The Black Consciousness movement began in the late 1960s in South Africa when black university students broke away from the National Union of South African Students to form SASO, the South African Students’ Organisation. Concerned with self-determination, the movement drew inspiration from similar developments in the United States. As a cultural movement, the Black Consciousness movement sought to create an internal transformation in the identity of black people, riding them of any inferiority complex and encouraging outward symbols of blackness, like the Afro, dashiki shirts and black music. It also found itself filling the vacuum left by the banning of existing liberation movements. At the time, black leaders like Mandela were in prison and even mentioning his name was a crime. This article examines how the movement spurred a remarkable transformation in South African theatre during the Apartheid era. The strand of radical theatre that developed in the heyday of the Black Consciousness movement in the late 1960s contributed to community theatre activities in Soweto in the 1980s, and its messages and medium continue to resonate today.
Steve Biko was the main spokesperson of the movement and the first president of SASO; he was later killed by Apartheid security agents. In 1975, Biko was called to testify at a trial of SASO activists, during which the ideas of the movement around culture were interrogated. The arrests of the activists had been sparked by rallies that celebrated the victory of the guerilla movement FRELIMO in neighbouring Mozambique, who led that country to independence from Portuguese colonial rule. For the government, however, the trial was about more than these rallies. They perceived Black Consciousness as a threat to white minority rule in South Africa and were especially concerned with the way the movement encouraged the proliferation of poems and plays that positively portrayed the black experience. In cross examination, Steve Biko explained that black people were beginning to embrace the stage as a form: black theatre was ‘directed at the development of … the humanity within blacks. It gives some kind of sedating effect, especially after any experiences at the receiving end [of injustice], it is nice to see it being parodied on the stage.’
In the early 1970s, the activist Mthuli ka Shezi was the first Vice President of the Black People’s Convention, an extra–parliamentary political group that was founded by the Black Consciousness movement. Frustrated with the apolitical tone of many popular theatre productions in the segregated townships, he wrote the radical play Shanti. It cast two characters as lovers who were classified by the state as Indian and an African amid the backdrop of revolutionary war. At the time, ‘interracial’ marriages in South Africa were illegal; the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 was the first piece of legislation the apartheid government passed, and it is seen by many historians as the cornerstone of their ideology. By upholding the notion of the ‘purity’ of the white race, apartheid ideologues could continue to justify the unequal treatment of other population groups.
Shezi died in mysterious circumstances at the end of 1972, when he ‘fell’ in front of a moving train after confronting a white railway worker who he believed had harassed black women. A group from Johannesburg, the People’s Experimental Theatre (PET), staged the play Shanti a few times in 1973 and early 1974, but came under intense surveillance and repression from the government’s security police. The play, which was performed alongside radical poetry, had to be quickly adapted by the cast when they were tipped off about the presence of security police. Sadeque Variava, a member of the PET, recalls, ‘when we went to Tembisa, the whole thing was raided with the security police. [In the play] they had a guy who had a gun, but it was a bloody pellet gun you were supposed to play pretend… at the end of the play they confiscated the gun everything, arrested the cast and that was practically the end of Shanti itself on the black theatre thing.’
By the 1980s, poetry had become the preferred means to express dissent or create spaces where audience and performer could imagine freedom. Performance poets such as Ingoapele Madingoane stirred audiences with poems such as ‘Africa my Beginning’. However, there was also a quite a bit of theatre being created in the townships. In Soweto, two prominent playwrights who drew direct inspiration from the Black Consciousness movement were Maishe Maponya and Matsemela Manaka. They both came of age during the tumultuous Soweto Uprising, a series of protests led by school children in Soweto and other segregated townships in 1976. Both Maponya and Manaka also came from a poetry background as members of the Allahpoets with Madingoane.
The economic exploitation of black labour by mining capital was explored in one of Manaka’s most powerful plays was Egoli — City of Gold. The play was first performed in community halls in Soweto from 1979. It moved to Cape Town’s Space and then the Market Theatre, where it was watched by multicultural audiences at a time when entertainment amenities were largely segregated by race. Egoli told the story of two black miners who had escaped from prison and worked in the bowels of Johannesburg’s mines, another type of prison. While their sweat built the wealth of the city, their own lives were precarious. The play was an allegory for the difficult situations in which black South Africans lived, but it also aimed to give the audience hope. The chain that the John and Hamilton broke in Act Two, for instance, symbolised the coming of freedom. Not content to merely protest against racial injustice, the play looked inwards and considered the effects of the South African labour system on the behaviour of black workers. John was depicted as an alcoholic who drowned his sorrows in beer and sex workers. Although the play was seen by hundreds of people, when the script was published by the radical Ravan Press a few years later, it was swiftly banned by the Publications Control Board for being ‘prejudicial to the general welfare or the peace and good order’. Clearly the government feared revolutionary art.
Another prominent resistance play of this period was Gangsters, which echoed Steve Biko’s life and murder at the hands of the security police. Written in the mid-1980s, Maponya’s play Gangsters took a direct aim at apartheid’s infamous security police. The two characters, Rasechaba the poet and Whitebeard the security policeman, were initially played by Maponya and John Maytham respectively. The action centred on Rasechaba’s interrogation and his continuing resistance. Threatened with violence, Rasechaba nevertheless continued to perform poetry to the oppressed people of South Africa until he met his untimely end at the hands of the police. Like Biko, Rasechaba became a martyr in death.
The play was a hit in Johannesburg’s theatre circles among white and black audiences, causing the Apartheid state censors to scramble to control who could see it. By this time, the censors had become more sophisticated and were wary not to be perceived as demagogues who controlled art. Rather than ban Gangsters outright, they chose to restrict it. Basing their decision on a revised censorship law, they said Gangsters ‘may only be performed in small intimate four wall theatres.’ This effectively reduced who could see it, since, at the time, Soweto, Lenasia, and other black townships did not have any theatres. There were many other works in which the echoes of Black Consciousness can be heard during the 1980s. More commercially successful works which toured overseas – such as Mbongeni Ngema, Percy Mtwa, and Barney Simon’s Woza Albert! – were not as directly confrontational, but they were nevertheless political.
There was a marked shift away from themes of resistance in the 1990s, as the euphoria of democracy engulfed South Africa. A new generation of playwrights, however, is now revisiting this radical legacy—aware that in many ways 1994 is still a dream deferred. Monageng ‘Vice’ Motshabi’s Red On the Rainbow, which I saw at the Market Theatre in 2022, is one such recent work. It deals with the real-life alleged murder of a black boy Matlhomola Moshoeu, accused of stealing sunflowers from a farm in 2017. Upending conventions of the Western stage in style and form, the play shows how the majority of black South Africans remain dispossessed and poor.
The Black Consciousness movement was effectively curtailed by the Apartheid government through arrests, convictions and imprisonments of activists. In some cases, such as Steve Biko’s tragic story, activists died fighting for change. When Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, took over as the first democratically elected government in 1994, they also sidelined alternative liberation movements. Although the Black Consciousness movement did not make it into government, they left a lasting impression on the theatre landscape of South Africa. Egoli, for example, was restaged in 2008 and 2016, and it still hits a nerve. While times have changed, this theatre remains important not only as a historical record but also as a cautionary tale against the injustices still faced by South Africans today. When direct action seemed impossible, use of the arts was a powerful tool to challenge the status quo. This offers a lesson for all who seek social change today.
This research is based on the PhD Thesis, ‘Theatre of Resistance in Johannesburg, 1960 – 2010’.