Jane Plastow

Finding Children's Voices: A Pilot Project Using Performance to Discuss Attitudes to Education among Primary School Children in Two Eritrean Villages.

This article deals with a British Academy funded pilot project carried out in December 2005 and January 2006 involving six primary schools in Eritrea. The project was led by the author, Jane Plastow, a Theatre for Development academic and practitioner, and John Holmes, an educationalist. Both partners work at Leeds University and have involvement with Eritrea dating back to soon after its independence in 1991. We worked with five Eritrean colleagues; three from the Asmara Teacher Training Institute, which is responsible for training all primary school teachers, and two from the Bureau of Cultural Affairs Yakim Tesfai and Mesmer Andu. Building on previous work that had identified a lack of child-centred teaching strategies and of creative arts work in the Eritrean education system, the project aimed to run, in parallel, training sessions in child-centred pedagogies for teachers and theatre projects for Year Five (top grade) children where they would explore their attitudes to school and present their work theatrically to teachers and the community. The project worked with two Eritrean language groups; Tigrinya and Bilen.

Intergenerational Community-Based Research and Creative Practice: Promoting Environmental Sustainability in Jinja, Uganda

ABSTRACT This article critically reflects on the methodological approach developed for a recent project based in Jinja, Uganda, that sought to generate new forms of environmental knowledge and action utilizing diverse forms of creative intergenerational practice embedded within a broader framework of community-based participatory research. This approach provided new opportunities for intergenerational dialogue in Jinja, generated increased civic environmental engagement, and resulted in a participant-led campaign to share knowledge regarding sustainable biomass consumption. We term this approach intergenerational community-based research and creative practice. We discuss the advantages of this model while also reflecting throughout on the challenges of the approach.

Embodiment, Intellect, and Emotion: Thinking about possible impacts of Theatre for Development in three projects in Africa

The performance form now most commonly known in Africa as ‘Theatre for Development’ (TfD) was pioneered by a group of radical scholars and artists in the 1970s and 1980s — notably Steve Oga Abah in Nigeria (Abah 2005), Michael Etherton in Zambia and Nigeria (Etherton 1982), David Kerr in Malawi (Kerr 1995; Magalasi 2012), Ross Kidd in Botswana (Kidd and Byram 1982), Zakes Mda in Lesotho (Mda 1993), and Penina Muhando Mlama in Tanzania (Muhando Mlama 1991) — with the intention of enabling marginalised people to discuss issues of importance to them, either among themselves, or with ‘experts’, to resolve community difficulties and/or to critique power: familial, local, or national. While some work with this broad set of intentions has continued, after the International Monetary Fund-imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes which swept Africa in the 1980s, leading to drastic cutbacks in many social and liberal communitybased programmes, TfD has largely been taken over and re-imagined by its funders, usually International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs)s or state organs. These techniques, and sadly all too often the facilitators, have been co-opted, and in some cases I would argue corrupted, either simply to promulgate messages pre-determined by funders or to offer a spectacle to impress dignitaries and provide good pictures for publicity purposes.

Practising for the revolution? The influence of Augusto Boal in Brazil and Africa

This article interrogates Augusto Boal’s idea of Theatre of the Oppressed as a means of ‘practising for the revolution’. Comparing practice and influence in Latin America and Africa the article draws on examples from work in Brazil, Burkina Faso, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The article will argue that while many of the techniques developed by Boal are useful as part of theatre practice with ‘communities of the oppressed’, the impression created by Boal that he has created a new universally applicable system is misleading, and uncritical following of his ideas can stifle creativity and undervalue culturally specific practice.

