The Drama of South Africa

Plays, Pageants and Publics Since 1910

Loren Kruger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415179836
• eBook ISBN: 9781134680856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Drama of South Africa comprehensively chronicles the development of dramatic writing and performance from 1910, when the country came into official existence, to the advent of post-apartheid. Eminent theatre historian Loren Kruger discusses well-known figures, as well as lesser-known performers and directors who have enriched the theatre of South Africa. She also highlights the contribution of women and other minorities, concluding with a discussion of the post-apartheid character of South Africa at the end of the twentieth century.

1
INTRODUCTION

The drama of South Africa

On 10 May 1994, South Africa’s first democratically elected government staged the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first president of a new South Africa. Taking place on a hill in Pretoria, erstwhile bastion of Afrikanerdom, in the amphitheatre-courtyard of the Union Buildings, Sir Herbert Baker’s monument to British Empire and white supremacy and still the seat of executive government, witnessed on television by millions worldwide, and in person by 150,000 people on the lawn below the buildings, this event was understood by participants and observers alike to inaugurate not only the new president but also the new nation.¹ At the center of the proceedings was the swearing in of the president who took the oath of office “in the presence of all those assembled here” while standing in a small pavilion, open to the VIPs in the amphitheatre but sealed with plexiglass at the rear end facing the crowd below. The official enactment of the new state and its representative actors in this privileged space was, however, framed by performances outside, which preceded, succeeded, and accompanied the act of inauguration itself.

The other performances may have lacked the indicative force of law of the act of inauguration but carried nonetheless the subjunctive power of prayer, prophecy, play, or occasionally doubt about the resolution of conflict in this drama of South Africa.² An hour or more before Mandela and his entourage entered the site, the arrival of national and international delegates was accompanied by choirs, some black, some white, some more or less integrated, whose informality contrasted with the formal mien of the delegates ushered in by (mostly white) members of the South African Defence Force (SADF) or (mostly black) UmKhonto we Sizwe [isiNguni: Spear of the Nation; MK], the former ANC guerrilla army.³ The act of inauguration was immediately preceded by South Africa’s competing anthems of modern nationhood, “Die Stem van Suid-Afrika” [The Voice of South Africa—the Afrikaner national anthem] and “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika” [God Bless Africa—the anthem of the African National Congress (ANC)], and by the izibongo [praises] of izimbongi [praise poets] vying with one another to hail the arrival of the new nation and its leaders in a manner that recalled without quite restoring the role of the court imbongi. It was succeeded by prayers from representatives of South Africa’s international religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. “Traditional” and “modern” elements in this celebration of invention were perforce mediated by the apparatus of electronic broadcasting and the local and global marketing of the recorded event and associated memorabilia as commodities.⁴

The events in the amphitheatre were followed by a series of entertainments on a stage in front of the crowd on the lawn, featuring performances that mixed people and materials from different ethnic groups under the rubric, “many cultures, one nation.” The opening act, the African Jazz Pioneers, recalled in personnel (black and white) and in repertoire (jazz laced with kwela and swing) the integrationist politics and syncretic aesthetics of the 1950s, which were being celebrated at the same time but in Sophiatown, the play (first performed 1985; published JATC 1994), revived at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg especially for the election. AJP’s performance, like the production of Sophiatown, underscored the link—at once nostalgic and hopeful—with the urbane modernity exemplified by its namesake, the most famous intercultural “bohemian” neighborhood to be destroyed by apartheid. Others included Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s deftly urbane reformulation of the isicathamiya [walking like a cat] dance developed by Zulu migrant workers, and a collaboration between Savuka, whose lead singer, “white Zulu” Johnny Clegg, sang of Mandela’s former imprisonment in “Asimbonanga Mandela” [We do not see him, Mandela] in a combination of rock and maskanda (itself a fusion of Zulu migrant song and a European instrument: the electric guitar), and the Surialanga Dance Company, who interpreted the song by way of Bharata Natyam. The range of languages, from Afrikaans via English to Zulu, and music, from the boeremusiek of Nico Carstens to the isicathamiya of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, was matched by visual diversity, in dance, from Bharata Natyam to tiekiedraai, and in formal and informal costume from one imbongi’s imvunulo (Zulu festive attire, including skins) to another’s designer shirt, or from the diplomatic blue “Western” suit—competing with the daishiki or the boubou (in homage to West Africa)—in the amphitheatre above to the T-shirt emblazoned with “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika” or with Mandela’s face or clan-name (Madiba) on the lawn below.

This amalgam of visual and aural diversity as well as the active responsiveness of participants, whether members of parliament or citizens on the lawn, to the words, images, and music mediated by screen and microphone, dramatized the act of union proffered by the official slogan, “many cultures, one nation.” While some responses were predictable enough, such as black and white ANC MPs swaying enthusiastically to Soweto choirs in the amphitheatre, others offered more idiosyncratic but no less striking performances of reconciliation on the lawn: a black woman danced a tiekiedraai [Afrikaans: turning on a threepenny piece] which she claimed to have learnt “in [her] boerestaat” (separatist Afrikaner state), playfully defusing the explosive idea of white secession (which had been behind the bombs that had threatened the election); an Afrikaner woman selling (and wearing) “Madibamobilia” despite her “usual” National Party (NP) affiliation answered the question “Are you ANC?” with “Today, what else can I be?” (Gevisser 1994a:9). Despite the security barriers separating the presidential party and the crowd below and the fence between entertainers and audience on the lawn, the audience danced, sang, and waved flags in response to the ceremonies in the amphitheatre, even cheering on the former apartheid airforce because it was now “saluting our freedom” (Gevisser 1994a:9).

