[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 local elements of traditional African performance: oral storytelling and improvisation, a pattern of action suggesting the imagistic accretions of folk tale, rituals of ceremony, and the ‘call and response’ of actor and audience sharing experience, knowledge and aspirations. This is not tradition, however, in any antiquarian sense; rather tradition has to ‘live’ in the contemporary idiom. It rubs harshly against city experience; there are allusions to the soap-opera musical, radio melodrama, and the rhythms of the jazz club, or shebeen. The Africanness is ‘impure’ in its brazen, opportunistic mixing of accents, styles and conventions. It is impure also in its borrowings from the Western stage. There are elements of the commedia dell'arte, and the absurdism of Beckett's tramps, while the stage theories of Grotowski (Towards a Poor Theatre) and Brook (The Empty Space) are made to serve the actual poor conditions of small-cast plays with minimal props. The black theatre model is an apt metaphor for an ideology of poorness: stage actions that undermine the rich theatre and, in the poor condition, rediscover the human potential of the oppressed.

MDA AND FUGARD: LITERARY PLAYWRIGHTS AND THE BLACK THEATRE MODEL

Such is the compulsion of Zakes Mda's practice. Writing from Lesotho where he had his education, Mda, a student of the theatre, came to prominence in the late 1970s when his plays Dead End and We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (written in 1973) were produced in the theatre climate of Black Consciousness. Both plays owe as much to Beckett as to African storytelling, but where the African element finally asserts itself is in the specificities of the subject matter. While he can be distinguished from most solidarity playwrights by his concern with the indeterminate, subjective consciousness, Mda refuses to inhabit an ontologically absurd universe. In We Shall Sing the two tramps, ex-soldiers of the wars of independence, find themselves still economically dispossessed in the independent country. Looking beyond South Africa to the post-independent African state, Mda struggles intellectually with the problematics of race (the Africanist necessity for psychological freedom) and class (the ‘bourgeois-fication’ of a new elite). The dramaturgy poses, rather than tries to resolve, the difficulty. In Dark Voices Ring (first performed, 1979), the Africanist impulse is predominant: the young man justifies his joining the guerillas while the emotional core of the play is found in the trauma of his mother who has to face the consequences of a life spent evading political conviction. In The Hill (first performed, 1980), the emphasis has shifted to the economic principle: Mda's indictment of the stranglehold that the South African mining industry in its demands for cheap labour has over impoverished Lesotho. This could sound ‘sociological’; the play, however, proceeds through a modernist action of sharply juxtaposed perspectives, in which the datum of poverty subserves human behaviour and, as is characteristic of Mda, heroics are muted. Unlike many black plays of the 1970s and 1980s, The Hill refuses the climactic unity of the freedom song. Mda has been criticised for his pessimism and commended for his toughness of vision; commended for shaping life into art and criticised for his art wanting to obscure life. His own response in his Marotholi Travelling Theatre has been to try to use his skills as intellectual and actor not merely to show villagers in Lesotho their situation, but—in a theatre of development—to help them become active participants in the transformation of their own life-scripts. For Mda theatre art, whether on the professional stage or in the rural clearing, has societal dedication.

While remaining less convinced than Mda that he wants a commission from society, Athol Fugard has had a commission thrust upon him. A white African of severely troubled conscience, he found his first inspirations in the ‘poor theatre’ environment of urban, industrial Johannesburg. In recollecting his experience as a clerk in the Native Affairs court in 1958, Fugard records how he watched with horror as pass-law offenders were shunted into gaol on petty technical offences. With images of African urban life etched in his mind, he co-operated with Sophiatown intellectuals who were attached to United Artists, the result being his early plays No Good Friday (1958) and Nongogo (first performed, 1959) both of which premiered at the Bantu Men's Social Centre. The style was similar to that of the almost legendary ‘African jazz opera’, King Kong,¹ in which small people in violent surroundings assert their ‘individualistic’ desire to escape to other, possibly white worlds. Although assimilationist rather than radical, these township plays struck a ‘bastardised’ local accent that could live on the stage and, in any discussion of a black theatre model, we are reminded that Fugard is a precursor of the form. Among his most stage-effective plays are his collaborative pieces with John Kani and Winston Ntshona who, together with Fugard and the non-racial Serpent Players in Port Elizabeth, anticipated the BC theatre of the 1970s in plays like Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973), which were first performed at the ‘alternative’ Space Theatre (Cape Town). (The Island was originally called Die Hodoshe Span.) In Sizwe Bansi a photograph in a pass book and, in The Island, a returning prisoner's horrible and hilarious stories of life on Robben Island are core images that provide the oral impulse for an improvised storytelling sufficiently anecdotal, particularly in Sizwe Bansi, to permit modification, even alteration, on any night in performance as a running commentary on topical events.

