Women, Politics and Performances in South African Theatre Today (Contemporary Theatre Review)

WOMEN, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE IN SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE TODAY—1

These issues are dedicated to those who live the politics about which we all write in these pages; and to the legacy of Barney Simon, Artistic Director of the Market

Theatre, Johannesburg, whose death in 1995 marked an end, just at the new beginning of South African theatre.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol 9, Part 1, p. v Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Contents

Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Lizbeth Goodman On Not Giving Up–An Interview with Fatima Dike

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Miki Flockemann The Number of Girls is Growing–An Interview with Gcina Mhlophe

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Dennis Walder Between Women–An Interview with Gcina Mhlophe

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Miki FlockemannThuli Mazibuko Unwilling Champion–An Interview with Reza de Wet

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Introduction by Temple Hauptfleisch Interview by Anja Huismans and Juanita Finestone The Front Door–An Interview with Erica Freund

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Jane de Gay Glossary of Terms, Names, Events, and Places

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Suggested Further Reading

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The Gender, Politics, Performance Research Project was founded in 1993, to explore connections between the representation of political protest and theatre in several countries and cultures, including the USA, Canada, the UK, Bulgaria, Poland, and South Africa. The Project is chaired by me and is supported by colleagues Jane de Gay, Research Assistant, and Stephen Regan, Research Associate, along with many colleagues in other institutions across the UK and in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Eastern Europe. Marcia Blumberg has been awarded a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to join the group in 1996—8. Funding for my research in South Africa was provided by the Open University’s Research Committee and Faculty of Arts, while local research expenses and assistance were generously offered by the South African Human Sciences Research Council for work in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria (thanks to Johan Mouton and Heide Hackmann), by the University of Stellenbosch (thanks to Anton van Niekerk, Willhelm Verwoerd, and Temple Hauptfleisch), by the University of Cape Town (thanks to Yvonne Banning), and the University of the Western Cape (thanks to Miki Flockemann). In England and South Africa, John B. Thompson offered invaluable support and assistance of many kinds–for which, many thanks. The Open University also funded Dennis Walder’s research visit to South Africa in 1994, as well as the post of Visiting Fellow in South African Drama, held by Marcia Blumberg in 1995. The post of Visiting Writer was sponsored by Southern Arts and the Open University, and was held by Fatima Dike in Spring, 1996 (she arrived just in time to see this issue go to press). Thanks are due to the playwrights and performers whose work we have included or referred to here, especially Fatima Dike, and Janine Denison, Erica Freund, Gcina Mhlophe, Nomhle Nkonyeni, and Reza de

v

Wet; and to all the contributors for their dedication to this issues and their willingness to update and re-update their work as the times changed; and most of all to Miki Flockemann who–as people moved around South Africa, and as times changed–helped enormously with chasing up people and groups and photos and details in order to bring this issue to completion. And thanks to the courteous and helpful staff at Rhodes House, Oxford; Senate House, London; Africa Centre, London; the Cambridge University Library; and the Open University Library. Finally thanks for perseverance and assistance to Franc Chamberlain, Series Editor, and Jane de Gay, Research Assistant. None of the material included in this volume has been previously published. —Lizbeth Goodman 1996

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 1—15 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Introduction Lizbeth Goodman

The contributors to these volumes write from many different perspectives, races, cultures. My own voice can only mediate. Here, I set out to say, as briefly as possible, how the project which led to these journal issues came about. I then introduce the issues, the people, the places and the ideas which occur and recur with compelling frequency throughout these pages. KEY WORDS: Apartheid (and after), Body Politics, Class Divisions, Cross-cultural Study, Cultural Developments in South Africa 1993—6, Feminism, Gender, Hope, Media Representations, Performance, Politics, Political Theatre, Popular Culture, Power Politics, Racial Divisions, South African Theatre, Theatrical Politics, Violence, Voter Education, Women. The work I’ve been conducting for some ten years on gender and politics in British theatre led me to consider the ways in which politics might be more directly ‘performed’ in the streets, as well as on the stages, of a variety of cultures. I formulated some hypotheses about the interconnections between race, gender and performance, and set about exploring these in the academic and theatrical spaces of Canada, the USA, Mexico, Italy, Bulgaria, and, of course, South Africa. Research time and funding were not nearly sufficient to support in-depth research on location in all of these different cultures, but it did provide a taste, a way of thinking through issues comparatively and, in the case of South African research, a means of meeting some of the people who could offer ‘insider’

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insights, from many different perspectives within South African theatre and culture. This is not to say that a mere ‘taster’ of South African culture, or theatre, would in itself be worth the paper it’s written on. But of course, the editor merely mediates between other voices, most with their own deep personal and political connections. And as importantly, as editor, I can draw on a range of material from outside the South African cultural context, not in order to map it over the top of the reality of South Africa, nor to aim at some artificially homogeneous views which amalgamate South Africa into a larger nexus of cultures and concerns, but rather to raise general questions of interest to theatre audiences and students of a number of subjects (Gender Studies, Women’s Studies, Theatre Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics, Performance), looking to see what South African theatre adds to a general understanding, and where South Africa offers something new, vital, unique. In selecting material for the journal, then, I was concerned to include interviews with women in South African theatre–so that the articles about their work would benefit from the words and speaking patterns of their authors–and also a few ‘conversations’ which are interviews focused not on an individual’s work, but rather on an individual’s perspective on the state of South African theatre in a more general sense. Many of these interviews and conversations, like this Introduction, were conducted or drafted several years ago, and then updated and revised to become chronicles of a changing time and political climate. The necessary delay in bringing the journal to print means that we have perhaps lost a bit of the topical edge, and yet what is gained is a range of examples of how the topical becomes the historical in the course of a few months, even weeks. Theatre history, and political history, were re-made in the past year, and so it seems appropriate that this three-part journal issue (at once less solid and permanent than a book, and more solid and permanent than a single essay, interview or review) should be the forum for expression of these changing times, told by many different women and men, within and outside South Africa today. Some of the contributors to this volume are students, some are academics, some are practitioners. They range in age and race and cultural heritage and political orientation. But they all contribute equally to the making and study of South African theatre today, and most importantly, they were all willing and able to say something about gender in this context. One of the most striking observations to be made about gender, next to the politics of performance, is how rarely and partially gender issues have

INTRODUCTION 3

tended to be represented in South African culture and theatre. Race has, understandably, tended to take political priority. Now that there is more room for gender in the national agenda there is a significant space opening up for other issues and debates. Gender is one such area, and these pages serve as one space in which debates may be outlined, mapped and remapped. Looking Back The South African dimension of the project was, for obvious reasons, most pressing in 1993. I travelled to South Africa in August of that year, and my stay there was not nearly long enough to come to any profound understanding of the many conflicting and fascinating aspects of South African culture and theatre, but was enough to provide a taste of things to come. I was there just before the elections. I travelled to the universities and theatres, comparing attitudes, collecting personal stories and political perspectives. The ANC’s power was evident and many people’s feelings about that were clearly mixed. The country was about to witness great change, and while most people I encountered were all for the end of apartheid*, they also feared violence and revolution, bloodshed and perhaps the destruction of communities, schools, libraries, and other resources. Over the past few years, each time it seemed that this theme issue was nearly complete, the theme had to change, again. Events overtook some of the articles originally intended for inclusion, and interviews seemed to need continual updating. This may seem ‘dated’ when it is finally in print, but I hope that instead, some of the flavour of change will be captured in these pages. I have scrapped most of the ‘Introduction’ I drafted in Cape Town, for it now seems too dated. I have kept only the following anecdote, to give a flavour of the times in which I first wrote. At the time of that first writing, one fine summer day, two things happened: a political women’s meeting and the murder of a young woman–events not connected, and yet somehow inseparable. On August 26, 1993 I visited UWC (The University of the Western Cape, the ‘traditionally mixed race’ university in the Cape area) and witnessed the first major demonstration of the mixed-race Women’s Caucus, organizing within the UWC Student Union, and then attended Miki Flockemann’s graduate seminar, where a group of students including Dudley Pietersen, Thuli Mazibuko (both of whom have contributed to this journal) and several of the leaders of the new Women’s Caucus discussed a range of texts and performances, focusing on issues

4 LIZBETH GOODMAN

such as race, gender, and the ‘post-colonial’ in modern and contemporary theatre (see Goodman, South African Theatre Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, May 1994, pp. 3—23). This was an inspiring day. Two days later, after another visit to UWC, I sat down in the evening to write. On a break, I switched on the television news and heard of the murder: American Fulbright student Amy Biehl, who had spent ten months researching and writing about ‘Women in Transition’ and who was due to fly home to New Jersey the next day, was killed in ‘Section Three’, Guguletu*, near Cape Town (see, for instance, The Cape Times, Thursday August 26, 1993, cover story). She was on her way home from the UWC campus; just giving a lift to a friend and classmate who lived in the township. Biehl was stabbed to death, and her friend, Singiswa Bevu, was injured in the tussle. Sadly, the murder in itself was not the biggest news; violence was a daily part of South African life in that time of uncertainty and political transition. The townships were–unsurprisingly given the poverty and political history of these ghettoized communities–a locus for violent protest. The murder was not calculated or pre-planned; not ‘personal’. A white woman drove into a black township with a black woman in her car, and she was killed for it. Here, perhaps, Biehl became a semiotic symbol for White Women–visually if not politically representing those who had similarly driven into Guguletu and other townships across the country dropping off their ‘maids’ and ‘nannies’. This was a familiar sight to the locals of Guguletu, and an understandably infuriating one, particularly in the month preceding elections for a ‘Free South Africa’. Her attackers did not know Biehl as a person, or as a student; her chosen field of study and reason for being in the wrong place at the wrong time only add to the tragic irony of the situation. She became a symbol, and remains one, though each of us will interpret her symbol differently much as we do any symbol or signifier (deliberately constructed or accidental) in theatre. Moving from the particular to the general, what was surprising about Biehl’s death was its representation in the news. Press coverage in South Africa was guarded, remarking on but attempting not to react too strongly to the tragedy. In conversation amongst the academics and theatre people I encountered, however, there was more of a sense of upset, of despair that the political environment was leading to such unnecessary acts of violence. But some reports in the international press, mainly on radio, where facts are often replaced by personal commentary, the representation of the incident was often charged with another layer of meaning mapped over the top: a vague, veiled larger ‘threat’ to white society, a more frequent mention of Biehl’s age (she was only 26) and of

INTRODUCTION 5

the fact that she was blonde (strangely, still often seen to be relevant to reports on female victimization of various kinds). I remember thinking how sad it was that racial prejudice could still whip up such fear and reactionary instincts even from otherwise ‘liberal’ people, but also recall thinking that it was easy for me to judge, as an ‘outsider’ and one who did not know Biehl. On that same research trip, John B.Thompson and I were fortunate to be taken by Willhelm Verwoerd* to see a few of the townships near Stellenbosch (the alternative tour, as it were). Afterwards, Willhelm shared with us a rare and thought-provoking account of the politics of race and gender which infused the ANC rally following Chris Hani’s* murder (see The Independent on Sunday, 13 May, 1993). Wilhelm and Melanie Verwoerd, ANC* Activist, spoke at the rally, and Sandeli Dikeni, a popular poet, recited a poem in Afrikaans*. Wilhelm recalled the extraordinary theatricality of the event: the sight of people reacting to both the emotional and political ‘content’ of the tragedy and to its mediated representation and symbolism. As in the television coverage of the Biehl incident, the media played a major role in the Hani murder and ANC rally, intervening between the emotion of the event and the power of the media to frame that event, transferring what was, at one level, a highly theatrical, cathartic gathering into a framed, contained report. The SABC conducted interviews to contextualise the rally, while ‘Agenda’ (the popular evening news/profile programme) blocked coverage of the event. Years later, working on the fourth major revision of the journal on a plane from L.A., the day the O.J.Simpson verdict was released, I recalled the same mixed feelings. The news coverage of the Simpson debacle, in retrospect, calls to mind the recent L.A.Riots, and also, the Biehl incident and the ANC rally which Willhelm Verwoerd recalled. This is contemporary everyday world theatre: real, and frightening, and part of the daily grind. But it all calls to mind a dramatic example: Shakespeare’s Othello– a play which Janet Suzman describes as a ‘classic’ tale of sex, race and politics (see the Conversation with Suzman, Part 2, pp. 27—37). Othello may, indeed, be a classic tale for South Africa. Suzman interpreted it for The Market Theatre in 1987, casting blonde actor Joanna Weinberg to play Desdemona against John Kani’s black, African Othello. In dealing with racial and sexual stereotypes in this production, within the South African context, Suzman began a process of deconstructing these stereotypes and semiotic short-hands. (Figure 1) Comparison of the Biehl incident to any fictional story of play is, of course, artificial. Yet the parallels to the story of Othello are striking. The enduring ‘themes’ of racial mistrust, sexual and ethnic stereotyping, fear of

6 LIZBETH GOODMAN

the other…all these are alive and kicking in Shakespeare, and in contemporary South African theatre too, just as they are in the streets of Guguleto and Soweto*, Suzman’s fictional ‘Sharkville’ (see Conversation with Suzman), Crown Heights, L.A. and London. A universal theme, chillingly told, all too frequently, all too well. Considering both of these events alongside the wealth of plays I was able to see in South Africa (including Fugard’s Boesman and Lena at the Market Theatre, featuring Nomhle Nkonyeni, interviews in this volume– see the interview with Nkonyeni, Part 2, pp. 1—4), I sat down and began to write about gender, and its absence and upstaging, in the explosive environment of South African theatre. But all that changed with the elections, and I’ve gone back to the proverbial drawing board several times since. Looking Around I began this journal issue, then, with the idea that the representation of gender did not seem to be as widely discussed and analysed in South African theatre writing and scholarship as in other parts of the world. I spoke to many women working in South African theatres, and most concurred with my simple hypothesis: that feminism was not the hot potato it is elsewhere, perhaps because racial, economic, and other ‘larger’ political issues took precedence. But of course, we all observed, the media decide what is presented and represented, what is seen to be ‘larger’ than what. So how did the figure of ‘Woman’ emerge in South African theatre? Not too often, partly because the cultural boycott extinguished the flame of dialogue between cultures which has sparked the ‘difference’ debates in, for instance, England, the USA, Canada, Australia, France and many parts of (post-glasnost) Eastern Europe. The Biehl incident fanned the flame, but only indirectly. The gender issue was suddenly front and centre, on the news. But not as a feminist issue– rather, as a race issue (shades of Othello again). Plays addressing economic and political issues, including the Dario Fo import Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, were being staged in South Africa at this time, providing comic relief as well as food for thought in the rapidly changing economy of South Africa. (Figure 2 and 3) Plays addressing issues of violence and race were harder to find, at least on the ‘mainstream stages’, though a few strong plays did find homes and audiences. (Figure 4) Yvonne Banning, known in South Africa as one of the first TV presenters, and also Head of the Drama Department at the University of

INTRODUCTION 7

Figure 1 Othello in South Africa: John Kani and Joanna Weinberg, 1987. Courtesy Janet Suzman, director. Photo: Rouphyn Coudyzer.

Cape Town when I visited in 1993, gave the first big hint about gender

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and politics in South African theatre. She told me all about the Black Sash: founded in 1955, formed of ‘middle-aged, middle-class, liberalminded, white, English-speaking women’; the group which has lobbied so consistently for civil rights, through marches, convoys, demonstrations, and all-night vigils. While I travelled around the country trying to find out about the representation of gender in the theatre, the Black Sash was using theatre to teach black women and men how to vote. In a combination of political agit-prop theatre and drama therapy, the Black Sash* organized groups of potential black voters and demonstrated the concept of democracy beginning with offering people the ‘right’ to choose their own sandwiches: the small everyday example leading to the larger notion of individual choice (see Conversations with Banning, Part 2, pp. 5— 26). Surely according to any definition, this is political theatre. And according to most definitions, it is, in some sense, ‘feminist theatre’ as well. This ‘theatre’ is ‘staged’ for a purpose: to encourage selfempowerment among marginalized individuals, black and ‘coloured’ people in South Africa, including many women. Of course, issues of power and control come into play as soon as we begin to discuss any of the key terms of this theme issue: gender, women, politics, performance. The language issue is fundamental, and (ironically), very difficult to express succinctly. A detailed account of the evolution of English as one of the ‘dominant’ languages in South Africa is provided by Awam Amkpa (Part 3, pp. 1—18), who accounts for the emergence of an expressive ‘new’ South African drama by analysing the histories of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and competing ideologies within South Africa’s troubled, divided (distant and recent) past. The connection between racial and gender oppressions are pointed to in that essay, and demonstrated in nearly all the work in the volume. But while the terms ‘politics’ in a wide sense, and ‘performance’ in a theatre-specific academic sense, are both fairly well understood and discussed in these essays, as in South African culture generally, the term ‘gender’ appears much less frequently, with less sense of political meaning, apart from designation of sexual difference. In sweeping terms, it is easy to note that, for instance, the vast majority of ANC leaders, Inkatha* leaders, and white Afrikaner leaders are male. The relative absence of women in the political arena mirrors, on a grander scale, the disproportion of political leaders worldwide. But when gender is brought together with politics and performance, when gender is put firmly on the agenda–and especially when viewed through the lens of a Western feminist perspective–the representation of women looks quite different.

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Figure 2 Gender and Class–comedy for the almost new South Africa. Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, by Dario Fo, adapted for the Nico Milan Theatre, Cape Town, 1993: Camilla Waldman and Jamie Bartlett. Courtesy CAPAB and Mavis Taylor, director.

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Figure 3 Boys will be Boys, in Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, 1993: Anthony Bishop and Jamie Bartlett. Courtesy CAPAB and Mavis Taylor, director.

Looking for or and to Women The theatre, in England for example, can offer a political platform as well as a forum for dramatic, creative expression and interaction with an audience. In South Africa, the Market Theatre has functioned in just this way; but where are the women playwrights? There have been a few academic articles about South African women’s playwriting, most of them very recent, just as women’s playwriting is itself a recent phenomenon. When women represent themselves, and other women, in the voices offered on stage–not only through the voices of ‘dead male writers’ and contemporary South African male writers, Fugard included–the voice of women in South Africa might begin to be heard. But women playwrights in South Africa are few and far between; female theatre directors are also few, and so women in theatre audiences still identify not with characters offering outlets for the voices of women, but rather with characters offering men’s ways of seeing, and trying to put themselves in the shoes of, women. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that appropriation is a dangerous business: a minefield where the question of whose shoes we try to walk in

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Figure 4 The Last Trek, a fantasy by Clare Stopford. Motshabi Tyelele as Usengumama and Tania MacKenzie as Straie, in the Little Theatre, Hiddingh Hall production (1989). Courtesy Jennie Reznek, director.

is often replaced, quite suddenly, by the explosion of the shoes from beneath, and around, our proverbial feet. To take a prominent example, I’ll consider, briefly, the case of Athol Fugard. [His work is discussed in more detail in Dennis Walder’s article, Part 2, pp. 51—59.] Deservedly known as one of the leading South African playwrights, and as one who deals inventively and engagingly with political issues, Fugard is a white man, whose first language is Afrikaans. His position as a leading voice in the theatre is situated by his use of the English language and his positions as a white man in South African culture. So, I would argue, the best way to view his work is to consider it within its framework, while looking to see how issues of language and cultural identity, race, and gender are and are not addressed. In this way, it becomes clear that whatever we may think of Fugard’s extraordinary work, or however much we may recognize a female actor adding to the portrayal of one of Fugard’s female characters in and through performance, still, this is not theatre which begins with and from within a female–individual or collective–experience.

