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Article originally written by Michael Walling for African Theatre 4
"Mandela embodied a more elemental and universal myth, like a revolutionary opera"
(Anthony Sampson)
It was in the aftermath of my production of Dev Virahsawmy's Toufann at London's Africa Centre in 1999 , that I was first approached by a young South African composer called Anthony Caplan, with a view to creating a new piece of music theatre on an African theme. Anthony had been working in South Africa with the award-winning group Co-Opera of Grahamstown, who had commissioned his first opera The Moon Prince. Based on a Xhosa legend, The Moon Prince had effectively integrated traditional instruments and styles with operatic voices, as well as giving a dramatic form to the ritual world of the sangomas. I was hugely impressed with Anthony's music as an attempt to find a musical voice for the contemporary African experience: an experience which is intercultural and dynamic, seeking for a new identity which does not deny its history, or histories.
As Anthony and I began the process of looking for a subject, I was involved with another, very different, operatic project, as assistant director to Peter Sellars on his production of John Adams' Nixon in China at the English National Opera. Nixon in China is something of a "contemporary classic", and has led to a whole genre of "docu-operas", most of which have tended to concentrate on the documentary at the expense of the opera. In our search for an African theme, we were sure that we wanted to do something which was fully operatic in the spiritual sense of the term. It had been this which had drawn Anthony to the Moon Prince legend. For me, the danger of working with a traditional African story was that I, as a white Englishman, for all my cultural and family links to Africa, would have no direct relationship to the subject. It would become exotic: the very thing we wanted to avoid. For that reason, I was very struck when, early in our rehearsals, Peter Sellars pointed out that opera has always been about the gods, and that for John Adams, Alice Goodman and himself, Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong had seemed to be the closest the contemporary world could get. I instantly thought of Nelson Mandela as our operatic subject.
Working this initial idea through with Anthony, we began to notice the mythic patterns in Mandela's life. At this stage the clearest image seemed to be of what Jung called a "dying god" - a leader who underwent the symbolic death of imprisonment, returning to a "resurrection" which remains the single most powerful image in global consciousness from a decade of enormous worldwide change. Here, we felt, was a genuinely operatic subject: a figure who was at once god-like and intensely human; a man who has at various times embodied cultural conflict, cultural change and cultural integration; an individual living in dialogue with an emerging nation. The musical and dramatic possibilities were immense. So immense that we felt inadequate to them. As a white South African and a white Englishman, we certainly had a real relationship to the subject, but we ran the risk of failing to understand that subject from the inside, of being incapable of giving voice to the many viewpoints which such a subject requires. For that reason, I proposed that we conduct a workshop, as we often do for Border Crossings' projects: a period which allows a pooling of many viewpoints, and a joint exploration of the subject which feeds the creation of the production.
Fortunately, the Commonwealth Games Development Programme was inviting funding applications. This got us some money from Visiting Arts and the North-West Arts Board. We were also able to use the ENO Studio as a workshop space. We felt that we would need to involve actors with both African and black British backgrounds, as well as black opera singers. And we decided to bring a traditional Imbongi (praise-singer) from South Africa.
The rest of this article is a basic log of the workshop period.
14th July 2001
It's 6.30 in the morning, and I'm waiting at Heathrow airport for Dumisa Mpupha to come into the arrivals hall. Dumisa is a Xhosa Imbongi from Grahamstown, who is also involved with the study of traditional African music at the University. We've been in touch for a few months, and he's already emailed us a number of praise poems about Mandela. In 1996, when Mandela came to Grahamstown, it was Dumisa who praised him. He's sent me a wonderful photo of this: Mandela with a garland around his neck; the mayor in Western regalia; Dumisa in his Imbongi skins, holding a microphone; and, just visible at the bottom of the picture, a white soldier standing guard.
We sent Dumisa his work permit some time ago, but he said on the phone the other day that it hadn't arrived. He has the serial number but not the document. He's also only got his passport for this trip, and hasn't been on a plane before. All in all, it's a bit disconcerting.
8.30. The plane landed over two hours ago, and there's no sign of Dumisa. Then I get a tannoy call. Airport Information put me on to Immigration, and the officer comes out, asking if I have my half of the work permit. Luckily, I do. A few minutes later, he re-appears with Dumisa in tow, dressed in his skins and carrying his spear. "They let you take that on the plane?" "I told them it was a cultural thing", he says.
I give him his first week's wages. He tells me that, in South Africa, it would take him eight months to earn the same sum of money. It's £300.
