Contemporary Literary Criticism | Post-apartheid Literature - Michael Chapman (essay date 1996)

Michael Chapman (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: Chapman, Michael. “The Black Theatre Model: Towards an Aesthetic of South African Theatre.” In Southern African Literatures, pp. 360-68. London, England: Longman, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Chapman traces the course of theater in South Africa from the 1960s through the 1990s, focusing on the works of Athol Fugard, Zakes Mda, and Mbongeni Ngema.]

An upsurge of black theatre in South Africa in the 1970s characterised political and cultural consciousness-raising and identified the Black Consciousness movement as a powerful source of resistance to apartheid. It was a theatre adaptable to both popular expression, as in the play Sarafina!, and to more self-consciously artistic treatment in the work of Zakes Mda and Athol Fugard, probably the two most literary playwrights to turn to their purpose what I call here the black theatre model.

The model is a hybrid. We may identify...

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