lanaire Aderemi is a writer committed to amplifying and archiving untold stories. She holds a First Class Sociology degree and a Distinction in an MA Creative Writing degree from the University of Warwick. She is the recipient of the 2019 Shoot Festival Artist Development Award and the 2020 Peter Gutkind Prize. In 2021, her play protests, hymns and caskets was shortlisted for the Mustapha Matura Award and was staged at the Belgrade Theatre in 2022 to over 300 people. In 2023, she was selected on the Soho Theatre Writers Lab course, Soho House Creative Fellowship and Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE Programme. Alongside writing, she created an immersive audio-drama about untold Nigerian histories called story story pod, which ranked #1 on Apple Podcasts history category. Her work across theatre, film and literature has appeared in The Republic, BBC, Tate Modern, Birmingham Rep Theatre, Warwick Arts Centre and Film Africa’s Festival. She is currently an M4C PhD candidate in Literary Practice at the University of Warwick exploring the Egba Women’s Revolt. 

Siana Bangura is a multi-award-winning playwright, writer, producer, and creative practitioner proudly hailing from South East London, currently living, working and creating between London and the West Midlands.

She is the founder and former editor of Black British Feminist platform, No Fly on the WALL; author of poetry collection, Elephant; and the producer of 1500 & Counting, a documentary film investigating deaths in custody and police brutality in the UK. She is also the founder of Courageous Films; Siana Bangura Productions; and co-founder and co-curator of the Sierra Leone Arts & Culture Festival (SLACfest).

As a playwright, Siana’s recent works include the play Swim, Aunty, Swim!, which was named Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards and recognised at the Black British Theatre Awards 2024.

Her short films include Denim (2017), a poetic exploration of the gentrification of South East London. In the podcasting world, Siana is co-host of ‘Behind the Curtains’ podcast, produced in partnership with English Touring Theatre (ETT) and host of ‘People Not War’ podcast, produced in partnership with Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), where she was formerly a campaigner and co-ordinator.

With three TED Talks to her name, and a body of work focusing on issues of race, class, gender and their intersections, Siana’s mission across her vast portfolio is to help move voices and experiences traditionally marginalised, from the margins, to the centre. www.sianabangura.com  

JC Niala is an award-winning, multilingual theatre maker based in Oxford, England. She mainly works in English and Swahili, incorporating other African languages such as Kikuyu and Luo in her plays. Her ‘Shakespeare in Swahili’ project, funded by Arts Council England, includes a translation of Macbeth. JC won the 2023 New Translator’s Bursary with Stinging Fly. For her, translation work is an act of language reclamation. She is a founder member of the African Women Playwrights Network and is currently active in the UK diaspora branch. JC is interested in translating African literature into forms of English that reflect the linguistic nuances of their cultures of origin. Read more from JC Niala →

Voices of Africa: Multilingualism in African Theatre Transcript

JC: Hello and welcome to the Multilingual Theatre Meet the World event. I’m JC and I’ll be talking to you with my friends and colleagues, Lanaire and Siana, and we’re all members of African Women’s Playwright Network for diaspora branch. So before we dive in, I’m going to ask Lanaire and Siana to tell you a little bit about their work and then we’re going to talk about multilingual theatre.

LANAIRE: Hello everyone. My name is Lanaire and I am a writer and researcher committed to amplifying and archiving untold stories. I explore stories through different forms, from film to theatre and essays and short stories and a lot of my work incorporates multiple languages. For instance, my play Protests, Hymns and Caskets, which was shortlisted for the Mustapha Matura Award, combined Pidgin English, Yoruba and English to tell a story about a Nigerian historical movement called the Egba Women’s Revolt and it was shown at the Belgrade Theatre to over three hundred people in Coventry. I’m very passionate about language. I think that language is powerful and is an important part of storytelling and I take inspiration from one of my favourite writers, Shange, who talks about undoing language, and I think that undoing language is a key part of what I try to do in my own work. So thank you, JC, for this.

JC: Thank you. Hopefully we’ll talk a bit more about undoing language during the course of our conversation. Siana, would you introduce yourself, please?

