Against Order(s): Dictatorship, Absurdism and the Plays of Sony Labou Tansi

Abstract

Congolese playwright, director and novelist Sony Labou Tansi created a large body of work during his most prolific period, the late 1970s to mid-1990s, while living through a series of political coups and authoritarian governments.¹ For two decades, Tansi’s plays, novels and essays offered an array of diverse forms of resistance to dictatorship. Alternately celebrated for his international success,² harassed by state authorities,³ and posthumously accused of ethnic factionalism,⁴ Tansi’s career is a searing example of an artist writing through authoritarian conditions and political upheavals. Educated under a repressive colonial system, Tansi witnessed independence and the establishment of a Marxist state, participated in political efforts that brought about the creation of a new constitution and the emergence of an ostensibly multiparty democratic system in 1992, and suffered from the state of violence and chaos into which the Congo was plunged after the parliamentary elections of 1993 were contested and the nation entered a prolonged period of civil strife that eventually escalated into civil war. At the end of his life Tansi suffered personally for his political activities when his passport was revoked; the medical treatment he sought for himself and his wife in France for their AIDS-related illness was fatally delayed and they both died upon their return to the Congo in 1995 (Thomas 2002: 57; Kirkup 1995: n.p.).

Theatre leaves us ample space while the world around us unrelentingly seeks to take it over. (Sony Labou Tansi)