THE CYBER PAGE OF LINJE MANYOZO

Full Text (6054   words)

Copyright International Council for Adult Education 2002

Introduction

This discussion examines the nature of villagers' involvement during community theatre programmes initiated and implemented by some Malawi non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It contends that the theatrical processes that took place in the communities were not community productions as they were supposed to have been, but rather were pre-planned and remotecontrolled productions prepared outside target communities, thereby demoting community theatre to what Paulo Freire (1970) termed "banking education."

The study defines theatre for development (TfD hereafter) in relation to drama in education and to theatre in education so as to clarify the extant confusion over what constitutes community theatre and its place in the development support communication (DSC) paradigm. Focussing on community theatre, the study establishes how NGOs employed theatre as a research and empowerment methodology and whether the end performances were communal productions. The study then finally critiques the challenges impeding the design and implementation of participatory community theatre programmes in Malawi. Though the study is not an impact assessment, it originates in light of the mushrooming interest of NGOs in DSC after Malawi became a multiparty nation in 1993.

Theatre for Development, Community Theatre and Participation

Theatre for Development (TfD) is a term describing a group of methodologies that employ song, drama and dance as modes of sensitizing and empowering communities to improve their status quo. TfD constitutes two schools: drama in education and theatre in education. Theatre in education refers to didactic productions on popular themes a community identifies with. Production, however, is a private rehearsal by actors with the performances presented as "surprise gifts." Drama in education is, on the other hand, participatory in its approach, for members of a targeted community are involved in the whole process of generating messages that affect their lives. A few outsiders called "animators" work with villagers in identifying critical issues of concern and then develop plays, spiced with songs and dance, such that the resulting performance does not surprise community members-hence the concept "community theatre." Drama in education, therefore, refers to a process whereby theatre is used to research, analyze, and solve critical issues in the community, empowering indigenous people to enhance or make change towards positive behaviours, knowledge and attitudes regarding social issues affecting their lives (Kamlongera 1988; Kerr 1989).

Equating community theatre to TfD, Christopher Kamlongera (1988) details how the Chancellor College Travelling Theatre employed TfD to sensitize people of Mbalachanda community in Northern Malawi to the newly built rural growth centre by the same name. Zakes Mda (1993) discusses how, with the Morotholi Travelling Theatre, he toured Lesotho, sensitizing communities on sanitation, alcoholism, and health, among other issues. David Kerr (1989) discusses how, together with the Chancellor College Travelling Theatre (alongside Kamlongera), he toured Machinga district in Malawi sensitizing communities to issues of primary health care, and Kerr terms such tours "community theatre." Penina Mlama (1971) relates how traditional modes of communication contribute to sustaining culture and development. While linking popular theatre to TfD, she argues that Theatre for Development is the employment of theatrical expressions at the grassroots level in order to research and analyze development problems; to create critical awareness and potential for action to solve those problems (1971: 65). Just like Kamlongera (1988), Mlama's conceptualization and approach is straight-forward: outsiders go into the community and stay there for a few days, during which time they must know the people and their culture and then produce plays around familiar themes-but coupled with "development messages."

Arguing that TfD is a theatre created for the people, Mda (1993: 81) is concerned with the different levels at which theatre for development can be conceived and practised. Mda lists five TfD methodologies: Agitprop, participatory agitprop, simultaneous dramaturgy, forum theatre, and comgen theatre. Agitprop involves university students or any other extension workers going into villages, setting up camp, conducting research and then privately analyzing collected data, preparing plays and presenting them to villages in prepackaged form. Mda (1993: 165) admits that with such an approach there is always little or no conscientization. Participatory agitprop is an advanced stage of agitprop but selected villagers work with extension workers whom Mda refers to as development agents (1990: 352). Simultaneous dramaturgy and forum theatres require full participation of villagers at all stages during which there is a provision for switching roles-spectators becoming actors temporarily. Comgen theatre is performed by community members without outside influence. Much as it may educate the spectators, this type is mainly for entertainment. Attempting to redevelop the TfD concept, Mda (1989) introduces the term, "theatre for conscientization," where he seems to concur with Paulo Freire's ideas on participatory education (Freire 1970). He argues that "theatre for conscientization" aims at bringing about social change through improvement of people's living standards (Mda 1989: 354).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o looks at theatre for development both as a DSC model and also as a postcolonial space and discourse where indigenous peoples conduct public examinations of their societies (1982: 100). Ngugi reminisces how, as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi in 1982, one old woman from Kamiriithu community outside Nairobi urged him to provide the community with "education for the uneducated." He teamed up with Ngugi wa Miiri and wrote a script for the people of Kamiriithu, but further discussions and debates involving villagers resulted in the creation of "Maitu Njugira" ("Mother, Sing for Me"). This project followed in the footsteps of "Ngahiika Ndeenda" ("I Will Marry When I Want"), which the Kenyan government had banned in 1977.