15th July
At home with Dumisa. He plays me some cassettes of praise-singing. The sound is really extraordinary - harsh and strident, yet strangely entrancing. The first tape is of Zolani Mkiva, who was Presidential Poet to Mandela, and retains that position under Mbeki. The first track is the most traditional in style, with the poet barking unaccompanied in Xhosa. On the second track he is "singing" with a beat underneath, almost like rap. Dumisa then plays me some of Mzwakhe Mbulu, a Zulu poet who sings in English. His work is accompanied by a band, with a lot of jazz influence. The lyrics are full of political comment: "A sovereign state should be a sovereign state" he shouts at one point. Dumisa tells me he's now in prison for bank robbery.
The Imbongi's role in Xhosa culture is to embody the voices of the dead, to bring the spirit world close to the community, advising, interpreting and mocking. He's not a priest, but it is a spiritual function, a direct link to the ancestors. I'm reminded again of the origins of opera, and especially of the Orpheus myth. So many operas, including the first ever, are about the singer and poet who went into the underworld and came back to life with a new and special knowledge.
16th July
First day at the ENO Studio, working with Dumisa, Anthony and Antoni Garfield Henry. So far, Toni is the only singer who has definitely been cast: his heroic tenor seems appropriate for Mandela. In some ways this restricts us before we even start, but such restrictions can be very liberating. It certainly throws naturalism out of the window - Toni is black, but there the physical similarities to Mandela end. He's in his 30s, but we can't let that confine us in terms of which parts of Mandela's life we explore. At once, we're compelled to think in terms of a presentational style, closer to African forms than Western ones.
We start by creating a space in which to work: throwing peat all over the floor. This is just a hunch, based on images we've been looking at, the importance of death and burial in African cultures, and the title of Wole Soyinka's inspiring book of poems, Mandela's Earth. The idea sets off some exciting responses: when Dumisa praised Mandela, he finished by brushing the dust from his shoes as a sign of respect. I remember reading that Niall Barnard re-tied Mandela's shoelaces just before he went in to the meeting with PW Botha. There's something resonant here.
We explore the physical possibilities of the earth, as much as anything just to find ways of working together. Toni and Dumisa improvise long routines of breaking stones, based on the cramped postures we've seen in one of the few photos of Mandela on Robben Island. This feels like the familiar territory of The Island, although Anthony gets excited by the repetitive, drum-like rhythm of the spades hitting the tyres (another hunch - we're using old tyres for just about everything which isn't earth). We try Toni performing the scene alone, and bringing Dumisa in to praise Mandela as he breaks stones. This is much more powerful and original: Dumisa's instinct is to mock Mandela, questioning his passive role in prison. It's like a Shakespearean fool: at once a joker, a friend and a conscience. Powerful lines emerge as Dumisa improvises: "Madiba - your eyes are black - how do we know what you are thinking?" Most interestingly for me, we're already starting to touch on fundamental debates about the uses of violence and passivity in political resistance. Dumisa's own political affiliation is to the PAC rather than the ANC, and much of what he says to Mandela today questions his emerging non-violent stance. "There is no freedom without blood".
We try working with the earth as a more positive image: Mandela's garden, which he cultivated during his latter years in prison, both on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor. With Anthony making his first tentative musical contributions on the guitar, Toni creates a long, delicate solo scene, giving a physical life to Mandela's own analogy between the garden and the political process which prison represents; a process in which he "sows seeds, and then watches, cultivates and harvests the result". In this workshop, his acting is fascinating, because it is so minimal. But the effect is ultimately frustrating: we cannot possibly expect an audience to watch something like this. How then, are we to show the extraordinary patience which the crucial, transforming prison years represent? Just as I am feeling this frustration, Toni expresses it with enormous power, throwing a fit in the earth, tossing it everywhere in a frenzied eruption of pent-up emotion. It's extraordinary - electric. Then, after a long pause, he starts to re-assemble the garden he has destroyed.
Afterwards, we talk about it. Toni is insistent that Mandela "must have cracked like that at some point". He points out the huge emotional strains under which he was placed: the death of his son Thembi, and of his mother; the denial of his requests to attend their funerals. "Anyone would have cracked" he says. I agree - except that there's not the slightest bit of evidence that Mandela ever did.
17th July
The group expands. We're joined by two African actors - Nisha Dassyne from Mauritius and Reginald Tsiboe from Ghana - and two Afro-Carribbean actors - Indra Ove and Wil Johnson. We begin by working from images: photographs of events in and around Mandela's life. The actors are in pairs, and only one in each pair can see the picture. That person has to convey the image to the other, using any means apart from words. I'm trying to get an initial sense of one of the key things we're looking for in the opera - the emotion underneath the news image. What we see in the papers or on the TV screen is so often made cold by the medium through which it is presented. Re-presenting such material through the body, as here, allows it an immediacy which is at once liberating and discomforting. Most exciting is Wil and Reggie's work from an image of the violence in KwaZulu-Natal after the 1994 election: Wil constantly drags Reggie's body back and forth across the studio floor, stamping and shouting as he does so.
