Past, Present, and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs (review)

Thirteen years after the official dismantling of apartheid, South Africa is still wrestling with its identity as a nation and a new democracy. The 2007 National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown, the world's largest theatre festival outside Edinburgh, revealed a panoply of interrogative forms—from dance to theatre to visual art to stagings of personal identities—that explored the shameful past, the corrupt yet developing present, and the uncertain future. The politics of belonging, dislocation, gender, voice, and identity formation(s) echoed through the two-week, sunshine-drenched festival, which included offerings on a Main and Fringe circuit.

The social debates and realities of contemporary Southern Africa informed and troubled much of the work at this year's festival. To the north, Zimbabwe is collapsing under Robert Mugabe's draconian leadership and South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) government refuses to intervene. As satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys describes it in his performance, Evita for President!, Zimbabwe is "a big black hole, a pigment of our imagination . . . Our policy of quiet diplomacy has been so successful that we can't even hear their screams."^s

With an economic and political collapse looming just outside its borders, South Africa is in internal crisis as well. The current administration's policies and rampant corruption, frequent absences from state of President Thabo Mbeki, and his misguided policies and beliefs about HIV/AIDS have become fodder for satiric critique. "The emperor is naked! Open your eyes everybody, the emperor is naked!" shouts Artymir, the artistic voice of reason in Mike van Graan's witty critique of the old and current regimes, Mirror, Mirror, in which the ghost of Okib (Biko spelled backward) also warns, "What you preside over now . . . is not what I died for . . . ."

The country is frantically planning, building, and preparing for 2010, when it will become the first African nation to host the FIFA World Cup. Five new soccer stadiums will be built and five existing venues will be upgraded for the world's most popular sporting event. Massive infrastructure, broadcast, electrical, and transportation hurdles need to be overcome before the country is ready. Harsh internal criticism has been waged over spending billions of rand on stadiums when, according to Cape Town mayor Helen Zille, "millions . . . are isolated from economic opportunities and decent public services. The poor bear the brunt of crime, disease, and underdeveloped infrastructure."¹

Women and children bear the brunt of much harsher realities in South Africa. According to People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA), a woman is raped every twnty-six seconds, a child is raped every twenty-four minutes, less than one in nine cases of rape are reported, and only seven percent of these cases are successfully prosecuted. Add to that the 1500–1700 new cases of HIV infection daily. These staggering statistics are testaments to a culture in severe crisis.

Against this troubled backdrop, the usual debates flared over the inclusiveness of the festival, whose voice(s) are heard, and how to draw audiences to NAF, which is now one of a whole host of festivals taking place through the year around South Africa—including the predominantly Afrikaans Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in April, the Oppikoppi Bushveld festival in August, Johannesburg's Arts Alive and Potchesfstroom's Aardklop in September, and the Spier Summer Festival in the Western Cape (December–March). The 2007 Grahamstown festival commenced the day before a million public service workers accepted a 7.5 percent pay raise from the government, ending a nearly month long nationwide strike that shut down schools and disabled hospitals.

The apartheid past still haunts the South African socialscape. In Brett Bailey and Third World Bunfight's Orfeus, the audience was asked to descend into a hell of the past. In silence, we followed the redheaded narrator (Jane Rademeyer) to an abandoned quarry on the outskirts of Grahamstown, paying attention to the "music" of nature: the crescendos of crickets, the twittering of sparrows, and the haah-haah cries of hadidas ibises nesting down for the night...