King's College London

Kininso Koncepts, a Lagos-based creative organisation, joined King’s on 4 March to share their socially engaged artistry and perform their work Waterside. The event was organised by Dr Ella Parry-Davies, Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory in the Department of English, as part of programming for King’s Africa Week, with support from the Global Cultures Institute.

At the panel discussion, Kininso performed a “rehearsed reading” of their play Waterside, which explores totemisim and cultural memory against the backdrop of oil exploitation in the Niger Delta. Actors Edgar Eriakha and Stankley Okeke took to the floor, improvising around the constraints of the lecture hall to conjure up a fraught family dynamic, playing multiple characters and captivating the audience.

Panellists then responded to the themes of the play from their diverse areas of expertise. Raidat Karim, PhD student in the African Leadership Centre, described the power of youth-led social movements in Nigeria, focusing on the close bonds of mutuality and young friendship that were also represented in Waterside.

Picking up on questions of ecology and extraction, Dr Adelene Buckland, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, offered an intricate close reading of 'Mine Mine Mine’, a poem by Uhuru Portia Phalafala examining gold mining in South Africa and its consequences in pollution, contamination, health, and bereavement.

Dr Clement Sefa-Nyarko, Lecturer in Security, Development and Leadership in Africa at the African Leadership Centre, reflected on approaches to the climate emergency. He emphasised that humans must consider ourselves of the environment, not outside of it, as similarly demonstrated by the depiction of animism in Waterside.

The panel was chaired by Annabel Ali, research assistant for the Department of English research strand for Creative Practice, Performance and Theatrical Cultures, and a King’s PhD student analysing theatrical approaches to codifying collective experiences and black cultural expression.

Earlier in the day, Kininso Koncepts hosted a workshop drawing on their theatre-making processes, where the seeds of lived experiences and encounters are germinated through group exploration and discussion.

Participants played physical drama games to hone group-thinking and sharpen senses, before reflecting on stories that inspire (or otherwise) and learning songs to sign together. Learning from these activities was compiled to create short performances using poetry and music to address themes of migration, climate and coloniality.

The event was part of Africa Week, an annual celebration hosted by the African Leadership Centre, based in the School of Global Affairs at the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy.

This year’s theme of Disrupting Distances: Nations, Systems, and Leadership explored the traditional dichotomies used to frame the world, such as developed versus developing, Global North versus Global South, and majority versus minority. Africa Week seeks to challenge these definitions through salient conversations reimagining world structures.