ABSTRACT
Political situations in neocolonial Africa in the 1970s instigated several artistic strategies through which people understood their new oppressions and sought cultural and political means of transcending them. Theatre for Development (TFD) emerged as one such cultural practice that helped communities produce forms of resistance by using performance traditions not only to tell stories of their oppression but also to galvanize them into social actions. As practiced in most of Africa, TFD brings together amateur and professional actors, social workers and health functionaries, in a broader movement to help communities coerced into poverty and under-development transform themselves into voluntary social organizations seeking more proactive citizenships. Its distinguishing feature is extending theatre of political consciousness into a programmatic activism whereby communities set agendas for their own social development, as well as devising means of negotiating with government and non-government organizations. Theatre for Development in Nigeria, where this vision of development became a broad-based movement, will be the focus of this chapter.
