ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on the realisation that both disability and Theatre for Development scholarship in Zimbabwe are yet to appreciate and mobilise the ways and extent to which disabled young people resist their marginalisation and oppression in private spaces. I argue that there is therefore a need to access and nurture these private forms of resistance to give them impetus to publicly challenge the marginalisation of disabled people in general. Deploying the concepts of ‘hidden transcripts’ and ‘public transcripts’ as theoretical frameworks, and drawing from a Theatre for Development project that I facilitated at the University of Zimbabwe (2008–2013), I argue that preliminaries and informal engagements with disabled people before the actual theatre performances are sites in which we can access and nurture the private forms of resistance from disabled young people. These methods of engagement with the private forms of resistance help researchers and development activists to access and appreciate the multiplex and sophisticated resistive powers of disabled young people which are usually overlooked by both popular opinion and disability scholarship. The chapter further shows how these forms of resistance might be strengthened to challenge disability oppression in a public theatrical production.