The plays, however, are not loosely structured. In scripting the spirit of performance into the permanence of the text, Fugard has the elements of improvisation reinforce a fundamental message: survival in harsh times. In Sizwe Bansi Styles's photographic studio, a place where people are allowed to dream, is suddenly inverted through a use of stage lighting into apartheid's bureaucratic nightmare: a photograph in a pass book defines the African's presence in the city with the result that Sizwe Bansi—the Jim-comes-to-Joburg figure—must die, figuratively, in order that he might live and provide for his family under the name of the dead man whose pass book is stamped with working rights. In The Island the play-within-the play—Antigone is to be performed by two prisoners—is held up in its Greek tragic anticipations prior to being collapsed into the local condition: there is no Creon who is sensitive to a conflict between divine conscience and state duty; the South African state, characterised by thugs, stamps its foot on the oppressed who have to bond together in gestures of brotherhood. As far as BC theatre practitioners were concerned, however, the destruction of the apartheid system, not survival within its dictates, was regarded as the driving force in cultural expression: Fugard's plays according to such a tenet did not escape their Aristotelian tradition in which suffering ends up superseding radical questioning. Argument continues today about the character and quality of Fugard's commission.

Fugard has been praised in liberal circles and attacked by Marxist critics, for example, on the same issue of apparently wanting to transcend the South African locality in studies of the human condition, and the collaborative plays are not seen as entirely typical of his practice. At the same time, he has been found by some influential Africanists to be frankly insulting in depictions of black people that verge on the stereotypical.² Prior to his involvement in the collaborative plays with their oral residue, Fugard had turned from No Good Friday to economical Beckett-like settings. In The Blood Knot (first performed at the African Music and Drama Association, Johannesburg, 1961), games of evasion and defiance by the two coloured brothers fail to mask the fact, at least for the audience, that Morrie and Zach have absorbed into their self-images apartheid's legislative degradation of the non-white body. In Hello and Goodbye (first performed at the segregated Library Theatre, Johannesburg, 1965) Hester's escape from the claustrophobia of her father's Afrikaner-Calvinist house is both brave and sad: she goes to Johannesburg where she whores for a living. But worse than this, the play suggests, is the fate of her brother Johnny who, as his crutches visibly indicate, remains crippled by the ghosts and guilts of his dead Afrikaner inheritance. In Boesman and Lena (first performed at the Rhodes University Little Theatre, 1969), the coloured Lena as the apotheosis of the archetypal Hottentot Eve is mentally abused by her mate, the pathetic Boesman, even as she grasps at her self-esteem from the rubbish heap that signifies the life of poverty and homelessness enforced by the policies of apartheid upon these coloured wanderers. The stage set was ‘poor’ in its use of scraps of paper and tin.

One cannot answer with any finality whether plays like Boesman and Lena are ‘South African’ or ‘universal’. Clearly however the characters Boesman and Lena are not representative of any bickering married couple. Their speech rhythms are accurate transliterations into colloquial English of the poor coloured-Afrikaans accent:

BOESMAN:
Quiet, hey! Let's have a dop.
[Lena registers Boesman's hard stare. She studies him in return.] You're the hell-in. Don't look at me, ou ding. Blame the white man. Bulldozer!
[Another laugh.]
Ja! You were happy this morning. ‘Push it over, my baas!’ ‘Dankie, bass!’ ‘Weg is ons!’

