Indigeneity and Theatre in the New South Africa

329 Pages·2016·1.35 MB·English

Indigeneity and Theatre in the New South Africa

Arifani James Moyo

Royal Holloway, University of London
PhD in Theatre Studies
2015
Declaration of Authorship

I, Arifani James Moyo, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely
my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated.

Signed:

Date: 30 June 2015

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Acknowledgements

The writing, research and all sponsorship for this PhD thesis were part of the international,
multidisciplinary humanities research project, Indigeneity in the Contemporary World:
Politics, Performance, Belonging (2009 – 2014), a project that Professor Helen Gilbert
initiated and led with funding from the European Research Council. The project headquarters
was the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research (CITPR) at the
Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway University of London.
The project looked at ―how indigeneity is expressed and understood in our complex,
globalising world‖, and the diverse ways in which indigeneity‘s ―cultural, political, ethical
and aesthetic issues are negotiated‖ through ―performance as a vital mode of cultural
representation and a dynamic social practice‖ (www.indigeneity.net). The core research team
included anthropologists and arts scholars with experience in indigenous peoples‘
movements of the Americas, Australia and the Pacific Islands. The project widely networked,
and also hosted numerous fellowships, with indigenous scholars, artists and activists from
around the globe. My task was to explore the topic of ‗Indigeneity in the New South Africa‘.
I thank Professor Gilbert for this extraordinary experience, and for supervising the
PhD. I also thank Professor Matthew Cohen, Doctor Lynette Goddard and Professor David
Wiles for their generous support of the supervision. I am grateful to my ever supportive
colleagues, friends and family whom I cannot adequately acknowledge here, as well as my
indigenous educators, whom I cannot properly credit for so much inspiration. Thank you,
reader, for your time.
I remember meeting Robert Owens Greygrass, a Lakota storyteller, a remarkable
man.
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Abstract

In recent decades, the emergence of a global indigenous peoples‘ movement has renewed the
significance of indigeneity as a theme of pan-Africanist ethnology. This thesis looks at the
semiotics of indigeneity in post-apartheid South African intercultural theatre, focusing on
four high-profile works of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The study of theatrical
examples helps to ascertain what ‗indigeneity‘ means for creativity and subjectivity, thus
sensitising both the empiricism and the critique of ethnology. The method of study combines
comparative and dramaturgical approaches, focusing substantially on subtext in order to
philosophically develop theatre‘s poetics of indigeneity for both dialectical and didactic
engagement. I argue that South African indigeneity is most palpable through the metaphysics
of filiation, which theatre narrates through the themes of nativity, orphanhood and adoption
as progeny desire intimacy with progenitors, closeness to origins and belonging in milieus.
The examples include Richard Loring‘s dance-musical-percussion pageant, African Footprint
(2000), Magnet Theatre‘s avant-garde dance-drama, Rain in a Dead Man’s Footprints
(2004), Isango Ensemble‘s post-classicist opera-film, uCarmen eKhayelitsha (2005), and
Yael Farber‘s post-naturalist drama, Mies Julie (2012). These aesthetically and ideologically
diverse works show that the poetics of filiation is very malleable to different ends; thus it
beckons a fresh humanistic turn in the pan-Africanist critique of cultural performance. Such a
turn could treat creative outputs as works of ontology, while subjectivity is centrally the
articulation of crucial affinities through which peoples formulate identities.

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Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 6
Theatre, Philosophy and the Return of Indigeneity in Pan-Africanist Thought
Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................. 28
‘Indigeneity’ as Metaphysics of Filiation in Twenty-First Century South Africa
Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................. 84
Nativity, Orphanhood and Adoption in Richard Loring’s African Footprint (2000)
Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................... 136
Colonial Orphanhood in Magnet Theatre’s Rain in a Dead Man’s Footprints (2004)
Chapter 4 ............................................................................................................................... 191
Postcolonial Faces of the Orphan in Isango Ensemble’s uCarmen eKhayelitsha (2005)
Chapter 5 ............................................................................................................................... 241
Contesting Inheritance through Contesting Filiations in Yael Farber’s Mies Julie (2012)
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 299
Filiation as Key Concept for Understanding South African Subjectivities of Indigeneity
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 317

