in CBT; at this point it is fair to assume rather
that the very failure of CBT is indicative of a much more extensive
failure when it comes to HIV prevention. It may even be reasonable to
suppose that culturally motivated modes of HIV prevention inevitably
will fail if a democratic and pertinent cultural form such as CBT fails
to make a difference. And therefore the other side of CBT’s failure may
be considered a success, although in the bleak sense of demonstrating a
rationale behind the failure of HIV prevention schemes in general (this
reasoning will be elaborated in the last chapter). This is far from a futile
task though. The capability of falsifying significant states of affairs or
methodologies is an experimental achievement on a par with important
breakthroughs in scholarly research and applied sciences.
In this chapter I have endeavoured to explain how the critical poten-
tial of CBT pertains to public opinion-making about initiation rites in
southern Tanzania as regards, for instance, the careless use of sharp
instruments in circumcision rituals, which was forcefully examined in a
mime I saw in Mikangaula village, on the sexual tutoring of female ini-
tiates. On occasions when elderly people openly protest the disclosure
of ritual secrets through theatre by young people, it is clear that CBT
has the capacity of revealing conflicts that loom in the backstage world
of ritual and how vital such revelations have become. However, more
needs to be known about the backstage factors of post-ritual societies
as well as the background factors of HIV prevention schemes in order
to thoroughly assess and evaluate the potential of CBT to overcome
the political and cultural resistance of its sites of performance. Hence
instead of attempting to prove CBT’s worth through yet another angle
of approach toward CBT performances per se, the next chapter will go
behind the public action and explore the stories behind the perform-
ances among performers as well as spectators. The next chapter will do
this in reference to conducted focus group discussions and interviews.
3
The Social Drama of Backstage
Discourse and Performance

In the conclusion of Chapter 2 it was argued that CBT has the capacity
to reveal conflicts that loom in the backstage world of ritual. The per-
formative merits of CBT as HIV prevention has primarily to do with its
task of bringing domestic or furtive behaviours into the broad daylight
of public accountability. In order to investigate the correspondences and
discrepancies between HIV prevention schemes, community perform-
ances, and potential outcomes, it is valuable to direct attention to dis-
courses and practices between private and public events. In this chapter
I will consider different kinds of discourses (group interviews, focus group
discussions, and informal talks), which will eventually reach a point of an
inverted theatrical and performative reality where confidential backstage
talks allow for comparisons with official accounts of the epidemic and
performances about the epidemic in the public sphere. As in the other
chapters, this chapter is inductively piloted by an example of a commu-
nity performance, which generates questions about the modal relation
between the public and the private. A community group in north-western
Tanzania, which could epitomize any manual with examples of best prac-
tices with regard to theatre as HIV prevention, turns out to be quite steered
by the religious organization that backs their activities. Only because of a
‘whistleblower’ who was brave enough to share her misgivings about the
condom policy of the Lutheran Church did I realize that even exemplary
groups under the aegis of quite liberal faith-based organizations can be sub-
ject to ideological restrictions which ultimately infringe on the freedom of
speech and liberty of association. The public-private fault-line manoeuvres
the chapter into a couple of somewhat odd directions, namely a statistical
analysis of the proposed topics of the focus group discussants I involved in
my fieldwork in the regions of Mtwara and Kagera, and individual inter-
views and informal talks with audiences or ordinary people in the places
79
80 Community Theatre and AIDS

where the theatre groups exist and operate. The backstage investigations
point toward two significant findings; first, focus groups and individuals
confirm the pertinence of the community performances when it comes
to meeting the crucial challenges of the epidemic risk factors; second, the
backstage discourse proves in no uncertain terms that the gender predica-
ments that have been suggested so far in fact can be considered to belong
to the root causes behind the epidemic offensive.

Part I

Morbidity and commitment in Ilemera village

Ilemera is a village on the slopes of Lake Victoria in the Kagera region
which I visited on several occasions during my research project. The village
had a very well conducted community centre, with ambitions to obtain a
set of best practices relating to home-based care programmes, social mobi-
lization of village audiences, information meetings and theatre perform-
ances, quite methodical post-performance discussions, and bold follow-up
schemes. State-of-the-art activities requires excellent leadership and in the
case of Ilemera, the leaders were young and genuinely interested in putting
up a communal front against the AIDS offensive. What follows is an
account of Ilemera community centre and, in particular, one of its leaders
who made a lasting impression on me on my visits to the village.

10 Personnel at the youth centre of Ilemera village, Kagera region

(Photo: Ola Johansson)
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 81

On my last visit (in 2006) D. (as I will call her in confidence) gave me
a long, tender handshake and said that we probably will not see each
other next year. ‘Why?’ I wondered. ‘I’ll be dead by then,’ she replied
and bursted out in laughter. ‘God will have sent me an invitation to
heaven.’ I heard myself uttering something like, ‘Oh, no!’, along with
a lame attempt to pitch her lenient mood, but my hesitant smile was
pretty far from laughter. Shortly thereafter, I wished everyone at the
community centre ‘Kwa Herini!’ But the farewell rang hollow inside my
helmet as I and my colleague Stephen Ndibalema rolled down the hills
of Ilemera on the motorbike.1
Usually we talked eagerly after our village visits along the potholed
dirt roads along the lake, but this time there was not much to say. I had
often asked my assistants, in Kagera as well as Mtwara, how close to the
epidemic risks they thought the community youth were and they had
always answered that they were at least as susceptible as every other
young cohort. In spite of this awareness it was hard to accept that D.,
who at twenty something years was already a professional peer educa-
tor and action researcher, was in the grip of the syndrome. Certainly
I noticed that she had slimmed a bit since my last visit a couple of years
earlier, but it was as if her unselfish way of laying out the local context
of AIDS, along with her enthusiastic appearance, made me look upon
her as someone who could not possibly be dying. But that was the grim
irony here: the ones who helped others to survive were often also busy
surviving – and dying.
This meeting occurred at an exceptional time in the 25-year history of
AIDS in Tanzania. Just a few years ago, around 2005, free anti-retroviral
(ARV) drugs were allocated to selected hospitals in Kagera and other
Tanzanian regions. Some people I met, a few of whom were friends from
previous trips, were actually alive solely due to ARV therapies funded
by organizations like the William J. Clinton Foundation.2 There can be
no doubt about the importance of medical campaigns at the present
time. However, it is equally important to point out that medical inter-
ventions will not alleviate the spread of HIV, but rather mitigate the
impact of AIDS for a certain number of people, at least as long as pro-
grammes are externally funded. For poor people in lack of a varied diet,
the ARVs can also be a painful physical challenge. In a group interview
(2 August 2006) with a People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) group in
Kamachumu, a few miles north of Ilemera, a number of women claimed
that they suffered so badly from the strong medicine on empty stom-
achs that the responsibility for their children ultimately kept them from
quitting their life-saving therapy altogether. Such complications have
brought ARV campaigns together with World Food Programme (WFP)
82 Community Theatre and AIDS

interventions in some Tanzanian regions – although not in Kagera,

which is a paradoxical region insofar as it generally has sufficient food
supplies while also having the lowest per capita GDP in the country.3
Even the best future scenario according to leading epidemiologists, how-
ever, reveals that less than one-third of AIDS sufferers will be reached by
ARVs in the next ten years. This speaks volumes about the necessity of
sustaining the development of HIV prevention work.
It is therefore important to justify why and how it is always necessary
to involve social and cultural factors in any attempt to mitigate the
epidemic – even if a cure could be produced and distributed. The reason
for this is that the causal problems of AIDS existed before AIDS material-
ized and they would certainly remain if AIDS was eradicated instantly.
No media or performance conveys this more acutely and accurately
than community-based theatre, through its syncretistic, eclectic, and
critical associations with ritual functions, communal meetings, ver-
nacular storytelling, old genres of Tanzanian performance as well as
new interactive and international theatrical and pedagogical methods
and techniques.
In the performance I saw (12 March 2004) in Ilemera, the doctor in
the local dispensary played the cameo role of a man who dies from
AIDS-related diseases about five minutes into the action. This drama-
turgical pattern is typical for theatre against AIDS in Kagera: people die
at the outset of performances and the remainder turns into a struggle
for surviving family members. Kagera is situated on the border with
Uganda, where the first accumulated mortalities were recorded in Africa
1982–83. Here almost everybody has at least one family member who
has passed away due to AIDS. In regions with less explosive epidemic
experiences, such as Mtwara, characters usually pass away towards
the end of performances. The latter ‘tragical’ dramaturgy, where the
incidence and the ensuing diseases lead up to one or another kind of
peripetia, lays emphasis on the preventive responses to AIDS, that is,
how to discontinue the spread of HIV, whereas the former poetics of
death and survival draws attention to the impact of AIDS, that is, how
to cope with the suffering, care, and treatment of sick, widowed, or
orphaned people.
So the performance in Ilemera starts with a man, depicted by the
self-denying doctor, lying lifeless in a grove of pine trees under the vigil
of his wife. Spectators from a nearby village sit on the ground close to
the action. The tense but silent scene soon erupts in a shriek as the
wife meets the inevitable fate and turns into a widow. In accordance
with the local custom, a mourning period of 40 days ensues. After that
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 83

something controversial happens, arguably as dreadful as being bereft

of a husband. It starts with the arrival of the late husband’s younger
sister, who confiscates all possessions of the household and it ends with
the father-in-law claiming the widow herself. The post-mortal prop-
erty grabbing and wife inheritance are part of a traditional regimen in
Kagera as well as other patrilineal parts of Africa.4 AIDS widows do not
just lose their spouses but also their belongings and belonging, that
is, their material and economic assets, quite likely their health due to
the risk of having contracted the virus from their diseased husbands,
and their personal status since the other losses are tied in with a social
stigma that makes it hard to meet a new man and thus an economic
guarantor.
Gender wise, the story may, of course, also apply the other way
around. In one of her early songs, Saida Karoli, the most celebrated
contemporary musical artist in Kagera, sings about a woman who wakes
up in the middle of the night and goes to a bar called ‘Tisa Tisa’ (also
the title of the song). The husband, who is depicted as lazy and unable
to satisfy her, is unaware of the nocturnal excursion. When she comes
back, however, the husband wants to have sex and so he gets the virus
that she has just acquired. He later dies and the woman goes to the capi-
tal Dar es Salaam and sells herself for money. She comes back beautiful
and moneyed, but gossipmongers suspect that she has AIDS. The allur-
ing wealth of the woman still makes men attracted to her and so they
too get HIV. It all ends with the woman getting sick, along with every-
one else. She dies and the rest will follow. The narrative of this song not
only illustrates the contemporary epidemic impetus and distribution,
but also previous twentieth-century STI epidemics in Kagera, especially
concerning syphilis in the 1930s and 1950s.5
In the Ilemera performance, the confiscation sparks a reaction in the
community that prompts the village chairman to summon a meeting
using traditional drums. When gathered, the villagers are asked to help
the widow and her children, which they do by donations of goats,
maize, and money. It is not spelled out, but everyone knows about the
vicious circle of the scenario: for a woman and mother the outcome of
destitution is all too often prostitution, one of the leading causes of AIDS
in Kagera. Prostitution should be understood in a very wide sense of the
word, namely a transaction between a man and a woman, where one of
them receives goods, money, food, or personal protection for sex. For
abundant historical and political reasons transactional sex for poverty-
stricken women ought to be understood as a means of survival rather
than a moral or promiscuous act, as many faith-based organizations
84 Community Theatre and AIDS

categorize it.6 A woman explains what prostitution means in her village,

Gabulanga:

It happens in the village, mostly through alcohol. You don’t feel shy;
you meet a guy who makes suggestions and you go with him. The
day after you realize you have had sex. It’s a simple way of getting
sex, pleasure, and some money. The bars are located in private houses
[the sign is a pack of cigarettes outside the entrance; author’s remark]
and it is not a matter of much money, but you get dependent. It’s an
easy way of getting money and pleasure. […] The man may offer her
clothes, while her husband is away. She accepts a gift such as a kanga
(dress) and that becomes a form of prostitution.
(FGD in Bonazi, 20 March 2004)

It is remarkable to see that an epidemic risk behaviour such as transac-

tional sex also can be perceived as a lifeline for impoverished women.
When they get infected, however, fellow villagers usually get the news
quickly which means that they need an escape plan. This also affects
widows. The woman from Gabulanga continues:

Prostitution also occurs when a woman knows that her husband died
of AIDS. These women are lonely and accept any kind of gift from
men. They know they will die, so they turn into prostitutes. They are
still beautiful, but lethal.
(ibid.)

What often happens with widows, D. makes clear in an interview two

years after the performance (3 August 2006), is that they dip into an
emotional and physical depression since they fear that they are going
to die themselves. After a while they realize, with retained vigour and
sexual desires, that they must find a new way of making a living.7 At
that critical juncture, many leave their communities, where people pre-
sume they are infected, and head for the economically wealthier islands
in Lake Victoria. If they are not HIV-positive before reaching the islands,
they run a great risk of becoming infected by the fishermen out there.8
But the widows have reached a point where they have nothing left to
lose, which is not to say that they are at a point of no return; after a long
period in which infected people are asymptomatic, they eventually start
weakening in opportunistic diseases and then usually return to their
villages to die. They still have a year or two to live and may very well
attract a few men before the fatal decline. This is the vicious epidemio-
logical circle in and around Ilemera in the district of Muleba.9
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 85

11 Four women from the village of Gabulanga in an ongoing focus group

discussion
(Photo: Ola Hohansson)

Donations can at best offer temporary aid for widows. In the village
meeting depicted in the performance, a Kagera Zone AIDS Control
Programme (KZACP) representative offers the woman a more sustain-
able solution, namely by proposing to resolve the conflict between her
and her sister-in-law by mediation. In so doing the assets are eventually
returned to the house of the deceased. Since KZACP also happens to be
the organizers of the theatrical event, their involvement in the fiction
makes the plot meta-theatrical – or, more precisely, performative. To at
once depict and aspire to redress a cultural predicament that is wide-
spread among the present spectators is to enact a perlocutionary speech
act in the form of a promise that the audience is encouraged to act upon
(cf. Chapter 2). Without the anticipation of a feasible audience reaction,
applied social theatre, at least in this case, would merely represent an
ideal scenario for the organizers and, in the words of Kerr, ‘scapegoat
the poor’.10 In the interview with the Ilemera group it was pointed out
that the same performance that we had just seen indeed prompted sev-
eral women to come back to the community centre to seek assistance.
They did not do so immediately, however, but tended to come the day
after the performance rather than in direct connection to the post-
performance discussions.
86 Community Theatre and AIDS

The religious predicament

The meta-staging, nonetheless, made me suspicious about the group’s
sincerity and possible ulterior motives, not least because the main spon-
sor of KZACP is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT).
Religious organizations have a systematic routine of promising people
something with one hand while requiring them to pay back in faith
with the other. Two things eventually relieved my scepticism; the first
had to do with the course of action after the performance, the second
with an intriguing renegotiation of Church policies on condom use, at
least by informant D.
The post-performance discussion in Ilemera went beyond the typical
performer-spectator exchanges conducted by the joker and ‘spectac-
tors’ in forum theatre. The common follow-up questions were indeed
posed – ‘Are the events in the drama happening in your society?’; ‘What
did you learn from the performance?’; ‘What can we do about these
problems?’ – but the 50–60 invited people, a significant part of a village,
were divided into three groups that discussed the queries, presented the
outcome of their talks, and then ventured into a shared dialogue that
lasted longer than the performance itself. The occasion ended with a
fundraising for widows and orphans in the audience’s community – just
as in the performance. This is something that takes place quite fre-
quently in Africa, but that few people are aware of in the North. Before
the meeting was closed, the leader of the theatre group offered the vil-
lagers a standing invitation to free counselling at the KZACP office with
regard to the widow dilemma, a very audacious appeal considering the
resource-consuming ordeal of such conflicts.
The second credible factor about the group had to do with their
partial defiance of the mother organization’s policies on condoms. In
Tanzania all major religious branches are discouraging people from
using condoms. This goes against the National Policy on HIV/AIDS,11
which does not hinder the many politicians who give support to
religiously authorized behaviour, that is, sexual abstinence until
marriage and subsequent faithfulness. The ‘C’ in the ABC-model
(Abstinence, Be Faithful, Use Condoms) is something church-goers
talk about outside their houses of worship, as one man told me at a
World Vision meeting in Kyaka on the Ugandan border.12 His comment
brought about an embarrassed laughter in the congregation that said
much more than words.
When it comes to ideologically sensitive policy issues, attitudes often
carry the significance of what is enunciated rather than the other way
around. During my fieldworks I talked about AIDS on a bus with a nurse
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 87

from a Catholic hospital in the south-eastern region of Mtwara. She

held no religious qualms, but on the issue of condoms she said: ‘Oh,
that’s a problem! I tell patients to use condoms when no one else can
hear me.’ In contrast to her commonsensical stance, most of her fellow
believers prudently adhere to the papal commands of the Vatican. It is
a matter of an attitudinal response to a principle, the opposite method,
if you will, to conducting critical or scientifically valid studies. Should
the Vatican lift its ban on condoms, people around the world would
robotically do the same without any kind of reflective consideration
and thus end the harm against countless people. As things are now,
I can fully appreciate the passionate views of Reginald Mengi, former
representative on the Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS) and
media tycoon, who criticized religious leaders’ stance against condom
use by associating it with the murder of believers who contracted AIDS
from unprotected sex.13
The nurse on the bus worked close to a staunchly Catholic ward that
happened to be one of my selected fieldwork sites, namely Mwena in
Mtwara region. Experiences from that place have confirmed my sus-
picions of how religious dogma not only allow, but actively engage
in doing harm.14 My first visit (16 September 2003) coincided with –
or perhaps prompted – a village meeting where I found a religious
convener inciting a crowd of about a hundred people and at one point
shouted: ‘What do we think of condoms?’ only to get the expected
unanimous response: ‘Bad!’. A little later I was invited to speak to the
congregation. Diplomatically, I expressed a hope that all preventive and
protective options are kept open and accessible for people without the
financial means or social status necessary to make deliberate choices in
critical situations.
The performance that followed by the youth group depicted a rather
narrow scenario of HIV transmission. After having casual sex with boys
in town, a young woman develops vaginal ulcers which turn out to be
an opportunistic infection related to AIDS. The woman’s parents first
take her to a witch-doctor, but his treatment does not hinder her from
getting terminally ill. By the time she is taken to St Benedict’s Hospital
in Ndanda (a Catholic infirmary near Mwena), it is too late and she dies.
The unusually long death scene and its ensuing grief bore signs of scare
tactics, again with emphasis on the preventive side of AIDS in Mtwara
rather than the impact dimension in Kagera. The message comes across
as saying that people will die if they have casual sex. The performance
had an individual appeal with its focus on moral liability rather than a
communal appeal with room for deliberation.
88 Community Theatre and AIDS

After the performance, I, as usual, expressed a wish to conduct con-

fidential gender-divided focus group discussions with the women and
men of the theatre group. For the first and only time in Tanzania, a com-
munity leader stepped in and hindered me and my colleague Margaret
Malenga from holding talks.15 Instead, we held a rather diluted general
discussion in the presence of the apprehensive guardian of the faith.
At dusk, when the latter man left the performance site, the remaining
youth keenly asked Margaret and I about the reliability of condoms
and other taboo laden issues. Again we kept a diplomatic tone and
accentuated the need to keep all life-saving options open for as many
as possible. I also informed them that HIV tests are free at the district
hospital Mkomaindo in Masasi town a few miles away, as opposed to
the Catholic St Benedict’s Hospital in Ndanda where they charged 500
Tanzanian shillings for a visit and test. It is nothing less than a scandal
that the young people of Mwena were kept in the dark about the free
option at Mkomaindo hospital in Masasi.
Three years later (26 August 2006), I conducted random interviews
with villagers in Mwena. A woman churning maize in her home, as
well as people at a village pub serving home brewed alcohol, said that
they had not seen anything by the theatre group for a long time and
that the AIDS epidemic seemed to have gotten worse in Mwena and its
environs. Of course I cannot ascertain a link between the local epidemic
state and the tightly controlled theatre group, but it seems clear that
the Catholic stronghold of Mwena impedes fully developed preven-
tive measures against the epidemic through, for example, an iron grip
around the young people’s troupe. Statistically the villagers seem to be
accurate: during my research project, Mtwara, the region with the low-
est number of HIV testing in Tanzania, has surpassed the Kagera region
in AIDS prevalence rates.
Back in Bukoba town in Kagera region, a Catholic priest told me that he
advises against condom use and advocates abstinence by force: ‘We have
forbidden our members to have parties after six o’clock at night. If they
disobey, we refuse to give them the sacrament in church.’ (I remember
thinking, ‘Come on Father, who cares about reprisal if it comes down
to having a good time and surviving a plague?’ while pretending to be
an objective researcher.) Notwithstanding the priest’s rigid position,
Bukoba town was full of stories in the summer of 2006 about late-night
parties at the Catholic Church on Bunena Beach on Lake Victoria, with
drinking clergymen enjoying watching people stumbling down to the
lake for a quick one. At the break of dawn, the beach beneath the church
is cleansed of condoms in waves of water – thank God!
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 89

Unlike the Catholics, the Lutherans and the Muslims are slightly less
dogmatic when it comes to banning contraceptives. A theatre troupe
from Bukoba, which I have seen and travelled with a number of times,
regularly dramatize scenarios with condoms in their performances,
despite relying on the support of the Lutheran Church. Coincidentally,
the Ilemera group is supported by the same diocese. When I and
Stephen Ndibalema addressed the question of condom use in our inter-
view with the Ilemera group, D. told the other leaders present in the
community centre, with a surreptitious but emphatic aside: ‘It is very
important to tell them about this!’ She went on to say, without explicit
backing from her colleagues, that ‘one problem we have – and this is a
big one! – is that our sponsor is limiting our ability to talk about and dis-
tribute condoms.’ In the same breath she showed me a book circulated
by a Lutheran publishing company that lays out the text on the ban of
condoms which they are meant to obey. Stephen later says that D. is
a typical Abanyaiyangiro, an outspoken person from southern Muleba
district, as opposed to the more modest Bahamba of the northern part
of the district.

12 A young man discusses condom use with counsellors in a performance in

Birabo, Kagera region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
90 Community Theatre and AIDS

On the topic of condoms, a scene comes to mind from a performance

in the village of Birabo (9 August 2006) near Ilemera. A man has an
appointment with counsellors about whether to take an HIV test and
the possible outcome of a positive (i.e., bad) result. The advice is that
he should, then, make sure to eat well and avoid having sex. He asks if
it is acceptable to have sex with condoms, waving a rubber in his right
hand. A counsellor replies that condoms only have partial protection
and that abstinence from sex is preferable. The man then concludes
the conversation by making one of the most intriguing of social gestus
I have seen in theatre against AIDS: the sign of the cross with the
condom in his hand.