SIANA: Hello everyone. Lanaire, that was a beautiful introduction from you. My name is Siana Bangura. Similarly, I am very much a multidisciplinary artist. I’m a writer, producer and a theatre maker and all of my work is very much grounded, unashamedly, in socio-political issues and interrogating the intersection of race, class, gender and matters surrounding that. My recent work, Swim, Aunty, Swim! has been taking over my life for a few years now but in terms of the context of this conversation, it definitely is the culmination of my practice of playing with language, of playing with creoles, of playing with the different ways we can expand English, especially as black diasporans, especially as African diasporans, and how we can challenge what is seen as proper language and proper ways to communicate and how we can uplift our cultures through the words we use and through our dialects and how our cultures are rich and they travel, as we do. So I’m very interested in that intersection of language, culture and identity, and particularly as a Sierra Leonean-British writer, it’s been very important to bring our particular creole to the stage in a way that you don’t often see, especially as a country that is smaller on the continent and maybe less known to some. That’s a little bit about my background and my practice.

JC: Thank you so much. I’ll also share a little bit about what brought me to this and how I ended up being involved in hosting this Meet the World event. My name is JC Niala and I took part in a virtual residency called Visible Communities and during that time I was translating a play called Wimbi la Mabadiliko, which means A Wave of Change, written by Dennis Shonko, who’s a Kenyan playwright. During the recent protest in Kenya in 2024, language and translation was used as a tool. So, for the first time in Kenyans’ history, generation Z or Gen Z went around and translated into all of Kenya’s major languages all of the materials that people were protesting about, such as the contested finance bill. And it was amazing to see, as you said, Siana, that language is political and translation was used as a tool to educate people about their rights and to make sure they weren’t being left behind in any of the conversation. So, working as a diasporan theatre maker, it felt really apt during this residency to be using translation to bring Dennis Shonko’s work to Jermyn Street Theatre in January 2024. All of us incorporate multiple languages and linguistic diversity into our work but sometimes it can be quite a challenging thing to do because we have to think about our audiences. We have to think about what people will understand but also what they might not understand. So I would love you both to share a little bit about the choices that you make. How do you make sure that an international audience will get the messages you want them to get when you’re working across multiple languages?

JC: I love what you’re talking about, women being keepers of the culture, especially in the context of language because we talk about ‘mother tongues’. We recognise that in the way that we define women’s role with regards to language. In Kenya, the national language, Swahili, which is one of my mother tongues, is a language for women and it’s women who have kept that language. There’s a cloth, which in West Africa would probably be a wrapper, but in Kenya we call them a kanga, and there’s always a phrase written at the bottom of it. So there’s a lot of Swahili literacy around these phrases. And they’re proverbs and they’re sayings, what we call misemo, and they always have more than one meaning. And even when they were being manufactured at one point in Kenya’s history in the 50s in Japan, Swahili women were in touch with the manufacturers saying, ‘We want this particular misemo’ because it was a way of communicating to their societies the kinds of things, the kinds of conversations that you’re talking about that we don’t normally have. So if you had a woman in the village, for example, and she was in conflict with somebody else, she might wear a kanga with a misemo that talks about when two elephants fight, what gets hurt is the grass. So there’s this thing about the way in which language is living. But looking at those kangas, we also have a history of the kind of things that were being talked about, going back over a century, more than that, several centuries, that give us an insight into women’s lives, which are therefore also the society’s lives.

SIANA: That’s such an important point, across our cultures. Speaking in proverbs is absolutely important. A proverb in Krio, which translates as ‘the same rain that beats the tea leaf until it’s bitter is the same rain that beats sugarcane until it’s sweet’ is a central proverb and it’s at the heart of the play Swim, Aunty, Swim! I remember our process of trying to decide which proverbs we were going to use, which ones really gave the essence of what we were trying to go for. That was a really interesting experience because I learned so much along the way. Like me sitting and thinking about that and then being in conversation with others, particularly about the cultures that were slightly outside of my own. But as Africans, and actually as global majority peoples, we do speak in proverbs, we are poetic people and those things really matter. In Sierra Leonean culture, in Krio, you might say someone’s in the pull hint, they’re pulling a hint or whatever. And that’s basically speaking in codes, maybe like throwing a little bit of shade again. But that is all still an art form. Even that example you gave. To me, that’s a little bit of that, really. She’s kind of saying, ‘Look at us fighting.’ It’s very profound, that proverb, I’ve heard it before. But it’s like communicating in code sometimes because for many reasons you can’t speak directly, so you’re cutting through the corners.

JC: Lanaire, do you use proverbs in your work, either to sync with or as part of your process?

LANAIRE: Yes, definitely. Some of my characters mention these proverbs, especially in Protest, Hymns and Caskets. I was able to learn more about the proverbs by asking people, like my friends or people older than me, for the common proverbs that they used. I really love hearing proverbs and I like the collective sigh in a theatre that comes in the silence when someone says a really profound proverb. I think it’s also something that you can talk about even after the play is over because it’s unravelling and people have their different perspectives on it. I love what you said, JC, about the cloth and the cloth communicating something. I’ve never heard of that before. So the kanga, that’s something that I’m never going to forget now.

