Henning Mankell play about colonialism in Africa published in English for first time

A play by Henning Mankell about a Swedish couple struggling to understand the Africa where they have lived for more than a decade has been published in English for the first time.

Best known for his crime novels about Inspector Wallander, Mankell was also a dramatist, with more than 30 plays to his name. The author called The Antelopes “a battle between irreconcilable presences, between falsehood and truth”.

Mankell, who died last year at the age of 67, was artistic director of the Mutumbela Gogo Theatre Company and co-director of the Teatro Avenida in Mozambique. He divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where “he became fascinated with the subject of viewpoints and the colonial impact on Africa”, according to Rachael Jolley, editor of the Index on Censorship quarterly magazine, which published an extract from the play earlier in June 2016.

“His last production in Mozambique was Hamlet, performed not long before his death,” writes Jolley. “In an interview, Mankell told the BBC that living in Mozambique and Sweden gave him ‘double perspectives, African and European, and it teaches me a lot about the kind of world we live in’.”

In his own introduction to the play, Mankell explains how it takes place in a room “furnished in the way of a well-to-do middle-class family without aspirations”, which could be in a prosperous Swedish suburb, but is actually in Africa.

“The African landscape, the bush, the burning plains, is already creeping in over the thresholds of the house,” he writes. “Termites are wandering, the elephant grass grows in amongst the furniture. The set itself is a battle between irreconcilable presences, between falsehood and truth. The main characters in this play are the [black people]. But they don’t show.”