The backstage performance of community-based theatre

It was mentioned earlier on how a performance initiated a post-per-
formance discussion that generated a donation for widows and orphans
and an organized undertaking to legally liaise with oppressed women
caught up in unjust survival games. This does not only have to do with
mitigating the impact of AIDS but also preventing the spread of HIV.
The performance depicted the predicament of widowhood as a crucial
symptom of the vicious epidemic circle related to patrilineal rule and
its property confiscation, leading to destitution, which can, in effect,
lead to prostitution, a leading cause in the dissemination of HIV in
Kagera. In the post-performance discussion, the villagers testified that
the vicious circle indeed exists in their community and that they would
take measures to protect widows – even with the help of KZACP coun-
sellors if necessary. Besides this, I conducted focus group discussions
(FGDs) with the female and male members of the community centre,
which verified the association of impoverishment and female prostitu-
tion. The FGDs also confirmed that the subsidizing church discourages
them from using condoms. This is, of course, a serious discrepancy in
the work by the community group in Ilemera. The latter is indeed one
of the most advanced groups of action researchers I have come across
in Africa, with an organization of outreach nurses, peer educators, coor-
dinators, and counsellors. And yet the adverse stance against condoms
can cancel out the possibilities to break the vicious circle of destitu-
tion/prostitution. In the group interview, however, there were not only
mixed signals but also mixed opinions about the condom issue.
This is where informant D. comes into the picture, a dissident who
was ready to speak out against contradictory principles and practices in
favour of epidemiologically, ethically, and politically motivated actions –
even in defiance of her financial and moral benefactor. It is highly likely
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 91

that optimistic statistical data about declining incidence rates and prev-
alence trends encourage extension workers in communities to pursue
what they consider to be efficient and true, in defiance of commands
and dogmas. Invaluable informants such as D. make the ‘backstage
performances’ of interviews as revealing as the theatrical events.16
Another informant who put his own leadership position at stake was
a young man whom we interviewed in a community centre in Ijumbe
(4 August 2006). He told us a story about the time when the governing
political party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) suddenly discontinued
their funding for the theatre group. The reason, he explained, while
anxiously looking over his shoulder repeatedly through the glassless
window frames to see that no one in the village could hear him, was
that a member of the rival party Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo
(CHADEMA) took on a leadership role in the community centre for a
period of time. Democracy, even in one of Africa’s most stable nations,
is quite restricted at community level, certainly institutionally, although
in particular in informal situations involving ordinary people’s everyday
life. The most serious ramification of party political interests in regard
to CBT is that it comes between the assignment of HIV preventive tasks
and its follow-up component. This is where politics and health stand
against each other rather than rely on each other for the sake of public
well-being.
Informant D. in Ilemera says that as a peer educator she has now
abandoned choir singing and direct theatre that simply alerts people
against the perils of AIDS. That is a very candid statement which most
people in her position would not make since they constantly seek more
funds for their projects. D., however, is predominantly interested in
efficacy. As paradoxical as it may sound, abandoning theatre can be an
achievement for state-of-the-art community-based theatre. The latter
course of action is about a broad action research methodology applying
a variety of tactics rather than about styles or aesthetics. CBT, as it has
developed in Africa and other parts of the world, is about intervening
in places by calling attention to certain crises, mobilizing action-prone
groups of people, letting them identify ways through or out of their
predicament by means of site-specific performative practices: local
meeting forms, action research, lobbying, protests, seminars, home-
based talks, therapeutic group activities, and so forth. Such practices
can be more performative than theatrical, as it were, and do not neces-
sarily take place in public, but in private or backstage performances.
Hence the objective of contemporary CBT is not to play theatre to
communities, but to get as close as possible to a community’s own
92 Community Theatre and AIDS

discourses, practices, and human resources according to one or another

scheme of efficacy. That may entail kicking away one’s own ladder
when cultural divergences are surmounted, projects launched and the
ownership of programmes are handed over to groups on a sub-village
level, through open-ended peer education training so that they can
learn by doing on an independent basis. This is also how I sense the fate
of informant D.: she is seeking out others to whom she can hand over
her own practical knowledge of living and dying.

Part II

The social drama of AIDS statistics

Statistics may seem to be hopelessly remote from performance analy-
sis of CBT, but it is in fact an inevitable part of the understanding of
AIDS and its counteractions. Needless to say, my research methods are
primarily qualitative in the form of, for instance, performance studies,
culture-historical studies, focus group discussions, and interviews.17
However, the epidemiological dimension of quantitative data can be
interpreted as a qualitative phenomenon if the focus is kept on people’s
attitude to, and use of, the information. It is largely due to statistics
that previous notions about AIDS as a medical problem for particular
risk groups were refuted; it was surveillance data that exposed AIDS as
a generalized syndrome linking widespread societal causes and impli-
cations with living conditions for people in prime reproductive age
groups, especially the young female strata and their statistical overrepre-
sentation.18 Some well-functioning community centres keep their own
longitudinal statistical data for the work they apply. This pertains to the
centre in Ilemera, where recent statistics collected by home-based care
units in the ward indicate that women outnumber men in HIV/AIDS
prevalence rates.19
In Tanzania more than half of all AIDS cases are unknown, not only to
epidemiologists but to the affected people themselves and their friends
and family.20 Few people go for a test and many live with the virus
unknowingly, but there are also a lot of healthy people who lead their
lives in fear of already being infected. Countless households live under
a constant state of uncertainty and insecurity, leading to a defeatist or
even fatalist attitude about AIDS as a personal and familial health con-
cern. People pick up ‘statistical rumours’ which may drastically exagger-
ate or understate current prevalence and incidence rates. It is interesting
to compare different views of the epidemic in terms of what Giddens
calls a ‘double hermeneutic’, that is, the practical and discursive levels
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 93

of expert knowledge and public knowledge respectively (Giddens 1984:

374). A consequence of the double hermeneutic of epidemiological sta-
tistics is that something wrong can be true and something true can be
nonsensical; if a rumour leads people to believe a certain thing about
the epidemic, then it becomes true if the criterion of truth is how peo-
ple act upon information; conversely, a piece of information about the
epidemic that it is not possible to act upon, even if it is valuable as a
health precaution, is meaningless in practical terms. In the first chapter,
the latter flaw was criticized insofar as Western prevention models based
on information did not apply to African circumstances, while they cer-
tainly had an effect in Europe and North America. In this chapter, the
other side of the truth paradox is crucial and can be viewed against the
double hermeneutics of expert versus local knowledge; when a rumour
or another type of informal information takes precedence over factual
knowledge, it begs another type of epidemiology than the conventional
one, that is, an investigation which comes closer to people’s own under-
standing rather than what they are supposed to understand through
medical knowledge or cognitive schemes.
I have met many people who believe that half of their community is
infected, or who think that traditional witchdoctors can heal affected
persons, as well as people who doubt that AIDS exists at all. Most people
live and protect themselves according to their social and economic abil-
ity; beyond that they appraise possibilities and risks to the best of their
ability, which is based on informal local knowledge; if that knowledge,
in the form of, for example, hearsay – is a misrepresentation of an epi-
demic reality then that misrepresentation becomes an epidemic factor,
at least for those who share the stories. Rumours may, of course, also
point to accurate epidemic trends. That is indeed the case in the Kagera
region, which at one point was the hardest stricken place in the world
along with nearby southern Uganda. Substantial declines in prevalence
rates in the 1990s have been corroborated in recent research by Gideon
Kwesigabo and this good news has apparently reached Ilemera and
many other communities in the region.21 When I asked about statis-
tics, D. maintained that one survey accounted for a prevalence rate of
9 per cent in Muleba district, of which the better part belongs to the dis-
trict’s 18 islands. Kwesigabo reported a prevalence rate for the Muleba
rural district of 4.3 per cent in 1999, again, with almost twice as many
recorded infected females as males. Since then the district has unfortu-
nately exhibited rising trends in HIV infections among young people
and blood donors.22 Statistics can indeed drain a lot of meaning from
studies by its quantitative mode of appraisal, but can also give a lot of
94 Community Theatre and AIDS

weight to ‘non-figurative’ phenomena such as preventable mortality,

gender injustice, and experiential uncertainty.

The social drama of focus group discussions

An alternative mode of discourse to the direct and public post-
performance discussions and the semi-confidential interview with com-
munity group is the confidential focus group discussion (henceforth
FGD). Group talks in general are interesting liminal (or liminoid) social
events. In virtue of mutually fostered attitudes, feelings, and opinions
in closely knit social groupings, talks about cultural issues can be more
revelatory in workplaces or in cafés than in domestic settings or in
structured face-to-face exchanges such as counselling, seminars, or cer-
emonial meetings. This is also why FGDs have become such a popular
methodological tool for social scientists and health workers, as well
as market and media researchers, not least when it comes to private
or taboo matters. To create a comfortable situation for participants
in FGDs with reference to AIDS, extraordinary arrangements may be
required. Certainly in my case, a lot of consideration had to be devoted
to the leadership role, especially as I inevitably appeared as a white
male European in pursuit of sensitive information on sexual affairs in
Africa. Whether I wanted it or not, I had to play an active role in front
of a target audience who would either react with awkward silence or
enact more constructive responses. This role-playing is done without
a script insofar as FGDs are ‘unstructured interviews with small groups
of people who interact with each other and the group leader’ on the
basis of a ‘topic/question list’ (Bowling 2004: 394, 395). FGDs are also
a discursive key to undisclosed taboo issues such as sexuality, sickness,
and death. To restrict my own position in the sensitive space of dia-
logues, pauses, and silences, I opted for an arrangement by which the
interviewees themselves decided what to talk about. This was actually
decided before I found out that such a method already existed and had
a designation, namely ‘Question and answer method’, as suggested by
sociologist Ahlberg (1997). ‘The method is deceptively simple’, writes
Judith Narrow (2003):

[I]t involves asking informants to write down all the questions they
would like to discuss about a particular topic. While answers might
then be forthcoming from the group, the beauty of the method is
that the agenda for the discussion (the questions) is set by the par-
ticipants.23
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 95

As a cognate variant of this approach, I simply asked the informants of

my groups to write down the three most important issues about AIDS
for him/her in his/her community. For the illiterate participants, the
questions were verbally formulated to my research assistants. Hence a
triangulation of factors of equal or similar importance provided a con-
tinual persistent framework for my 20 FGDs: you (wewe), AIDS (ukimwi),
and community (maisha). The suggested topics relating to the three
factors were then presented as subjects for discussion for the groups (cf.
Appendix 1).
The statistics of 20 FGDs, ten in Mtwara region and ten in Kagera
region, will provide a framework of the rest of this chapter but have
already been touched upon in the analysis of the Ilemera performance.
Thematic associations will be made within this framework of data, if
not directly in the form of statistical graphs then in various contexts
that point to correlations and associations between the statistics, the
themes of performances, and the various modes of ‘backstage talks’
which I have conducted along with my research assistants. Later in the
chapter I will go into more qualitative issues, especially with reference
to a case study from Mumbaka village in Mtwara. But the first charts
specify overall categories of topics on behalf of young women and men
in theatre groups in what they believe is the most important issues to
discuss about HIV/AIDS for themselves under their respective living
conditions.
The most common topic proposed for the FGDs was education
(Figure 3.1). There is still a need to convey accurate information and
education about HIV/AIDS and its preventative possibilities. This is a
need that reproduces with new generations of sexually active people,
which has come as a bitter revelation not only in Africa but also in
the North, where a lack of attention to the epidemic has resulted in
exponential doublings in incident rates in, for example, the United
Kingdom. Another rationale behind the need is that awareness about
AIDS implies an extraordinarily complex comprehension since the epi-
demic determinants are social, personal, political, sexual, and medical.
What makes it even more difficult to bring clarity into this complex
set of knowledge, ethics, and life skills is the fact that so many differ-
ent kinds of information have been disseminated out of governmental
agencies, non-governmental organizations, faith based organizations,
schoolteachers, parents, peers, and so forth. There is still a lot of inac-
curate information and rumours that distort the perception of the
epidemic. This is so not only in Africa, of course, but all over the world,
96 Community Theatre and AIDS

100%
90%
80% Male
70%
Female
60%
Kagera
50%
Mtwara
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Edu Kag/Mtw Kagera Mtwara

Figure 3.1 Mtwara and Kagera: education (category/topic)

which proves the point that awareness about AIDS requires a complex
set of information and practical considerations.
Education should not be understood as a formal training in issues
related to the epidemic, but rather as a wide-ranging umbrella term for
knowledge about specific risks in relation to AIDS. To take an obvious
example, the South African leaders Tabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma are
clearly well-educated men and yet ignorant when it comes to informed
approaches to AIDS. The first doubted the connection between the HIV
virus and the opportunistic diseases of AIDS, while the latter believed
he could get rid of the HIV virus by having a shower after sex. These
stances pertain to a particular male ‘will to know’ better than scientific
research and can confidently be called uneducated in the sense of turn-
ing a blind eye to what is evident. Many cognate stances can be heard
in talks with people in Africa and elsewhere in the world as regards
sensitive AIDS topics (for examples, see the men’s FGD in Mumbaka
below).
Beside the fact that the ratio for the topic of education is almost iden-
tical in the respective regions (16 per cent for Kagera, 15 per cent for
Mtwara), it is clear that the propositions from young men exceed those
of young women. This is indicative of a typical gender pattern of the
FGDs in general. Interests which claim outward going modes of com-
munication and knowledge are typically propounded by young men,
whereas considerations for more familial or intimate means of protec-
tion and care are typically expressed by young women. This gender
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 97

16 Kargera
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0

unemploym.

child/orphs.
education

poverty

development

alcohol

mortality
Figure 3.2 Kagera: most common topics (per cent)

dichotomy is less obvious in Kagera than Mtwara, probably because the

groups in Kagera are much more familiar with informational campaigns
by governmental and non-governmental organizations, whilst Masasi
district merely accommodated a handful of organizations at the time
of my fieldworks.
Figure 3.2 demonstrates which topics were most commonly proposed
in the youth centres of Kagera region. Education has been mentioned
as the most common topic for both regions. Also the second most
common topic, namely poverty, is shared between the two regions.
The third most common topic in Kagera is development (i.e., sustain-
able improvements in local or region industries and infrastructures),
again probably due to the more established programmes and discourse
on communal progress in the presence of aid organizations in the
north-western corner of Tanzania, as opposed to the less recognized
south-eastern part of the country. The fourth most suggested topic is
alcohol/drug abuse in both regions. Mortality, that is, coping with the
deadly characteristics and consequences of the syndrome, is a distinct
topic for Kagera, where many more people have perished to AIDS.
Unemployment, which is up among the most commonly suggested
topics in both regions, is, of course, difficult, although meaningful,
to separate from poverty. It is possible to hold a job and still consider
oneself to be poor. Unemployment, especially for men, may also mean
a lot of spare time spent in public houses and other social meeting
grounds, which makes it align with issues of alcohol and drugs. The
seventh most common topic in Kagera is a consideration about the
impact on children and, in particular, orphans which brings me to
98 Community Theatre and AIDS

100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
child / orphs.

unemploym.
mortality

alcohol

getting worse

education

poverty

development
Kagera men Kagera women

Figure 3.3 Kagera: most common topics among women vs. men

Figure 3.3. Considering the overall selection of topics, it is quite remark-

able how dominant the impact issues are in Kagera compared to the
preventive concerns. The near absence of the topic of condom use as
one of the most crucial factors in the epidemic is ambivalent, though;
everywhere we go and see performances and talk to people, the condom
issue is raised in semi-clandestine ways since most places are tied to a
religious sponsor. The issue looms in every discourse, but public ones
and it seems quite clear that people are using condoms in sexual rela-
tions, regardless of religious commands. The relative absence of preven-
tive considerations presents a thematic watershed between Kagera and
Mtwara regions. This also shows in the dramaturgy of the community
performances in the respective regions. In Mtwara it would probably
not be possible to find a performance where a doctor enacts a dying
man in the first five minutes of a performance. Even of the performance
in Likokona (cf. end of Chapter 2) about the widow is almost identical
in dramaturgical pattern to the one in Ilemera, the crucial issues seem to
be about prevention and impact respectively, given the contextual fac-
tors of the performances. In Likokona, the need for preventive measures
inculcates corruption, mismanaged inheritance procedures according to
ethnic customs, and destitution as potential threats to the health and
survival of the widow and her children. In Ilemera, the performance
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 99

16
Mtwara
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
unemploym.
education

poverty

condom use

alcohol / drugs

rec gov / NGOs

night dances

prostitution
Figure 3.4 Mtwara: most common topics

appears to take issue with the unjust situation of a widow drifting away
from a fair chance of getting reintegrated into society after the loss of
her husband. The latter scenario not only jeopardizes the widow but the
whole society, since widowhood is so commonplace in Kagera. Hence,
while the storylines may be identical in performances in Kagera and
Mtwara, the performative instantiation and the spectatorial perception
differ according to the needs of the respective regions.
Figure 3.3 shows the same topics as Figure 3.2 above (with one addi-
tion, namely the opinion that the epidemic is getting worse, see com-
ment below), but with a gender differentiation. It is interesting to see
that young women are prioritizing private considerations of children
and orphans as well as the mortal characteristics and consequences of
AIDS more than official phenomena such as development and unem-
ployment, which exemplifies men’s priority. When it comes to alcohol
and the opinion that the epidemic is getting worse (against the consen-
sus of official statistics in Kagera over at least ten years) the distribution
among men and women was almost even, whilst education and poverty
were proposed more frequently among men. A similar clarity in gender
divisive priorities could be noticed in Mtwara, although on the basis of
partly different topics.
The most common topics in Mtwara (Figure 3.4) agree with the topics
in Kagera, although with the exception of condom use, night dances,
100 Community Theatre and AIDS

100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%

unemploym.
prostitution

condom use

night dances

poverty

alcohol / drugs

education

rec gov / NGOs

Mtwara men Mtwara women

Figure 3.5 Mtwara: most common topics among women vs. men

and prostitution. Condom use may be considered an all too obvious

precaution in Kagera, where the impact rather than prevention of HIV/
AIDS is most important at this stage in the epidemic. Night dances are
more common in Mtwara due to a much more active tradition of ritual
and ritual dances in the southern region (Lange 2002). Such nightly
occasions are closely associated with unsafe sexual relations (cf. condom
use) and transactional sex, commonly as a result of the consumption
of alcohol and/or other drugs. The topic called ‘rec gov/NGOs’, that is,
recommendations for government and NGOs is Mtwara’s topic for what
was called ‘development’ in Kagera. The relations of the progressive ver-
sus the more protective considerations make an interesting comparison
between the regions.
Figure 3.5 shows in no uncertain terms how the most common top-
ics suggested in Mtwara divide young women and men. Apart from
the relatively evenly distributed focus on poverty and alcohol/drug
use in the middle of the continuum, it is quite obvious that women
are preoccupied with socio-economic links to sexuality in the form of
prostitution, condom use, and nightly dances, rather than more exter-
nal links to public sectors like the job market, education, and societal
development. The pattern is indicative of a classical gender discrepancy
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 101

100%
90%
80% Male
70%
Female
60%
Kagera
50%
40% Mtwara
30%
20%
10%
0%
Liv conds Kagera Mtwara

Figure 3.6 General living conditions in Mtwara and Kagera

100%
90%
80% Male
70%
Female
60%
Kagera
50%
40% Mtwara

30%
20%
10%
0%
Dev. / Rec. Kagera Mtwara

Figure 3.7 General living conditions in Mtwara and Kagera: development and
recommendations

with domesticated and passive women versus mobile and forceful male
roles. This deep and enduring predicament has proved to be a general
pattern in line with a male-privileged division of labour and household
economics in the most seriously AIDS stricken countries in Africa, such
as Botswana, Swaziland, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Figures 3.6 and 3.7 show how frequent the broader category of
‘general living conditions’ were as topics for focus group discussions.
102 Community Theatre and AIDS

General living conditions signify a category of existing conditions and

habits in society and domestic settings. Unemployment, which could
very well be applied in the category of education and development, is
here a condition rather than an activity; it could, of course, be seen as
a risk factor that leads to casual sexual encounters by means of alcohol,
which is yet another topic specified as a general living condition, but
that could be seen as a direct link between of socio-sexual relations.
General living conditions are slightly more common topics in Kagera
than Mtwara. The real discrepancy within this category of topics,
however, has to do with gender preferences. It is more common for
males to associate general living conditions as risk factors in the epi-
demic, especially in Mtwara where less than 30 per cent of the proposed
topics came from women. The difference becomes quite apparent in
Figure 3.7.
It is not only women in Mtwara who appear alienated from the
topics of development and recommendations for authorities, but also
women in Kagera, where less than one-third of the proposed topics of
development were motivated by women. The topic of development (as
well as education) denote societal conditions that the discussants wish
to actively influence, improve, or change in order to gain control over
HIV/AIDS (e.g., by recommendations to authorities and agencies).
Socio-sexual relations were mainly propounded by young women in
Mtwara as relevant focus group topics (Figure 3.8). This is a practical
category that indicates factors associated with the social environment

100%
90%
80% Male
70%
Female
60%
Kagera
50%
40% Mtwara

30%
20%
10%
0%
Soc-sex rel Kagera Mtwara

Figure 3.8 Socio-sexual relations in Mtwara and Kagera

 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 103

and the interactive behaviours in sexual encounters. It is difficult, not

to say impossible, to make firm distinctions between categories. Poverty,
which can be identified as a general living condition, is ‘hijacked’ to
contextualize the social and sexual vulnerability of women due to
an often disproportionate poverty to the detriment of domesticated
women with little influence over economic agreements in the house-
hold. There is consequently a need to blend the categories in order
to make an interpretive analysis of the statistical data. Numbers, like
words, are not innocent of context-specific meanings and values. To
bring together categories of risk factors is a necessity for anyone who
wishes to explore the potential to not only highlight states of affair, but
also the possibility of showing their cultural and political contingency –
that is, the possibility to change their conventional order. The next and
final chart, Figure 3.9, is an attempt to reveal the gender predicaments
behind the FGD topics by graphic means.
The graphs represent both women and female suggestions for FGD
topics; rather than absolute numbers, however, here it is the different
categories of topics that make up the gendered proportions. As has been
suggested earlier, women seem to have put forth suggestions for the
most important topics for FGDs by referring to existing living condi-
tions, while men to a greater extent refer to eventual factors linked to

100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Mtwara Kagera

Other factors Edu/Develop.

Gen liv cond. Soc-sex rel.

