Altering the ways they think about themselves and pupils

52 administrative unit had been formed along with a rural council and a secondary school built. This administrative unit and school built point toward communalism or collectivism consequential from the TfD workshop which the establishment of organizations at the communal level.

53 The theatre which emerged at this point addressed itself to the problem of suppression the Nigerian society was experiencing at the hands of the Europeans settlers. This sort of problem was faced by many other African countries as well.

(1)

The theatre quickly became thoughtful of issues of oppression and subjugation of the people by their colonial masters. Theatre practitioners like Hubert Ogunde protested vehemently with their talents in the art against this colonial ascendancy. His play Bread and Bullet which was produced in 1949 criticized the gruesome killing of innocent miners who protested their poor remuneration by embarking on a strike action. Ogunde‘s theatre became a tool for addressing national problems and predicaments which includes the independence from our colonial masters.

Ogunde‘s theatrical practices borrowed heavily from the rich traditional theatre heritage and culture of his time, modified and confer on a number of features to successive aeon. Traversing through the training manual on Community Theatre for Social Mobilization, Obuh informs that:

The main features of his of theatre included the following: it dealt with current issues which were of immediate relevance; it made use of the traditional arts; it reached out to the people by moving from place to place, and the plays were made by the group. (1)

The idea and practice of moving performances to different communities was seen as important and espoused by tertiary institutions; group of students toured rural communities with performances, educating and entertaining members of those communities on crucial matters.

This mores, however traceable to the Makerere University of Uganda in East Africa, and was later adopted by the University of Ibadan, Nigeria giving birth to the popular University Travelling Theatre. This, as the name suggests, was predominantly itinerant in nature, taking performances to various communities outside the university. This mode of theatre proved effective and afterwards was adopted by government agencies as a method of information dissemination and it works like charm or magic on the people.

54 These government-sponsored plays were faulted in some ways. First, their impacts were not often sustained after the performances had ended owing to the fact that the people did not take part in the making of the plays. Again, the plays often discussed problems from the government‘s point of view and hardly embrace the people. Thirdly, it was difficult to adopt the continuation style of making plays in any given community as there was no skill left after the professional theatre artistes had gone.

The above paucities gave birth to the need to develop a new approach to community theatre whose focal points hover within the neighbourhood of developmental issues of the rural and urban disadvantaged. In Nigeria therefore, this novel approach is believed to have originated in 1975 from Michael Etherton who established Drama as a course of study at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Etherton had been affiliated to the University of Zambia and was spellbound and influenced by such works in Botswana; he was later employed at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. This position is corroborated by Hagher, who asserts that TfD in Nigeria:

appears to have descended from the experiments of Augusto Boal and Paul Freire in Latin America, through the East Africa experiments in Kenya, especially in LaedzaBatanini campaigns in Botswana and the Chikwakwa travelling theatre in Zambia. (3)

Etherton, while in Zaria, applied his knowledge of the theatre and sought to develop his TfD experience. His contributions were fabulous. With the help of his expatriate colleague, Brian Crow, and the collaboration of such enthusiastic young theatre practitioners as Tunde Lakoju, Salihu Bappa and Abah, Etherton established ABU Collectives which according to Kerr:

was heavily influenced by the concept of ‗rehearsal theatre‘ developed by Latin American drama worker and theorist, Augusto Boal. Boal emphasized ‗theatre as a discourse‘ where, instead of polished performance presented to a popular audience by an elite cadre of artist, the theatre team actually collaborated with the audience in the creation of drama. (Qtd. in Odi, 161)

55 ABU Collectives like several other theatre groups in Nigerian universities that arose after it sought to create a favourable meeting point for town and gown by reaching out to enlighten and empower communities to confront their socio-political problems collectively.