Decades after writing her now-legendary work Fatima Dike is still asking: “Why were my ancestors so stupid?”
Guy Willoughby
‘Our grasp of the past is so unbalanced: black experience has been separated for so long from white that we don’t understand why we each do the things that we do. I wrote Kreli in 1976 because I wanted to make our history available to all so that we could look at each other with a different eye.”
The name Fatima Dike the playwright whose now-legendary first play, The Sacrifice of Kreli, enjoys a revival this week at the Baxter Concert Hall conjures entire worlds of experience in our modern theatre history.
Protest, black consciousness theatre, women’s liberation, the notion of the stage as political weapon and debating tool: Dike was a dynamic element in the forces driving our best theatre in the 1970s and 1980s. “For me, theatre has always been a platform to achieve liberation and that hasn’t changed in the new South Africa.”
Frank, feisty, voluble and engaged as always, Dike finds her play more critically useful than ever. “This generation knows so little, they must be given something to think about the past.”
Set in 1885 Kreli tracks the fortunes of a defeated Xhosa king in exile, avoiding capture by the victorious British forces after the ninth frontier war. It has proved to be a pioneering example of a heartening recent cultural trend: the recovery and redeployment of stories, from pre-apartheid times that throw a revealing light on the present.
Says Dike: “We know a lot about the recent past since 1976 and very little about before that. Besides, it’s good to test your plays against time.”
Kreli debuted at The Space in 1976 and was followed by another historic reclamation, The First South African (1977).
Her subsequent work records the changing drama of urban black life. “Black theatre came out of community theatre, that need for expression and debate. Our task today is to take that theatre back to the townships from which it came.”
To this end, Dike expounded in her racy township comedies, So What’s New? (1991) and Streetwalking and Co (2000), a politics of humour, laughter as liberating lever, that chimed in with the rebirth of South African stage comedy. “There is always humour in the townships it gets us through. We laugh so that others don’t know that we’re scared!”
The Sacrifice of Kreli was inspired by an 1896 interview with King Kreli. “This interview answered a question: why had my ancestors been so stupid, giving away land for knives and mirrors? Landlessness was the problem in 1876 as in 1976, with the Soweto riots going on around us.
“I was working in another context besides the political: it was the time of Ipi Tombi, when audiences thought black theatre meant singing and dancing only. I wanted to write a straight drama drawing on Greek elements to tell an African story.”
The new production employs a strong township cast honed by their training at Dike’s beloved New Africa company, with an augmented chorus component “we have the luxury of many actors to use” and combines the manifold resources of two directors of widely differing backgrounds.
The Sacrifice of Kreli marks a milestone in a remarkable theatrical career still unfolding. Dike concludes: “I have journeyed to seeing what has become of our political ideals and I want to do all I can to fight wrong as we did before. I don’t just believe the theatre is the place to achieve these things. I know it is!”
The details
Fatima Dike’s The Sacrifice of Kreli shows at the Concert Hall at the Baxter Theatre Centre until November 24. Book at Computicket on Tel: 021 685 7880.