Dr Shonagh Hill is a Research Fellow (AHRC) at Queen’s University Belfast working on ‘Feminist Temporalities in Contemporary Northern Irish Performance’. Shonagh previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at QUB (2020-2022). Her monograph, Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2019), provides an alternative genealogy of modern Irish theatre. Shonagh is a member of the Executive Committee of ISTR.

Born in South Africa, Nandi Jola has lived in Northern Ireland for over 20 years. The focus of this paper is her 2024 play, Mamtshawe - The Rise of Maqoma, which emerged from a period of research on the Frontier Wars, Europe’s invasion of South Africa in the 18th century, the establishment of the Cape Colony and the bravery of the Xhosa Warriors. Mamtshawe - The Rise of Maqoma was first performed as a staged reading at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, Dublin on 9^th January 2024. A full production, performed entirely in Xhosa, then toured four locations in South Africa in January and February 2024. The play centres on the narrator Mamtshawe (played by Jola): a royal princess and 5^th descendent of Jongumsobomvu Maqoma, Chief and Commander of the Xhosa forces during the Frontier Wars. During her research, Jola discovered that Maqoma’s ceremonial stick is held in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks, Dublin: it was brought to Ireland in 1873, the year of Maqoma’s death, by a British soldier and donated to the Museum in 1880. Decolonization underpins her play which addresses the double dispossession of colonial and patriarchal histories. In Mamtshawe - The Rise of Maqoma, the ceremonial stick and the legacy of Maqoma are passed on to Mamtshawe to demand address of disavowed collective histories that continue to resonate in the present. This paper will apply the lens of decolonial feminism to enable exploration of colonialism, capitalism, and the individualist freedom of a white ‘civilisational feminism’.