Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theatre, with the author considering the merits and limitations of the multi-racial theatre projects created by white liberals; the popular commercial musicals staged for black audiences by emergent black entrepreneurs; and the efforts of the Black Consciousness Movement to forge a distinctly African form of revolutionary theatre in the 1970s.
The result is a highly readable, pioneering study of the theatre at a time of unprecedented upheaval, diversity and innovation, with Kavanagh's cogent analysis demonstrating the subtle ways in which culture and the arts can become an effective means of challenging oppression.
Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theatre, with the author considering the merits and limitations of the multi-racial theatre projects created by white liberals; the popular commercial musicals staged for black audiences by emergent black entrepreneurs; and the efforts of the Black Consciousness Movement to forge a distinctly African form of revolutionary theatre in the 1970s.
The result is a highly readable, pioneering study of the theatre at a time of unprecedented upheaval, diversity and innovation, with Kavanagh's cogent analysis demonstrating the subtle ways in which culture and the arts can become an effective means of challenging oppression.
Theatre and Cultural Struggle under Apartheid
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Overview
Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theatre, with the author considering the merits and limitations of the multi-racial theatre projects created by white liberals; the popular commercial musicals staged for black audiences by emergent black entrepreneurs; and the efforts of the Black Consciousness Movement to forge a distinctly African form of revolutionary theatre in the 1970s.
The result is a highly readable, pioneering study of the theatre at a time of unprecedented upheaval, diversity and innovation, with Kavanagh's cogent analysis demonstrating the subtle ways in which culture and the arts can become an effective means of challenging oppression.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783609772 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zed Books |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2017 |
| Series: | African Culture Archive |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Robert Mshengu Kavanagh played an active part in the development of South African theatre in the 1970s through his participation in Experimental Theatre Workshop ’71 in Johannesburg, and as founding editor of S’ketsh’, a magazine covering black and non-segregated theatre in South Africa. After leaving the country in 1976, he did his doctorate at Leeds University and then played a leading role in founding theatre arts departments at Addis Ababa University and the University of Zimbabwe. In 2012 he was awarded the Ibsen Prize for a project on negotiating Ibsen in Southern Africa. He has lived in Zimbabwe since 1984.
Ian Steadman, former professor and Chair of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, author of numerous essays on South African theatre during the 1980s and 1990s, and founding co-editor of the South African Theatre Journal, is retired and lives in Oxford, UK.
Read an Excerpt
Theatre and Cultural Struggle under Apartheid
By Robert Mshengu Kavanagh
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 1985 Robert Mshengu KavanaghAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-977-2
CHAPTER 1
Culture and Social Relations in South Africa before 1976
'Objective Facts not Abstract Definitions' – Mao Tse-tung
In 1960 the population of the Union of South Africa, as the republic was then still called, was 16 million. Of these, 10.9 million were classified as 'Bantu', 3 million as 'white', 1.5 million as 'coloured' and 0.5 million as 'Asiatic'. In 1970 the figures were: 'Bantu' 15 million, 'white' 3.8 million, 'coloured' 2 million and 'Asiatic' 620,000. Thus in 1960 68% of the total population was classified as 'Bantu'. In 1970 this figure had increased to 71.4%. In 1976 it was estimated to be 71.5%. By 1976 the white population was estimated to have increased from 3 million in 1960 to 4.3 million.
In 1960 47% of the total population and 32% of the total 'Bantu' population lived in urban areas. 46% of the total urban population was classified as 'Bantu'. By 1970, despite strenuous efforts to reverse the trend, this figure had increased to 50%. Also in the same period the percentage of black Africans who lived in urban areas rose by 1.3% against the total black African population. The figures relating to black population in urban areas are notoriously conservative. For instance, official estimates of the black African population of Johannesburg in 1946, 1953 and 1957 were 395,231, 400,500 and 432,900 respectively. In the same years the Non-European Affairs Department of the Johannesburg City Council, which administered the area, estimated unofficially that there were 400,847, 516,620 and 541,521 respectively. Non-governmental estimates usually put the figures as much higher.
By 1976 of South Africa's 9.7 million workers 71% were black. The following table shows the population economically active between 1960 and 1970:
[TABLE OMITTED]
During the 1950s trading and general dealers' stores owned by black Africans increased steadily. In the Johannesburg area alone up to June 1958, 1,683 licences had been issued. In 1955 the African Chamber of Commerce was established and a number of finance corporations formed and larger commercial enterprises undertaken.
The above statistics have been quoted in order to illustrate a number of things which are central to an analysis of South African society and culture. First, they indicate the extent to which the population of South Africa, black and white, was urbanized by 1976. Second, they show the important fact that, though whites are outnumbered by blacks, the ratio of white to black is relatively high and over the period 1960-1976 relatively stable. Third, they illustrate the determining factor of race in the occupational structure but also point to a process of class differentiation among blacks.
The size of the white population, the degree of urbanization and the nature of the occupational structure and class formation among blacks characterize social and cultural relations in South Africa in the period up to 1976 and therefore determine the nature of the analysis of art and culture in the country.