JC: I actually have a piece on the National Centre for Writing’s website that came out of one of the readings that we were doing with the actors for Dennis Shonko’s play, A Wave of Change. It was the very first reading and one of the actors asked, ‘Do people really speak like this?’ because they hadn’t been immersed in either African languages or the experience of African theatre-making. And I really thought about that a lot because to me it was obvious, this is exactly how people speak. But it made me realise also some of the things that we take for granted in the richness of our language, or languages, I should say. I’ve been listening to both of you talk about your process and you’re never alone in your process. It makes me realise how multilingual theatre, how African theatre, diasporic African theatre builds community, builds identity. Because even though when the play’s being shown there might be only one name on the poster, there’s actually a whole host of people whose thoughts and ideas went into the sense of creativity. What gifts do you think working in this way brings for the audience and in terms of making space for African stories on the stage? What does that mean for you?

SIANA: There are lots of gifts. The industry part of theatre-making is challenging, especially if you are an African storyteller, a black woman and have other layers of otherwise marginalised identity. You have to cut through a lot to be able to lift up the stories you want to lift up in the ways you want and to stay authentic to your culture and your craft when you are not the majority. So there is a challenge there. That said, though, the beauty of the arts makes it all worth it. Writing is very much a solitary endeavour a lot of the time and you come and create this world and then to bring it to life you need others to step in. And it’s interesting because with anything, when you’re so immersed for many years or many months, it’s really interesting to then take it out into the world and see how others react and how others are like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And others might say, ‘Oh, that syntax or that rhythm, I don’t know if that’s quite right when I say it out loud as an actor and so can we adjust that?’ And then it starts to open other layers of how you see your work. Particularly when you’re bringing in many other cultures, you can research as much as you like but it’s so important to speak to people, to engage with people, to have the aunties on the phone who are Ghanaian, who are Nigerian and who can say, ‘Actually, no, it’s not this’ or ‘Actually, yes, it’s that’ and call up this person and call up that person. All of that is part of the richness of the process and also holding that not everything that you have done will go into the final form but all of that process is still there as the seeds for everything. So it still all makes it in in the end, even if on paper it’s not quite documented. The collaborative process is very, very important and helps you to see things from a different perspective. It offers other ways of looking at things that you feel very fluent in because it’s the world that you’ve built and you’ve created but it has its challenges and there’s definitely something about having too many voices, as well. That can be difficult. So, ultimately, it’s also about being sure of what your artistic identity is and what you’re trying to communicate and why and then being led by that so that everything else enables that to be born.

LANAIRE: I love what you said, Siana, about how it’s such a beautiful process. I remember when I was younger, in primary school, my mum always told me, ‘Lanaire, read the work aloud before you submit it.’

SIANA: Yeah, it sounds different.

LANAIRE: Sometimes you read it aloud and then edit and submit. I have brought that lesson into now as a twenty-something-year-old when creating work. But what you were saying, Siana, about how you would consult people, I also do the same. I remember I had a 21st century character in a play who had participated in the EndSARS protest and, without spoiling the plot, there was a character who was in prison and at the time I was trying to write Pidgin but I think that there is a difference between trying to translate what’s in your head onto paper and actually saying it aloud, and when I wrote it on paper I asked a friend for feedback and she said, ‘Lanaire, this is not how we say it.’ She actually made a joke. She said to me that my time in London has changed how I think about Pidgin. And to be fair, I was never confident speaking Pidgin but I could understand it. I thought that being able to understand it meant that I could write it, which is actually untrue. But she made me confident, or rather she supported me in filling those gaps, which was very comforting, and I felt more confident when I went through the rehearsal process because even during that rehearsal process things changed. You had another character say, ‘Actually, no, this should be said in this way’ or ‘Actually, we need a full stop here or we need a break here.’ I think that’s also a bit easier when you’re working with good actors. I was very blessed that the team of actors we worked with were also quite skilled with the Nigerian accents because accent does play a big role in the beauty of it and I was very worried about the accents not being perfect. It still wasn’t perfect but I think that is also part of the issue in the industry of not having actors of the global majority who get opportunities like that. I remember one of the most wonderful things I got was at the end of the play. People kept telling me that they felt really happy that in their several years of acting they had never been given an opportunity to speak Yoruba, to speak Pidgin and that this opportunity was very rewarding for them because they got to connect with their histories and connect with their language. It reminds me of that Toni Morrison quote about how there’s been a systematic looting of language and as a result of that we lose our nuances, our complexities and oppressive language is then used. I think that the erasure of our languages, even on the stage, is very violent. Because our languages are rendered subjugated or inferior and that reproduces more violence and limits our knowledge because the way in which we think about our world is informed by our use of language. So if language itself is restricted, so is our knowledge. I think that for me, it’s had its pros and cons. But similar to what Siana was saying, I think the collaborative process has made my work richer and I know that even though I’m a writer, I would not be this person without the people around me, without my community. I think that just speaks to how collaborative and communal Africans are. We do things with each other and we ask for help when we need it. So I’ve really enjoyed the process and I feel like I’ve learned so much from doing language in this way.

