Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (review)

Some thirteen years after her classic monograph Women of Phokeng (written with Mmantho Nkotsoe), Belinda Bozzoli has produced another splendidly detailed and insightful piece of small-scale social analysis, this time of the antiapartheid struggle in Alexandra township in Johannesburg during the 1980s. Despite what its title may suggest, this book is not about popular theater and its role in the struggle, as has been studied by Bhekizizwe Peterson, Ian Steadman, and Loren Kruger, among others. Rather, it aims to analyze the physical manifestations of the struggle in Alexandra as if they were theater, with actors, scripts, stages, and audiences, as is done in the relatively young but growing field of performance studies. The theoretical basis for Bozzoli's analysis includes a 1992 article by Robert Benford and Scott Hunt that is frequently cited in the literature on social movements, as well as the work of Goffman, Habermas, Turner, and many others.

Given the centrality of space and ritual in the township struggles of the eighties, the relevance of Bozzoli's approach here should be clear. The case of Alexandra is particularly suited to such an analysis because of its unusually cramped layout and the disproportionate amount of attention it received from the media in South Africa and indeed worldwide. Bozzoli's main contribution here is to show how Alexandran youths, Alexandran elders, the ANC/UDF hierarchy, and the late apartheid state struggled to realize their competing visions of the "production." The most important types of performance included demonstrations, street battles, funerals, and court proceedings of both the official and "kangaroo" variety.

But it would be wrong to make too much of this theoretical framework, for it is only referred to in passing for most of the book, the only focused discussions coming in Bozzoli's analyses of the people's courts, the funerals and vigils for fallen comrades, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Elsewhere the analysis is mainly about space more generally, and quite often even this falls by the wayside and we are left with merely empirical detail, albeit well told and peppered with interesting observations.

One aspect of Bozzoli's approach that may raise quite a few eyebrows is that she derives the overwhelming bulk of her evidence from official court records of the apartheid-era trials of protestors from Alexandra. She has done very little original oral research for this project. Her justification for this is that, as her reading of the relevant testimony from the TRC demonstrates, the passage of time and the rise of the ANC's hegemony have produced a retrospective teleology and imposed a false sense of unity on people's memories of the events. Maybe so, but it would take some thorough oral and ethnographical research to be convincing on this point. After all, the fractiousness and unpredictable twists and turns that come out of the court records are only barely submerged or concealed in the TRC testimony. One wonders what some independent snooping would turn up. On the other hand, it is also true that Bozzoli's main concern is what happened in the mid-1980s, not how those events are remembered today.

Two minor quibbles: First, "the end of apartheid" referred to in the title is not really the subject of this book. When the violence in Alexandra came to an end in the late 1980s, the apartheid regime had won and seemed to be as secure as ever. Bozzoli has nothing to say about the crucial events of apartheid's last five years. Second, the endnotes are extensive and sometimes contain some very important bits of evidence and argumentation. This undermines the readability of this otherwise very well-written work.