Theatre for the People

Although Lesotho left me breathless with its altitude, its scenery, and its people, I was not there as a tourist. I was a “Fulbrighter,” a scholar in a program created by the unpredictable southern Senator J. William Fulbright. His being a segregationist and white supremacist was no surprise to voters in his home state of Arkansas, but he became a figure of interest and curiosity when he opposed the communist witch-hunting of Joe McCarthy and the escalation of the Viet Nam war. He was a rogue politician. Fulbright rolled out his educational exchange program at the end of World War II to “promote friendly and peaceful relations” between people of the USA and the rest of the world. The program was (and still is) funded by the US State Department. 

Like many academics and artists who have been Fulbrighters before and after me, I signed a statement claiming to be a patriotic American supporting the goals of our government. That enabled me to slip through the cracks in security and be chosen to do the work of an American theatre scholar abroad: to make theatre, to conduct research on theatre, and to write about it. I lost the project I had carefully planned for Nigeria, which would have enabled me to document the outrageous theatre of Igbo women, but new work presented itself as soon as I stepped off the plane in Lesotho. 

There were classes to teach. Theatre was part of the English Department, and I was there to fill in for the tenured theatre professor who was taking a sabbatical leave to study Theatre for Development in Leeds, England. His courses were Intro to Theatre (with an Afrocentric approach, beginning in Benin and not in Greece) and Practical Theatre (a catch-all course offering students an hour of college credit for working on plays produced on campus). There was a theatre club that needed a faculty advisor and some kind of guiding vision. The commedia-style Burial Society Theatre Group was loosely attached to the departing theatre professor. On top of all that, I arrived to find university administrators in a flurry of anticipation, rumor, and intrigue. 

A grand global organization, perhaps WHO or the UN, it was whispered, had offered to fund a theatre group for AIDS education. “We’re looking at a quarter of a million dollars, American,” murmured a Dean, rubbing his hands together and grinning expansively. 

“Half a million” whispered the Registrar. 

“This could be income for a staff of fifty people over two years,” an administrative assistant confided, “and I am sure my niece will be hired, as her English is very good and she is not yet married.”

“We will need a stage for rehearsals. Perhaps we can get a new building funded by this thing. ” 

An engineer, wiping engine oil off his hands with a rag, told me dreamily, “There will be vehicles bought with this grant, vehicles that will remain for us to use after the grant expires. This is very good because all our vehicles are old now.”

The possibilities danced like sugarplums over the heads of everyone who talked with me about it, but there was an undercurrent of anger and anxiety. Video cameras. Sound equipment. A portable stage. Per diem expenses. Musical instruments. A truck. A bus. Costumes. Lights. Action. 

“But none of this is good,” I was told in confidence by one of the remedial English teachers, who heard it from her sister, a nurse in Maseru whose boyfriend was a driver for the Health Minister. A woman who was “very high up” in the health department was having an affair with a Cameroonian playwright. This health department official accepted her boyfriend’s proposal before she even announced the availability of grant money for this project. This Cameroonian would come to Lesotho and create a theatre company to “tour the provinces” with his play about AIDS and its transmission and prevention. He would get a year’s salary of $40,000 (American). Principal actors would come with him from Cameroon and would be paid half his salary (which was more than a full professor earned in Lesotho at the time). Basotho performers could audition for smaller parts and would be paid a pittance by comparison with the salaries of the Cameroonians, but more than they’d ever earned from doing theatre in their lives. Ten to twenty percent of the total would be handed over to the National University of Lesotho for “overhead.” Everyone would get a piece of the action. Everyone knew about it. And everyone was outraged.

“You have been sent here as a gift from God,” a senior university official told me after closing her office door so that no one could hear our conversation. “This absolutely must not happen!” 

I was dumbstruck. Why? 

“What language do you think these Cameroonians are speaking in this play? Do you think a playwright from Cameroon has written this play in Sesotho, which is the only language our rural people can speak? No! The play,” she paused for dramatic effect. “Is entirely….” Another pause, during which she stood up and lifted both arms to the heavens before shouting: “In ENGLISH!”

I understood finally why everyone was both furious and excited about this massive infusion of money. English and Sesotho are the official languages of Lesotho, but English is the language of privilege, the language of power, a holdover from the years in which Basutoland, as it was called, was a “Protectorate” of the British Empire. Independence had come in 1966, but all university classes are taught in English, which is how it was possible for me to teach there. Most of the maintenance workers, gardeners, cleaners, and drivers at the University did not speak English. None of the people in the rural areas spoke English. Among themselves, even University students spoke only Sesotho. A play in English would make as much sense in the “provinces” of Lesotho as a play in one of the 230 languages of Cameroon. M’e Mpho got the job as cleaning woman at the Guest House because she was one of the few village women who spoke English. I went to her immediately with the problem.
I found her mopping the floor in the larger of the two guest houses, and she was glad to pause, sit down at the table with me and a pot of tea, and listen gravely as I explained the situation.

“It is true, M’e,” she nodded. “You have been sent by God, and by the spirits of the ancestors.”

“No, really, M’e Mpho. You scare me,” I said. “Kea hana. (I cannot.)” 

“This is why. Because if the makoerekoere (a pejorative term used by Basotho to describe West Africans) take the play to Semonkong (a town in the heartland of Lesotho), no one is going to know what they say. More people will die of AIDS, more children will be orphans. You are studying Sesotho very hard. You are going to make this thing. It is your job. Do not disappoint God, my dear. And now I go finish the floor.”