Figure 3.9 Gendered proportions of categories in Mtwara and Kagera

104 Community Theatre and AIDS

education and/or development. Thus a plausible interpretation from

women’s point of view is to align socio-sexual relations with poverty
and other topics under ‘general living conditions’. As a combined cat-
egory this represents the main topics, that is, greater than both educa-
tion and development, in Mtwara. In Kagera, however, topics relating to
education and development are still greater than socio-sexual relations.
(‘Other factors’ represent topics that are not directly associated with
culturally integrated forms of HIV prevention, but which have more
to do with the impact dimension of the epidemic, e.g., people living
with HIV or AIDS, or topics which are so generalized that they do not
fit specific categories.) The upshot indicates that a more advanced level
of public opinion and developmental programmes probably brings the
gender perspectives closer together, with the result of more consolidated
groups and group efforts and objectives. Perhaps it is not, after all,
a coincidence that Kagera region experienced a radical downturn in
HIV incidence and prevalence rates during my fieldworks, while Mtwara
region seemed to experience the opposite trend.

Focus group discussions as action research

I will return to questions of statistical correspondences between per-
formances and official data in the conclusion of this chapter, but
before that it is necessary to get into close detail about the actual modus
operandi of the FGDs. As indicated in the statistical trends above, one
important arrangement was to conduct discussions in gender-divided
groups and then conclude with joint discussions. A normal day in the
field involved meeting a group in the morning, seeing their perform-
ances, eating lunch together (for the significance of the social climate
of fieldwork, see Bowling 2004: 395), and then conducting the discus-
sions. These are quite different types of activities in terms of time, space,
publicity, and privacy. While the performances were public and the
meals were more informal, the confidential talks needed to be held in
‘found’ spaces in public buildings or secluded open-air pockets. On rare
occasions the talks were accommodated in intact rooms in community
centres.
When it comes to the actual discussions, it was an ambition to be
as unobtrusive as possible. This was a guideline for me but also for my
assistants, who often, quite naturally, had the urge to approach individ-
uals by way of ordinary interview techniques, or daily discourse. Despite
the fact that I was often in need of translation, I decided that the only
communication between my assistant(s) and myself was to be in written
form between us once the topics were suggested and talks transpired.
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 105

It was quite clear that a reformulated query or a follow-up question after

a silence of several seconds could spoil an imminent narrative or unrav-
elling dialogue. On several occasions a lengthy pause led into quite
divulging stories that in effect unfolded energizing discussions. The
key to revelatory FGDs thus came down to a quite finely tuned balance
between personal discretion, communicative openness, and attentive
patience. The rationale behind my decision to combine performance
analysis and FGD is that the latter can stand in as a form of performance
in its own right when the former falls short as communication about
HIV preventive conditions or solutions. In what follows, I will give an
example of this alignment from Mumbaka village in Mtwara region.

Part III

A lost performance in Mumbaka village

The performance in Mumbaka Youth Centre (21 July 2003), an uncom-
pleted brick house with a corrugated roof like most other centres in
Masasi district, has to be considered as a work-in-progress. Most of the
shaky plot is obviously carried by the improvisational skills of the per-
formers, while the rest is acted out by physical gestures and interactions
in line with a preliminary draft. It revolves around three young men in
a public drinking house, who alternates between boasting about their
own drinking skills and talking about the risks of AIDS. Two antagonis-
tic characters quickly crystallize – pedagogically dichotomized between
the attitude of enjoying oneself and taking care of oneself – while a
third character mostly listens. The cautious fellow has obviously done
his homework on HIV guidance as he paraphrases the ABC model of
abstinence, faithfulness, and condom use. Hence the brief discussion
about drinking and sex ends in a consensus reminiscent of Horace’s
classical criteria of theatre itself: ‘Mix pleasure and profit, and you are
safe,’ as Horace put it.
In the next scene, women join the men in the bar. The man who ear-
lier boasted his drinking skills continues to do so as he comes onto the
women. He also makes sure to let everyone know that he is loaded with
cash. Within seconds he has picked up one of the women and soon
leaves the place with her. After a jump in time, the next scene shows
how he picks up a second woman in the bar. His friends insist that he
must be careful and remind him about the epidemic, but he is by now
too drunk to take advice. After yet another hiatus, he comes back to
pick up a third woman. She demands that they use a condom, but he
pretends not to know what it is – and off they go.
106 Community Theatre and AIDS

After this there is a greater leap in time as we enter a scene where

people prepare for a community meeting. To no one’s surprise, the
promiscuous man now shows signs of AIDS-related opportunistic infec-
tions. People gather, but a man voices a protest about attending yet
another meeting that will lead to nothing. ‘There is no water, the pipes
are finished, this meeting is useless, for no one is doing anything any-
way,’ he claims. The protester then directs his attention against the sick
man and says that he will leave the meeting if the infected man stays.
Other people seem to take his side and so the meeting breaks up and is
then postponed indefinitely. And with this open-ended situation, the
performance also comes to an end.
The performance highlighted a few crucial culture-specific risk factors
of the epidemic. Passing comments about failed irrigation and overt
stigmatization allude to a relatively isolated agricultural ward with five
villages on the arid slopes of the Makonde plateau. To get water up to
those villages in the dry season requires a two-hour walk to the wells in
Masasi town. The dry period inevitably also generated less employment
since Mumbaka, like the rest of the district, is a primarily agricultural
society. In July of 2003, people in this area had not seen rain for well
over a year and in the periphery of the district along the border to
Mozambique came reports of critical starvation. It is important to take
such a geographical and societal backdrop into consideration when
existential issues on disease are being dealt with in performances.
Unemployment, poverty, and deficient food security are, needless to
say, considered to be more pressing matters for healthy people than an
epidemic with an incubation period of about ten years. The sick people
showed symptoms, infections, and diseases which coincided with the
local pathological environment, so under such vague epidemic con-
ditions it is quite challenging to persuade people about the burning
concerns of AIDS. A rhetorical question about poverty and HIV preven-
tion that I heard repeatedly in Masasi was the following: ‘What’s more
important to spend a hundred shillings on as a family provider: a bar of
soap or three condoms?’
A more up front theme in the performance was the link between alco-
hol, money, and sex. This is a typical set of determinants for sexually
transmitted infections not only in southern Tanzania, but also other
areas of the country as well as internationally. If it is not about business-
men who pass by on the big district thoroughfare (barabara), it is about
local village men – around or along smaller roads like the one passing
through Mumbaka – who for one or another reason have managed to
get some extra cash. An economic surplus is quite often used for either
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 107

casual sexual affairs or more permanent extra-marital relationships.

In the Mumbaka performance, the semi-official and semi-private regi-
men was merely hinted at, but was to be explained in greater detail in
subsequent focus groups discussions, with the performers and villagers
respectively.
As I and my research assistant Margaret Malenga made our way back
up the stony dry road to Mumbaka village in September 2003, we had
become increasingly wary of an additional thematic strand of the per-
formance we had seen three months earlier, namely its gender partiality.
Since July, we had accumulated a reflective hindsight of the Mumbaka
performance by several visits to other youth centres and performances
indicating a repetitive pattern of male-centred plots, male-defined
problems, and male-driven resolutions. So as we divided the youth into
one female and one male group for discussions, I did not expect a very
vibrant talk with the women. On this occasion, however, I would learn
a lot about the use and conduct of focus group discussions.
Since it was a Saturday (13 September 2003), we managed to find a
vacant classroom in a nearby school. The four school benches that we
put together for the talk made us sit in a square while an ideal option for
a FGD would have been a circle. We were in the company of shy young
women. When I now replay the micro-cassette and hear us introduce
the initial topic to the group, there is a reserved giggle in the group.
Then there is a long silence. The topic hanging in the air is about pros-
titution (umalaya). In the presence of reserved groups, the tactics was
either to begin with the topic suggested by most participants or with
the least suggested topic as a more drastic icebreaker that would then
pave the way for an increasingly open discussion about less charged
topics. In Mumbaka, we sensed that the women appeared shy but that
they were consolidated enough to crack a taboo laden opener proposed
by a single participant. The topics were, again, suggested anonymously
and the only thing we know about their context was which three top-
ics had been proposed by which anonymous individuals. The one who
mentioned prostitution as one of the most important issues related to
AIDS for her in Mumbaka also mentioned alcohol and the multiple
use of knives in circumcision rites as personal/epidemic/social fac-
tors. Among the other suggestions for discussion, three were about
increased condom use, three were about infidelity, another three were
about sharp instruments such as the knives used in circumcisions, two
were about the need for improved education, two were about abuse of
alcohol, while single suggestions were made about blood transfusions
and prostitution.
108 Community Theatre and AIDS

After the lengthy silence on the topic of prostitution, just as the

taciturn atmosphere threatened to spill over to discomfiture, one of
the women began to talk about evening dances (usiko ngoma). People
get drunk, she said, and men ask women to come with them into the
bush to have sex, most often without condom. It happens that women
are with three men per night. It is not always agreed in advance, but
women expect to get paid. If they do not get paid, they may abandon
one man for another.

Pause.

Another participant offers an example. A woman comes into a pombe

place (an informal building or site in which home-brewed beer and
liquor are served) and come upon a bunch of drunk men. The latter do
not jump at the woman at once, so she starts to dance and teases them
as she says that they do not know how to have sex. She offers them to
go with her so that she can show them what real sex is about. Then she
promises that the one who goes with her will not be able to leave her.

Pause.

So far we had heard that, and how, prostitution takes place, but not
really why it was so. The two initial anecdotes are like mini-drafts for an
eventual play, although with female lead characters. A third participant
then comes into the discussion: ‘A man can know that he is HIV posi-
tive but since he has money he can attract women, who accepts him
due to their poverty. It is impossible to know when he gives you the
disease. Lack of food leads us into this situation.’
Here the pronouns starts to shift from third to second to first person
and so the narrators gradually merge with the depicted characters. This
is a shift from description to performance – a performative move out
of the diegetic distance, as it were. The next informant who offers an
example of prostitution again assumes a third-person perspective, but
now in a dialogic form with direct speech. We identify the narrative as
a site-specific experience, which may or may not be directly personal. In
other words, the discussion is entering the same register as theatre and
as researchers we feel invited into an at once group-based and subjective
sphere of discourse. This is what is said:

A woman walks along a road and is being wooed by a man. Right

at that stretch of the road there are no houses, so she gets scared of
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 109

being raped. She says to him: ‘If you wish to talk to me you can do
it in front of a house.’ Luckily there were people coming from the
opposite direction so she now asks what he wants. He says that he
loves her. She gets confused and says: ‘So you love me? All right, well,
I’m a married woman.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’m a married man.’ She goes
on to say: ‘I can’t cheat on my husband with you; can you cheat on
your wife?’ He replies that he loves her despite that he is married and
then asks if they can go into the bush, just for a brief while. ‘No,’ she
says, ‘I can’t go into the bush with you, especially since you don’t
love me; if you had loved me you would have wanted to know more
about me, as, for instance, whether I am married or not.’

The anecdote ends here, in an open conclusion, just like a public com-
munity performance. There was no post-anecdotal deliberation though,
probably because the individuals of the group had heard of the inci-
dent or similar incidents before and because they also were aware of its
implications. A series of further anecdotes were then generated within
the group, which had to do with women who go to towns for the pur-
pose of prostitution; the inadequate AIDS education in homes, schools,
and churches; the sexual magnetism of HIV-positive widowers so long
as they have money; the difficulty for women to make men wear con-
doms; the lack of HIV testing among the young people of Mumbaka
(‘We can talk about it, but no one would do it even if the machine was
brought here – even if they were forced by police or military.’). Taken
together the narratives gradually expose the initial accounts about pros-
titution – the dilemma for women to, on the one hand, sell their own
bodies in order to, on the other hand, protect themselves and children
economically. This health-economical double bind is like a simultane-
ous inward and outgoing gesture, which is impossible to manoeuvre for
an individual. To use a theatrical analogy, there is no possibility for a
person to interpret her role if that position forces her to protect her life
in a life-threatening way. There simply is no directorial method for such
character development in the art of living.
When we sat down and talked to the young men we noticed, like so
many times since and after, a considerable change of tone and attitude.
What is striking is the men’s demanding and even challenging attitude
to governmental and other organized responses to AIDS. The gender
discrepancy is given away already at the stage of suggesting topics for
FGDs. Here is a sample of some typical suggestions by women:

• Women should stop prostitution

• Abstain from sex
110 Community Theatre and AIDS

• Use condoms
• We should respect out marriages
• Abstain from excessive drinking
• Avoid trying to get everything from other people (clothes, presents,
etc.)
• Do not share injections or needles
• Do not have sex with HIV/AIDS victims

If the suggestions are not disapproving risky routines and behaviours,

they advocate actions that are defensive. As opposed to this passive
stance, it is easy to sense more affirmative and assertive suggestions by
the young men:

• The government should look for medicine to reduce the sexual drive
for men and women.
• Condoms are not the solution. People cannot use condoms prop-
erly.
• After an HIV test at hospital, people should be notified about their
status, and if found positive, the patient should explain it to his/her
family, to get the family’s assistance.
• If someone dies of AIDS, it should be announced in public.
• Reduce the disease by drama, poems, and songs.
• They should provide us with media like magazines, video tapes, and
leaflets to distribute to the villages.
• Show sick people on video.
• Youth should get educated on HIV/AIDS.
• Youth should get help starting income0-generating activities to be
self-reliant.
• Authorities should bring as many condoms as possible.
• Authorities should also bring anti-retroviral medicines.
• They should bring testing equipment. There should also be a dispen-
sary with a focus on HIV/AIDS.

Needless to say, the confident ethos behind these suggestions has not so
much to do with personal qualities as a male licence to develop a criti-
cal stance to the social and political order of their living environment.
Even where acknowledged risk factors reveal a defeatist or even fatalistic
attitude, the assertive mode of opinion-making divulges a certain com-
mand of social critique and change. This implied command indicates,
in turn, a more advanced stage for men than women along the Freirian
continuum of conscientization and self-reflective praxis. It should be
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 111

pointed out, however, that young men who have acquired life skills
for a more self-assertive life face a discriminatory crisis cognate to the
gender predicament for women, although in a generational sense in
relation to adults and elder people. This will become quite clear in the
light of the audience’s FGDs below.
The discussion in the male group authenticated the assertive stance
and affirmative mode indicated in the suggested FGD topics. ‘Partners
are not faithful and take risks without condoms. When boys want
women, they don’t just want to look at them but have sex with them
right away. After sex many men abandon women. But the disease may
already have spread – you may have contracted HIV.’ Here it is more
difficult to figure out the relation between the first and third person,
but there is no doubt about the men’s willingness to stand in for other
men in the community, even if it should involve themselves. The men
did not talk about prostitution, but another form of transaction that is
just as detrimental to young women, namely the culture-historical phe-
nomenon of bride price. In the relatively de-tribalized demographies of
Masasi district, there are still evident remnants of traditional regimens
which affect people in decisive passages of life, although in less institu-
tional ways than before. Today a man can simply send a friend to the
parents of a young woman and propose a marriage with their daughter
by handing over 5000 Tanzanian shillings (approximately US $5) in an
envelope. The parents seldom turn down such proposals, according to
the discussion group, but the money is non-refundable if the young
woman should refuse the marriage.
A related and quite astonishing subject had to do with initiation rites.
The male and female initiations (jando and unyago respectively) used
to take place around the adolescent age of 13, that is, on the limen to
young adulthood. Today, due to waning traditions and especially in
times of extreme poverty – such as the drought in 2002–04 in Masasi
and other parts of eastern and southern Africa – families cannot afford
to keep children in their homes and therefore send them to initiations
at ages as low as seven or eight. There are at least two directly hazardous
epidemic risk scenarios implicated in such circumstances. First of all,
these children may be infected with HIV from birth without showing
any signs of disease and consequently spread the virus if, for example,
one knife is applied on several novices in circumcision ceremonies.
(The irony is that male circumcision has been promoted as a major
factor in reducing HIV in the last few years in sub-Saharan Africa.)
The other risk is associated with sexual tutoring during confidential
stages of the ritual. What is well known, however, is that the sexual
112 Community Theatre and AIDS

instructions received by novices differ considerably between boys and

girls. For young males in ritual communitas, sex is often characterized
as a pursuit of manhood that should be conquered, while the narrative
and physical instructions for young females more often takes place in a
domestic setting that contextualizes a culture of subjugation related to
the husband’s needs. As a result, youth in Masasi district tend to have
sexual relations at a very early age, which leads to a range of typical risk
scenarios: reinforced gender roles, unprotected sex, untreated sexually
transmitted infections, early pregnancies resulting in disrupted school-
ing for women, and so forth.
There is no doubt that the FGDs validated the thematic and epidemic
pertinence of the rehearsal that we had witnessed three months earlier.
A culture of poverty, alcohol and casual sexual relations impelled by
money seem to lie at the centre of the epidemic in Mumbaka. A few
questions remain to be answered, however, before a clear picture is
established about the local determinants and the ways they can be
counteracted. Why, for instance, were there no women in the leading
roles of the play? Considering their ability to overcome their shyness
in FGD, it should be possible for them to carry a public performance of
theatre on the crucial risk factors of AIDS. And why was prostitution,
or transactional sex, not a more prominent theme in the performance?
As usual, it is also possible to question why gender inequity was not
addressed more explicitly. What about the related dilemma of being a
young person in a highly patriarchal and elder-oriented society? These
questions all beg answers from the adult spectators who may sit on the
culture-historical truths of the mentioned queries.
Three years after the rehearsal in the youth centre, I went back to
revisit the Mumbaka group and to conduct FGDs with spectators after a
new performance (23 August 2006). This was not to be. It turned out to
be impossible to meet the group, despite intense attempts through dis-
cussions with the youth centre leader. The latter person was found in a
newly established NGO, called Masayoden, which comprised the previ-
ous youth centres in the 32 wards of Masasi and Mangaka districts. The
interest for specific theatre or HIV prevention projects in the new NGO
seemed low; instead events and schemes had become centralized to a
head office in Masasi town where rather more indiscriminate income-
generating activities were planned for the villages and sub-villages.
The first thing we noticed when we arrived to Mumbaka was that the
youth centre building was still incomplete. The UNICEF led project that
provided walls and roofs for the youth centres had obviously come to
a construction standstill at the pilot stage. We took a walk through the
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 113

village with a faint hope of meeting a member of the centre who could
tell us more about the fate of its theatre group. No one was to be found.
So we walked back toward the main road and managed to recruit two
focus groups for discussions on the same topic as we had done with the
youth in 2003: ‘Write down the three most important issues about AIDS
for you in Mumbaka’. The men were selected from a group of people
sitting under a tree in the midday heat, who appeared to belong to the
same work force. The women were to be selected by a female volunteer
during our discussion with the men.
The six men proposed to talk about three topics more than any other:
alcohol, unemployment, and poverty. Prostitution, night dances, and
unprotected sex were also mentioned although as singular suggestions.
We started by asking what the group had to say about the link between
AIDS and poverty/unemployment. The discussion directly took a turn,
however, by the following opening line: ‘Men don’t know where to get
jobs, so some become alcoholics. Bad behaviour follows.’ Without delay
the cue was taken up by a young man, who literally identified himself
with the subject: ‘I’m a drunk. After I get drunk I want any kind of
woman that comes by. The brain forces me to it. I take any woman and
don’t remember it the day after. But in the morning I realize what I have
done: I have had sex without a condom and slept with a woman I can’t
even remember.’ Throughout this comment, which set the tone for the
rest of the discussion, the other men laughed flat out several times.
This is one of the best reactions a FGD can experience since a shared
expression at once unifies a group and encourages follow-up comments
with similar intended effects, even if it should be in another pitch and
mood. That kind of remark came from an elder man: ‘We drunkards are
the problem, because when we get drunk we don’t distinguish people;
as long as it is woman we’ll seduce her. And that’s why the epidemic is
so big: alcohol.’
At this point the discussion went from first-person speech to a collec-
tive ‘we’. This is, once again, a theatrical mode in which depicted exem-
plifications and dialogues can enact the discourse in the form of direct
or indirect experiences of cases against a communal backdrop: ‘When
you take alcohol,’ another participant explained, ‘your mind changes,
your brain becomes wild and does anything. Any woman should be
seduced. When you get drunk, the desire is high, but without alcohol
you are a normal person.’ In other words, the effect of alcohol is in itself
a decisive role play in the arena of the communicable syndrome. The
drunken identity seems closely related to the ghostly existence of the
virus that shadows you if contracted.
114 Community Theatre and AIDS

The old man then comes back into the discussion by making an
historical comparison: ‘In the old times old men drank, not young
men. Nowadays young men can drink the strongest alcohol available.’
A participant explains that some ‘alcohol is very strong’. ‘There are
softer drinks like uraka and local pombe, but we also take gongo, which
Kikwete [the current president of Tanzania, author’s remark] has forbid-
den. Women also drink nowadays, ten at the same time in groups. So
when everyone is drunk, the epidemic spreads. Now I am OK, but if I get
drunk I would come after you and want to touch your breast and every-
thing else. In the old days it was a pleasure, but nowadays it has turned
into bad behaviour.’ This comment, which assumed a first-person
perspective and was directed to my female research assistant Delphine
Njewele, is, of course, difficult to unpack, but it is fair to assume that
men look upon the personal and social phenomenon of alcohol as an
alleged reason to behave in risky and injurious ways. And if alcohol
allows you to change your behaviour, then it seems to be a conse-
quence, in accordance with the mentioned comment, that other people
who drink, including women as a collective category, implicitly make
allowances for a changed behaviour toward them. Unemployment and
other factors of insecure livelihoods thus seem to be a cause of alcohol
abuse, while alcohol is linked to a promiscuous lifestyle where health
and social regulations are compromised. The interpersonal and societal
limbo that ensues is of course quite hazardous for women since the
whole scenario is dictated by men.
Interesting comments on the background of, and specific problems
with, unemployment were being made in the group. Furthermore,
a remark was uttered about the uselessness of warning young people
against HIV and AIDS since they do not heed guidance from elders any-
more. It is the current and future state of the community that interested
me, however, so after a brief talk about past social and sexual regula-
tions that confirmed an old matrilineal order without really saying
anything about the security and health situation of that era, we asked
the group to comment on the existence of prostitution in Mumbaka
(despite that this topic was mentioned by a single participant). An
almost ten-second-long silence followed, then the old man resumed his
personal speech: ‘I am an old man and only carry 200 or 1000 shillings.
Young women says “Vipi mambo, vipi mambo!”, when they hit on you.
Should I get that young woman? You give her the money and sleep with
her. And they have short skirts.’24
Everybody in the group seemed to agree with this characterization.
A fellow man exemplifies in more detail: ‘Ceremonies nowadays have
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 115

a lot of women. Women are hunting for men. We just take them and
sleep with them. They misbehave at initiation ceremonies and night
dances.’ This punitive stance is backed up in retrospective terms by the
senior man: ‘In the old days if you wanted something you got it from
your father – clothes, for instance. These days youth are very greedy
in terms of fashion. Women get men, have sex, and then purchase
modern things.’ Another one jumps in: ‘Even mini-dresses. Men get
crazy by that.’ Finally, the ‘young drunk’ wraps up the talk with the fol-
lowing deduction: ‘Women come with short skirts and say ‘Vipi kaka!’,
‘Vipi mambo!’, and you don’t care about dying, you just give them your
500 shillings and have sex. If you go buy local alcohol and a group of
females help you to drink, they want you. First you are shy, but after
one glass…’
It is quite clear that the group gravitated toward a consensus by
gradually supporting each other’s discursive alignment of unemploy-
ment, alcohol, and sex as primary epidemic determinants. At the
moment when they had consolidated their argument about economic
vulnerability and the ensuing social limbo, they had already pre-empted
the inquiry about prostitution by holding external factors responsible
for risky behaviour. The volatile external factors not only include job
markets and culture-historical changes, but also the women as a social
category of transformation. Hence if the upshot of unemployment is
abuse of alcohol, then the upshot of drinking is abuse of social relations.
Throughout their line of reasoning, the male focus group in Mumbaka
managed to keep their own responsibility at an arm’s distance and at
the end of that arm is a finger pointing to women as responsible agents
of change in a world that now lacks a stable domestic life, kinship sys-
tem, and social hierarchy.
So what did the women in Mumbaka have to say about this? Well,
just by reading the suggestions for topics to discuss, one can immedi-
ately see that their perception of the local epidemic is more personal.
Just like the men, the women did mention poverty, alcohol, dress
sense, and unprotected sex as discrete epidemic risk factors, but the
overwhelming determinant was prostitution, mentioned by four out
of five women. So it was only natural to start the discussion with that
subject. After brief laughter, an elder woman opens the conversation:
‘Prostitution is caused by the behaviour influenced by pombe. If you
put on tempting clothes, men will even rape women. That’s how the
epidemic is spread. Young girls who tempt men and seduce men don’t
care about the epidemic; it’s an occupational hazard for them; it’s like a
house fly to be killed at the wound. It’s just normal.’
116 Community Theatre and AIDS

