Mapping age and disability through performance in African Orature and theatre performance

The complexity of conceptualising the elderly and disabled people in oral and written interpretations in Buganda (Uganda) results from the subtle interplay between perceptions of their mental and physical disabled bodies and the correlated invisibility attributed to them in social and political representations. Still, performance as a field allows diverse mappings and offers multiple approaches that enable artists to view practices such as narratives, songs, recitation, and drama, as spaces where age could be explored. My purpose in this study is to observe the range of contemporary questions concerning Ugandan performance in order to map the presence of discourses of age and disability that may be in song-texts, and dramatic texts where they have been embedded. My study of the nature of the Baganda proverbs, songs, folktales as well as Uganda plays whose discourses dramatise age and disability politics, reveals that these performance forms constitute a wealthy connection to the traditional and contemporary constructions of age and disability in Uganda. The essay draws examples from Baganda artists Robert Serumaga, John Ruganda, Elvania Zirimu’s dramas, and Albert Sempeke, to demonstrate their interest in agedness, disability and performance.