By Emily Geminder
29 June 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: In the local drama productions of Ilemera, Tanzania, characters with AIDS tend to die within the play’s first five minutes. Ola Johansson, who researches community-based theater across the country, told MediaGlobal that this unusual dramatic arc is common in the region, where almost everyone has at least one family member who has died of AIDS.
In one such play, the death is a characteristically quick affair. A young man dies of AIDS in the middle of the night. The rest of the play follows his young wife through a period of mourning and the subsequent process of disinheritance by her father-in-law. Destitute, the young widow and mother turns to prostitution, a major conveyor of HIV infection in Tanzanian society, according to Johansson. By the play’s end, the degree to which infection and death are ingrained in the texture of society is starkly apparent. Social traditions, stigmas, and laws are as much a part of the epidemic as the molecular composition of its viral strands or its devastation to T-cell counts.
NGO that uses theatre and puppetry to provide
interactive, social life-skills education to youth.
(Photo courtesy: arepp:Theatre
for Life)
In Tanzania, women lack basic inheritance rights, and the property and land of the deceased is conferred to the next male in line. In some cases, the widow herself is “inherited” by the brother-in-law of the deceased. Some traditions maintain that a widow must be ritually “cleansed” through sexual intercourse following the death of her husband, usually by her brother-in-law. Johansson noted, “The causal problems of AIDS existed before AIDS materialized, and they may very well be around even if AIDS could be eradicated.”
It is increasingly evident that any approach to HIV/AIDS prevention will have to incorporate a social response. “Even after information has been disseminated to the point where almost all adults in a country like Tanzania are aware of HIV and its determinants, the epidemic continues to spread unabatedly,” Johansson said. “So there is clearly something beyond medical and cognitive solutions that needs to take effect for successful outcomes in HIV prevention.”
While AIDS continues to course through Tanzania, studies have found exceptions to its spread in two regions, Kagera and Mbeya. In both places, community-based theater initiatives have been particularly intensive, said Johansson, evolving over time into interactive exchanges based on location-specific needs. “The early applications of outreach theater in Africa suffered the same problems as the initial AIDS campaigns in the 1980s,” he said. “They were predicated on ‘expert’ knowledge conveyed to target audiences that were treated as empty vessels. In the 1990’s, people became aware that AIDS was much more than a health syndrome, and communicative and social approaches were combined.”
The young, new face of East African community theater often looks a lot like Dennis Kimambo. An actor with the Kenyan theater group Repacted since he was 26 years old, Kimambo is now the group’s Program Manager and works with young people, sex workers and prison inmates to create participatory theater performances that deal with HIV/AIDS. “Essentially, the performance provides a forum for the community to discuss issues that would normally not be discussed,” Kimambo told MediaGlobal, speaking from Nakuru, Kenya. “Discussing sex openly is still a huge taboo.”
Part of community theater’s success lies in its ability to intuit the immediate needs of a specific group and engage the issues in a spontaneous manner. “If we are going to a new village, we talk to all demographics of the community and try to get a real sense of what the issues are there,” Kimambo said. For instance, in the wake of Kenya’s political violence in December, routine stigmas around HIV were compounded by the upheaval, often running along tribal fault lines. Repacted helped the community identify and work through the tensions that arose. “The community helps us form a skit on the basis of what’s going on at the time,” Kimambo said.
Discussion regularly precedes, follows, and occasionally interrupts the performances. For Kimambo, the discussion is the whole point. “In this kind of theater, as opposed to other HIV prevention approaches, the impact is immediate. You can guage if people are getting the message right then and there.”
Community-based theater programs throughout East Africa draw on long traditions of drama, using site-specific languages and customs to convey their message. But they fracture traditional norms, too. Johansson recalled a town where the local elders were angered by young theater performers who publicly decried the practice of using a single knife to circumcise the town’s young men.
Ultimately, Johansson believes it is the flexibility of the medium that allows it to continue to navigate the interlocking channels of tradition, social change, and a modern disease. Immediately following the play about the widow who turns to sex work, Johansson recalled, a conversation broke out in the community about widow’s rights and the relationship between HIV/AIDS and poverty.
Earlier this month, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked that, “Africa has multiple AIDS epidemics, and one-size-fits-all policies will not work across the region.” Community theater provides no fixed or easy answers. Instead, it engages discussion by breaking down traditional barriers between actors and audience. Through the lens of fictitious characters, it allows people to cast a critical eye on themselves and their society. At the same time, because the performers are comprised of real and susceptible bodies, neither audience nor participants can lose sight of the reality of lives at stake.
Phylemon Odhiambo Okoth, another AIDS activist and performer in Kenya, inverts this strategy by using puppets as his medium of choice. Puppetry, he said, imitates life from a slanted angle. “It holds up a mirror onto society and gives people a chance to look at themselves objectively, from a different point of view, enabling them to laugh at themselves.”
He added that puppets could sometimes get away with things their human counterparts cannot. “They can often say more, especially when dealing with taboo or sensitive issues such as sex because it is less embarrassing than live acting.”
But whether through actors or puppets, performances that get people talking about stigmas such as sex and AIDS are creating visibility for an illness that is too often rendered invisible. And they do this through engaging communities’ many voices. Kimambo said, “If you use your own people to reach your community, if you use their voices, you will be more effective in getting your message across.”