Guy Willoughby describes putting together his new play about Olive Schreiner’s forgotten brother Will
‘The only duty we owe to history”, declared Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.” Eighteen months ago, a National Arts Council grant in hand, I set out to do just that – or at least to refashion the historical record about century-old events in our country (a man, a war, a fight for voting rights) into a theatrical text at once fresh, topical and, most of all, entertaining.
A tall order? Maybe, but the thing that’s always astonished me about South Africa is how dreadfully dull our institutions, possessed of great source material, have managed to make our history. We’ve all suffered from a surfeit of ideologies in this country, generally at the expense of, well, living, breathing people. In a country as divided as ours, everybody has used something called “history” to further a political agenda. This hasn’t made for much fun – and generations of bored schoolchildren will attest to that.
But when one considers that “the past” is merely a shifting set of stories we tell each other about actual people – rich, poor, famous, obscure – one begins to find reason to make stagecraft out of history. That is why I went with my shards of story to director Chris Weare in the first place.
So what is is our new play African Star! all about – and why dramatise it now? I’ll answer the last question first. With the Anglo-Boer South African War centenary upon us, I wanted to tell a story that would yank that conflict out of its sterile, whites-only, Boer-versus- Brit narrative, and into a much more pressing, topical debate: what the war meant, and means, for most South Africans.
Certain stories, I think, have their moment; this is Will Schreiner’s. I had come across the one dusty book written about him in 1937 while in Oudtshoorn, serving my time in the defence force, and I obscurely felt there was a good story lurking beneath historian Eric Walker’s turgid prose. When the Boer war suddenly took on a currency, and Schreiner – who tried hard in 1899 to stop the war – kept popping up on the margins of my reading, I realised his moment has come.
WP’s career provides the link between the 100-year-old Boer war, at base a struggle between whites for supremacy, and the shape of modern South Africa. After the war, when the country’s white decision-makers wanted to form one state out of four disparate colonies, Schreiner and his comrades in black politics fought for a federal South Africa with a non-racial franchise.
Think about what our state is, and has been, for decades: a tight political union of mismatched elements, deeply racist, obsessively authoritarian, bureaucratic, top-heavy, top-down. Our great democratic sea change hasn’t changed any of that – yet.
But how many people know that this ugly edifice was put in place at the time of Union in 1910 – and that Union itself was a patch-up job to bury the Boer-Brit emnity of the war, with black rights sacrificed to appease racist Boer sentiment? As our history is taught so badly (I’m told Union hardly features in the new grade 11 to 12 syllabus), hardly anybody at all.
Enter WP, voicing in 1910 a contrary political urge: to weaken the centre, federalise, and – most importantly – take the racist sting out of our constitutional thinking. Schreiner, almost alone of his (white) countryfolk, saw in Union a betrayal of “black” South African hopes, carefully fostered by Britain, that Imperial victory in the war would lead to the extension of black voting rights throughout South Africa.
It may come as a surprise that blacks had voting rights at all in those far-off days; indeed they did, as part of the non-racial franchise arrangements of the old Cape Colony. Schreiner’s mission was continuity, not rupture. He went into battle to defend and advance that qualified franchise – in existence at the Cape since 1852 – and found himself at one with educated black opinion across South Africa.
New, nationwide black politics came into being around this struggle, which led directly to the formation after Union of the African National Congress. Much of the pathos of African Star!, I think, is to witness this modest white colonial discovering, in concert with these black men, what a future South Africa – race set aside – might be like.
When at last they went together to London to protest the racist Union Constitution, they went as South Africans. The pity was that nobody else at the time, who wasn’t black, could recognise the fact.
That’s why we tell this story in African Star!: because it is quixotic, noble, far- sighted – and filled with fun, larger-than- life characters.
In short, I dug up, dusted off, ferreted out this story because the war did a lot more than kill off lots of soldiers; it visited upon us the South Africa that we are still trying to shake off. At least, that’s what I find in the story we tell.
You might disagree, and find other meanings in African Star!; well, I hope that you do. That’s history – and that’s theatre. To understand ideas, you need to stage them. In African Star!, as interrogated by Chris Weare and six actors in debate with an author, I believe we’ve done exactly that.
See African Star! at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown at the Rhodes Box on June 30 and July 1 and 2