JC: You talked about undoing language and now you said doing language, and I really feel that that’s what’s fascinating about all of our processes, that we’re working with languages that in some ways have been undone and are finding our ways to doing them in community, whether it’s by ourselves or in collaboration, and figuring out how to get this absolutely wonderful polyphony of voices clear enough to come through singular characters.

SIANA: That clarity point is so important, JC, because the more you do it, like Lanaire’s point about good actors who are diligent enough to be able to pull things out and question and challenge you, the more it helps with that clarity and stretches you. I talked about how you get stretched in the R&D process as a writer. It can be quite painful but the stretching, if done well, can make sure that you and the world emerge much richer for it. I just want to speak to that very important point you made, Lanaire, about what your actors said about all their years of being in the industry and not having the opportunity to engage with their particular culture in this way. I got similar feedback through the Swim, Aunty, Swim! process. That speaks to more structural things there. But there is something about the gift as well. When you write and create worlds, you do it for the reasons that you do it but there are all these other things that come from you being able to do that and the gift that it gives people to be able to engage. It can be quite emotional as well, when they’ve had to maybe mask their way through an industry or mask their way through in order to make it, to be able to say, ‘ I can go back and I can reconnect with my language, my heritage’ and maybe that opens doors for them to reconnect with parts of themselves that they have left dormant for a long time for complex reasons.

JC: I’ve definitely had the same experience of actors telling me exactly that and in ways that I didn’t expect, very much in terms of African languages. But also, to return for a moment to the Gloucester accent. n that particular play, there’s a mother and a daughter with Gloucestershire accents and both of them said they had never had a chance to speak in a Gloucestershire accent, even though that’s where they were from. So I think it is about these complexities that sometimes bring us to people in ways that we wouldn’t have otherwise expected. I think it’s important that we all have acknowledged the struggles around being able to make this kind of work and the idea that there isn’t an audience sometimes. People say, ‘Well, who’s going to come and watch this? Who’s interested in these stories and these histories?’ What would you say

to somebody who was concerned that they were going to go and see a multilingual play? What would that mean? Would they understand it? What would you say to convince them to come and see it?

LANAIRE: I’d say that there are many things in the world that we don’t understand and we have to confront them and I think they should just come with an openness and excitement and enthusiasm. I think that at every point in our lives we have to meet something that is perhaps unfamiliar to us but we find that if we do so with faith and with courage, it can often be a very rewarding experience. I’m remembering something now that’s become a meme, this idea of Europe not being the sun. I think it’s from the Senegalese filmmaker, I forget his name.

JC: Ousmane Sembène?

LANAIRE: Yes. That’s him. He says we should remember that we are the sun and I think that it’s also okay for you to not be the focus of everything. It’s okay for you to be outside for a change and that itself is a wonderful space because you’re able to see things differently, you’re able to learn. I think there’s something beautiful about being a learner and I would say to people, just come with an open heart. I think that you’d find

that there is so much beauty in not being able to be the centre of things. Perhaps that’s also because a lot of the stories that we work with us are stories that are located at the margins and we’re constantly having to pull them to the centre and claim it as central when it’s at the margin, to borrow that Toni Morrison quote. But I think there’s something so beautiful about the discomfort. I think the discomfort is fine. Sit in that discomfort and you might find that there are beautiful things that you learn about yourself, about other people and about the world from doing that. So come with open hearts is what I’d say.

