‘All work and no play makes civilisation unattractive to the masses’

Abstract

This article explores the promotion of theatre amongst Africans by Fr Bernard Huss at St Francis College, Mariannhill, Natal. It starts with a delineation of the intellectual traditions operative at the mission. Two areas are highlighted in this regard: the use of the vocabularies of narrative and drama to validate the idea that evangelism is a melodrama of sorts, and secondly how the struggle between Christian and heathen results in a proclivity towards ethnographic assumptions and practices. The final sections of the paper detail the social gospel preached by Huss and how, in response to the poverty and suffering caused by conquest and industrialisation, Huss was predisposed to seeing theatre as a genre that could be used to facilitate social control amongst Africans.