… allowed in a lecture hall?’
They grin like crocodiles.
‘Forgive me, I’m not from South Africa—perhaps this is common practice here …’ Like the impi of Zulu warriors, burnt-out offices, the Frankenstein stitches on Zimmerlie’s head—all perfectly normal.
‘It’s for the play, sir.’
‘The play?’
‘The Tempest.’
The AK, gunmetal heavy symbol for liberation and oppression, shimmers before your eyes. You stare. The AK is crude and badly made: salvaged from parts of guns to be sure, but non-functioning—the barrel a piece of pipe, the butt (with notches) from a plastic toy gun you could buy in any supermarket. The panga—real enough—is also a prop, blunted, daubed with red paint.
‘Is this what you were carrying with you yesterday?’
‘We’re doing The Tempest for our group Honours Project,’ explains Eric Phala.
‘Kaliban, you see, takes up arms against Prospero, liberates the island …’
‘The Kapitalist Kolonisers—both with a K—are banished …’
‘Driven into the sea.’
‘I’m Ariel,’ says Scarface. ‘He is under house arrest by Prospero and has to do his bidding until he negotiates a settlement.’
‘Trinkulo with a K.’
‘Wait, wait. You’re putting on The Tempest. With an … AK-47?’
‘A modern version,’ says Eric Phala. ‘Where the oppressed have weapons to fight back.’
Joel Matinde: ‘We rewrote the entire play ourselves. Workshopped it.’
Kaliban: ‘The New Strugglers—that’s the name of our play group.’
Eric Phala: ‘The New Struggle for a New South Africa.’
Joel Matinde: ‘The New Struggle for the Post-Apartheid, Post-New South Africa.’
Kaliban gestures to the ceiling: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!’
You cannot keep your eyes off the AK, wondering now how you could possibly have mistaken it for the real thing. It is a crude caricature of an AK-47.
You feel, not for the first time in your life, very foreign. Your perceptions are slow as mud.
The woman in the front row hasn’t said a word yet. She folds her arms and watches you with ironic superiority.
‘And you are?’
She does not answer. The men at the back speak for her. ‘She’s Miranda! Miranda!’
‘Prospero the Kapitalist’s beautiful daughter,’ says Kaliban.
‘But in our version,’ says Eric, ‘she marries Kaliban, not the prince!’
‘And what’s your name, Miranda?’
Finally, she deigns to speak. ‘Tracey Khumalo.’
‘Is that Khumalo with a K?’
Your eyes meet. She tosses her braided hair over her shoulder and the beads and bells clatter and jingle. An echo of a past ache inserts itself in the present, cuts and pastes itself onto her, squeezes your heart for a moment, and then is gone.
Beauty and good looks, which are merely accidents of biology, should not influence how you treat a student, or any person for that matter. And why should such an accident of beauty (and beauty is always relative, constructed) elevate a person’s status in the eyes of others? So you refuse to pay homage. Or try not to anyway. But her green eyes follow your every move, like a cat about to pounce on its prey.
‘What have you guys got against the letter C?’
She speaks to you as if you are an idiot. ‘It’s not African.’2
2 The letter ‘c’ in IsiZulu is pronounced with a click, not as ‘see’ or ‘kay’ as in most European languages, hence the comment that it is not ‘African’. This is nothing unusual. Most English speakers don’t like the letter ‘t’. Cockneys and Londoners say ‘w’ instead of ‘th’, and when they can possibly help it, leave out the ‘t’ altogether: ‘writing a letter’ becomes ‘wri’in a le’a’. Americans and Australians, however, prefer a ‘d’ to a ‘t’: ‘wriding a ledder’. But Tracey is probably referring here to the word ‘Afrika’, the name adopted by black consciousness movements during Apartheid South Africa which strove for a New Azania. The ‘a’ and ‘k’ were of course a subconscious draw card. Ironically the word is also spelled ‘Afrika’ in Afrikaans, the ‘language of the oppressor’. The word ‘Africa’ itself is, of course, not African, as Sizwe Bantu tells us in his ‘Notes on Azania’ (see p. 165, Seven Invisible Selves.) Africa is the Latin name for this continent, kindly bestowed on it by Roman imperialists. And if we want to play the reductio ad absurdum game, none of the letters ‘a-f-r-i-c-a’, or even ‘k’, are African either.
You could say something here. But you don’t. ‘So, who’s playing Prospero in your play?’
‘We still don’t have anyone to play Prospero. We need a white man, and no white man has volunteered.’
You have sufficiently regained your composure. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
The men at the back laugh.
You are aware of the baggage you carry, that they carry: that this superficial friendliness is not real, that underneath this banter is a century of resentment against white men, of which you are one. You have to tread carefully. But your instinct is to say to hell with treading carefully. Culture is not god. Culture is a mould growing and feeding on people, a deceptive green furry substance. You believe that underneath all racial, gendered, cultural, religious and political impositions, there is a fundamental sameness, common ground and this is what you need to tap into here. Vive la similitude!
For example, they have an ironic humour you can relate to. Their attitude to the world is wry and sceptical, a familiar stance. The distance with which they measure themselves from others is a trait you might say you had yourself. They exude a dark, restless energy. This is a language you have in common.
You gesture to the six women who sit stony-faced in the middle rows. ‘What parts are you ladies playing?’
Joel answers for them. ‘They’re the chorus. They comment on the play in a unified voice.’
‘The main parts of the play are traditionally taken by men,’ offers Scarface.
‘And what do the women think of that?’
‘They agree with us,’ says Joel.
Tracey