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South African theatre is missing something vital, something irreplaceable, when it is discussed without reference to performances and plays devised and written and directed, as well as performed, by women. So, controversial a statement though it may be, I would argue that neither Yvonne Bryceland nor Nomhle Nkonyeni, no matter how much either of these actors adds to Fugard’s character of Lena, can completely rewrite the character and make it her own. She is always framed by the voices of other characters, speaking the words given them by the playwright, acting out the ‘plot’ or story as it is written. The concept of each of his plays’ is, of course, Fugard’s, and neither the actor nor the audience, nor even the actor working with the audience, can completely silence the voice of the author weighing on the page from which the lines are taken. Nor can Esmerelda Bihl as Veronica in Fugard’s most recent play, Valley Song (1996, published by Faber) speak or sing out in her own voice; nor can Fugard’s self-conscious positioning of himself centre-stage as both author and character give, or even create the impression of giving, the female character a voice of her own. In any case, the author in this play has the last word. The closest comparison to this play–in terms of the featuring of class difference, the clash of generations and the prioritizing of a region and regional identity and desire to move beyond it–is, perhaps, Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1992, published by Methuen) but in that play, the female character LV–the eponymous Little Voice–breaks through a range of restrictions and uncertainties and eventually sings out the last words ‘in her own voice’. Of course this is an over-simplified reading–perhaps enragingly so for Fugard enthusiasts and scholars. This brief reference to a play which is, in many ways, liberating, is unfair. Fugard clearly wants to give voice to a range of issues of vital importance to South African theatre today, and also to pose the problem of change: the difficulty of generations coming to terms with change, the difficulty for the young of being patient, being content to let the old, and the old ways, be. Dennis Walder addresses the problem of ‘patience’, with regard to other authors and ideas, in his article. I don’t want to pre-empt that debate, but rather to pose questions and concerns for feminist scholarship, and for the more practical issues of the representation of women in political theatres and theatrical politics. (The positioning of Fatima Dike’s play at the end of the final part of this volume is, in this context, an attempt to ‘give’–with all the problematics of ‘giving’ a voice to someone else acknowledged–a black South African woman the ‘last word’ in this particular publication.) For Valley Song to be performed in Sloane Square today is important in itself: a bridging of cultures, and a prompt to Londoners to consider the South African issue

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again, rather than think it all ended when Mandela went free and the walls of apartheid shook and crumbled. The cultural boycott has left a legacy to South African theatre, and it will take time and much good will to get that ‘valley’ bearing fruit again. Valley Song plays an important role in this sense. It is not the rather simplistic representation of South Africa which poses problems for me, nor even so much the author’s choice of playing the part of the black grandfather in the piece (though for many critics, these are significant issues). For me, it is the treatment of gender which limits the piece. The play equates a metaphorical valley with all of South Africa, and a single young black woman as all of South African youth and innocence and hope, connecting her to the earth in what can just as easily be (mis)read as ‘essentialist’ rather than ‘liberating’, or as ‘political’ or ‘naïve’ or ‘hopeful’ or depressing in the extreme. Any play will, of course, be greeted with mixed reactions, but a South African play which deals with gender and race, and with the central theme of generations trying to cope with change, is so dangerously ‘real’ that any response is loaded. It is the potential for response to Fugard’s latest play which troubles me, just as it is the potential for misinterpretation and misappropriation of some hard-core representations of female sexuality in some feminist and lesbian theatre work in the USA and UK. That is, for the creators and audiences who know what the creator intends and is willing to play along, all manner of representations can be invigorating, thought provoking, subversive in the most constructive sense. But we can never guess who our audiences will be, particularly when plays are published and so become written records, easily mistaken for ‘history’ years down the road. Before seeing the London production of Valley Song, I thought briefly of adding an essay to round off this volume, called something like ‘Valley Song in Sloane Square’, but having seen the play, I decided that it will take years, and the time to accumulate a substantial body of South African women’s plays, before this one can be fairly reviewed in the context of an ongoing debate about gender, politics and performance. For this critic to write about this play now would not only be inappropriate, but unhelpful. Let’s let the dust settle. And yet, the dust never seems to settle on the South African theatre scene. Plays by South Africans performed in England and the USA, for instance, may come in for criticism about feminist issues, while no doubt, many political plays by British and American authors may miss the point entirely in South Africa. A few ‘classics’ will endure, wherever they are performed, but will take on new meanings, inflections, echoes and keynotes in each cultural context.

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Looking Ahead: After the Boycott What is most exciting at the moment is the range of voices emerging in work by women in South Africa, some of which has travelled, with its makers, further afield. It is difficult not to think of Elsa Joubert’s modern epic (personal, historical) novel Poppie here. This tale of a woman’s struggle to keep her children safe from violence, and to encourage independence at the same time, captures the essence of the ‘gender issue’ in South Africa: when racial oppression was so extreme, and sanctioned by the state, the concept of feminism could hardly help but be seen as secondary. But of course, Poppie Nongena is a feminist hero(ine) of sorts, more likeable and less cynical than Brecht’s Mother Courage, she fills a gap in culture, at the crossroads of realistic and mythic representations of strong women (see the Conversation with Suzman, Part 2, pp. 27—37). Poppie is, in a sense, the WOMAN in South Africa; and more specifically, BLACK WOMAN in South Africa. She is a real mythic figure, and the tendency to mythologize strong female figures is, of course, antithetical to some forms of feminist analysis. But ‘Poppie’ also emerges from a strong women’s culture active in South Africa: the culture of the home, where women’s strength holds together families and communities (see, for instance, the interviews with Dike, Mhlophe and De Wet in Part 1 of this volume). As importantly Poppie’s story is a kind of history of South African people; retold in many forms by other women. Erica Freund’s play The Front Door, for instance, has a touch of ‘Poppie’ around the edges (see interview with Freund, Part 1, pp. 65—68). The stories which women tell, from generation to generation, are at the heart of South African culture. Now, after apartheid, more and more of these stories are being scripted, as plays. Oral storytelling traditions have informed and reshaped the theatre in South Africa today, just as they have done in the areas of Canada and the USA where First Nations cultures have recently begun to represent themselves in the theatre, and just as Aboriginal women’s voices have recently begun to be heard in Australian theatre, and theatre conferences. In all these cultures, it is too simple to take an academic outlook called either ‘postcolonial studies’ or ‘feminist criticism’ and apply it after the fact to work made by women and men who did not begin (or end) with such labels in mind. It is far more difficult, more irritating (because never quite satisfactorily ‘proved’ one way or another) and yet infinitely more interesting, and more appropriate (rather than exclusively appropriatory) to begin with questions and juxtapositions, and leave them to be explored, debated, proved and unproved in and through creative work.

INTRODUCTION 15

So, the articles in this journal issue explore the possible reasons for and implications of the relative silencing of women’s voices in the South African struggle–voices which are expressed most clearly (powerfully and comically) in the work of women in the theatre: Gcina Mhlophe and Fatima Dike, amongst others. Women actors including Yvonne Bryceland and Nhlomle Nkonyeni have also made a great impact, as have women in the media and academia, including Yvonne Banning and Miki Flockemann. But ‘gender’ is about men as well as women, and the political impact of the apartheid struggle can be traced in the theatres of South Africa, and in the political arena itself. All the articles and interviews included here offer one part of a large picture, some of the pieces of which are to be filled in by other writers, in other forums. My perspective on the action of the ANC rally following Chris Hani’s murder was framed by the run-up to the elections: a theatre of everyday life in extraordinary times. By contrast, the theatre work discussed in these pages deals with the everyday in less ‘dramatic’ settings: while there were horrific, violent events inspiring Fatima Dike to write (see her interview with Miki Flockemann, Part 1, pp. 17—26), for instance, she somehow manages to frame her work with comedy, to ease pain with laughter. Yvonne Banning tells of the voter registration lessons conveyed through amateur dramatic techniques (see the Conversations with Banning, Part 2, pp. 5—26), while Marcia Blumberg (Part 3, pp. 19—35) writes of Janine Denison’s play all The Rage, hitting hard at a woman’s rage against the culturally produced demand of thinness, of body perfection, which leads so many to bulimia: the metaphor and dangerous reality of Denison’s play offering a telling metaphorical and real connection to the themes of gender, body-awareness, race and politics in so much of the work in this volume. This journal issue offers a range of voices which are already ‘historical’– we spoke and wrote on the cusp of a major change, so what we record in these pages is probably more interesting as a record of changing times than it is as a topical account’. Events change so quickly that it may be impossible to be topical, except in newspaper articles and television reports. But the voices included here offer a wide cross-section of perspectives on South African theatre today (in 1993—1995). I hope that they go some way towards offering insight into the complexity of exploring African culture, and if this journal issue has only one aim, then it is to open out the areas of debate, in order to fuel more research on South African theatre. The terms ‘women’, ‘gender’, ‘politics’ and ‘performance’ have been debated in many forums, for many reasons. I do not wish to take up

16 LIZBETH GOODMAN

space here with more of my views, but will rather give over to a range of people–academics and artists, within South Africa and in Britain and North America–who have made some sort of journey to and from the ‘issue’ of South African theatre, with all its assorted, conflicting, and everchanging ‘themes’. I will end with one thought: it is a great tribute to Nelson Mandela and the leaders of the ANC that so little violence erupted after the elections and that, to date, the transition has been relatively smooth. The times, they are indeed ‘a changin’, and there is now a great deal of work to be done, economically and culturally and educationally, as well as politically. It is a tribute to writers such as Fatima Dike, Gcina Mhlophe, and Reza de Wet, for instance, that the theatre remains alive, if small, disparate, and still struggling to find solid ground. Women’s voices are indeed rising in South African theatre, one by one, louder and louder, in many dialects, accents, and vocal registers, and for many different reasons. Gender, Politics, and Performance are explored and expressed in all the conversations, interviews, and articles which follow. Finally, in Fatima Dike’s play, we end not with an answer but a question: ‘So What’s New?’.

Notes * For readers new to the study of South African theatre and culture, a short glossary of selected terms is provided at the end of each part of this volume. Words in the glossary are marked with the sign* in the text of each interview, conversation and article. Literal translations of titles of plays and poems are contained in the text, as are terms used in Dike’s play A list of suggested further readings is also provided in Part 3, along with notes on the many contributors to this volume, and an index to aid study of themes and ideas across the volume.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 17—26 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

On Not Giving Up–An Interview with Fatima Dike Miki Flockemann

This interview was recorded on 22 October, 1994 and updated in 1996. It represents an ongoing dialogue between Dike and Flockemann, and also sums up some of the most compelling stories Dike has to tell about her experiences as a woman in South African culture–on the brink of major change–and in South African theatre. At the beginning of the interview, Flockemann and Dike talk about Dike’s comment (to Stephen Gray in 1977) that her entry into theatre was the result of hearing of the brutal rape and murder by a migrant worker of a seven year old township girl, to which Dike responded by saying, ‘I had something to say to my people about that’. Flockemann asked whether she still thought of the same people as ‘her people’ now, after the elections, to which Dike replied: ‘Yes, because the effects of apartheid policies have taken a serious toll on township family life, and this situation has not improved, despite the election’. In the interview, these themes are developed within the frame of in-depth interview on Dike’s politics and writing; themes discussed include Dike’s strong feelings on the displacement of traditional values within her community–demonstrated by her amusing account of irritation with ‘coconuts’ (children who go to white schools and speak mainly English) and her pleasure that her youngest daughter has nevertheless discovered that: ‘It’s cool to be black’. Dike remarks of her daughter: ‘You can’t take the township out of her’, but Flockemann notes that she moves between two worlds. Both worlds are explored in this interview, which is an edited version of a follow-up interview (the first was held with Fatima

18 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

Dike and Mavis Taylor with a group of students at the University of the Western Cape, held in August 1994). KEYWORDS: Anger, Class Divisions, Gender, Hope, Language, Mothers: influence of, Performance, Personal as Political, Poetry, Politics, Plays by South African Women, Politics, Popular Culture (soap opera), Power Politics, Racism, Reverse Racism, Resistance, South African Theatre, Storytelling, Violence, Women’s Influences, Women’s Voices. BACKGROUND: Fatima Dike (Figure 5) is the first black South African woman to have her plays published in the post-Soweto* era. Born in 1948, she grew up in Langa township in Cape Town, and completed her high school education at a convent in the Transvaal. Her first encounter with theatre was while working as a stage manager at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, but before that she had worked in a variety of jobs, including a steakhouse, a butcher’s shop where she worked as a ‘blockman’, a bookshop, and a supermarket. Her plays include The Sacrifice at Kreli (1977), The First South African (1978), The Glass House (1979), which also toured Off Broadway. The collaborative, workshopped production, So What’s New? (1991), was developed at the Market Theatre Laboratory. She also wrote a children’s play, The Crafty Tortoise (1978). She is currently working on a new play, ‘Streetwalking and Company Valet Services’. FLOCKEMANN: You write plays, you write articles, you began by writing poetry. What is your favourite form of expression? DIKE: If it’s something urgent, I write a poem. It does not have to be political, it can be something beautiful; I still remember when I wrote ‘Langa, my love’ (Fatima quotes from her poem) written while in exile in the US, and that’s the only way to bring pictures of my home back into my head, because that is immediate feeling– it’s like quick sex–and at that particular moment it is flowing and it comes out and the memories are there. But now I’m working on the sequel to the play So What’s New? which was a statement–after Mr Mandela’s release, I could smell freedom, and already it was a foretaste of freedom for me to be able to write

ON NOT GIVING UP 19

Figure 5 Fatima Dike; courtesy of Margaret Salter, for Sesame, The Open University, 1996.

something not directly political, but just something fun, but also informative in a way.

20 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

FLOCKEMANN: But also political, of course. DIKE: Yes. But not didactic. Within the sequel, I’m no longer looking at one big issue, I’m looking at a lot of small issues, women’s issues, and I will bring in an issue like raising a ‘coconut’*, then someone who has a child at a white school who has had the same experiences as I have will laugh, and say, ‘yes, I know that’, and even if she doesn’t have the solution, she might find my solution a help to her, you know. FLOCKEMANN: So it’s not that you are writing from one community talking to another community, but focusing on issues within the community? DIKE: Yes. Social issues. FLOCKEMANN: Particularly relating to women? It appears logical in terms of your work and where you’re situated now, that there’s this development from your play Kreli, which dealt with such large historical issues, to these domestic issues–are you aware of this or did it just happen? DIKE: Yes, in fact, I knew all along that I would do a trilogy. What’s nice for me is, being a woman writer and also black, I can say I don’t have to speak with any voice, in the sense that some white writers have to. Because I know that life already, I’ve been there. Somebody else that is coming in from another culture is going to sit there and laugh and really enjoy themselves. I’m just going to lay myself bare and open, you know, talk about the side of me that usually I would not have shown. And now I have that opportunity FLOCKEMANN: Wasn’t it almost considered politically incorrect to depict the personal because it somehow seemed to detract from larger political issues? DIKE: Yes, but now I want to write plays that are dealing with real community issues and communities are made up of people. I want to write plays that look at social problems, so that when people go to the theatre they can look at society I don’t want to be didactic, but instead, personal. FLOCKEMANN: The actor who also plays in Generations (a popular black soap opera), Sello Maake MaNcube, says that

ON NOT GIVING UP 21

what we need now are love stories–it’s almost as if the whole nation must fall in with with itself, to be healed. DIKE: But if you look at theatre in South Africa, especially in the townships before protest theatre grew to what it became, we were dealing basically with social issues. And there is nothing that black people like more than to see their lives portrayed on the stage. And this one’s for women–because I’m treating myself–no men. It’s got to be us. FLOCKEMANN: Now, have you thought of the implication, that ever since Glass House you have gone into an all-woman mode? DIKE: Well they never said anything about Woza* Albert!, Where are the women? (Both laugh.) FLOCKEMANN: About theatrical influences. I know you set out to do something like Greek theatre in Kreli, are you aware of any other the-atre influences? DIKE: Oh, it was written at the Space and I must say, coming from the townships, with no theatrical background whatsoever, I read, but I never read plays. I read books, I read Dickens, books like that. I had an opportunity that nobody with my background had. I saw a lot of plays. I think for me, plays that stay with me are visual. You are going to laugh when I tell you this, but what had an impact on me was the first time I saw Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker with Bill Curry; it was on at the Space. And I saw Homecoming with Jacki Singer, and something also happened to me there. What I liked about Pinter’s plays was, the characters, they were so simple. And the rhythms, and the silences, and pauses. OK that was the first thing, and I was very impressed. But the thing with Pinter was that there is violence, but it is the kind of violence that you find in that man, he directed Psycho… FLOCKEMANN: Hitchcock? DIKE: Yes, you never see the knife going into the body, you never see the gore, but his are the most violent movies because they violate your soul and you get scared. I don’t know how to explain it…but now I’m coming from the background of the township and there’s all that

22 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

violence in our homes and in our streets, and when I see a Pinter play I immediately relate to that. FLOCKEMANN: I can believe that. Pinter has said that growing up in England as a Jew gave him the sense that there was this unseen dimension of possible violence, and he has also said something like, ‘I’m the real social realist, protest plays make up realities.’ DIKE: So, you see, he and Hitchcock are very similar to my mind and I love them because I know I’m going to be scared. The other thing I love in writing, is form. If you look at all my plays, they have shape–you look at Glass House, Glass House has a form, it’s a house that’s got walls, but when you look at it, it doesn’t have walls. And in The First South African I’ve got two sets, the realistic set and the abstract one. It’s always important that I have that form before I begin writing. FLOCKEMANN: I wanted to ask you about the way you use language: this is quite a difficult question because each play uses language very differently. DIKE: The language, OK, I think in my mind, when I write, I write with a white audience in mind. That’s why I use English. Also, English is a universal language. I think you can reach people with English. FLOCKEMANN: So you still see yourself writing for a white audience ten years down the line? Don’t you think that after the elections we will see a growing black middle class, and that this may mean that the distinction between white and black in terms of venues will perhaps disappear? DIKE: Yes, let us talk about the issue of venues which are very hard to find in the townships. I hope to take it [the trilogy] to the townships first, to see how much feedback we can get before we take it to the Nico Milan (a commercial theatre in Cape Town) or the Baxter (a theatre attached to the University of Cape Town). But since this new government has been in place, we have not had a chance to hear from the minister of Arts and Culture what the situation is going to be money-wise. So as I’m sitting here I don’t know where to go for money to do theatre. So basically, I think we should go

ON NOT GIVING UP 23

back and do what Gibson [Kente]* did: play anywhere and everywhere. FLOCKEMANN: But would you at the back of your mind still think that you are also writing for a white audience? DIKE: Yes, definitely, because I think that the minute I start shutting my mind to a white audience, then I am taking a step back. The distinction between white and black venues and audiences will disappear because of the language thing. Because most of us now write in English. But also, Xhosa* is a very difficult language. I could never sit down and write anything in Xhosa unless I would write colloquially, the kind of Xhosa you speak in the townships–because if you tried to write in pure Xhosa it would be static it would be the same kind of stuff that you find on the radio, the Xhosa radio plays where the language makes everything heavy. English is an African language. FLOCKEMANN: Do you mean South African English? DIKE: No, English in Africa is an African language. Now the way I use the language thing differs from play to play. But in Kreli there was a problem of language. The play should have been in Xhosa, it would have been beautiful. But then there was the question of audience–if I wrote it in Xhosa I would be cutting people out. FLOCKEMANN: A bit like Ngugi* writing in Gikuyu*. Now, what about your work with other theatre practitioners, for instance, you and Mavis [Taylor] have a long-standing relationship, and also Rob Amato and Barney Simon*. Is this an unequivocal good, or is it sometimes frustrating when there is a clash of creative ideas? DIKE: Yes it is. When I started working in theatre, Barney Simon was my mentor. Did I tell you the story? In the early 1970s, I was asked by Barney Simon to perform at a fundraising event at The Barn Theatre, and to do a poem, ‘Madame Please’. When I first read it I became very angry because it struck a chord with my experience of racism (it’s spoken by a black woman to a white woman, asking her to think of other people’s– black people’s–experience before complaining about her own lot). I was really angry when I recited it.

