Theatre and the Eritrean Struggle for Freedom: the Cultural Troupes of the People's Liberation Front

Abstract

The thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence – during which a small and poorly-armed guerrilla force eventually triumphed over a highly-equipped enemy, supported by foreign powers – is also the story of a social revolution in which the theatre played its part. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only employed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating its people – concerning education and women's rights, and on the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods – and with victory came measures to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in our previous issue, Paul Warwick here makes the first attempt to reconstruct its undocumented role in the independence struggle, and the efforts of the rebels to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. A graduate of the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, Paul Warwick made this the subject of his research when he visited Eritrea in the summer of 1995 as part of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project. Since his return he has collaborated on a translation of The Other War by Alemseged Tesfai, written during the independence struggle, and given a reading at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 1996: this is due for publication later this year in an anthology of African drama from Methuen. Paul Warwick is currently Artistic Director of the Unlimited Theatre Company based in Leeds.