We move on to work from a set of interviews with people in various ways close to Mandela, which I've found on the internet. These are the research for the Frontline documentary The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela, and are hugely valuable to us in themselves. But for today, the interest is in the dramatic possibilities of testimony. Each actor (plus Anthony) reads an interview. She or he then "performs" that interviewee, talking to the rest of the group. Toni, who has the interview with Neville Alexander, (a younger, more radical prisoner on Robben Island), returns to yesterday's themes, trying to find evidence of cracks in Mandela's emotional armour. He's already thinking about playing Mandela, of course, looking for ways in which he can identify with the man. He's particularly struck by the ways in which the warders were deliberately provocative, placing press cuttings about Winnie's dubious activities in his cell.
Reggie, on the other hand, working from the interview with another prisoner, Fikile Bam, emphasises Robben Island as a period of preparation. He's particularly struck that Mandela learnt Afrikaans in prison, and studied a great deal of Afrikaaner history, trying to discover what it felt like to be an Afrikaaner. There's an interesting parrallel to this when Anthony presents Kobie Coetsee, the National Party Minister of Justice, and talks about Mandela joking with him in Afrikaans: "A lot of the others [ANC leaders] didn't understand us - our history". Hearing Anthony saying these words in his South African accent is very powerful. In the character of Coetsee, he states the National Party position: the real threat was seen to be communism. If Mandela was not a communist, then he could be worked with. For Coetsee, it was compromise or bloodshed, "Mandela or Mrs Mandela". The antithesis is powerful and dramatic.
Dumisa provides our most powerful link to African realities, working from an interview with three Xhosa chiefs from the Transkei. Talking about Mandela's youth, he evokes an entire social system and a relationship with the natural world which helps to make sense of Mandela's complex character, but also distances him from our own experience (even Reggie's). I start to understand Anthony's sense of the piece as a specifically African ritual, his desire to make its structure clearly non-Western. Something he said yesterday in response to the earth: "Longing so much for home I've gone into the most spiritual music". Today Dumisa shows us the same longing in Mandela himself.
We work on Mandela's release from prison. Reggie reads us Anthony Sampson's account from the biography, and everybody instantly starts to tell their own memories of that day. We try turning these into a scene, various characters give their own viewpoints on the release, building up to the presentation of the moment itself. We use our own accounts - Wil with his friends in London, Nisha watching on TV in Mauritius - and add in material from the interviews, like Adelaide Tambo: "I was dazed with excitement. I was so happy...... I was jumping around". There are interesting possibilities for the music here, layering different voices to create a sense of the world watching and waiting.
We combine these ideas with another idea: that of Mandela's release as a sort of resurrection. Dumisa helps us to relate this to Xhosa thought. The gods live in the earth, not in the sky. Burials take place in the kraal in front of the house, with the body facing the door. To speak to the ancestors, you speak to the body in the kraal. Eventually, through a long afternoon of experimentation, this leads us to a scene with which the opera might open. Toni is buried in the earth - maybe the audience won't even be able to see him there. Dumisa begins to sing a freedom song, with the others answering him. Other voices start to emerge, testimonies to the power of the release as an image. The sound and physical activity, the excitement, build, until the figure of Mandela finally appears out of the earth.
I'm excited by the idea of starting with the image the audience will recognise most clearly, that of the release. I also like presenting it metaphorically, allowing it to suggest other images for later in the piece. Anthony is excited by the musical possibilities, but resists the freedom song. Maybe we should use something colder, like a choral setting of the Freedom Charter? "We, the people of South Africa" would be a wonderful opening line........
18th July
Mandela's birthday. We begin with some power games, trying to understand the structures of apartheid in emotional terms. A very simple game: one actor has to get across the room, and a second actor has to stop them. The only rule is that physical force is not permitted. It's incredible how oppressive this becomes, and how desparate. It gives us a tiny taste of what it must have been like to live under the pass laws.
The exercise awakens some powerful responses in the people who have actually experienced apartheid. Reggie visited South Africa after he had become a British citizen, and was accorded “honorary white” status. He talks about the agony of showing papers to prove he could stay in “white” hotels - the indignity, and the sense of betraying other black Africans. Anthony shares something of his own background. At school, he tells us, he didn’t have any idea of the way the system operated - he simply didn’t have any real contact with black people. It was only when he arrived at University in 1993 that he first realised the fictions on which his life had hitherto been based, and experienced a huge anger.