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Introduction
Theatre, Philosophy and the Return of Indigeneity in Pan-Africanist Thought

During the twentieth century, a global indigenous peoples‘ movement, representing more
than three hundred and seventy million people (UNPFII), and following historical
decolonisation and civil rights movements, gained pace and became highly visible in cultural
and political forums. This movement is extremely multifarious, and has taken advantage of
the considerable technological and cultural developments of the information age, enabling a
vast interconnectivity of representatives of indigenous people groups and various institutions
participating in the movement around the world (Levi and Maybury-Lewis 12). It is a
political, humanitarian and cultural arena, wherein diverse ideologies, agendas and
exigencies meet under banners such as human rights, peoples‘ rights and cultural
regeneration. Decades of global institutional campaigns finally resulted in one of the
movement‘s most important achievements, the historic 2007 United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN). Many parts of the contemporary movement resemble
the world‘s diverse, preceding decolonisation struggles, including the twentieth-century pan-
African expulsion of European colonialisms. Pan-African humanitarianism has participated
in the new international advocacy of indigenous peoples‘ postcolonial rights and restitution;
thus the very question of ‗indigeneity‘ makes its ‗return‘, that is, back into the program of
pan-Africanist intellectual engagement with culture and identity.
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This moment of ‗return‘ beckons a fresh philosophical response; yet pan-Africanist
intellectuals have generally not made much of the fact.1 Scholars have often been either too
uncritical or too critical, neither case allowing enough breathing room for the emergence of
an appropriate attuning to the new indigeneity as a unique challenge to cultural theory. The
uncritical contingent tends to rehearse the racial essentialism and decolonisation stylistics of
an older pan-Africanist consciousness, which either incorporates or rejects the new
indigeneity. The overcritical scholars are so impatient and sceptical that the new voice of
indigeneity, facing its own enemies, does not have a fair trial, even when the judge attempts
neutrality, for this neutrality still cannot permit the thought that indigeneity might be a
genuine voice of reason, not just a political actor seeking legitimisation from other authorities
of reason. Indigeneity‘s new appearance, specifically as ‗return‘, generally finds no adequate
acknowledgement among those who feel that they already know indigeneity very well as
they applaud or dismiss it. There are exceptions, such as Adam Kuper‘s anthropologically
critical essay, ―The Return of the Native‖, which scholars in social studies and anthropology
usually regard as the most memorable polemical response against the indigenous peoples‘
movement. The essay did indeed note that a thematic ‗return‘ had transpired, but Kuper then
reduced this ‗return‘ to simply a problematic new primitivism; thus the essay and similar
critiques have not ultimately broken the general intellectual pattern, whereby the ‗return‘ is
merely an ideological and pragmatic situation to support, resist or analyse noncommittally.
This pattern has led to a philosophical gap, which is evident, not through particular
theoretical discussions, but through the very dearth of the kind of exploratory thinking of

