Making Waves: POPULAR THEATRE
Stories of Participatory Communication
for Social Change
TITLE: Network of Educational Theatre (NET)
COUNTRY: Nigeria
MAIN FOCUS: Health, Children's Rights
PLACE: Oyo, Ondo, Osun and other Yoruba states
BENEFICIARIES: Villages in 46 Local Governments
PARTNERS: Local Governments Administration (LGA), Ministry of Health
FUNDING: UNICEF
MEDIA: Theatre
The Ede LGA theatre group are consummate actors. The three men and a woman, clamber into the minibus while their two musicians don handsome green and white costumes before joining them. The music strikes up as the entourage weaves its way through the extravagant bush of Osun State. Imposing trees, heavy with foliage and fruit, conceal a background orchestra of insects, birds and animals. By the time the jolly crew reaches the community of Ogobi Ajibode, they are already in role.
The musicians alert the people to their arrival, leading them with their talking drums in traditional songs. Chairs are brought forth the fancier, upholstered ones for the Oba (traditional ruler) and elders and mats are unrolled for the small children.
Like the medieval morality plays, the characters are easily identifiable: there's Good and Evil and an attendant cast of local character-types. The costumes are appropriately zany and the laughter rolls in easily from a delighted audience.
Two hunters, Ola and Oye, are setting out to catch bush meat, chanting as they go. The two strike up a conversation about village developments, Ola is delighted with the prospect of a borehole for piped water; Oye is pleased enough, but not satisfied. He thinks roads and electricity are more important. They start to argue. Ola wonders how his friend could not be aware of the relationship between health and clean water. Anyone who has had guinea worm like him, would forever treat water with the respect due to it.
The attentive faces of the audience light up when a handsome young woman enters carrying a jug to fetch water. Ola alerts her to the dangers of her mission to the pond. Oye tries to ridicule his friend: who will the woman listen to?
Then there is a song demanding responses from the community, and now, the climax, a lad with guinea worm comes onto the set crying in agony.
Spontaneously, people approach the performers and slap Naira bills on their foreheads in a gesture of appreciation known as spraying. An elder addresses the assembly. He was a guinea worm victim. He pronounces the play to be absolutely true. The audience cheers.
States UNICEF's Lynn Geldof
The success obtained by community theatre during the Extended Programme of Immunisation (EPI)led to the idea of sustaining and expanding the experience, by adding a strong component of training, by including health and children's rights topics, and by extending the theatre performances to other states.
By 1991 it was clear that the two or three existing community theatre groups would not be sufficient to perform in hundreds of new villages, so a thorough training programme was devised. The initial drama group, led by Nigerian director and scriptwriter Jimmy Solanke, was invited to organise the core group of trainers. A training manual and materials were developed to provide a methodology for ten intensive days of training that would cover everything from the history of theatre to modern drama techniques. The emphasis of the training was put on the actors.
The local government contributed food and accommodations during the training, which was always conducted at the LGA level. UNICEF agreed to pay the trainers and for script development. The training workshops included the preparation of simple props and costumes that would become property of the LGA drama group after the training, to support their performances at the community level. An important issue by the end of the training was the selection of a name for the newly formed drama group, a process that was done collectively in order to establish an artistic identity.
Jimmy Solanke developed twelve scripts based on "Facts for Life". Ten million copies of the popular UNICEF publication had already been distributed worldwide by 1991, in more than 150 languages. In Nigeria, the book had been published in four local languages (Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba and Pidgin English); and nearly 500,000 copies were distributed, including those in English. The topics that were developed into scripts tackled health issues such as AIDS, immunisation, safe motherhood, basic education, guinea worm eradication, environment, food security, diarrhea, and malaria. Each script had plenty of humour, which came easily to Jimmy Solanke.
A new and totally different perspective was developed. In order to ensure sustainability of the programme, Local Governments were asked to provide transportation and seed funds for the newly trained groups to operate. LGA health services would accompany the theatre group during performances, for effective service delivery at the community level. As soon as new theatre groups came out of training, they would start performing; 46 groups were trained in an equal number of selected LGAs. Their mission was to perform in their own area, because of cost-efficiency, cultural pertinence and sustainability.
Financing the performances of the LGA drama groups touring at the community level was never a hindrance to the project. Most local government authorities were willing to provide the seed funds on the order of Naira 1,000 per performance, or US$25. Though initially some groups were not interested in such a small amount, soon they realised that by performing every night of the week the sum became interesting. And they also knew they could collect as much as Naira 200 per show from the "spraying" custom. That is, if the community enjoyed the performance.