24 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

Afterwards, Barney just sat there and I said, ‘what?’ and he said, ‘If you talk to me like that, if you talked to a white woman like that, you’d just be told to fuck off.’ So we had a fight, a huge fight: blood and everything. And he said, ‘if you say the words like that, she will not listen to you’ and I said, ‘but what do you want me to do?’, and he said, ‘don’t read it with such anger, or they will call you mad, and not listen’ and I said: ‘Barney, I am mad; I have a right to be mad.’ So Barney said to me: ‘she has the money, she pays, you must talk to her.’ Those were the first lessons. I used to hate the poem, I used to hate Barney Simon, I used to hate doing this. Those were the first very hard lessons. And then on the night, I performed it his way. I didn’t want the show to be ruined because of me. (She recites the poem again, in a quiet voice). There they were, all those ladies in their fur coats, and they gave me a standing ovation. I was so insulted, I locked myself up in a toilet. I was so angry, I cried. Even when I did it his way, I felt, ‘I am black’, and doing the poem their way made me more angry. I felt I had to talk down to these white people. I was so upset. And when I came out, there was this woman standing under a tree. Thank God, to this day I don’t know who she is. She came and held me and she was bawling and she rocked me and said, ‘my baby, my baby.’ Then, five years later, at the Space we were talking about the Barn Theatre, and then Jacki said, ‘No, Fatts, we were the ones watching (she meant some drama students from UCT who were waitressing there); we were so for you, we were calling out for you.’ And you know, I had been carrying this bitterness with me all these years, so that I couldn’t talk about it. We talked it all out, and suddenly it became clear, what Barney wanted. And now, I am never militant. But that has been my thing, not to be militant, but to tell the truth as it is. And even Glass House came out of another whew! explosive bout of hatred. You know, I go through these bouts where I really hate white people. And in a way, it

ON NOT GIVING UP 25

makes you lose faith in humanity, when you see people being that way to other people. In Langa in 1976, I saw a child, a fifteen year old child, being killed after the students marched. Now I can talk about it, but before I could never talk about it, I kept ‘ssshhh.’ A white policeman chased this child, Xolile, and grabbed him, twice, and it was like a game. So the third time–and we were all laughing because it was so funny, and we were saying he was so smart and everything to run from the police like that the third time, he didn’t chase him, he just took out his gun and shot him through the head. One minute he was running, he was crossing the street, when he lifted his foot to put it on the pavement, there were so many shots going off everywhere, nobody actually saw the shot that hit him. But as he was putting his foot on the pavement, we saw the back of his head blown off. And then suddenly he had his foot over the pavement, and then life went out of him (mimes Xolile stumbling and falling). OK, At that point everything stopped, there was silence. So when the teachers ran forward to pick him up, the police started pointing guns at them, and told them they couldn’t take him because he was government property. At that point people started to scream, men and women with stones in their hands, but they were frozen at that little boy’s death. The worst was when a dog came and licked at the brains on the street. And when they came to pick him up, they just dragged him by his legs and threw him in the van. My first reaction was a poem (she recites the poem). I remember being so angry, not really believing that a fully grown man could shoot a child at point blank. And that this man is going home, and his children are going to meet him at the gate, and he will hug them and he has blood on his hands. He’s going to sit at the table and say grace and eat. What about that boy’s mother? You know, racism, that this thing happened, must never happen again. What has happened in this country must never happen again. (She describes how

26 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

she went back to work at The Space but felt she couldn’t be with whites on set that day.) It was too much, it just…(gasps) I had to go home, I just couldn’t be there. There was too much hatred in me, and anger, I had to leave. Then this little coloured boy asked me for money, and said, ‘Hey kaffir’*–he shouldn’t have said that, I picked up that boy and I hit him against the wall, again and again and again, until Ben Dekker came, hit me and threw me on the ground, and held me there and held the coloured boy and kept us apart. And the coloured boy was screaming, ‘All I did was ask her for two cents, and she fokken hit me’ and I was screaming ‘who are you calling a kaffir?’ But it was all that anger. (Pause). FLOCKEMANN: How did you manage to turn that anger into your play, Glass House, which seems to go beyond the hatred? DIKE: I had to sit back on it. It took me two years. I have to make certain rules for myself as a black person. It’s my self-respect that’s most important. I only respect those who respect me. That’s basically what saves me from going over the edge. Lots of people who wrote protest theatre were like me then, who felt, ‘this is a picture that is square, it can never change’. You see, that’s how they see the situation. ‘Whites are bad’. They can never break down the nation into individuals. Emotionally I’ve had to work through this. It’s tough stuff.

(Pause) FLOCKEMANN: Well, but we have to talk about it, we can’t pretend it didn’t happen. DIKE: But, Miki, with lots of my white friends, this is a bridge I’ve got to cross, because, I’m a human being, I’ve had these emotions and I’ve felt I don’t like white people…. FLOCKEMANN: Well, how can you not feel that? I often don’t like white people myself, and that’s quite hard, being one. (laughs) DIKE: FLOCKEMANN: Two questions, starting with one about your relationship with the Black Consciousness Movement*. While your work was strongly informed by this relationship, I get the feeling that you were also testing the limits here, particularly in Glass House? And, a

ON NOT GIVING UP 27

question (with subquestions) about women in theatre: do you consciously trace a line from your first play to this trilogy, where women have come to be centre stage? Is this something to do with you personally? Do you feel that you are freer, and not just freer politically but more free in yourself, to say ‘this is what I want to say, this is who I am,’ rather than, ‘I am a representative of a community?’ You mentioned earlier that you felt constrained by your position as member of an oppressed class, being black, being African during the era of protest theatre? (laughs) No. I enjoy being a woman. With So What’s DIKE: New?, I enjoyed being a woman who hasn’t got boundaries around her. In other words, I can just about do anything. My characters can just about do anything under the sun. You see, in So What’s New?, for the first time women are really talking on stage, they are not talking politics, they are talking social issues. But also, when last did you see a play with only black women? You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock, (The Vusisizwe Players, 1981) they were plucking chickens, and they were singing. But in So What’s New?, this is a new generation of women, who watch soap operas, talk openly about men and their love lives, and sex, you know, where women talk about themselves, and just about everything else. FLOCKEMANN: Do you think that if you had grown up in a rural environment you would have had the same sort of independence? DIKE: Yes, we women always are the ones who take care of things. But also there is that sense of pride. OK you might not have a man, but that doesn’t mean the end of life, you pick up the pieces, life doesn’t stop. I’m sitting here today, and I am who I am, because of my mother, she brought me up and seven others. And if you look at that woman, and you ignore what she did, what are you? You are a lump of shit, man. FLOCKEMANN: Do you ever write about her? DIKE: I always write about my mother. My mother is Freda, in The First South African. And if you look at black

28 MIKI FLOCKEMANN

women, there was always that woman before her. They don’t give up. (We compare Sis Pat in So What’s New? with Freda). FLOCKEMANN: You mentioned You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock. In our conversation with Mavis Taylor, before you arrived, we talked about a comment made by Yvonne Brewster, a Jamaican playwright living in Britain. She suggests [in Goodman, Lizbeth (1991) ‘Drawing the Black and White Line/Defining Black Women’s Theatre: an Interview with Yvonne Brewster’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. vii, No. 28 pp. 361—368] that You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock is not a black play because it was directed by Phyllis Klotz. What do you think of this? DIKE: What kind of play is Fugard’s Siswe Bansi is Dead? FLOCKEMANN: A black play DIKE. Exactly. You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock deals with the experiences of black women. These women told their stories and she (Phyllis Klotz) put them into shape, and they produced one of the greatest pieces of theatre. Would they say that the experiences of John Kani* and Winston Ntshona* in The Island were not black I’m not asking you, I’m just saying. That has always been my argument. I’m just saying to you that the way I think and the way some of my colleagues think is different. (She suggests this is a result of ‘reverse racism’). FLOCKEMANN: Could it not also be that in South Africa the differences between ‘black’ and ‘white’ life (and I have to use these terms here) are still so stark that a white working in a play dealing with black experience does not make a difference, which is why we see So What’s New? as a black women’s play And it could also have something to do with the non-racialism of the mass democratic movement here. DIKE: Another thing that makes people overseas react that way is because of the way apartheid has been painted outside this country. They then feel that, how could we, the oppressed, still have the guts to deal with white people. Then again it’s that thing of saying the whole

ON NOT GIVING UP 29

bag is rotten, and not dealing with the individual. I’ve said openly, because I always get this question; for theatre in South Africa to progress, there were white people who were prepared to lay down their lives to make it work. Fugard did, Barney Simon did, and I mention all the people who worked with black companies, to make black theatre what it is today. And if we as black artists do not have the honesty to acknowledge those people…? FLOCKEMANN: (summary) We end the conversation by talking about the women in So What’s New?. When we drive back to her home in Langa, Fatima points out the houses of women whose lives have informed (and will inform) the characters in the trilogy, commenting that she and her friends had hoped that the woman on whom Thandi is modelled would go to see the play, so that she could see the harm her drug-dealing can cause. Fatima is off to a conference in India in the near future, but first she must get ready for her evening shift at the service station….

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 27—39 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

The Number of Girls is Growing– An Interview with Gcina Mhlophe Dennis Walder

This interview is composed of a set of edited interviews, representing an ongoing discussion between Gcina Mhlophe and Dennis Walder, from 1991 to the present. It represents a detailed set of discussions spanning several years, and covering a wide range of subjects in Mhlophe’s work, relevant to the study of South African theatre more generally. This interview is meant to be read as a companion piece to the one by Miki Flockemann and Thuli Mazibuko, which follows (pp. 41—51); this one stresses the politics and sets the wider scene for the second, which focuses more centrally on gender. The title of the interview, ‘The Number of Girls is Growing’, is a literal translation of the word ‘zandile’: the name Mhlophe gave to the eponymous character in her best known, highly autobiographical play, Have You Seen Zandile? (discussed in these pages). KEYWORDS: Body Consciousness, Class Divisions, Cultural Change, Gender, Identity, Language, Mothers: Influence of, Music, Performance, Poetry, Popular Culture, Politics, Power Politics, Racism, Reverse Racism, Storytelling, South African Theatre. BACKGROUND: Gcina Mhlophe was born on 24 October 1958, in Hammarsdale near Durban, in the Natal Province of South Africa. She was the last child (Gcina means ‘the last’) of Thomas Mzikayise Mhlophe, a sometime chef and electrician, and Nomanina Shezi, a domestic worker, renowned as a wedding-singer from Mount Frere in the

THE NUMBER OF GIRLS IS GROWING 31

Transkei. By 1960, Gcina’s mother had returned to her home in the Eastern Cape, Gcina having been taken in by her father’s family to be cared for by ‘Gogo’, her father’s elder sister (‘gogo’ in Zulu means both father’s mother and/or older female sibling)–whose own children had died and whose husband had left her. Gogo or Mtwalo (as she was known) was a wonderful storyteller, and became a shaping influence upon the young girl, who went on to attend the local primary school until the age of ten, when her mother suddenly reappeared and ‘kidnapped’ her, with the result that she had to restart her education in her mother’s language, Xhosa, at Mount Frere. Later, one of her older step-sisters sent her to the Mfundisweni High School, a Methodist boarding-school, where her talents as a singer and writer first began to be recognized and encouraged. After completing her schooling, she joined her sister in Johannesburg, working briefly as a domestic and then in a clothing factory, while living illegally in the city. Her first writings had been in Xhosa, but by then (1980) she had begun to compose stories in English, one of which, ‘The Toilet’, recounts her situation at the time, hiding in a public lavatory to write. After sponsored courses in film and journalism, she obtained a position writing on Learn and Teach (an adult literacy magazine) for two years. While performing her poetry in the townships she was ‘spotted’ by Maishe Maponya*, who asked her to act in his play Umongikazi (‘The Nurse’) at The Market Theatre in September 1982. Since then most of her work as an actress, playwright, and director has been at The Market, including roles in Barney Simon’s Black Dog/Inj’Emnyama (1984) and Born in the RSA (1985), for which she won an Obie Award (1987), and in her own Have You Seen Zandile? (1986), with Thembi Mtshali and Maralin Vanrenen, for which she won the Jefferson Award for Best Actress in Chicago (1988). She has acted in several films (including Place of Weeping, 1986), and has published four books for children, based on familiar myths and legends, such as The Snake with the Seven Heads (1989) and Queen of the Tortoises (1990). In 1989 she wrote and directed Somdaka at The Market, having become Resident Director–the first person of her race and gender thus honoured. While there, she instituted an annual story festival, to recover the rural traditions of her people. This has become a dominant theme in her life, which since 1990 has been largely devoted to freelance writing and performance, promoting her group Zanendaba (‘Bring me a story’), and storytelling around the world. She performed in her commissioned short play Lovechild at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1991, and from 1993—4 she presented a popular TV programme on the arts in South Africa. She was active on

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the executive of the Performing Arts Workers Equity Association. In June 1994 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Open University, for her contributions to the arts and to the educationally underprivileged. Gcina Mhlophe lives in Johannesburg, often travelling abroad. (Figure 6) The Following Interviews were Conducted in London

8—9 May 1991 WALDER: You once told me you began writing when you were seventeen. What was it that made you start at that point in your life? MHLOPHE: I have a vivid memory of the day I started. I was at the boarding school in Umfundisweni, and I thought I was the ugliest girl in the whole school. I looked at my legs and they were not right, and my ears were wrong, and my voice was terrible. Everything was not right about me. I used books to hide in. WALDER: Such as? MHLOPHE: We studied Wind in the Willows, Twelfth Night, Man For All Seasons and Joyce and Yeats and other English literature, and some in Afrikaans*, also Xhosa* literature. I admired A.C.Jordan most, Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (‘The Wrath of the Ancestors’, 1940): it’s a love story, it’s history, he’s the Shakespeare of the Xhosa language! But no South African writers (in English). When I was out of school I read the African Writers Series, people like Okot p’Bitek, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I was looking for black writers, and I picked up So Long A Letter (Mariama Bâ, 1981): a brilliant book. I still have it. And later I read Bessie Head*. I have read everything she wrote. Her work is important because of her sense of community, and also because it is so valuable to find writing by another woman; there is a real shortage of women writers in South Africa. I learned how her writing became a therapy for her, just as my writing became a therapy for me. WALDER: But that was long after you began writing yourself. You began at school?

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Figure 6 Gcina Mhlophe; courtesy of Mhlophe, 1995.

MHLOPHE: Yes. During the time I was hiding in books, I also found it difficult to deal with The Bible. I come from a religious family, they don’t push it down your throat or anything, but I had to read passages and memorize them, and when I went to high school I carried on, being part of the teenage group of the Methodist church. But somewhere along the way, things just didn’t make sense. I used to go to the minister at the school, Mr Fikeni, and ask questions. God knows how the poor guy had the patience to sit and talk to this mad student! I created a relationship with him because of the problems I was going through. He knew I thought I was

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ugly, and he persuaded me to join the church choir, a big struggle because I hated my voice. But he came out with this word, that my voice was ‘resonant’. I didn’t know what it meant, but I thought ‘it’s a good word, I’ll join the choir’. And then one long weekend he asked me to come with him to his family in Tsolo. I was the poorest student in the school and only went home in June and December, so I jumped in. Then the following day there was a big meeting of the elders, discussing all kinds of problems, such as when do you allow the cattle back in the fields. He insisted I come, so I was sitting next to him trying to look important, and listening to everything like the nice student I am. Finally people finished discussing, and a man stood up, dressed like they do, the amaBomvana* (a Xhosa people), in red ochre, in blankets, one over his shoulder, beads around his neck, headgear, bracelets, and a long stick with an oxtail on it– beautiful! He stood up, tall, singing the praises to the chief. This is a traditional thing, it goes back as long as black people have existed. After he’d finished, people called out to him: ‘aqira’* (traditional doctor); then he came to greet Mr Fikeni, and he greeted me too. To touch his sweaty hand was like– okay, I’m baptised, I’m a poet. I don’t remember what went on after that, but the same weekend I wrote my first poem. And after I had written it, I stood up and read it aloud, and for the first time I liked my voice, I thought, this voice was meant to read poetry. WALDER: Did you carry on writing after that? MHLOPHE: I carried on writing poetry, and then I started writing short stories. One of them got published in the Xhosa magazine Bona, and that was it. I thought, okay, I’m an author. But when I finished my matric I didn’t write for some time. I was too worried about accommodation and jobs and running away from the police, because I didn’t have the right pass, and when I got a pass, I didn’t have the right stamp. WALDER: Where was this happening? MHLOPHE: In Johannesburg. My sister was working there and she asked me to come. I used to go there to hospital; I had a kidney problem. But after finishing school I stayed on. It was very difficult and I was very lonely Except for the people we went to church with, I didn’t know anybody in

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those white suburbs. I was locked up in the back room of the place where my sister was a domestic. Then I got a job. I worked exactly 37 days for this woman (laugh). I kept a diary and after that I wrote a story, ‘My Dear Madame’, which was published in Mutloatse’s Reconstruction (1981). Then I went to work in a clothes factory. I was writing all the time then, out of loneliness, and that was also when I started writing in English, poetry as well. I wrote ‘The Toilet’ then too. This was still 1980, it’s the story of that era. Then I met someone who liked my voice and asked: ‘can I come work for them?’ That was Press Trust, which was BBC Radio Africa Service, Radio Nederlands and Radio ZBC. They trained me to become a news reader. WALDER: So that was your first training for anything like drama or theatre work? MHLOPHE: Yes. I worked there for six months. I was meeting lots of people, journalists, and I got a scholarship to do film-making in 1981.1 was convinced I had found my profession, I was going to be a camera lady, you know, and I loved it. We went and did little snippets of a movie in the park, four of us. I was part of an arts group called Khawuleza*, which means ‘hurry up’. When I was finished I hadn’t a clue what to do. I was still having problems with the police, living illegally in Alexandra. Then I went on a short journalism course. More of my stuff was being published, like in Staffrider. Then the editor of Learn and Teach asked me to join them. We had to write in simple English–not easy if it’s your second or third language. I was the only black journalist on the staff, so I did a lot of running around the township doing interviews. The focus was on a different kind of audience: the workers. WALDER: How did your involvement in theatre start? MHLOPHE: I was already performing my poetry when Maishe (Maponya)* asked me. Maishe was part of the Allah Poets then. We used to have all-night sessions of poetry, sacks of oranges and lots to drink, drums and flutes and the whole number. Maishe saw me there, he had a script, and he asked me if I could act this part. They had already done The Hungry Earth (Maponya, 1979); his new play was Umongikazi (‘The Nurse’). ‘Of course I can do it’ I wasn’t

