Theatre Historiography and Archive Politics in Nigeria: Recovering Lost Performance Histories from Colonial and Post-Independence Records

This dissertation undertakes a critical historiographical investigation of Nigerian theatre archives, examining the politics of archival formation, the silences and distortions embedded in existing historical records, and the methodological challenges of recovering suppressed and marginalised performance histories. Theatre historiography in Nigeria has been shaped by colonial record-keeping practices that privileged elite, English-language, and Western-influenced theatre over indigenous performance traditions, and by post-independence institutional archival failures that resulted in the destruction or neglect of substantial performance documentation. The research develops an original decolonial archival methodology combining conventional archival research with oral history, community memory work, and the critical reading of negative space within extant records. Fieldwork was conducted in national, university, and state archives in Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu, and Kano, supplemented by community oral history sessions in regions with limited archival documentation. The dissertation makes original contributions both to Nigerian theatre historiography, through the recovery of previously undocumented performance histories particularly from South South and North East Nigeria, and to the methodological field of performance historiography, through its theorisation of the decolonial archive as a practice of historical justice. Keywords: theatre historiography, archival politics, decolonial methodology, Nigerian performance history, recovered histories.