This discussion of the pass laws leads us to improvising around the Sharpeville massacre. The symbol of burning the pass, or doembook, is a very potent one. We find ourselves playing with a sense of euphoria similar to that of yesterday when we improvised the release - rumour spreading through the group as word of mouth rallies people to the protest. Dumisa vouches for the authenticity of this: “It was when we felt the sense of happiness - then we were going to get killed”.
To begin with we try the scene growing until it’s suddenly terminated with a burst of gunfire, leaving silence. This is powerful, but feels too final. Instead, we try a version in which not everybody dies. Some are wounded, some are in shock or mourning. This provides a more truthful context for Toni as Mandela to engage with what has happened. Amongst the groans and the whimpers, he sings gently, setting fire to his doembook, and dropping it, burning, into a tyre. It’s very like the famous photograph. Toni’s performance world is a musical one: he simply repeats “doembook, doembook”, but with varying melodies and deep emotion. We can easily find some words for this. That’s the joy of a workshop like this - the script can be created out of the effect you find you want for the final performance: the exact opposite of the conventional process. This will be an Aria.
The afternoon session takes us to an earlier event: Mandela’s circumcision. Anthony has been keen to work on this since we first discussed the piece: his feeling, having been present for other Xhosa circumcision ceremonies, is that this will root the piece, and its central character, in a firm and clear cultural context. We ask Dumisa to lead us through the process. Working with Toni as the young Mandela, he guides us through the whole extraordinary process of initiation school, and re-enacts the rituals through which Xhosa boys become men. It’s full of resonant images: the young Mandela holding his spear, his head hidden under a blanket; the moment of circumcision with a single stroke of an assegai, and the initiate’s cry of “I am a man”; the burial of the foreskin. There are startling parallels with the morning’s work: in each case a new commitment and a new self seems to be born from a moment of pain. Dumisa tells us that, after the circumcision ceremony, the initiation school is burnt. Again, there is a symbolic destruction of the past through the element of fire.
We try to put the two scenes together, to see what happens if they are performed simultaneously. The effect is full of poetic resonance and musical possibility, particularly as the two fires blend. In each moment, Mandela achieves a kind of manhood, leaving his former way of being behind. A new identity is required by the political ritual, just as by the social one. The fact that the culture contains one is very suggestive of how it created the other. But I sense that we may run the risk of confusing the audience. It’s difficult: I’m resistant to the idea of the two scenes being played one after another because that makes the correspondence more schematic - more like a bio-pic than an opera. Something exciting is offering itself in the simultaneous playing of two scenes - but we mustn’t let the material become unclear in the process. There’s nothing worse in political theatre than muddiness.
For me, the other truly fascinating discovery of the day is the extent to which African life in its traditional forms is deeply and beautifully theatricalised. The amazingly complex ritual of the initiation school and the circumcision involves the young Xhosa men assuming a whole series of roles, each with its own costume, make-up and mode of behaviour. It’s even comic on occasions: on the night before the circumcision the initiate is expected to return to his village, and to plead with his sister for chicken. She has to ignore him. I suppose it’s a bit like English stag nights, but infinitely more powerful.
19th July
Indra has also been very struck by the theatricality of African life. This morning, she brings in a book full of incredible photographs of tribal peoples in wildly theatrical make-up. These are not actually South Africans, but Kau people from the Sudan. The imagery is hugely powerful: black and white faces in abstract patterns, with the occasional stars and moons. There’s no doubt that this sort of abstraction of the body fits in with much of what we have achieved so far, particularly the anti-realistic image of Toni coming out of the earth - like somebody being born, as Nisha says. But I find myself resisting once again the pull of the exotic. The piece should be anti-naturalistic, ritualised in a genuinely African way, but it must not in the process allow the audience any distance from the reality of what we are portraying. Abstraction, as in the work of Mnouchkine, has the effect of universalising the subject matter. Our subject is too recent, too present in the political realities of today’s world, to respond to that sort of treatment. We have to find a way of presenting the material which allows a tension between documentary reality and poetic resonance. So it’s also today that we find ourselves discussing casting. It doesn’t matter that Toni is shorter, broader and balder than Mandela: it does matter that he is black. This is the affinity between the performer and the performed.
A change of tack: we decide to spend the day looking at two women, Mandela’s second wife Winnie and his mother Nosekeni. It turns out that Indra’s father once started to make a TV documentary about Winnie, although it was never completed for legal reasons. What had struck him more than anything else was the brutality which Winnie had suffered during Mandela’s imprisonment, including her own periods in jail.
