My dissertation examines how dramatists in west and south Africa have adapted Greek tragedy to address a number of dilemmas facing political communities in the 20th and 21st centuries. By staging ancient myth as present conflict, these playwrights shed light on the epistemological and material challenges of the post-independence era, a period marked not only by the lingering aftermath of colonial-era violence but a resurgence of its methods of depredation. I argue that the dynamics of transmission that have generated Greek tragedy’s prodigious postclassical afterlife offer strategies for imagining a future beyond and despite these present exigencies. Using methodologies in translation studies and classical reception, I survey the creative tools deployed by African dramatists to bring global recognition to regional socio-political conflicts of the past half century. Drawing from critical perspectives in performance studies, psychoanalysis, and political theory, I argue that in their divergent and evolving approaches to adapting tragedy, these playwrights dramatize the difficulties of addressing a postcolonial polis whose borders are often in tension with the existing boundaries of the nation-state. Each of my chapters focuses on the practices of linguistic, cultural, and transmedial adaptation showcased in the “afterlives” of these performances. By analyzing archival and discursive traces to understand how these works fail to address their imagined audiences, my investigation maps the diminishing viability of the nation-state to serve as a “moral-political horizon” for postcolonial collective life. Nonetheless, even as I question the utility of live drama to cultivate emancipatory political action, my project sees these occasions of failed transmission as unprecedented sites of local knowledge production: for fostering forms of remembering, imagining, and acting as a collective beyond either the nation-state or the theatrical performance event. Attending to the generative paradoxes of tragedy’s performance, my research showcases the benefits and limitations of theatrical performance as a tool for mobilizing collective action and social change on the African stage. Ultimately, my project elucidates the potential for African interpretations of Greek tragedy to clarify unfolding challenges facing postcolonial presents and to cultivate the kind of speculative deliberation that might allow new futures to be imagined and enacted.