Through "Maitu Njugira" and "Ngahiika Ndeenda," Ngugi's focus was on the process of creating the production and the extent to which villagers identified with it or participated in the production process. The community reworked the scripted story, adding things that meant much to them, thereby removing unnecessary details and preserving local memories. They recreated the story to suit their conception of the world, from problem identification to implementing proposed solutions. Through the creation process, the villagers were able to educate themselves (Bjorkman 1989).

Unlike Kerr (1989), Kamlongera (1988), Mda (1989, 1993), and Mlama (1971), who rely on Travelling Theatres and whose conceptualizations of community theatre focus on collecting information and perfecting a performance, Ngugi (1987) defines it as one created by and for the people in their own language. Ngugi's definition reflects Augusto Boal's concept of community theatre he calls "poetics of the oppressed," thereby giving us three Freirean concepts of community theatre: theatre as a weapon, as a discourse, and as a postcolonial public sphere.

As a discourse, weapon and a forum, community theatre provides an egalitarian opportunity for indigenous peoples to critically analyze community and national issues, linking effects to causes, thereby attaining Boal's "mental liberation"-known as conscientization in the Freirean praxis (Nyirenda 1995; Servaes 1996: 78). Community members interpret and reconstruct their lives rather than strangers coming to do what Derek Mulenga (1989: 40) calls "advising;" otherwise, community theatre would be reduced to cultural imperialism.

History of Community Theatre Projects in Malawi

1. Chancellor College Travelling Theatre

Kamlongera notes that he formed the Travelling Theatre with the aim of taking theatre to the people (1988). He himself taught drama and theatre at the University of Malawi from the 1970s to the 1990s, using his classes as laboratories for his TfD ideas. Class sessions (in the Theatre for Development class) involved students-including myself-visiting communities surrounding the university and collecting information from people, many of whom did not know where our conversations would end up after the performances. Students would then go back to college, create storylines, songs and plays, rehearse them and then take them back to the communities as surprise gifts. This was emulated and further distorted by some non-governmental organizations. Referring to community theatre, Kamlongera emphasizes that Theatre for Development is the theatre created with the people (1988: 30). Kerr (1989) however used the term TfD to describe a process of presenting privately rehearsed productions to communities, thus manifesting conceptual differences between himself and Kamlongera.

His earliest recorded theatre for development trip is to the Mbalachanda, in Mzimba district of Northern Malawi, which was commissioned by the Malawi government's Ministry of Agriculture and the troupe comprised Kerr and eight undergraduate students. Kamlongera mentions that the day after arriving on 15 July 1981, the TfD team talked to elected members of the community. Between 17 and 18 July, the team started developing scenarios and sketches of plays. On 19 July, the privately rehearsed plays were presented to villagers as "surprise gifts." Assisted by different funding organisations, the Travelling Theatre visited many villages in Malawi but the format of research and performances remained intact.

2. Girls' Attainment in Basic Literacy and Education Social Mobilization Campaign

With funding from USAID, the Malawi government contracted an American company, Creative Associates International, to design and implement the Girls' Attainment in Basic Literacy and Education (GABLE) Social Mobilisation Campaign (SMC) (GABLE hereafter). A primary study was conducted to determine factors hindering girls from attending school. Machinga was chosen as a pilot district; its population constitutes mainly of the Yao people. The findings were used to create "universal" messages concerning girls' education for Malawi's divergent cultures. Working with relevant government ministries and departments, GABLE selected sites and embarked on action research with TfD chosen as the action research vehicle to change Malawians' attitudes about the importance of girls' basic education. The TfD team was comprised of six troupes of eight students each, with equal female to male ratios, representing nearly all of Malawi's districts and ethnicities (GABLE 1998a, 1998b).