Working from accounts in the various Mandela biographies, and in the excellent The Lady by Emma Gilbey we start to improvise key moments in her story. Her period in prison during 1969, when she was tortured by the notorious Major Theunis Swanepoel, seems to be a key here. Toni and Nisha create a powerful scene around a single metal chair, incorporating the catalogue of abuses to which Winnie was subjected. There was constant artificial light which made it impossible to tell night from day; she was deprived of sanitary pads while menstruating; Swanepoel made great play of her friendships with men. And so on. It’s painful to watch them play this out; but the real discovery is the energy of Nisha’s reaction to the torture. The screams of her Winnie are deeply ambiguous, veering between agony and avenging fury. “You make my blood run!” she shouts, and at once Indra and I both scribble it down. A few days later, it will become the beginning of an Aria.
Playing this scene makes it far easier to play an incident much later in Winnie’s life: the murder of Stompie. As we did yesterday, we look at two incidents which are considerably separated by time, and find the value in their juxtaposition. Viewed beside Winnie the victim, Winnie the torturer becomes an understandable, even a pitiable figure. Of course, there are huge difficulties here. If we show a Winnie who is too sympathetic, we run the risk of belittling her own brutality. It is essential that we are truthful about her violent actions, because this makes concrete the extent of Mandela’s challenge both personally and politically, holding off a descent into anarchy. At the same time, our work today has clarified the origins of that brutality, and we cannot afford to lose that clarity in a rush of sensationalism. I suspect that the key to this is in the casting of Stompie. We improvise the scene with Dumisa playing him to Indra’s Winnie, and then Indra to Nisha’s Winnie. Indra is, of course, more convincing as a boy, and a female singer could be even more so. But maybe that isn’t good……. Dumisa’s version of the scene has a built-in distancing, which helps us to clarify the scene. Anthony suggests that we might use a puppet, which is dismembered as a female singer gives him a voice. I like this idea. Certainly we’re all agreed that a real child performer would sentimentalise the scene in a counter-productive way. It’s also interesting to hear another woman’s voice at this crucial moment in what’s emerging as a journey through gender. As Winnie becomes more “masculine” and violent, so Mandela becomes more “feminine” and forgiving.
Work on Nosekeni. Anthony is very passionate about Mandela’s mother and her importance in his life. It’s because she represented an ongoing relationship with his rural roots, which is important to his musical conception of the opera. I absolutely understand that: but find great difficulty in locating a dramatic voice for the role. The biographies are decidedly thin on the subject: there are mentions of her presence at the trials, and her visit to Robben Island shortly before her death. She lived in her village in the Transkei until she died, and never, it seems, really understood the nature of Mandela’s political commitment. We try to improvise the visit to Robben Island, but it doesn’t really work: it feels as if the characters have nothing they can say to one another. But perhaps that’s exactly the point: parents and children often continue to love each other when there is no possibility of rational communication between them. We try a scene of each Mandela and Nosekeni each recalling the visit in their own terms, and find that this leads to a paradoxical sharing of the sorrow of separation. This could be the basis for a duet. The performers use the earth and the tyres: Nosekeni cooks over her fire as Mandela works his prison garden, or buries a chapter of his memoirs. As he moves the earth through his hands, his mother dies. Dumisa buries her in the earth, then washes his hand and eats the mealies from her cooking pot, as a Xhosa gravedigger would do. It’s nice to find a moment of peace like this. Very moving.
20th July
Today we are joined by Ken Bones, an actor I first worked with years ago on Sir Thomas More. Ken has a formidable intelligence, as well as being a very talented actor. He also happens to have the “look” of Botha and de Klerk about him, which can only help us. We start by reading the various accounts of Mandela’s first meeting with PW Botha, the famous “tea party”. There is one eyewitness account, from Niall Barnard, although Dumisa warns us to be wary of this. Apparently Barnard made statements in the press before the Presidential election in which he portrayed Mandela as his creation, as if this was an argument for white voters to support him. Ken points out that Barnard was also responsible for destroying the tape which was made of this meeting: he was making history in a literal sense, and wanted only his own version of it to survive. In itself, this is a very telling idea: we explore the dressing of Mandela for the meeting: his tie being tied by the Major before he left the prison, Barnard himself bending down to tie his shoelace outside the door of Botha’s office. There is, disturbingly, a sense of a dramatic accuracy about Barnard’s viewpoint: as if the establishment re-created the African chief in their own image as a democratic President. There’s nothing African about the Presidential tradition. Mandela’s tradition is a chiefly one.
