Search

The Laedza Batanani Project has been regarded as the pioneering experiment that paved the way for other prominent African Theatre for Development (TFD) projects such as Kamiriithu in Kenya, Murewa in Zimbabwe, Kumba in Cameroon and Marotholi Travelling Theatre in Lesotho. Laedza Batanani (1974-6) aimed at awakening the creative potential of villagers in the Bokalaka region of Botswana. As the Setswana term for the project implies, "laedza batanani" sought to raise the community's consciousness by enabling villagers to participate in their own development and replace apathy with collective action. However, in spite of its best intentions, Kidd and Byram (1982) report that nothing happened at the end of the Laedza Batanani experiment. Why? They attribute the failure to the dual nature of TFD projects, their intention to create critical awareness among participants on the one hand, and to disseminate dominant ideologies that tend to domesticate participants on the other. This paper seeks to demonstrate how best to negotiate with community leaders or gatekeepers without overshadowing the primary beneficiaries of TFD projects. Drawing illustrations from a baseline survey workshop held with community leaders in the Eastern Cape Province, the paper shows how the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) method could be perhaps the most effective strategy for initiating sustainable community driven TFD projects. The ABCD strategy rests on the premise that local communities can drive their own development by identifying and mobilizing their own existing, and often unrecognized assets. [Paper presented at the International Conference on Arts, Culture, Heritage and the National Development Plan: Vision 2030 hosted by Tshwane University of Technology, Faculty of the Arts, Pretoria (South Africa), 1-3 October 2014.]