1 I have previously dealt with the problems of African philosophy in my short monograph, the arguments of
which I will not repeat here, but even my own earlier work does not overcome the limitations that I am now
describing.
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which my thesis is an attempt. Such exploration takes the return of indigeneity as a special
incitement not to ‗judge‘ indigeneity but rather to make its voice properly audible.
Scholars are not wrong in associating newer concepts of indigeneity with older ones,
and not allowing the differences to become too much of a distraction; yet the distinctiveness
of this moment puts even an intergenerational understanding of indigeneity on the line, so
that neither colonial primitivism nor anti-colonial essentialism can claim to be the continuing
historical meanings of indigeneity. The effect of this moment of the ‗return‘ is so forceful
that it demands an update of the interpretation of the subjectivity of indigeneity, any
Afrocentric indigeneity, of yesteryear and of the current dispensation. The return of
indigeneity has taken place at a time when the intellectual milieu of pan-Africanist social and
cultural studies has been in the midst of a complex institutional and epistemic process of
decolonising knowledge. This process is by no means a coherent execution of some clear
policy, but rather an ethical and ideological drive that motivates diverse pan-Africanist
scholars as well as local thought leaders in different countries. The monumental pan-African
task is to reconstitute knowledge and identity through new data, new approaches to data, and
new ideas about what it means to ‗belong‘, or at least what kind of diverse particulars
belonging entails. Demagogues, religious and cultural specialists, as well as charismatic
persons of the media or popular culture, all have a say in informing the public of the
prospects for identity and belonging, while pan-Africanist academic researchers and thinkers
must give an account of how diverse peoples are living, dying and making sense of their own
lives. This intellectual work must take place while global knowledge legacies, and legacies of
prejudice, continue with the momentum of the past as well as the reinforcement of
contemporary reality, influencing perceptions, attitudes and, potentially, actions with high
stakes for human life in distinct third world locales. The philosophical meets the institutional
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and the cultural, so that there is a pressing need to improve understandings of what this
familiar figure, ‗the native‘, really represents with regard to ideological investments and
actual human experiences. The solutions will not come from a dubious fascination with the
‗native body‘ and its practical conditions, but rather through intelligent inquiries into the
public rendering of human subjectivities in creative cultural works that the world can access.
Theatre rises as one such creative work that has so much to say to the world about the
conditions and prospects of human subjectivities, while the study of the creative arts has
more generally become an important work of pan-Africanist philosophy, a work that still
needs more minds attending to it.
My disciplinary context is theatre studies, not philosophy, and my primary interest is
in what theatre does, not in canonical philosophical ideas; yet in order to bring in a genuinely
humanitarian sensitivity to knowledge of peoples, cultural creativity must be both object and
subject, not merely object. This indispensable imperative forcibly shoves theatre right onto
the frontline of the process of cultural philosophy, as theatre becomes the knower; thus my
task is not mainly to know about and record the existence of new theatre, but rather to tease
out what theatre seems to have known about culture and human life. The discipline of South
African theatre studies, prolific in its regular output, also has its wonderful major genealogies
of the medium, including classics like Loren Kruger‘s The Drama of South Africa: plays,
pageants and publics since 1910, Martin Orkin‘s Drama and the South African State, and
Temple Hauptfleisch‘s Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured
Mirror. The multidisciplinary field of South African performance studies also has a healthy
productivity since its pioneering background works like David Coplan‘s In Township
Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, Peter Larlham‘s Black Theater,
Dance, and Ritual in South Africa, and Duncan Brown‘s Oral Literature and Performance in
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Southern Africa. These works and the research areas that they opened up have generated an
important academic record of black and indigenous theatre and performance histories in
South Africa (Hauptfleisch, ―Tipping Points‖ 281–282). The record shows the dynamic
heterogeneity, syncretism and continuous change in South Africa‘s black and indigenous
performance cultures emerging in cities and rural areas, through political complexities, and
within the melting pot of South African modernity, wherein tradition and cosmopolitanism
come together or come apart. The scholarly field itself is very heterogeneous, but history,
historiography and cultural materialism remain important emphases in the general approach
of critical writing about South African theatre and performance. This means that when
indigeneity enters South African theatre and performance theory, it is likely to be a social or
cultural variable; in other words, the indigeneity of cultural practitioners, or the
indigenousness of particular performance praxes, are axioms of research, even if scholars
have not neglected the critical imperative to scrutinise or perhaps deconstruct ethnocentric
essentialisms of peoples, praxes and cultural realities.
My thesis will also allow indigeneity to endure the critique of ethnocentrism, but in
order to achieve this, it is necessary to first clear the muddle in the notion of the ‗native
body‘. Such a concept has been problematic because of its collaboration with both colonial or
neo-colonial primitivism and Afrocentric essentialism. In this synopsis, I will focus on the
history of primitivism first, then connect it with the more contemporary problems of the body
in performance, and finally return to Afrocentric essentialism. The history of imperialism
involved widespread colonial legacies of racist representation, freak shows and minstrelsies,
which fabricated the native body as a theatrical grotesque. Imperial power relations were
never simple; yet the negotiation of relationships by no means neutralised the realities of
exploitation, humiliation and oppression. In this and the previous century, indigenous
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