Political prostitutes: conflicting loyalties and identities in middle-class Zimbabwean popular theatre (1998–2008)

Abstract

Middle-class popular theatre narratives and discourses emanating from various crisis-driven contexts in Zimbabwe reflect prevalent political affiliations, sentiments and interests. Methodologically, Marx's historical–materialist framework offers a means of analysing middle-class's vacillating economic status, political shifts and realignments drawn from specific scenarios of everyday life and stage performances. The article argues that in the context of a rapidly changing, complex and conflict-filled world, boundaries between staged performances and everyday life performances unavoidably become blurred, not only out of the dire need to evade political censorship and restrictions, but also because of the need for political survival and realignment. On both the performance stage and in their everyday life performances, the middle class is constantly involved not only in forging strategic alliances, but also in constructing and staging its class identities (Schechner 2003, p. 5). Its location between the elite and the low class accounts for the intermediate class's vacillating tendencies especially in crisis-filled situations. Through the double lens of performance theory and historical materialism, this article illuminates the complexities of shifting identities, loyalties and power bases in both staged popular theatre performances and everyday life performances among the Zimbabwean middle class.

Keywords:

• Theatre
• performance and everyday life
• protest theatre
• political theatre and popular theatre
• theatre censorship
• middle class theatre

Notes

1. This analytical framework also draws upon long-established interdisciplinary theorists such as Erving Goffman, Michel de Certeau, Victor Turner, Kenneth Burke and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who interrogate the boundaries (or lack thereof) of conventional stage performance and everyday life.

2. West gives 1915 as the year when elite Africans petitioned the colonial administrators to establish a housing scheme for the more respectable class of natives who form part of the labour supply line and who shun the location [African ghetto] as a dwelling place for their wives and families.

3. In Zimbabwe this genocide is locally known by its code name Operation Gukurahundi, which translates as ‘clean away the trash’ and is often referred to as gukurahundi, a Shona word for the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains.

4. Father Zimbabwe refers to the late Joshua Nkomo generally regarded as the father of the nation of Zimbabwe for his role as the founding father of the first labour movements and nationalist political parties (Railway Workers' Association, Federation of African Workers' Union, the African National Congress of Southern Rhodesia [ANC], the National Democratic Party [NDP] and the Zimbabwe African People's Union [ZAPU]) that waged the struggle which lead to Zimbabwe's political independence in 1980. Until his death in 1999, Father Zimbabwe committed himself to uniting all Zimbabweans irrespective of race, colour, creed, gender, age or ethnicity as he continued to spearhead the country's struggle for political, social and economic freedom.

5. Terence Ranger (2005, p. 219) has aptly described what he calls ‘patriotic history’ in Zimbabwe as a strategy by the ruling party (ZANU PF) to ‘rule by historiography’, a situation in which, ‘you could have too much history if a single, narrow historical narrative gained a monopoly and was endlessly repeated.’

6. These middle-class professionals regularly commute between rural and urban areas.

7. Peasants constitute the bulk of the population in Zimbabwe and they have always been regarded as a highly valuable and hotly contested electoral bloc.

8. During the first two decades of independence the nationalist regime discredited and disempowered traditional authorities such as chiefs as traitors who collaborated and acted in concert with the colonial regime to oppress the colonised Africans in Zimbabwe.

9. The judge advised the complainants and defendants, in this case the police, to address the play's ‘sticky’ areas outside court.