We start to improvise the scene, discussing each attempt and the issues which it raises. The first surprise is how cordial everything has to be to allow the scene to work - but, of course, that’s the root of the tension. As Ken puts it “Unless they’re psychopaths they’re trapped within form and convention”. This is where the operatic form can really help us: as Botha pours tea, the orchestra can play the subtext of tension and enmity. We only have to act the surface. Toni, Ken and I find the way in which the meeting began, with a long series of enquiries about one another’s health and families, truly extraordinary; but Anthony points out that this is the African way - each man was in fact doing what the other expected. Improvising it, the scene is so full of tensions and ironies as to be almost funny: Botha expresses his sympathy over Thembi’s death, and asks after Mrs Mandela’s health. This atmosphere leads the actors into a many-layered improvisation. As he pours the tea, Botha asks Mandela if he takes milk. When he gets the answer “Yes”, he says: “So, shall we say ‘white’ tea?” Even discussing the nature of their agenda, there’s a peculiar sick humour: “We must get to know one another as human beings, if I may use such a term”.
What is striking about this is how close it is to Afrikaaner culture. Ken, who has a black partner, describes visiting South Africa. He expected to dislike the Afrikaaners intensely, but found he rather admired them; their passion for the land, their dark sense of humour. Anthony’s experience bears this out: white South Africans go through an intense religious and political schooling which makes them very self-aware as a people of destiny.
We explore this through further attempts at the scene. Botha seems to have been able to abandon the paranoia of the Afrikaaners because of what else was going on in the world: the end of the Cold War, the arrival of Glasnost and the coming down of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, in some ways he had to change, because the West was no longer able to regard apartheid-based South Africa as a bulwark against the Soviet threat. The international capitalist interest within South Africa, which had been the cornerstone of this alliance, now had to be preserved in a different way. In a sense, the scene is about the negotiation of compromise: Botha decides to give away political power in the interests of maintaining that much more crucial thing - economic power. By bringing Mandela into the establishment as a black President, he effectively gives the black community a vested interest in capitalism.
Pushing the scene further in this direction, we start to find it very disturbing from an English liberal viewpoint. Ken as Botha starts explicitly to mention Barclays and Standard Chartered Banks, and the need to remain close to his “friends”, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He talks about the “investment” which “his people” have made in the country, and the “development” of “your people”. This last idea in particular is disconcertingly close to contemporary Western attitudes to African nations as countries which somehow need to be made more like our own. By placing such ideas in the mouth of a character our audience will expect to dislike, we can start to question some of their own assumptions. Certainly today leaves me questioning many of my own.
In case this sounds as if our work concentrated solely on Botha, I should say that the exploration of Mandela’s character was also fascinating, with both Toni and Dumisa playing him at various points today (the latter through a brilliant impersonation!). A quiet firmness emerges as the key to him here: he had sent his ten-page memorandum ahead of the meeting, and it sits on Botha’s desk throughout, unmentioned. As happened in reality, the only tense moment of the meeting is Mandela’s request for the release of Walter Sisulu. It’s rather wonderful that this tension should come from his desire to be humane.
The meeting ended with a photograph being taken. We re-create this: a deliberately historic handshake.
21st July
Today we are going to look at Steve Biko as a potential counter-character to Mandela: a younger, more radical leader in the struggle, who confronted where Mandela would eventually appease, and who was brutally murdered in prison.
We begin by asking Dumisa to tell us a little about the Xhosa attitude to death.
“To us”, he explained, “death is always haunting us. We don’t plan things in advance, because the question comes, what if I die?………. Death is monitoring our ways…… Youth is always thinking about death.”
I wonder how much of this is Xhosa tradition, and how much is a new cultural response to the AIDS epidemic.
“When you are an activist, death is always stalking you. When you try to change bad things to good things, you are challenging death……. Don’t be afraid of death, because it is our destiny……. There is always death around us. We tend to respect death.” So, even when the person who dies is young, the Xhosa do not see death as a waste so much as a destiny: “The blood nourishes the tree of freedom.” Hence, I suppose, Biko’s incredible Christ-like power in death. He’d prepared for it, of course, by dubbing himself the “Son of Man” in an extraordinary blend of African and Western cultural signifiers. Wil is reminded of Malcolm X embracing death as something which has to happen. Ken has another angle on the same thing: “The power vested in absolute moral certitude”.
The mysticism of this is very powerful in the context of this evolving African opera. Toni responds to Dumisa with particular passion: “Everything you gain in today’s culture is factual, but older black people tell you to be mindful of the things you can’t see…. Western cultures are always going to Africa to try and put fact to things.”
Theatre, and perhaps music theatre in particular, is about making visible those things which we can’t see.
We turn to the specific (and very upsetting) accounts of Biko’s death, as presented to the inquest. For our purposes, what is especially potent is the parallel (and the contrast) between his period in prison and Mandela’s own. Biko’s imprisonment was short but intense - Mandela’s draws its power from its length.
