Theatre, Politics and Society in Ethiopia: 1991-2017

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This project will involve an in-depth historical analysis of the relationship between state propaganda objectives and professional theatre-making over a 25-year period, from 1991-2017, and tries to explicate how this relationship impacted the production and reception of theatre in Ethiopia. Comparatively, the research will also study such relationship in the broader African context. The plan is to examine the influence of political structure and ideologies on the theatre and the response of the theatres to such influences. The new government of Ethiopia that took power in 1991 after a seventeen-year civil war (1974-1991) introduced an ethnic-based federal system intending to give full recognition to ethnic autonomy, while maintaining the unity of the state (Alem, 2003). The ethnic-based federal system aimed at responding to the inequality that the country's various ethnicities had been long suffering from. By giving the right of political inclusion to different ethnic groups in the country, the government introduced a multi-ethnic nationalism which served as a tool in the nation-building process. However, the multi-ethnic nationalism project did not garner widespread support, and so the ruling party, the Ethiopian People Revolutionary Democratic Front (hereafter referred to as EPRDF), began to use artistic practices as major instruments of propaganda to promote the idea. The government used informal censorships and different controlling mechanisms, against the constitutional order of the country, to exploit the potentials of theatre and the performing arts to propagate its political ideology of multi-ethnic nationalism.