Christopher John
Social Responsibility & Funding Officer, AFDA The School of Creative Economies
“I believe each generation must challenge racial inequity and discrimination in terms of power, social, economic, and legal structures that perpetuate inequality. This is a continuous process that each generation must take up. ”
Dr Christopher John is an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and was a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at California State University Polytechnic, Pomona.
In 1997 he moved to South Africa to lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme. He has worked at AFDA since 2012. He has a master’s degree in English and doctoral degree in Community Development from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has extensive experience working in higher education with a particular interest in community engagement.
Before becoming an academic, Christopher worked in management training for Anglo American Corporation's group companies in Zimbabwe. He consulted to large mining houses, heavy industry, private sector companies, government, parastatals, and NGOs. He ran community projects in Zimbabwe shortly after the Gukurahundi (genocide) in the Matabeleland provinces and with ZIPRA veterans in the co-operative movement, consulted to Care Mozambique and Redd Barna in Mozambique after the civil war, and ran community engagement projects in KwaZulu-Natal after the ANC/IFP political violence ended, and amongst the gangs in Westville Correctional Facility in Durban.
During his early working life he was an actor, teacher, and director under the name Christopher Hurst. He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the West End, and on Broadway.
Born in Zimbabwe, Christopher returned to Africa and worked with Mbongeni Ngema’s Committed Artists and Cont Mhlanga’s Amakhosi Productions. In 2013, he directed Mbongeni Ngema in his return to the stage in The Zulu, which played at the Grahamstown Festival and Market Theatre. He was also script editor on Ngema’s screen play Asinimali. He directed Mbongeni Ngema and Percy Mtwa, the original cast of Woza Albert, in a revival at the Durban Playhouse in 2018. The Tabex Encyclopedia Zimbabwe credits him with making an important contribution to the debates about decolonizing theatre in Zimbabwe in the 1980s.