Coming clean: The art of surviving in post 2000 Zimbabwean drama and theatre

Abstract

This paper discusses how a dramatist and two theatre organisations have evolved survival strategies in their drama texts and theatrical performances to legitimize and/ or challenge or subvert state hegemony in the highly restrictive and choking post 2000 Zimbabwean political landscape. Using Stephen Chifunyise’s selected drama and the experiences of Savannah Trust and Theatre in the Park theatre groups, the paper argues that to a larger extent, despite the resistance from the prohegemonic social actors, dramatists and theatre practitioners in Zimbabwe have consolidated and maintained their presence and relevance alongside other oppositional civic society cultural formations by evolving both overt and covert survival strategies in interrogating the Zimbabwean crises in the post 2000 era. The paper uses the theory of hit- and- run and advances the argument that like oppositional media and the mainstream civic society groups such as the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), ZimRIGHTS and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), drama and theatre have been targeted by the state bureaucracy and apparatuses with a view to silencing and possibly obliterating their counter hegemonic activities and that they have managed to survive or ‘come clean’ by evolving and consolidating their newly found survival strategies.