South African Theatre As/And Intervention ed. by Marcia Blumberg and Dennis Walder (review)

Reviews bership dues, the Zimbabwean government, and businesses, ZACT has managed so far to retain control over its grassroots focus. Although Byam offers clearly written, systematic case studies, one wishes that she had ventured beyond Freire's model to offer theoretical insights of her own. Apart from following the Freirian model, ZACT's success seems to be a matter of luck in that its chief officer, Ngugi wa Mirii, has been extraordinarily self-sacrificing and Robert Mugabe's government initially supportive. But Byam offers no discussion of what seems an important observation: that the success of the Freirian model is likely to be precarious or short-lived, since by definition practitioners will, through their critical praxis, bite the reformist, governmental, or philanthropic hand that feeds them. At times, Byam does not reflect critically upon her own language. For example, early on, she asserts that "lilt seems that the ideal post-colonial strategy, necessary for national reconstruction, required absolute abrogation of' foreign values and interests, pursuit of an African identity, and an African culture, and subordination of political processes" (7) without recognizing that, given colonial history and contemporary globalism, African culture is forever entwined with "foreign" elements. Similarly, Byam often uses the term "authentic" without ever defining what she means or, more importantly, recognizing that it is almost always a post-facto construction aimed at excluding someone or something. Puzzlingly , this book by the Greenwood Publication Group has been poorly copyedited , with several computer-generated textual glitches finding their way into print. But these objections do not detract from the overall value of Community in Motion. L. Dale Byam has written a carefully researched, accessible text that cogently brings together Freirian theory, process, and history of theatre for development across the African continent. MARCIA BLUMBERG and DENN IS WALDER, eds. South African Theatre As/And [Iltervenlion . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Pp. 293, illustrated. $83·00 (Hb); $25.50 (Pb). Reviewed by Jane Plastow, University ofLeeds South African Theatre As/And Intervention is drawn from papers given in London in 1996 at a conference of the same name. It is one of a series of recent white-authored books on contemporary South African theatre, all of which question, quite legitimately, what direction that theatre will take in the new free country and all of which seem to cast aside with huge sighs of relief the "crude" protest theatre of the years of struggle, reaching instead for something less functional, more refined, subtle, and entertaining. In its favour, this is one of the more interesting and well-balanced of that spate of writings. Indeed, if its title had only been something like "White Perspectives on Contemporary South African Theatre," I might have felt a tinge of sadness for its REVIEWS limited theatrical vision, but I would have been spared the incandescent rage that seems to grow in me as I read yet another book purporting to tell me about perfonmance in South Africa while denying any space for black critical writing and barely scratching the surface of black theatrical fonms of expression. The introduction by the editors explains the context of the conference, seeking to look at how South African theatre is developing and what role, if any, intervention has in this theatre, which the editors agree is often nostalgic and escapist. Much of the tone of the book is then established by Ian Steadman's keynote paper, "'When you see an African .. .': Race, Nationalism and Theatre Reconsidered." Steadman, a respected white South African academic, argues that people are fed up with the old anti-apartheid theatre, which he feels could not be analysed critically as theatre because that might have been seen as unsupportive of the political struggle for freedom. He goes on to say that we must not confuse race with African identity and that, rather than looking to racial essentialism, we should strive for a world consciousness. Quite rightly, Steadman warns that it is dangerous to think there is any simple unity of black identity, and he goes on to argue that "[t]o insist on a rejection of Western aesthetics and influences in the name of an imagined African or black aesthetic [...] is to forget the fundamental point of the...