We try a scene with Wil as Biko, experiencing solitary confinement. He is alone in a space we mark out in the earth, and a voice announces the dates one by one. Occasionally a little food or water is thrust into his cell, and he eats or drinks a tiny bit. Wil’s body language is brilliant here: from a virile young man he turns into a wreck in barely perceptible daily stages. At one point he marches back and forth in the cell repeating his name as a bulwark against madness “Biko. Steve Bantu Biko”. This suggests musical ideas too.
I’m more and more convinced that Mandela’s cell needs to be somehow present on the stage throughout the piece, so that we are given, subliminally, a sense of the passing years which he had to spend locked away. It’s very difficult to show what must have been quite a boring process in a dramatically interesting way. But counterpoint is an answer to this problem. He can carry out simple tasks like gardening, writing his memoirs, reading, eating, while momentous events are played out elsewhere on the stage. Rarely is he even aware of what is happening beyond the cell. In this particular moment, the contrast between Mandela and Biko should be very telling.
We attempt to improvise what may have happened in Biko’s cell to lead to the injuries which killed him. From what we read, he was kept naked in the cell until very weak, when he was assaulted: thrown against the wall of his cell so that his skull fractured. Ken portrays a brutal and horribly witty prison officer. As Biko lies on the floor of his cell, he laughs, “Black UnConsciousness”. It’s intriguing to see this scene being performed by the same person who yesterday portrayed Botha. I wonder whether we might not use this double in the final opera. Then, as Biko dies, we might see Mandela shaking hands with this same man.
The more I think about this, the more it seems to capture the real conflict which is emerging as the heart of the piece. Mandela’s achievement can only be understood in terms of what was overcome, and that was a legacy of genuine hatred. We can only make sense of his policy of Forgiveness through his policy of Truth: we have to see the extremity of the violence for which apartheid was forgiven. Biko is a particularly apposite symbol for this.
It also makes sense, given this line of thought, to show links between Biko and Winnie. Over the weekend, I write the first lyric, which Anthony sets in the form of a funeral march for Steve Biko. It’s to be sung by Winnie, towards the end of the opera:
Not this forgiveness, Madiba, not this forgiveness.
Not after massacre. Not after rape.
Your clemency stinks of white man’s spittle
The Afrikaaner pissing on your people’s grave.
Not this forgiveness, Madiba, not this forgiveness.
Remember once they stole the sheet from our bed?
The cloth of love and birth has been defiled
Our nest and womb becomes a bloodied shroud.
All through the night they drove the naked man
Brain haemorrhaged, meat-like, in a transit van
Twelve hundred KM. And why?
The black Messiah’s destiny was to die.
His blood is water to the freedom tree.
Would you, Mandela, deny the Son of Man his victory
To preserve a specious equanimity?
The price of “truth and reconciliation”
Was the manhood of the Xhosa nation.
Woza Steve Biko! Woza Black Consciousness!
Confront the oppressor with the match and the necklace.
But not this forgiveness, Madiba.
Never this forgiveness.
22nd July
The lyric becomes a stimulus for more discussion of Winnie. In Anthony Sampson’s book about Mandela there is a hint (though it is nothing more than that) that she and Biko may have been lovers. A conversation with an associate of Biko now living in London provides a second hint. We’re aware that we are getting into quite difficult material here, since the full facts are not known, and one of the people involved is very much alive. On the other hand, we do know that both Winnie and Biko were promiscuous, and we find ourselves sensing a symbolic value in showing them as lovers, even if it wasn’t literally true.
Although we don’t rationalise this, I suppose it’s because much of the opera is turning out to be about maleness. Mandela’s cry at his circumcision, “I am a man”, could become a haunting question throughout the piece. Biko represents a younger, more confrontational alternative self: a poet and a lover, but in the end destroyed for his refusal to compromise. This should provide us with genuinely dramatic material: both figures are in the right, and yet they hold diametrically opposed positions.
