In this book, South African performer and activist Robert Mshengu Kavanagh reveals the complex and conflicting interplay of class, nation and race in South African theatre under Apartheid. Evoking an era when theatre itself became a political battleground, Kavanagh displays how the struggle against Apartheid was played out on the stage as well as on the streets. Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theatre, with the author considering the merits and limitations of the multi-racial theatre projects created by white liberals; the popular commercial musicals staged for black audiences by emergent black entrepreneurs; and the efforts of the Black Consciousness Movement to forge a distinctly African form of revolutionary theatre in the 1970s. The result is a highly readable, pioneering study of the theatre at a time of unprecedented upheaval, diversity and innovation, with Kavanagh's cogent analysis demonstrating the subtle ways in which culture and the arts can become an effective means of challenging oppression.

These five plays by one of South Africa's foremost black playwrights were written between 1979 and 1986, a period in the country's history marked by intense repression and escalating violence. Several of Maponya's works fell foul of the censorship system. The works included in this collection - 'The Hungry Earth', 'Dirty Work', 'Gangsters', 'Umongikazi/The Nurse' and 'Jika' - look at topics such as the lives of miners, apartheid in hospitals, and the workings of the security apartheid state and its agents. His plays are multilingual, using agitprop and physical theatre techniques. Maponya won the 1985 Standard Bank Young Artists award. The plays are introduced by Professor Ian Steadman, former Head of the Drama Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts.