Saw Tshepang tonight with a friend, a play written and directed by Lara Foot Newton, notably a white South African with much theatrical repute. It was not what my friend expected, despite warnings.
My friend was horrified and mostly baffled by the play. She could not wrap her head around its subject matter; that life is not fair was "too abstract," she said after some discussion as we hunted for her car in the poorly signed NAC parking garage.
It is very hard, as a caucasian Canadian, to comprehend that this kind of violence exists in the world. It is also very hard to understand that many people's reality is so much different from what we experience every day. I find it hard and I have lived there, seen it, experienced some of it and grew up in a family with cosmopolitan experience, able to share the many shades of grey and evil in the world. But I am still a white Canadian with a comfortable life in a very, very rich country.
Before I go into the contents of the play, I must say that those who are disturbed by such things should not read on. Though, I think, being disturbed and uncomfortable is a good thing and you should.
We are told in PR materials playwright Newton wrote the play in reaction to news stories of a child, renamed Tshepang by hospital nurses, who had been brutally raped and then left to die in a veld in the Western Cape of RSA. I told my friend of this; she is the sort who is wounded when puppy dogs are spoken to harshly.
What I forgot to tell my friend before we sat down was that the child was nine-months old. I forgot to do this because when I was living in South Africa such news reports were not uncommon. My friend was so shocked by this kind of violence she, literally, could not get her head around it.
Most instances of child rape are not reported in South Africa. We are told by the play that 20,000 children are raped every year. We are not told the source of this number (obviously) nor how "children" is defined.
I do not have access to numbers at present but I know, during my time there, it was understood most female Zulu children would be raped before they reached the age of 12. I held a five-year-old boy in my arms whose body was covered in scar tissue from being lit on fire during a political party fight in a village, who had been raped and as result was now HIV positive.
I was also made familiar with the cavalier attitude of many within the police force and made intimately familiar with the cavalier and violent attitude of certain men towards the sanctity of a woman's body — even the men alongside whom I worked in NGOs and legislatures. And I heard from women and girls who accepted this, the misogyny behind it and its other permutations, as part of their life.
We have also all heard the stories — or I thought we had — of a certain belief that having sex with a virgin would prevent the instance of what we term HIV or AIDS. I write "what we term" because until recently RSA had a president who refused to acknowledge the disease accurately. Without such acknowledgment, health information and public health programs could not be effectively implemented. NGOs and CBOs struggling to change deeply held views came up against warped policies, let alone public participation and economic realities.
It would also be shortsighted and idiotic to see violence only among a certain population. Blacks, coloureds, whites are violent across cultural boundaries and the violence we can comprehend from our homes in Canada is only a fraction of the systemic, visceral normalization of practised violence that has gone on for decades in South Africa, often by political groups later canonized by western powers and media.
Playwright Newton points at endemic drinking and patriarchy/misogyny as the cause of this particular rape. I was surprised to not see more discussion about the cause of such instances, nor the commonality of such and political inaction. Particularly as the final message seems to be one of "hope" (as Tshepang translates) and a quiet spurring to action. Though there is some pointing at how the remote village's shame brought media attention and, with it, much transient largesse, there is no questioning of larger issues and what people who should be held accountable.
Applause must be given to Mncedisi Shabangu who, as narrator Simon, spoke all but maybe five words in this very difficult play. He was comic, dramatic, grounded and compelling. He was human, vacillating between emotions normally; one minute revealing his erectile dysfunction, the other making jokes about dogs then telling of creating Jesus' sister as comfort for a beaten friend.
It is unclear why the role of Ruth, the mother of Tshepang, was even cast. She was mute most of the time and though seeing her face was interesting and probably made reaction easier for Shabangu in his role, theatrically the narrator could have carried the play without Ruth. And, I believe, Shabangu could have well carried off this play on his own.
It seems trite to criticize anything in a play of such subject matter — however, what small problems there were came with some periods of shouting upstage where his voice was lost. This was unfortunate because he did create an intimate environment and those moments brought the fourth wall into existence.
That Shabangu is skilled showed in his ability to use stage props — a wooden broom and a loaf of bread — to re-enact the disturbing rape of the infant, shocking many in the audience to tears and silence, and then emerge to regain the intimate trust of the audience in the telling of the story.
He was even able to keep the audience engaged through far too much scripted use of Xhosa and later Afrikaans — two of the 11 official languages of RSA. I am sure the vast majority of the audience understood neither opening night, let alone which language was being spoken and also missed the socioeconomic meaning behind the use of each language. It is a clunky device and though very relevant to RSA audiences, lost to others.
Though hearing those languages, the accent and references to milk tarts made my heart sing — with joy and a reaffirmation echo of how each of us must be part of a "solution." Many were moved to tears as Simon finally unpacked the violence at which he'd been hinting during the first half of the play. I was, prepared as I was, when Simon finally told us of the young pimply-faced paramedic weeping beside the unconscious, ripped-open body of Tshepang. It is a difficult play to see because of its content, an important one for we complacent North Americans, though our fear and shock is safe in the hands of the gentle character Simon crafted by Shabangu and Newton, who looks out at us, crying, asking and demanding, at the end of the play.
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