The Fiction of Reconciliation: Creating Dialogue through Verbal and Performance Arts in South Africa

Abstract

Except for a small number of novels and short stories, South African writers have shied away from narrating reconciliation, and from creating work that draws its inspiration from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Publishers, in their gate-keeping role, have played a crucial role in the dearth of literature that responds to the TRC. In South Africa today it is difficult for a new writer to get narratives that are set in the apartheid era published due to commercial considerations. Theater, on the other hand, goes through profoundly different gate-keeping processes than works of prose fiction. Theater is highly subsidized by the state or private grants and foundations. Profitability or lack thereof is often not the ultimate determining factor as to whether a play is produced or not—except in the purely commercial performances spaces. As a result playwrights and other creators of the theater have narrated reconciliation, sometimes in the context of the TRC, quite extensively. There are still vast unwritten spaces in the literary landscape of South Africa. Although the spectacle of the TRC hearings ended years ago, dialogue about reconciliation continues beyond the walls of formal theater to other interactive spaces and visual exhibits at museums.

Zakes Mda is a South African novelist, playwright, painter, and beekeeper currently working as a professor of creative writing at Ohio University. He was the Gladstein Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut when he presented this paper.

Notes

1. Eleni Coundouriotis (2006) has an interesting analysis of this concept in “The Dignity of the ‘Unfittest’: Victims Stories in South Africa.”

2. This is one aspect of black South African culture that I think needs further examination by sociologists.

3. I think here they mean Truth in Translation conceived and directed by Michael Lessac. The music was composed by Hugh Masekela.