GABLE's Field Officer would make prior arrangements with community leadership structures. The troupes would go and station themselves in the six villages of each district, spending a week in each village, during which time they would conduct semi-structured narrative interviews about community life in relation to girls' education. Troupe members would take notes and, in the evenings, discuss and categorize information, develop messages, and perform two plays incorporating those messages. The last two days would be spent on rehearsing the plays. A day before the performance, an announcement would be made in the village, informing villagers to go to the village bwalo or theatre on the next day to watch performances by "visitors from Chancellor College." The performance programme consisted of villagers' traditional dances, speeches by local leaders, and lastly, the two plays. During the performances, actors would pose opening-up questions allowing audience members to say yes or no or make a comment on a particular course of action. After the performance, the troupe privately analyzed the performance and wrote a report, which the villagers never saw.

3. The Story Workshop's Maternal and Child Health Project

In 1996, Story Workshop, an Entertainment-Education production company registered as the first Malawian media NGO in 1998, was contracted by UNICEF to write a radio drama series on Maternal and Child Health. After developing characters and some episodes, researchers (of whom I was a member) were sent into villages to test the story lines and characters. That is how "Zimachitika" ("It Happens"), the famous radio soap, was born, modelled after the South African drama serial, "Soul City."

In November 1997, a four-person research team visited Chitenjere and Maselema villages of Malosa area in Zomba district on a one-week village participatory research project using Pamela Brooke's traditional media methodology (Brooke 1996). We arrived in the villages on Sunday and on Monday attended a village headman's son's funeral. From Tuesday to Friday, we met clan heads and organized their clans into discussion groups, which resulted in clan productions on Saturday, the performance day.

During this exercise, audience participation and attendance in the discussion groups was very poor. We indeed went beyond the GABLE experience in that we managed to know the participants personally, but throughout the process, we (the outsiders) directed discussions and 'forced' people to come up with plays in lieu of the performance on Saturday, the deadline given by the director, Brooke herself. The intention was to have people discuss and develop skits on maternal and child health, but they favoured popular issues of witchcraft, infidelity, drunkenness, and theft. The performance itself angered villagers because, when the director came to watch the plays (the first time to enter the village), she awarded prizes to what she construed as good actors and performances, and villagers felt we had engaged them in a competition without warning them, all the more-so considering that most prizes went to one clan.

4. Project Hope STD Participatory Estate Drama Campaign

Around 1995, Project HOPE began training health workers in and around Malawi estates on Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) diagnosis, prevention and treatment after an earlier survey had established common attitudes regarding STDs. The survey report indicated knowledge of the issue but poor behavioural practices related to the STDs and suggested that mere preaching about changing behaviour was not effective; a process that would lead to behavioural change was needed. The study also observed that the culture of silence on reproductive health issues largely contributed to the spread of sexually transmitted infections. A communication campaign was called for and in 1997, the Story Workshop sent two facilitators who teamed up with Project HOPE field staff and Ministry of Health and Population staff, thereby forming a team to design and implement an effective health education process through drama training workshops. The target areas were Machinga, Thyolo, Lilongwe and Nkhata Bay districts. The team conducted six one-week training workshops for local community drama groups, which would continue sensitizing the communities on STDs. The Story Workshop argues that the "emphasis in the workshops was developing effective story lines while mastering the participatory techniques of story theatre which falls under the broad category of entertainment education" (Brooke and Kamowa 1999: 2).

Pamela Brooke and Olex Kamowa introduce the concept of story theatre arguing it is a form of entertainment-education aimed at achieving social change by dramatizing human emotions connected to the realities of life (1999). They argue that story theatre is outstanding in its reach, for people are able to identify themselves with loveable and entertaining personalities on whom they look as role models. Other types of dramas Brooke and Kamowa mention are: didactic, social drama, theatre for development, forum theatre, popular theatre, village drama, folk media, docudrama, and soap opera.

