UI Press | Edited and with an Introduction by Kathy A. Perkins

African Women Playwrights

For the first time, a distinctive collection of plays by African women published in English

This anthology consists of nine plays by a diverse group of women from throughout the African continent. The plays focus on a wide range of issues, such as cultural differences, AIDS, female circumcision, women's rights to higher education, racial and skin color identity, prostitution as a form of survival for young girls, and nonconformist women resisting old traditions. In addition to the plays themselves, this collection includes commentaries by the playwrights on their own plays, and editor Kathy A. Perkins provides additional commentary and a bibliography of published and unpublished plays by African women.

The playwrights featured are Ama Ata Aidoo, Violet R. Barungi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nathalie Etoke, Dania Gurira, Andiah Kisia, Sindiwe Magona, Malika Ndlovu (Lueen Conning), Juliana Okoh, and Nikkole Salter.

“I have long wished there were a collection of the work of African women playwrights. This unique and valuable volume makes a truly significant contribution to the field of both African theatre and black women’s writing. The plays are stimulating and very interesting, dealing with a range of pertinent issues.”--Jane Plastow, coeditor of Theatre and Empowerment: Community Drama on the World Stage

“These plays are fascinating to read; the plots and characters are varied, interesting, and well developed. Moreover, as the only collection [in English] of plays written exclusively by African women, this collection will be immensely appealing to students and scholars of theatre, literature, cultural studies, African studies, and women’s studies, as well as general readers who are interested in learning about contemporary African plays and playwrights.”--Judith Stephens-Lorenz, editor of The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement

Kathy A. Perkins is a professor of theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, and several other anthologies of plays.