Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (review)

Theatres of Struggle recounts the events and significance of the six-month-long urban rebellion in Alexandra, one of the most famous townships of Johannesburg, South Africa. Alex, as it is popularly known, is a tiny place of much significance in South African history for many reasons, not least because it was home to one of the deepest and most overtly revolutionary of the urban conflicts of the 1980s, conflicts that contributed greatly to transforming apartheid's discomfort into its death throes. Bozzoli is much taken by the metaphor of performance in explaining the rebellion, which was started by a violent "rupture" of the social fabric known as the Six-Day War, in February 1986. Battlefields and their surrounds are often, of course, known as theaters; but Bozzoli takes the meaning literally and uses the extended metaphor of theater, actors, scripts, audiences to give structure to a complex moment.

Theatres of Struggle introduces the reader to Alexandra's history; the political trials and economic tribulations of the late apartheid state; the substance and structures of the rebellion, its participants, and leaders (most of all, the neighborhood activists known as comrades); its generational and ideological conflicts; its physical course and impact; and finally, how it was remembered in the Truth Commission hearings in the 1990s. This is a long reach of intricately detailed historical sociology. As South Africans move far enough away from the agonies of the 1980s to be able to begin to reexamine the era, there is no doubt that Bozzoli's portrait of urban spaces, social groups, and dynamics will prove a fruitful stimulus to further research and debate.

One forgets how deft Bozzoli's writing can be, masterfully blending sure phrase with complex conceptual constructions. The book's inner structure allows the explication of different forces and personae of the rebellion to walk onto a stage, like a play within a play. Bozzoli has a freer rein to "play" with her scenes, language, and so forth. The hourly saga of the violence and drama of the Six-Day War is wonderful historical stuff.

This book often reads like a brilliant soliloquy: swaths of pages dramatically roll by, again, like a novel or a play. The presentation amounts to a tour de force, in which Bozzoli relies heavily on her insight and powers of historical synthesis.

This is an important book—because of its strengths, as noted above, but also because of what its weaknesses reveal about the difficulties of South African social science. A new problem is that Bozzoli's use of the concept of performance to explain the rebellion suggests that there was an artifice to what was (as of course she portrays) six months of grim, incredibly taxing (although sometimes exhilarating) struggles over life, death, and morality. We see how Alex residents fought each other along a host of social cleavages, and how they redefined the local meanings of power and authority through fighting the police, the army, and other apartheid governance structures. The idea of performance holds within it a duality, a prior identity that is preserved, watching and perhaps judging itself. Elements of agency and spontaneity seem to be removed from Bozzoli's characters and scenes by the use of this concept.

Bozzoli's treatment of white liberalism in Alexandra is an older problematic angle. Before the period that she terms "racial modernism" was enforced by the apartheid state, she argues that "welfare paternalism" and white liberals made aspects of township life more bearable and orderly. A discussion of the role of white liberalism in black South Africa must take on board the Black Consciousness argument that liberalism, because it propagated the idea of white efficacy, was in fact an obstacle in the path of black advancement. Bozzoli does not have to agree with this idea, but she should acknowledge it. The political-historical crosscurrents of Soweto were only on the other side of Johannesburg in 1986, for example, not on the other side of the world...