Theatre, communication and development: An interview with Professor Chris Kamlongera by Linje Manyozo. 18 March 2004, Chancellor College, Zomba, Malawi.
The past century has seen the rising battles of definition over what constitutes ‘authentic participation’. Notable is that the top-down transfer of western development solutions to third world development problems was a total failure because of the conflicting cultural and socio-economic trajectories characterizing Third World societies. Then came the dependency-disassociation debates followed by the another development paradigm, characterized by African socialism projects in Tanzania and Mozambique. The last part of the 20th century has seen the growing demand for ‘authentic participation’, itself characterized by the mushrooming of organizations and institutions interested in social change programs in areas of health, natural resource management, girls education, democracy and decentralization, food security and other social enigmas. Communication methodologies and methods have focused on theatre for development, community theatre, interactive theatre, participatory media and other clichés related to notions of “people-centered”, “community-based” or “locally-oriented” development. The problem however, as noted by Professor Christopher Kamlongera, is on how we have gone about implementing this notion of participation. In an interview with one on his development communication students, Linje Manyozo, Kamlongera, reflects on the contestable notion of ‘living with the people’, by tracing the development of theatre for development in Malawi.. Professor Kamlongera has taught in the University of Malawi from the 1970s and was one of the founding members of the Fine and Performing Arts (FPA) Department under which the Theatre for Development Program is based. He has researched and published extensively in development support communication. He is the current head of the FAO-sponsored SADC Centre in Communication for Development in Zimbabwe.
Linje: I would like to hear your background in development communication, how you started the (Chancellor College) Traveling Theatre and how you moved away from presentation of plays like in Western Theatre to community theatre
The start of the Traveling Theatre was even before I joined the Department of Fine and Performing Arts. Then, I was in the Department of English as a student, majoring in English and Economics-and in economics, we were looking at development issues, agricultural economics, development, labour economics, economics of education, Marxist Economics etc. In the English department we had one unit, of practical drama in which we were learning skills in acting, directing and playwriting. My natural choice was to go for acting. When I graduated from Chancellor College, I went into teaching English in the Department of English Language and Communication, at the Polytechnic (a constituent College of the University of Malawi) Teaching English as a second language, I found drama was a very good tool for teaching English, and naturally, I went into directing plays that were in English-focussing being on plays written by myself or those by my students.
Eventually, I came to teach here at Chancellor College (also a constituent college of UNIMA). At the Polytechnic, English was taught as a service subject, thus whatever we were doing, Drama was supposed to be building up English communication skills for students. But at Chancellor College, I joined the English Department, where again, they were teaching Drama, for its own sake. And that is when we started to produce plays-either from an English Literature background or from an African collection of plays.
The Traveling Theatre on the other hand, was a structure that was set up, as a result of the success of a production by the English Department, before Chancellor College moved from Blantyre to Zomba (in the 1970s), when I was a student myself. The first production of note that I can recall from my student days was Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. This was a very successful play and had notable names like Mr. Longwe (who is now the University Registrar) James Ng’ombe (now, Director of Malawi Institute of Journalism), myself and others. Due to the success of this European play, the Director, the late Mr. John Linstrum decided to do Everyman written by Obatunde Ijimere. The play was adapted to feature local culture, singing and dancing. The play was very well received. It was later adapted for radio on MBC’s Theatre of the Air programme. Beyond that, a decision was made to tour the play around Blantyre and nearby districts.It was performed in churches and hospitals. The result was a resounding success. And the feeling that plays should be taken out to people, became firmly established. I would like to believe that this idea must have been mooted by people like Mupa Shumba, who is a product of the early Makerere University’s Department of English-where they had a Traveling Theatre, whose philosophy centred on taking plays outside Makerere as well as outside Uganda, like to Tanzania or Kenya. Then Mr. Shumba was an Assistant Registrar who later joined the English Department.
