People's Theatre Association

People's Theatre Association

Founded by Sam Mhangwani when he gathered about him a cluster of smaller commercial companies and formed the People's Theatre Association. Formed with the express purpose of negotiating with the West Rand Bantu Board in order to streamline the bureaucratic procedures that hindered black commercial theatre. None of the groups affiliated to the People's Theatre Association dealt with radical political material. On the contrary, much of their material implied a positive endorsement of the ruling white group's ideologies. They therefore had little to fear from censorship except that in some cases action was taken against member groups on account of pornographic elements in their work, for example Jerry Raletebele's Adultery (1974).

Sources

Robert Mshengu Kavanagh. "The Development of Theatre in South Africa up to 1976 - Anti-Apartheid Literature." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg Lawrence J. Trudeau, Vol. 162. Gale Cengage, 2005.

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