Racial Segregation, Economic Exploitation and Political Oppression
The four major racial groups that live in South Africa – black Africans, whites, 'coloureds' and 'Asiatics' – are by no means homogeneous. Each group is divided and differentiated in various ways. For instance, in 1960 the white group was divided into 1.8 million Afrikaners, 1.2 million English-speakers and whites of various nationalities, among them Dutch, Germans, Italians, Portuguese and Greeks.
The black African population of South Africa is also heterogeneous. In 1960 black Africans were divided into 3 million Xhosa, 2.7 million Zulu, 1.3 million Sotho, 1.1 million Tswana, 0.5 million Tsonga and 0.2 million Venda. Whereas the heterogeneity of the white group is officially ignored, that of the black African group is emphasized in legislation and policy.
During the 1950s and 1960s government policy and legislation, reinforced by race prejudice on the part of the vast majority of whites, segregated the lives of blacks and whites as far as possible given their economic interdependence. In the rural areas blacks were swept up from their homesteads in areas designated 'white' and dumped in those designated 'black'. The major towns and cities consist of a central business and shopping area exclusively reserved for white business or residence, a sprawl of white residential suburbs and industrial estates or mines, and usually well removed from the white city and suburbs, separate 'townships' for 'Bantu', 'coloureds' and 'Asiatics'.
In the early years of urbanization blacks lived in areas relatively close to the town centre and in these areas there was a large degree of racial integration. African 'coloureds', 'Asiatics' and poor whites lived as neighbours and intermarried. By 1958 these racially integrated inner-city areas had been largely destroyed, along with many of the segregated 'locations' which had grown up on the outskirts of the towns, and the process of removing the black groups to the segregated areas, now called 'townships', was well under way. For instance, in 1955 Sophiatown near Johannesburg was cleared, its inhabitants removed to South-Western Native Townships (Soweto) and converted into a white residential area.
Despite official policy, there was always some social interaction between whites and blacks. Lewis Nkosi describes a multiracial 'Bohemia' in the 1950s in which certain black intellectuals and professionals fraternized with small numbers of 'liberal' whites. The state exerted pressure in order to stop such contact and this was reinforced by white public opinion. The journalist Bloke Modisane, who was a part of this 'Bohemia', in his book Blame Me on History, described his despair as his white friends began to succumb to the fears and pressures and stopped coming to visit him in Sophiatown.
Nevertheless such mixing was very much the exception. The vast majority of blacks and whites lived apart, were educated apart, recreated apart, were buried apart. In the daytime they met at work in the town centre or on the industrial estates. There too they were kept apart. Blacks did different, inferior jobs – often in segregated areas in the factory or the office. They used different facilities, for example lavatories, and at lunchtime or teatime whites could eat in restaurants and tearooms while blacks ate 'takeaways' or lunchboxes at the workplace, in the street or in one of the very few, crude, 'blacks only' eating places in the seedier parts of town. At the end of the day the whites returned to their suburbs, blacks to their 'townships'.
What they returned with on pay day was different too. In 1959 the average worker of the black African group in private industry, the best-paid sector, was paid £174.6 a year. The average white worker in the same sector was paid £948 a year. In 1972 the overall average monthly wage of whites was R316, that of blacks R48. In 1976 the figures were R467 and R101 respectively. Black workers tended to be paid weekly, white workers monthly, hence the special significance of Friday in black urban culture:
The ward was like a battle-field
victims of war
waged in the dark alley
flocked in cars, taxis, ambulances, vans and trucks
...
'So! it's Friday night!
Everybody's enjoying
in Soweto.'
[Oswald Mtshali]
In the discrepancy of wages lay the key to the relations of black and white wage-earners. The Federated Chamber of Industries put it quite frankly in 1925 when in evidence to a commission it said: 'White wages have been paid, and are being paid, largely at the expense of native workers.' What was in 1925 industrial practice was by 1960 government policy. As a Nationalist MP explained in that year, all the government was trying to do
is import labour into South Africa (i.e. the 'white' areas), and when those labourers have completed their work here, they return to their homeland, where they have their roots, where their future lies, where they can realize their ideals and where they can get their rights. They only come here to supply labour. They are only supplying a commodity, the commodity of labour ... As soon as the Opposition understands this principle that it is labour we are importing and not labourers as individuals, the question of numbers will not worry them either.
Or as the poet Sipho Sepamla saw it:
To Whom It May Concern
Bearer
Bare of everything but particulars
Is a Bantu
The language of a people in Southern Africa
He seeks to proceed from here to there
Please pass him on
Subject to these particulars
He lives
Subject to the provisions
Of the Urban Natives Act of 1925
Amended often
To update it to his sophistication
Subject to the provisions of the said Act
He may roam freely within a prescribed area
Free only from the anxiety of conscription
In terms of the Abolition of Passes Act
A latter day amendment
In keeping with the moon-age naming
Bearer's designation is Reference number 417181
And (he) acquires a niche in the said area
As a temporary sojourner
To which he must betake himself
At all times
When his services are dispensed with for the day
As a permanent measure of law and order
Please note
The remains of R/N 417181
Will be laid to rest in peace
On a plot
Set aside for Methodist Xhosas
A measure also adopted
At the express request of the Bantu
In anticipation of any faction fight
Before the Day of Judgement.
