The period that marks the historical boundaries of this study stretches roughly from the subjugation of the independent Zulu dynasty to the responses of artists drawn from the first generation of the Zulu intelligentsia. The theatre of power that played itself out in South Africa between 1879 and 1940 was one where economic and social developments were predominantly apprehended and articulated in political modalities that foregrounded ‘race’ and culture as crucial sites of representation and identity formation. Thus drama was seized by missionaries like Huss and Phillips and promoted as an art form amenable to the needs of evangelism, pedagogy and the spread of wholesome recreation among urbanised Africans. Fundamental to the missionary deployment of drama was an appreciation of ‘play’ – as game, genre or system of representation – in the socialisation of individuals into specific ‘racial’, cultural and gendered identities. In order to realise the expansive aims identified by evangelists, a considerable degree of institutional muscle was necessary to sustain the cultural visions espoused. Hence the remarkable range of publications, forums and organisations that Huss and Phillips initiated, were members of, or contributed to in one form or another. As members of a nascent class forged in the interstices of mission education and the trajectory of colonialism, the African intelligentsia found itself part of the institutions intended to secure colonial hegemony. Where possible the African elite established its own political and cultural formations and newspapers which, as was to be expected, seldom escaped the influential imprint of white patronage.

This layered context underscores the significance of institutional support for social groups when cultural practices are conscripted in the creation and contestation of hegemony. The ideological instabilities that marked the cultural cohabitation between whites and blacks at spaces such as Mariannhill and the BMSC have been underplayed. Instead, the exercise of power by missionary and colonial authorities has led to such dominance being regarded as absolute and irrefutable and the initiatives and creative works of the African elite being dismissed en tout as simply dependent if not downright reactionary. Readings of this kind display an inadequate grasp of the workings of hegemony.