Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora

Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schirmer Professor and Chair of English at Princeton University, USA where he is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies R. N. Sandberg is a lecturer at the Lewis Center for the Arts and Department of English, Princeton University (1995-2021). Though retired in 2021, Sandberg has continued to be affiliated with the Program in Theater, advising and directing student theses Wole Soyinka is a playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist born in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1934.Soyinka won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature with his debut novel, The Interpreters, becoming the first-ever African laureate and has since won many other prizes such as the Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award in 2009 and the Anisfield-Wolf book Award, Lifetime Achievement in 2012.A prominent political activist, Soyinka was imprisoned for nearly two years during the Nigerian Civil War and was later exiled. He continues to fight against government corruption and oppression worldwide.Professor Ama Ata Aidoo (b. 1943) was a Ghanaian author and playwright. Having grown up in a Fante royal household, she attended Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost was produced in 1964, and published the following year, making her the first female African dramatist to be published. She is currently long term Visiting Professor and writer in residence of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Brown University, Rhode Island. Ama Ata Aidoo died in 2023.

A handsome, weighty and beautifully curated edition ... you can hold, in one edition, an entire world of drama … Unified by an international and broadly non-Western perspective, this is a rich and illuminating collection.

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionThe Triumph of Horus translated and edited by H. W. Fairman“Masque of the Boa-Constrictor,” a Yoruba masqueradeOba Ko`so (The King did not hang) by Duro LadipoFabula: Yawreoch Commedia “The Comedy of Animals” by Tekle Hawariat “When the Hunchback Made Rain” by Elvania Namukwaya ZirimuDeath and the King’s Horseman by Wole SoyinkaAnowa by Ama Ata AidooSizwe Banzi is Dead devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston NtshonaDream on Monkey Mountain by Derek WalcottCouvade by Michael GilkesFurther Reading