36 DENNIS WALDER

too excited. It was like doing my poetry. Journalism was the serious thing. Then we opened at The Market (in September 1982), and there were the staff from Learn and Teach and other journalists and critics, it was mad! One thing I remember, we two girls in the cast used to wash our own uniforms, because we were from outside, not part of The Market. WALDER: Did Maishe give you any sort of training? MHLOPHE: No, we just rehearsed. He directed, did the lights, told me where to stand, and things like that. We went to Baragwanath Hospital and talked to the nurses there, so I got a sense of the character, I didn’t just want to say the lines. The last week of rehearsal was at The Market, and we did a technical run and I got a sense of how big the stage is, where the spotlight is. I never thought of that before. WALDER: There’s hardly been any other way for black people to learn about theatre in South Africa, has there? MHLOPHE: You learn on the job, and even those who can now go to university find it very white orientated, the type of training that goes with nothing from your culture that is honoured. The Market Theatre represented a place where black people could put their work up, and take it from there, have an audience, get a sense of what professional theatre is all about, because there is no such thing in the townships. WALDER: What about Gibson Kente* in Soweto*? I know that for example Mbongeni Ngema and Percy Mtwa were with him. MHLOPHE: I never went to Gibson Kente, but I know he doesn’t get enough credit. He has been the university, the drama department, where almost all the famous people that I know in South Africa come from. Several of them haven’t even been able to strip his style, to get out of it, the singing and all that. If I look at the way I have developed as a playwright, music is not crucial for me. Sometimes people have this assumption that if something is black, then it must have music, it must have dancing. I love words, I think there is so much you can do in connecting with the audience without having music. Unless the music belonged, I wouldn’t have it. WALDER: Of course your own Zandile has song and music, doesn’t it? MHLOPHE: It’s different. Let’s take a song like Ulele na, ulele na, the lullaby in Have You Seen Zandile?. That’s about the

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intimacy between the girl and the grandmother, nothing to do with the usual energetic stuff. And look at the scene when the teenagers are trying out dances for the farewell party– very different from the usual steps, the revolutionary songs. This has to do with people being conscious of their bodies, something very rare in our drama. WALDER: But to some extent it’s important in all drama, the body as a form of communication? MHLOPHE: Yes, first of all in the way you command your body. You can do a very static play and just be talking, which is something black people don’t do (at the moment). The use and control of the body is crucial, even in that kind of play. But the way you deal with your face can be swallowed up in song and dance. The way you are can be beautiful, but in different ways, in not saying something but winning the (audience’s) heart it is equally important to have your words and your body functioning and relaxed. You can say the right words in the right order, but if you are unrelaxed the audience keeps thinking what’s wrong. They can’t place it. WALDER: I wonder if this is specially important to you because of how you felt at school? MHLOPHE: I don’t know where it came from, but suddenly this thing of hating my legs and my ears and my voice was upon me, for a long period. 1 don’t know what I would have done to get away from the ugliness. As soon as I started, as soon as I thought my voice was creative, then I could look at myself in the mirror, and think, ‘I like what I see’. I would not be where I am today if I didn’t fall in love with myself before I started. I would have been terrified to stand up in front of people. WALDER: This is central to Zandile, isn’t it? The issue of self-image, selfrecognition. Like in the scene between the two girls in the river, when they look at each other, comparing each other. When you direct such scenes, when it’s not you performing yourself, how does your view of what’s happening come through? How do you instruct the actors? MHLOPHE: I am not easy to work with as a director because I won’t say I’m satisfied until I am. When I am acting, I find out things, internalize them, and become them. That’s what I encourage others to do. When I did Zandile in America

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(with Carpetbag Theatre, Knoxville, 1989), there were problems with the Americans doing the South African thing. I had to show them the movements myself. One of the actors I worked with was Edris Cooper, from the San Francisco Mime Troupe. I had to find the right vocabulary for her, for what it is to be a child, you know, abandoning the body, the lack of consciousness of the body. Because I work a lot with children it may be easier for me. WALDER: Do you think this is more of an issue for women, because of women being the subject of a ‘male gaze’? MHLOPHE: It’s just a different problem for men, they’re also worried about their image. This is something I wanted to show in Somdaka (‘Untidy One’). But in Zandile I was trying to sort out my own life. it was a therapeutic thing. I was criticized for that. I have been in political theatre from the beginning up to Zandile, which was seen as too playful. ‘How can you do a play like this?’ ‘It’s not the right time’. Things like that (were said). I argue that if I am allowed to talk about the rest of South Africa, I’m more than allowed to talk about myself. I am one of those masses we talk about all the time, why not talk about me specifically? And I could have written about another family, that family also has a right to be put on the map. My writing centres around people more than the movements. Even Somdaka, it’s about this young man who wants to stay in the countryside, that’s very rare. The play is about the one person who appreciates the beauty of the place, of Mount Frere, which I never saw when I was there, and he wants to create work there, work that honours his manhood. It’s the opposite of The Hungry Earth, which just shows people stripped of their manhood. It was based on a young man I saw there, a few years older than me, beautiful, striking. I always wanted to write about him. When I directed it at The Market, people found him very warm, very strong, this self-assured man who didn’t want to be part of the migrant labour system. WALDER: What do you feel about how something you create gets criticized, or taken over by others, by audiences, by people who find other meanings in it? MHLOPHE: Well, I do listen to myself. Reading my poems, for example, like ‘Sometimes When It Rains’, and trying to understand

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what’s in it. But other people find other things–they see me swimming across the river trying to make sure my books aren’t wet, whatever image is conjured up in their minds when it’s raining. I think it’s beautiful for them to have fun, understand things the way they want to. I wouldn’t ever wish to be a prophet, setting out to make everybody believe this is the way things should be. As the Resident Director at The Market I was supposed to be putting on light stuff in December, so some were disappointed when it was Somdaka, and also that I wasn’t in it. And when people came for tickets they asked is this political, and we said, no, it’s not. But of course if I wanted to look at it in that way, I could have set it up in protest style, migrant workers refusing to go back to the mines, we could have involved the Mineworkers’ Union, the whole number. But I wanted to get to the heart of the man. WALDER: It is still political in some sense, isn’t it? MHLOPHE: Yes, in the way I did it, and in the way it was understood. But it wasn’t marching and singing revolutionary songs and ‘Amandla!’* I took out the mob, and looked at how things affect us personally. WALDER: Would this way of understanding its politics be true of Zandile, too? MHLOPHE: Yes, definitely, Zandile is also political, in that sense. It looks at relationships between men and women: something which is not touched on by most South African theatre, and it also looks at the school system (the one-sided mess of history we learn in school). It looks at several things…including the way my parents met. Their story is not only personal; it is shared, in that it happens a lot in South Africa; these extramarital relationships bear children, and of course the children are affected by the relationship of the parents. But often this is not seen as political, or at least not so important as ‘the struggle’, the growth towards our freedom. I cannot imagine attaining our freedom while pretending we don’t fall in love. Human relations are on par with the political relations we give so much priority to.

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22—4 November 1993 WALDER: Last time we were talking about the genesis of Zandile and of how you wanted it to be understood at home and in the rest of the world. I’d like to pick up on that again, and ask you about the language of the play–or rather, the languages. It’s in three languages at least, although mainly in English. Is that how you wrote it? MHLOPHE: I was writing in different languages, whatever came to mind. The language I use in Jo’burg, and the people I mix with, is more English than Xhosa or Zulu. But also, I used English to make the play accessible to local audiences. English is a bridge, even for black people, not all speak either Xhosa* or Zulu*. One thing I inherited from my father was a good memory. I switch from one language to another, I enjoy it. In my travels, I have had a translator with me, in Germany or Japan; that is something we need in South Africa, it would solve a lot of problems. Language is who you are, it is important to say ‘this is my language’. To have a language you can love enough to call your own. WALDER: Which do you love the most? MHLOPHE: Oh, my! I love Xhosa, I’m glad I was made to learn it. But I’m also fascinated by what one can do in English…and Zulu, I work with in a different way, I seem to find a gentler voice for myself in Zulu. Zulu was my father’s tongue, the early part of my life. When I went to the Transkei in 1968 I had to learn Xhosa. WALDER: So you were ten then? The same age as the little girl in Zandile, when she’s abducted? MHLOPHE: No. I wanted her younger, she’s eight. It gripped us more, her being younger. Also I wanted to put in my first encounter with the police. I broke these two front teeth running away from this policeman with dogs who thought he was playing with me. I fell down some steps, I was terrified, and I’ve never trusted a policeman since. But we left it out, it wasn’t the focus. The focus was the relationships between women, Zandile being behind in her sexual awareness, but ahead in her books. There are men in it, the teacher Mr Hlatshwayo, and the image of Paul, my brother, the drummer. He died in 1983, a very important person to me. But the main relationships are to do with women. Zandile, the play,

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begins with the grandmother, and everything Zandile the character still has at the end is from her grandmother; she ends with the memory of her grandmother. Have You Seen Zandile? was born out of looking back at everything, totally everything, and putting it all down on paper, no matter how painful, no matter how much I thought I had buried in a suitcase, to survive…I remember one of the first naughty things I did in the Transkei was to open up crabs to see how much fruit they have. They have a suitcase that opens underneath, the clear-water crabs. We would hold them upside down and open them. I remember sometimes defending those crabs, saying, ‘that’s not fair, they worked so hard to keep that fruit, let’s not hurt them.’ So in the play I was doing that to myself, and it proved very difficult. But I just kept writing and rewriting, and when we were ready to rehearse, the script was sort of there. We would rehearse and then another idea would come up. The thing about teaching the flowers: they thought it was hilarious, crazy, so I went back and developed that. The imaginary friend: that started as a very small part of the play and we developed it as we went along. I was trying to remember good things about my mother. My poem ‘The Dancer’ was a breakthrough–to be able to write, talk about her when she was happy and playful. It was digging and digging to find something good. She had taken me away from my grandmother and father and family friends. If she had shown me love it would have been okay, but she didn’t. WALDER: The play seen from this perspective is about recreating, restoring an identity for your self, out of the past. And the pain that involves. Your mother is part of that, she also gave you something? MHLOPHE: I’m like her, exactly, in my stubbornness. When my eldest half-brother came back to the Transkei, he used to beat me up and he called me a whore’s child. He chased my mother out, he said he must have the house, being the first-born. All the other sisters were married. I was the only one at home. My mother was so angry, she wouldn’t speak, she wouldn’t beg, we just moved and built a new house, for the two of us. We worked throughout that June and July holiday cutting

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grass for it. We built it, and my mother rose up like a new person. I remember she gave me a new dress. She didn’t say anything. And the next day, still cutting grass in the fields, our backs killing us, we sat down for some umbila (fermented porridge), and I said: ‘My mother, why did you take me away?’ ‘But you are my child,’ she said. ‘I know, but it is rare that you give me anything that shows I’m your daughter and tells me you love me.’ She told me she had been forced to marry a man she didn’t like, put through all kinds of things, and that she was preparing me for when I got married, so that I would be hardened and ready to take it. I don’t know if I understood all that, but I heard her. WALDER: You understand now? MHLOPHE: Oh, I understand now. I was writing after her death, trying to look at my mother from a woman’s point of view. I was no longer a child in 1984, and I was looking through those memories, searching for good things and also trying to understand that she went through difficult times. I was a town child at the time (of the abduction), and I behaved like that in the Transkei. She tried to make me a country child; she tried so hard to make me fit in. So, I was searching through my mother’s baggage too. I wanted to be at peace, and I wanted her to rest at peace. I did not want to remember her with hatred. WALDER: I recall seeing the play at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London in 1987, and how many women came up to you afterwards, especially black British women from the Caribbean and elsewhere, to say how much it moved them, because the relationship between them and their mothers and grandmothers had been disrupted. They felt the play was very important as a way of exploring memory and disruption in a woman’s life. MHLOPHE: Yes, I think it was a voice not heard before. Nobody knew me, and Zandile was a departure from the kind of writing coming from South Africa at the time. The biggest support for me at home came in fact from the youth. They came despite the criticism. The custodians of the politically correct were seeing it as a small little thing. Even the manager of The Market saw it as not lasting. When we had to have a second run because of all the full houses, Mannie

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(Manim) didn’t know where to look! People came with their families, they cried, they sang Ulele na, ulele na (the lullaby) with us, and started talking, about this grandmother and that family. My father came; he watched very quietly. Then after the show he talked to me, filling in the gaps. He was not offended. He just thought I needed to know more. WALDER: Allowing people to speak, asking people to listen. Is this part of your move into storytelling, too? MHLOPHE: For me, the storytelling wasn’t new. The departure from theatre happened in Zimbabwe in 1990, when I took Somdaka there. I was staying with a friend, and reports were coming out that she was a spy, and that I was spending time with the PAC* (Pan African Congress). I didn’t know if she was or not. Then I went to Chitumwiza Training College with the play. It begins very quietly. With a mouth organ before the first speech, and the students were so rowdy we couldn’t start. My actor was terrified. There were Members of Parliament in the audience, and the Principal, and nobody was doing anything. So I walked out on the stage and said: ‘Please can we start the show. We cannot start unless you keep quiet.’ Of course I was angry, but I wasn’t rude. I just had to lay it down. They laughed, and then they kept quiet. But when I got back to South Africa, I was called up by Mzwakhe Mbuli, head of the Cultural Desk, saying, ‘You got to apologise to the ANC, this is terrible, defecting to the PAC, rude in front of the MPs of Zimbabwe’. People were disgraced a woman should behave like that. I said no. I would not apologise for anything. Then I went to The Market Theatre, and John Kani and Mannie Manim said the same, they said you’ve been naughty in Zimbabwe. I was supposed to do a second year, but basically I was retired, in the middle of my residency The Press wanted a scandal. I refused to speak to them, I didn’t want to get the ANC into trouble, I respect them. But I also don’t want to be told what to do. So I had two months broke, not knowing what to do. Then I got to go to a Writers’ Conference in Germany, to read my poetry. When I came back, this idea came to me: storytelling! Right. Now I can focus. July 1990, I set up office at home, printed my own letterheads, and thought: this is me on my own. I told my

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contacts, and they were wonderful, they came through. In fact, I’ve been paid much more than if I ever stayed on with The Market, and in terms of understanding what I’m capable of. I’m grateful to The Market. If they hadn’t kicked me out, I would’ve been still under their wing. Now I can go there and do a show, but it’s on my own terms. WALDER: I think it’s important to know how your move to storytelling was tied up with becoming more independent. But can you define the kind of thing you do more precisely, and where it comes from? MHLOPHE: I have a strong belief storytelling is an early form of theatre in Africa, because it involves so many things–mime, voice, singing, creating characters, everything you can find in theatre. I started doing traditional folk tales, mostly Xhosa and Zulu. Now I tell stories from all over Africa, from Japan, native American stories, wherever. Even before I began, people were bringing me little gifts, like the tortoise, so I began to read up about it too, about what the tortoise represents: stopping for a moment, taking time, wisdom, judgement. There’s so much richness in Africa, it’s hardly been explored. I want to go out now in my country, to listen. Sometimes I record, sometimes I just want to be part of the community. And even in the townships, it’s important if I interview people that they want to know about me, too; they ask me about my praise names, my father, my mother…I’ve got a good memory. If a story is told well, you remember it. Storytelling is coming back in South Africa.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 41—51 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Between Women–An Interview with Gcina Mhlophe Miki Flockemann and Thuli Mazibuko

This interview was recorded in Cape Town on the second of August, 1994, and was updated in 1995 and 1996. It represents an ongoing discussion between Mhlophe and Flockemann, one writing for and one writing about the theatre. Thuli Mazibuko’s contributions are an important addition to this ongoing dialogue: as a black student studying South African and Western drama and culture at the MA level, she occupies an interim position between the experiences of the black artist and the white university lecturer. The three way conversation adds to the body of material in the interview with Walder (pp. 27—39) and raises issues of particular interest to women. This interview has not been edited as heavily as some of the others, because it seemed important to retain the flow and rhythm of the conversation, the points where each woman picks up and finishes sentences for the others. KEYWORDS: Attendance Patterns (for women), Class Divisions, Cross-cultural Study, Elitism, Gender, Language as Issue, Mothers: Influence of, Poemdras*, Performance, Personal as Political, Poetry, Politics, Political Theatre, Racism, South African Theatre, ‘Taboo’ for Women, Venues, Women’s Experiences, Women’s Influences, Women’s Voices. MAZIBUKO:

I’d like to start by asking what you think of the view that South African theatre is élitist.

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MHLOPHE:

No, definitely, I don’t think theatre is élitist. I think also it depends on where it is happening. There are different kinds of theatre. The content matters, the place where the theatre happens matters. And the people who are performing in it, who are they? What do they feel, what are they doing? You see, theatre can be élitist, but you can’t make a sweeping statement about it and say ‘theatre is élitist’. MAZIBUKO: What if you look at how many people go to theatre, and at where the venues are…? MHLOPHE: Okay, you’re talking about a certain kind of theatre. There are people who are performing in the big cities generally who are doing professional theatre, who’ve got the theatres which are wellequipped and scripts and the whole number, with stage managers, and all of that. That is quite removed from the kind of theatre most of us make. Only people who can afford to go, can see that theatre. But we are ignoring the theatre that is not reported in the newspapers or on the radio or on television, but is happening continuously around our country–in small spaces, in townships, in squatter camps, in ordinary places. I think that kind of theatre must be taken into account as well. And there’s also community theatre. People write plays around certain issues because they are driven to do that. I just met these women last week who are domestic workers, who have suddenly learnt to read and write, and two of them have learnt to drive too; they’ve got driver’s licences and they think that next, they must write a play. That’s the logic: after they can read, write, and drive a car, what is the next step? You write a play! So theatre is not this exclusive event for everyone. I’m amazed by this, they’ve never been in a theatre in their whole lives, they’ve never been to the Civic Theatre or The Market Theatre. No! FLOCKEMANN: It has been said that since theatre has become professionalized (you know with rehearsal times in the evenings), it has actually made it very difficult for women who would normally be part of the event to come, because they are seen as home-makers. Do you

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think that having women in professional theatre detracts from the performance roles that women have outside formal theatre structures? MHLOPHE: Yes; and that is what makes some people want to keep things as they are, not change rehearsal times and all that. A boyfriend may say to a woman that she can’t go to rehearsals; I know people whose boyfriends say ‘listen, it’s either me or the theatre, choose!’ And also it has something to do with a certain view in the community that show business women are loose women. So that’s something we’ve had to deal with too. And there is a lot of sexual harassment in South Africa, and quite a lot in show business as well. FLOCKEMANN: How did you perceive your job, as Artistic Director of The Market Theatre? MHLOPHE: I was Artistic Director between 1989 and 1990. It was a time when I was very much aware that it was not just me the director. I felt that I represented many black women. MAZIBUKO: Did you feel the same about participating in the Grahamstown Festival? MHLOPHE: First of all, I was indifferent to the Grahamstown Festival (laughter). For years I was indifferent. It didn’t invite me, it didn’t appeal to me. And so when I went for the first time it was during the debate about the cultural boycott. And I was fascinated by what goes on around there; Grahamstown is one of those boring English towns in South Africa. There is this obsession amongst black people that Afrikaners are the only racists (laughter) and this is not true, some English people are just horrendous! And Grahamstown is one of those places where you will encounter that racism, Grahamstown and Pietermaritsburg. I went over before the festival actually started and looked around, and at once I was very much aware of the separation of the town, and the festival, by race. What I found was a black township that had nothing to do with the festival, nothing at all. MAZIBUKO: And it’s just a few kilometres away.

