ABSTRACT
It was a balmy northern Nigerian evening during the rainy season of 1984. A troupe of student actors playing drums, gongs, and flutes, strolled through the shantytown of Samaru opposite the carefully landscaped campus of Ahmadu Bello University in the city of Zaria. Accompanied by young onlookers who grew into an animated audience of adults as well as children before long, the actors set up stage with a tarpaulin canvas on a Samaru street cordoned off for dramatic performances. As the play opened amid songs and dances in Hausa and pidgin English, the two main narrator-protagonists Dauda and Sauna, invited passersby and members of the audience to mediate a fierce internecine dispute over the lack of water in the community. Before the end of the event, no witness to the show was left in any doubt as to the overtly political purpose of the play – which was not simply to dramatize the unsanitary living conditions of Samaru’s inhabitants, but also to galvanize the local community to seek redress through social and political activism.
