Ugandan Theatre: paradigm shifts

Abstract

Western literary and theatre critics have held that Uganda, along with all other African countries, lacked any form of real theatre until the late the nineteenth century. This position emerged because Western critics differentiated theatre from performance and, as Rose Mbowa (1999: 227) has noted, they defined theatre as a scripted theatre performed on a proscenium arch stage, an artistic form that was introduced [to Uganda] by the colonial educators and missionaries. In the interest of clarity we will for the moment accept the Western distinction between formal theatre and other kinds of performances while noting that such a distinction did not exist in Uganda's culture.