Sarafina!: The children’s revolution from Soweto to Broadway

Abstract

On 16 June 1976 an estimated 20,000 black students took to the streets of Soweto, South Africa in protest against the mandatory use of Afrikaans in all segregated schools. Apartheid police responded to the protest march with unrestrained brutal violence, firing live rounds of ammunition at the unarmed school children. This police intervention left thousands injured and 176 people dead. Using Mbongeni Ngema’s Sarafina!: The Sounds of Liberation (1987), this account problematizes the often romanticized post-apartheid portrayal of the usage of art as a tool to fight apartheid. It investigates two interrelated themes. First, it interrogates how the memory of the 1976 student protest was shaped, preserved, remembered and transmitted over space and time through performance as the show toured from apartheid South Africa to the US. Second, through a close reading of the musical this article investigates how Sarafina!’s global circulation and reception negotiated the United Nations sanctioned academic, cultural and sporting boycott imposed on South Africa in 1968, which called for a total ban on all such activities. This close reading of the tour offers a nuanced understanding of the complicated and sometimes contradictory dynamics of the total anti-apartheid cultural boycott movement and the use of art as a weapon for the struggle.