In story theatre, the emphasis is on modification of traditional practices and developing an effectively catching story whose characters the audience looks up to. The idea is to empower villagers through local drama groups, to learn skills of developing participatory village drama and then create and perform their own drama in the absence of animators. The objective of the STD awareness campaign was therefore to make people discuss reproductive health, thereby tackling the problem of poor or lack of communication on the issue. Working with local leaders like teachers and nurses, the story theatre trainers camp in an area and identify a drama group to work with. Usually they meet at a school or church. After orientation details on the objectives and the process of the workshop, the drama groups) are sent into the community to gather information. They come back and (collectively) in private analyze the data, choose themes to be addressed, and develop messages. Then there is roleplaying in "what would you do situations," to test and enhance the participant's imagination. These situations are developed into debates involving two characters with opposing views which are also developed into skits involving more characters exchanging and switching roles. The next stage is to create and develop music, songs, dance and slogan banners or posters which are incorporated into the production. The final performance, termed "story theatre," is planned two or three days after. Careful planning is necessary in order "to have a big audience" which will enjoy the performance since "the whole village campaign is based on the final performance" (Brooke and Kamowa 1999: 72).

Challenges of Implementing DSC Programmes in Malawi

1. Misunderstanding of TfD and Community Theatre

GABLE (1998d: 8) imagined that TfD, participatory drama and popular theatre are all terms that mean one thing and have been used to define a methodology for identifying areas of critical need or concern, and motivating others to work toward resolution of these concerns or satisfaction of these needs. For GABLE, TfD is popular theatre and a methodology (1998a: 18). Having university students live in a village for a week, talk to people for half the time and then spending the rest of the time on creating plays in private and presenting the plays to the people as "surprise gifts" that constituted 'community participation, raises the question, which `community?' GABLE targeted performances, arguing that all work is improvised and rehearsed very briefly and quickly before presentation (Kamlongera 1988: 168). Similarly, Brooke and Kamowa (1999) argue that participatory village drama leads to story theatre and that it is a new model and outside the scope of Theatre for Development. They also assert that at the moment they are the only people with expertise in story theatre and, to avoid compromising the standards of the methodology, those who want to use the village participatory drama should contact them (1999: 78).

Story theatre, however, is just Mda's Comgen theatre, and it does not lead to the production of "story theatre" but rather to "community theatre." Story theatre as a notion is a manifestation of conceptual confusion for in a theatre there is a story, be it a line in a short pounding song, or folk story, or a traditional dance. Story theatre is a modified version of GABLE's TfD. Village participatory drama is again Mda's agitprop theatre in which extension workers go to the village, collect information, digest it and with the assistance of a few village actors perform it back to the community.

2. Confusion over the Notion of Participation

As already mentioned, Malawi's Theatre for Development has been about extension workers going into villages and staying for six days, out of which three are dedicated to talking to villagers as researchers and coming up with plays about village life. Participation, however, refers to contributing wilfully based on an informed choice. To pragmatists, participatory research is an education and research process during which there exists the Freirean dialogical and dialectical relationship between the educator and educatee. On the other hand, Marxists view participatory research as a process of class struggle for social justice through generation and utilization of indigenous knowledge (Mulenga 1989: 34). Participation is not achieved through spectatorship, as was the case in the four aforementioned projects.

3. Lack of Research Partnerships with Indigenous People

Yasuko Nagai (1989), a teacher in Western Australia, relates how at one time a male university student came to attend her classes for research purposes (1989: 19). The researcher never elaborated on the kind of information he was looking for, making her feel uneasy as each day the research student observed the classes and sometimes played with the Aborigine children she taught. When she saw the student's report some weeks later, she felt it was biased and incorrect. She was disappointed and vowed never to allow any researcher in her class for a "university student with no teaching experience had acted as the superior researcher and she, a better-qualified person, was treated as an inferior research object" (Nagai 1989: 20).