I thus believe that Mr Shumba was the key person to plug the idea of touring plays around. But the key person to come on the scene was Dr James Gibbs, who came from Ghana and Ibadan, and joined the English Department. When Gibbs came on the scene, he found that we had toured Everyman. So all his productions came into the same thinking of touring plays. Gibbs started producing plays that were derived from African sources, more directly than anybody had done in the past. He first did a series of plays from his own collection, based on the myth about the beginning of the world. Even when Gibbs left, the tradition had been established. Most tours however were in the Southern and Central Region because of rising costs.
When James Gibbs was leaving, I was recruited to replace him in the English Department here in Zomba. Within two weeks of my arrival, there were complaints that drama had died, which surprised me. Despite those complaints, I started producing plays, starting with The Lion and the Jewel, The Trials of Brother Jero by Wole Soyinka, and other African plays. We launched them on campus and later on began taking them out.
One critical thing that came out was that, the Travelling Theatre, which had been firmly established by James Gibbs, should be controlled, organised and run by the students themselves, rather than be run by the English department or staff. The students thus elected their own office bearers. This enabled them to think of national tours, which popularized drama and Chancellor College Travelling Theatre in the country. In 1981, the Office of the President and Cabinet wrote a letter, inviting us to take plays to a Rural Growth Centre in Mbalachanda in Mzimba. We looked at our repertoire at that time, asking ourselves: How can we take English plays, meant for an audience in an academic setting, to people in a Malawian village, with no, or little, English. We decided that we would go to Mbalachanda, but we would not take English plays because they were not relevant to the villagers: The subject matter, the acting, the directing, the staging style were totally not in line with village reality.
This time we said, we would create plays based on the people’s wishes. We would in other words, see what they themselves would like to see on stage and then find ways of doing the plays for them. We agreed to go there and spend about 10 days within which we would live with the community-get to know them, get to know their problems, their wishes and dreams-and out of which, we were going to develop plays.
One of the issues we also discovered was that some English plays like Enock Timpunza’s The Lizard’s Tail would make a very good play as it deals with popular issues of love potion and family problems. So we translated it into Chichewa. The translation did not stick to the text. It just acted as a springboard for improvising a play around its story. We also developed other plays as a result of our interactions with the community. So we had a package of four or five plays that we were carrying with us to take out to the people in their own villages. This time, we were taking ideas from the people and going back to where we were staying – and on our own, developing these plays and then, performing them to the community.
The idea of going to Mbalachanda was to get the community to use the facilities at the centre as their own. The Centre had an infrastructure of a township in that it had a market place, a post office, a clinic, a primary school, a football ground, a community centre-where people could hold dances and meetings. But it had been imposed on the community. Communities were never consulted to say whether they needed it or what should go into the Centre. It was assumed, from a development perspective, that if you start a centre like that in the middle of nowhere, it would attract people to it. It would also encourage people around it, to become economically active in farming or income generating activities.
Indeed, while we were there, we were able to attract people to come to the Hall, but more or less like in the case of any concert anywhere, but nothing permanent was guaranteed from this experience. I am not sure whether Mbalachanda Rural Growth Centre changed after this tour.
When we came back from this experience, it was felt that Mchira wa Buluzi ( The Lizard’s Tail) was a very successful play. Students and a colleague, David Kerr toured the production throughout the country, and it became a household name. People would make jokes, cut lines out of the play, and use them in everyday conversations - to the extent that other people who had never thought of doing plays in the vernacular, started doing plays in the vernacular. And the style of production was not so much in writing a script. The line was to develop a sketch and improvise around it. This is still done by many groups today.