This public response anticipated and answered—in the most immediate ways—the opening words of Mandela’s thoroughly mediated (scripted) inauguration address: “Today, all of us, by our presence here, and by our celebrations in other parts of the country and the world, do confer glory and hope on new-found liberty” (Mandela 1994:4).⁵ As the addressee of the speech and implied subject of the sentence, “we the people of South Africa…tak[ing] possession” of a “new nation” and a “common victory” for “justice, for peace, and for human dignity,” those present assumed the role of national audience and national protagonist. In embracing in this single “we” those whose crimes subjected “our country” to the “human disaster” of “racial oppression,” and those “heroes and heroines who sacrificed their lives so that we could be free,” (see page) Mandela’s inaugural speech did not obliterate the past and present of “poverty, deprivation, suffering and gender and other discrimination” but, for its willing participants, it performed, if only momentarily, the “miracle” of national unity (see page). In the eyes, ears, bodies, hearts, and minds of those present, and in reports across all but the most extremely separatist terrain agreed, this was no mere “imagined community”—as Benedict Anderson categorizes the notion of nation in the “mind of each citizen” all of whom cannot be literally present to each other (Anderson 1983:15)—but an experience of simultaneous presence as national belonging.

While television and press reports highlighted consent rather than dissent, they obliquely acknowledged the persistence of discord and dramatic conflict in the national celebration. Most visible in the ex-ministers of the “old” South Africa who appeared unable or unwilling to sing “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika” or the anti-apartheid activists turned MPs chortling ironically as they sang “Die Stem,” dissent was occasionally more explicit. Newly inaugurated imbongi yeSizwe [people’s poet], Zolani Mkhiva, dressed to signify the new South Africa in a loose white garment, topped with a skin hat festooned with new South African flags, staged this dissent in “A luta continua,” his izibongo to ANC leaders including not only Mandela but also Jay Naidoo, formerly trade union leader and now Minister of Telecommunications, alluding to the class struggle many in the ANC elite would rather put behind them. While his later izibongo on the podium, “Halala Mandela,” saluted Mandela unconditionally, “A luta continua” was delivered in the style of the mass movement rally, dramatizing the difference between the militant language, emphatic tone, and bold gestures of the struggle, and Mandela’s subdued mien as he turned to face the assembly through the plexiglass to call (in Afrikaans, the language associated with apartheid), for the overcoming of the past—“Laat ons die verlede vergeet. Wat verby is, is verby” [Let us forget the past. Bygones are bygones] (emphasis added).

Mandela’s call to reconciliation and the audience’s performances in direct or indirect response prompted at least one reporter—observing from the lawn rather than, as the SABC crews were, from the amphitheatre—to call this “political theatre,” which “blurred the distinction between audience and players to such an extent that…the…event became a living enactment of this country’s possibilities” (Gevisser 1994a:9). This attribution of theatricality to the event is paradoxical because it appears to celebrate the transcendence rather than the restoration of theatrical form. While it did not enact a dramatic fiction in the conventional sense, the inauguration was theatrical in its formal staging and script, and in its distinction from ordinary speech and behavior. Gevisser’s celebration of a blurring of the boundaries between actors and audience, conventionally associated with (Western, modern, bourgeois) theatre and manifest here in the security barriers separating the presidential party and the crowd below, may seem antitheatrical to the extent that it posits an authentic experience of collective belonging that belies the formal orchestration of the official enactment. But the moniker “political theatre” also alludes to the antiapartheid drama which, although performed on stages for audiences, has been largely understood to have provided the place and occasion for representing an alternative nation, one that achieved full legitimacy with the inauguration of 1994. The analogy between theatre and inauguration is a casual one, but it is precisely this casualness that draws attention both to the pervasive authority of theatre in South Africa and to the difficulty of defining “theatre” and “South Africa” and thus provides this introduction with its point of departure.

The brief account of the inauguration and its surrounding celebrations that I have outlined here does not exhaust the semiotic and ideological complexity of the event nor does it pretend to plumb the depths of the not quite compatible passions it conjured up in participants and observers. What it does provide is a series of intersecting scenes, whose consonant and dissonant performances outline the parameters for the drama of South Africa. This outline allows me to begin to trace the ties and the ruptures among plays, pageants, and their publics, and the social, political, and historical conditions that these performances have inhabited and animated; to sketch the links and boundaries among the terms that frame this study; and to argue both for the distinctiveness of these South African formations throughout the twentieth century and the heterogeneity of cultural practice in this place and time. Rather than attempting at the outset to define terms—such as performance, theatre, and drama, or modern, civilized, and postcolonial—I shall use the points at which they coincide or conflict with each other as points of departure for plotting this drama of South Africa.