An ear for dialect is one of Fugard's strengths, and we are reminded of class markers in his own speech that locate him in the underprivileged communities for which he has consistently shown compassion and respect. (His father was working-class Irish, his mother an Afrikaans-speaking cafe owner.) Neither can Boesman and Lena be experienced adequately through the perceptible influences of absurdist theatre, or Camusian existentialism, even though Fugard frequently mentions the effect of Camus' courageous pessimism on his work. Again, the universalism, or do we mean post-war European angst, takes its accent from the local condition: giving edge to the play are the Verwoerdian policies of racial ‘clearing’ and ‘resettlement’ that characterised the 1960s. Fugard accurately describes the impression on stage of Boesman and Lena when he says that he concerns himself with specifics: ‘If there have been universals in my writing they have had to look after themselves. … When the fire-blackened paraffin tin or Boesman's flea-ridden mattress, or the mud between Lena's toes means something to me, things might start to happen.’³ That Fugard is liberal in seeking the good in human nature rather than radical is envisioning revolutionary alternatives is undoubtedly true. That his black characters are merely mimics is unfair: there is an important distinction to be made between the caricature and the stage-effective type, and Boesman and Lena convey very credible psychologies from behind their coloured slang. (When the play toured in South Africa in 1969, incidentally, racial prohibitions led to the two wanderers having to be played by whites with blackened faces, most memorably by Fugard himself and Yvonne Bryceland.) What Boesman and Lena shares with the other Fugard plays that I have mentioned so far is an action that fills the stage with its purpose: the spectacle has moral impact, and Fugard's limitations it seems to me lie elsewhere than in whether or not he is universal, whether or not he is revolutionary.

Concerned that he might have been short on social specifics in Boesman and Lena, Fugard found in Grotowski and in his African actors’ storytelling skills the social commission that in Sizwe Bansi would manifest itself in the ‘black perspective’.⁴ But instead of moving forward with the possibilities a black theatre on an open stage, he harked back to the script and the fourth wall in plays of talk rather than plays of feeling. The trouble is that Fugard is not a philosophical playwright. When he fails is when his ideas fail to be transmuted into experiential action. This is the case, I think, with A Lesson from Aloes (first performed, 1978) and My Children! My Africa! (first performed, 1989). In both plays there are too many words. As he elaborates on his ideas, Fugard is in danger of lapsing at one moment into abstractions, at another into good sentiments. In confirming that he is a liberal—he has felt the need frequently to justify himself in these terms—he is inclined to forget what gives his brand of liberalism its power: a deep-seated Calvinist concern with guilt that infuses his ideas with both torment and generosity. In Playland (first performed, 1992) the subject is guilt and atonement as the African nightwatchman and the white ex-soldier meet in a dusty fairground somewhere in the Karoo. It is New Year's Eve, which is made to symbolise the eve of South Africa's post-apartheid dawn. Having spent years in prison for murdering the white ‘master’ whom he caught with his wife in the domestic servant's room, the nightwatchman has to try to come to terms with his bitterness and even to reach tentatively to an understanding of the soldier who, as a victim of the ‘total onslaught’ ideology of the 1980s, has killed SWAPO guerillas in the Namibian war. The ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation could have been nobly embodied in the stage action. But the black perspective and the agony of the Calvinist, as two Fugardian strengths, are missing. As a result, the discrepancy between the two men's ‘crimes’ points beyond the play's own comprehensions to the ingredient that Fugard should have but has not stirred into his debate: justice. For blacks to show forgiveness might require whites to expiate their sin of racial pride, something the ex-soldier does not begin to comprehend. In the end it is perhaps worth returning to the observation that Fugard has remained caught in the ambiguity of wanting liberalisation while hedging about liberation.⁵ Times have changed since 1961, however, when Fugard in The Blood Knot began to revolutionise South African theatre by putting black experience on centre stage with a seriousness that had not hitherto been encountered, and an astute remark by Michael Billington summarises what may be a dilemma not only for Fugard but for other white Africans who wish to make the transition to an open society. Of Playland Billington notes that not only is the symbolism oppressive (funfair = white escapism; pigeons = personal freedom) but that too strict a control is exercised over the characters and their situation. Although the idea is that we look to the future, the dramatic structure relies too heavily on a ‘closed’ stage which encourages the characters to dwell oppressively on their own oppressive pasts.⁶ What is absent is the mobility of the black theatre model that Fugard helped initiate, but failed to develop.

