Yvette Hutchison - Contemporary Plays by African Women

This impenetrable question is one we have been asked throughout the creation of this book, as scholars of African womens writing and as playwrights. What do we write about? Summarize it. Define it. Capture it in a sentence. What do these seven plays have in common? The question is absurd mainly because it implies a homogeneity that there is such a thing as a singular African Woman playwright, that such a person may be defined by her geography, by her cultural positioning, by her history, by the accident of being born on the continent that it may be possible to define what we write about based on who we are. The reality is that such a categorization is not a given and is rarely neat.

Impulses to tell stories bloom from contexts as much as they are borne from imagination, from the tangible realities of life as much as from the yearning for transcendence. The scope of subjects, themes, obsessions and impulses that frame these plays traverse a wide range of lived (and imagined) experiences. They are defined both by the coincidence of their shared geography and by the specificity of the lives presented therein. That the work is mostly political in nature is a given, in the way that a black woman putting pen to paper is almost always a political act, working as it does against the hegemonic canon of plays by white men. That the work is often tragic is similarly inescapable: these plays overwhelmingly reflect the inherited trauma of what it means to exist as a black woman, written between the lines or in the words themselves. That the work often explicitly or otherwise questions Africas relation to the West or interrogates the post-colonial subject is true as well.

Beyond that, however, lies a range of cultural specificities that make it difficult to speak for or on behalf of a we. These works are playful, ironic, heartbreaking and funny, simultaneously bound to their environments while being universal. Some were written in the authors mother tongue and translated by her into English, while others include local languages in the English texts in songs, terms or proverbs. Broadly, they fall into two thematic categories: The first engages directly with womens potential responses to gendered abuse: how they negotiate their desires and aspirations in a world where male control is often enforced through physical and/or sexual violence. Sara Shaarawis Niqabi Ninja addresses Egyptian womens sense of shame regarding their bodies. This play fantasises about how the protagonists sense of agency evolves through a comic superhero role model, from fearful defence to defiant offence.

Tosin Jobi-Tumes Not That Woman considers the role of women in abuse, female solidarity and agency from a Nigerian perspective. Thembelihle Moyos I Want to Fly (Zimbabwe) tells the story of an African girl who wants to be a pilot. It looks at how patriarchal society can limit female aspirations and shapes the thinking of men regarding lobola (bride price), how women are viewed as domestic or sexual commodities, why women endure abusive men, and the role society at large plays in these issues. The second thematic thread in this collection considers the role of history in the experiences of women. Many historical periods of injustice, particularly colonialism and its legacies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have not been acknowledged or critiqued to any great extent. The plays that follow explore aspects of how various disavowed collective histories and individual memories continue to resonate in the present, from a particularly female perspective.

Adong Judiths memory play, Silent Voices, is based on interviews she conducted with the LRA Rebel Victims of Northern Uganda and how this conflict continues to affect Ugandans in the present. JC Nialas Unsettled explores gender violence across races, post-colonial issues and relationships between black and white Kenyans living in and out of the country. South African Koleka Putumas Mbuzeni tells the stories of four orphaned girls, their sisterhood, and their fixation with death and burials. It suggests the unseen force that governs and dictate the laws by which the villagers live. Sophia Mempuh Kwachuhs Bonganyi draws on an old Cameroonian myth to suggest how the history of slavery continues to affect perceptions of women in their societies today. This play goes beyond the ghosts that haunt Mbuzeni, as it is told by a ghost at her funeral, on the eve of a dance competition she had hoped to win to free herself and her family from slavery, and thus achieve full personhood.

These plays link ghosts and memory, the past and the present. They consider the complexities African youths face as they negotiate various complex and unjust pasts in order to make futures for themselves. The collection comes from the need to hear and read as many of these experiences as possible within the confines of a single book. These playwrights names may be fresh to scholars and supporters of new writing from Africa, and many of these women are being published here for the first time, but they join the ranks of women who have led the movement of self-actualization among African female artists writers like Fatima Dike and Gina Mhlope (South Africa), Stella Oyedepo, Zulu Sofola, Julie Okoh and Irene Salami (Nigeria), earlier playwrights like Ama Ata Aidoo and Efua Sutherland (Ghana), Micere Mugo (Kenya), Rose Mbowa (Uganda), Penina Mlama and Amadina Lihamba (Tanzania), and so many more. It would be ideal (if not feasible) to update this volume annually, based on the number of plays being written by South African women alone. That these plays often remain unproduced, are written without development funding or formal support structures and without a view to publication does little to curb the playwrights irrepressible impulse to create.

What this collection aims to do is widen the scope of new playwriting by a centimetre or two, to create a bit of room for these underrepresented voices, if only to hint at how many new writers have entered the conversation since such a collection was last published. If only to indicate how much legwork there is to be done to find similar spaces for other emerging and established female writers from the continent.

This collection emerges from material gathered for the Womens Playwriting International Conference 2015 and the AHRC-funded African Women Playwrights Network. In 2015, the Women Playwrights International Conference (WPIC) was held in Cape Town, South Africa hosted on the African continent for the first time in its then twenty-seven-year history. Even though the continent has a long legacy of new writing, these works have often existed on the fringes of criticism, academic pursuit and production. It became clear during this conference, and in our subsequent work in this field, that the publication of new plays by women from Africa is still overwhelmingly scarce.

Despite the UN recognizing and advocating gender equality and the empowerment of women, particularly with the appointment of Michelle Bachelet as the first Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women, African women continue to lack healthcare (more women die from complications giving birth than from war or cancer), education, and justice systems that will uphold their human rights and equal access to the means for economic empowerment or representation in cultural fora (cf. Mikell, 1997). Although women playwrights are very productive in creating new works for the stage and are active in many community projects, there is a significant imbalance in what is published by women on the continent. This is very noticeable when one compares published material on African-American women playwrights to their African counterparts. For example, Kathy Perkinss

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