On the Surface of South Africa (Part One)

By Linda Brogan

 

The Arts Council England (ACE) funding strand Developing Your Creative Practice asks, ‘Tell us about the developmental opportunity you want to undertake, what you hope to get out of it, and how you will go about it.’

 

I reply. 

 

• 2017 I excavated a legendary 1970s Manchester Moss Side cellar club, the Reno; 2019 I exhibited our finds and filmed memoirs in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. As I engineer the latest evolution I realise: 

 

• I am sick of black people thinking of themselves and being thought of in terms of what they haven’t got post-slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow and Apartheid. They are the cradle of humanity. Everything begins with black people. We are the grandparents of humanity. 

 

• I was watching Africans make dresses, understanding they are hampered by already absorbed ideas of African fashion. It follows, therefore, how am I hampered by Western ideas and ideals? 

 

• I want to travel back in time before slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow and Apartheid to the ‘Cradle of Humankind’, the Sterkfontein valley 50 km northwest of Johannesburg, to photograph and film its caves, cave art, the stars our first ancestors saw, hear their creation myths, to feed my Manchester International Festival (MIF) commission from scene one, in ways presently not natural to me. I want black people to leave the performance with a newfound pride. I want white people to leave with an appreciation of black peoples’ inner world, like how both left our glorious Whitworth exhibition, but on a global scale. 

 

• Week 1: devour Witwatersrand University’s Origins Centre and Evolutionary Studies Institute to understand fossil, cave and rock art lineages. 

 

• Week 2: feast upon the Maropeng and Sterkfontein Caves. 

 

• Week 3: imbibe the landscape and a sense of its nomadic people with new age shaman Bradlox Vans. 

 

• Week 4: digest the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) exhibitions on South African modern art and Nirox Sculpture Park. 

 

ACE then asks, ‘Why is this important for your practice at this point, and how will this help create future opportunities?’

 

I reply.

 

I’m a playwright. I fell out of love with theatre: the blocking; the energy lost in the regurgitation of the same lines; the white middle-class gatekeepers; the lack of representation. The Reno project was an assault on all of that. Our memoirs weren’t staged or edited. I had full autonomy. We were authentically represented by all of it. Magical. I now want to reintroduce the theatrical. The Origins Centre talks about cave art as not being merely representational, but a gateway into the spirit world. The Reno was our cave. Outside was dangerous, predatory – ‘sus’ laws, unemployment. Apartheid played as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It was a spiritual experience to be warm amongst our own. Basking in Black Power, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Luther Vandross. How do I take all the material I have gathered over four years of the Reno project and organise it to tell that story, so the audience feel it, experience it, as a spiritual journey? First, I must experience those caves. Submerge myself in their symbolism. Use theirs to build my own. I struggled with the Origins Centre’s academic language. How do I free that, so the black origins of mankind stop being relegated to the dusty haunts of geeks and become commonplace? A black man knapped the first flint – without that first hit on that first rock there would be no mobile phone; those drawings on those cave walls are the origins of Steve Jobs; and of your nan who thought the Jamaicans at no. 22 would lower the price of her home. 

The British Council’s Art Connects Us application asks me to describe my research concept: ‘Indicate your research outline, focusing particularly on the connection between the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and the UK. Please include clear research outcome(s) in your description. Also, give a clear summary of your research approach.’

I tell them more-or-less the same. But this time I need a South African partner. At a mutual friend’s barbeque, I meet cellist Abel Selaocoe. He’s that good he’s bossing the Philharmonic around. He says to me, ‘You need to meet the people, unless you do, you will not experience the essence – only a white man’s museum version. ‘

I am awarded both grants. I blend them into one. COVID postpones it many times. Abel’s career takes off, making meetings impossible. Then a window opens in March 2022. I meet Abel in Newtown, Johannesburg for his 30th birthday party in a five-storey mill full of South African artists. Everything changes. My research concept has become stilted, invalid, in the face of reality.  These are the experiences, insights, epiphanies, growth that fuel my real research. 

