Theatre and Political Struggle: Trends in Apartheid South African Drama

Abstract

Ghandi's satyagraha, passive resistance, initiated in 1906 and Mandela's armed resistance championed by Umhkonto we Sizwe begun in 1961 very probably marked the opposite extremes of the anti-apartheid struggle. The chasm between these two strategies points in the direction of dramatic unfolding of historical events in the racist enclave necessitating a sober reappraisal in tactics. In the cultural onslaught against apartheid in which literature had a focal position the debate was not only about the authentic mode of resistance but also fundamentally about the authentic form of anti-apartheid literature itself. Apartheid South African theatre, polarised by the institutionalised inequalities of the system in white and black communities, inhibited in both by ruthless censorship laws, acknowledging different, even contrasted, philosophical and technical inspiration, offered varying spectacles of the South African experience. If Fugard's (early) drama, demonstrably indebted to Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, valorises an essentially passive form of resistance, Nkosi's attraction to and anxiety about Fanonian revolutionary violence on the other hand respond to South African history itself.