ABSTRACT
After several well-received international tours of his plays by his own Theatre Limited – Abafumi Company, 1 Robert Serumaga has probably become the best-known East African dramatist to audiences outside the region. This is a result not only of his dedication to the theatre but of his extraordinary entrepreneurial ability, a commercial and publicity sense at least comparable to his acting, directorial and writing talents. 2 But while his skills as a theatre craftsman have been generously acknowledged, and his ambitions as a political figure have been widely noted, Serumaga has often been bitterly criticized for an apparent lack of social commitment and political concern in his plays, 3 quite contrary to most of his contemporaries in East African theatre. This apartness is the inevitable consequence of a radical individualism, tending distinctly towards solipsism, which characterizes all his central characters. It is not that the social and political are absent, for they form the necessary back-drop to each of his five plays and his novel. But however social and political issues may precipitate crises in Serumaga’s work, they are never closely examined, receding quickly into the middle distance. For Serumaga’s Olympian protagonists are always men apart, what Herman Melville called isolatoes, 4 cut off not only from nation and community but from friends, family and in the final exigency of alienation, from self, by madness, hallucination and self-deception.