 

1. Networks 

A. In a five-storey mill in Johannesburg’s Newtown I meet township-born South African                musicians, writers, filmmakers, poets with no Arts Council. They generate, market, sell their              own work, including through government contracts. I am brokering exchanges with MIF                  and  the British Council to teach us in the UK how.  

B. In Witwatersrand University’s hominid vault I meet Little Foot, a 2.5-3,000,000-year-old            hominid. In the Cradle of Humankind, I enter the cave into which she fell. Her grave. I have            put the university in touch with Manchester Museum to exhibit these stories of our common              ancestors.

2. New Work – Real Scenarios 

A. Joburg. 2010. The mill owner, dark-skinned township-born Lucky, meets dark-skinned Princess        Azwi, of tiny, abundant in natural resources Lesotho. His quest, to win her hand. Just as Perseus must produce the mirror against the Gorgon, Lucky must select Azwi from six maidens all secreted in thick blankets or her two maiden aunts will turn him to stone. 

 

B. Cape Town. 1972. So-called Coloured Trish, 13, discovers the dark-skinned woman is not the maid    but her mother. In another house, coloured Neil hates how his family treat the dark nanny he loves. 1976 he goes to uni. Grows an afro. Leads a movement. Gets imprisoned. Constantly tortured by Red Beard. Becomes Christian. 1980, marries Trish. 1990, forgives Red Beard who he finds dying abandoned in a coloured hospital.

 

3. Experiment

Combining their South African cultural references and authenticity with my Western eye, me and Lucky experiment to turn these two stories into films. In a predominantly black country, we explore the love. The race politics are merely backdrop. 

 

4. Development 

I enter a township. Men mend engines, laughing ladies wash clothes, little girls belt out Céline Dion, barefoot little boys kick balls outside tiny, dirt floor shops and hairdressers, away from the communal portaloos and wash basins at the furthest end. Nobody is interested in murdering me. The majority say hello. Going forward I no longer want to pimp black people as in need but to honour the humanity I witnessed. 

 

5. Retribution

Joburg. 

Daily, as we drive to research the Cradle of Humankind, shamed by the poor blacks accosting our car for alms, educated white professors lament the demise of South Africa’s infrastructure since the corrupt blacks took power – evidenced by no traffic lights because electricity is rationed. 

 

Drakensberg.

Assuring me with their rifle that what happened in Zimbabwe is not going to happen here, my white South African guide, on the climb down from the rock art, descends from the majesty of the San people who painted them to ‘We will kill them. I am going nowhere — I am born here.’

 

Durban.

I ask my guesthouse host why they implemented Apartheid. 

He replies, ‘Because they did not know how to govern.’ 

 

6. Struggle

Robben Island.

Sailing back from Robben Island, I listen to Mandela and some of his famous fellow political prisoners’ testaments. They speak of their tactics to outwit their guards and educate each other; their ploys to get messages out; how they kept each other’s spirits buoyed; their camaraderie. Immediately following are their wives’ testaments. There is more bitterness in their stories: township arrest; no work because of their affiliations, therefore no money; looking after kids who can’t visit their fathers until they are 16; how the kids pay deeply. 

 

7. System

Cape Town.

Trish and Neil, 62, born under Apartheid, explain. The dark-skinned blacks’ townships are 80% corrugated iron, 10% battered wood, 10% brick. The coloureds are 80% brick, 10% corrugated iron, 10% wood. The Indians have a similar set up but better quality (I hear this said more than once) because they are capable of bettering themselves. Banded this way so the Indians will step on the coloureds, the coloureds on the blacks, so as to never end up in their circumstances. Townships are laid out in the bands described, so the blacks are furthest from the whites, with one way in and out in case of insurrection. Implemented in political prisons, blacks have no jam, coloureds have some jam, Indians have more jam, and whites are in a separate prison with jars of jam.

 

8. Mirror

I begin to see the game I must avoid.  Like a big game hunter, I came to bag Apartheid stories. A carpetbagger. To mount their shame on my Cradle of Humankind wall from which we all descend. 

I feel shame as Lucky says, ‘I don’t look at that.’ 

Like him, most 30-year-olds laugh side-by-side on Melville’s trendy 7th Street where the staff care only about the colour of their money. 

I will dig beneath the surface of this in part two.