It is interesting to see that alcohol once again takes over the opening
comment – it seems to be the primary social determinant in Mumbaka.
And yet alcohol per se does not necessarily disclose anything about
the decisive responsibility of a sexually transmitted epidemic; it is not
like the parasite carried and transmitted by mosquito, but a concocted
drink that is predicted to lead to sexually careless actions. As mentioned
above, men know very well what will happen when they drink and they
drink anyway. This is partly due to a relinquished sense of responsibil-
ity, which men ascribe to external factors such as economy, culture,
history, but also women. In one sense, the old woman of the female
audience group reconfirmed this view by pointing to the risks of drink-
ing alcohol, dressing provocatively, and behaving nonchalantly. In
another sense, though, the attribution of responsibility is very much a
shared affair. If women act carelessly ‘men will even rape women’. This
is not the same thing as saying that women run the risk of contracting
HIV if they simply have casual sexual relations. Another participant
continues this discussion: ‘Women always go for the men who have
bought plenty of alcohol; so you find a group of men and you start
to get drunk. They have sex in big groups. It may be 20 men with one
woman.’ The responsibility is, again, pointed to women who act reck-
lessly, but this is said in relief against a quite brutal backdrop. It harks
back to the comment made by the young female three years earlier in
Mubaka about the woman who tempts men to have sex with her in a
pombe place. And it certainly indicates the accuracy of the rehearsal in
the youth centre three years ago.
The discussion dies down for a while, so I take the opportunity to ask
an interview question, namely about the reason behind prostitution.
A woman reflects back in time: ‘We had prostitution in the old days, but
it’s much worse now. A girl can be in primary school and become house
girls for wealthy or urban men and they are changed forever.’ Then
comes an older woman’s confession, which could very well motivate
an interpretation in a chapter of its own: ‘In our days we engaged in
prostitution, but there was no AIDS epidemic then (lakini hapakuwepo
ukimwi). In these days, God is angry and tired of people and has sent a
bad disease that cannot be cured, because they are not faithful to their
spouses. I enjoyed prostitution in my days, for there was no AIDS. We
could do it freely, without fear.’ It is not entirely clear what this utter-
ance actually asserts, but it does expose a cultural order where sexuality
has been used as a social refuge from an unfeasible domestic situation.
At this point, something happens in the group. It is as though we are
getting closer to a painful truth behind the public discourse on poverty,
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 117

alcohol, promiscuity, and morals – touching upon a culture-historical

volatility and personal insecurity which has had to be coped with by
clandestine means, long before AIDS came along. The group quiet down
again. In an attempt to keep the discussion alive, I take the opportunity
to ask an interview question about unfaithfulness in the community.
‘Instead of staying home and being faithful while my man is being
unfaithful’, replies a woman, ‘I just go out and find a man too. So we
all go out and get AIDS.’ The atmosphere is now slightly ill at ease.
Delphine asks if anyone would like to add anything before we break up.
Yet another discussant takes the opportunity: ‘Poverty is also a factor.
A woman thinks: I don’t have money and a man from Dar es Salaam
has money. Why should I refuse and starve? No, even when we know
that this man is HIV positive, we would go with him if he has money.’
This comment concluded the discussion and quite pertinently wrapped
up my three visits to Mumbaka, but also prompted a need for interpre-
tation of the cultural events I had witnessed as well as the speech acts
I had heard.
The rationale behind the decision to conduct FGDs after perform-
ances was to assess the efficacy of CBT as HIV prevention. The rehearsal
in Mumbaka youth centre in July 2003 was a simple piece that mixed
generic HIV preventive counsel with site-specific risk behaviours. I do
not know how many of villages in Marika ward the eventual perform-
ance visited, but I do know that it was accurate insofar as it dramatized
the most frequently propounded determinant in the FGDs as a leitmotif,
namely the abuse of alcohol in informal drinking places. The young
people chose to foreground a leading character with mannerisms that
were later anecdotally ascribed as pivotal triggers in the local epidemic,
namely a young drinking man with money. Under the influence he
listens to no one and walks away with one woman after another to
have sex without protection. It is astonishing to notice the similarities
between the dramatized young man and the so-called ‘young drunk’
from the FGD with the male Mumbaka audience. Hence the ostensive
characteristics and other mimetic features in the work-in-progress were
indeed realistic. The problem with AIDS in Mumbaka is, however, that
realistic correspondences between the performance and the social order
do not necessarily capture the real crux of the epidemic, since the lat-
ter is mainly impelled by invisible, taciturn, and other implicit factors.
The imperceptible virus is spread behind people’s curtains or in aloof
heterotopia, gives rise to ghostly diseases and is mainly transmitted by
means of untreated, and thus undisclosed, sexually transmitted infec-
tions. But the most significant determinant of AIDS, which turns it into
118 Community Theatre and AIDS

an epidemic, is a social affair sanctioned in lopsided gender relations.

FGDs serve to make the relations between the culture-historical arena
of human interaction and the unnoticeable medical factors of AIDS
perceptible and sensible. In other words, it points to a mimetic drama
beside public campaigns and medical programmes. This is, of course,
also what CBT is meant to do in public. However, the more discrete
FGDs also serve the derivable purpose of indicating that CBT may be
right about what it is doing and yet ineffective as HIV prevention. This
was not my intention when I initiated FGDs in my research project; the
aim was simply to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the
personal, performative, and societal relations of local epidemics. I did
not foresee that FGDs would be a methodological tool for the assess-
ment of CBT. What became clear, however, was that FGDs and CBT
could say the same things and yet the public appeal of the performances
would not necessarily further the aim of rallying a community against
AIDS. Hence there seems to be something about the performative out-
reach component that does not take effect. Let me try to explain this
in more detail before I resume the discussion about gender impeded
culture-historical regimes.
AIDS is a recent phenomenon that has actualized old predicaments.
Suddenly, these dormant predicaments threaten the future health of
vast populations. In a deductive manoeuvre, then, one may find it
problematic to apply contemporaneous countermeasures, such as CBT,
against an epidemic that is driven by entrenched behaviours and inher-
ited lifestyles. A performance such as the one in Mumbaka may very
well be viewed as an event about a recent medical crisis that should
be prevented by superimposed modern means like condoms, a mor-
ally sanctioned faithfulness, and a religiously motivated abstinence.
In peripheral villages like Mumbaka, where one finds unique mixes of
local traditions, Christian dogma, and modern lifestyles, these measures
may not even come near the critical issues of AIDS. The ABC model,
which obviously informed the script behind the rehearsal in the youth
centre, is a contemporary concept that is, and always has been, control-
led by men and powerful institutions.25 This brings me a step closer to
an interpretation of the performative malfunction of applied theatre
against AIDS.
It seems to be the case that initiatives to break the silence and bring
clandestine risk scenarios into the light are not enough to make CBT
efficacious as HIV prevention, even though it offers the only public
appearance of such scenarios in many places. This contradiction indi-
cates that something inept remains in the very basis, or the framework,
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 119

of performances and their project format. I believe this contradiction

can be detected in recent research on so-called Theatre for Development.
On the one hand, the versatile formation and wide-ranging application
has made TFD arguably the most celebrated genre in African theatre
today; on the other hand, this support has been tainted by a mistrust
of its efficacy due to a constant dependency on national and interna-
tional funding by organizations and agencies with special interests.
An analogous contradiction can be found in the post-colonial attitude
to performance on the whole in Tanzania. The performing arts, spear-
headed by the nation’s great variety of ritual dance (ngoma), represented
a pre-colonial legacy in Tanzania which President Nyerere himself called
to be revived with the help of cultural workers. The nostalgic notions
about a pre-colonial national theatre has been radically questioned in
the light of the commandeered deployment of cultural performance
troupes for political purposes as long as Tanzania was a one-party state,
and, more recently, the sparse public funding for the performing arts in
the educational system, as opposed to its celebratory symbolic use in
official functions such as during Independence Day. The fissures of the
mentioned contradictions can be traced all the way down to the village
level of Mumbaka. The implications of the contradiction do not pertain
to the performative element of theatre as much as the acknowledge-
ment of theatre. Apart from the ambiguous legacy of theatre as cultural
performance it is worth considering that it is young people who are
deployed to open and lead communal discussions on the taboo-laden
topics around AIDS through performance. I am convinced that the key
development of applied theatre today has to do with acknowledge-
ment.26 Let me concretize the issue of acknowledgement by redirecting
it toward the rehearsal in Mumbaka.
According to the focus group discussions I conducted after seeing the
performance in question, it seems clear that the epidemic in Mumbaka
is thriving on impoverished and socially unsafe women who sell their
bodies to drunk men with money who refuse to use condoms. To gear
the play in Mumbaka toward the issues of stigmatization and dis-
crimination of HIV-positive people, as was the case in the final scene
of the rehearsal, seems to be an officially correct preference to address
a generic problem with AIDS in accordance with the list of items that
organizations like UNICEF put together in their standard leaflets.27 But
this key scene can be interpreted another way since there is arguably
more to it than meets the eye. What we hear is a defeatist stance on
holding yet another political meeting that will lead to nothing but the
usual setbacks. The frustration then spills over into a diatribe against
120 Community Theatre and AIDS

an HIV-positive man, a hostility that is picked up by the group of peo-

ple, who eventually agrees to split up and cancel the meeting on the
spot. A conventional way of understanding this collective breakdown
would be to claim that the poverty stricken situation makes people so
frustrated that they start picking on the weakest individuals in society,
such as HIV-positive people. Another interpretation of the communal
collapse would be to see it as a more self-critical event by reversing the
state of affairs and suggest that the unsolved problems behind the AIDS
epidemic, which the frustrated man gets reminded of when seeing the
sick man, is in fact a cause of the political defeatism in the village.
If the gender-infected determinants of AIDS can be traced back through
the cultural practices and historical narratives in places like Mumbaka,
then poverty does not necessarily qualify as the root cause behind the
epidemic, but as a secondary cause behind a social division of labour,
economy, and sexuality.
It is not clear whether the mentioned ambiguity was a conscious or
unconscious reflection of the group, let alone whether it eventually gen-
erated post-performance discussions along the mentioned interpretive
lines, but regardless of this the open-ended drama points to a highly
interesting vicious circle. Again, it has to do with a domesticated gender
politics of economy whereby women are living in a permanent extreme
poverty while men may live in moderate poverty, at least periodically,
which means some extra money to spend. This is especially disturbing
since Mumbaka, like Likokona, is traditionally matrilineal and a place,
like most other places in East Africa, where women commonly work
much more than men in the agricultural sector. The inference of this
complex scenario would be that many men seem to be engaged in extra-
marital sex with the surplus of money that their wives have brought
into their household through hard labour in the fields.

A wider epidemic pattern

The rehearsal in Mumbaka youth centre showed the tip of the iceberg
of the mode of epidemic spread and its culture-historical rationale,
but that indicative semiotics is probably enough to stir up a debate
in performance events among community members who are well
aware of, but reserved about the hidden dimension of the scenarios.
The scene with the hard-hitting drunk man who has unprotected
sex for money with multiple women is, of course, not only indicative
of the social conditions of Mumbaka, but in many other places in
Mtwara and Mangaka districts (and elsewhere in Tanzania). It would
 Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance 121

not be meaningful to speak of the Mumbaka case unless it served as an

example of a wider epidemic pattern. The fact that the man who was
put at centre stage in Mumbaka was the one who assumed the female
role of having multiple sex partners over one night does not mean that
the more peripherally depicted women did not also have multiple part-
ners. (It would be interesting to pursue an interpretation of the man
with multiple partners in terms of a nostalgic behaviour of an inherited
but obsolete kinship custom of polygamy, but that lies outside the scope
of the present analysis.)
What was previously mentioned as a ‘double act of upfront challenge
and private resistance’ on behalf of young women in casual relations
turned out to be not only a consistent pattern of epidemic determi-
nants in the district, but also an analogue to the public and confidential
nature of community performances and FGDs respectively. In daily life,
women do not always have the power to say no to unprotected sex; in
performance, they can express such power but without a given social or
political mandate; and in FGDs, they talk about condom use but with-
out a public appeal. This is a problem not of awareness of AIDS or of an
willingness to break the silence about it, but a problem of powerlessness
due to a null and void official mandate. Young women represent the
weaker sex in their homes, in schools, in public spaces, in organiza-
tions, as well as in performance. In the light of the epidemic profile of
Mumbaka that crystallized through the mentioned rehearsal and the
subsequent FGDs, this weakness translates into a vulnerability within
the social dimension of the AIDS epidemic and thus a susceptibility to
the bodily transmission of the HIV virus.
When I asked the audience focus groups in 2006 if they had seen the
local group play theatre about AIDS, not one single discussant had seen
a performance. However, the fact that CBT can fall short due to weak
public staging in terms of official backing and that it may be viewed as
a new form of communal intervention does not mean that it should be
discarded as HIV prevention. Even under such circumstances, theatre
still provides a unique opportunity of education and life skills exercise
for young people; it still makes unseen and unmentionable scenarios
accessible in public; and it is, not least, a diachronic and syncretistic
mode of cultural performance that draws on ritual practice, culture-
specific stories, dances and songs, as well as new, contemporary themes
by means of international forms of participatory theatre. As opposed
to naive notions about CBT as an application of self-sufficient and
rapid problem-solving mechanism in cross-cultural conditions, I would
propose that it should become even more closely aligned to local ways
122 Community Theatre and AIDS

of living and governing. This double move suggests a simultaneous

bottom-up and top-down approach. I will save the discussion on such
advancements to the final chapter. But without appropriate political or
organizational backing CBT is not acknowledged as a legitimate media-
tion in Tanzanian communities and, as long as it is not acknowledged
as such, it will become a mimetic reflection of an epidemic condition
where women continue to be insecure second-class citizens and men go
on as agents of a doomed culture-historical potency.
4
A Deadly Paradox: Assessing the
Success/Failure of Community-
Based Theatre against AIDS

Assessing the efficacy of community-based theatre as HIV prevention

entails what could be called a deadly paradox: in the previous three
chapters, one case after another shows that the ultimate accomplish-
ment of this art of survival may be tantamount to failure. It may also
be the case, mutatis mutandis, that many HIV prevention projects in
Africa have succeeded in fulfilling their own stated goals and yet had
no effect whatsoever on the epidemic. These inferences hinge on two
pivotal and potentially contentious notions: first, the communicative
routes of the epidemic and, second, the capability of theatre to identify
and disrupt such routes. At face value, theatre ought to be the most auspi-
cious mode of HIV prevention since its instantiation is so similar to the
social situations whereby the virus is acquired. This was the hypothesis
of the research project in the light of a number of stipulations. And if
it is possible to identify the ghostly virus and its intersubjective com-
munication, then it also ought to be possible to show and tell how it is
possible to counteract the HIV incidences. With a retrospective through
the previous chapters, the assessment of theatre has been broadened
to consider its culture-specific pertinence and democratic potential
as HIV prevention; CBT has, moreover, been recognized as a mode of
intervention in a crises, with methods adaptable according to social
predicaments rather than an invariable ritual regulation; furthermore,
it has been distinguished as a form of performance that brings out back-
stage issues of the most susceptible epidemic cohorts to deal with them
in dialogue with the general public in local circumstances. Despite the
timeliness, suppleness, and prowess of CBT, however, it would be naive
not to say mistaken, and thus a great disfavour to its performers, to say
that CBT is logically effective as HIV prevention. For that to be the case,
the performers as well as the outcome of their action research would
123
124 Community Theatre and AIDS

have to be taken much more seriously by organizations, agencies, coor-

dinators, and leaders. The assessment therefore shifts over to another
register of research, namely one about the political limits and possibili-
ties of implementing effective HIV prevention at all.
The pandemic, which used to be viewed as a medical issue but
which is now, more sensibly, considered as a chronic societal and
political condition, has exacerbated notorious concerns like poverty
and health care on a continent that already lagged behind the rest of
the world for decades in these areas.1 The pandemic has undermined
institutions that people rely on such as education, marriage, political
functions, judicial bodies, kinship systems, ritual regimes, and faith-
based organizations. It took many countries, Tanzania among them,
about twenty years to acknowledge that the key determinants of
AIDS hinged on social relations rather than biomedical conditions
or informational stipulations. Along with the abnormally long time
of the asymptomatic infection, the culture of silence on sexuality,
disease, and death makes the epidemic exceptionally hard to control.
Reducing the understanding of the epidemic to medical and informa-
tional matters has given national authorities and the international aid
industry reasons to sustain their discrete developmental programmes
and discourses. Monetary and educational aid projects are, of course,
much easier to control and quantify than ‘soft’ cultural programmes
with local ownership over projects geared by critical inquiries, action
research, and suggestions of long-term changes in social behaviour and
gender relations. The latter approaches have no translation manual
for efficacy vis-à-vis results to be readily displayed in glossy pamphlets
with succinct results on behalf of international aid organizations, but
require formative and continuous assessments by mixed means of
communication, observation, and interpretation. There are no simple
or rapid measurements to be done for gender trouble or existential
fatalism, nor changes thereof.
The specialty of CBT is, of course, to operate by keeping a sharp
focus on local states of affairs. Again, this seemingly auspicious
quality can be perceived as detrimental if experts and authorities run
ahead of themselves by looking for macro-political solutions to local
challenges. In order to identify epidemic determinants within site-
specific epidemics, HIV preventive projects must work as closely as
possible with the social agents of the epidemic, preferably by direct
involvement. This is the first of many ways in which theatre coin-
cides with the impetus of AIDS. The relatively young social actors that
drive the epidemic belong to the same cohort that takes the greatest
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 125

interest in applied theatre and thus become theatrical actors. Mobilizing

the most susceptible groups – for example, young uneducated men that
hang around public hubs for labour opportunities and young unedu-
cated women who work in the field and take care of domestic matters
without much social esteem or public influence – are certainly not
given participants in theatre projects, but since theatre group members
are of the same age and background and consequently know the most
susceptible individuals, the mobilization and referential scope of the
performances do at least encompass them. In a group interview with
gender-divided segments of the audience after a performance the dia-
logue turned personal:

Man: Nobody knows how the youth groups are formed. We just see them
at performances. We are worried that they are not the right people.
Later another man asks: Is he [i.e., me] a donor of a group?
Delphine Njewele (my research assistant): No, he is an independent
researcher.
Man: OK, if he is a researcher then he should hear the truth. The youth
groups are not formed by the right people. When the authorities hear
about a group being established, they go to the villages and pick their
own relatives for the groups. This group is not functioning, unless
someone comes and pays for them.
(Mpindimbi, Masasi district, 26 August 2006)

This piece of information may or may not be true, and should certainly
not be interpreted as a general fact, but the matter of involving the most
concerned individuals is a standing issue that must not be underesti-
mated in organized theatre. If a theatre group consists of exclusively
talkative role models, it is highly likely that it misses some crucial epi-
demic predicaments, such as the taboo-laden, taciturn, marginalizing,
and oppressive aspect of AIDS.
In the light of the intricate challenges to mobilize relevant individu-
als, capture the epidemic make-up within the format of community
performances, engender post-performance discussions, and instigate
follow-up programmes, it is fair to say that AIDS has driven African CBT
up against its limits. Contrary to passé developmental discourses and
clichéd academic jargons, there is, in my experience and opinion, no
assurance about the facility of applied theatre to empower communal
groups or change social life when it comes to AIDS. Applied theatre
may, as Helen Nicholson (2006) writes, implicate a gift with ambiguous
implications in Mauss’s sense of the concept. On the one hand, it offers
126 Community Theatre and AIDS

cultural participation with ample freedom of expression, but on the

other hand, it is subject to highly uncertain exchange meanings and
values in its encounter with target audiences. Certain kinds of applied
theatre, such as community theatre, gives access to artistic research on
matters which are as useful as they are painful to explore; the reciprocat-
ing response, when the times comes to do something about what has
been scrutinized, is frequently one of achievement and further Theatre
against AIDS may be seen as a gift that most people need but almost
nobody wants.