Linje: In theory and practice, what was the connection between the Mbalachanda trip (which was like a pioneer of Theatre for Development in Malawi) and the 1980s Liwonde Village Health Communication Campaign
When we went out to perform in Mbalachanda, we were being invited to entertain the people. Full stop. There was nothing like “go and encourage people to do this or that, in order develop their lives”. It was just to keep them happy. When we got there, from interacting with the people, we formed plays that showed village realities in terms of economics, health or agriculture. We never went there to develop plays that would emphasize health or agriculture progress although during performances, we would open up the performance, we would see on the faces of the people that it was necessary to engage them in dialogue as the play was on. So, I introduced the “opening up technique”. This opening up technique was born by chance, by just asking the audience directly “ Isn’t what I am saying correct?” or “What do you think?” And they would respond spontaneously and from the heart. And you would turn to your fellow actor and say, “You see, the people are saying it’s correct, so let’s move on with what people are thinking-what are you trying to say here” etc. If someone in the audience responded by saying, ”No, I disagree”, you would turn back and engage in a dialogue with the audience trying to get at the bottom of the response.
In this style of acting, as an actor, you were made to be very aware of the presence of an audience which was with you as you were performing- a kind of thing, you don’t get on in an end-on stage –because the proximity of the audience is not there. Performing in the village required performing in the round, as decided by the audience. When you got to the village, you found the villagers already seated there in a particular way. They had created the acting space for us-and we had to use it -you had to learn to act in one direction and at the same time turn for those behind you, so you did not forget anybody on the spot.
Mbalachanda did not have TfD built into it-and if there were any stories related to agricultural, development and health issues, they came up by chance, because we were developing plays from real lived experiences of the people. Nevertheless, after each performance, we used to have in-house post-mortems-examining what had happened, how we felt about it and what things could we have been done to improve the performance. It was this examination process that began to push us towards being conscious of what we were doing when we were on stage. In this manner we built a body of knowledge specific to TfD as we practice it today. One of the things that came up after Mbalachanda was that we saw possibilities of using theatre for development purposes.
Indeed an opportunity came up when a Dr. Hayo Schmidt, then heading the Liwonde Agricultural Development Division Hospital talked to me and said: Chris, can you help us to use theatre to encourage primary health care amongst the population of Liwonde-about 2 million people.
By that time, we had come from Mbalachanda with concrete experiences of performing for village audiences. We were aware of the need to get a true picture of the situation from the villagers-about what and how communities thought about issues than to go there with already made up minds and imposing these or what any health officials would have wanted to be done. Because we were living in the communities, we wanted to get stories that would lead to lively sketching and improvisation. We thus started getting the other side of the story as it were. This was perfect material for drama-a recipe for conflict.
Given that scenario, we were able to do plays that were relevant. During performance, we could open up the dialogue to the audience and incorporate what they were saying, into the play at the same time, without losing course of our objectives. This time, I found this opening up very original and unique because this time I had began reading about forum theatre in the United States and other people who were doing forum theatre. But most of them do not talk about the actor-they talk about the theatre group and talk about the audience and its relationship to the theatre team particularly as it relates to the story you are telling. But they don’t talk about the demands placed on the individual actor. The challenge is in seeing how an actor relates to his space, surrounded by people on all sides. Building this knowledge into the Liwonde plays was a big achievement-which came out naturally in practice.
This Liwonde experience enabled us to move into TfD where we were consciously using the art of theatre to transport, to share experiences around health issues. To me, this was the real beginning for me, of TfD, because it was now being done consciously. Then we introduced a TfD course.
In TfD, the focus is on development. Theatre is seen as a communication tool. How do you develop the play? You go out and live in the community-you get information from the community-you share experiences with the community. Here, already you are communicating with the community because your communication process starts a lot earlier than when you are preparing the performance. I reject the conventional notion of research in TfD because to a scientifically minded person, research suggests extraction of information on particular things from somewhere. In TfD, you are living experiences, sharing experiences, sharing a life. TfD has not been built on extracting information from people – It has been built on shared experiences and a shared understanding.
In performing TfD plays, an actor becomes a carrier of different points of view, you become a facilitator – during the performance you are challenging people to comment on what is going on with regards to different views being portrayed in the performance- not endorsing what actors are thinking. Thus you are asking them to rethink what is their position as reflected in the play. For instance, if you have a play about headmasters abusing young girls there is bound to be different perspectives before you arrive at that view. You must have different points of view-some of which will support the headmaster and others that will not support it. The villagers will take a position. The actor’s duty is, in the next stage, to ask the people, what should be done in this school. Then they will start saying: let’s form a committee or lets ask the ministry to fire him.
