Chalimbana Popular Theatre Workshop 1979

 In Zambia the theatre workers found the Botswana Theatre for Development
ideas very attractive. In fact, there had already been examples of plays in
Zambia before 1987 which used a didactic technique to highlight social
problems. For example, the Lusaka Housing Unit used drama in the mid-1970s for
demonstration of techniques of building low-cost houses in the ‘site and
service’ schemes. One such play. Chawama!
Chawama! mixed drama with slide shows (with electricity run from a grocery
or bar) and songs from a popular township group called the Buntungwa Stars
Band.

In order
to provide financial aid to the workshop and to provide an organization which
could plan and administer it, an International Theatre Institute (ITI) Centre
was set up in Zambia. The centre managed to
raise funds, mainly from the Gulbenkain Foundation and CUSO for the
considerable expense of the regional workshop. International resource persons
came from Botswana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Canada and USA. 

<

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resource contingent of workers or extension officers from different agencies in
Zambia. The regional
workshop was held at Chalimbana Training Centre, about 40 km east of Lusaka in
August, 1979. It followed closely the Botswana format of research in villages,
problem analysis, play creation (at the centre), performance in villages,
discussion with villagers, and evaluation and planning for follow-up
activities.

One crucial
difference between the Zambia regional workshop and the Botswana national
workshop was that. despite the attempts at participatory research, there was a
larger gap between the workshop participants and the villagers. Partly this was
a result of not having so many non-Zambians in the research and performance
teams. Probably even more significant was the language question, which made
even many of the Zambians outsiders. 

Chalimbana is located in an area inhabited
by one of the less populous ethnic groups in Zambia, the Soli. Althounh many of
the Zambian participants could communicate with villagers in Nyanja, which is a
lingua franca in Lusaka, very few could speak the local Soli language. (In
Botswana there is a widely accepted national language, Setswana, which made
communication a lot easier at Molepolole) it was significant, for example,
‘that one of the plays at Chalimbana about a literacy class was completely
transformed when a talented Soli-speaking primary school teacher joined she
cast. There was much closer rapport with the audiences when he was performing.

Another
different emphasis at Chalimbana was the greater attention paid to performing
skills. Particularly impressive was the way the dance team which contained two
very skilled drummers and choreographers, Mapopa Mtonga and Stephen Chifunyise,
created a didactic play without dialogue. The performance by the dance group
illustrates some of the basic contradictions in the aesthetics of Theatre for
Development. 

In five movements the play highlighted the theme of poor water
supply, which the participatory research revealed to be a major problem. The
story dealt with a man suffering from a gastric complaint cause by dirty water.
After rejecting a false mercenary sing’anga
(spirit medium), the man goes to a clinic from where he is transferred to
the main hospital in Lusaka. He returns triumphantly cured; the villagers dig a
clean well and celebrate.

The
plot sounds crude, but the play actually had a considerable impact both on the
audience and the other participants at the workshop. Each movement of the play
was associated with a dominating dance motif; these ranged from Lozi Siyomboka dance, Tonga Chingande, Tumbuka Fwembe to West African Highlife and Afro-rock; the whole was
choreographed to produce a unified ballet performed in the round near the
primary school at Chilyabele village.

Such polished performances were
different from most of the Laedza
Batanami sketches where the resource persons often had skills in social
mobilization rather than in performing arts. The different emphasis led to a
debate about the role of aesthetics in Botswana there was a tendency to avoid a
display of intimidatingly sophisticated theatre skills. 

The idea was that a
simple set of skills which were nevertheless close to indigenous performing
traditions could be an appropriate communication and conscientization tool for
villagers to adopt. Doubts existed, however, whether such a ‘rough’ theatre
might not in fact be a euphemism for a second-rate theatre, especially bearing
in mind that the pre-colonial traditions theatre were certainly not ‘rough’ in
the sense of de-emphasizing skills.

Performance
of a play like the untitled water-borne disease mime described above at
Chalimbana was meant partially as a giving back pre-colonial performance arts
to the people. Unfortunately, in the context of a two-week workshop like that
of Chalimbana there was practically no time for the villagers to genuinely
participate in and learn (or relearn) such performing skills. This meant the
villagers were dazzled with the spectacular performance with little impact on
their cultural life once the workshop was over.

The lack
of follow-up applied not only to the cultural/aesthetic impact of the
Chalimbana workshop addressed itself. After the dust had settled down from the
last performances the people around Chalimbana were still plagued by
illiteracy, poor roads, inadequate water supply and lack of health facilities.
In the absence of a dynamic group within the community mobilizing for
development, half­hearted schemes which the organizing committee made for
follow up programmes were doomed to failure.