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MHLOPHE:

Ya, it’s just a walking distance away; it’s just over there and at the same time, its not there at all. MAZIBUKO: It’s invisible. MHLOPHE: So I noticed all of those things right away and I knew why I had always been indifferent to the Grahamstown Festival. MAZIBUKO: What year was this? FLOCKEMANN: It would have been 1990. MHLOPHE: Yes, 1990. Now, generally I am for festivals, people getting together and presenting different art forms and styles and voices and speaking in a way that communicates with other people, other artists, as well as audiences. I am for festivals, as I say, so I wouldn’t want that festival to be scrapped. Since then, I think the festival has grown, has been forced to grow and accept more people, a wider range. But still, I work with young people and I spoke to the high school pupils, not many of whom could afford to go to the festival. A lot more must be done to improve representation. FLOCKEMANN: Thuli went down to Grahamstown with a student production and gave this riveting account to the class of the difficulties involved in getting your show advertised if you don’t have money. And if you don’t get advertised, if you don’t have the money to put your name down, who’s going to know about your production? MHLOPHE: It’s a real problem. You’ve got to put your name down months and months in advance. Let’s say you’ve been working on a script and you didn’t think about going to Grahamstown and suddenly the play is hot you can feel it and you think, yes!: this is a play I should take to Grahamstown, and you organize some transport and off you go. Then you struggle for accommodation and it’s freezing cold! So you’ve struggled to get to Grahamstown and no matter what your show is, not many people know about it and you don’t get reviews. MAZIBUKO: You don’t get reviews, ya! (laughter). MHLOPHE: You don’t get reviews, and that’s a very important part of one’s being made or broken in theatre and in the arts in general. Some critics can be really hurtful in the way

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that they just criticize you flat out, just flat out. And sometimes your play (or your exhibition or your dance or whatever) wasn’t really that bad. It’s just that maybe the critics have got something against the subject, or maybe they’ve got something against you, or the people you work with or whatever. FLOCKEMANN: Or they don’t know how to read your play. MHLOPHE: Or they don’t know how to read your play. FLOCKEMANN: So are you very aware of critics and what they say about your work? MHLOPHE: Definitely! I’ve seen wonderful movies that were criticized by the press, and enjoyed them, so I don’t totally believe in what they have got to say; I take them with a pinch of salt (they are human beings, you know). So what I’m trying to say is that a critic is one human being’s point of view, so we shouldn’t go with it as though it’s the gospel truth. FLOCKEMANN: How do you describe yourself? As a storyteller, an educator, or as a writer? Which ‘label’ informs you most? MHLOPHE: I’m a writer. But I’m into many things too. I’m doing something now called ‘In the Company of Words’. I’m having a good time performing that poem, and it’s been a pleasure because my poetry touches my heart in a way which no other performance art can do. And it describes me in many ways; I’m ‘in the company of words’ whether I’m reading, or writing, or performing, or singing, or doing different things. So I say I am a writer first and foremost because I love writing, that’s my first love. Secondly, the storytelling has definitely got to me. I love the flexibility, the fact that I can perform under a tree in a farm school, or at The Civic Theatre with the grand stage and the wonderful lights and the curtains! I like the extremes that you can reach with storytelling, and the fact that you don’t need props, you don’t need anything, you arrive and tell stories. You can enliven ordinary people’s lives and you can tell a whole range of stories. I’ve gotten into environmental storytelling, and history telling. I’ve gotten into the old folk tales and finding meaning in

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them. These stories survived all these years because they were worth it. There’s no time you can say ‘gold is not gold’–it’s going to be gold forever. It’s the same with story telling. Folklore is the essence, the gold of our wisdom from whatever culture–whether you’re talking about the Maoris of New Zealand or the Aborigines of Australia. FLOCKEMANN: Do you choose your stories for particular audiences? MHLOPHE: Yes; audiences define our work all the time, and I let my audience define my work. Even with poetry for that matter. So when I’m aiming my work at an older audience and there are children in the audience who just go, ‘Wow!’ and they lean forward and they are really into it, then I’m just amazed. Or when I’m performing to very posh people who think it’s not cool to just laugh and look ridiculous, who think you’re supposed to look good all the time, and who get into the performance and forget that they’re supposed to be good looking, and laugh! I like it when audiences forget they are good looking, forget what they thought they should do or be. So I always want my audience to define my work. FLOCKEMANN: It’s quite interesting that you are a writer first and then a performer. MHLOPHE: People I went to school with were shocked when they first read about me in the newspapers: ‘Nokugcina of all people in the world, I mean, she stands in front of people, Nokugcina? This is unbelievable!’, they would say. Basically, all I ever did at school was read; I was boring (laughs), and so people who went to school with me are shocked to see me on television, to see me in the newspapers and on stage–it’s like I was born again (laughs). I could never have imagined that I would travel the world, that my life would turn out the way it has. I never even imagined it was possible never, never… FLOCKEMANN: Have you always had that wonderful deep voice…? MHLOPHE: Yes, but I didn’t think of it as ‘wonderful’. My voice has been a major problem for me. For years, I wanted to have a ‘good’ voice, to speak ‘like a woman’ (laughter). I wrote a story called ‘Transforming Moments’ because

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it represents that time in my life when I wanted to be ‘beautiful’. I wanted to have a dark skin like my mother and to be good looking like the minister’s wife and then… what else did I want?…I wanted to have nice hair. My hair was horrible and my ears had these pointy parts and I had knock knees–I mean there was no end to things that were wrong with me! (laughter) On top of all that, I had this voice that did not sound like a woman’s voice! I thought, one of these days an angel is going to come down and touch me and then everything will be okay. I thought that so many things were wrong with me, so that was definitely a transforming moment in my life, a time when I thought I’d be able to change. FLOCKEMANN: Your writing is strongly autobiographical, as for instance, your stories ‘Transforming Moments’ and ‘The Toilet’. But do you sometimes want to move away from autobiography in your writing? MHLOPHE: Autobiography is a good place to start. Writers start from what they know–with your own life as a strong base, you can start and then you can take off from there. I’ve just been reading a lovely interview with one of my favourite writers from South America, Isabel Allende–she’s brilliant. She is a storyteller, there’s no other way of describing her. She was saying that for her, the important thing is to tell a story whether it’s yours or not. So for me, I’ve found strength in telling stories that are autobiographical, stories that say something about who I am. I’ve summoned myself by writing about myself. But I’ve reached a stage where it’s wonderful also to start creating new characters. At the moment one of the stories I’m working on is called ‘Nolita’. Nolita is coming alive you know, it’s like I know her. One of these days I’m going to walk onto the street and look around and think I can see her: ‘there goes Nolita’. Even when I wrote Somdaka, I used to dress up the character of Somdaka, figuring out what he would wear, why he didn’t want to work in the mines, why he wanted to stay in the countryside…I would try to describe Somdaka and give him a life. The name you choose for a person is very important. I like

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names and colours. The dominant thing I find interesting at the moment is a combination of light and water. I’m amazed at this–I discovered it recently, and now that I’m writing more fiction, I find that a lot of my work has got to do with water and light. FLOCKEMANN: Is it something that you’re only now aware of? MHLOPHE: Yes. It’s not something I was aware of before, and I’m not fighting it now. I’m just observing it, as if from the outside looking in. FLOCKEMANN: …This lets me think of the scene in Have You Seen Zandile? where Zandile and Lindiwe are in the river… MHLOPHE: Oh yes… FLOCKEMANN: It’s such an interesting scene in terms of gender, because there are these two young women talking about their bodies (which they don’t yet know much about) while their mothers are already planning their marriages. The girls don’t even know where babies come from, and at one point Zandile says, ‘do boys also get periods?’, which is usually a taboo subject. I’ve often thought that Have You Seen Zandile? acts as a sort of ‘counter discourse’ to what has been called ‘protest theatre’, because of the way it delves into areas of personal life and experience. MHLOPHE: If I can write about the masses I can also write about myself–I’m one of the masses! FLOCKEMANN: Yes, but the story is not only personal; it is also about being a woman. So the irony is, while there is ‘76 going on, there is also Zandile who is dealing with issues about gender–‘political’ issues in another sense. Would you agree? MHLOPHE: Yes; In 1976 I was not politicized, and that’s the honest truth. I never pretended to be. I was not politicized. I had a lot of insecurities inside which I needed to sort out. I was out in some methodist boarding school in Maqhenqo, you know, far away from anything that was happening. I heard about Steve Biko for the first time on the 12th of September, on the day he died. I thought it was a fashion that the guys were not combing their hair; I thought they looked very cool. I did not know anything about the BC* movement and that’s the truth.

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FLOCKEMANN: So you weren’t in Jo’burg in the 1970s? MHLOPHE: No, I only came to Johannesburg in 1979. MAZIBUKO: Did you know anything about the poemdras* that were happening at that time? MHLOPHE: Oh yes; I got involved immediately; I fell into the lap of all that. That was the Staffrider* era so I mixed with Lagunya* from Cape Town…all those people. We used to have all-night sessions where we would perform our poetry and I was the only woman among the men. The first time I stood up they took a breath and they looked at me: ‘who is this one? Oh, Nokugcina! Where is she from?…’ (laughs)! FLOCKEMANN: So poetry was your entry into writing? MHLOPHE: Yes, the first thing I wrote was poetry. MAZIBUKO: And these poemdras were a mixture of poetry, drama, and movement? MHLOPHE: Yes, definitely. It was performance poetry. In 1977, I was so inspired by traditional praise poets, the imbongi,* that I wrote my first poem. I had heard about praise poetry before, and had admired guys like Mqhayi. But I had never seen a performance, ever, and then I went to this meeting and this man stood up and performed a poem. I couldn’t believe it. I was riveted, he touched me. And I thought: that’s me, that’s what I want to do. MAZIBUKO: Your work with Freeflight Dance Company and with Christopher Kindo also involved this combination of movement and narrative. Do you see any connection between the poemdras that you did in the ‘70s and the sort of thing you did later, with Christopher Kindo and Freeflight Dance Company, and in your other work– any connection between the forms of movement and storytelling you tend to use? MHLOPHE: Well, I don’t remember a time when there was no movement in my work…(laughs)…Ever! whether it was poetry or poem-dra or theatre. I’m fascinated by crossing over a mixture of different disciplines. I cannot dance but I love dance. I always go and watch dance, and also jazz. Rosie Ngquwana wrote the music for the story Lovechild which I’ve always performed as a one-

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woman show, so to do Lovechild with 14 dancers and live jazz band was an amazing interaction: a very, very beautiful collaboration! With all of us coming from different persuasions and different corners, all of us were doing fine on our own, but we came together and produced something new. It was very good. Last year I did some work with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. When they first approached me I was shocked; I said, ‘me with an orchestra! Please, it’s boring that stuff, classical music, I don’t understand it. I want to work with young people. I want to do workshops’…. But I did it, and it was great. There are so many things you cannot say with words that you can, sometimes, say with dance. And there are certain things you cannot communicate to someone else that you can say with music easily, and there are certain things I can put in a certain language that I cannot put in another language. All these things fascinate me. If I had been a specialist at university I probably would have done the history of languages. I love languages. I was lucky to be born into a bilingual setting with my mother speaking Xhosa and my father speaking Zulu, because I had to learn two languages, and then I moved on from those languages, so now I speak four (including English and Afrikaans). And I wish to learn Swahili, you know. It’s very important if you are a person who loves stories, loves words, to free yourself from the restrictions of language. FLOCKEMANN: In an interview with Tyrone August [1990, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 329—335] you were asked how you saw yourself as a black woman writer–this old question that you always get asked (don’t worry, I won’t ask you that), but I think what you say there is very interesting, and wondered if this can be applied to your theatre. You said, ‘luckily I started writing when I had fallen in love with myself’, in other words with that ‘self’ that has been influenced by these four languages, each with their own cultural baggage. This seems to be very evident in Zandile, for instance, which is also largely autobiographical. What

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advice would you give to someone interested in story telling, if that person does not come from an African language background? MHLOPHE: It doesn’t matter, a story is a story in any language. I think that to tell good stories, you must have a curious mind to start with, and want to hear things and see stories in small things, everyday events, and when you have that, then you’ve also got to enjoy telling stories. You’ve got to get used to using your voice, get used to hearing your own voice. That’s another issue, how you use your voice: you’ve got to make different sounds, like making the sound of a donkey, or a lion, or a person who is shy and a person who is pompous. So it’s a very important thing, the voice. Also, you need to think about how you see yourself telling the story, why you are telling this story, who you are, why you like this particular story. And when you tell a story you’ve got to like it so that the other people can like it also; it must touch you. It is good for individuals to tell a story their own way. When storytellers work together, that’s an exercise we do–we take the same story and have six people tell it their way, each choosing an emphasis, and even different punch lines; it must be different for each person, in the same way that it will have different connotations for different audiences. FLOCKEMANN: Are these generally stories that you find, or are they stories that you remember (are they your own personal stories)? MHLOPHE: Some of them come from Gogo [my grandmother]; some of them come from people that I listen to or encounter when I travel. Wherever I go I end up with young people, or I end up with very old people. I think that after a while you start having an ear for stories. FLOCKEMANN: Coming back to Zandile, I like the story Gogo tells about the woman in the moon as an alternative to the ‘man on the moon’–that’s a great way to make a story mean something special to her. I suppose this making of alternative stories is one of the ways that people make sense of the world. Is that why people like stories?

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Yes…(laughing) I remember this time, I was doing Have You Seen Zandile? and this boy came to see the show. He was sitting on his mother’s lap, and we were telling this story, and we came to the part about the ‘woman on the moon’: we said…‘and that’s why there’s a woman on the moon’, and the boy said: ‘it’s not a woman; it’s a man, it’s not a woman; it’s a man!’ He was sucking his thumb (laughing). Oh that was too funny! FLOCKEMANN: What are working on, and what do you hope to work on in future? MHLOPHE: I’m full of information and things to put down, and my enemy is time, not mental block. So I’m at a point in my life where I’m clearing things that I don’t need to do, and concentrating on my writing. The book I’m working on now is a collection of short stories. I think all my stories must be in one book now. I’ve published a lot in anthologies. The second half of the book will be ‘In the Company of Words’, a collection of my poetry, so it will be a kind of portrait of my work, and then there’ll be a few photographs in the middle. Next year, well, I’ve finished the text but I haven’t found an artist to work with me, on Mother Christmas…I’m going to make a book (hopefully a pop-up book), and a video, an audio cassette, and some toys…for the little ones. In fact, it’s a very important story. FLOCKEMANN: These books are always read by the grown ups. MHLOPHE: Mhm, as well. FLOCKEMANN: Yes, they are! (laughter) Your version of Mother Christmas will, obviously, be set in South Africa? MHLOPHE: It’s set in the Valley of Thousand Hills! Where else could Mother Christmas come from (laughter); where else! What a question! The Valley of a Thousand Hills (in Kwazulu Natal)! FLOCKEMANN: To return to your ‘adult’ work, I’m interested in what you said earlier about ‘Transforming Moments’ because, you know as South Africans, we’re probably going to experience a lot of them! MHLOPHE: Definitely, definitely. And I hope there will be more biographies and stories about women, whether on cassette or on paper or on video; we need to hear more. MHLOPHE:

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FLOCKEMANN: We do need to hear more and storytelling traditionally is actually women’s… MHLOPHE: …domain… FLOCKEMANN: …domain, yes. MHLOPHE: The stories that get published are not always the best stories, but the ones written by people who got to go to school first, you know. FLOCKEMANN: Yes that’s right, and the ones which are told but not published are often by those (women, mainly) who have a family to look after. You know, even with female students who are part of a professional class, they still have the sense that somehow they must be homemakers too, and that their profession is simply there as a way to earn money. MHLOPHE: And it’s a pity that one has to choose in that sense. FLOCKEMANN: One shouldn’t have to… MHLOPHE: …there’s nothing wrong with being a home-maker actually there’s nothing wrong. FLOCKEMANN: It is interesting that in an interview with Carola Luther, Maishe Maponya says, ‘yes, men have written women out of plays’ Luther asks, ‘why don’t they change the time of the rehearsals to accommodate women?’ There still seems to be a reluctance at times to make things easier for women (and here we’re getting back to the beginning of this interview). MHLOPHE: Yes. That’s right. FLOCKEMANN: Do you think you’re an exception? MHLOPHE: When you’re not married you can make those choices. But it also depends on how strongly you feel about your art. For me, if you love me you love the whole package; there’s no separating the two, it’s one human being. And there’s this whole thing now about how much we boast and brag about our husbands when they are successful/Oooh! he’s a doctor you know. Oooh, he’s a dentist/ And you tell everybody about it, but you dare be a dentist and he’s not…Trouble! I recently received an honorary doctorate from the Open University, and you know women brag about those things if they happen to their husbands, but I don’t know many men who would accept that. I’m an

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exception now, as I finally find that it’s really lovely to be with someone who’s proud of my work and accepts it. FLOCKEMANN: Well, obviously there are men like that, but they’re not the majority, not in South Africa… MHLOPHE: No, they’re not the majority. FLOCKEMANN: Is your mother still alive? MHLOPHE: No, my mother has gone. FLOCKEMANN: I was thinking: what would she have thought about your success and your honorary doctorate? MHLOPHE: Well, my mother wanted me to be a good woman, and I’ve never achieved that!