This relation of economic exploitation was organized and maintained by legislation which determined that the political relations of blacks and whites were those of oppression, in which the minority governs the majority without its participation in any meaningful way, without its consent and without consultation. Thus the distinctive characteristics of South African society before 1976 were racial segregation, economic exploitation and political oppression. In other words, the major social forces operative were those of race, class and nationality. It is to the peculiar conjunctures of race, class and nationality that we now turn.
Race, Class and Nationality
In complex modern societies the analysis of class and occupational structures is difficult at the best of times. In South Africa it is further compounded by the difficulty presented by factors of race and nationality. Many analysts writing about racialist or so-called 'plural' societies reject class as a relevant factor. Others insist on class as the primary factor and reject the importance of race. Few take the factor of nationality into consideration and even fewer attempt to understand the dynamic, dialectical relationship of all three factors.
In the previous section it was suggested that the three distinctive characteristics of South African society before 1976 were political oppression, economic exploitation and racial segregation. It is our contention that to concentrate on one of these and neglect the others results in an unreliable analysis. We intend to take all three factors into consideration as important social forces, without attempting to demonstrate the primacy of any one of them.
In the analysis of social structures, particularly those related to culture, two aspects of Marxist theory are particularly important and useful. These are the model of the base and superstructure and the concepts of 'class consciousness' and 'false consciousness'. Marx explains the former thus:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations which are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. [Selected Works, p.101]
Engels himself and recent Marxist writing have been at pains to reject vulgarizations of this idea. The model is not a wooden construct and much harm is done when it is treated as such. Engels wrote:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms the proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure ... also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular. (Engels to Joseph Block, 2122.9.1890)
And again:
Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself. (Engels to W. Borgius, 25.1.1894)
Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature, devoted considerable space and attention to the attempts of various Marxist theorists to interpret the model flexibly and to the concept of 'hegemony' as developed by Antonio Gramsci. When we refer to the model we shall assume that there is a constitutive interaction between base and superstructure. We shall assume that consciousness determines and is determined by social being, and that social being determines and is determined by consciousness, but we shall situate our analysis of this interaction within a firm appreciation of the nature of the material base of the society and its class structure.
The main usefulness of the model in the analysis of culture in South Africa is that it enables us to distinguish between 'material life conditions', 'social being', etc. and 'social, political and intellectual life processes', 'consciousness', 'ideology', etc. In the main it is this distinction that provides the key to the differentiation of 'false consciousness' from 'class consciousness', or between what individuals and groups think they are and what they objectively are. Georg Lukacs defined these concepts thus: 'Class consciousness' is 'the appropriate and rational reactions "imputed" to a particular typical position in the process of production'. 'False consciousness' is 'the sum (or) the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class' (Lukacs, 1971, p.51).
The determination of what an individual or a group's objective interests are is made with reference to the relation of that individual or group to the economic base as well as to the legal, political, ideological, cultural, etc. superstructure of society. By making this reference the analyst is able to recognize the function of a group within society and thus determine its real interests, distinguishing these from 'false consciousness', from its hopes, aspirations and affiliations based on what it imagines its interests to be.
We are concerned with culture and ideology, and more particularly with cultural domination, and therefore primarily concerned with superstructural phenomena and with 'false consciousness'. We must, however, examine these things in the context of the interaction between them and the structures and forces of the economic base of society and 'class consciousness'. It must be reiterated at this early stage that the consequence of analysis of this kind is that it is the function of human beings and their actions, the function of theatre in the society, that is taken to determine in whose interests they operate. Though individual motives or what people imagine to be the nature and consequences of their thoughts and actions are important factors which ought not to be excluded from the total analysis, they must be distinguished from the real function, the actual consequences, of their thoughts and deeds. As Engels wrote:
The many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended – often quite the opposite; their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives ... [Selected Works, p.613]
Apartheid appears to be primarily a racial structure. This is how it is commonly regarded by most people within South Africa and by liberal scholars and writers. Recent analysis has, however, offered a different understanding of it. It is now suggested that 'Apartheid is "economic" no less than political.' These are the words of Harold Wolpe, one of those who is working to produce a Marxist analysis which effectively demonstrates the importance of class and economic factors in South African society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Theatre and Cultural Struggle under Apartheid by Robert Mshengu Kavanagh. Copyright © 1985 Robert Mshengu Kavanagh. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. Cultural and Social Relations in South Africa before 1976
- 2. The Struggle for Social Hegemony
- 3. Alternative Hegemony in the Making
- 4. The Develolpment of Theatre in South Africa up to 1976
- 5. 'No-Man's Land' - Fugard, and the Black Intellectuals
- 6. 'A Tremendously Exciting Inter-Racial Enterprise'
- 7. 'A Deep Insight into the Loves and Hates of Our People'
- 8. 'A Dialogue of Confrontation'
- 9. Conclusion: 'The Future in Their Hands'
- Notes
- Bibliography