Despite the originality of his theatre and the enormous success of his Brazzaville-based troupe, Rocado Zulu Théâtre (1979-1995), Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi (1947-1995) is rarely studied as a playwright and director. I address this gap through an examination of fourteen plays from across his oeuvre of published and unpublished works, including Conscience de tracteur (1973), La Parenthèse de sang (1978) and Qui a mangé Madame d’Avoine Bergotha? (1989). Employing the notions of embodiment and entanglement as tools for analysis, I seek to show how Sony uses the body in text and performance to contest the physical and discursive limitations imposed on human lives through practices of violence, exploitation and dehumanisation enacted and enabled by a web of local and global powers. In four chapters discussing the central themes of (ill) health, gender, nonhuman life, and death, I illustrate how Sony’s imaginary of the body, characterised by fluidity, multiplicity and resilience captured in the image of the ‘ouragan’, destabilises colonial binaries derived from Cartesian dualism. If the satirical plays both expose and contest the mechanisms of power in (post)colonial politics as theorised by Achille Mbembe, they also propose a vision of a new humanity and way of being-in-the-world inspired by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon. Refusing a didactic exposition of this vision however, Sony uses affect, and especially laughter, to instead implicate audiences, highlighting their responsibility in the construction of a different future through collective action. In analysing this social purpose of his theatre, inspired by Kongo rituals, I also consider Sony’s own ambiguous relationship to La Francophonie during a period of significant investment from French cultural institutions, such as the Concours théâtral interafricain, and oil companies, such as Elf, in Francophone African theatre. I examine Sony’s strategies for navigating these powers to realise new possibilities for (intercultural) theatre production.