Theatre, Crime and the Edgy City in Post-apartheid Johannesburg

Abstract

Crime and money have been persistent themes of writing about Johannesburg since the 1890s, barely a decade after the city's founding in 1886, when Winston Churchill allegedly called the city "Monte Carlo on top of Sodom and Gomorrah." 3 Crime in the [End Page 223] city has inspired drama about Johannesburg, from Helena's Hope Ltd (1910), the gold-rush melodrama by actor-manager Stephen Black, via anti-apartheid plays about the struggles of newly arrived blacks, from Athol Fugard's No-Good Friday (1958) to Matsemela Manaka's Egoli (1979; lit: "Place of Gold"), to the potentially post-apartheid Love, Crime, and Johannesburg (1999), about crime and politics in the "new South Africa." Despite the lament of one of Nadine Gordimer's characters in the 1950s, that "Johannesburg has no genre of its own," variations on the crime story and its theatrical cousins, the melodrama and the gangster show, have been around since the beginning. 4 Nonetheless, as my first epigraph suggests, the disorder of the mining town at the turn of the last century pales before the mayhem that prevails in Johannesburg at the turn of this century. The end of apartheid has not brought peace to Africa's wealthiest city, but rather unleashed the lawlessness that plagued black township residents for decades on the wealthy (mostly white) population as well; a "lost generation" of youth with little education and no prospects has turned not only criminal but violent, matching theft and burglary with apparently gratuitous rape, torture and murder. 5