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 53—63 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Unwilling Champion–An Interview with Reza de Wet Introduction by Temple Hauptfleisch, Interview by Anja Huismans and Juanita Finestone

This ‘interview’ takes two parts. In Part One, Temple Hauptfleisch gives a brief but detailed overview of Reza de Wet’s accomplishments and contributions to South African theatre. In Part Two, Anja Huismans and Juanita Finestone interview De Wet, raising questions of gender and performance within the context of questions about language and identity for this Afrikaans playwright. KEY WORDS: Afrikaans Language, Afrikaner Identity, Class Divisions, Gender, Language as Issue, Performance, Politics, Racial Divisions, South African Theatre, Women’s Voices. The Background: Reza de Wet and the South African Literary Establishment

Temple Hauptfleisch Reza de Wet is a remarkable phenomenon in the South African theatrical landscape. Since her sensational debut in 1981, she has produced nine plays of outstanding merit: compelling and imaginative works which are highly regarded by academics for their literary qualities and loved by audiences and performers for their sparkling vitality in performance. The major plays are: Diepe Grond (produced: 1985, published: 1987). This play has since been translated into English under the provisional title

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of Dearth), Op Dees Aarde [Lit: On this Earth] (produced: 1986, published: 1991), and Nag, Generaal [Lit: (Good)night, General] (produced: 1988, published: 1991) These three plays were published together in a collection significantly entitled: Vrystaat Trilogie [Lit: Free State Trilogy]. In a Different Light (produced: 1988, unpublished), and Worm in the Bud (produced: 1988, published: 1995). Mis [Lit: either Frog or Dung; can also mean Miss (a target) and (the Catholic) Mass] (produced: 1993, published: 1993), Mirakel [Lit: Miracle] (produced: 1992, published: 1993), Drif [Lit: Ford (in a river) or Passion] (produced: 1994, published: 1993). The latter three plays were published together in a collection significantly entitled: Trits–Mis, Mirakel en Drif. Her most recent play is Drie Susters Twee (published: 1996; produced: 1997). The plays have won numerous theatrical and literary awards and in 1994 she was awarded the prestigious Hertzog Prize, the highest accolade for Afrikaans literature. Indeed, if anyone may be seen as the natural successor to Athol Fugard, at least some of the good money would be on her, yet in the majority of English publications on South African theatre she is seldom mentioned and makes way for authors who have written one or two plays of far less complexity, albeit works of more immediate political ‘relevance’. Thus it would seem as if Reza de Wet, like so many individuals working in the complex labyrinth of South African culture, is destined to be caught in the general myopia and parochialism induced by centuries of racial, linguistic, and class division. In her case three factors in particular come into play which may seem to influence the extent to which her work is accepted beyond the boundaries of–and even within–the Afrikaans literary establishment: (1) She writes primarily in Afrikaans. Writing in any one of South Africa’s other ten languages has traditionally limited accessibility of the writer’s work among speakers of English, who either cannot read it or (in the case of Afrikaans, more usually) prefer not to, for ideological and other reasons. The latter attitude is backed up by the widely held myth that the only writing in South Africa worth studying is that written in English. It represents a neo-colonialist view, perpetuated by the somewhat naive notion that only Afrikaners read Afrikaans, only born Xhosas read Xhosa and so on. This latter attitude totally ignores the fact that for almost two thirds of the century the dominant indigenous playwriting tradition in the country has been an Afrikaans one, impelled by a powerful drive towards language nationalism and the relative protection afforded Afrikaans writers from foreign competition both by the language and the

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government. (For different reasons, radio drama has for many years been a dominant form in some of the other indigenous languages.) The result is that significant (yet ignored) Afrikaans writers like Louis Leipoldt, W.A.de Klerk*, Bartho Smit*, N.P.van Wyk Louw, P.G.du Plessis, and others are as much the forerunners and contemporaries of Athol Fugard and Reza de Wet as are the international authors and directors of the ‘great tradition’ of English theatre and drama, and certainly they are more fundamental to the theatre of both playwrights than the works of most local playwrights in English. (Like most such provocative statements, this actually refers to a much more complex situation, one I do not have the space to explore here. The basic point is, however, this: there is a significant, but neglected body of work in the other South African languages, that need to be studied if one is to understand the world of Fugard or anyone else writing in English in South Africa. The literary and theatrical landscape is [and was always] far more integrated than the structures of apartheid would lead one to believe.) However, as interest in things South African grows, more and more translations are appearing. In Reza de Wet’s case, two of her plays (Worm in the Bud and In a Different Light were originally written in English, while the first, Diepe Grond [Dearth]) has been performed in English. Negotiations for publication are under way. So perhaps this limitation may be addressed as we enter the period of reassessment before us. (2) She is a woman playwright in a male dominated business. Now it is one of the intriguing things about South African theatre that, while there have not been that many woman playwrights who have had any real success on the professional stage until the late nineteen seventies, the industry as such has in actual fact been heavily influenced by some immensely powerful women during this century. (There is surely a book to be written about the full extent to which women have influenced the shape of South African theatre. The facts have been suppressed far more I think than even the women themselves ever allowed themselves to be.) First of all the majority of authors who write for the amateur stage (particularly one act play for schools) are women, as are the majority of teachers of drama. In fact the first university drama departments were founded by women and women have always played dominant roles in such institutions. (The names of such individuals as Elizabeth Sneddon, Rosalie van der Gught, Anna Neethling-Pohl, Doreen Lamb, Mavis Taylor, Esther van Ryswyk, Bernadette Mosala, and Babs Laker have become legendary in this respect.) Also there have been some remarkable theatre

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figures over the years: Leontine Sagan, Wena Naude, Marda Vanne, Gwen ffrancgon-Davies, Muriel Alexander, Hermien Dommisse, Taubie Kushlick, Janice Honeyman, Saira Esaa, Clare Stopford, and many others: producers, directors, administrators, and performers. However most of these women operated mainly in the private and commercial world, for it is true that the state-funded theatre organizations have hardly ever allowed women into prominent positions of power. Thus these women were used, their creativity tapped–but their control of the system limited. In fact in the so called ‘alternative’ theatres of the seventies and eighties the situation was not much better, for they were still being run by men, but the difference was that the experimental and communal nature of The Space Theatre and The Market Theatre for example, did allow women more access to performance spaces allowing them the freedom to voice their concerns and anger. By the eighties this accessibility had necessarily opened up for women working within the Performing Arts Councils as well and by the nineties we see Reza de Wet’s work being premièred by the Cape Performing Arts Board. (3) She writes social rather than political plays. A fine distinction in any other country, this had rather specific meaning in South Africa during what came to be known as the Cultural Struggle (1976—1990) Reza de Wet’s plays to date have focused on specific socio-cultural issues relating to her Afrikaner roots and her identity as a woman within that context, not on what appeared to be the burning political issues of the day. To focus overtly on the latter to the exclusion of all other matters was of course widely perceived as the sine qua non of the struggle-driven and oppositional South African theatre of the eighties, despite the alternative view (supported by prominent figures such as Albie Sachs, Breyten Breytenbach, and others) that whatever one did, said or wrote was of necessity a political action in apartheid South Africa. What audiences and critics very quickly came to recognize in the work of Reza de Wet however, was that her analysis of the factors which had gone to make the modern Afrikaner–and indeed her almost confessional exploration of the world that had made Reza de Wet–were in their own way extremely relevant in terms of the struggle for the soul of the nation. Thus, despite the apparent limitations detailed above, Reza de Wet has come to hold something of a pre-eminent position as serious play-wright within South Africa today. She must certainly be seen as one of–if not the –writer of the Afrikaans renaissance of the past decade. Others who have contributed greatly to the re-establishment of the Afrikaans and/or bilingual dramatist as one of the important theatrical forces in the country, include Pieter Fourie, Deon Opperman, and Charles Fourie. However

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none of them have really been able to put together quite the same body of consistent work over the last ten years, though their output has been prodigious. Much of this is due of course to the sheer quality of her work: the imaginative richness and meticulous, craftsmanship are irresistible. However, recognition of her achievements as playwright has, I think, in some ways obscured true recognition of her equally important role as cultural activist in South Africa (It is a title she would be reluctant to accept, but it is apt nevertheless.) Because hers has never been a confrontational style and because she has not quite taken to the role of public figure quite as easily as some of her peers (despite a quite magnificent eloquence once forced into the spotlight–vide the interview) few have realized the real extent to which Reza de Wet has contributed to breaking down barriers within the theatrical system in South Africa. By positioning herself so well socio-politically and socio-culturally, she has not only staked a claim for women writers and writers in Afrikaans, but has helped to re-establish the notion of serious and formal playwriting as a valid (and complementary) alternative to the workshop tradition which necessarily arose during the eighties and has worked so well for South African theatre. Interview: Exploring the Masculine Within

Anja Huismans and Juanita Finestone Over the past ten years Reza de Wet has established herself as a major South African playwright. She was born in rural Free State, and educated in both Drama and English literature. She now lectures at the Drama Department of the Rhodes University in Grahamstown. As an experienced actress as well as director, she writes plays that are at once very performable as well as literary. Her plays have won a host of Vita awards (awards specifically for performance) as well as major literary awards. In 1994 she was awarded the most prestigious award for Afrikaans literature, the Hertzog prize for Drama. Her plays mix the macabre with the naïve. They are structured with the simplicity of fairy tales or old-fashioned ghost stories. Within these forms she explores Afrikaner mentality, its myths and morals. Her passion for the theatre leads her to explore theatricality itself, celebrating dream and play At a time when most South African writers felt compelled to focus on the political side of South African life, Reza de Wet

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has consistently denied that she has any kind of political message to convey. She says she writes out of a purely personal impulse and a love for the theatre. De Wet’s first play, Diepe Grond, opened in Pretoria in 1985. This dark play, touching on the themes of incest, patricide, and the oppressive force of Afrikaner Calvinist morality won seven Vita awards. The next two years saw performances of Op Dees Aarde and the more directly political Nag, Generaal. In 1991 these three plays were published together as Vrystaat Trilogie. These plays are all set in a specifically Afrikaans milieu, exploring the effects of Calvinism on the Afrikaner psyche. Diepe Grond is set on a run down farm, it is a grotesque parody of the farm stories of Afrikaans mythology where hard work and deep-set religious sentiments as well as Afrikaner baasskap* rule in the midst of paradisiacal innocence. In Nag, Generaal the myths surrounding the Anglo-Boer war are deconstructed in a similar way, exposing a diseased world ruled by a male impetus to war. Between 1990 and 1993, De Wet completed her next cycle of Afrikaans plays, Mis, Mirakel and Drif, published together as Trits. This cycle was inspired by medieval plays. Although they are still set in an Afrikaans milieu, they are more concerned with personal liberation. The plays are meta-theatrical works with performing artists as central characters in all three. The world of art, represented by a circus, a travelling theatre troupe and a hypnotist, is shown as an avenue of liberation from a sterile Calvinistic environment. In 1996, she completed Drie Susters Twee [Three Sisters Two], a post-modern response to Chekhov’s Three Sisters, set in Russia during the Revolution. De Wet’s play was published and performed in 1997. Between 1988 and 1990 De Wet wrote two English plays, In a Different Light and Worm in the Bud. For Worm in the Bud, performed at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, she was nominated as best play-wright of the year, Worm in the Bud relates the tale of a young Victorian English woman coming to the Eastern Cape to spread the light of civilization. HUISMANS AND How do you feel about being labelled a FINESTONE: woman playwright? DE WET: I resent it entirely I find it a rather condescending attitude. Categorizing male and female has become a very primary concern for many people, it has never been one for me. I have

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found a great deal of femininity, in its archetypal sense of being intuitive and creative as opposed to order and structure, in both men and in women. I have never wondered about what I should do because I’m a woman or what it is that makes my experience different. I have never felt that I should assert in some way that I am a woman. There’s never been an ‘in spite of’ for me at all. For me everything is a human issue. I don’t agree with categorizing people. It falls into the patriarchal trap of needing to define and separate. If you accept divisions then you are accepting those structures. I believe to become psychically andro-gynous is the answer. And this categorizing seems to work against it. I think that masculinity and femininity are not sexual categories, that they interact in any creative process. Andrew Buckland* and Nicholas Ellenbogen* and myself were speaking at a symposium on the future of drama in South Africa. Nicholas wondered who should go in first and said to me that I couldn’t because they would think we’re being sexist. So I said that I’m not a woman, quite seriously, and Andrew said very seriously that he was. And Nicholas was utterly confused. Even so Afrikaans women playwrights, like you, Jeanne Goosen and Corlia Fourie are very prominent at the moment. What was the situation when you first started writing? I remember, when I was about twenty, telling Bartho Smit* that I wanted to be

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a writer. He asked me, very sweetly, what I wanted to write. I said I wanted to write plays. And he told me I should rather write poetry, plays are much too difficult for women. He came to the first performance of Diepe Grond and was very moved by it. I did feel a small triumph there, because I was rather irritated by his remark although he did it so sweetly. But it is the only time that I was aware of having proved a point, I write out of a purely personal impulse. I never see myself as a female writing. I was only responding to my personal impulse and my love of the theatre. Does feminism inform your work? I have never consciously regarded feminism as informing anything that I have written. Of course being a woman I have experienced life differently than if I had been a man, but I have never consciously looked at feminism as such. Exploring the masculine aspect within me is more important to me than exploring it as a social issue. Do you conceive of yourself writing in a specifically feminine way? It would have to do with constant shifting energies within myself. Jung saw a closure or a completion in a way as the fusion of the masculine and feminine elements within a particular psyche. For me that makes perfect sense. So that I sense masculine presences within myself, constructive and destructive ones. And other feminine presences as well. It is that volatile situation that I want to express.

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I have never placed it in a larger context, but it would have to remain ambiguous because I can not turn the light of reason onto those aspects. They exist before I express them. The constant changes that are undergone by those forces and these energies continue their shadowy existence. There is no resolution or fixed framework, it is shifting all the time. In your plays women are liberated sexually rather than materially. Do you view sexual repression as more fundamental? I would say that women’s sensuality has been oppressed. Patriarchal society has viewed sensuality or eroticism with suspicion. All kinds of structures have been created to deny this aspect of being alive. Sensuality and the power of eroticism has been regarded as subversive. It is generally the most terrifying oppression in our society. Everything else seems to follow from there. As you have said you do not see masculinity and femininity as sexual categories. How do you use this in your plays and what are these masculine and feminine values? I am sometimes aware of the fact that female characters act in a very masculine way, as masculinity has been defined. A female character can embody a male way of looking at things. There is a more interesting fusion if you have a female behaving in a way which one would associate typically with masculine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are not

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sexual categories but ways of being. Masculinity is usually associated with imposing a particular order on others, things being clearly circumscribed and being very rational. Masculinity has to do with linear, daylight, consc-iousness. Femininity is more associated with the intuitive, with night, eroticism, creativity, and a much greater freedom. It is women that oppress other women most successfully in your plays. In Trits the patriarch is virtually absent. Do you see women oppressing other women as the greater evil? I find these women terrible and terrifying. I suppose if you see the masculine, the need to control and rigidly suppress, embodied in a woman, there is this more interesting fusion. The masculine values have become part of these women and they are not expressing, their more natural inclinations. (I think there are obvious gender differences and I think women who are generally more in tune with natural rhythms.) These women embody the masculine principle. I find this masculinity more macabre than seeing it in a man and also more treacherous because they are oppressing other women in the guise of woman. So in a sense they can get closer to the other female characters in the play. It is like a disguised enemy in the camp. You do seem to have ambiguous feelings about women. I’m aware of these conflicting forces within myself. I would have had to experience being perverse and explo-

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itative in order to create these characters. But I must admit I have personally, more of a distrust of women than I have of men. I have always experienced them as more calculating than men. These negative and positive images of women is a very strong part of the way I write. They seem to crystalize like that. Because of the fairytale simplicity of my plays, they are either very bad creatures or perfectly delightful. I would be inte-rested in attempting a hybrid. I think in the last play, Drif, Esmerelda is quite an ambiguous character, because in one way she is quite like a water nixie or something that tempts people to their death. It is because of her story that the sister succumbs to the dark influence of the male figure. On the one hand she’s enacting the role of innocent victim and on the other it is her narrative that leads to the ominous thing that happens to Sussie. She was quite frightening as a character but also embodied all the innocence and the simplicity and purity that the other socalled positive characters had. Other ambiguous characters would seem to be the male figures, that appear in Trits. They share a dark, magical quality suggesting danger, and at the same time they save the women from their oppressive sisters. What is still their function in the plays? They are the presiding artistic consciousness, they understand things like ritual. They could be seen as a shaman, they know the shape the play has to take. And it’s their appearance

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that determines the shape. Their being theatre artists, a pierrot and a hypnotist would undermine them as male figures. They would be feminine forces, who embody imagination, transformation, and endless possibility They liberate the women from a masculine dominated environment. Although they are males they embody the feminine. They do contribute to shaping the events. But it is interaction among them all that is really more important. I never see them in isolation but immediately in relation to the other characters. All the chara-cters complement each other. I was aware of a masculine presence within myself. I am deeply indebted to Jung, I was in Jungian therapy for five years. So I became very aware of the liberating role of what Jung calls the animus and had many very important dreams of a masculine figure who would point the way, liberates me. How important are these males as figures of liberation? Hopefully the structures of the play are liberating. They should form a pattern which is a liberating structure for the audience to experience. So that it is not one particular character that is important, but the rhythm and shape of the whole event. What constraints did you experience writing in English? The irony of it pleased me immensely. I used the language to launch an attack on the colonial attitude. I had become very irritated by the colonial way of

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looking at the Afrikaners here in Grahamstown. I remember one of the English lecturers once said to me: ‘Oh, I know another Afrikaner, you are the salt of the earth.’ I have never been called that before or since. They had this way of putting up with me–and finding me strange and maybe a little violent or vivid and not quite tasteful enough. In Worm in the Bud you make use of the diary and the letter, often seen as specifically feminine forms of expression. Women have been able to express their deepest feelings in diaries, and also letters. Private correspondence is also a very refined way of communicating. I liked that quite delicate framework for the violent impulses that it had to contain. It is such a little Victorian frame and it formed quite a stark contrast to what was actually happening. And it was not in fact a feminine form of expression, all these things were being presented to the father, so that he could see how it all happened. It is ultimately the paternal eye that the play is being presented to. And it is that patriarchal eye that has brought about the whole calamity. In Worm in the Bud, the main character, Emma, is driven by her sexual fantasies. How would these fantasies differ from her Afrikaans counterparts? Her Afrikaans counterparts are not shattered when they encounter their fantasies. They are more resilient, they can follow this man. This encounter

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shatters this character, drives her to madness and then kills her. It is not the same kind of death that exists for the characters in Drif. It is a sterile death, she’s dressed, her shoes are on and her hat is on. She is embalmed. Emma was very masculine in her way of imposing and thinking that she would save and enlighten the Afrikaner. It was in a way also an analogy for how the liberals were thinking about the black people in Africa. The Afrikaners were a cause for the British. They had a need to impose foreign ideas and ‘civilize’. I think Emma is a more terrible embodiment of masculine consci-ousness. It gave me great joy to see her disintegrating like that. I think Africa is a very feminine place. Jung called Africa the subconscious of the human race, and I sense it very strongly when I go to another country and come back. Because it is feminine and quite threatening and in that way a very strange and ambiguous continent. The colonial attitude has been very divorced from it, trying to stave it off and control it and not encounter it. And of course if you repress something it will shatter you. And deep repression that is never faced will destroy you. The Afrikaans characters have a yearning, they are open and inviting. In fact the male characters almost seem to arrive to fulfil their particular needs. The males, the artists, form the action, but the females are yearning for this completion. So it is their need that determines events as well. Whereas in Worm in the Bud the woman

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completely annihilates her needs, she is not receptive to these impulses. And it is this that makes her a masculine force. She is destroyed by the more anarchic, more vital, vibrant feminine African experience. The Afrikaans chara-cters seem to have imbibed something of their natural surroundings. How do you see the future of Afrikaans drama? In terms of South African drama I believe that things will become more open ended and then become more dynamic. I think Afrikaans drama will benefit from being seen in a wider context as part of the Southern African experience. I can hope that more what are called ‘coloured’ voices will be heard. Apart from the enormous vitality of their language, accommodating a variety of experiences can bring about an exciting explosion of Afrikaans theatre. That should be the future of Afrikaans drama. Afrikaans theatre seems to have become a bit state of the art, exclusive. It is not taken onto the streets enough, it is not acknow-ledged as a vital thing. I am very grateful for the Hertzog prize in terms of particularly the theatre and stimulating audiences. But Afrikaans drama has a problem of wanting to be legitimized all the time. Many different and wider things are happening in English. Not only English writers, but also black writers. Afrikaans needs to be opened up so that everyone can feel that they have the right to use it on the

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stage as they wish. But I believe that is slowly happening.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 65—68 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

The Front Door–An Interview with Erica Freund Jane de Gay

In this piece, Erica Freund talks about her experiences as a white South African playwright based in England. She left South Africa while still in her teens, frustrated by living in a divided society which she could not change. Her first submitted play, The Front Door, was written in 1993, at a time when that society was changing, and South Africa was preparing to hold its first democratic elections. The interview is included because it seems important to include the perspective of at least one South African playwright now working on the ‘outside’, as contributions from several South African academics now working from ‘outside’ South Africa are included later in the journal. KEY WORDS: Audiences, Attendance Patterns, British Context for South African Plays, Class Divisions, Cross-cultural Study, Gender, Performance, Personal as Political, Politics, Racism, Reverse Racism, South African Theatre, Women’s Voices. BACKGROUND: The Front Door had a four-day showing at the Oval House Theatre, London, in 1994, directed by Astrid Hilne as part of the Women’s Theatre Workshop’s ‘Out of the Attic’ Festival. It focuses on the lives of Sophia February and Wilhelmina Pieters, women who support their families in the shanty towns by working as domestic servants for a white family in Cape Town. DE GAY: What were the origins of The Front Door?

