When the past strikes the present: performing requiems for the Marikana massacre

Abstract

Although the positive effects of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) are commonly acknowledged, an increasing critical debate points at the limitations of the Commission's meta-narrative approach in ‘mastering’ the cultural trauma of apartheid. It is important to find relief in drawing meaning from traumatic experiences; however, the danger of a master narrative is that it constitutes a unilateral discourse with defined characters, actions and places, excluding anything that differs from the narrative ‘mastering’ of the trauma. In this article we reflect on the exclusive mechanism of the master narrative of forgiveness, reconciliation and disclosure instigated by the TRC. The progress of the nation, put forward as the most important meta-action of the narrative, manifests a profound desire for forgetting and for a radical break between past and present. This modernist disjuncture between past and present becomes problematic in the wake of the Marikana massacre of 2012. Marikana reminded South Africa of the traumatic past of apartheid that continues into the present. This article documents the remarkable potential of the performing arts to avoid exactly the modernist time construction of a master narrative in coping with cultural traumas. Avoiding the exclusive mechanism of a hypermastery in narrating a traumatic event, the performing arts have the ability to entail multiple narratives within their non-judicial, momentary nature and to question a unilateral narrative structure. By doing so, they can formulate an alternative to the master narrative of the TRC. Two contemporary South African performances, MARI and KANA and Iqhiya Emnyama, bring together in a remarkable way the diverse, unsettling stories of victims and survivors of the Marikana massacre, while emphasizing in particular the role of the mourning women and hence entail a profound call for critical reflection on the construction of a master narrative in relation to the traumatic past of apartheid.

Keywords:

• Marikana
• trauma
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• performance
• Infecting the City

Notes

1 This task was publicly announced a few hours before the shooting by General Mbombo, Police Commissioner of the North-West province predicting: ‘Remember that we said our intention is to disarm the people and to make sure that they leave that illegal gathering area. We wish that we will do that amicably, meaning we will ask them to leave. But I don't want to explain to you what if they don't. What I told you is: Today we are ending this matter’ (Rehad Desai 2014). These words resulted in the murder climax of what is known as the Marikana massacre.

2 ‘The consciousness of South Africans and others has been scarred by media footage that makes it seem like strikers were charging the police, and defending themselves against savages’ (Alexander 2013, p.16).

3 As someone testified at the TRC: ‘The media, both print and visual, took a few seconds of my testimony that dealt with other issues and superimposed upon me the very narrative that I went to the TRC to question. The disembodiment of my testimony has made the struggle to reclaim my voice, memory and agency harder’ (Hutchison 2005, p.359).

4 As both performances are programmed on Infecting the City, the present as hegemonic time becomes even more precarious as we consider the ephemeral and everyday life character of festivals, which have become a dominant feature of South African theatre over the past two decades. ‘The artistic output is eventified and the everyday life event is turned into a significant cultural event, framed and made meaningful by the presence and the responses of an audience and reviewers’ (Hauptfleisch 2006, p.185). Head of the curatorial team of the festival, Jay Pather, referred to the festival as a ‘very temporary infection indeed’ (Fleishman and Pather 2014, p.106).

5 As those songs are embedded in Xhosa culture, most who are raised in this culture know them by heart and don't hesitate to sing along. That actually happened that evening. This search for sharing a human experience and the belief in the necessity to restore the human spirit (Gobodo-Madikizela 2008) are highly topical issues in South Africa. Pather (2014) says: ‘What is going on at the core of our society is a continued abnegation of the human – and until we have restored a kind of humanity in our society, none of what we achieve will mean very much’ (p.1).

6 ‘Machel was convinced that people needed her voice. So she spoke up. This is exactly what happens in Iqhiya Emnyama. These women navigate in the situation in which they are present’ (Mkaza-Siboto 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This publication is part of a research project supported by the NRF-FWO, entitled ‘Masks, Puppets and Performative Objects in Relation to Trauma, Reconciliation and Performance in South Africa’. This research project runs over the period 2014–2017. Supervisors of this research project are Prof. Dr. Christel Stalpaert and Prof. Dr. Marie Kruger.