Sumbwanyambe takes politics from the family to the stage

Daniel Nelson

First came African-American playwright Lorraine Hansbury's 1970 epic about independence in an unnamed African country at the National T

After Independence

Image by Arcola Theatre

After Independence is "an unflinching examination of land ownership, dispossession and justice in the postcolonial world. It is inspired by real events in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, when white-owned farms began to be forcibly seized by thousands of war veterans dissatisfied by their corrupt government and desperate for change."

Sumbwanyambe is steeped in the events that inspired the play. Though he was born in Edinburgh a year after his parents migrated to the UK, his grandfather was an elected mayor in Zambia and his father was in independent Zambia's first government: "Politics was in the family." 

The Scottish element is relevant, because Scotland's referendum made him realise "that if Scotland voted yes I would have to re-define myself."

He has written about Zimbabwe in his seven-year writing career - "I've always written about Africans and about politics" - but this is his first large-scale stage drama. He is keen to show African lives that are neither about the fly-blown poverty of countless TV news clips or the Big Man dictators with fly whisk or carved walking stick in hand - in other words, the lives of Africans like Charles, the pacifist civil servant in the play who wants to restore Guy and Kathleen's land to the 'native' people. He is educated but not massively wealthy.

"A game of cat and mouse, claim and counter-claim, begins, with the heritage of an entire nation to play for. As truths are revealed and moralities questioned, can things ever be more than simply black and white?", says the Arcola Theatre blurb.

Sumbwanyambe is keen to avoid stereotypes and good guy-bad guy dichotomies ("In the theatre we have an obligation to do more than is in a news bulletin"): Guy and Kathleen consider themselves Africans but are suddenly told they are not. Charles abhors violence but knows that the independence fighters demanding land redistribution cannot be denied. The oppressed become the oppressors. 

History plays a part, too. The laws used by President Robert Mugabe were put on the statute book by the British, and Britain and the West as a whole backed a morally dubious leader - as they did in Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia, "supporting people who did awful awful things" until it suddenly didn't suit them.

You  get a flavour of his approach from one of his recent blogs: "It seems to me that there are two ways to write about Zimbabwe in the decades after independence was achieved. One way is to stick to the received orthodoxy of mainstream Western media, focusing through a top-down approach on the consequences of one (often corrupt) black leader’s actions. What excited me was the other way of telling this story, one that acknowledges a chaotic and conflicted moment in history, and people who do not fall easily into categories of ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

"The world of After Independence is a place where the different views of war-hardened veterans, pacifist civil servants and white farmers symbolises the debate that all postcolonial countries must address: how do we balance punishing past injustice while being just to individuals living today?

"Through the characters of my play I hope that I interrogate ‘independence’ and its many meanings in Zimbabwe. For a nation; for an old white farmer; for a disempowered woman; most of all, for a young white woman and a young black man looking to the future – ‘independence’ means different things. It is this difference, and its difficult and often fatal consequences, that we explore."

* After Independence is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 on 4-28 May. Info: www.arcolatheatre.com/ 7503 1646/ http://papatango.co.uk/