Exploring Poetic Voice in the Uganda Women's Intergenerational Theatre Project

Summary

Introduction (JP)

This project arose from a serendipitous series of encounters at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds in England where, between 2000 and 2010, Alison Lloyd-Williams, Evelyn Lutwama-Rukundo and Susan Kiguli all studied for postgraduate degrees with me. Both Evelyn and Susan wrote PhD theses during this time about aspects of Buganda culture in Uganda.1 During the process of supervision I became interested in issues in Buganda society concerning theatre and the situation of women in Buganda society, which is particularly strongly patriarchal. However, since the National Resistance Government took power in 1986 and encouraged a grassroots programme of women's participation in social and political issues, a number of women, operating both alone as oral poets and within a growing matrix of nationwide amateur theatre groups, have been producing performances concerning women's issues. I was also interested to learn that the strongly hierarchical nature of Buganda society made it difficult for women to speak freely across age and educational barriers, even amongst themselves. Finally, there has been an ongoing battle since 1964, in one form or another, to enact legislation in the form of a Marriage and Divorce Bill which would grant women improved rights in relation to marriage.

I had previously run a short workshop at Makerere University on Theatre for Development; Alison had worked in Ugandan schools, Evelyn had researched and practised with rural women's theatre groups and Susan taught literature at Makerere. Susan and I are practitioners as well as academics. I developed the idea that we could collaborate on a piece of work which would be innovative (I knew of no other intergenerational women's theatre project in Africa); would model collaboration with equal weight given to all participants’ views; and would be a genuine experiment to see whether performance was a good way to find out about women's perspectives on their lives and a situation in which they could be encouraged to exchange views across the barriers of class, age and education. Together we developed our project proposal, conducted the work, and Susan and I have written this article.