SARAFINA!: THE SERIOUSNESS OF POPULAR RESPONSE

A free-flowing form is the strength of Mbongeni Ngema's widely acclaimed Sarafina! (first performed, 1986), a play that forged the content of United Democratic Front (UDF) activism into the song-and-dance routines of the township musical. With the Soweto schoolgirl Sarafina anticipating Mandela's release from prison as the utopian event that will ensure black freedom (Mandela's photograph is used as icon), the play in its film version in 1992 could have been seen to have fallen into the trap of popular idealisation. Although Mandela was by then free and attended the opening night of the slickly choreographed film, freedom in the world of politics was continuing to prove more morally, socially, even ethnically, divisive than the liberation rhetoric of the 1980s had been prepared to contemplate. According to one (white) critic, Sarafina! the film was myth-making at its best whereas the intellectual tradition insists that good art really be about myth-shattering.⁷ Not caring about the expectations of good art, audiences which were mainly black packed into cinemas to see the film. What Sarafina! offered was inspiration through recognition. The schoolgirl hero undergoes a testing experience that, in the years of the emergency, had been authenticated in the news stories of the alternative press as the national narrative of liberation. Against graphic images of police terror and township resistance, Sarafina comes to know the bitter cost of struggle and the need, despite torture and deprivation, to redouble her commitments. The dance of unity at the end—embarrassingly reminiscent of a tribal extravaganza—did not succeed, fortunately, in undermining a picture that is powerful in its very one-dimensional focus of a community fighting the machinery of the state.

One may point to the irony of an intrusive white hand in the making and promotion of the film: a white South African film director, Hollywood expertise, and a R2 million subsidy from the South African government that in its pre-1990 guise was the villain of the piece. Despite this, Sarafina! did not make the mistake of Cry Freedom, a film which while purporting to tell the story of murdered BC leader Steve Biko (played by Denzel Washington) turned its camera-focus primarily to the story of Donald Woods, the white newspaper editor whose respect for Biko led to his discovering and adopting the cause of black suffering. Rather, Sarafina! bequeathed the screen to black perspective; the venue was the popular cinema, not the elite theatre, at prices that ordinary people could afford. In 1992 Sarafina! was both myth-making and myth-shattering: its remembrance was the cruelty of apartheid; its yearning was freedom; its international kudos invited world-wide assent for the black story. It is easy to be cynical about such meshing of the ideal and the opportunistic, the serious intent and the commercial temptation. But we should allow Sarafina! its inevitable complicity in the modern world while measuring its emotional and psychic veracity in contrast to the lucrative African song-and-dance shows that, stripped of any social comment, have over many years coined money for mainstream theatre. In 1974 Bertha Egnos's notoriously exploitative Ipi-Tombi (a romance of warrior chiefs and gyrating maidens), for example, played to full houses in South Africa and went on to support three touring companies abroad. (A film version appeared in 1994.) Sarafina! can be seen countering the effects of the Ipi-Tombi syndrome. It firmly removes black people from their colonial station in the musical as loin-skinned primitives and, with panache, places them on the screen as thorough-going moderns.

Theatre criticism can trouble the literary-academic mind. Where Martin Orkin's valuable study Drama and the South African State (1991) goes askew, it seems to me, is where in desiring the correct idea, it is too hesitant in granting stage effect its own kind of statement. In choosing to find the creative potential of South African theatre in a black theatre model, however, modes of the popular will require our serious consideration.

Notes

1. Published text, edited H. Bloom, King Kong: An African Jazz Opera (London, 1961).

2. See R. Vandenbrouke, Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard (Johannesburg, 1985); Mshengu, ‘Political Theatre in South Africa and the Work of Athol Fugard’, Theatre Research International, vol. 7, no. 3 (1981); and L. Nkosi, ‘Athol Fugard: His Work and Us’, Home and Exile and Other Selections (London, 1965).

3. CAPAB-PACT-Phoenix Programme Notes with Phoenix Players production of People are Living There and Boesman and Lena (1969).

4. Fugard's Notes (26 December, 1968) reproduced in his introduction to Boesman and Lena and Other Plays (Oxford, 1978), p. xxv.

5. See D. Cohen, ‘Athol Fugard and the Liberal Dilemma’, Brick, no. 40 (Winter 1991).

6. Review, Weekly Mail Guardian (19 March, 1993).

7. M. Gevisser, review of Sarafina!, Weekly Mail (2 October, 1992).

References

Fugard, Athol. 1978. Boesman and Lena and Other Plays. Oxford: OUP.

———. 1981. A Lesson for Aloes. Oxford: OUP.

———. 1987. Selected Plays. Oxford: OUP.

———. 1990. My Children, My Africa! Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

———. 1992. Playland. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Mda, Zakes. 1990. The Plays of Zakes Mda. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

———. 1993. And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses: Four Works. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Orkin, Martin. 1991. Drama and the South African State. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Johannesburg: Wits University Press.