CBT as epidemiological counteraction

In an overarching epidemiological context AIDS can be said to have

turned CBT into one of its symptoms, which is apparent in dramatic
situations whose breaking points transgress liminal boundaries of ethi-
cal tolerance, existential attitudes, and communal actions. And if AIDS
is a set of symptoms with social determinants, the real disease is a
political syndrome of insufficient democratic opportunities for power-
less people. In this chapter I will pursue a question that comes close to
the political crux of AIDS, namely the lack of follow-up programmes in
theatre projects. It is, of course, normally not advisable to investigate
something non-existent, but in this case it is necessary for the assess-
ment of CBT in the extended political field.
Before I go into greater detail in consequentialist analyses and recom-
mendations, it is worth reminding the reader about some basic premises
and modus operandi of CBT projects. The wider discussion of efficacy will
also be preceded, just as in the previous chapters, by an example whose
community event can epitomize and offer substance to the subsequent
analysis. The critical research question was always quite simple: what is
it, here and now, that causes the virus to spread from person to person,
and from group to group? When the determinants, or risk factors, have
been identified and mapped out by a local group on their home turf,
attempts are made to identify the epidemic routes in virtue of people’s
shared experiences of social crises, their traditional ways of redressing
cognate critical conditions, as well as their ability to take action against
new crises.2 To access and counteract the determinants behind AIDS it
is necessary to mobilize the most relevant local individuals and civil
society groups. These ‘amateur experts’ are aware of their own situ-
ational limits and possibilities, but are also ready to acknowledge a crisis
without given empirical solutions or premeditated messages – unlike
much previous applied theatre, such as the typically agenda-driven or
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 127

task-based Theatre for Development. In the nationwide HIV prevention

scheme launched by UNAIDS in Tanzania a few years ago (Mazzuki
2002), theatre projects against AIDS was viewed as a central part of the
scheme, involving so-called ‘community mapping’, in which particu-
lar risk sites are ascribed stories of events informing a rough draft for
eventual performances. The ‘scripts’ in amateur driven CBT are mostly
verbally composed sketches and always leave a lot of space for improvi-
sation. The scope of improvisation allows, in effect, for local variations
in plots as troupes travel their own districts, where wards and villages in
close proximity can typify quite disparate risk scenarios.
In connection to the community mapping and its allocation of narra-
tivized incidents, daily routines and events are tricky to ventilate if they
coincide with sexual affairs, not least extra-marital relations. It may, for
instance, be guesthouses, marketplaces, or schoolyards that are viewed
as the sites for casual or transactional sex; there may be unsafe paths for
women fetching water at remote wells, or along smaller roads with spo-
radic traffic or other unreliable heterotopia. The most crucial epidemic
hub, though, is the private household. Most spectators know about, or
will at least have heard of, sexual relations in all of the mentioned loci
and most people surely know about their own homes as a risk site. This
is part of the alienation effect of CBT performances: to confront audi-
ences with issues they are well aware of, but do not verbalize or act out
in the presence of each other.
The community mapping converges with site-specific performances
where spectators are aware not only of the intimate problems but also
the local performers. By breaking the silence on issues like sexuality,
stigmatization, disease and death, by exposing unseen affairs and pri-
vate conflicts, disclosing the secret acts of initiation rites, casting doubt
over religious dogma, embodying the bedridden in the dark corners
of houses, and letting the vigil of family members of dying parents or
children come into public view, the representational distance between
actors and spectators collapses into performative acts – particularly in
Austin’s (1962) functional sense – where shows cut so close to the bone
of matters that they become the matter. By enacting life-size situations
in the public domain with, and for, directly involved social actors and
performing the ailing and dying in broad daylight, the theatre stands in
for former rites of afflictions on a par with current epidemic incidences.
The countless numerals in statistical incidence and mortality rates
come alive in events where one’s spouse or next-door neighbour may
turn out to be a typical representation of what otherwise appears as an
outlandish scourge. Furthermore, the audience becomes an integral part
128 Community Theatre and AIDS

of the blocking, as it were, of HIV preventive scenarios. To emphasize

the participatory dimension, a Joker commonly steps into the breach of
the open-ended plot and asks people what they are going to do. ‘Was
it a fair depiction?’, ‘Do these things happen among us?’, ‘And, if so,
what are we going to do about them?’ In other words the spectator gets
reminded of his or her double role as theatrical witness and social player
in the communal events. They also know that they have to act upon
such appeals if they want to sleep comfortably that night.
It is interesting to see how community groups can situate the epi-
demic in their own communal time and space. In a Kenyana village
near the Ugandan border in the Kagera region a group is still composing
and performing songs that contextualize the epidemic outbreak in the
early 1980s in detail:

Come gather mothers and fathers […] We now know that AIDS
is the problem […] It was first seen in Kanyigo village and then
poured over the border at Mutukula […] People didn’t know and
left behind orphans who became street children […] Tanzanians and
Ugandans thought they had bewitched each other […] in 1981 doc-
tors announced that it is a virus which weakens your immune system
[…] AIDS is caused by sex […] Please stop drinking and taking drugs
[…] We urge you to change behaviour to survive […]
(Kenyana village, 19/03/2004; the cited phrases are
taken from two songs performed at the occasion)

This is an example of how a historical record gets lyrically inscribed in a

live storytelling tradition, invoking the communal reverberations of an
incarnated ‘we’ on behalf of those who passed on (cf. the last phrase).
It may seem as rudimentary information for people who already knows
the risks and consequences of the epidemic, but it is in fact directed at
new generations for whom AIDS is a brand new threat. For older gen-
erations, spiritual and narrative songs about the epidemic may carry a
communal sentiment which brings them to tears. Somewhat in contrast
to such lyrical compositions, propagandist political choirs hammer out
more pragmatic advice for the purpose of proactive, protective, and
collective actions. Both types of choirs often appear in similar styles
in terms of costumes and movements. The aesthetic and technical
consolidation has its pros and cons as it brings people together under
the guidance of life-saving messages or admonitions, while it can also
hinder fine-tuned dissidents or sub-cultural depictions of the epidemic
onslaught.
13 A community group performs a dance before the theatre performance in the village of Kenyana, Kagera region

129
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
130 Community Theatre and AIDS

The Joker in Kenyana poses his questions after the songs. The villag-
ers remain quiet for a while. It is not just that a painful past has been
unearthed and that pragmatic questions for action followed, a scorch-
ing sun also forces everyone to seek shade under the slender banana tree
leaves. The local politicians and elders sit on one side, the schoolchildren
are scattered on the ground, while the rest of the villagers sit around the
temporary ‘stage’ area. In the background, quite significantly, is a pri-
mary school and a little further away the local government office. ‘We
should establish a fund for orphans’, a man suggests in the local tongue
Ruhaya. The Joker asks: ‘How?’ No one answers. ‘Discuss it!’ the Joker
insists. After some muffled and stumbling exchanges, the Joker puts the
matter on its head: ‘Are we poor? Can we start a fund? How many work?
How many can help with 500? 300? [Tanzanian shillings, about 20–40
US cents; my remark].’ A man who presents himself as a mechanic says:
‘God help me, I’m poor!’ But a fellow spectator ripostes: ‘We should sit
down together and find a way. We are not so poor that we cannot help
our children to go to school.’ The Joker pushes that train of thought
further: ‘If you have 800 workers and they contribute with 500 shilling
each, you would get 400,000. That’s ten orphans in school!’
So far so good. The post-performance discussion lands in a promising
plan for the local orphans. This kind of fund raising is something I have
witnessed in other villages in Kagera region, where several hundred
thousands of orphans are currently living and dying. It is also some-
thing which people should be aware of in the Northern hemisphere.
No matter how much foreign aid a country receives, the overwhelming
support for people affected by AIDS and other far-reaching crises is, and
will always be, communal and, ultimately, familial (in Africa pertaining
to so-called extended family systems).3 Local donations for orphans are
tremendously important, but not a test of what state-of-the-art CBT
against AIDS can achieve since it exemplifies an instrumental response
by a one-way communicative message and offers a temporary remedy to
an enduring predicament. After the choir, the theatre ensues and things
are about to get much more complicated.

The multiple lives and deaths of Neema

A man comes back to his house after a long absence only to find his
family in shambles. The mother has lost control over their two teenaged
sons, who either keep fighting each other or smoking opium in their
ragged clothes, probably out of the boredom of being stuck between
disrupted schooling and permanent unemployment. The older brother
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 131

barely takes notice of his homecoming father, not even when he is

handed a gift from him. It is obvious that the father tries to re-establish
his authority as head of family by material means. This is seen as futile
by the older brother who soon picks a fight with him.
The paternal role has less than decent traits. As soon as the father is
left alone in the house, he calls out for the housemaid Neema. In a sof-
tened voice, he addresses her as his daughter. In that personal vein she
takes the opportunity to ask for a pay raise. He says she will indeed get
something extra and drags her into a room – a booth covered with cloth
in the middle of the play area – where he has sex with her. As so often
during such scenes, the audience emits a scattered and embarrassed
giggle. The sex scene is then repeated when the older brother forces
Neema to have sex with him in the same place, and then threatens
her to keep quiet about it. The audience giggles again. Like a farce, the
scene is then repeated again when the younger brother coerces Neema
to have sex. This time the audience laughs nervously as the farce turns
into tragedy.4

14 The older brother grabs Neema’s hand after demanding sex from her
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
132 Community Theatre and AIDS

The rest of the intrigue is predictable although mordantly sad.

A nurse visits the house – incidentally from Ndolage hospital where
the first AIDS case in Tanzania was diagnosed in 1983 – and announces
that Neema has just died from an AIDS-related disease. Panic whips the
senses back to reality among the male family members. In a distressed
state, the mother also figures out the plot and so the family that used
to be only geographically disintegrated implodes into a jumble of social
remains beyond remedy in their own home. Later a priest makes a visit
and reads from Corinthians: ‘[…] now remains faith, hope, love, these
three; but the greatest of these is love.’ After the recitation, the clergy-
man grimly asks what happened to love in the house. It is a good ques-
tion, but begs numerous other more or less related questions (which
cannot be posed nor answered within the format of this article). One
of the more provocative follow-up questions is whether a woman like
Neema could actually afford real love in her lifetime.5
So what can an audience say after an in-your-face tragicomedy on
AIDS? Well, everyone seemed to be taken aback by the straightforward
depiction of sexual abuse. Before a word was uttered the children were
escorted back to school. After a lingering silence – which is, of course, as
telling as any discourse – a man suggests that the family in the play, just
as families in real life, perished due to sexual greed. The spectator went
on to say that this theme was merely mentioned in the songs, while the
theatre made it a key theme. His remarks went uncommented, perhaps
because it tapped into a religious discourse of cupidity and guilt that
is too abstract to do something about on the spot. The next comment
by a younger woman was also religiously correct: ‘Being honest in your
marriage is a crucial issue’, she said, and added a warning against the
use of drugs and alcohol. The truth is that the audience did not have
too many things to say about the performance – the post-performance
discussion soon stagnated and died out.
There are two major causes for the communicative breakdown in
Kenyana, apart from the obvious fact that it is always awkward to
discuss sexual matters in public (which is as true in the North as in
Africa). First of all, in 2004 seeing a performance on the deadly impact
by, and on, infected families as a result of AIDS was to arrive at an
eschatological abyss between a defeatist rock and a deadly place. Taking
an HIV test with a bad outcome back then could, at best, imply an
altruistic act that gestured toward an individual behaviour change to
save others’ lives (cf. Reynolds Whyte 1997: ch. 9). This was, of course,
several years after anti-retroviral medicines were introduced and made
available for infected people in the Northern hemisphere. Today ARVs
15 Audience in the village of Kenyana

133
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
134 Community Theatre and AIDS

are available in selected hospitals in Kagera region, such as already

mentioned Ndorage, which does not mean that more than a fraction
of the sick actually gets access to therapy. According to epidemiologists
Gideon Kwesigabo (interview 29 May 2007) and Stefan Hanson (2007),
predicted scenarios show that only about 25 per cent to 30 per cent of
the sick will get access to ARV therapies in the near future.
The other cause behind the communicative breakdown in Kenyana
is more complex and has to do with a problematic mix of social and
ethnic traditions, patriarchal supremacy, generational discrepancies,
and other gender-related predicaments. Yes, I do generalize the com-
plex of problems by pulling together a range of historical and culture-
specific issues in terms of gender inequities. This is what science is about:
finding related causes behind symptomatic issues. But in this case, it is
not a matter of boiling down a deductive theory to explain reality, but
an inductive procedure whereby a series of different, and sometimes
contradictory, cases can be interpreted as cognate exemplifications of a
particular phenomenon, namely how HIV is contracted through sex in
situations where women, especially, do not act out of pleasure or other
voluntary incentives. Women are not, however, the only subjugated
gender cohort under the current epidemic conditions, but they do share
some risk scenarios with the general stratum of young men. Young men
and women – more than half of the population in sub-Saharan Africa are
under 20 years of age – are the most susceptible strata in the African AIDS
pandemic and, not coincidentally, the ones who make most use of CBT.
The reason for this is that CBT arguably is the most democratic response
to the most serious democratic challenge for decades in African countries
(cf. de Waal 2006). Young people are open for identity formation and
therefore clash with older and more obstinate spectators (Klink 2000).
A play performed the same week (11 March 2004), in the same dis-
trict as the Kenyana performance, presented cognate predicaments. In
Ijumbe village a group enacted the cruel exploitation of a housemaid
trapped in the same tight spot as Neema, that is, the double bind of hav-
ing one of the rare wage employments available for young rural women
in Tanzania at the price of having a sexually abusive employer. Many
poverty stricken women find themselves forced to become sex slaves,
not least if they have children to support. In Ijumbe the vicious circle
turned into a triple bind when an orphaned girl is hired as a maid by
a businessman who takes sexual advantage of her. In a deeply moving
story, it is the girl’s alcoholic aunt who puts her up for sale and who
ultimately becomes dependent on the girl as she falls ill from AIDS-
related diseases. Abuse of alcohol is as commonly referred to as a cause
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 135

of the epidemic as is gender abuse and is just as obviously linked to the

underlying problem of poverty.
After the performance, the Ijumbe group put on a dance and a hymn
for the vendors and visitors at a local marketplace. As always everyone
enjoyed the upbeat ngoma and a few joined in. The dirge that followed
about AIDS, however, caused nearly each and every man to turn back
to their market activities. It is hard to say precisely what caused most
men to steer away from the sombre choir, but it appeared to be a mat-
ter of priority, that the market activities became more important in the
moment of lament. If so, it would serve as a metonymy of the gender
roles which have become more and more evident throughout this
study, namely that of the more outgoing and monetary male pursuits
and the more domestic and caring responsibilities of women in contem-
porary Tanzania. It also reflects the preferences in the FGDs spoken of
in Chapter 3, where women tended to put more emphasis on existing
and familial concerns, while men were inclined to stress developmental
issues. At any rate, it is probably the most evident gender divisive social
gesture I have witnessed in connection with performances on AIDS and
confirmed the importance of capturing young males in ongoing iden-
tity formations by means of theatre, before they are cast in this more
mature masculine matrix.
Yet another similar plot was dramatized in Bugandika (10 August
2006), when a woman with a drinking husband takes her orphaned niece
into her household. The village is located in a severely affected part of
northern Kagera region – just a few miles from Kanyigo village that was
mentioned as the epidemic fountainhead in the choir mentioned above –
and, to the horror of the young woman, her auntie soon dies. At the
funeral the drunkard husband begs the community residents for help,
but despite his shaky state people deny him support since he always
refused to cooperate with the village in their common funding for
people in his present situation. Things go from bad to worse as the
niece finds herself cornered in the man’s house and ends up being
raped. In the end, nearly everybody is found HIV positive (in light of
the epidemic history of the village this is a quite realistic scenario). The
suggested outcome is, again, fundraising for the orphan centre. This
means that performances by three separate community groups share a
thematic triangulation by typifying young poor or orphaned females as
the leading roles in their action research on AIDS. Hence, understand-
ing viable epidemic counteractions is not only a matter of widening the
view from a medical perspective to that of a social horizon, but also of
being able to focus in on quite distinct key roles and actors in social life.
136 Community Theatre and AIDS

Nelson Mandela has said that AIDS calls for a ‘social revolution’ (quote
in Hansson 2007), a notion that may become feasible if, but only if,
radically reformed gender roles are sanctioned to be the avant-garde in
civil life.
In the case of the performances in Kenyana, Ijumbe, and Bugandika,
the actors and spectators are up against a historical horizon with sce-
narios not only of colonial disruptions of societal structures, but also a
domestic history of gender inequity where the pre-colonial Haya king-
doms used tribute systems of slave girls (later encouraged by German
colonialists) and where women in post-colonial times have found
themselves driven into systematic prostitution in order to cope with a
lack of inheritance rights, land rights, and other civil and human rights.
In her excellent book Women in Development: A Creative Role Denied?
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), Marja-Liisa Swantz writes a well
researched chapter on the culture-historical situation for Haya women
and draws the conclusion that:

prostitution has been the Haya women’s response to the conditions

which have too often treated the woman as an inferior being, a com-
modity of exchange, a tenant and a servant who could be dismissed
at the will of the husband, and used for producing children who were
then stolen from her.
(Swantz 1984: 76–7)

Despite recent legal reforms, the hierarchical, polygamous, and patrilin-

eal legacy of traditional Haya societies is still quite obvious in Kagera.
The democratic relevance of CBT against AIDS has to do with substi-
tuting health issues for ideologically fettered political agendas and
religious dogmas. Ethical and political issues are no doubt intricately
linked with health, but in my opinion issues of life and death outweigh
dichotomies like right or wrong, or the political left and right. Brecht
knew that when he formulated the motto, ‘food first, then morality’ in
The Threepenny Opera. CBT is – or should be – an open-ended mode of
action research rather than a norm driven deployment of ideological,
pedagogical, or other special interests. The inductive exploration of
epidemiological conditions does not lend itself exclusively to written
research or lab practice so much as it extends also to people with local
knowledge and life skills. If action research is allowed to function on a
culture-specific level, it can flesh out vital features and distinctions in
risk analyses that otherwise get diluted when issues are elevated to a
conceptual, institutional, or other type of generalized level of reasoning.
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 137

One of the most common generalizations in discourses on AIDS in sub-

Saharan Africa is the view that poverty is the root cause of the spread of
HIV. Needless to say, there is some truth in this argument but it is, nev-
ertheless. vague; it does not serve very well as social analysis or cultural
interpretation, and it is not practically adaptable in preventive interven-
tions. Action research such as CBT does not bring closure to inquiries
by quantifying issues, it keeps processes and outcomes open as long as
social actors are working out issues. All too often in social research on
AIDS there is the risk of an epidemiological fallacy in the sense that
investigations merely map out and descriptively enumerate risk factors,
whereby numerous small truths may add up to one big lie, namely the
idea that AIDS is an infinitely complex and permanent quandary. But
that may very well be a reflection of the scientific mapping exercise as
such. AIDS is about the routines of daily living and livelihood; the ques-
tion is how the routines can be opened up for discussion and plausible
change between spouses, neighbours, teachers, politicians, religious
leaders, elders, parents, and children. It is about social relations within
and between public institutions and domestic regimes. CBT takes
epidemiological and other quantitative research into account – many
places in Africa are full of facts and rumours about overwhelming inci-
dence rates and prevalence trends – but instead of leaving matters on
a descriptive level or aiming for explanatory closure, applied theatre is
enacting facts, accounts, and stories through performative means that
show and tell audiences how actions can be transposed from action to
interaction and, ultimately, to counteraction. Poverty can be counter-
acted if household economies as well as property and land rights are
treated not as abstract, historical facts, but as man-made contemporary
predicaments.
After witnessing more than a hundred CBT performances on AIDS
in Tanzania and other places in Africa in recent years, I have identi-
fied the most consistently depicted determinant of HIV/AIDS as gender
discriminatory household economies and their links to transactional
sex. In fact, performances on gender issues do not even have to allude
to AIDS for the audience to understand what danger it poses to young
women in the epidemic. I saw a simple performance in Masasi town
(17 July 2003) in which a woman gets so frustrated over her domes-
ticated and impoverished situation that she physically attacks her
husband. It soon turns out that he spends their money on a second wife
(a so-called nyumba ndogo) in another house. There was no mentioning
of AIDS in the show and yet every spectator knows which kinds of risk
a situation like this implies in terms of health.
138 Community Theatre and AIDS

16 A woman pushes a man after finding out about his second wife; perform-
ance in Masasi town, Mtwara region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

Almost all of the groups and performances that the research project
has examined have revealed clear examples of unequally distributed
poverty. In the focus group discussions and interviews with group
members and spectators of the performances, it has been uncommon
not to mention poverty as the cause of the epidemic. It is just that
when men speak of poverty, it is job related or even macro-politically
argued against, whilst women generally speak of poverty as a familial
predicament. Hence, the discourse of poverty is in itself indicative of an
entrenched deadlock to the solution of poverty insofar as it is ingrained
behind the institutionalized gender divisions of the private versus pub-
lic, submissive versus assertive, protective versus proactive.