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FREUND: The germ of the play came to me at the age of five. I was brought up by a succession of black ‘mothers’ who lived in our house. One of these women had a child of my own age who lived with us, and we played together. At that age I had no consciousness of colour, but one day my mother told me not to play with Frances in the front of the house because the neighbours had complained about me playing with a black girl. Most of my black ‘mothers’ had to live apart from their own children. One maid, a single mother, gave up her job with us because she could not leave her child. This image of mother and child made a big impression on me. I realised that this was the story of many women’s lives. The worst thing about apartheid was the separation of families: men going away from the townships to look for work, and women struggling on with the children. So the characters in the play are a microcosm of the problems facing South Africa as a whole. DE GAY: When did this germ start to form into a play? FREUND: I began to write the play in London in 1993, at around the time of the first democratic elections in South Africa. I felt that it was the best time to write it, and I discovered that I was right when I went back to South Africa shortly afterwards. I visited the shanty towns and went to look for the places where my characters lived. I asked people there what they thought of my story and many said,’ That play is long overdue/I met one mother who reminded me of my character, Sophia–she had got a job as a nurse and did not expect to see her baby again for a year. She seemed to be living the same story I had written. Sadly, there are many many ‘Sophias’. DE GAY: Has the play been staged in South Africa? FREUND: Not yet, but I would love it to be done in South Africa. The Market Theatre has a fine tradition of workshopping, which the play needs for it to develop more fully. It would also be good to see it performed by South African actors, who understand the cultural background to the play. One of the many difficulties I faced when the play was performed in London was that some of the cast did not know South Africa. However, I was disappointed when The Baxter Theatre in Cape Town said it was not able to put on my play Perhaps this was because the play takes a critical look at South Africa, and at the moment people want to celebrate reconciliation and

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not dwell on problems. Someone at the Baxter told me that history is being made, and now is not the time to raise social issues. ‘Walking on eggshells’ is a phrase I heard from many quarters. But theatre will die in South Africa if it stops being critical. Reconciliation in South Africa is worth celebrating, but living much further away has made me see that the dismantling process is tenuous and slow. People now are looking harder than ever for solutions, but the problems are huge. Women and families face financial problems, infant mortality is high and tuberculosis is rife. Even though the apartheid laws have been lifted, many people are still segregated into black and white areas. The issue of people of different races sharing the same areas and having equal opportunities is being discussed, but these things will take time. The whole question of servants needs to be addressed, but people are nervous about looking at this situation. There is marvellous theatre in South Africa. I think the theatre circuit may be doing itself down by not allowing itself to look critically at the cultural situation and its long-term effects, or to reflect people’s stories on stage. In South Africa, I met many people, including some freedom fighters, who were asking for their stories to be written. Women’s stories especially are being neglected. I don’t know why this is, why women’s stories don’t tend to get written down. Maybe it is because improvization is more popular than scripted plays, so South African theatre is less interested in narrative…? DE GAY: I have noticed that women’s inequalities are often overlooked in the theatre, particularly in societies which face major social or political problems–for example in Northern Ireland, or in poor, working-class areas of England. Could the same be true of South Africa? FREUND: Yes, in some ways. Women are feared and yet they are still the most dispossessed group of workers in South Africa. Women’s groups are taking over financially, making a big contribution to change by providing economic funding and marketing, but some men would have preferred it if women had carried on working as domestic servants…. But it is difficult for me to talk about the situation, as a white woman living in England.

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DE GAY: Did leaving South Africa enable you to write The Front Door? FREUND: Some people tell me that if I lived in South Africa I would not have been able to write the play, but others were resentful because they saw me as a white woman in England looking on other people’s problems from a distance. But I don’t label myself as a ‘white woman writer’. The play is about people, human situations and it tries to cut across colour and gender. While I empathize with the single mothers in the play, I also deal with the dilemmas and conflicts between a white married woman and her daughter, and I look at a father’s relationship with his daughter too. DE GAY: The front door is a powerful, visual image in the play. Where did it come from? FREUND: The play was based on people I had known, and the front door was an image which reminded me of one of my black ‘mothers’ who was always dreaming of having her own house. Somewhere in my mind was the idea of ‘our house’–she lived in our house but she didn’t share our home. So she must have had her own door, somewhere. DE GAY: Why did you decide to write parts of your play in dialect? FREUND: The characters were based on people I knew. When I wrote the play, I could hear them speaking in their own dialects in my head. DE GAY: Have you written any plays since The Front Door? FREUND: I am writing a play called ‘Olayinka’, about what is happening now in Central Africa–it’s a terrible situation for women and children. The play has both black and white characters, and mothers are especially important. DE GAY: The theme of mothering seems to be a constant in your work…. Would you say that you ‘write as a woman’? FREUND: Nurturing is something which concerns me very much: how we care for our young, give birth, and make close bonds. It reflects the kind of society we create, and in The Front Door I was very concerned about women’s difficulty in bringing up their children in South Africa. But I have difficulties in saying that I write just as a woman. Sometimes it is easier to write about a different sex, about things which are different from me. The central character in my new play is a boy, although, again, the mother-son bond is important. So I would say that I do not think of myself as

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‘writing as a woman’ but as writing what has to be written. Women have great responsibilities, they have to struggle to do the best for their children, but often their stories are not told. This play is just one story, one beginning. DE GAY: What are your hopes for the future? FREUND: I was encouraged by what I saw at The Market Theatre: clubs from the townships doing improvizations and women doing marvellous monologues and plays, telling the stories of their lives. Lots of black women are coming up now in South African theatre, telling their stories, but I don’t know if their work is being put on. I fear that it won’t be because they don’t always push themselves enough (or aren’t always in positions to do so) and because they work under such tight financial and domestic constraints. I think that lots of stories will come out of South Africa and that in three or four years’ time people will start writing plays which deal with all kinds of issues. I just hope people will be strong enough to be critical and not sentimentalize things.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 69—75 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Glossary of Terms, Names, Events, and Places Compiled by Lizbeth Goodman from a variety of sources including: Bradford, Jean and William Bradford, eds. (1991, 4th edn.) A Dictionary of South African English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harber, Anton and Barbara Ludman, eds. (1995) A-Z of South African Politics. London: Penguin. Joubert, Elsa. (1985) Poppie. Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball (first published, 1978). Lipschutz, Mark R. and R.Kent Rasmusen, eds. (1989, 2nd edn.) A Dictionary of African Historical Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rake, Alan, ed. (1989) Who’s Who in Africa: leaders for the 1990s. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press. Wiseman, John A. (1991) Political Leaders in Black Africa. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

African National Congress (ANC): a political party with mainly black membership, committed to a non-racial people’s democracy (Freedom Charter) and with close links to COSAH and the SACP. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the ANC was renamed in 1923. Afrikaans: independent South African language, derived from Dutch; one of the ten languages of South Africa; a version of Dutch and English developed by Afrikaner (Boer) settlers; considered by many to be the ‘language of the oppressor’. Afrikaner: white colonial settler (see Boer). ag: Afrikaans interjection, roughly equivalent to ‘oh’. Amandla!: Power! Giving the black power salute and shouting ‘amandla ngawethu’ (power is ours). See also Sharpeville. amaBomvana: A Xhosa people. apartheid: ‘separateness’, used in Afrikaans politico-religious discussion since 1929. Apartheid by 1948 described a long-established status quo of discrimination but also became a focal word for the ‘new’ ideology of the National Party. aqira: traditional doctor (see also igquira, and igqwira).

GLOSSARY OF TERMS, NAMES, EVENTS, AND PLACES 81

baasskap: Afrikaner political rule. Dominion, mastery–usually in a political sense of white supremacy. baba: a Zulu word meaning father; a term of respect. Bantu: people–also the term designating a large family of languages (including the Nguni and Sotho-Tswana sub-families). bantustans: black homeland; the term for ‘reserves’, where native African groups would be forced to relocate. Now often a derogatory term. BC: shorthand for Black Consciousness (see below). Biko, Steve: Bantu (black) political activist, founder of the BC movement, who died in detention 12 September, 1977–Biko was active in the Soweto uprising and subsequent protests, and was arrested by security police on August 18, 1977; 26 days later he was dead from massive head injuries sustained during the interrogation (see Soweto Uprising). Black Consciousness Movement: Movement founded by Steve Biko for promotion of awareness of rights and dignity of black people and their eventual liberation. Black Sash, the: a Women’s organization founded in 1955, to protest against violations of Civil Rights and assist victims; also sponsoring research. Boer: (1) an early Dutch Colonist of the Cape, (2) a farmer, (3) a Republican fighter in either of the Boer Wars, (4) an Afrikaner (or sometimes, any white South African), (5) slang: a prison warder or policeman. Botha, P.W.: (Pieter Willem) Prime Minister of South Africa 1978—89, an advocate of apartheid, who secured white electoral support for a new constitution which not only made him an executive president but also created ethnically distinct houses of parliament for whites, Coloured people, and Indians, with no representation for Africans. Buthelezi, Chief Mangosuthu: Zulu leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party; he said the party would not take part in the elections, but changed his mind a week before the historic event. Coconut: slang–black child attending a white school, learning mainly English. Coloured: South African of racially mixed descent. The term is now often avoided by many publications and speakers, hence ‘Coloured’ or socalled ‘Coloured’. Crossroads: a township area near Cape Town. de Klerk, F.W.: (Frederik Willem) Leader of the South African National Party from 1989; the last leader of South Africa under apartheid. Known as a conservative figure earlier in his career, he later implemented many important changes and reforms. He played a crucial role in the transition to democracy, ordering the release of Nelson Mandela and lifting the ban on the ANC and South African Communist Party. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela in 1993. de Klerk, W.A.: Afrikaans playwright, author of ‘Puritans in Africa’.

82 GLOSSARY OF TERMS, NAMES, EVENTS, AND PLACES

Ellenbogen, Nicholas: director of Theatre for Africa. Gogo: grandmother, or more generally, venerated older female relation. Guguletu: a township near Cape Town. Hani, Chris: (Chris Martin Thembisile Hani) A leading figure in the younger generation of the ANC, and Leader of the South African Communist Party, murdered in April 1993. Head, Bessie: one of South Africa’s leading writers, born in South Africa in 1937–the child of an ‘illicit’ union between a white woman and a black man–writing from ‘exile’ in Botswana for many years. Her writing addressed political and personal issues; her story Maru has been adapted for the stage. She died at the age of 49, in Botswana in 1986. igqira: ‘witchdoctor’ who treats people for physical and psychological ailments, usually also a herbalist. igqwira: ‘witchdoctor’ who uses his power for evil purposes, such as to cast spells. Imbongi: praise singers to African chiefs whose traditional role is to chant in honour of the chief and his ancestors. Inkatha: aka Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesiswe (Organisation for Freedom of the People): a Zulu national organisation aiming at a non-racial democracy in South Africa with scope for free enterprise. Founded as a social and cultural body in 1928. interregnum: in recent South African history, the period following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, up to the first democratic election in April 1994. Joubert, Elsa: contemporary Afrikaans writer, author of noted epic story Poppie: the real life account of the life of one black woman and her struggle to hold her family together under the oppressive laws of apartheid, in the area of the Cape Province–the book is often referred to as the South African, ‘real’, Mother Courage (see also ‘poppie’). kaffir: (1) slang: ‘nigger’: a term of contempt for a black person held to be offensive, developed from the ‘proper’ use: (2) a member of the Xhosa, Pondo or Thembu nations, regular nineteenth century use for those speaking the Xhosa language. kaffirland: rural tribal areas. Karroo: The arid plateau or semi-desert regions of the Cape Province. Kente, Gibson: popular actor in South Africa, known for theatre work and also his appearances in soap operas. Khawuleza: hurry up. Khoi: The related group of languages spoken by the Khoikho including Nama (qua), Korana and Griqua. Khoikhoi: a pastoral people of South Africa and Namibia often called Hottentots (literally, men of men). KhoiSan: group of people comprising the Khoi and the San (bushmen) and their languages.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS, NAMES, EVENTS, AND PLACES 83

lekker: (1) general term of approbation especially popular among children, with various positive connotations including: pleasant, excellent, delicious, beautiful, good, (2) slang: tipsy, merry. Mandela, Nelson (Rolihlahla): Current President of South Africa, the first black man to be elected to the post. He served 27 years in prison for his military activities with the ANC, and the campaign for his release became a focal point for the international struggle against apartheid. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with F.W. de Klerk in 1993. Mandela, Winnie: A South African politician who has frequently attracted controversy for her radical views. She was married to Nelson Mandela for over 30 years; they separated in 1992. Previously, she held the post of Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture, Science, and Technology; she was for many years-while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned–the main public voice of the ANC. Maponya, Maishe: contemporary black South African playwright, author of The Hungry Earth. Born in 1951, he and his family were forcibly removed from their home and ‘relocated’ to Soweto in 1966. He began writing in 1976, and refers to his theatre as ‘theatre of the dispossessed’. Mtwa, Percy: co-author, with Mbongeni, of the well known 1981 South African satirical play Woza Albert! Ndebele: An African people of Zulu descent now in Zimbabwe and the Transvaal. National Party: the Political party committed until recently to a policy of separate development for each major racial group, but since 1989—90 to ‘a united multi-party democratic state with a single citizenship’ and to dialogue with the ANC and other ‘liberation’ groups. Established in 1915. Ngema, Mbongeni: coauthor, with Percy Mtwa, of the well known 1981 South African satirical play Woza Albert!; also the author of Asinamali! Nguni: A group of African peoples including the Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa, and Zulus and that family of languages. PAC (Pan African Congress): African resistance body established in 1957, its policy then stated as: government of the Africans for the Africans, with everybody who owes allegiance and loyalty only to Africa and accepts the democratic rule of an African majority, being regarded as an African. Founded by Robert Sobukwe. poemdra: a performance poetry or storytelling form combining poetry, performance, and movement. poppie: colloquial: familiar mode of address when referring to a young girl, equivalent of ‘girlie’, a diminutive. Ramphele, Mamphela, Dr.: Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and a prominent political activist. She is the widow of BC activist Steve Biko.

84 GLOSSARY OF TERMS, NAMES, EVENTS, AND PLACES

Robben Island: Island in Table Bay, at various times a penal colony, leper colony and mental asylum and a place of detention for political prisoners. San: the people known as Bushmen; the languages of this group. shebeen: (illegal) house of liquor, pub. Sharpeville: scene of demonstration against Pass Laws on 21 March, 1960, in which 65 people were killed. Now used figuratively for any similar violent confrontation. Simon, Barney: Late artistic director and co-founder of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Smit, Bartho: emerged as a major South African playwright in the 1960s. His anti-apartheid stance was very controversial, and his influence has been profound. He became a mentor figure for a whole generation of young Afrikaans playwrights, including Reza De Wet. Soweto: acronym for the South Western Township (of Johannesburg)– now itself a city, and the scene of the first major student uprising of 1976. Soweto uprising: major student protest on 16 June, 1976 (now known as Soweto Day, and as National Youth Day). The protest was kindled by a government decision to enforce the use of Afrikaans as a language of medium in schools; this provided a focus for more generalised anger about apartheid oppressions of many kinds. The uprising was supported by the new Black Consciousness Movement (led by Steve Biko), and led to a series of revolts and demonstrations which lasted 18 months. (See Biko). Staffrider: person who rides illegally on the outside of suburban trains (to avoid paying the fare or to avoid theft or assault). State of Emergency: in 1984—5, racial divisions and uprisings were so extreme that a State of Emergency was declared, and the government (under P.W.Botha) banned news coverage of the violence. Tambo, Oliver: leader of the ANC in Zambia. Tsotsitaal: a polyglot language common to many of the South African townships, especially near Cape Town. Tutu, Archbishop Desmond: The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and a strident critic of the apartheid regime. Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch: Prime Minister of South Africa from 1955; one of the chief architects of the apartheid system, stabbed to death by a parliamentary messenger in the House of Assembly in September 1966. Verwoerd, Willhelm: Grandson of H.F., dedicated to helping to dismantle the apartheid system both socially, through political work with wife Melanie (ANC activist), and academically, through his post as Philosophy Lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS, NAMES, EVENTS, AND PLACES 85

Woza Albert!: literally, ‘Arise Albert!’, a well known 1981 South African satirical play by Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema, portraying the hypothetical coming of Christ to South Africa under apartheid. Woza: imperative command: come!, rise up!, return! Xhosa: (1) a member of an African people, originally of the present Transkei, Ciskei and Eastern Cape, (2) the Nguni language of the Xhosa people is deemed to be the earliest form of Bantu speech, into which the Bible has been translated. Xosa: earlier spelling of Xhosa. Zulu: member of an African people originally of Zululand and Natal; also the language of these people.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 77—79 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Suggested Further Reading

Titles by contributors and related work on gender, the politics of performance and South African theatre. (also see the lists of references and works cited following each article) Adam, Heribert and Kogila Moodley. (1993) The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa, Perspectives on Southern Africa 50. Berkeley, L.A. and London: The University of California Press. Agenda Editorial Collective, the, eds. Agenda: A Journal about Women and Gender (Durban, South Africa)–to obtain copies, contact: 29 Ecumenical Centre Trust, 20 St. Andrews St., Durban, 4001 South Africa. August, Tyrone. (1990) ‘Interview with Gcina Mhlophe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 329—335. Awkward, Michael. (1995) Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender and the Politics of Reading Chicago: Chicago University Press. Banning, Yvonne. (1990) ‘Language in the Theatre: Mediating Realities in an Audience’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 12—33. Black Sash, the editorial committee. (1991) SASH: Women and Gender, Vol. 34, No. 2. Black Sash, the editorial committee. (1993) SASH: Conference 1993, Vol. 36, No. 1. Blumberg, Marcia. (1991) ‘Languages of Violence: Fugard’s Boesman and Lena’ in James Redmond, ed. Violence in Drama, Cambridge University Press. Blumberg, Marcia. (1993) ‘Fragmentation and Psychosis: Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!’ in James Redmond (ed.) Madness in Drama, Cambridge University Press. Bobo, Jaqueline. (1995) Black Women as Cultural Readers, Columbia University Press. Davies, Carole Boyce. (1994) Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, Routledge. Davis, Geoffrey and Fuchs, Anne. (1996) Theatre and Change in South Africa, Vol. 12, Contemporary Theatre Studies, Harwood Academic Publishers. Flockemann, Miki. (1991) ‘Gcina Mhlophe’s Have You Seen Zandile?: English or English? The Situation of Drama in Literature and Language Departments

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING 87

in the Emergent Post-Apartheid South Africa’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2. Flockemann, Miki. (1992) ‘The State of South African Drama up to February 1990: the case of an(other) drama’, Pretexts, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 99—108. Fuchs, Anne. (1990) Playing the Market, Vol. 1, Contemporary Theatre Studies, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press. Goodman, Lizbeth. (1993) Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own, London: Routledge. Goodman, Lizbeth. (1994) ‘Stages Between Theory and Practice: Teaching Feminist Theatre’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 3—23. Goodman, Lizbeth, ed. (1996) Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press. Graver, David and Loren Kruger. (1989) ‘South Africa’s National Theatre: The Market or the Street?’, in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 19. Gray, Stephen. The Theatre of Fatima Dike’, in The English Academy Review, Vol. 2, 1984, pp. 54—60. Gray, Stephen. (1990) “‘Between Me and My Country”: Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 21. Gunner, Liz. (1990) ‘Introduction: Forms of Popular Culture and the Struggle for Space’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 199—206. Gunner, Liz. (1994) Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry, and Song in Southern Africa, Johannesburg: The University of Witswatersrand Press. Hauptfleisch, Temple and Ian Steadman, eds. (1984) South African Theatre: Four Plays and an Introduction, HAUM Educational Publishers. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1989) ‘Citytalk, Theatretalk: Dialect, Dialogue and Multilingual Theatre in South Africa’ in English in Africa, Vol. 16, No. 1. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1988) ‘From the Savoy to Soweto: The Shifting Paradigm in South African Theatre’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1992) ‘Post-Colonial Criticism, Performance Theory and the Evolving Forms of South African Theatre’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2. Hauptfleisch, Temple. Yolande du Preez and Yvette Hutchison. (1989) ‘A Bibliography of South African Theatre 1987—88’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1993) ‘Crossover Theatre: New Trends in Theatremaking in South Africa’, Assaph: Studies in Theatre, No. 9. Hauptfleisch, Temple. (1995) ‘The Company you Keep: Subversive Thoughts on the Sociopolitical impact of the playwright and the performer’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. xi, No. 44. Horn, Andrew. (1986) ‘South African Theatre: Ideology and Rebellion’, African Literatures, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 211—233. International Defense Aid Fund for South Africa, eds. (1991) Women Under Apartheid, in Photographs and Text, London.