SIANA: You said it beautifully. Just to add to that, Bell Hooks talks a lot about from the margins to the centre and that’s central to my pursuit as a storyteller, too. Come and understand and embrace the art, whatever form it takes, as a portal. You’re being transported somewhere and maybe for that moment, as Lanaire says, you’re not the centre of it and that’s okay. So I think it’s very much about coming with an open mind. Actually, to be able to access art in its fullest beauty, you have to be open. So there’s nothing to worry about, there’s no need to worry. If anything, come and expect that you might be curious enough to want more and learn more. One of the reasons why I’m multi-disciplinary by necessity is that my work is very much about looking at state violence, looking at really big, gnarly questions. You protest, you go on the front lines, you march, you do this, you do that. And yes, that is perceived in certain ways, as we know, and there’s a point where folks just shut down and stop listening to you and you get dismissed as a social justice warrior. But can you say the same thing again differently? And so for me, without giving away too many spoilers, with Swim, Aunty, Swim! it’s very much a continuation of the work that I’m always doing. So on the one hand, that centring of voices and experiences that are traditionally marginalised and pulling them from the margins to the centre. In the case of our aunties, for example, a particular character goes through something extremely harrowing and she embodies the many women, mothers, sisters and aunties that I’ve spoken to and have organised with and alongside and behind over the last decades when it comes to state violence and deaths in custody, for example. One of my characters is very much portraying that amalgamation of different women who have a story to tell that maybe the audiences that come to see the work might also have in their own homes. They might have a particular view of when they read certain headlines in the news. But my hope is that having met my character and knowing the story of her son, that maybe in the ways that my other tactics don’t work, maybe that coming and embracing and listening through theatre, maybe the next time they see those same kinds of headlines, they’ll stop and think about Fatu and Ishmael and maybe in the conversation their household will be quite different from how it has been in the past. To me, that makes a world of difference. Art is political, whether folks want to embrace it or not. It’s a tool used by many to be able to communicate. And whether it’s poetry, whether it’s theatre, artists are very essential to our revolutions, very central to the awakening in our consciousness and we’re very essential to the archiving and documenting of our time. Nina Simone reminds us of our duty to do that. So for me, art is a portal and not just through time but through the many different states of being as a human being.

JC: I really love what you said about that portal and the way that both of you have also referenced poetry because I think this is where I might have a little teaching point, in that African theatre has always embraced poetry and has always been multi and interdisciplinary in the way that it functioned. It has functioned as a court. In history, it functioned as an archive, a way for people to be able to tell and share their stories and hopefully bring that understanding that you so beautifully described. One of the things that struck me after A Wave of Change was shown at Jermyn Street theatre was when one of the audience members came up to me and said, ‘You know, I had a Kenyan friend who used to tell me the stories of when he was in school in Kenya but I always felt there was something that I wasn’t quite getting. But now, after seeing this play, I can’t wait to see him again because I fully understand it now. I’ve been able to see what it was he was talking about through the experience of the play.’ So I think what I’m hearing from you both, tell me if I’ve got this wrong, is that we’re actually talking about the way in which multilingual theatre, by doing and undoing and then redoing language, forms a kind of bridge between all of these different communities through time and space and just allows us to be able to connect with each other.

SIANA: Summarised beautifully. You always hear that there’s this need for universality, universalism, whatever the word is, in our stories. Sometimes it’s important to push back and say, ‘No, actually, the context is really specific, it’s very much West African’ but that does not mean folks can’t take something from it. And that’s the thing. We’re talking about that shifting, whose centre is what, who is the sun? We’re often expected to be able to universalise our experiences through a European lens, through a white lens, and then actually being able to say, you can still learn from me, you can still learn from us. One of the things I’ve loved about the Swim, Aunty, Swim! experience is the way that aunties of all creeds and colours have seen themselves in these characters. And that was one of my hopes as well, that you would have aunties from whatever culture come and be like, ‘Oh, that’s me’ or ‘Oh, that’s her’ and be able to see themselves in these characters. There are some specificities because of culture and traditions, but the human condition, in many ways, is universal and it just has all these different flavours and nuances. As you say so brilliantly, JC, it’s all about being a bridge in the end.

JC: Thank goodness for those nuances and those cultural differences and those complexities because the world, quite frankly, would be very boring if we were all the same. I want to thank you so much for taking part in this conversation and thank you for the thoughts and the insights and also how generous you have been with sharing your process because so often we talk about the art but for people to be able to hear what it’s like to get into the weeds is really a great offering. So thank you for that. And I also want to thank Kate Griffin and the people who were behind the Visible Communities residency. It was an amazing and in many ways quite transformative experience for me. And to thank Martin, who’s done the tech, because without the tech we would not be able to reach you, and the National Centre for Writing for the work that they do to support the many different Englishes and languages all around the world. Thank you.

Supported by Visible Communities Residencies.