The year of publication of African Theatre in Development is significant. In the immediate years preceding its 1999 release, important works that mark the march of progress in African theatre had been published: Martin Banham, Errol Hill, and George Woodyard's The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994), Eckhard Breitinger's Theatre and Performance in Africa (1994), Marion Frank's AIDS-Education Through Theatre (1995), Jane Plastow's African Theatre and Politics (1996), David Kerr's African Popular Theatre (1996), Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard's West African Popular Theatre (1997), Don Rubin's The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Volume 3, Africa (1997), Oga Steve Abah's Performing Life: Case Studies in the Practice of Theatre for Development (1997), Robert Mshengu Kavanagh's Making People's Theatre (1997), Kamal Salhi's African Theatre for Development: Art for Self-Determination (1998), and Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998). Published as if with one eye on a fin de siècle assessment of past theatrical achievements and the other on millennial aspirations, African Theatre in Development is mostly a case-by-case study of how theatre has been developed in Africa, and how it has been used in and for development. It is the first in Indiana University Press's nascent African Theatre series edited by Martin Banham, James Gibbs, and Femi Osofisan, all eminent scholars of African theatre.