And so from summery England to wintry Johannesburg, and on down the highway to the even more wintry Grahamstown.
Why put yourself through the agony of driving 10 hours down a dangerous highway to spend a couple of days at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in
Grahamstown, and then drive all the way back? When are they going to do the sensible thing and move the festival to Johannesburg, anyway? But somehow, having skipped a year and vowing never to return, you find yourself drawn out of curiosity to see what’s coming down, what’s new and what can still be derided in the Settler City.
One of the pieces I was determined to see was Andrew and Janet Buckland’s take on Makana. Two years ago I had written a rather scathing piece on the festival, with some strong questions about the absence of the spirit of Makana in this celebration of theatre among the rolling hills of Xhosaland. Was it a coincidence that the Bucklands were now bringing Makana to town?
I was to be distracted by a couple of other things before being able to make my date with Makana. The first was the discovery that someone had audaciously decided to bring King Kong to the festival, without telling me anything about it. The second was a cheeky-sounding piece called White Men in Buckets.
We certainly have had white men in buckets and buckets in this country. Was this going to be a stylish dig at this phenomenon, white men on what white men are really like? A metaphor for the festival itself, perhaps? The blurb in the festival newspaper described the piece as depicting “the struggle of white men in the new South Africa”. White men struggling? Too intriguing to miss.
In the event the most “struggle” about it was the adaptation of the physical style of protest theatre, 2/3 à la Woza Albert! and countless others, to tell the story of a couple of guys in the navy around the time of South Africa’s transition to democracy. A rather dated theme, in fact, and no real clue about what white guys think about themselves today – but reasonably amusing none the less. The hall was packed to the roof with whities having a mighty hearty time.
I steeled myself for the rendezvous with King Kong, wondering whether I was going to walk into yet another debilitating battle about rights and royalties. But it turned out that this King Kong had nothing to do with the legendary Johannesburg musical of the 1950s. Instead, it was another two white guys (also with a bucket as a central prop – was this going to be the running motif for this year’s festival?) doing a 52-minute version of the original 1930s movie about two white guys and a giant gorilla who are all in love with the same white lady.
This was brilliantly conceived and acted, with Aldo Brincat and Michael Gritten playing a cast of hundreds, including the natives on the South Sea Island, the panic-stricken citizens of New York and the gorilla himself – not to mention the pretty lady.
The hall was packed to the roof with whities having a mighty hearty time. I, and the couple of other darkies who had showed up, had a mighty hearty time, too. This was spoof, invention and highly imaginative physical and visual theatre at its best. If you had never seen the original, you left there feeling like you had.
And so to Makana.
Well. To begin with, the hall was packed to the roof with whities having a mighty hearty time. The stage was packed with Andrew Buckland having a mighty hearty time. A couple of black actors and a black actress were doing their best to give sterling support. And somewhere in there, mostly missing-in-action, was the story of the black hero Makana.
All the best parts go to Buckland, showing off his virtuosity as, in rapid succession, Scots and English officers, an Afrikaner dominee, various Xhosa characters and the central role of Robben Islander Plaatjies, who turns out to be the real hero of the story. True, there are occasional shining moments for the black actors – the younger Makana undergoing conversion to Christianity, the older Makana rejecting the same Christianity, one of Makana’s generals in a lengthy scene with his wife on the eve of the fateful battle. These are flash-back scenes, filling out the central drama of Makana’s attempt to escape from Robben Island, where he was incarcerated by the British army after losing the battle for Grahamstown.
Makana’s attempt to escape from Robben Island, with all the symbolism that act took on during the years of the liberation struggle, is central to the Makana myth. In this version, the central role in his own myth is taken away from him. Instead, Buckland revels in playing the character of Plaatjies, a half-mad Khoi who claims to be the original inhabitant of the island, with more right to both the island and the mainland than the newcomer Makana. While Makana argues futilely, Plaatjies gets on with the business of building the boat that will carry them to freedom – if he is ever able to finish it, that is. In the meantime, he peppers Makana with a barrage of put-downs, and clearly has all the best arguments (and funniest lines) at the end of the day.
Does all this matter? Don’t people have the right to put their own version of myths and history on the stage? If South Africa wasn’t such a bizarre and unbalanced space, it wouldn’t matter. But since we are still fumbling for a collective identity, and since myths and how we look at them are central to putting an identity together, finding ourselves still travelling in contradictory directions is somewhat disconcerting.
Like I say, all around me I saw white folks having fun in buckets. I still didn’t feel the spirit of Makana.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza