Sarafina! in Black and White: revival, colour-conscious casting and new social cohesion paradigms

Abstract

Under the direction of Josias Moleele, a group of students from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in Pretoria revived Mbongeni Ngema's iconic anti-apartheid musical Sarafina! at the Soweto Theatre in July 2013. Moleele cast Tumi Lesejane, a black actress, and Suzaan Helberg, a white Afrikaans-speaking performer, in the title role. His casting decision angered some and inspired others. This article argues that colour-blind casting is a misnomer. Moleele employed, instead, colour-conscious casting. When the performance initially premiered at Pretoria's Breytenbach Theatre, Lesejane and Helberg played Sarafina in repertory. This served only to reinscribe the racial separations institutionalized by apartheid. In its final two performances at the Soweto Theatre, Sarafina! in Black and White overcame this limitation. Both Sarafinas appeared in the same performance. Lesejane played the first act, Helberg the second, and both performers appeared hand-in-hand dressed as Nelson Mandela in the musical's final moments. They intoned, ‘We are one colour.’ The performance, which garnered a standing ovation from the racially mixed audience, offers a new paradigm for approaching issues of social cohesion in contemporary South Africa.

Keywords:

• Sarafina!
• Mbongeni Ngema
• South African musical theatre
• post-apartheid theatre
• anti-apartheid revivals
• colour-conscious casting
• social cohesion

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the generous support of Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa, as well as the invaluable assistance of Josias Moleele, Dr Allan Munro, and Dr Patrick Ebewo, who graciously supported this work.

Notes

1. The term ‘born free’ refers to those South Africans born after the end of apartheid in 1994.

2. State President P. W. Botha declared a nationwide state of emergency on 12 June 1986. This gave him extraordinary powers to rule by decree and tighten his grip on the townships and homelands (Ellmann 1992).

3. Multi-party negotiations between the opposition party, the African National Congress (ANC), and the ruling National Party (NP) as well as the South African Communist Party (SACP) were held during the Congress for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA I and II).

4. Scholar Loren Kruger (1999, p. 191) coined the term ‘post-anti-apartheid’ to refer to the time period between Mandela's 1990 release from prison and his 1994 ascendancy to the presidency.

5. Though 1992 movie version of Sarafina! was filmed in Soweto, Sarafina! in Black and White marked the first time that the live musical played in the township.

6. In September 2013 Art Fair organizer Ross Douglas removed Ayanda Mabulu's Yakhalinkomo – Black Man's Cry, a painting depicting Zuma's complicity in the Marikana shooting, from the First National Bank Johannesburg Art Fair, only to return it when a number of artists, including photographer David Goldblatt, the premiere attraction, threatened to pull their pieces from the show. The incident suggested a collective anxiety concerning the subject of Zuma's involvement with the police action (SA Breaking News 2013).

7. For an in-depth study of nineteenth-century blackface in South Africa, see Thelwell (2013).

8. In his examination of non-traditional casting practices in the US, William Sun (2000, p. 87) uses the term ‘colour-specific’ to describe a host of intentional cross-racial casting choices, including Jean Genet's The Blacks, in which white characters are played by black actors in whiteface.

9. Teboho MacDonald Mashinini (1957–1990), or Tsietsi, while a student at Morris Isaacson High School, organized the mass demonstration on 16 June 1976 that touched off the Soweto uprisings and led to the deaths of 176 people, many of them students. Despite being pursued by the Special Branch for his involvement, Mashinini escaped to exile in London. He lived for a time in a series of West African countries including Liberia and Guinea. During the winter of 1990 he died suddenly in Guinea under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It is generally accepted that he died from AIDS, although when his body returned to South Africa family members discovered a gaping wound at the eye socket that could have caused his death. Mashinini's family refused a formal autopsy (Schuster 2004, p. 376).