African theatre and the University of Leeds

This paper discusses the impact that teaching and research on African theatre in the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds’ School of English may have had in Africa and elsewhere. After surveying the productivity and influence of the Workshop Theatre to the present, the authors ask if they have contributed meaningfully to the development, the promotion, and the excellence of African theatre. In addition, the authors question if the Leeds University Workshop Theatre should be ‘luring’ African students to Leeds instead of them studying in Africa. Was it a valid premise that African students could only get a ‘good’ education in African theatre if they came to the UK to do it? The best answer to these questions is that most African universities are under-resourced, so that access to good drama resources drives students and scholars abroad. Since most African students have very little opportunity to travel on their own continent, a community of international like-minded staff and students gives an opportunity to widen horizons and take something new back to Africa. Many Western and other international students have been introduced to African theatre in the Workshop Theatre. In addition, the Workshop Theatre has had postgraduates from at least 20 other countries. They learn, therefore, not only about particular plays and playwrights but also about ideas of performance and philosophies of life profoundly different from their own. Three case studies relate the Workshop Theatres specific engagement with (1) Sierra Leone, (2) Eritrea, and (3) the ‘home community’. The work at Leeds, and that of countless British and international students, has been enriched by African colleagues. The paper ends with the question of how this can be ‘measured’.

Teatro Asmara: understanding Eritrean drama through a study of the national theatre

ABSTRACT This paper looks at the history of the oldest theatre in Eritrea, Cinema or Teatro Asmara, and seeks to understand how the theatre has been seen and used by its multiple owners and users from 1918 to the present day. Eritrea has had a complex modern history, being ruled from Italy, Britain and Ethiopia before achieving independence in 1991, and each government has had an uneasy relationship with culture, seeking to varying degrees to control and manipulate what could be shown in the nation’s de facto national theatre. By exploring the organizations that have run and put on performances in the building, and looking at some of the theatre they produced it is my contention that we can understand much about the cultural aspirations, anxieties and aesthetics of the artists living and working in Eritrea over the last hundred years.

Drama for Development: Cultural Translation and Social Change

oriented to the long run than broadly comparable groups of male CFI members. Third, Agarwal finds that, in Nepal, ‘all-women CFIs have significantly fewer overall [forest use] violations compared with other groups’ (p. 282). Interestingly, too, Agarwal finds that in both Gujarat and Nepal women are commonly perceived as the most likely forest rule-breakers (sneaking in for firewood given half a chance: ibid), when in fact it is men who are overwhelmingly to blame for major cases of timber theft. Finally, Agarwal suggests that the greater active involvement of women in CFIs is good not only in and of itself, for reasons of social justice and as a spur to wider empowerment, but also instrumentally as a precondition for more effective forest regeneration. Women help forest protection initiatives not because they are at one with nature, but because they effectively police transgressors, spread information about forest closure rules (including to landless women), think long term, and instil a conservation ethic in local children. Agarwal’s fourth major conclusion – in some respects the pay-off conclusion – is based both on villager recall surveys and satellite data. Inevitably, even in a study as rigorous and data rich as this one, verdicts about forest coverage and regeneration have to be handled cautiously. Ten or more years on from the time of Agarwal’s fieldwork it will be interesting to see how effective local CFIs remain (does involvement remain active over many years, and if so how and why?) and what has happened to forest canopy levels and other measures of forest health. (A research council should fund someone to take on this task, if Bina Agarwal and her co-workers are unable to do it themselves). Ideally, of course, one would hope to measure these changes through strictly laid out and repeatedly measured sample plots: comparing forests managed by effective CFIs and other local forests not so managed. Oddly, however, in what is a very comprehensive bibliography to Gender and Green Governance, Agarwal does not cite the one path-breaking paper I am familiar with that does just this: an essay inWorld Development (2002) by Sanjay Kumar – one of a number of first rate pieces of work by a loosely defined group of workers at Cambridge University in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Pari Baumann and Sarah Jewitt (both cited here), and also Cathy Nesmith, Manish Tiwary and Bhaskar Vira. All this is simply to say that Agarwal’s wonderful book should not be the last word on Gender and Green Governance, but must act as a spur to further and more effective work that will seek to build upon and challenge her key public policy findings. Gender and Green Governance will rightly be acknowledged as a classic not just in environmental studies, but in studies of development, governance, public action and public service delivery more broadly. As I said at the top of my review, it is a landmark text.