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Acting Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Loren Kruger
Loren Kruger
Affiliation:
Loren Kruger is The author of The National State (University of Chicago Press) and of numerous articles on South African Theatre. She teaches atThe University of Chicagoand is currently co-editor of Theatre Journal.
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Extract

I begin with two images of African actors. The first, from Asinamali by the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Africa (1935; Plate 24), portrays the ‘smelling-out of a fraudulent umthakathi’ (which can be translated as diviner or trickster), which were followed, on this occasion, by other scenes portraying the civilizing influence of European settlers. While the first offers an image of African agency and modernity in the face of oppression, the second, with its apparently un-mediated reconstruction of pre-colonial ritual and, in its teleological juxtaposition of ‘tribal’ and ‘civilized’ custom, seems to respond to the quite different terms set by a long history of displays, along the lines of the Savage South Africa Show (1900), in which the authenticity of the Africans on stage was derived not from their agency but by their incorporation into the representation of colonial authority.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 1996 , pp. 132 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1996

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References

Notes

1. Steadman, Ian, ‘Theatre Beyond Apartheid’, Research in African Literatures, 22: 3 (1991), p. 84.Google Scholar

2. Kavanagh, Robert's pioneering but idionsyncratic Theatre and Cultural Struggle, London, 1985Google Scholar, emphasizes the paradigm of theatre as a cultural weapon, as does Martin Orkin's more recent and more comprehensive Drama and the South African State (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1991). Ian Steadman's work traces this trajectory, from the focus on protest theatre in ‘Black South African Theatre after Nationalism’, English Academy Review 2 (1984), pp. 9–18 and in ‘Towards a Popular Theatre in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16:2 (1990), pp. 208–28, but critiques it in ‘Theatre beyond Apartheid’, ibid. See also Kruger, Loren, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Drama, History and Liminal Moments in South Africa’, Modern Drama, 38: 1 (1995), pp. 60–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. As Negt and Kluge have argued in response to Habermas's classic conceptualization, Qffentlichkeit (‘publicity’, usually translated as ‘public sphere’) includes not only physical space for public activity but also the civic and cultural mobilization necessary if the popular majority is to emerge as the public. It also acknowledges the experience of exclusion from public action which might precede such mobilization. See Negt, Oskar and Kluge, Alexander, Public Sphere and Experience, trans. Labanyi, Peter, Daniel, Jamie Owen and Oksiloff, Assenka. Minneapolis, 1993.Google Scholar For a more thorough going theory of theatre as virtual public sphere, see Kruger, Loren, The National Stage. Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America, Chicago, 1992, pp. 3–29.Google Scholar

4. The concept of ‘invented tradition’ is that of Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983, p. 3.Google Scholar Veit Erlmann uses this concept to illuminate the construction of a folk tradition by New Africans who drew on urban and rural, modern and pre-colonial practices; see Erlmann, , African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago, 1991, p. 150.Google Scholar

5. Herbert Dhlomo, playwright and essayist of Zulu parentage, argued in the 1930s for the dramatic elements in izibongo (praises), but notes that each was delivered by a single speaker; Dhlomo, , ‘Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama’ (1939)Google Scholar, reprinted in Literary Criticism and Theory of H. I. E. Dhlomo, ed. Nicholas Visser, special issue of English in Africa 4:2 (1977), pp. 23–36. Finnegan, Ruth, in her classic account, Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford, 1970Google Scholar, notes that South Bantu conventions favour the sequential impersonation of several characters by the storyteller or praise poet, rather than the dramatic imitation of individual characters, each by a designated actor (p. 501).

6. I am drawing here on V. I. Mudimbe's reflections on re-traditionalization as an alternative to rather than repudation of Western modernization; see Mudimbe, , The Invention of Africa, Bloomington, 1988, p. 169Google Scholar, and, for further commentary on the ambiguity of re-traditionalization as an alternative road to modernity in the New African context, Kruger, Loren, ‘Placing the “New Africans” in the “Old” South Africa: Drama, Modernity and Racial Identities in Johannesburg, circa 1935’, Modernism/Modernity, 1: 2 (1994), pp. 117–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Caldecott, C. H. (son of the impresario, A. T.) Descriptive History of the Zulu Kafirs. London, 1853, p. 26.Google Scholar For detailed comments, see Elizabeth Dell, ‘Museums and the Representation of “Savage South Africa” to 1910’. Ph.D Dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1993.

8. Lloyd, T. C., ‘The Bantu Tread the Footlights’. South African Opinion (8 03 1935), pp. 3–5.Google Scholar

9. Coplan, David, In Township Tonight!, London, 1985, p. 127.Google Scholar

10. Gérard, Albert, Four African Literatures, Berkeley, 1971, p. 197Google Scholar; Kavanagh, , p. 45.Google Scholar

11. Slosberg, Bertha, Pagan Tapestry, London, 1939, p. 194.Google Scholar

12. Slosberg, , p. 192.Google Scholar

13. Skota, T. D. Mweli, ed. and comp. The African Yearly Register. Being an Illustrated National Biographical Dictionary (Who's Who) of Black Folks in Africa, Johannesburg, 1931, p. 215.Google Scholar

14. See, for example, Coplan, , pp. 113–142.Google Scholar

15. Bantu World (hereafter BW), 7 May 1932, p. 17; 28 September 1935, p. 4; 14 March 1936.

16. Christopher Ballantine's book and accompanying tape, Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville, Johannesburg, 1993, definitively demonstrates the diversity of the repertoire.

17. South African Institute of Race Relations: AD843/Kb28.2.2; Historical Papers, Witwatersrand University Libraries.

18. Mbali, William, ‘The Darktown Strutters and Merry Blackbirds play in Queenstown’, BW 24 04 1937, p. 17.Google Scholar

19. Erlmann, , p. 63.Google Scholar

20. Matheus, John (1887–1983)Google Scholar published ‘The ‘Cruiter’, in 1926, after the first wave of the Great Migration had brought close to a million African-Americans to the Northern cities. The play portrays, in two brief but vivid scenes, an encounter between a share-cropping family and an unnamed white recruiter, distinguished by his formal wear (hat and gloves) as well as formal speech, as opposed to the sharecroppers’ dialect. It is not known whether Motsieloa and his company attempted to imitate this folkloristic rendering of African-American speech or whether they followed the example of the Bantu Peoples' Players, who substituted local African English for the American dialects of The Hairy Ape in a 1935 production in Johannesburg; see Kruger, Loren, ‘New Africans and Neo-Colonial Theatre’, South African Theatre Journal, 9: 1 (1995), pp. 29–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Tim Couzen's study of the playwright and essayist Dhlomo, Herbert, The New African: The Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo, Johannesburg, 1985Google Scholar, and Veit Erlmann's essay on the composer, Reuben Caluza, Dhlomo's cousin (Erlmann, 112–155) are exemplary.