Towards a community-based theatre as a relational agency

AIDS has brought with it the greatest democratic challenge in Africa

since the time of independence. It is a bodily syndrome that breaks
down a person’s immune system, but it is also a societal set of symptoms
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 139

that weakens any community’s immunity to critique. This may

seem like a far-fetched analogy between a particular corporeality
and a general order of things. In terms of a communicable disease,
however, HIV is a virus that always runs the risk of spreading if the right
to one’s own body and mind is violated in a certain society. This applies
not only to the current African state of affairs, but also to local govern-
ments, religious authorities, educational systems, non-governmental
organizations, and (post-)colonial ramifications of global trade policies.
There is no way around this complex body of influences so long as one
identifies the cultural contexts of the disease.
As a complex cultural syndrome AIDS has forced CBT to go beyond,
on the one hand, the notion of rapid conflict solving with target groups
on specific developmental tasks and, on the other hand, the idea of a
more basic awareness for those directly involved with theatre. The syn-
drome challenged the culture-historical limitations of CBT by urging it,
according to theatre for development researcher David Kerr, to focus on
‘sexual issues previously thought of as taboo’, ‘attitudes to women and
children’, and ‘issues of human rights and social exclusion’.6 In effect,
once theatre practitioners recognized and counteracted the intricate
epidemic challenges, they also challenged the limitations of current
HIV-prevention projects by bringing them out of the medical realm of
white-collar edification to the public arena of participatory practices,
where alternative life skills are enacted by community residents. I do
not believe it is a coincidence that the two Tanzanian regions (Kagera
and Mbeya; see Kwesigabo 2001 and Jordan-Harder 2004 respectively)
where decreases in AIDS prevalence trends and HIV incidence rates have
been recorded have had an abundance of active theatre groups involved
in AIDS control programmes.
It is not possible to change an epidemic by either discrete perform-
ances or projects or with an ideological awareness as such. The epidemic
challenges have brought about typological as well as functional conse-
quences for the theatre. The typological consequence has to do with the
historical trajectory of community theatre, from its didactic foundation
in colonial times to its autonomous formation in post-colonial times,
which again needs to be unpacked, re-evaluated, and rewritten as a
cultural practice. Sustainable self-reliance is a vital condition for groups
who are fighting for free speech and the liberty of association, but the
naive notion of artists as ‘floating islands’ (cf. Barba 1986) can also be
an isolating factor if the task is about wider issues than the endurance
of theatre groups. The functional consequence has to do with strategic
objectives other than change. With associations to political ‘revolution’
140 Community Theatre and AIDS

and ‘self-determination’, the practice of CBT has come to define itself

as an ‘alternative practice’, and ‘the end point to this exploration of the
alternative, and the “other” as an instrument of alienation and subjuga-
tion, is to seek a point of equilibrium or change’ (Kidd 1973a, b; Salhi
1998; Abah 2002).
The course of actions as planned and implemented in theatre against
AIDS should not aim for change a priori, but rather function as a critical
examination – a form of comprehensive action research – of the con-
ditions for people to lead healthy and constructive lives. Communal
intervention becomes necessary in generalized epidemics, so it is not
a matter of group dynamics as in drama-in-education, drama therapy,
or so-called process drama (Simpson and Heap 2002). Theatre activi-
ties should bond and bridge social capital within and between groups
(Campbell 2003: 55–8; Putnam 2000). The debate about political self-
determination versus donor affiliations is an old one for community
theatre, as well as for civil society groups versus governmental influ-
ences (Kerr 2002, 1995; Kasfir 1998). Discursive and economic self-reli-
ance is, of course, important as resistance to post-colonial didacticism,
academic elitism and authoritarian top-down projects, but once civil
society groups working against AIDS have been established, they need
to align themselves and coordinate their schemes with associated pro-
grammes. The argument I want to make and urge for more research
around has to do with a fundamental revision of the idea of an effica-
cious community theatre, especially as pertaining to the AIDS epidemic
and cognate complex crises, by emphasizing its crucial qualities as a
relational means for change, a generic nexus in local peer-education
programmes and comprehensive schemes in the public sector, rather
than a means in itself or a means for rapid change. Theatre is, of course,
a small device in the pandemic apparatus, a petty franchise in the big
business of AIDS aid in Africa, but it is the link that can join the weakest
parts in the chain of HIV preventive measures if aligned with relatable
efforts. The performances I have referred to take place in public hubs of
social life. A stone’s throw from these performance grounds there will be
one or two schools, a couple of churches, a mosque, a hospital, miscel-
laneous workplaces, community centres, a court building, a prison and
various NGOs. In most places, none of these institutions or organiza-
tions invites young people’s theatre groups, nor do they get encouraged
by authorities to do so. When I revisited the 20 theatre groups that
I first met a few years ago, it soon became clear that well-connected
groups were still doing well (regardless of whether they were sponsored
or not), while the more isolated groups were waning.
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 141

The AIDS epidemic is as serious as it ever was and will remain so

for many years. New generations need to be offered opportunities for
participatory life skills and peer-education programmes, they need to
be recruited and to recruit peers to counselling and voluntary testing
centres and thereby get access to the newly introduced anti-retroviral
drug therapies, and they need to be taken seriously by politicians and
other stakeholders. The time for pilot projects is over and it is high time
for the realization of follow-up programmes in cooperation with schools,
hospitals, people living with HIV or AIDS, elders, NGOs, governmental
agencies, and so forth. A few serious programmes have been rolled out,
such as the coordinated multi-sectoral approaches in a nationwide
Tanzanian District Response Initiative (DRI) organized by the Tanzania
Commission for HIV/AIDS (TACAIDS), in which Community Mapping
and Theatre against AIDS (COMATAA) held a central place. But it is one
thing to plan programmes in Dar es Salaam, and quite another to imple-
ment them at community level. Progress is constantly made on paper,
but seldom in situ. At a meeting with TACAIDS (4 September 2006),

17 A young man presents a plan for a ‘youth friendly centre’ in Muleba town,
Kagera region
(Photo: Ola Johansson)
142 Community Theatre and AIDS

I was told that youth are represented in district committees in line with
the DRI guidelines, but that their influence had not yet been evaluated.
Still later (21 May 2007), I interviewed programmers from the same
organization and they said that theatre will not be part of the new mid-
term scheme (2008–12) for district responses to AIDS.7 To this I want to
say that they did not even try it out or evaluate it properly, but rather
gave up the attempt.
The lack of evident progress in HIV prevention in Masasi district is
having concrete effects on theatre groups. While many groups are doing
well in the Kagera region, where the health-care system, youth centres,
and governmental agencies are conducting coordinated work (at least
in some places), things are worse in Mtwara region. Some groups have
simply given up; on my random revisits three years after my initial
fieldwork, most village residents I met confirmed that they had not
taken part in theatre events for a long time, which usually indicates
a general absence of prevention activities. In the village of Lukuledi
(24 August 2006), a group presented a ‘variety show’ of old-style strug-
gle songs, poetry, and speeches, obviously intended for visiting polit-
ical delegations and potential donors. In the village of Mikangaula (29
August 2006), a remaining fraction assembled just to hear in a quite
passive fashion what the muzungu (white person) had to offer them.
I had to remind them that I am a researcher, not a donor. The already
mentioned group in Likokona sang a highly ironic shairi (poem) in 2003
about failing UNICEF promises; three years later (28 August 2006) when
I revisited, they were still highly interesting as they put on an innova-
tive performance on the local epidemic scenario with a provocative
ending for post-performance discussions. They had apparently stopped
waiting for support at a certain point and managed to finance and
organize their own activities. In Mpindimbi (25 August 2006), a youth
group performed a meta-theatrical piece about seminars that people
attend but forget about as soon as they get drunk. The thematic range
of these performances suggests that the CBT in Mtwara is either vanish-
ing or turning towards its own performative conditions of conducting
HIV prevention.

Recommendations

The findings of my research project indicate a war lost after victory in

every battle. The studied projects in Tanzania mobilize the most sus-
ceptible epidemic cohorts and offer them participatory and gender bal-
anced means to catalyse experiences, discourses, and life skills through
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 143

local modes of traditional performance as well as contemporary interna-

tional drama methods. The performances consistently attract consider-
able crowds who are exposed to, and often prone to share, taboo-laden
topics and, at best, follow-up ventures. In FGDs with members of
theatre groups as well as audiences, backstage perspectives toward risk
scenarios consistently verify the validity of action research through
performances by theatre groups. Rural young women repeatedly testify
that theatre is their only access to public opinion and participation in
the development of a sustainable and secure civil society. In interviews
with villagers as well as programme directors, almost all who have come
in contact with theatre perceive it as a serious and significant form of
HIV prevention. Government representatives and non-governmental
organizations usually praise its emotional and communicative impact.
As opposed to economically or biomedically driven campaigns, how-
ever, the perceptible appeal and sensitive pursuit of theatre projects
makes it akin to archaic ideas of female qualities. Few organizations
or agencies have anything qualitative to say about the efficacy or real
impact of theatre in the greater scheme of AIDS. Epidemiologists and
politicians still quantify projects and programmes in terms of the
reached number of people vis-à-vis estimated incidence and prevalence
rates for areas of implementation, but seldom make qualitative evalu-
ations of the need for interventions with culture-specific means for
susceptible or subjugated groups. The most serious conclusion to be
drawn from this is that even if an intervention driven by theatre were
successful as an epidemic diagnosis and counteraction, it would not be
noticed by project stakeholders, let alone policy-makers who collate and
evaluate reports on AIDS campaigns.
The flip side to this dilemma is simply to presuppose the facility of
applied theatre to change the order of things in which it intervenes,
without recognizing the complexity of AIDS. The determination of
change of course has its heritage in the revolutionary discourses and
practical models of Freire (1971) and Boal (1979). Needless to say, any
applied theatre project aspires to change. The question is whether
change should be a built-in component or even a strategy of projects.
Abah (2002) and many others predicate theatre for development on
change by designing and assessing projects in terms of an alternative
or new order. Thompson (2004), on the other hand, disengages this
kind of requirement in what he calls theatre action research (TAR) by
instead stressing how applied theatre can examine viable conditions for
eventual community projects. Nicholson (2005) also leaves outcomes
wide open, but by correlating applied drama projects with an abstract
144 Community Theatre and AIDS

concept, namely the gift and its ambiguous claim and, every so often,
paradoxical result in debt. With a slight amount of generosity, I could
of course claim that the post-performance discussions leading to dona-
tions to orphans and widows in Kagera is proof of both an attitudinal
and material change. Discrete and temporary changes, however, have
little to do with the driving forces of AIDS. Real changes take effect
through altered ingrained actions among people, not by what is given
to them whether it is money, promises, or knowledge.
Another dominant but equally narrow view on efficacious theatre
against AIDS finds justification in the concepts of information and
education. Whilst an informative theatre mostly pertains to the trans-
mission of medical or moral messages, educational theatre draws on the
notion of drama as a pedagogical mode of telling and showing taboo
issues. A crucial challenge thus lies in how to deal with the fact that
people are as susceptible to HIV as ever, despite sufficient knowledge.
It was therefore slightly disconcerting to pick up a supplement of the
prestigious medical journal The Lancet on health and art, and to read a
couple of articles on theatre against AIDS. Mbizvo writes that theatre is
‘an effective and entertaining strategy for dissemination of health infor-
mation and reinforcement of positive health messages’ (Mbizvo 2006:
30; see also Klink 2000: 166). By effective she means that theatre breaks
down communicative barriers for the sake of behavioural change,
conveying knowledge about expected aid, and arousing audiences’
‘emotions to stimulate acceptance of the messages’ (Mbizvo 2006: 31).
Rather than functioning as a mouthpiece for medical and political
authorities, it is more relevant for theatre to show these people how
and why their conventional strategies for communication, behavioural
change, and biomedical aid have proven unsuccessful for the majority of
people in Tanzania and most other sub-Saharan countries. And the only
way to do this is to do what theatre does best: function as a revelatory
and relational agency of young people’s interests in cooperation with
official agencies and non-governmental organizations that can meet and
support such interests for the purposes of a worthy and safe life.
That young people enjoy the privilege of being backed by NGOs,
however, does not always sit well with people who used to control
public opinion. Ironically, the fair, unique, and independent features of
CBT can also be a curse for its participants since such contemporaneous
features have been licensed to young people from non-governmental
organizations rather than earned through official merits (or favours).
The groups can easily draw a crowd, bring spectators to laughter and
tears, and provoke discussions, but without a mandate that provides
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 145

the performances with a platform wider than the events per se, CBT will
remain culturally alienated and not be able to effect social change.
Hence timeliness and unicity in design do not guarantee efficacy in
performance. There are reasons to doubt a theatre against AIDS in the
name of transformation, education, or donation. What, then, is it good
for? If CBT engages the most susceptible epidemic target groups in
participatory counteractions against risk scenarios in cooperation with
communities, why is it so hard to speak of its efficacy? The only way
to approach efficacy in CBT is, I believe, to identify its limitations and
thus turn its insufficiencies under specific epidemic circumstances into
reflective and productive forces. (Instead of celebrating applied theatre
against AIDS, I believe it should be an obligation of researchers to high-
light its problems, at least until it is possible to substantiate palpable
achievements.) In the light of the findings of my research project, it
seems obvious that the critical means and ends of CBT, which are so
appealing and convenient to celebrate, neither have a recognized place
in organizations that use theatre, nor a destination in societies where
it performs. CBT does not have ownership over its own activities, often
due to meagre financial means but even more so because of a deficient
social legitimacy.8 It is directly involved in precise epidemic problem
solving and yet cut off, as it were, from epidemic-wide solutions. In
Marxist terms, one may say that the groups are alienated from the pur-
pose of their social work by being used as exchange items in the produc-
tion of aid, rather than as useful agency in consequential prevention
schemes. One of the most disturbing aspects of this problem is that the
theatre facilitators from places like Bagamoyo College of Arts and (my
Tanzanian host department) the Fine and Performing Arts Department
at the University of Dar es Salaam which organizations use for their
epidemiological and commercial purposes, never (not one I have spo-
ken with!) receives feedback on their contribution to HIV preventive
projects. The effect of the alienating division of labour is, again, that a
potential achievement of theatre as HIV prevention would not even be
recognized. If it is difficult to appreciate the effects of applied theatre,
then it should at least be possible to see its obvious use as a means for
young people to acquire life skills for a safer social existence. However,
if the quest for efficacy is an epidemiological challenge, then the quest
for a pragmatic use of it becomes a political challenge.
As Byam (1999) insists, the use of Boal’s methods in theatre projects
stands in need of an awareness of political frameworks such as those
discussed by Freire to take effect in societal and developmental circum-
stances. The roles of the Brazilian pedagogues have been thrashed out
146 Community Theatre and AIDS

in debates on African applied theatre since the 1970s, although mainly

without much criticality. The reason why the discourse on theatre for
development often stagnates is that it tends to hinge on certain celebra-
tory concepts, such as radical change through theatre, the economical
and political self-reliance of civil groups, and rapid appraisals of project
efficacy. The discrepancy between the concepts and real political condi-
tions is an interpretive gap that is often accrued by extending the meth-
odological scope of Augusto Boal into the pragmatic visions of Paolo
Freire. When individual or site-specific modes of understanding reaches
the level of socially applicable self-reflection, as Freire points out,
people enter into the realm of praxis where quite advanced attempts
can be made to revolutionize policy making. In particular Freire’s cau-
tion, with the backing of post-colonial philosophers like Fanon (1968),
against unconscious identification with one’s so-called oppressors, and
the need to always uphold a critical dialogue about the means and
conditions of liberating strategies, are invaluable pieces of advice for
any CBT group.9 However, in this publication I have mentioned project
participants whose ‘potential consciousness’ has ‘[emerged] from real-
ity’ and who have already perceived ‘the causes of their needs’ (Freire
1970: 117). Through codified acts of problem-posing practices that are
discussed in public (ibid: 122), they have indeed rehearsed their cultural
revolution (Boal 1979: 141) through critical reflections and actions,
attained ownership of their labour (Freire 1970: 183) and thus reached
an entry point for an applied social performance of durable change.
However, the fundamental need for CBT against AIDS has little to do
with didacticism, utopian objectives, or radical policy; it has rather to
do with an acknowledgement of already achieved cultural practices
and their participants. The latter have attained ‘conscientização’ and
are constantly, although casually, celebrated for it in quasi-educational
terms. Given the lack of proper assessment, one may say that the
theatre groups have created performances of effective communication,
although without epidemiological efficacy.
Despite its clear pedagogical, organizational, logistical, critical, and
intellectual merits, CBT is not allowed on to the arena of organized
aid, public sectors, or real politics. Rather than just pointing to poverty
and gender in sweeping arguments, the crux of the efficacy of theatre
is its lack of legitimacy. This has not only to do with patriarchal com-
munities resisting young people’s creation of a new public opinion, but
also with an unprecedented political challenge. It is a matter of demo-
cratic urgency to acknowledge that young people make up more than
half of the population in Tanzania. This majority has more site-specific
 A Deadly Paradox: The Success/Failure of CBT 147

knowledge about the spread HIV than any imagined or authorized

expert; they constitute the most susceptible groups in the pandemic;
and they are the ones who make the most of HIV prevention practices
through participatory means such as CBT. What they need is not a
revolutionary breakthrough of utopian ideology or liberating knowl-
edge, what they need is a performative democracy whose functions go
beyond flags and polling stations, all the way down to the ground level
of villages where most people in Tanzania pursue a reliable, healthy,
and productive everyday life through acts rather than rhetorical declara-
tions or judicial trials. That is the level and sphere in which a cultural
legitimacy can be validated through actions. If CBT fails, or is allowed
to fail by a deliberate neglect of its impact or recommendations, it is
reasonable to assume that every other socially constructed form of HIV
prevention also will fail.
CBT has the qualifications for functioning as a ‘best practice’ in HIV
prevention and should be used as a relational agency in coordinated
programmes.10 It effectively attracts the core risk groups on a voluntary
basis in the most AIDS-affected societies in sub-Saharan Africa; allows
them to steep their popular views through ceremonial, ritual, theatri-
cal, pedagogical, and informal/improvised modes of performance as
well as through biographically and collectively informed community
analyses; and in that way CBT meets the most urgent and taboo-laden
issues head-on in performances and post-performance discussions
where people, again and again, end up appealing to organizations and
governmental authorities to consolidate actions in view of the depicted
scenes. What the national district response initiative (DRI) in Tanzania
needed when it rolled out was not only a poetic licence for young
people to map out and depict critical behaviour patterns but also a
political licence to apply its results in local programmes. It is difficult to
understand why NGOs are willing to give community groups all sorts of
education, except one in applied politics. In the interest of a more com-
prehensive democracy young people ought to be provided something
like youth councils in local political offices. Meanwhile, it is unfathom-
able, not to say hypocritical, why authorities and NGOs in the districts
where I have carried out fieldwork are not deploying voluntary com-
munity groups with responsibilities to, for instance: coordinate services
like condom distribution out of hospitals; mobilize people for HIV tests
and counselling under the aegis of ARV programmes; work in closer
cooperation with schools,11 faith-based organizations and workplaces;
and, not least, be allowed to take on a greater role in the research,
action, reporting, and evaluation of projects in cooperation with NGOs
148 Community Theatre and AIDS

and AIDS coordinators. It is exciting to imagine what would happen

if such a performative coordination and management, where words
means action and vice versa, was in effect a political office aligned with
community performances. The group in Kenyana who highlighted the
situation for housemaids, the Likokona group that shed light on the
link between corruption and AIDS, and the group in Bugandika who
demonstrated the vicious circle for orphans, would have led not only
to discussions and donations but also to enquiries and eventual reforms
in communal, judicial, political, and educational systems. But this is,
of course, exactly what authorities and NGOs do not want to happen
since it would infringe on their agendas and audit books and threaten
to take away their work. After having rehearsed their social revolution,
to paraphrase Boal and Mandela in one breath, the community groups
I have studied are now waiting at the point of entry to an official stage
of politics where their democratic legitimacy is fully recognized.
Appendix I

Focus Group Discussions: Modus Operandi

Each youth centre selects 4–6 boys and 4–6 girls (in total 8–12 boys and girls) for
focus group discussions. The daily programmes will be as follows:

(1) We introduce ourselves, hand over the video tape of the prior visit, and
present the daily programme. It is important to indicate that the programme
will take 5–6 hours to complete (including a break for lunch with the discus-
sants). (15 minutes)
(2) We then ask the participants to formulate – or enunciate for those who can-
not write – the three most important issues to discuss regarding the risks of
being infected by HIV for young people in the present location. This should
be done individually and confidentially, so that each participant feels free
to express whatever he or she thinks is the most necessary issue to ventilate.
The method of letting focus group members formulate the topics of discus-
sions themselves pertains to a method called ‘question and answer’ and aims
for an optimum degree of participatory research. (15 minutes)
(3) After that, we collect the suggestions for discussion and keep the women’s
and men’s suggestions apart. There should be roughly 15 suggestions for
each group. Since some suggestions will coincide and overlap, we will need
to sort out which of the suggestions will work best for the eventual discus-
sions. It is important that this screening process is representative of the
issues brought up by the participants. After this selection, there should be
at least five topics of discussion points for the boys and girls respectively.
The topics will most likely differ between the groups and should be kept
separate. (30 minutes)
(4) Then we sit down – preferably in a place with minimum disturbance – with
the first group (girls or boys) and allow it to discuss the suggested topics for
as long as it takes to cover them. (in all probability approximately one hour)
(5) Then we do the same thing with the other group (girls or boys). (about one
hour).
(6) When the group discussions are completed, we treat the groups for a lunch
break and eat together. (one hour).
(7) After lunch we sit down with the groups together and discuss the different
topics brought up in each group and how the topics and discussions differed
between the women and men. (1–2 hours)

We end the sessions by assuring the youth centres that we will be back later with
a summary of the discussions and with follow-up interviews.

149
150 Appendix I

18 Mr Andrew Hamisi, a great friend and mentor, was the research assistant I worked with
most of all during my research project in Mtwara region, as well as Dar es Salaam. Sadly,
Andrew passed away in 2005
(Photo: Ola Johansson)

19 Andrew engaged in translation work in Dar es Salaam in 2004

(Photo: Ola Johansson)
Appendix II

Questionnaire for HIV Preventive Organizations in Tanzania

THIS QUESTIONNAIRE IS CONFIDENTIAL AND WILL ONLY BE USED FOR

ACADEMIC PURPOSES AND WILL THUS NOT BE EXPLOITED COMMERCIALLY
OR POLITICALLY OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON. I AM AN INDEPENDENT
RESEARCHER, I.E., UNRELATED TO COMMERCIAL CORPORATIONS, NGOs,
POLITICAL PARTIES, AND OTHER INTEREST ORGANISATIONS.

Dr. Ola Johansson

Research Associate, Lecturer
Department of Musicology and Performance Studies at Stockholm University (Sweden)
Section of Theatre Studies, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster
University (UK)

Place & date:

..............................................................................................................................
Name of interviewee (optional): ........................................................................
Name & start year of organization:....................................................................
Sponsoring organization(s): ..............................................................................
Cooperating organizations/preferred: ...............................................................
Target group(s): ...................................................................................................
How many people do you think carries the HIV virus? ...................................
..............................................................................................................................

1. What is/are the goal/s of your organization?

2. How would you like to see your organization develop? What are the
major obstacles?
3. Which are the major risk factors of HIV/AIDS in your district?
4. Do you think you have prevented HIV transmissions? How do you
report the results?
5. Which methods of HIV prevention do your organization deploy?
6. Why did you choose to use community theatre as HIV prevention?
7. How have you used performing arts – e.g., plays, dance, choir, storytell-
ing, poetry?
8. What responses have there been to the performances (audiences, NGOs,
political)?

151
152 Appendix II

9. What kind of follow-up action has resulted from your projects? (fund-
raising? IGAs?)
10. Specifically, what impact do you think community theatre can have on
AIDS?
PS. Have I forgotten to ask you an important question, or would you like to
ask me one?

Most commonly proposed FGD topics in kagera

CATEGORY % prop. #prop.

Education 17% 49
Poverty 15% 43
Development 8% 24
Alcohol 7% 20
Unemployment 5% 15
Children 4% 13
Mortality 4% 13
AIDS is getting worse 3% 8
AIDS big problem 2% 7
Counselling 2% 7
Luxury 2% 6
Sexual routines 2% 6
(Un)faithfulness 2% 5
Condom use 2% 5
PLWHA 2% 5
Medicine 1% 4
Empower YC 1% 4
Night dances 1% 4
Prevention 1% 4
Promiscuity 1% 4
Prostitution 1% 4
Sharp instruments 1% 4
Uncertainty 1% 3

Most commonly proposed FGD topics in mtwara

CATEGORY % prop # prop.

Education 14.5% 47
Poverty 10.2% 33
Condom use 9.9% 32
Alcohol & other drugs 8.4% 27
Unemployment 8.0% 26
Development 4.9% 16

(continued)
 Questionnaire for HIV Preventive Organizations 153

Continued

CATEGORY % prop # prop.

