Theatre of rural empowerment: the example of Living Earth Nigeria Foundation's Community Theatre Initiative in Cross River State, Nigeria

Abstract

About 60% of Nigerians live in rural areas with poor access roads and health facilities, near-absent communication media, unemployment, alienation and disempowerment by the political leadership. This scenario has excluded the rural Nigerian from meaningful participation in development action. A bottom-up participatory approach to development/advocacy was used in this project to empower the rural people through strengthening their communication skills and action competence to embark on meaningful development projects. The project was executed under the auspices of Living Earth Nigeria Foundation's (LENF) Community Theatre Initiative. In Cross River State, the project trained, established and empowered community-based theatre groups in six rural communities, using a modified variant of Theatre for Development methodology. These community-based groups became the arrow-heads for local development. Post-evaluation results have shown a people hitherto timid and apathetic, waking up to articulate their problems and charting a course towards overcoming them. It also proved community theatre as the most popular of all environmental education approaches. The Project led the communities to witness dramatic changes as local energy and creativity were unleashed and harnessed for the development of the rural communities in different ways. There were also positive behaviour changes and a questioning attitude to traditional practices and governance. These results were achieved not through the conventional packaging of theatre for rural people but by equipping them with requisite histrionic, production and management skills to develop and practise their own culturally relevant theatre based on identified local problems.