Theatre from the Frontline

Amakhosi, Zimbabwe’s liveliest community theatre group based in Bulawayo, performed two plays in Glasgow.

Stitsha!

Written and directed by Cont Mhlanga

In a fast-moving performance, thirteen young men and women sang and danced the story of African women – their culture and traditions -women at work – women as mothers – the struggle to cope with migrant labour, a common feature of family life throughout Southern Africa. Exciting, emotional, drawing on current political issues, this was the theatre of Cont Mhlanga, Zimbabwe’s controversial and widely acclaimed writer and director.

Workshop Negative

Written and directed by Cont Mhlanga

This was the most powerful and successful play to have been performed in Zimbabwe in recent years. The company charted, with incredible force and compassion, the turmoil of a people undergoing social and political upheaval. The story is based on the meeting between two young men from opposite sides of the war of independence, one black, one white. Post war they both faced the personal challenge of a new world with new values.

Cont Mhlanga, photographed in 1990. In 2008 he was awarded the ArtVenture Freedom to Create prize for his political satire, ‘The Good President’. He gave half his prize money ($50,000) to Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), an organisation of Zimbabwean women campaigning for rights and democracy in the face of police arrests, threats, assaults, harassment and detentions. The rest  he dedicated towards making his work available to a wider audience in  Southern Africa.

Amakhosi Theatre Productions

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