Night dances/gatherings 4.3% 14

Prostitution 3.7% 12
Sharp instruments 3.4% 11
Blood tests 3.4% 11
Unfaithfulness 3.1% 10
Circumcision 2.8% 9
Polygamy 2.5% 8
Abstinence 2.2% 7
Trad. practices & beliefs 2.2% 7
Inappropriate clothing 1.9% 6
Desire for wealth (‘luxury’) 1.6% 5
Multiple partners 1.5% 5
Unsafe sex 1.5% 5
‘Difficult life’ 1.2% 4
Public disclosure of HIV+ p. 1.2% 4
Initiation ceremonies 0.9% 3
154 Appendix II

20 Tanzanian Residence Permit

 Questionnaire for HIV Preventive Organizations 155

21 Tanzanian Research Permit

Notes

Introduction
1. In Swahili, the official language of Tanzania, AIDS spells ‘ukimwi’, an abbre-
viation of upungufu kinga mwilini, which is a rough translation of the
English word AIDS, i.e., acquired (upungufu) immuno deficiency (kinga)
syndrome (mwilini).
2. The conference was called ‘Language, Literature and the Discourse of HIV/
AIDS in Africa’ and took place at the University of Botswana in Gaborone,
24–28 June 2002, with sponsorships from UNAIDS and the University of
Botswana. I presented the paper ‘Performative Speech in African Community
Theatre on HIV/AIDS’.
3. For information about the video collection called Steps for the Future, see
http://steps.co.za/ (accessed 11 April 2010).
4. See http://www.aegis.org/news/sapa/2002/SA020409.html (accessed in
August 2009).
5. During that visit to Bukoba I visited a Swedish woman called Deborah
Brycke, who has lived and worked in Kagera since 1969. Her organization,
The Tumaini Children Centre, has a firm reputation of receiving orphans
and accommodating them in centres and educational settings. When
I visited, she introduced me to a young girl who had suddenly turned up out-
side her gate the day before. The girl said she came from Karagwe, a nearby
Tanzanian district, but Deborah thought she may have come from across
the Rwandan border a few miles further away. When it comes to migrating
orphans, it is often hard to determine the cause behind the displacement.
When it comes to AIDS orphans, it is, again, only possible to estimate their
quantity and percentage.
6. Cohen-Cruz, Jan, ‘Practice & Policy in Theatre & Development’, in Martin
Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, eds, African Theatre in Development,
Oxford: James Currey, 1999, p. 115.
7. Toolis, Kevin, ‘Killer on the Road’, The Guardian, 3 July 2002 (see http://
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/03/aids.kevintoolis (accessed 12 April
2010).
8. Sunday Observer, Dar es Salaam, 23 September 2001.
9. Later I was informed by my colleague Stephen Ndibalema, lecturer with the
Fine and Performing Arts Department at the University of Dar es Salaam,
whose wife is a secondary school teacher, that the vulnerability of teachers
has to do with their low wages, which are in effect a result of very weak trade
unions for teachers in Tanzania.
10. The Joker function of course comes from Augusto Boal’s forum theatre.
Many artistic facilitators in Africa, including Michael Kifungo, are aware of
this role function and its source, even if they seldom manage to develop the
Joker into the dynamic and role swapping agent that Boal instructed for a
forum theatre event. Anything beyond an open post-performance discussion

156
 Notes 157

amongst the audience and actors would be a tall order in local settings where
AIDS is taboo-laden.
11. Michael Kifungo’s group was instructed in forum theatre technique by
Stephen Ndibalema from the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at the
University of Dar es Salaam. Ndibalema, also from the Kagera region, later
worked with me in the same region.
12. The documentary was aired on CNN and MTV on World AIDS Day on
1 December 2004 as part of a series of short films called ‘Staying Alive’.
13. As will be discussed later, this is not as straightforward as it may seem,
though. The Lutheran Church of Tanzania, like every other religious organi-
zation in the country, is against the use of condoms. The branch in Bukoba,
however, seems to be wise enough to tacitly agree upon condom promotion
as long as it is not done in their name. It appears to be a case of ‘don’t ask,
don’t tell’, by means of a poetic licence. By including scenes of condom use
in the documentary, the group ‘came out’ through a different media outlet,
but the group has not suffered financial or any other detrimental conse-
quences after the broadcast.
14. Omutoro is a so-called heroic dance designed to show allegiance to the
chief among the Haya people in Kagera. In this society only men could be
heroes with a mandate grounded in encounters like hunting and warfare (cf.
Barongo 1998: 3–4)
15. Mtwara and the rest of southern Tanzania retain an immense reservoir of
traditional (ritual) dances which are still used by local communities as well
as urban dance troupes all over Tanzania (cf. Lange 1995: 54–5).
16. It is worth pointing out an anomaly in the depiction under discussion. The
fact that the girl has become sick from an AIDS related disease so shortly
after contraction, i.e., in connection with the pregnancy less than a year
ago, is not realistic and must be looked upon as a fictional strategy for illus-
trative purposes. The incubation time between the HIV infection and the
opportunistic diseases associated with a weakened immune system is about
ten years.
17. The explanations suggested include not only out-migration but also ‘poor
nutrition and sexually transmitted diseases’ (Seppälä and Koda 1998: 19).
In the region, ‘many women are childless while women with only one
or two children are also common, despite the high level of divorces and
remarriages. The infertility is partly induced by the prevalence of syphilis
and chronic gonorrhoea. An additional source of low population increase
nowadays is AIDS’ (ibid.: 21).
18. Mlelwa, Hadrian Cosmas, Food Shortage and Famine Problems in Masasi
District: From Colonial and Post-Colonial Era (1895–1991). Doctoral diss.
University of Dar es Salaam, 1992, ch. 4.
19. http://www.populationaction.org/Publications/Fact_Sheets/FS32/
Population_Growth.pdf
20. To be accurate, one should always denote AIDS in Tanzania as a pluralistic
variation of ‘epidemics’. Hanson (2007b: 78) identifies 15 different epidemic
levels in Tanzania, among which the differences appear in accordance with
local or regional characteristics.
21. FHI/UNAIDS Best Practices in HIV/AIDS Prevention Collection (2001), ed.
Bunmi Makinwa and Mary O’Grady: (http://www.fhi.org/NR/rdonlyres/
158 Notes

e3hmq5w4o542tmtlhi66rtwqijhfqqzgaspcwkc55f327e6dvdc5a2d5zwjd
bdhhl7mgw6bprtmhip/FHIUNAIDSBestPracticesreduxenhv.pdf (accessed
9 April 2010). This collection is revised continually, with reference to the
following six criteria in HIV/AIDS programmes: relevance, effectiveness,
efficiency, replicability, ethical soundness, and sustainability.
22. The chapter draws on my article ‘The Lives and Deaths of Zakia: How AIDS
Changed African Community Theatre and Vice Versa’, Theatre Research
International, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2007a).
23. The chapter elaborates the article ‘Performative Interventions: African
Community Theatre in the Age of AIDS’, in Franko, Mark (ed.), Ritual and
Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
24. My fieldworks account as follows: the Mtwara region, Tanzania: 4 fieldworks
(2002, 2003 x 2, 2006); the Kagera region, Tanzania: 4 fieldworks (2003,
2004, 2005, 2006), and a documentary film on theatre against AIDS in
Kagera 2004; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: numerous research visits to the uni-
versity, governmental braches, National AIDS Control Programme, archives,
NGOs, etc.; Bagamoyo College of Arts, Tanzania: visits and interview ses-
sions in 2001 and 2003; Addis Ababa and Bahir Dar, Ethiopia: 1 month
project in collaboration with UNICEF; South Africa: visits to Eastern Cape
(2002), KwaZulu Natal (2003), and Western Cape (2007); Kenya: several visits
from 1996, to the Mathare slum in Nairobi and to the central highlands with
reference to HIV prevention; Botswana: 1 visit to a conference, performances
on AIDS, and hospital visit in 2002.
25. Chapter 3 is partly informed by my article ‘Eschatological Field Notes:
Community Theatre, AIDS, and the Fate of Informant D. in Ilemera,
Tanzania’, published in Nordic Theatre Studies, No. 19, 2007b; and partly
by a paper called ‘The Quest for an Efficacious Community-Based Theatre’,
which was presented at University of California, Berkeley, at the conference
‘African and Afro-Caribbean Performance’, 26–28 September 2008.
26. The chapter is based on my article ‘The Limits of Community-Based Theatre:
Performance and HIV Prevention in Tanzania’, The Drama Review 54:1
(T205), (Winter 2010), New York and Cambridge, MA: New York University
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chapter 1 HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre

1. My friend and colleague Stephen Ndibalema, who worked with me during
my fieldwork in Kagera in 2006, lived in Bukoba in 1987. In those days it
seemed that people went to a funeral more than once a day, he told me and
went on: ‘If close relatives die, you normally shave your head and mourn
for 40 days. But people just couldn’t shave after a while. Their heads were
already naked. People couldn’t even work because of all the funerals. So
people started to change the traditions: they stopped shaving and stopped
wearing casual dresses on funerals (which is a custom since it shows that you
are not enjoying the occasion but that you are concerned). People started to
wear nice clothes. People also came with plastic bags. In connection to that
a saying became established: “When did you receive the news?” (i.e., about
someone dying, whose funeral you had to attend without notice, which
 Notes 159

is why the plastic bag became the most convenient baggage). The plastic
bag was therefore called wabimanya maki, meaning “when did you get the
news?”.’
2. For more information about the possible origin of the HIV virus, see: http://
www.avert.org/origin-aids-hiv.htm (accessed 15 April 2010).
3. AIDS is the new ‘great imitator’, according to Sabin (1987). This follows upon
the old characterization of syphilis as a great imitator of other diseases.
4. This relates especially to poor outcomes for malaria, which are often caused
by rural people arriving too late with their children to dispensaries after
lengthy journeys, not seldom by foot. But the long distances and the
scarce logistical means will also have an impact on the distribution of anti-
retroviral medicines for a long time to come.
5. In the movie Traffic, Michael Douglas said something interesting as he
depicted an American politician who steps down as head of the so-called war
on drugs, while agonizing over his son’s cocaine addiction: ‘How can you
wage war on your own family?’
6. The lack of local political commitment was recently corroborated in inter-
views with a big organization like UNAIDS (interview with programme
associate Henry Meena in Dar es Salaam, 21 May 2007) as well as the
smaller Forum for Grassroots Organizations in Tanzania (FOGOTA; inter-
view with Secretary General Emmanuel Kazungu in Dar es Salaam, 25 May
2007).
7. In 25 years AIDS is estimated to have killed about 25 million people and
infected 65 million; thus nearly 40 million are currently living with the
virus. UNAIDS/WHO, ‘Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic’, Geneva,
available at: http://www.unaids.org (accessed May 2006). As Nugent points
out (with reference to R. Shell, ‘Halfway to the Holocaust: The Economic,
Demographic, and Social Implications of the AIDS Pandemic to the year
2010 in the Southern African Region’, in R. Shell et al., eds, HIV/AIDS:
A Threat to the African Renaissance (Johannesburg: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung,
2000), p. 10), ‘It is estimated that by 2010, AIDS will have killed more peo-
ple than all of the previous global pandemics – including the Black Death,
smallpox in the sixteenth century and the devastating 1917/19 influenza
outbreak – combined’ (P. Nugent, Africa since Independence: A Comparative
History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 357–8.
8. Tears do not transmit the virus, but have a certain viral load, just like
other bodily fluids. See H. Jackson, AIDS Africa: Continent in Crisis. (Harare:
SAfAIDS, 2002).
9. Needless to say, monetary and clinical approaches to AIDS are necessary
complements to preventive measures through human resources. It is just
that money and pills have for long overshadowed cultural factors in the
expertise of the epidemic. Anti-retroviral medicines have been distributed en
masse by WHO in a global scheme called ‘3 in 5’ – alluding to the ambition
to reach three million people in five years – but they keep missing their goals
even in areas for which they have secured funding and medical supplies.
The incidence rates simply exceed the logistical possibilities of distributing
medicine in many countries.
10. Writing from a female perspective, of course, involves certain ethical risks,
not only about being taken as a white man who wants to save brown women
160 Notes

from brown men, as G. C. Spivak puts it (‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313), but also due to the
epistemological risk of alienating men in an epidemic which is ultimately
about establishing gender-balanced negotiations and solutions. Nonetheless,
according to statistical data, general research, my own performance analyses,
focus-group discussions, and interviews (see below), it is undeniable that
the most critical risk factors and perilous experiences of the epidemic are
female.
11. M. Pompêo Nogueira, ‘Theatre for Development: An Overview’, Research
in Drama Education, 7, 1 (2002); D. Kerr, African Popular Theatre: From Pre-
colonial Times to the Present Day (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers,
1995); J. Bakari and G. Materego, Sanaa kwa Maendeleo: Stadi, Mbinu na
Mazoezi (Dar es Salaam: Amana Publishers, 1995); Z. Mda, When People Play
People (London: ZED Books Ltd, 1993); P. Mlama, Culture and Development
(Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1991); C. Kamlongera, Theatre for
Development in Africa with Case Studies from Malawi and Zambia (Bonn:
German Foundation for International Development, 1989); R. Kidd, From
People’s Theatre for Revolution to Popular Theatre for Reconstruction: Diary of a
Zimbabwean Workshop (The Hague/Toronto: CESO, 1984a), to mention but a
few.
12. D. Kerr, ‘Art as Tool,Weapon or Shield? Arts for Development Seminar, Harare’,
in Biodun Jeyifo, ed., Modern African Drama (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002);
D. Byam, Community in Motion: Theatre for Development in Africa (Westport,
CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1999); J. Plastow, African Theatre and Politics: The
Evolution of Theatre in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. A Comparative Study
(Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, B.V., 1996).
13. O. Abah, ‘Creativity, Participation and Change in Theatre for Development
Practice’, in Francis Harding, ed., The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader
(New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 158–73.
14. M. Frank, AIDS Education through Theatre: Case Studies from Uganda (Bayreuth:
Bayreuth African Studies, 1995).
15. R. Mabala et. al., Participatory Action Research on HIV/AIDS through a Popular
Theatre Approach in Tanzania (Unicef: Evaluation and Programme Planning,
2002); M. Klink, ‘Theatre for Development’, in Hands On! A Manual for
Working with Youth on SRH (GTZ: 2000), available at: http://www2.
unescobkk.org/hivaids/FullTextDB/aspUploadFiles/HandsOnPublikation.pdf
(accessed 28 October 2006).
16. L. Bourgault, Playing for Life: Performance in Africa in the Age of AIDS (Durham,
NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003).
17. B. Crow and M. Etherton, ‘Popular Drama and Popular Analysis in Africa’, in
R. Kidd and N. Colletta, eds, Tradition for Development: Indigenous Structures
and Folk Media in Non-formal Education (Bonn: German Foundation for
International Development, 1982).
18. Kidd, ‘From People’s Theatre’; P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1970).
19. O. Abah and M. Etherton, ‘The Samaru Projects: Street Theatre in Northern
Nigeria’, Theatre Research International, 7 (1983), pp. 222–34; O. Abah and
S. Balewa, The Bomo Project (Zaria, Nigeria: English Department, Ahmadu Bello
 Notes 161

University, 1982); A. Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and

Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (London: Pluto Press, 1979).
20. Mda, When People Play People; Byam, Community in Motion, ch. 3; P. Mlama,
Culture and Development, chs 4–5; F. P. Nyoni, Conformity and Change:
Tanzanian Rural Theatre and Socio-political Changes (doctoral dissertation,
University of Leeds, 1998).
21. Paulo Freire is one of the most influential educationalists in the twentieth
century, especially for his theories on progressive practice for impoverished
and oppressed people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Freire’s Pedagogy of
the Oppressed (1970) inspired fellow Brazilian Augusto Boal to develop the
methods for his so-called ‘theatre of the oppressed’.
22. The project was lead by Penina Mlama, Amandina Lihamba and Eberhard
Chambulikazi from The Fine and Performing Arts Department at The
University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who are among the chief innovators
of the TFD community process (for a detailed description on the project, see
Mlama 1991, ch. 7).
23. In a Tanzanian village called Ijumbe in 2004, it was remarkable to see almost
all male spectators, after enjoying an ngoma (dance), turn around and go
back to their market stands as they heard the opening stanza of a choir on
AIDS.
24. Frank, AIDS Education through Theatre; G. Kwesigabo, Trends of HIV Infection
in the Kagera Region of Tanzania (Umeå University Medical Dissertations, New
Series No. 710, 2001); B. Jordan-Harder, ‘Thirteen Years of HIV-1 Sentinel
Surveillance and Indicators for Behavioural Change Suggest Impact of
Programme Activities in south-west Tanzania’, AIDS, 18 (2004): 287–94.
25. Femi Osofisan (in R. Boon and J. Plastow, eds, Theatre Matters: Performance
and Culture on the World Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), pp. 11–35) considers students and other educated cohorts the most
important target groups for radical theatre, rather than the proletariat
favoured by, e.g., Ngugi wa Thiong’o and most other developmental theatre
artists and groups in Africa. There are countless school projects involving
theatre against AIDS in Africa, but they are mostly temporary and lack
financial, administrative and moral support. It is not uncommon that teach-
ers have sex with students, while being reluctant towards sexual and repro-
ductive schooling due to its encouragement of promiscuous lifestyles. For
country-specific views on theatre as education, see also S. Lange, Managing
Modernity: Gender, State, and Nation in the Popular Drama of Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania (University of Bergen: Department of Social Anthropology, 2002);
L. Edmondson, ‘National Erotica: The Politics of “Traditional” Dance in
Tanzania’, Drama Review, 45:1/T 169 (2001): 153–70; T. Riccio, ‘Tanzanian
Theatre: From Marx to the Marketplace’, Drama Review, 45:1/T 169 (2001):
128–52; Hatar, Theatising AIDS for Paralegal Organisations.
26. The artistic extension workers were Amandina Lihamba, Penina Mlama, and
Eberhard Chambulikazi, all from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
27. Besides the numerous plays, a few interesting films have also depicted sugar
daddies, such as the Tanzanian film Duara (2003), collectively written by
students at the Fine and Performing Arts Department, University of Dar es
Salaam, and directed by Richard Ndunguru.
162 Notes

Chapter 2 The Performativity of Community-Based

Theatre
1. This is obviously a qualified truth; see, for instance, Turner’s remarks about
British interference among the Ndembu in connection with the Ihamba cult
(Turner 1967: 359–93; esp. 374).
2. This also concerned the Ndembu to a certain extent. Just to give one exam-
ple, Turner writes that he came upon a Ndembu man in the Copperbelt
mining town of Chingola who asserted that ‘he was never going back to
village life’ (Turner 1967: 391). For an updated account on the life of the
Lunda-Ndembu, see Pritchett (2001).
3. For further discussion of gendered aspects of Turner’s ethnography, see the
essay by Andrew Wegley in Franko (2006).
4. There are some traditional medicines that mitigate the effect of AIDS-related
opportunistic infections and diseases. Hence, medicine is certainly an area
where traditional knowledge should be combined with modern biomedicine
(for more on this, see ‘Collaboration with traditional healers in HIV/AIDS
prevention and care in sub-Saharan Africa’ (UNAIDS 2000)). Most people in
Africa still consult traditional rather than modern doctors. In light of this
fact and the widespread lack of anti-retroviral medicines, people’s hesitation
about taking a HIV-test is quite logical. Reyonolds Whyte writes: ‘In 1995,
many people spoke of the need to have AIDS testing in Bunyole [Uganda].
I suspect that this idea is attractive as a way of resolving the uncertainty
about others. However, it is not clear that worried people would choose
to resolve the uncertainty about themselves by seeking a test – at least not
without persuasion and counselling. It is better not to know for sure that you
are doomed’ (1997: 214).
5. Forum theatre is an interactive form of performance, in which spectators – or
‘spect-actors’ – can intervene both verbally and physically in critical scenes
and suggest alternative solutions. It was invented by the Brazilian theatre
pedagogue Augusto Boal in the 1960s and has had a great influence on
popular theatre in Africa due to its adaptability to local modes of storytell-
ing, dialogue, and improvisation.
6. I will not comment on Jacques Derrida’s or anyone else’s criticism of Austin’s
speech act theory here, but simply suggest that readers look up a most
clarifying arbitration of the arguments involved in Stanley Cavell’s A Pitch
of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1996: ch. 2). Nor will I comment on
Austin’s exclusion of theatre from his reasoning in How to Do Things with
Words, which I believe was made for the sake of philosophical clarity in his
Harvard lectures; I am also confident that the above-mentioned perform-
ance in the South African school workshop would have appealed to Austin
to such an extent that he would have found it impossible to exclude it as a
philosophically pertinent example due to its, at once, ordinary and ceremo-
nial case of performative speech.
7. I have criticized both the sociological and anthropological stereotypology of
theatre elsewhere (Johansson 2006; 2002).
8. See the six conventions for an explicit performative to take effect (Austin
1962: 14–15; also Austin 1979: 237).
 Notes 163

9. It should be clear that Kerr uses the word ‘theatre’ in a very wide sense, namely
‘to cover drama, many forms of ritual, dance, and other performing arts such
as acrobatics, mime and semi-dramatized narratives’ (Kerr 1995: 1).
10. To inform, warn, and persuade someone typify certain kinds of Austinian
speech acts, namely, respectively, locutionary acts (simply by uttering
something meaningful, such as the term ‘AIDS’ in a site where it is rarely
enunciated), illocutionary acts (e.g., alerting people of a danger), and perlo-
cutionary acts (by convincing people of a hazard).
11. One of the most valuable qualities of Louise Bourgault’s book Playing for Life
(2004) is its many examples of chants and songs (ch. 6) that have shaped
the public opinion of some African countries when it comes to AIDS. One of
these songs is indeed Philly Luutaya’s Alone (Bourgault 2004: 164).
12. An individual’s blood serum converts after exposure to the virus, from HIV
antibody negative to antibody positive. This conversion can be quantified
and thus measured in terms of, e.g., the need to set dosage in anti-retroviral
medicine.
13. For the use of metaphors on AIDS in the West, see Sontag 1988.
14. It is worth pointing out that the pre-colonial performances called mashindano
in East Africa took place in communal events that functioned as competi-
tions (Gunderson and Barz 2000).

