We are in a precarious moment, a time when history is being flattened, ignored, denied, sugarcoated and rewritten. In some places, notably the US, the misdeeds of the past are being systematically erased as, for example, museum displays are altered and school syllabi modified to suit an administration hellbent on doctoring the nation’s memory of how it evolved to be what it is today.
This flouting of reality isn’t limited to what’s being done politically to reengineer understandings of the past. History’s erasure is being exacerbated by our own willingness to escape and disappear deeper into the shallow unrealities of our handheld devices, as we forget how to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around us and increasingly see the past as something disconnected from ourselves.
It’s in the face of such developments that the Baxter and Market theatres have co-produced Rise ’76: The Story of June 16th, a docu-fictional stage drama commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, a terrible tragedy that shattered the soul of South Africa on June 16 1976.
If you’re not aware, that was the day police shot into crowds of children who had gathered in Soweto to march and protest against the apartheid regime’s implementation of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction at schools administered by its department of bantu education.
As the play highlights, the policy was designed to impede the prospects of black learners and make knowledge more difficult for them to access in an attempt to maintain a servile, subservient and impoverished underclass.
Written and directed by Tiisetso Mashifane wa Noni, Rise ’76 debuted in Cape Town in May and will, in early June, move to Johannesburg, close to where the tragedies that inspired it took place. While the story it tells is grounded in historical reality, the play avoids the trap of being a textbook rendering of facts. While there are reenactments of specific moments, dramatisations of real figures from the past and plenty of details that make the history come to life in vivid and often astonishing ways, it’s essentially a fictionalised account of events designed to get to the emotional truth of a moment that has reverberated through time.
Mashifane wa Noni has imagined dramatic action and crafted characters in order to get the story across without feeling like a documentary. Rather, it is an intimate engagement with the past ― unearthing just some of its buried ghosts and forgotten heroes, its lies, misremembered moments and fractured memories. Because, as much as the play is about remembering a crucial part of our nation’s story, it never pretends to offer a complete view of that history.
It does, however, allow us to feel the weight of those unfair policies and how they disrupted the lives of ordinary people, engaging with the issues in ways that make the grand narrative of history feel quite personal, immediate and alive.
We’re told that “it all began with a bullet”, so even those in the audience unfamiliar with the coming horrors have a sense of a story steadily moving towards tragedy.
It’s a play one watches in order to be enlightened and reminded rather than for pure enjoyment. Yet, it is not without its pleasures, many of which emanate from the play’s theatricality, the way Mashifane wa Noni imaginatively illuminates details with dramatic flair. Crafted from a diverse pool of resources (archival material, literature and inputs from more than 40 people), her story takes us into the minutiae of the living, breathing world in which that terrible tragedy took place. What we get is a story with heart and soul rather than history as a straightforward chronology.
Rather than zooming out to try and replicate the scale of the horror, it takes us in closer in order to give us the lived experience, feelings and sensations of the individuals affected.
At the heart of the story is a bright-eyed independent thinker named Bafana Buthelezi, a teenaged boy who would rather write poetry and read banned books by Chinua Achebe than be taught maths in Afrikaans. Bafana is played by the wonderful Alex Sono who brings such quixotic energy, so much spirit to the role of an outspoken youngster who is smart enough to have seen through apartheid’s social engineering and brave enough to speak up about it.
The luminous actor Mfuneli Ntumbuka plays Bafana’s mother, a role that demands such an emotionally stirring performance that at times the entire theatre seems to shudder with the expansiveness of her character’s grief. Ntumbuka also plays a teacher who is caught up in the system’s crosshairs and who at one point spells out the ridiculousness of her dilemma: how was she expected to teach a subject like maths in a language that, for her, was barely comprehensible?
Bafana’s bright-eyed friend, Kedibone, is played by Zilungile Mbombo. Early on, she announces herself as one of the survivors of that fateful day. In doing so, she introduces the idea of the play as a kind of palimpsest, that we are looking at the past through the long lens of history – and through the distorting complexities of memory. It’s an idea that is occasionally underscored by projections of archival images and newspaper clippings that appear against the set while the actors freeze in place, recreating three-dimensional versions of old photographs.
Also marvellous to watch is the lovely Sbuja Dywili as a black policeman who is considered a malign betrayer to his own people, yet simultaneously forced to endure the indignity of being treated as “lesser” by his white colleagues. Dywili also has a cameo as Sam Nzima, the photographer who captured the uprising’s most iconic and widely circulated image, one that alerted the world to the savagery of the apartheid regime and had a ruinous effect on Nzima’s journalistic career, making him the subject of unsparing police harassment and death threats.
There are more downright shady characters, too. Ben Albertyn channels considerable menace as a wraith-like school inspector who predatorily skulks across the stage looking for hints of mischief. Albertyn’s sustained bitterness is transformed into outright brutality when he becomes a cop, full of self-righteous indignation, and when the opportunity for outright violence arises, he’s there, front and centre.
So, too, is Deon Lotz’s underhanded police commander, who, between giving the order to open fire on children and issuing death threats over the phone, invites his potential victims to join him at the station for a cup of coffee. Lotz coolly embodies a kind of terrifying presumption of superiority which comes pre-packaged with his character’s white privilege and authoritarian power. When Lotz shifts into the role of an apartheid government minister who declaims and deflects and points his finger during a press conference, the loathsomeness that oozes from every pore is ― like so much in this play ― something that you feel.
And that’s where this play beautifully succeeds. Rather than grappling for hard facts, it connects us emotionally with another time and with characters who have largely been relegated to history books ― or condensed into a single image, such as Nzima’s photograph of 12-year-old Hector Pieterson’s body being carried at the front of a largely anonymous crowd.
Rise ’76 compels us to consider June 16 as something more than a single snapshot frozen in time. Because, beyond the remembered facts and assumed truths, there are countless more untold stories, many forgotten heroes and an endless supply of grim ghosts all of which are ultimately also part of this thing we call history.
The play is at its most tender during a scene set in a hospital that’s inundated in the aftermath of the massacre. Covering the stage, in the place of children’s corpses, are items of clothing, carefully laid out and treated by the actors with solemn reverence, each shirt or dress or pair of pants representing a child gunned down by the police.
While it’s impossible to ignore the scene’s evocation of parallels with Gaza, with Tiananmen Square, with Marikana, with Ukraine, with Syria, with Iran, with Lebanon, and with countless ongoing atrocities involving violence enacted upon innocent people, Mashifane wa Noni brings the story back to specifics, zooms in on intimate details drawn from the tragedy. And thus we hear a heartbreakingly cold description extracted from the autopsy of a tiny girl whose lifeless body, represented by a yellow dress, is among those discovered in the wreckage of the uprising. As a theatrical moment, it’s as beautiful as it is terrible and an apt example of the historical record being cracked open in search of humanity’s soul.
Rise ’76: The Story of June 16th is playing in the Baxter Studio until 30 May and at The Market Theatre’s Mannie Manim from 5 to 28 June.
