"Zimbabwe: Challenging the Stereotypes" brings the story of Zimbabwe up-to-date (2014) in a dramatic, readable, firsthand description of thirty four years of Zimbabwe's history by a South African academic, writer and arts educationist who went through it all - from Independence to the present. While it confirms some of the West's criticisms, it offers a unique alternative viewpoint and questions a number of long-held and seldom challenged beliefs, including the almost universal cliche that at Independence Zimbabwe had everything going for it and threw it all away through bad government. It...

Selected Plays is a collection of plays with a difference. It features the work of South African theatre practitioner, arts educationist, cultural activist and academic, Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, in South Africa, England, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. However, as Kavanagh himself makes clear, he did not single-handedly write a single one of them. They are all plays in which he worked with actors or other writers in a playmaking process which he led and which produced a performance which he directed. Even the directing method was socialised and democratic, with actors and sometimes visitors free to...

'The Complete S'ketsh'' is a facsimile edition of the seven issues of a theatre and entertainment magazine that was published in South Africa between 1972 and 1979 and which reflected the ideas, debates and practice of those excluded from segregated white culture and which flourished against all the odds. The 1970s were an extraordinary decade in the history of South African theatre and S'ketsh' Magazine has proved to be an extraordinary record of it. The pages of S'ketsh' are a window into the arts and, in particular, the theatre of a unique period in the history of South Africans' heroic...

This is the story of a Black South African who was brought up, lived and died in Soweto or thereabouts. It is very unlikely that history will remember him - or the many others like him. No important people attended Vusi's funeral. At one point in his life, he was described by the Chairman of a great gold-mining corporation in South Africa as a 'nobody'. According to the measure of the world, that is what he was. But the dark days of apartheid and the lighter but deceptive days of the new democratic South Africa are well-known for stunting lives and wasting human capital. A white South African...

In Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, South African performer and activist Robert Mshengu Kavanagh reveals the complex and conflicting interplay of class, nation, and race in South African theater under Apartheid. Evoking an era when theater itself became a political battlefield, Kavanagh displays how the struggle against Apartheid was played out on the stage as well as in the streets. Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theater and assesses the merits and limitations of the multi-racial theater projects created by white liberals, the...

In Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, South African performer and activist Robert Mshengu Kavanagh reveals the complex and conflicting interplay of class, nation, and race in South African theater under Apartheid. Evoking an era when theater itself became a political battlefield, Kavanagh displays how the struggle against Apartheid was played out on the stage as well as in the streets. Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theater and assesses the merits and limitations of the multi-racial theater projects created by white liberals, the...

Making Theatre is an A - Z guide to making and performing theatre. There are hundreds of books on the various aspects of theatre but almost all of them are about theatre as it is practised in Europe and North America. Making Theatre is a guide to theatre that many theatre practitioners in the rest of the world might find refreshing and extremely helpful. With knowledge, experience and insights derived from over thirty years of practical theatre and teaching in many different countries in Africa and exposure to theatre from all over the world, Kavanagh takes the reader from the very earliest...

SELECTED PLAYS is a collection of plays with a difference. It features the work of South African theatre practitioner, arts educationist, cultural activist and academic, Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, in South Africa, England, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. However, as Kavanagh himself makes clear, he did not single-handedly write a single one of them. They are all plays in which he worked with actors or other writers in a playmaking process which he led and which produced a performance which he directed and sometimes acted in. The first in the series featured the work of Workshop '71 in South Africa in...