Chapter 3 The Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and

Performance
1. I had the privilege of working with Stephen Ndibalema, a teacher at The
Fine and Performing Arts Department, University of Dar es Salaam, dur-
ing my fieldworks in Kagera 2006. Stephen grew up in Kagera and is an
artistic as well as academic expert on the region’s performance traditions.
In 2004 I worked with Priscus Kainunula, who works with the non-
governmental organization Humuuliza, one of the most important civil serv-
ices for orphans in Kagera. When I visited Ilemera for the first time in 2003,
John B. Joseph, programme advisor for Swissaid in Muleba, accompanied
me. All three are trilingual, fluent in the local language Ruhaya, the national
language Kiswahili and English.
2. In March 2003, the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) part-
nered with the Government of Tanzania, the Harvard AIDS Institute, and
PharmAccess, and worked with a multi-sectored team comprised of the
Ministry of Health, the Tanzania Commission for AIDS, cabinet agencies,
Muhimbili University, local NGOs, and others to develop a business plan for
providing comprehensive care and treatment to Tanzanians living with HIV/
AIDS. However, it took a couple of years to allocate the medicine to many of
the regional and district hospitals in Tanzania. In a regionalized initiative,
CHAI was allocated to the southern regions of Mtwara and Lindi (UNGASS
Country Progress Report: Tanzania Mainland (2008), Dar es Salaam: Tanzania
Commission for AIDS, p. 34).
3. Kagera Region: Socio-Economic Profile (Dar es Salaam: National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS)/Kagera Regional Commissioner’s Office, August 2003), ix.
164 Notes

4. Vanessa von Struensee writes: ‘Although Tanzania’s Law of Marriage Act,

1971, (LMA) recognizes marriage as a partnership and declares that any
property acquired during the existence of a marriage is joint matrimonial
property, the LMA does not apply to inheritance and does not supersede cus-
tomary law. Thus, the discriminatory rules continue to apply to succession
matters to the detriment of widows. Worse still is the customary practice
governed by Rule 62, of wife inheritance, where a widow is required to marry
a male relative of her dead spouse. If she agrees, she can remain there as a
wife, but with no claim or control over the land. Women succumb to widow
inheritance under duress where the alternative is destitution.’ (‘Widows,
AIDS, Health, and Human Rights in Africa’, http://www.crisisstates.com/
download/forum/HIV/901widowsaids.pdf, pp. 25–6, 2005. Last visited in
April 2007. This can be compared with the governmental legislation of the
Married Women’s Property Act in 1882 in the United Kingdom, under which
married women had the same rights over their property as unmarried women
and allowed a married woman to retain ownership of property which she
might have received as a gift from a parent. In 1893 the Act was broadened,
as married women were given full legal control of all the property of every
kind which they owned at marriage or that they acquired after marriage,
either by inheritance or by their own earnings. Interestingly, Elin Diamond
refers to the Married Women’s Property Act in her analysis of Ibsen’s Hedda
Gabler, see ‘The Violence of “We”: Politicizing Identification’, in Janelle
G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (eds.), Critical Theory and Performance (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 390–412.
5. Japhet Killewo, Epidemiology towards the control of HIV infection in Tanzania
with special reference to the Kagera region (Umeå: Umeå University, Department
of Epidemiology and Public Health, 1994).
6. Transactional sex is not, as Western prostition may be, a full-time occupation
but more of a temporary, or more or less regular, opportunity to make ends
meet, mainly for destitute women. Transactional sex mostly involve a cash
deal but often other kinds of gifts as well.
7 Suicide is, of course, also an option and an often ventilated one. It is as if
this fatalistic taboo is less unmentionable than the syndrome that causes it.
To show a suicide attempt in performance is unusual, though. One excep-
tion took place in a performance by a theatre group in Bukoba town, where
a disinherited widow tried to hang herself but gets saved by a neighbour at
the last second. About a hundred noisy marketplace spectators quieted down
in a moment, as if seeing something they had merely heard – or possibly
thought – of before, if not experienced surreptitiously.
8. The islands are notorious for their HIV/AIDS prevalence. In 1997, several
years after the epidemic peaked in Uganda and Tanzania, a Lake Victoria
fishing community was studied by Pickering and Okongo et al., who found
that ‘[i]ts men had on average one new sexual partner every twelve days’
(quoted in Iliffe The African AIDS Epidemic: A History, pp. 24, 165). It is also
worth pointing out that when I asked the Ilemera group what they con-
sider to be the major risk factors of HIV/AIDS in their (Muleba) district (cf.
Questionnaire/Appendix II), they respond: ‘Sexual behaviour on the islands’
(group interview in Ilemera, 3 August 2006.) There are 18 islands within the
bounds of Muleba District in Lake Victoria.
 Notes 165

9. An alternative and more contemporaneous scenario is mentioned here.

When young diseased women have made money on the islands by trans-
actional sex, they can afford going back to the mainland and establishing
a lifestyle using ARV therapy (group interview in Ilemera, 3 August 2006.)
This statement seems to suggest that maintaining an ARV regimen requires
a certain amount of money, which is of course true in terms of transport
and other side-costs in connection to hospital visits. Eventually regions like
Kagera and countries like Tanzania will also have to carry all or parts of the
cost of the medicine.
10. David Kerr, African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present Day
(Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1995), p. 160.
11. ‘There is overwhelming evidence about the efficacy and effectiveness of
condoms when used correctly and consistently in the prevention of HIV
transmission. Good quality condoms shall be produced and made easily
available and affordable. The private sector shall be encouraged to produce
and market good quality condoms so that they are easily accessible in urban
and rural areas’ (National Policy on HIV/AIDS, sec. 5.10, 2001).
12. It is a well-known fact that all major faith-based organizations in Tanzania –
including not only Catholics but also Lutherans, Anglicans, and Muslims –
are officially opposed to the promotion, distribution, and use of condoms.
In a joint statement at a convention in Dar es Salaam in 2002, 70 representa-
tives from the major religions made it clear that they discourage their follow-
ers from using condoms due to the fact that all holy books are opposed to
the use of condoms (Clerics’ Condom Stand At Odds With National Policy
in UN Integrated Regional Information Networks – March 18, 2002; http://www.
aegis.com/news/irin/2002/Ir020305.html (last accessed 15 August 2007).
13. Nyanje, P. ‘HIV/Aids Debate Hots Up’, The Guardian in Dar es Salaam (31 July
2002); for an online version, see UN Integrated Regional Information Networks –
August 20, 2002: http://www.aegis.com/news/IRIN/2002/IR020806.html
(last accessed 15 August 2007).
14. For further reading on the moral implications of allowing versus doing
harm, see, for instance, Philippa Foot, ‘Morality, Action and Outcome’, in
Ted Honderich, ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1985), and Warren S. Quinn, ‘Actions, Intentions, and Consequences:
The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing’, in A. Norcross and B. Steinbock, eds,
Killing and Letting Die, 2nd edn (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994).
For more specific reading on how ideology comes in between national
(South African) attitudes on AIDS and people’s need for protection, see
Catherine Campbell,‘Letting them Die’: How HIV/AIDS Programmes often Fail
(Oxford: James Currey, 2003).
15. In the districts of Masasi and Mangaka of Mtwara region. Apart from
Margaret Malenga (2003), I have worked with Andrew Hamisi (2003 and
2004), and Delphine Njewele (2006).
16. This reasoning is, of course, inspired by Erving Goffman’s notion of, and
approach to, social front- and backstage performances in The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday; Anchor Books, 1959), see
esp. p. 112.
17. I am using most of the research methods that Ann Bowling defines in health
studies: ‘Qualitative research describes in words rather than numbers the
166 Notes

qualities of social phenomena through observation (direct and unobtrusive

or participative and reactive), unstructured interviews (or ‘exploratory’, ‘in-
depth’, ‘free-style’ interviews, usually tape recorded and then transcribed
before analysis), diary methods, life histories (biography), group interviews
and focus group techniques, analysis of historical and contemporary records,
documents and cultural products (e.g. media and literature).’ Research
Methods in Health: Investigating Health and Health Services (Maidenhead: Open
University Press, 2004), p. 352.
18. Statistical gender discrepancies are found in a number of reports in Tanzania
(see ‘HIV/AIDS/STI Surveillance Report: January–October 2004’, United
Republic of Tanzania: Ministry of Health/National AIDS Control Programme,
Report No. 19, October 2005) as well as in sub-Saharan Africa in general
(‘Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic’, December 2006). Hence, women are
more exposed to HIV and, in the words of a Ugandan representative at the
fifteenth International AIDS Conference in Bangkok in 2004, it is statistically
more dangerous to be a housewife than a soldier in Africa.
19. The statistics for 2006 reads as follows in the Ilemera ward, where the com-
munity centre in question deploys extension workers: Among 86 people
living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) 13 were male and 73 female. These numbers –
which are not scientifically validated but indicative of local incidence and
prevalence trends – point to a greater willingness among females to seek or
be recruited for medical attention and also a great number of absent men in
general. But the statistics are also indicative of the above-mentioned gender
discrepancies.
20. ‘HIV/AIDS/STI Surveillance Report: January–October 2004’, United Republic
of Tanzania: Ministry of Health/National AIDS Control Programme, Report
No. 19, October 2005), p. 2.
21. Gideon Kwesigabo, Trends of HIV infection in the Kagera Region of Tanzania
1987–2000 (Umeå University Medical Dissertations, New Series No. 710,
2001).
22. ‘HIV/AIDS/STI Surveillance Report: January–October 2004’, United Republic
of Tanzania: Ministry of Health/National AIDS Control Programme, Report
No. 19, October 2005), pp. 26–7. Hanson (2007: 7) confirms these figures
with reference to Kwesigabo. 1987 Muleba had an estimated prevalence rate
of 10 per cent, in 1996 it had declined to 7 per cent and 1999 it was down
to 4 per cent.
23. Judith Narrow (2003): unpublished document.
24. Vipi mambo is a fashionable, contemporary, and urban way of greeting a
peer. Tanzania is a country where greeting ceremonials have been, and in
many places still are, considered as an important indicator of respect and
social status. Mambo derives from jambo, as in Hujambo!, which roughly
means ‘What is your news?’, which is always followed by a positive response
such as Nzuri sana, ‘Just fine’ or something like it. (A variant of this is men-
tioned in the following paragraph, namely vipi kaka [brother].) It is not
uncommon that young people, especially in rural areas, greet elders with the
word Shikamuu!, to which the elder responds Marahaba! The latter is a greet-
ing ceremonial from the early era of Arabic slavery in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, with quite controversial political roots. However, for a
young women to address an old man with any other phrase than Shikamuu!
 Notes 167

would be considered as disgraceful just ten years ago, before the urbaniza-
tion of rural sociolects in Tanzania.
25. This was said by Dr Alex Coutinho from the Ugandan The AIDS Support
Organization (TASO) during a speech at SIDA in Stockholm, Sweden,
3 August 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8xkdJ47YY (accessed
19 April 2010).
26. The component called ‘community analysis’ in some applied theatre projects
can, for instance, make use of more thorough and hands-on modes of action
research, such as organized fieldwork with focus group discussions and
interviews. This may sound too academic but it can, I believe, be used in a
quite simple and yet trustworthy and conscientious way by taking in shared
and intimate stories from fellow community residents and thereby enhance
their respect. (Of course such initiatives presuppose a more serious political
and civil backing from project stakeholders, but this is, I believe, a premise
to any qualitative improvement of CBT against AIDS.) A more methodical
and thorough use of action research would also provide an entry point to
a more differentiated analysis of male and female experiences of HIV/AIDS.
It is worth repeating that the gender factors, more than any other, could be
made much more explicit in most of the community performances I have
seen.
27. During our visit in July 2003, we saw pamphlets and other text material from
UNICEF on some bookshelves in the youth centre.

Chapter 4 A Deadly Paradox: Assessing the Success/Failure

of Community-Based Theatre against AIDS
1. It is by now clear that sub-Saharan Africa will not fulfil the millennium goals
set for 2015 (for a discussion of this, see Easterly 2007).
2. An alternative vocabulary for the mobile and containing features of CBT
would be to use Robert Putnam’s (2000) terms of ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’
social capital. The latter concept has already been put to the test in an
important social study on the limits of HIV prevention work in South Africa
by Campbell (2003). The task of bridging communal divisions is a greater
and more significant challenge than bonding individual groups.
3. It is important not to tap into defeatist fear mongering about ‘AIDS Africa’.
Irobi (2006: 32) asserts that the ‘overall tragic prognosis is that these children
are destined to die unless world governments, drug companies, politicians
in both the rich Western countries and the impoverished African countries
can work out a pragmatic programme for treating the infected, particu-
larly the AIDS orphans, for whom the beginning of life has now become
the commencement of an agonizing death sentence’. It is true that many
AIDS orphans are left without care, but at least as many are taken care of
by grandparents, who have taken on an overwhelming and unprecedented
responsibility. In all fairness, it should also be said that international donors
have put quite heavy emphasis on orphan care. Painting broad and general-
izing strokes of catastrophe only serves to enhance Western caricatures of
Africa. Among the many elderly guarantors I have met in Africa, a woman
called Beatrice in Nairobi, Kenya, stands out as a special person. She lives in
168 Notes

the Mathare slum in Nairobi and takes care of about 40 grandchildren after
all of her own eight children perished in AIDS-related diseases. She is now
doing all right by participating in a sustainable micro-finance programme set
up by the organization Jamii Bora.
4. For a sociological study on women working as housemaids in Tanzania, see
Heggenhougen and Lugalla (2005: ch. 13).
5. The religious intervention is indicative of the Christian interest organiza-
tion behind the theatre group, the conservative World Vision. If the priest is
inquiring about love according to the creed of World Vision, it is certainly a
matter of faithful bonds within monogamous relationships. If the person is
not yet married, she or he should abstain from sex until marriage. However,
in reality it is much more likely that the love in question is challenged by
materialistic and financial constraints and incentives (for an interesting
study on the commodification of relationships in Tanzania, see Setel 1999).
6. M. Banham, ed., A History of Theatre in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), p. 305.
7. See: http://www.entersoftsystems.com/tacaids/documents/NMSF%20%
202008%20-2012.pdf (last visited in August 2009).
8. In a significant report for UNESCO, Hatar (2001) cracks the myth on per-
forming arts as naturally integrated in Tanzanian society by showing what
little support they have received in the educational system since independ-
ence.
9. Kerr makes the observation of the constant risk of self-blame in Theatre for
Development, where poverty stricken theatre workers tend to fall into the
paradoxical stance of ‘scapegoating the poor’ (Kerr 1995: 160).
10. FHI/UNAIDS Best Practices in HIV/AIDS Prevention Collection (2001), ed. Bunmi
Makinwa and Mary O’Grady: http://www.fhi.org/NR/rdonlyres/e3hmq5w4
o542tmtlhi66rtwqijhfqqzgaspcwkc55f327e6dvdc5a2d5zwjdbdhhl7mgw6
bprtmhip/FHIUNAIDSBestPracticesreduxenhv.pdf (accessed 9 April 2010).
11. There is a prolific and long-term project called Tuseme (‘Let Us Speak Out’
in Swahili), which is implemented for girls in secondary schools and based
on the principles of Theatre for Development. It has yet to be properly
evaluated, but exemplifies both qualitative and quantitative qualities in the
application of social theatre. CBT is closely related to theatre activities like
Tuseme, but it also takes on the precarious challenge of mobilizing out-of-
school youth, since they represent a majority in their age brackets and are
likely to be more closely associated with the most susceptible youth in the
pandemic.
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Interviews with individuals

Gideon Kwesigabo, Dean at Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences,
Dar es Salaam, 29 May 2007.
Henry Meena, Programme Associate at UNAIDS/TACAIDS in Dar es Salaam, 21
May 2007.
Mgunga Mwa Mwenyelwa, Parapanda Lab Arts, Dar es Salaam, 7 August 2002.
Emmanuel Kazungu, Secretary General in Forum for Grassroots Organizations in
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Index

Abah, Oga S., 140, 143, 160n Byam, D. L., 44, 145, 160n, 161n
Ahlberg, B. M., 94 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 60
AIDS
in Africa, 1, 3, 7, 10, 16, 18, 21–2, Campbell, C., 38, 40, 45, 140, 165n,
26, 36, 40–1, 51–2 167n
in Tanzania, 3, 5, 7, 10, 16, 18, Cavell, S., 63, 162n
21–2, 26, 36, 40–1, 51–2, 72, Clifford, J., 61, 62
81–2, 86–7, 92, 116, 124, 127, Cohen-Cruz, J., 5–6, 156n
132, 139, 142–6 colonial issues, 6, 8, 20–1, 35, 40–1,
in the world, 29–31, 33 46, 52, 55, 57, 65–6, 136, 139
and health-care, 1, 24, 26, 35–9, 50, Conner, M., 39
55, 91, 124, 136, 142, 144 Coutinho, A., 167n
and religion, 16, 21–2, 26–8, 31, 36, Crow, B., 160n
42, 48, 51–2, 54–5, 57, 59–62, 65,
dance, 5, 11, 16–17, 25, 27, 48, 50–2,
67, 71–2, 74, 79, 86–90, 98, 109,
57, 61, 65, 70, 74, 76, 99–100,
118, 127, 132, 136–40
108, 113, 115, 119, 121, 129, 135
Ajzen, I., 39
Dilger, H., 60–1
anti-retroviral medicine, 3, 15, 16, 35,
58, 68, 70, 81, 110, 132, 141 Easterly, W., 167n
Appleton, J., 53 Edmonson, L., 161n
Arnfred, S., 31, 48 Etherton, M., 160n
Austin, J. L., 62, 63, 64, 72, 78, 127, Ethiopia, 26, 71
162n, 163n ethnicity, 18, 20–1, 26, 35–6, 40, 54,
60, 71, 74, 98, 134
Bakari, J., 160n Eyoh, Ansel, 60
Banham, M., 48, 66, 156n, 168n
Barba, E., 139 Fanon, E., 146
Barnett, T., 35, 36, 40, 58 Feldhendler, Daniel, 45
Barongo, G., 157n Foreman, Martin, 48
Barthes, R., 63 Frank, Marion, 12, 46, 68, 73, 160n,
Barz, G. F., 163n 161n
Bell, C., 65 Franko, M., 158n, 162n
Biodun, J., 160n Freire, P., 6, 42, 44, 45, 67, 143,
Blaikie, P. M., 36 145–46, 160n, 161n
Bloch, M., 62 Freudenthal, S., 39
Boal, A., 6, 42, 45, 143, 145, 146, 148,
156n, 161n, 162n Gausset, Q., 60
Boon, R., 161n Gerholm, T., 59
Botswana, 2, 3, 6, 36, 42, 50, 66, 67, gender inequality, 22, 25, 26–32, 38,
70, 101 41, 45, 53, 76, 80, 94, 100, 103–4,
Bourgault, L., 160n, 163n 107, 112, 118, 134, 146
Bowling, A., 94, 104, 165n and politics, 18, 42, 47, 54, 60, 118,
Butler, J., 63 120, 137–8

177
178 Index

gender inequality – continued Lugalla, J., 168n

and prostitution, 18, 52, 83–4, 90, Lutaaya, Philly, 68
99–100, 107–18, 136
and research, 28, 44, 88, 96, 99, Mabala, R., 74, 160n
109, 124 Mandela, Nelson, 3, 68, 136, 148
and role formation, 25, 40, 48, 50, Materego, G., 160n
83, 112, 135–6 Mazzuki, W. M. S., 127
Giddens, A., 92–3 Mbembe, A., 21
Gilbert, H., 66 Mbizvo, Elizabeth, 144
Goffman, E., 64, 165n Mda, Z., 44, 49, 160n, 161n
Görgen, R., 74 Mead, George H., 49
Green, A. E., 64 Meena, Henry, 18, 159n
Grimes, R. L., 61, 76 Mkapa, Benjamin, 72
Grossberg, Lawrence, 160n Mkapa, William., 36
Gunderson, F., 163n Mlama, P., 24, 44–5, 52–5, 160n, 161n
Mlelwa, H. C., 157
Hansson, S., 136 music, 5, 11–12, 83
Harding, F., 160n Mutembei, A. K., 35
Hatar, A., 17, 42, 161n, 168n Mwa Mwenyelwa, Mgunga, 74
Heap, B., 46, 140
Heggenhougen, K., 168n Narrow, J., 94, 166n
Holden, S., 45 Ndunguru, Richard, 161n
Holmdahl, B., 31 Nelson, C., 160n
Honderich, T., 165n ngoma, 5, 25, 48, 108, 119, 135
Nicholson, Helen, 125, 143
Iliffe, J., 34, 35, 42, 53, 58, 60, 164n Norcross, A., 165n
Irobi, E., 167n Norman, P., 39
Nugent, P., 39, 58, 70, 159n
Jackson, H., 159n
Nyanje, P., 165n
Johansson, O., 162n
Nyoni, Frowin Paul, 45, 70, 161n
Jordan–Harder, B., 139, 161n

Kalipeni, E., 45 Ormrod, J. E., 39

Kamlongera, C., 160n Osofisan, Femi, 156n, 161n
Kasfir, N., 140
Kaunda, Kenneth, 68, 70 Piot, Peter, 1
Kazungu, Emmanuel, 159n Plastow, J., 71, 160n, 161n
Kenya, 8, 9, 53 Pompêo Nogueira, M., 160n
Kerr, D., 6, 44–6, 67, 85, 139, 140, post-colonial issues, 6, 21, 31, 40, 58,
160n, 163n, 165n, 168n 65–7, 119, 139–40, 146
Kidd, R., 6, 45, 140, 160n Pritchett, James A., 162n
Killewo, J., 18, 164n Putnam, Robert, 140, 167n
Klink, M., 134, 160n
Konings, E., 31 radio, 16, 26, 68
Kwesigabo, G., 93, 134, 139, 161n, Rappaport, R. A., 64–5, 56, 76
166n Reinelt, J. G., 164n
research, 18, 20, 22–3, 28, 30, 38, 41,
Lange, S., 65, 74, 100, 157n, 161n 46, 57, 61
Lesotho, 42, 44, 60 and epidemiology, 4, 23, 27, 28, 30,
Lincoln, Bruce, 60 36, 93
 Index 179

and fieldwork, 4, 13, 16–18, 29, 57, Spivak, G., 160n

61, 104 Steinbock, B., 165n
and focus group discussions, 23, Struensee, Vanessa von, 164n
28–9, 32, 76, 79–80, 84–5, 88, 90, Swantz, M.-L., 21, 136
92, 94–105, 108, 109, 112–13, Swaziland, 36, 60, 101
117–19, 125, 138, 143
and interviews, 23, 28–9, 32, 74, theatre for development (TFD), 5, 6,
90–2, 94, 104, 116–17, 125, 134, 12, 24–5, 41–6, 66, 119, 127, 139,
138, 142–3 143, 146
as practice-based/action research, Thompson, James, 143
30–1, 48, 73, 81, 90–1, 104–5, Tompkins, J., 66
123–4, 126, 135–7, 140, 143 Toolis, K., 9, 156n
Reynolds, S., 132 Turner, V., 25, 57, 59–61, 64–5, 67,
Riccio, T., 161n 73, 76, 162n
ritual, 5, 21, 23, 26–8, 50, 52, 55,
56–68, 74–78, 79, 82, 100, Uganda, 9, 12, 18, 29, 36, 46, 51, 52,
111–12, 119, 121, 124, 147 54, 68, 70, 73, 82, 86, 93, 128
Roach, J. R., 164n
Roth Allen, Denise, 60 Van Gennep, A., 57, 60, 61
Rubin, Don, 66, 71 Vansina, J., 47

Sabin, T. D., 159n

Waal, Alex de, 134
Salhi, Kamal, 48, 140
Wendo, C., 70
Schechner, Richard, 63–5, 76
Whiteside, A., 35, 40, 58
Seppälä, P., 19–21, 157n
Wittgenstein, L., 63
Setel, Philip W., 44, 58, 168n
Shell, R., 159n
Shuma, M., 21 youth, 19, 21, 25–6, 47, 49–50,
Simpson, A., 46, 140 54–5, 67, 71, 74–5, 81, 87–8,
Sithole, J., 70 97, 107, 110, 112–13, 115, 125,
Sontag, Susan, 163n 141–2, 147
South Africa, 3, 8, 36, 60, 62, 68, 96,
101 Zimbabwe, 36, 42, 60, 101