Theatre
Le Dieu impôt
Not translated into English
Abdourahamane Soli · 1973
Synopsis
A play in three acts whose title makes tax a god. Neither its plot nor its characters are known.
Context
The play was published in Paris in 1973 by a French cooperation service, and not in Niamey: this was then an ordinary route for West African theatre, which found in the former colonial power the presses that its own countries lacked. The head tax, a flat sum that the colonial administration had village chiefs collect from every inhabitant of working age, was kept in most countries of the region until the seventies: the text is therefore contemporary with its end. It has not been reissued, and its content is described nowhere.
Who it is for
In French. It helps to know that the head tax was, for half a century, the act by which the colonial administration made itself felt even in the most remote villages.
Prizes and reception
No prize or stage revival is attested. Directories of Nigerien writers record the author's name for this title rather than for his later books.