Presentation Date: Feb 14, 2026
AGSA Abstract
This work investigates how ‘Mama Africa’ is established as a transformational figure in the music of Miriam Makeba and the theatre of Rose Mbowa and John Ruganda. Read through the lens of Jill Dolan’s groundbreaking theoretical framework of the Utopian Performative, I examine how the Mama Africa figure enacts the performance of a possible future, transforming the people and places around her by embodying different expectations and representations in theatrical and musical performances. This essay investigates how Mama Africa functions as a tool of the Utopian Transformative in Rose Mbowa’s adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (Mother Uganda and Her Children), and John Ruganda’s The Burdens. Rose Mbowa’s adaptation is approached as a living text, adapted from collections of video clips through which the work was salvaged. For The Burdens, the character of Nyakake (played by Rose Mbowa in January of 1972 at Uganda’s National Theatre), is analyzed as the theoretical seedling of futurity who represents the ageless potentiality of Mama Africa as a transcendent and transformational force. Makeba’s performances of Malaika in 1963, her performance of Qongqothwane (The Click Song) in 1969, and its subsequent tribute offered by Siki Jo-An in 2019 demonstrate the varied embodiments of Ephemerality, Communality, and Affectiveness through which Mama Africa enacts the Utopian Performative. These selected musical and theatrical case studies are explored through the objectives, texts, and actions of key female figures within select Ugandan plays, their influence on and under post-colonial strife, and the wider perception of Mama Africa to the Western world. Ultimately, Mama Africa represents the transition from the Utopian Performative to the Utopian Transformative – a shift from a hope in no-place, to a hope in this place, grafting new possible futures on the bodies of performers and thespians who inhabit her idealism.
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