This cautionary tale shows us how, by not involving in research, indigenous people are made to feel inferior and powerless as they do not know what the outsiders are going to do with the information. In another example, a member of a fishing community asked a biologist to tell the village what results he had obtained from researching on their lake (Bongwe and Manyozo 2000: 4). In another instance, a village headman in Lilongwe demanded a bale of sugar as one condition to allow the GABLE TfD troupes in the village for after the performance they would disappear and thus no benefit would come to him or the village.

4. Lack of Co-ordination between NGOs, Government and

Academic Institutions

Every time a group of people seeking to find employment come together, write up a good proposal and a constitution with a board of trustees, they get registered as an NGO. The government does not seem to care whether other NGOs are already interested in the area. On the other hand, NGOs, with lack of expert advice on many of issues, do not want to work with the university, resulting in a lack of theory-based DSC programmes. Keyan Tomasselli (1987) laments that theatre for development programmes have failed in this part of Africa largely because governments and institutions do not listen to expert advice by professionals. He gives the example of "Sarafina 2" in which Mbongeni Ngema's troupe wasted their R14million, having miscommunicated information on AIDS.

5. Inadequate Training Opportunities in Theatre for Development

Apart from the second year TFD course at Chancellor College, the PRA course at Malawi Institute of Management, and the Rural Development course at Bunda College, training opportunities in TFD are non-existent. Added to this is the lack of proper and culturally relevant manuals to provide direction, something which has bred territorialism-where those who know a little do not want to share information so they remain the only experts and, resultantly, make money out of consultancies.

In 1999, the Ministry of Women, Youth and Community Services sponsored a TFD training workshop for some of its extension workers in Ntcheu district. There were twelve participants who were Primary Education Advisors (PEAs) and Community Development Assistants (CDAs). The trainers were Gable's Field Officer and a Junior Lecturer in Language and Communication at Chancellor College, both of whom were graduates of Kamlongera's TfD. The first three days were spent on lectures, two on research, three on data analysis, developing and rehearsing plays respectively and one for performance and evaluation.

The TfD theory taught to participants reflected Kamlongera's influence. For instance the participants were referred to as "change agents"-personnel ferrying 'change' from outside to inside the community (Bongwe and Kaunda 1999: 8). Keyan Tomaseli (1987: 5) would explain this as a result of impact of the Shannon and Weaver model of communication, which he argues, has a universal toehold on conventional thinking. In 1947, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver developed a general mathematical model of communication, which came to be known as the Shannon-Weaver Model. The model proposed that all communication must include six elements: source, encoder, message, channel, decoder and receiver. It thus involved breaking down an information system into sub-systems so as to evaluate the efficiency of various communication channels and codes. Subscribing to the Shannon-Weaver model, Bongwe and Kaunda taught that TfD is performance oriented during which time the audience critically follows the play and freely participates (1999: 9-10). One notices here that villagers are conceptualized as passive recipients, thus reducing Tff) to the kind of education Freire rejected as "banking education."

6. Uncommitted Extension Workers/TfD Troupe Members

One morning, while on a community theatre field trip, we were forced to wait longer for three colleagues who were embarrassed to come out of their rooms as they had overslept with prostitutes. In other field works, most evenings were spent partying and drinking which affected team performances during mornings but we never included these things in reports for fear of culprits losing jobs. Casual relationships between troupe members and women from indigenous communities also flourished. For instance, while testing Zimachitika radio drama episodes in villages of Zomba district a team member slept over at an engaged woman's house (the fiancee had gone to work) and this relationship affected the member and consequently everybody during the period we were there, as now the priority was on the relationship rather than the actual work. As students we looked on fieldwork as a means to generate some money for our tuition fees. In another instance, troupe members went on strike over pay disagreements. Looking back critically, one discovers that our participation in DSC projects had more to do with personal poverty alleviation reasons than concern over poor standards of living in indigenous communities.

The Consequence of Insufficient Participation

Lack of villagers participation in DSC projects has resulted in misrepresentations of people and their cultures. In Nsanje district, GABLE's troupe six performed two plays. The first play featured a girl who, due to a lack of parental support, drops out, gets a boyfriend and becomes pregnant; her parents encourage her to marry the boy. Meanwhile, her niece has worked hard at school and becomes a nurse and when the girls meet, the married one has too many children and life is too cruel for her. This play, like many others developed, presented many fallacies: that parents and boys are the only combined cause of dropping out; when you dropout, you get married and become pregnant, have many children and end up with many problems; when a girl gets married she stays with her mother. In fact, the people of Nsanje district are matrilineal.