We ask Wil to read us Biko’s essay Some African Cultural Concepts (in Biko 1978), initially as a political speech, testing out the potential reactions of the crowd. It’s a brilliant piece of intellectual analysis, but it doesn’t seem to have any dramatic life presented as pure rhetoric. Then we try gradually focussing the speech in more and more specifically on Winnie, played by Indra standing in the crowd. The effect is extraordinary, as the erotic subtext of Biko’s writing becomes clear, together with his assertion of his own maleness. As Anthony improvises at the keyboard, Biko and Winnie dance close together, with Wil’s voice murmuring Biko’s seductive words:
"Ours has always been a man-centred society. Westerners have on many occasions been surprised at the capacity we have for talking to each other - not for the sake of arriving at a particular conclusion but merely to enjoy the communication for its own sake. Intimacy is a term not exclusive for particular friends but applying to a whole group of people who find themselves together......... Nothing dramatises the eagerness of the African to communicate with each other more than their love for song and rhythm. Music in the African culture features in all emotional states." (pp.41-2)
What seems particularly attractive about this is that Biko talks about music, so that the very medium we will be using is itself incorporated into the action. Toni remembers a passage in Mandela’s book where he talks about African music. "I enjoy all types of music, but the music of my own flesh and blod goes right to my heart. The curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale........ Politics can be stengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics." (Mandela 1994 p. 209). We try him singing this from the cell, writing the book, as Biko and Winnie make love in the earth. Then, to add one more level, Indra suggests that the rhythm of the revolutionary toi toi might grow from the sexual rhythm of the scene. We try it. It says it all.
These discoveries are dramatically and musically exciting. They begin to suggest who the Mandela of our opera may turn out to be: a deeply lonely, isolated figure, confined for so long and unable to make real human contact because he has become a symbol. Of course, we know that the real story ends happily with Graca Machel; but I’m inclined to think that it’s enough for the audience to know that. Wil says, “It’s like King Arthur”. I like this: we said we wanted to make a mythic piece out of real modern people. Anthony points out that there’s a political meaning to the loneliness too, that it relates to the whole issue of Mandela’s accommodation with Botha, De Klerk and the National Party, becoming a President and not a chief. “In African societies, people are never lonely.”
All our reading suggests that Winnie really was Mandela’s blind spot. Throughout his time in prison, and for some considerable time after his release, he clung onto the belief that he could go back to an idealised family life with her which, in reality, he had never known even in his youth. He refused to believe what was really going on, even though she refused to be alone with him or to abandon her young lover Dali Mpofu.
We look for a way of capturing this in a simple dramatic image, and think back to where we started: the release. We look again at the famous photographs of Mandela walking out of Pollsmoor hand in hand with Winnie, and realise that she is on the left (which, as any actor can tell you, is the stronger side in the image). Her body language is strong and confident, his is diffident and bewildered. We try to improvise what might have happened just before this moment. Toni as Mandela sits in the “cell” (in reality, it was a luxurious bedroom by now, but the prison image remains dramatically useful). He gets himself dressed to look like the potential President: a suit and tie, just as he had worn for Botha’s tea party. Outside, the crowd is chanting his name. Then Indra enters as Winnie, excited, buoyant and a little bit drunk. He tries to share with her his doubts, his loneliness, his trepidation about all that is in store for him. Winnie’s response is dismissive. At first she laughs it off, and then suddenly she is determined. She has waited a long time for this moment: and nothing is going to stop her now. And , with that, she leads him out into the sun.
When we started this workshop, we said we were looking for ways to show the emotional reality under the familiar images. This really achieves it: to begin and end the piece with the same moment, but to understand it so very differently the second time.
Epilogue
This is necessarily a brief summary of quite a complex workshop process. There were four more days of work after the ones I have described, in which the emphasis transferred to the music, and particularly the challenge of blending operatic voices with African instruments and rhythms. As well as Antoni Garfield Henry, we worked with Alison Crookendale and Jordene Thomas.
After the workshop, the process of writing the piece began in earnest. At the time of writing this article, the writing is still going on. We are planning to produce the opera for the first time in 2003, and hope that it will be performed in both London and South Africa. Doubtless the two audiences will show very different reactions: but I hope both will sense the honesty combined with respect in our approach to this most important of contemporary African subjects.
Books consulted during the workshop included:
Biko, Steve: I Write What I Like. Oxford, Heinemann 1978.
De Klerk, FW: The Last Trek - A New Beginning. London, Macmillan 1998.
Gilbey, Emma: The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela. London, Cape 1993.
Malan, Robin (ed): The Essential Steve Biko. Cape Town, David Philip 1997.
Malan, Robin (ed): The Essential Nelson Mandela. Cape Town, David Philip 1997.
Mandela, Nelson: No Easy Walk to Freedom. Oxford, Heinemann 1965.
Mandela, Nelson: Long Walk to Freedom. London, Abacus 1995.
Meredith, Martin: Nelson Mandela - A Biography. London, Penguin 1997.
Sampson, Anthony: Mandela - The Authorised Biography. London, Harper Collins 1999.
Smith, Charlene: Mandela. London, Struik 1999.
Soyinka, Wole: Mandela's Earth and Other Poems. New York, Random House 1988.
Thompson, Leonard: A History of South Africa. New Haven and London, Yale University Press 1995.
Internet sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/mandela/interviews.html
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mandela.html
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Michael Walling
London, 2001
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