Theatre for Reconciliation: Desire and South African Students

It is imperative that the first democratically elected government in South Africa enable South Africans to come to terms with the injustice of their past. Such is the enormity of the impact of apartheid policies that the present government cannot grant individual and specific compensation to all. Instead, its representatives have created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a site and a vehicle for bearing witness to the individual and collective acts of violence and suffering under apartheid. ¹ This witnessing has two functions. One is to encourage the confession of crimes by the perpetrators in order to make the truth public. This is essential in a country where press censorship and clandestine and unaccountable government operations withheld verifiable information about state violence and its antagonists from the public eye. This truth is reinforced by the testimony of the victims, which makes public and therefore legitimate the suffering formerly officially denied. The second function of the Commission is that of effecting reconciliation. The Commission hopes to bring about reconciliation through the public acknowledgment of a common humanity, which the apartheid state denied officially to blacks, thus compromising the humanity of all South Africans. In the words of the Commission’s principal officer, former Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, “African jurisprudence is restorative, rather than retributive.” ² This common humanity is publicly affirmed ideally (but not always in practice) through the ability of ordinary citizens to understand the sufferings of others. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has chosen to make hearings public, thus accentuating its ritualistic aspect, but it may also grant amnesty to perpetrators who make a public confession of apartheid crimes. ³ This choice has provoked controversy but affirms the belief of the government and many citizens that forgiveness and reconciliation are prerequisites for a united nation and that transparency is the basis for trust.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission illustrates for South Africans the significance of public, ritualistic, and symbolic representation of pressing social tensions in order to acknowledge their emotional consequences and to facilitate the understanding and analysis of their impact. Symbolic representation of social conflict is also what theatre does. Both processes can be described, in Victor Turner’s terms, as “social drama.” ⁴ His identification of four phases in the evolution of social drama (namely: “breach of normal social relations”; “crisis”; “redressive action”; and “reintegration” or “irreparable schism”) could indeed apply to the drama of apartheid and its demise. Turner’s definition of the third phase, “redressive action,” includes legal processes as well as the performance of public ritual “in order to resolve certain kinds of crisis or legitimate other modes of resolution.” ⁵ In favoring, for the moment at least, a restorative rather than retributive jurisprudence, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has mixed the conventions of a court of law with those of a ritual of collective cleansing.

Rather than vainly attempt to analyze the nationwide processes of the ongoing Commission, this article will focus on a particular but, I think, exemplary fusion of theatrical practice and the public ritual of confession and reconciliation: the performance of David Lan’s play Desire by drama students at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (UNP), in the heart of KwaZulu-Natal, the province most affected by civil war in recent years. ⁶ The play uses scenes of legal and ritual enactment to represent the processes of truth-telling and reconciliation and in so doing it shows the theatrical nature of these processes. In particular, the dramatic climax of the play is effected through public confession, which makes possible the healing of Rosemary, the central character, her realization of her power, and the reunification and reconciliation of members of her village. Our production of Lan’s play harnessed the subject matter of the drama as well as the processes of theatrical enactment and, through the process of rehearsal and public presentation, enabled students in our department to understand and affirm local practices of healing and reconciliation as well as to develop new skills of dramatic interpretation.

Desire is set in a village in the Zambezi valley immediately after...