Eric Dudley (1993) argues that villagers resist imposed educational processes, terming villagers' resistance an "abandoned house" as they participate in a project in the presence of extension workers and abandon it when the outsiders leave. Participatory research is egalitarian; it reverses the roles of educator and educated (Servaes 1996: 78). Freire's participation is intended to liberate indigenous peoples (Nyirenda 1995). Liberation here means four things: to enable people to say "no" to an idea; to enable people to accept a project as well-informed citizens; to give them skills to carry out the project; and finally, to give them creativity to use these particular skills on another, different project. So there is an element of continuity in Freire's conscientization.

Just like GABLE', Project HOPE STD campaign ended with performances. In one performance in Thyolo district, one drama group performed a skit about removing "dust," a traditional sexual cleansing rite, with the dust being removed by new initiates. The skit features a boy who, accompanied by his uncle, proposes marriage to a girl who is about to undergo female initiation. When the girl comes out of initiation, the mother tells her to have sex with several men for sexual cleansing and she contracts an STI, which angers the suitors.

Thyolo district-where I come from-is largely populated by Mang'anja and Lomwe tribes, which have many similar customs and traditions. After initiation rites, initiates are not asked to have many sexual partners, but rather to attempt to have sex after they graduate, to establish if their circumcised penises have healed. Parents do not say anything encouraging a child to have sex, nor are they free to discuss sexual issues with children. Yet, the Project HOPE-- Story Workshop play presented mothers as encouraging daughters to have cleansing sex, which is a cultural fallacy, for the appropriate person to discuss sex with a girl is her nkolodzolo, a Nyanja term for an initiate's representative. Again, the mother talks of many sexual partners, which is yet another incorrect fact, culturally. Then in the skit the girl gets a sexually transmitted disease, not from her boyfriend, but from "other men." Only the fiancee is in a position to have the first sex with his girlfriend. These facts could have been verified through extensive and in-depth research interviews. Unfortunately, there was not enough time for attenuated research and most of the workshop participants were school children and obviously had never been initiated, otherwise they would have spoken the cultural truth.

Conclusion

The foregoing has attempted to critique the logistics and processes of carrying out community theatre programmes in a democratic Malawi. The discussion has critically reflected on attempts by GABLE, Project HOPE, Story Workshop and the Chancellor College Travelling Theatre to collaboratively work with villagers in producing theatre together. It has demonstrated that lack of adequate training opportunities and co-operation between the academic experts and NGOs has only managed to breed territorialism, where people without concrete knowledge (who do not want to share, write or publish information for debate, thus developing knowledge) get unadvertised consultancies in DSC. The small programme at Chancellor College has to start offering short-term training programmes and also organize forums where practitioners can present papers and exchange information which could benefit NGOs and other DSC practitioners, otherwise the implementation of development support communication shall always be at the expense of poor people since the emphasis is on change, not transformation.

This discussion does not recommend the dos and don'ts of DSC programmes for practice, logistics and implementation always depend on various cultural contexts. It has managed however to emphasize that in the three case studies and many other incidences, the trend has always been the same: The donors provide funds to NGOs based on guidelines and specific objectives measurable by certain indicators. These NGOs have extension programmes into communities, operating through field workers, traditional and community structures. Research is carried out, data is analysed with little or no community involvement, the performances are carried out, the extension workers leave, reports and evaluations are prepared which end up in donor organizations offices without copies to indigenous communities. The question is: why do we go into communities, intruding into people's private lives? To make money or to make positive contributions towards achieving social justice and better lives?

Finally, we cannot blame Kamlongera for the problems that emerged within Malawi's community theatre programmes. He was a pioneer in the field within the country and there were some concepts he never fully elaborated on, like the principles governing the practice. It is this ambiguity that opened the field to gross manipulations and misinterpretations. NGOs, therefore, thriving on territorialism, have had a huge part to play in establishing the current status of Malawi's DSC and for their failure to re-develop Kamlongera's earlier work.