How did the play come about?
I wrote it as part of my MA for Wits University. I did a course in theatre writing last year. So it was really the first play that I’ve done where I walked into the rehearsal room with a second draft ready. And then Mncedisi Shabangu [who plays the narrator] added some of his own take on it, in the vernacular.
Is it intending to be historically accurate or is the play an impression?
It’s an impression. A lot of it is based on fact: the child Tshepang, the fact that six people were accused and that it wasn’t them. That was what motivated me to write it. When the story broke Tshepang was the same age as my little girl — nine months old — and that made an impression on me. Then all the newspaper articles started coming out — about a five month old, a six year old, a two year old. It was like a scab had been pulled off a wound. But when they found out it wasn’t the six guys they just stopped the story — the fact that it was one guy. Now it wasn’t sensational enough to sell papers.
Was the mother’s story, about her alcoholism, based on fact?
Yes. What happened was that another actor, Beki Vilakazi, who was going to play the role, went and stayed in the town for 10 days. Every night he would talk into a tape to me about what he had seen. What was evident from the tapes was that nothing ever happened. People get up in the morning, have a wash, a wipe, put their cents together, meet under a tree, work out what they can drink that night and go drinking. They find a partner for the night and start again the next morning. I was hoping he would come back with factual information about Tshepang, or stories that happened in that village, but he didn’t. What he came back with was a portrayal, a sketch of a landscape — how people survived — and at first I was disappointed, I thought where are the stories? Then I decided, let me start with the landscape. The landscape grew in my head as if the landscape was the rapist, as if the landscape had been raped itself. And that’s what motivated that slant on the play.
That’s quite a rational way of looking at the crime. It almost exonerates the criminal by saying that if you lived under such oppressive conditions you may be capable of the most horrendous crimes.
In no way does the play excuse or condone it. One must look further than just the rapist and say, ‘hang him, castrate him”. At the time when they had those six guys on television I started to feel a warped empathy towards them because I thought: ‘What makes a guy get to that?” Not to say anyone who’s been oppressed or suffered poverty is going to be a rapist. When I stared researching what doctors and psychologist have written about infant rape I discovered it is completely different to paedophilia. Infant rape is associated with a terrible once-off violent crime. A sudden, impulsive action, whereas paedophilia goes on over years. The major things that contribute to the psychology of a child rapist is that they’ve been subjected to extreme poverty, violence and gender discrepancy. It happens where there’s a discrepancy between male and female, where the male is expected to be the provider and the patriarch but where he has no job and no sense of self-worth.