Performing Invisible Stories through Creative History

Abstract

The recovery of the responses of Southern African people to colonial conquest two hundred years ago is complex. Their feelings must be deduced from their actions, as recorded in hostile written records. A two-person play, Umnqa!—Never Defeated portrays the fighting spirit of a young man who eluded colonial controls three times. Produced in 2015–16 in the context of militant student unrest demanding intellectual inclusiveness, the performance aimed to engage nonacademic audiences and speak to their experiences. Grounded in the theories of Paolo Freire, it became a foundational example of an emerging creative history methodology which promotes a robust partnering of history and art to tell partly imagined stories.