Last Saturday I watched Ben Voss in the satire Beauty and the BEE, directed by Janice Honeyman. In it he plays BEE beneficiary Beauty Ramapelepele — sassy, cheeky and ostensibly exuding that special brand of post-apartheid self-confidence.
Yet, even though I think of myself as having skin as thick as that of a rhinoceros, it felt as though I was under siege. Voss may be hilarious, but I didn’t find most of his jokes particularly funny. It might have had to do with the make-up of the audience — more than 90% white, most laughing raucously. Perhaps this made me retreat into a cocoon, in which I found myself meditating on how far theatre has come in its discussion of race and belonging.
“You came on a bad day,” Voss says on the phone. “If there are only a few black people in the audience and a black character is being satirised, you identify with the subject and consequently feel under attack.”
There was the gag in which Beauty (speaking as the arrogant employer of a black servant) makes fun of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema: “But nowadays firing someone is so difficult,” she says. “It’s like trying to get rid of Julius Malema. My maid and Malema are the same. Floaters. No matter how much you flush they just keep popping their heads up. Round and brown and doing anything to stay afloat!”
Satire, Voss explains, is not just meant to be funny: “You are supposed to laugh one moment and cringe the next.” He says that the way humour works in South Africa is that when a joke is made satirising one racial group, the other group holds its laughter while checking to see whether the members of the race at the receiving end of the joke are laughing — if they are, they also break into laughter. The principle of a joking licence seems to be working. “We all need one another’s permission to laugh,” he says.
He admits there’s a lot of racial slurring going around “and I would hate to become part of that. I want to bring [people] together; not to divide.”
Voss admits to a fascination with the figure of the middle-aged black matriarch, affectionate and constant, partly because the black female has been and continues to be the surrogate mother of many white children. “There’s a certain warmth about the black female,” he says, but the relationship has been evolving since 1994. The kinship remains, to be sure, but there’s a subliminal rage and envy at her changed circumstances — she’s become powerful and rich, hence all the satire.
Voss is not alone in his summation that today it’s okay to make powerful black women the targets of cutting-edge satire. In the frenetic solo show, Happy Shabalala, the versatile Harry Sideropoulos plays several characters, including BEE fatcat Sibongile Sisulu. There’s also a Mrs Liebovitz, boasting four maids, a gardener called Bongani and several other characters, including Happy, a radio host.
Sideropolous’s take is broad and cynical, aiming his poisoned darts at corporates, politicians, blacks and whites, the rich and the poor. One character scoffs at the idea that South Africa has undergone meaningful transformation. “The only real changes are all the ama names: Baragwanath to Chris Hani, DF Malan to Beyers Naude and garden boys to flora enhancement executives.”
In the play’s climactic moment Sideropoulos paints himself black. It’s surreal. It reminded me of the Selous Scouts, a Rhodesian counter-insurgency hit squad that targeted fighters of Zimbabwe’s liberation war — they routinely disguised themselves as black people. After donning a wig he takes on the outrageous persona of Sibongile Sisulu. This one even has the surname of South African political royalty.
As with Voss, Sideropoulos’s comedy hints at a tenuous sense of nationhood, an acknowledgement, at least, of a shift in power relations.
Although Ramapelepele and Sisulu are outrageously selfish and negative, their presence can’t be ignored anymore. The black woman is a pointer to a nation in transition. The black matriarch, formerly occupier of perhaps the lowest rung of adult apartheid society, has been elevated. Her rise has been the most abrupt and spectacular, yet her position in the new hierarchy is the most insecure — perhaps that’s why she finds herself the easy target of bile from the white male who is howling in consternation at finding his surrogate mother “transformed utterly” (to pilfer a phrase from Yeats’s estate) into an unrecognisable, padded fatcat.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian Sideropoulos admits that “people are going to get upset” and adds a little later that “anger can never do you good; anger will breed anger. But we have got to translate that anger into positivity.” He’s aware that the nation needs to repair itself: “There’s still a lot of healing that needs to happen.”
Perhaps this is what Shabalala (who speaks for Sideropoulos) is gesturing at when he says: “This is here. This is now. And we’re all in it together — with our very big South African hearts — even if our brains are cluttered with bullshit.”
Happy Shabalala runs at The Fringe at the Joburg Theatre until November 29 and Beauty and the BEE is at The Old Mutual Theatre at Sandton’s Nelson Mandela Square until November 21