Performance and theatrical nationhood

As the print and televisual record of the inauguration suggests (and the memories of many confirm), the impromptu as well as the official enactments appear to carry the force of performance in its most emphatic sense. In inaugurating the new nation, these performances were seen to “actualize” a “potential” action (Bauman 1989:3, 262–63), completing that action in the world as well as on stage (Turner 1982:13), and thus constituting an efficacious enactment of social transformation rather than just an entertaining representation of fictional action (Schechner 1988:120–24). In other words, these enactments were felt to have the power of rites of passage or liminal performances (Turner 1982:54), in that they marked a fundamental and collectively acknowledged breach in the life of a community, as well as the resolution of that breach in the reassembly of the nation. At the same time, the combination of the formal ritual of national installation and unification and the aleatory acts of individual participation, such as the black woman dancing the tiekiedraai or the NP member selling (and wearing) “Madibamobilia,” suggests performances of a liminoid character, not only because the latter were idiosyncratic and playful (Turner 1982:54), but also because they introduced a self-reflexive, ostentatious, theatrical pause into the visual and narrative representation of collectivity, as well as a reminder of the ways in which this immediate experience is mediated by local and global commodity circulation.⁶

While this enactment of the nation is performative in both strict and playful senses, it is also more specifically theatrical. As an instance of theatrical nationhood it signifies “nationhood” because it purports to summon the nation, its unofficial as well as official representatives, to ratify the event (Kruger 1992:3). It does so “theatrically” because it is a performance by actors for an audience at a designated site, and because this performance follows scripts that call on the actors to take on roles not quite their own, from Mandela speaking in Afrikaans to the dancing black woman who declared “I am black. I am white. I am coloured. I am Indian” (Gevisser 1994a:9). These scripts are only partly verbal—culled from the discourses of modern statehood and armed struggle, liberal democracy and ethnic affiliation. Their force arises out of their embodiment in what Richard Schechner has called “twice-behaved behavior”: the “symbolic” and “reflexive” (and in that sense, “theatrical”) representation of once-behaved behavior in a new context (Schechner 1985:36–37). As Schechner notes, this restoration may have an ambiguous, if contradictory relationship to its source; or, as Raymond Williams might sharpen the contrast, it may restore residual practices understood as tradition or offer a subjunctive sketch of an emergent, contestatory practice (Williams 1977:121–28). What is at stake in these performances is not merely the restoration or even the revision of the past, but the transformation of received material in the inauguration of a new model that might provide the basis for future restoration.

The intersection of residual and emergent scripts was manifested not only in the SABC camera’s attention to ways in which the formal attire and movement of the nation’s official representatives, their retinue, and guests, reclaimed the rituals of modern statehood, but also the ways in which these rituals are “subject to revision” (Schechner 1985:37), when newly legitimate actors, such as newly inaugurated people’s poet Mkhiva and his better-known colleague, Mzwakhe Mbuli (in designer tie-dyed silk shirt), contested in dress and comportment as well as in speech the normalization of the South African state. By praising the militancy of the anti-apartheid organization rather than any single leader and by calling for ongoing struggle, Mkhiva used the performance and political repertoire of the struggle to challenge the decorous behavior and the formal gravity of Mandela’s appeal to reconciliation. On the other hand, he also challenged assumptions about the traditional role of the imbongi praising the court by invoking a militant form of political izibongo that had already revised the deferential behaviors attributed to (but not always assumed by) precolonial izimbongi and by highlighting instead the affinity of his performance repertoire with the script of modern revolution and international class struggle as well as with local practice that has historically “mixed veneration and criticism” in so-called “praises” (Vail and White 1991:43).⁷ The dramatic conflict in the revision and restoration of performance repertoires could also be more subtle, especially when subordinated to the representation of cultural unity. The fusion of Indian dance, Zulu lyrics, and syncretic musical form in “Asimbonanga,” for instance, submerged but did not quite erase the history of Indian/Zulu tension in its performance of intercultural collaboration.⁸

Placing the occasion

As designated site for this national drama, the Union Buildings functioned as both proscenium and threshold. As proscenium, they directed the audience’s attention to the physical and historical definition and boundedness of the official stage and the relatively unmarked entertainment stage below, shadowed but not surrounded by the erstwhile colonial structure. As threshold, the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• ABBREVIATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION: THE DRAMA OF SOUTH AFRICA
• 2: THE PROGRESS OF THE NATIONAL PAGEANT
• 3: NEW AFRICANS, NEOCOLONIAL THEATRE, AND “AN AFRICAN NATIONAL DRAMATIC MOVEMENT”
• 4: COUNTRY COUNTER CITY: URBANIZATION, TRIBALIZATION, AND PERFORMANCE UNDER APARTHEID
• 5: DRY WHITE SEASONS: DOMESTIC DRAMA AND THE AFRIKANER ASCENDANCY
• 6: THE DRAMA OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESSES
• 7: SPACES AND MARKETS: THE PLACE OF THEATRE AS TESTIMONY
• 8: THEATRE IN THE INTERREGNUM AND BEYOND
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES