Introduction

Performance in colonial Uganda was dominated by dance and song, although individual technical mastery of dance, song, and instrumentation was a prerogative of the professional performers and court musicians who played at the royal courts, beer parties, and market places. There are limited written materials available on indigenous performances of the colonial period in Buganda. However, the existence of a corpus of archival Luganda musical recordings, going back to the 1930s, and oral narratives of aged people, gives us an insight into performance activities of this period. Old musical recordings help us to understand various forms of performance about which we know little, and contribute to aspects of performance that have shaped contemporary Ugandan theatre. Popular performances of the colonial era allowed the Baganda indigenous culture to indulge itself, therefore, they have become a memory bank where everything, economic, social and political is presented. Ian Steadman in his article, ‘Towards Popular Theatre in South Africa’, insists that any evaluation of archived indigenous performances ‘must be sensitive to the complexities of performance which are inscribed therein, complexities in which surplus meanings are produced and often subvert the meanings intended for the reader of the printed text’ (1990: 208).

It is from this approach to an embodied archive, with performance central to the analysis, that I am approaching the following examples of colonial theatre in Uganda. In orientation and performance, Serumaga's Majangwa (and Kawadwa's Oluyimba lwa Wankoko (1975)), offered re-interpretations of indigenous theatre in order to challenge oppressive systems whose policies impinged on people's freedom.