The starting point of this research study began with a broad and unwieldly question - what would Zimbabwe look like if colonisation didn’t happen? This question arose with regard to the launch of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (IEEA) in 2007 and is focused of on building an understanding of notions of indigeneity in Zimbabwe through an inquiry of indigenousness and indigenisation. The methodological approach is designed as an interdisciplinary and experimental research inquiry that processes these debates and proposes an expansion of the probabilities of notions of indigeneity within the range of existing socio-political, economic and historical analyses of indigenousness and indigenisation in Zimbabwe. This exploration begins with a broad historical, anthropological and etymological survey of the term 'indigenous’ that is interwoven with a contextual account of Zimbabwe and its socio-political lifespan. The primary site of investigation is the independence-day ceremony that took place at the National Sports Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe on the 18th of April 2017. This focus is motivated by two distinctive elements at this event - a banner that declares 'ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER BE A COLONY AGAIN’ and a fragment from the president’s speech that asserts, 'we can now call ourselves full masters of our destiny’ (Mugabe 2017). This event stands as a crucial node for the debates and questions this research aims to pose regarding notions of indigenisation, indigenousness and registers of indigeneity. Political and socio-economic analyses of this annual ritual tower above the lacuna of analysis of its performance logics. This performance-specific inquiry aims to contribute new meanings and complexity around the event. The information generated from this reading is further processed through the mechanisms of speculative research as a way to think beyond the dilemmas and paradoxes that emerge from the historical, anthropological and performance analyses of this event. The penultimate chapter of this dissertation suggests a conceptual rehearsal of the findings generated through an expanded understanding of queer theory. The final articulation of 2 this research investigation extends the experimental approach, presenting a set of visual, aural and sculptural elements as the conclusion. The dissertation offers alternate readings of notions of homogeneity and singularity. It is also constituted as a way to understand the probability of building new knowledges through lateral and rhizomic processes as a journey that gathers and synthesizes from across a number of disciplines. The contention of this thesis, then, is to suggest an expansion of the notion of indigeneity towards the possibility of polygeneity, a notion that aims to align with the conceptual constructs of cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006, Kleingeld and Brown 2014), which engage arguments for expanded understandings of contemporary identity formation. Embodied in this suggestion of polygeneity lies the potential to revive notions of dynamism and creativity that have been dormant since the onset of European colonisation in Zimbabwe. In the wake of the 'new dawn’ in Zimbabwe, in this moment of growing debates for alternatives, the thesis finds its impulse in the imperative for radical and creative shifts in consciousness to activate new ideas, new readings, and new knowledges.

This study analyses, over a three-year period, a theatre programme with forensic psychiatric patients and staff at Fort England psychiatric hospital in Grahamstown/Makhanda, South Africa. Framed as a ‘theatrical playground', programme sessions were structured around theatre games, improvisation and devised theatre processes that culminated in playmaking at the end of each session. Participation in the group was voluntary and constructed to allow involvement in theatrical play on its own terms, set apart from the therapeutic and rehabilitation agendas that govern the institution. By means of a conceptually-driven critical analysis of the empirical practice, the study explores the ethical tensions and possibilities of locating all participants as political actors with agency to develop the stories, characters, and images they choose for themselves. It juxtaposes the democratic principles of the theatre space with the oppression and control of psychiatry when viewed as a Total Institution. I draw on the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman in order to conceptualise a history and critique of psychiatry, and to contextualise how colonial psychiatry developed in South Africa. I compare manifestations of power and control that are part of forensic psychiatric practices with the political possibilities of different resistant theatre spaces, such as the work of the Olimpias artist collective and the Madness Hotel (Vitor Pordeus). I show how these examples, and the theatre project researched here, approach all participants as authors and makers of and on the world. I deploy a Vygotskian lens to discern how participants collectively create a Zone of Proximal Development, which explains the profound shifts in learning and skills observed in participants considered as low functioning or beyond treatment or rehabilitation. The study analyses three aspects of the practice: video documentation of selected workshops and performances; interviews with patient and staff participants; and my reflective practitioner field notes - in order to build the case for the radically humanising effect of the theatre playground. My analysis of key moments in the theatre practice highlights the ways in which patient-participants perform ‘a head taller' than clinical staff's expectations, when offered opportunities to experiment with relationships by means of embodied practices in a creative process set apart from the therapeutic gaze. Reflective and critical analysis of the practice reveals three types of experience in particular: first, hope as an overall affect that aligns with a recovery approach to mental health; secondly, how participation is experienced as humanising by disrupting and playing with institutionalised roles and bodies; and finally, how permission to play with the roles, narratives, and the power structures of psychiatry as an institution, reoriented participants as political actors in relation to the forensic hospital and the wider world. These experiences challenge the stigma and positioning of forensic psychiatric patients as incapable, outside of culture and humanity, and reposition them as legitimate knowers and creators.