Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality (review)

Abstract

In the last decade, historical research in South African literature, theater, and performance in the first half of the twentieth century, a period of neocolonial modernization but also of attempts at re-traditionalization by the state as well as the emerging African elite, has transformed the field from a terrain of sketchy if pioneering books to a "dense forest" (to quote a favorite metaphor of Peterson's primary subject, Herbert Dhlomo) including studies of literary, theatrical, and musical figures, from Dhlomo to his cousin, composer and impresario Reuben Caluza, as well as a range of cultural forms, from ragtime to marabi, vaudeville to agit-prop, izibongo to protest poetry. Bhekizizwe Peterson's book draws on this research as well as his own investigation of as yet underused archives to contribute a nuanced historical account and analysis of the role of dramatic texts and theater practice and criticism in the education of African intellectuals and in their negotiation with the hegemony of English neocolonial culture in a South Africa still tied, as a Dominion, to the British Empire. Peterson focuses on two case studies, drama education at the Marianhill Catholic Mission (ch. 1-4), and the debates around the cultural, political, and social role of drama among educated Africans in Johannesburg, such as Dhlomo (ch. 5-9), but his framing arguments about the impact of drama on the social relations of "practitioners, audiences and critics" as well as the "intellectual, moral and cultural horizons that shape identity and agency" (p. 9) resonate with ongoing debates about the present role of theater in South Africa.