It was made clear to the drama groups that the relationship with UNICEF was only temporary. Eventually they could offer their theatre services to any government or cooperation agency wanting to promote a programme in rural areas.
As time went on, other trainers for the Hausa-speaking northern region and for the Ibo region in eastern Nigeria, were involved in training more groups.
During the late 1980s UNICEF took over the responsibility of supporting every country in the world in their attempts to achieve 8 percent immunisation for all children under one year of age. Massive media campaigns were put in place with the support of national networks, which generally provided free airtime for UNICEF supported messages.
In Nigeria no less than 15 radio and 13 television stations in ten states were involved. Monthly training sessions with journalists ensured that the right messages were delivered with quality. Weekly programmes were produced at each LGA, in an attempt to create competition for better immunisation results among the states.
But it was not enough to achieve the objective of 8 percent. "The limitations of mass broadcast and print media in a country such as Nigeria are fairly obvious. Electrification is confined to the cities and immediate suburbs or shanties. Even where electricity exists, television sets are too expensive for the vast majority. Television tends therefore to be the prerogative of the rich and the influential. With radio the reach is much wider though limited by the expense of batteries, a set of which cost the best part of a dollar", wrote Lynn Geldof.
Nevertheless, the top-down communication approach through mass media was insufficient. It was imperative to get down to the communities where not even radio is heard. That is how community theatre came into the picture.
The only strategy possible for reaching the poorest of the poor and the most isolated communities that were left out of the immunisation campaign in Nigeria was interpersonal communication, and one communication activity that could contribute to social mobilisation efforts at the grassroots level was the popular theatre. UNICEF identified one hundred villages in Oyo and Ondo States where immunisation coverage was at its lowest and then organised village performances by theatre groups, who would go along with the immunisation services to the villages. By 1991 this successful experience later led to the full blown project called the Network of Educational Theatre (NET), where training became the key element.
The beauty of popular theatre in Nigeria is that it can be built on existing ritual manifestations, taking advantage of local culture to communicate new messages of benefit for the community. Local culture not only contributed to strengthen message delivery, but also benefited from the process of digging into local traditions and reassessing the value of customary practices.
The important and immediate impact of the popular theatre activities resulted from marrying the dramatic performance with service delivery. For cultural reasons many women had until then avoided vaccinating their children, but eventually were convinced by Jimmy Solanke's play The Postman Calls. Right after the performance, nurses had to deal with hundreds of women and their children of all ages, lining up to get their immunisation shots or drops.
This had a double benefit: on one hand it created greater awareness among people in the villages; on the other hand, it ensured that the health staff from the local government would go out to the villages on a regular basis, which they were often reluctant to do.
One theatre group already made a difference. Moreover a continuous programme of training contributed to multiply and establish permanent drama groups in each of the selected Local Governments. The innovative aspects of the programme derived from the fact that each drama group was culturally relevant to the villages where performances would take place. Not only was the language the same, but other cultural codes which are very specific to each community were taken into account: the costumes, the songs and the local greeting.
Furthermore, the drama group would often arrive at the village a few hours before the performance in order to collect information and anecdotes about recent events in the village, to incorporate references into the play and thus ensure the involvement of the audience during the performance. The scripts were adapted to each concrete situation through improvisation, though carefully preserving the quality of the messages to be delivered as much as possible.
The whole project was designed to be: cost-effective, culturally relevant, directly related to service delivery, and sustainable. The idea was to deliver a medium as a tool for communities to use according to their needs.
The methodology of training and quickly making drama groups available for performances were the keys of a strategy that aimed to rapidly expand the coverage and the scale needed to reach thousands of deprived communities.
Apart from Jimmy Solanke, few trainers were interested in working at the community level, or if they did, their demands for compensation were far outside of UNICEF possibilities.
Some Local Governments did not fully commit to support the newly trained drama groups. They wouldn't provide transportation when needed, and wouldn't include seed funds for the drama groups in their annual budget, as was agreed with UNICEF.
Not all the groups took training with equal seriousness. The ten intensive days were sometimes shortened to eight because some groups were not willing to continue the training sessions over the weekend.
The very advantage of adapting the scripts to the concrete situations of the villages where performances were scheduled often became a dangerous practice, since some drama groups left out important messages and derived their performance into a sequence of funny situations with little or no content.
Community Empowerment: Social Mobilisation in Nigeria by Lynn Geldof, UNICEF 1994. Pp.132.
Popular Theatre by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, UNICEF 1995. Pp.176.
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