TfD goes beyond the performance, to include a postmortem that looks at the performance and the relationship between the performance and, the audience. Out of this postmortem, you get trajectories coming up, taking you into further action. TfD is thus a process of starting to look at an issue as our agenda and asking people to engage in the process of sharing and taking over the agenda-and looking for resolutions and concrete action. Thus the postmortem enables participants(the audience and the actor) to make real, the issues that came out during the performance.
Linje: How different is PRCA from TfD?
PRCA is a method that helps you enter the community-that helps you understand the communication system in existence-that helps you understand the entry point with regards to interacting with the community. TfD is a tool that might be one of the identified channels through which you can choose to communicate with villagers.
PRCA is broader. PRCA could be used as a starting point for TfD, if we use the model in which TfD is conceived as having a “living with the community” component. PRCA could help you in developing a communication strategy, as it gives you a good profile of the community, their communication systems, and who are the interaction groups. It is out of such information one develops a communication strategy that includes communication tools to be used. In our TfD work in the Liwonde Primary Health Care programme, we took research for granted as we didn’t develop a systematic approach to that research component. Our skills and tools for living with the community were not organized in a systematic manner. PRCA could have helped in this as a preamble to TfD. It would have enabled us to make informed decisions as to whether or not to use theatre. PRCA feeds into strategy and the strategy suggests the tools you are going to use, which might include theatre.
Linje: What if people don’t choose TfD?
You see, if you go there with theatre for development, you have chosen, as an outsider to use theatre as a tool of communicating with people. But what are you going to communicate about? How are you going to use that theatre in the community? Are you going to use it as a top-down tool or as a facilitation tool for encouraging further debate of the issues and development of action from there? Theatre in TfD should not be used for its own sake; it should be seen as part of an ongoing process, which will lead you to achieving the goals of the people’s development.
Linje: What are the key elements of Theater for Development as a form of development communication?
I agree entirely that there are problems in the way we are going about communication for development in places. We should however, bear in mind that nothing stands still in human life. Let us take on board the dynamism of what people are trying to do and add value to it.
In my case, my position shifted a long time ago since the Mbalachanda days (1981). Even as we were doing the GABLE project from 1995 through 1996, questions did arise which the field could not answer nor had the time to address. We briefly touched on some of my concerns with Theatre for Development (TfD) at the moment when we chatted! These include the research component of TfD work. I do not think that it is systematic. Everything is covered in "living with the community". What does this mean? The Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA) method […] is ideal for TfD- as a forerunner to development of sketches or plays. In fact, even Radio and Television work would benefit from this.
Another element which TfD practitioners world over are glossing over-even your intervention- is the impact assessment that is necessary if we are to talk about success stories and if we are to be able to justify pumping more money into TfD and [other development] communication interventions. I know that this is an area that most communication or media experts do not feel comfortable with. But it has got to be done! I am now in a position to handle these two areas-let alone in placing TfD in a broader communication strategy rather than see it as a stand alone intervention mechanism.
You will notice that I am pushing for field-based discourse. [Antonio] Gramsci and [Paulo] Freire have been pushed for quite some time now. The 70s and 80s saw a good deal of the issues you are talking about. In fact University of Dar es Salam was at the helm of this then although Penina Mlama does not talk about it in her work. Let us test the theory against practice. There are challenges there. Very exciting ones I must say!
In my first book [Theatre for development in Malawi and Zambia] there is a section, which records the experiences of setting up a Primary Health Care system in the Liwonde ADD. We used TfD as a community mobilization tool NOT as a cure for any problems and we saw interesting results. Sometimes we forget the limitations of TfD!
The question of outsiders versus communities or whose agenda TfD carries is critical! May be this is where we go back to PRCA!