School of Arts (Book Chapters)

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    A history of the decolonised African theatre aesthetic: projections of an emergent African theatre practice - Afroscenology
    (Routledge, 2024) Ravengai, Samuel
    With the advent of colonialism and its mission to ‘civilise’ Africans by assimilating them into European culture, some African theatre practitioners responded by aping western theatre, the dominant aesthetic being Aristotelian. The rise of Negritude questioned the inferiorisation paradigm, and impacted African theatre by inspiring work based on African material yet still presented in western aesthetics. Later, as Africans resorted to the armed struggle to dismantle colonialism, African theatre also disbanded western aesthetics to adopt Afrocentric ones. The newly formed independent ministries of culture and higher education encouraged the postcolonial university to either start new theatre departments or to decolonise those inherited from the colonial state. Thus, from the 1960s Africanist artist researchers who worked from the academy or practised community service have run experimental theatre companies not affiliated to the academy to create new practice and theories feeding an African theatre curriculum in the academy. Among the first to develop such an African theatre were Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, where most intellectuals had received western education but worked from African creative modes, with results of a syncretic nature. The processes of decolonisation of theatre in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and more recently South Africa have also had a profound effect on the emergent theatre. This chapter historicises this process and formulates the direction and theory of African theatre of the future.