/ 18 September 2022

Remembering black people’s suffering and presence in the Anglo-Boer War with The Parrot Woman

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Vintage photograph of a Victorian British soldier and his African manservant. From the era of the Boer war, in South Africa. Photo: Getty Images

In the latest version of Charles J Fourie’s play The Parrot Woman, on at the Market Theatre, Venter the soldier tells the captive woman he’s guarding to stop speaking in her native tongue, in an irritating refrain. This repeated irritation in the play can be likened to the constant attempts and successes at erasing and dehumanising black lives throughout history. 

Fourie’s play is set in the Anglo-Boer War and the premise of this new iteration is to highlight the participation of black people in the war. 

The play was last staged at the Market in 1990 with Henriëtta Gryffenberg and Wayne Robins. This was the first English version. Fourie premiered The Parrot Woman in Afrikaans (Die Papegaaivrou) at the Windybrow Theatre with Michelle Burgess and Hannes Muller in 1988. The play has had a rich life since then, having been performed to critical acclaim throughout the country and internationally. 

Giving context Fourie says, “When I wrote the play in 1988, my contemporaries and I were young and vibrant. But the 1980s was a very dark time and I wanted to change the world and change South Africa. It was a dangerous time. So, all my work in the 80s and 90s was stuck in that period. 

“This play was written from fear and danger. I was brought up in an Afrikaans home. So, it comes from that Afrikaans/boere world that I was busy disenfranchising or disorienting.”

The story takes place in an Anglo-Boer War concentration camp and centres around the relationship between an imprisoned woman and the “British” soldier who guards her. In previous versions, the woman was Afrikaans. Here, she is black and played by Gontse Ntshegang and the soldier is played by André Lötter.  

The Anglo-Boer War is often thought of as a “white man’s war” between the British and the Boers. However, research shows South Africa’s tribal population took part in the war – voluntarily and involuntarily – on both sides. In the SA Military History Journal, education officer Nosipho Nkuna points out that Zulu, Xhosa, Bakgatla, Shangaan, Sotho, Swazi and Basotho people were embroiled in the war, employed in a wide variety of roles ranging from trench diggers, scouts, dispatch runners and cattle raiders to labourers and trackers. Black farmworkers became “agterryers” (rear riders) and military aides on the side of the Boers.

Nkuna writes: “Agterryers were either conscripted by the Boers or joined the commandos voluntarily. The Boers utilised the agterryers for guarding spare ammunition, looking after the horses, cooking, collecting firewood and loading firearms. Not only were the auxiliaries used in a labour capacity, but they were also used in fighting.”  

In his article, “To fully reconcile The Boer War is to fully understand the ‘Black’ Concentration Camps”, Peter Dickens notes, importantly, that it was not only black men who supported the Boers – black women supported Boer women in providing food to the commandos on the frontlines. He writes that when the concentration camp system started, set up by the British, black women and their children were also gathered up and often lived in the tents with the Boer families. Imprisoned in the “white” concentration camps, black women primarily looked after children (black and white), sourced food and water, and did the cooking and washing. 

“They too were exposed to the same ravages of war in the camps as the white folk, mainly the water-borne diseases which decimated the women and children in these camps,” Dickens writes. 

This explains the findings that black concentration camps contained primarily men. They were more like forced labour camps where black men were expected to work – and pay for their rations of food. In other concentration camps, food rations were handed out for free.

Because of the racism of the Victorian period, although inadequate care was given to those in the white concentration camps but very little or none was received at the black concentration camps.

In addition, when commissions of enquiry, such as The Fawcett Commission, were established to investigate the problems and death rates in the concentration camps, the plight of black people in the camps was ignored. 

The official death toll in the Boer concentration camps is estimated to be around 26 000, compared to the 6 000 Boers who died in battle. Black deaths are estimated to be at least 20 000. The number could be higher, considering that many of the British records are incomplete or missing, and that some black people were buried outside the camps (those who died in labour or in transit), with others buried in communal graves. 

This erasure of black suffering in the Anglo-Boer War, and the disregard for black history in the mainstream which strengthens the notion that black lives are of less value than white lives, gives resonance and legitimacy to the global Black Lives Matter outcry. This is why this iteration of The Parrot Woman is important. 

It’s a personal and spiritual undertaking for Ntshegang to play Itatoleng, the Motswana woman in a “white” concentration camp, who along with her caged parrot, carries trauma in her seemingly mad demeanour.  

“The play is very personal for me,” Ntshegang says. “I want to know my history. I have an identity issue which is my existential anguish. I have been researching Sol Plaatje and Batswana at the time. I want to know the different stories that led to us being here at this present moment. Where does our politics stem from?

“As an actor, I deal with things spiritually now and I combine that with my training. I’m rekindling the soul that lives in many and that has lived for so many years. This is the story of a woman who is saying, ‘I was there, I saw what was happening and I’m retelling it.’ 

“I am immersing myself without making judgment on this character, being open-minded to her psychology at that time. I put it very spiritually that I want this soul to come out and speak out what it has to say, like a parrot.” 

The gravity of this production rests on Ntshegang and her parrot woman; she carries the play and the character with grace. She straddles the line between being caricature and embodying the poetic juxtaposition of a clown. 

She carries the load with Lotter as her partner. And their natural chemistry is tangible on and off the stage. 

For Lotter, the play is about exploring the human condition. Both actors bring something personal to the stage – with Ntshegang being a Motswana, like Itatoleng, and Lotter having Afrikaans and English lineage, like Venter. 

The characters are both rejects of the system they find themselves in. And there lies the root of their connection. 

“My entry point to the play is what Charles mentioned about not associating with that image of the Anglo-Boer War/ the Boer/ the farmer and disenfranchising from that. I have always lived that.  

“But it eventually became about the human condition and human connection within turmoil. And the truth. What is the truth? You go to an Afrikaans school and you’re taught history – but what was true and what was not? 

“Doing this play, researching the Anglo-Boer War specifically, as an adult now, you learn different things and that becomes interesting. The play is a quest for the truth,” Lotter says. 

This quest for truth is guided by the explorative process that the cast describes. They breathe new life into Fourie’s considered script which poses more questions than it gives solutions. Parts of the script strike chords, sparking a verbal reaction from an audience member on opening night – a quirk of the South African theatre experience, where the audience is moved to respond to the drama as it happens. 

The production uses props that help place the period piece in the here and now. One might think of the war in Ukraine. The Israel-Palestine conflict. With the recent death of Queen Elizabeth II, the play may be another way to remember the legacies of colonialism and its present-day hauntings. It may also be a call to our humanity. 

The Parrot Woman is on at the Market Theatre until September 25.