88 SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Joubert, Elsa. (1980) Poppie, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball with Hodder and Stoughton. Kershaw, Baz. (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge. Kruger, Loren. (1991) ‘Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York’ in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2. Kruger, Loren. (1994) ‘Placing “New Africans” in the “Old” South Africa: Drama, Modernity, and Racial Identities in Johannesburg, circa 1935’, in Modernism/ Modernity, Johns Hopkins, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 113—131. Larlham, Peter. (1992) ‘The Impact of the Dismantling of Apartheid on Theatre in South Africa’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2. Maponya, Maishe. (1984) ‘Interview’ (conducted by Carola Luther), in The English Academy Review, Vol. 2, pp. 19—32. Maponya, Maishe. (1995) Doing Plays for a Change: Five Works, ed. Ian Steadman, The University of Witswatersrand Press. Mathilda, Yvette, ed. (1995) Open Space, and anthology of plays including Reza de Wet’s ‘A Worm in the Bud’. Human and Rousseau. Mvula, Enoch Timpunza. (1991) ‘Strategy in Ngoni Women’s Oral Poetry’, in Critical Arts, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 1—37. Ndlova, Duma, ed. (1986) Woza Africa! An Anthology of South African Plays, with a Foreword by Wole Soyinka, George Braziller. Okpewho, Isadore. (1990) The Oral Performance in Africa Nigeria: Spectrum Books/UK: Safari Books. Orkin, Martin. (1986) ‘Body and State in Blood Knot/The Blood Knot’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1. Orkin, Martin. (1991) Drama and the South African State, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Orkin, Martin. (1992) ‘Whose Popular Theatre and Performance?’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2. Pavis, Patrice. (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London: Routledge. Roberts, Diane. (1994) The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region, London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. (1991) ‘A Tale of a Few Cities: Interculturalism on the Road’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 28. Spink, Kathryn. (1991) Black Sash: The Beginning of a Bridge in South Africa, with a Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, London: Methuen. Steadman, Ian. (1981) ‘Alternative Performance in South Africa’ in Critical Arts: A Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1. Steadman, Ian. (1984) ‘Black South African Theatre After Nationalism’, The English Academy Review, Vol. 2, pp. 9—18. Steadman, Ian. (1984) ‘Alternative Politics, Alternative Performance: 1976 and Black South African Theatre’ in Daymond, Margaret, Jacobs, Johan, and Lenta, Margaret eds., Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, Durban: University of Natal Press.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING 89

Steadman, Ian. (1988) ‘Stages in the Revolution: Black South African Theater since 1976’ in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 19, No. 1. Steadman, Ian. (1989) ‘Theatre Studies in the 1990s’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2. Steadman, Ian. (1990) ‘Towards Popular Theatre in South Africa’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2. Steadman, Ian. (1990) ‘Collective Creativity: Theatre for a Post-Apartheid Society’ in Trump (eds.), in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, Ohio University Press. Steadman, Ian. (1992) ‘The Uses of Theatre’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1. Steadman, Ian. (1992) ‘Performance and Politics in Process: Practices of Representation in South African Theatre’ in Theatre Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research, Vol. 33, No. 2. Walder, Dennis. (1992) ‘Resituating Fugard: South African Drama as Witness’ in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 32, pp. 343—361. Walder, Dennis, ed. (1993) Athol Fugard: The Township Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walder, Dennis. (1993) ‘Crossing Boundaries: The Genesis of the Township Plays’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 39, No. 4. Young, Robert C. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 81—83 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Notes on Contributors

Jane de Gay is a full-time Research Assistant on the Gender, Politics, Performance Research Project in the Department of Literature, at the Open University. She is sub-editor of Feminist Stages, ed. Goodman (Harwood, 1996), and co-editor of The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (Routledge, 1998). She is also completing a doctoral thesis in the Literature Department of the Open University, on influence in Virginia Woolf’s novels. Juanita Finestone lectures and teaches in the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. She has completed a Masters degree (Cum Laude) in dance and choreography: The Politics and Poetics of Choreography: The Dancing Body in South African Dance. She is also assistant Artistic Director for the First Physical Theatre Company for which she both performs and choreographs. She participated in the Open University’s conference on ‘South African Theatre as/and Intervention’ in August, 1996. Miki Flockemann has been teaching in the English Department of the University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa, since 1984. She has published widely on South African theatre and teaching methodologies. Other publications (which have appeared locally and in Tulsa Women’s Studies, Ariel, and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature) focus on comparative studies of the aesthetics of transformation in writing by women from South Africa and the African diaspora. Relevant publications include: ‘Gcina Mhlophe’s “Have You Seen Zandile?” English or English? The Situation of Drama in Literature and Language Departments in the Emergent Post-Apartheid South

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 91

Africa’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, September 1991, and The State of South African Drama up to February 1990: the case of an(other) drama, Pretexts, Vol. 4, No. 1,1992, pp. 99—108. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, and Chair of the Gender, Politics, Performance Research Project (one of the ongoing initiatives of the Gender in Writing and Performance Research Group) and of the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project, for the Open University Faculty of Arts and the BBC. She is the author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (Routledge, 1993) and editor of Feminist Stages (Harwood, 1996), Literature and Gender (Routledge, 1996), and coeditor of Shakespeare, Aphra Behn and the Canon (Routledge, 1996), and Imagining Women: Cultural Representations and Gender (Polity Press, 1992). Her next authored book, Sexuality in Performance, will be published by Routledge in 1999. Mythic Women/ Real Women: Plays and Performance Pieces by Women is forthcoming from Faber and Faber in July 1999. Erica Freund is a South African playwright and teacher, currently living and working in London. Her play The Front Door was premièred at the Oval House Theatre, South London, not long after the elections in April, 1995. Other work includes the stage play Olayinka (1996) and the radio plays Khizzie (1995) and Tearing at Silence (1996), all of which deal with issues of multiculturalism and all of which include African and British characters and settings. She often uses drama in her teaching; her first writing for the theatre was for her one-woman children’s theatre company, Happy Time. Temple Hauptfleisch is Director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies and Professor of Drama at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (he was previously Head of the Centre for South African Theatre Research at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria). His many publications include: Athol Fugard: A Source Guide (1982), Towards a Methodology for Theatre Research–a South African Perspective (1984), ‘Citytalk, Theatretalk: Dialect, Dialogue and Multilingual Theatre in South Africa’ in English in Africa, Vol. 16, No. 1, May 1989, ‘From the Savoy to Soweto: The Shifting Paradigm in South African Theatre’, in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, May 1988, ‘Post-Colonial Criticism, Performance Theory and the Evolving Forms of South African Theatre’ in South African Theatre Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2,1992, ‘Crossover Theatre: New Trends in Theatremaking in South Africa’ in Assaph: Studies in Theatre, No. 9, 1993. The Company you Keep: Subversive Thoughts on the Sociopolitical impact of the playwright and the performer’ in New Theatre

92 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Quarterly, Vol. xi, No. 44, 1995, and (with Ian Steadman), South African Theatre: Four Plays and an Introduction (Pretoria: HAUM Educational Publishers, 1984). He is co-editor with Ian Steadman of The South African Theatre Journal. Anja Huismans is a post-graduate student and Lecturer in Dramatic Theory in the Department of Drama at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Nokuthula (Thuli) Mazibuko is a Masters student working with Miki Flockemann at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. She lives in Johannesburg and works as personal assistant to South Africa’s renownded diva, Sibongile Khumalo. She is completing a dissertation on the representations of black women in musical theatre, ranging over five decades (1950—1996), including King Kong and Sarafina!. Dennis Walder, a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is Head of the Department of Literature at the Open University, where he is also Chair of the Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures Research Group. Author and editor of numerous publications on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, including nine books, he published the standard work on Athol Fugard in 1984, and is currently editing the third volume of the scholarly edition of Fugard’s plays for Oxford University Press. His next book will be Post-Colonial Literatures in English: Theory and Practice (Blackwells, 1997). He is working on a study of South African Theatre.

Contemporary Theatre Review 1999, Vol. 9, Part 1, pp. 85—88

Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood

Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. Printed in Singapore.

Index

Aboriginal cultures, 48 advertising of theatre, 47 African cultures Afrikaner, 8, 47, 58—73 Xhosa, 33—34, 43 Zulu, 43 Afrikaans language, 4, 10, 33, 54, 58— 73 Afrikaner culture, 8, 47, 58—73 Alexander, Muriel, 61 all the Rage, see Denison, Janine Amkpa, Awam, 8 ANC (African National Congress), 3, 4—5, 8, 14, 15, 43 Cultural Desk, 43 anger, 16, 23, 24—26, 61 Apartheid (and after), v, 3, 12, 13, 14, 16, 27, 61, 62, 76 attendance patterns, 74 for women, 44 audience(s), v, 7, 8, 10, 12, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 47, 54, 58, 62, 69, 73, 74 impact on a playwright’s work, 48— 50 languages understood by, 22

Baxter Theatre, the, 22, 76 Biko, Steve, 51 Black Consciousness (BC) Movement, 26, 51 Black Sash, the, 7, 2, 19 Blumberg, Marcia, iii, 14 body-consciousness, 14, 29 and bulimia, 14 lack of, 36 body politics, v Boesman and Lena, see Fugard, Athol Brecht, Bertolt, 13 Brewster, Yvonne, 27 Breytenbach, Breyten, 62 British context for South African plays, 74 ff. Bryceland, Yvonne, 10 Buckland, Andrew, 64 bulimia, 14 Civic Theatre, the, 46, 48 class divisions (also see racial divisions), v, 10, 16, 22, 26, 29, 44, 58, 60, 74, 77 ‘classic theatre’ adaptations, on stage, 13 Othello, 5

Banning, Yvonne, iii, 7, 14 Barn Theatre, the, 23

100

INDEX 94

coloured (designation of race, as opposed to black or white) people, 7, 24, 73 comedy (role in culture), 14 Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, 7—9 creativity, 61, 67 cross-cultural studies, v, 44, 74 cultural boycott, 7, 12, 13, 46 cultural change, 1 ff., 29—44 cultural developments in South Africa 1993—6, v—15 dance, 48, 52—54 traditional African, 36 deconstruction, 5, 63 Denison, Janine, iii, 14 all the Rage, 14 Diepe Gronde, see Wet, Reza de Dike, Fatima, iii, 12, 13, 14, 15 Glass House, The, 18, 20—22, 23— 26 interviewed, 16—28 So What’s New?, 18, 19, 26—28 Dommisse, Hermien, 61 drama therapy, 7

interview with Gcina Mhlophe, 44— 58 Freund, Erica, iii, 13 interviewed, 74—78 Fugard, Athol, 5, 8, 10—13, 27, 28, 60— 61 Boesman and Lena, 5 The Island, 27 Siswe Bansi is Dead, 27 Valley Song, 10—13 funding, academic, iii, v arts and theatre, 77 Gay, Jane de, iii, v interview with Erica Freund, 74—78 gender politics, v—15, 51 gender, v—15, 16 ff., 29 ff., 31, 44 ff., 51, 58 ff., 67, 74 ff., 77 Glass House, The, see Dike, Fatima Goodman, Lizbeth, iii-v, 27 introduction, v—15 Goosen, Jeanne, 64 Grahamstown, Festival, 46—47, 64 Rhodes University in, 63, 69 Gray, Stephen, 16 Gught, Rosalie van der, 61

Eastern European parallels to South African theatre, 7 elitism, 44 Ellenbogen, Nicholas, 64 empowerment, 7 English culture, 46—47, 64 English language, 7, 8, 10, 16, 31, 33, 34, 54, 58, 60—61, 63, 64, 69, 73 understood by audiences, 22, 39 equal opportunities, 76 Esaa, Saira, 61

Hani, Chris, 4—5, 14 Hauptfleisch, Temple, iii, 58—63 Have you Seen Zandile?, see Mhlophe, Gcina Honeyman, Janice, 61 Huismans, Anja, interview with Reza de Wet, 58—73 Hungry Earth, the, see Maponya, Maishe

feminism, v, 7, 13, 66 ffrancgon-Davies, Gwen, 61 Finestone, Juanita, 58—73 Flockemann, Miki, iii, 3, 14, 29 interview with Fatima Dike, 16—28

identity, 29, 40, 58, 62 Afrikaner, 58 cultural, 10 regional, 10 imperialism, 8 Inkatha (IFP: Inkatha Freedom Party), 8

95 INDEX

Island, the, 27 jazz, 52 Joyce, James, 33 Klerk, W.A., de., 60 Klotz, Phyllis, 27 Kushlick, Taubie, 61 Laker, Babs, 61 Lamb, Doreen, 61 language, 8, 10, 16, 29, 73 and power, 8 as issue, 8, 44, 58, 60—61, 69 Fatima Dike’s use of, 22 Erica Freund’s use of, 77 Gcina Mhlophe’s use of, 34, 39, 54 Reza de Wet’s use of, 58, 60—61, 69 Leipoldt, Louis, 60 Lovechild, see Mhlophe, Gcina Luther, Carola, 56 mainstream theatre, 7 Mandela, Nelson, 12, 15, 19 Manim, Mannie, 41, 43 MaNcube, Sello Maake, 20 Maponya, Maishe, 31, 35, 56 The Hungry Earth, 35, 38 Market Theatre, the, 5, 8, 18, 31, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 61, 76, 78 Mazibuko, Thuli, 3, 29, 44—58 media representations, v, 4—7 Mhlophe, Gcina, iii, 13, 14, 15 Have you Seen Zandile?, 29, 31, 35—41, 51, 54, 55 interviewed, 29—44, 44—58 Lovechild, 31, 52 Mosala, Bernadette, 61 mothers, influence of, 16, 29, 44 Fatima Dike on her mother, 27 Gcina Mhlophe on her mother, 40— 41, 50, 54, 58 in Erica Freund’s plays, 74—76, 78

Mtshali, Thembi, 31 Mtwa, Percy, 35 music, 29, 35—36, 52—54 Mutloatse, Mothobi, 34 Naude, Wena, 61 Neethling-Pohl, Anna, 61 Ngema, Mbongeni, 35 Ngugi, 23, 33 Nico Malan Theatre, the, 8 Nkonyeni, Nomhle, iii, 5, 10 oral storytelling, 16, 29, 31 as women’s domain, 56 influence on theatre, 13—14 Gcina Mhlophe and, 43—44, 48, 52 PAC (Pan African Congress), 43 patience, 12, 33 patriarchy, 64—67, 71 performance, v—15, 16 ff., 29 ff., 31, 44 ff., 48—50, 52, 58, 74 ff. spaces, 61 Vita awards for, 63 women’s roles, 46 personal as political, 16 ff., 44 ff., 74 ff. Pietersen, Dudley, 3 plays by South African women (see also Dike, Fatima; Freund, Erica; Mhlophe, Gcina; Wet, Reza de), 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 35, 38, 61—62 Plessis, P.G. du, 60 poemdras, 44, 52 poetry, 16 ff., 19, 29 ff., 31, 34, 35, 43, 44 ff., 48, 52, 55 genre for or women, 66 politics (also see body politics, gender politics), and Erica Freund’s work, 74ff. and Fatima Dike’s work, 16 ff. and Gcina Mhlophe’s work, 29—44, 44 ff.

INDEX 96

and Reza de Wet’s work, 58 ff. developments in South Africa 1993—96, v—15 popular culture (see also soap operas), v, 16, 29 post(-)colonial, 3, 14 power politics, v, 16, 29 racial divisions, v, 58, 60 racism (see also reverse racism), 8, 16, 23— 26, 29, 44, 74 at Grahamstown Festival, 50 rape, 16 regional arts associations, Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB), 8, 9, 62 resistance, 16 reverse racism, 16, 27, 29, 74 Ryswyk, Esther van, 61 Sachs, Albie, 62 Sagan, Leontine, 61 sexuality, female, 12 Shakespeare, William, 33 Othello, 5—7 Simon, Barney, 23, 28, 31 Siswe Bansi is Dead, see Fugard, Athol Smit, Bartho, 60, 64—66 Sneddon, Elizabeth, 61 So What’s New?, See Dike, Fatima soap operas, 16, 26 Generations, 20 South African theatre, v—15, 16 ff., 29 ff., 44 ff., 58 ff., 74 ff. effect of cultural boycott on, 12 elitism in, 44—46 relationships between women and men ignored in, 39 Reza de Wet’s contribution to, 58— 63 themes in, 5 women in, 7, 10, 77—78 Soweto, 5, 35

uprising at, 16 Space Theatre, the, 16, 62 Stopford, Clare, 9, 61 street theatre, lack of in Afrikaans theatre, 73 politics performed as, v student theatre, production at the Grahamstown festival, 47 subversive strategies of representation, 12 Suzman, Janet, 5 taboo, 51 for women, 44 Taylor, Mavis, 8—9, 16, 23, 27, 61 teaching of drama at universities in South Africa, 3, 7, 16, 35, 44, 61, 63 theatre venues, locations of (see also Barn Theatre, the; Baxter Theatre, the; Civic Theatre, the; Market Theatre, the; Nico Malan Theatre, the; Space Theatre, the), 22, 44—46 Thompson, John B., iii, 4 township theatre, 20, 46, 78 lack of venues for, 22 not professional, 35

Valley Song, see Fugard, Athol Vanne, Marda, 61 Vanrenen, Maralin, 31 Verwoerd, Willhelm, iii, 4—5 Verwoerd, Melanie, 4 violence, v, 3—4, 13, 16 abeyance of, 13 representation in performance, 7, 20 voter education in theatre, v, 7, 14 Vusisizwe Players, the, 26 Walder, Dennis, iii, 10, 12, 44 interview with Gcina Mhlophe, 29— 44

97 INDEX

Western theatre traditions, on stage, 20 Western theatre traditions, taught in universities, 44 Wet, Reza de, iii, 13, 15, 58—73 Diepe Gronde, 58, 61, 63, 66 interviewed, 63—73 women as central to the community, 27 women as central to the home, 46, 56, 74—76 women as playwrights (see also Dike, Fatima; Freund, Erica; Mhlophe, Gcina; Wet, Reza de), 8—15, 46, 61—63, 64—66 women as poets (see also Dike, Fatima; Mhlophe, Gcina), 66 women as political activists, 3, 7—8, 77 women as teachers, 3, 7, 61 women’s experiences, 27, 44 ff. women’s influences, 16 ff., 20, 44 ff. women’s status in theatre, 7, 10, 26—27, 61—63, 77—78 women’s voices, 12, 14—15, 44 ff., 58 ff., 74 ff. Woza Albert!, 20 Wyk Louw, N.P.van, 60 Xhosa culture, elders’ meeting, 33—34 folk tales, 43 Xhosa language, 22, 29—31, 33, 34, 39, 54, 60 Yeats, William Butler, 33

You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock, 26, 27 Zulu culture, folk tales, 43 Zulu language, 29, 39, 54

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