CHAPTER 3: HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: LOCATING COMMUNITY
3.2 The Struggle for Cultural Space in South Africa and Zimbabwe
The historical predominance of coercion as the base of hegemony in the South African and Zimbabwean social formations marked out the social terrain as a key area for contestation between the state and its radical oppositions (Peterson 1994). Cultural performances, therefore, became the centre of the resultant conflicts due to their potential to give meaning to people’s lives in the social transformation process. Black theatre addressed itself as part of the projects initiated by radical oppositional movements, to challenge the states’
myths about South African (Peterson 1994) and Zimbabwean history and society by presenting alternative historical narratives and aspirations. This put the relationship of an “oppositional cultural aesthetics and popular performance” (Steadman 1994:11) at the centre of the cultural struggle and development in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
The growth and development of an adversary idea in the South African theatre must be analysed against a background of repressive legislation and hegemonic co-option (Steadman 1994), while that of Zimbabwe needs to be analysed against the background of a long-drawn-out liberation struggle (Kerr 1995). This sets the background to the analysis of the politics and challenges that affected the development of black community theatre mainly in the urban centres of South Africa and Zimbabwe. While access to the media and capital ensured that for decades a dominant hegemonic tradition of theatre was established, the activities of theatre practitioners creating work in opposition went largely unrecorded (Kavanagh 1985).
The growth of South African community theatre entailed a continuing struggle against the dominance of a British colonial and imperial centre, compounded in the post colonial period by the powerful influence of the emergent North American metropolis (Orkin 1991). Martin Orkin (1991: 12) maintains that
the sense that South Africa is a country on the periphery of a metropolis destined always to be situated six thousand miles or more away and the cultural denigration attendant on this, the belief that anything imposed is
28 somehow of superior inherent quality and anything locally generated
inferior persists.
Orkin hereby, identifies the cultural industry as a site for the struggle of perpetual dominance and control of the South African indigenous people. The denigration and downgrading of the popular cultural traditions, lives and practices of the South African indigenous peoples further speaks to the destruction of the means of survival, production and community life by the colonial system.
In Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, Preben Kaarsholm (1990) and Stephen Chifunyise (1990) posit that the cultural industry became a site for struggle from the early 1890s, through the liberation war era in the 1960s, to post independence Zimbabwe today. During the colonial era, the white settlers sought to reproduce and imitate the London West theatre of the 1890s to reinforce a conviction of closeness to their mother country, provide legitimation and consolidation of its very existence and values - both in order to harmonize the white community internally and to put on a show of civilization the world of black Africans (Kaarsholm 1990).
Bhekizizwe Peterson (1990) points out that the imitative high end West London type of theatre was initially set out for the colonial sojourners, but due to their desire to ‘civilise’ the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, these practices were further forced on them. In South Africa, the white settlers introduced mission schools which taught the basics of drama and theatre to the young black South African. Peterson (2000:218) explains that “drama was seized by missionaries and promoted as an art form amenable to the needs of evangelism, pedagogy and the spread of wholesome recreation among urbanised Africans”. The plays produced, therefore, presented the South African ruling classes, and particularly their preferred religious discourses, as the bringers of civilisation and order to an otherwise barbaric people (Kerr 1995). The drama-in-education model, consequently, was meant to break down the pre-colonial political and micro-economic systems, and legal and cultural practises which provided the ideological bases (Kerr 1995) of indigenous societies.
However, in Rhodesia, Kaarsholm (1990) posits that the early white settlers set up segregated white only amateur Repertory Theatre groups, Dramatic and Choral Societies in Salisbury (Harare), Bulawayo, Gwelo (Gweru), Umtali (Mutare), Fort Victoria (Masvingo), Que Que (Kwekwe) and Gatooma (Kadoma) that performed in whites-only playhouses and little theatres in mining towns. These repertory groups directed their energies “towards the cultivation of settler voices and cooperating with theatre groups in the staging
29 of musicals, and help Welsh colonists resist the temptations of a relapse into barbarism” (Kaarsholm 1990: 249).
Peterson (1990) argues further that the Rhodesian colonial cosmology, firmly situated the dramatic and other cultural modes of expression of black Africans outside the boundaries of art and/or culture and relegated them to the dark hinterlands of anthropology. Since indigenous ‘cultures’ and ‘arts’ were not regarded as cultural activities, the Dramatic and Opera Societies sought to acculturate the ‘uncultured’ black indigenous blacks through teaching them
‘civilized’ music, and theatre traditions.
Peterson (1994), in agreement with Kerr (1995), points out that the western settlers’ colonial approach of dislocating cultural practices from the social struggles of the indigenous people and marketing them instead as universal and trans-historical ‘civilising forces’ was meant to dismantle the black South African and Zimbabwean struggle for survival and independence. This would force them into practising a “theatre of surrender”, which Sam Ukala (2001:30) identifies as the first phase through which African theatre responded to colonialism; as he notes:
the African surrenders to the aesthetics of his colonial master and is content with abridged translations, adaptations or reproductions of popular European plays, music and dance.
To Ukala (2001), this process would provide ‘distraction’ to the African cultural performer and make him or her an imitator of European cultural traditions, thereby succeeding in its attempt to dismantle the African’s hold on his or her indigenous cultural traditions. This “theatre of surrender” had its foundations in colonial missionary education system. The “theatre of surrender” resulted in performance versions of The Merchant of Venice and Julius Cesear in Natal (Orkin 1991) and Macbeth and Jesus Christ Superstar (Kaarsholm 1990) in Zimbabwe.
Ukala (2001) argues that western education influenced African students of Western literature, as well as a great number of non-student theatre-goers to interpret the world the way colonial planners of the African curricula wanted them to, and to imbibe the Western social habits and pastimes in Western drama. In this light, traditional performances were not allowed by the colonialists because they were considered potentially detrimental to the safety of whites and colonial government. This resulted in the abolishment of the Mhande dance through the 1899 Witchcraft Suppression Act in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) (Ukala 2001:29) which the colonial government considered as witchcraft.
30 Kaarsholm (1990) posits that from the 1950s a more apartheid-like, more brutal and more sophisticated policy of cultural and political management vis- a-vis black African aspirations was introduced in Zimbabwe. In South Africa, cultural practitioners were left despondent in the 1950s and 1960s due to the restrictive legislation introduced by the Nationalist government. This period was characterized by a number of legislations, such as the Censorship and Entertainment Control Act of 1967 in Zimbabwe (Chapman 1996) while in South Africa, David Kerr (1995: 216) notes that the most prominent laws were
the Entertainment Act of 1931 which introduced legal censorship, the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act which forbade any quotation from banned authors, the Public Safety Act of 1953 and the Entertainment Act of 1963 which segregated white and black audiences except under special licence.
Coupled with the Urban Areas Act of 1923 and Group Areas Act of 1965 in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia’s Subversive Activities Act of 1950 and the Residential Property Owners' (Protection) Bill of 1971, the apartheid and colonial governments controlled the use of city based theatres, officially segregated performers, audiences and venues. Black audiences were banned from attending public performances in white areas and black performers from performing there (Kavanagh 1985). The banning of black audiences meant that the Nationalist and colonialist governments’ policy on the political status of the urban Africans obviously contradicted its refrain of separate but equal facilities.