Gangster

Since the rise of the penitentiary in Europe and the United States in the 1800s, prisons have been regarded as sites for spectacular performances of both criminality and state power. When Dutch and English settler colonists began to occupy southern Africa in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, they adapted the penal practices of their homelands to subjugate indigenous populations. Florence Bernault, Dirk van Zyl Smit, and Kelly Gillespie have documented how, over time, white political and economic elites used colonial judicial systems and the military to conquer southern Africans they regarded as biologically inferior, criminal, primitive savages and establish the independent Union of South Africa, the predecessor to the contemporary Republic.Footnote ¹¹ More than stereotyping black, coloured and Asian men, women and children as lawbreakers, colonial judicial processes invalidated their humanity, rights, bodies, languages, customs, and acts of resistance.Footnote ¹² Under the pretext of preventing crime against whites, the aggressive system of social control called apartheid was instituted in 1948.Footnote ¹³ For the greater part of the twentieth century, South Africa's criminal legal system was explicitly calibrated to contain the movement (physical mobility and political activism) of dispossessed blacks.Footnote ¹⁴ The apartheid regime attempted to depoliticize all black organizing, criminalizing any actions that defied racial segregation, destroyed private or state property, or interrupted the flow of business. The apartheid state attributed such activities not to members of the organized resistance but to individuals it labeled as local hooligans or gangsters (tsotsis). It asserted that the tsotsis were not political activists but disruptive criminal opportunists masquerading as liberation fighters in order to get away with stealing, destruction of property, gun running, and murder. This rhetoric was countered by discourse from the Left that framed such activities as purposeful incursions to take down the corrupt apartheid state. Organizers of and participants in the Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws and other liberation campaigns of the twentieth century, including members of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), understood that the authorities had criminalized the actions people took to liberate themselves. They coined the term tsotsi-comrade (or com-tsotsi) to reveal and invert the state's logic and to identify a person who engaged in illicit activity to defend him- or herself and the community against apartheid rule because of a growing political awareness and the knowledge that other means of resistance were ineffective. Where the tsotsis were considered common criminals who pretended that their actions were political, the com-tsotsis engaged in criminal activities as a natural outgrowth of a critical analysis of the political landscape.Footnote ¹⁵

In the mid-1990s, observers of the transition from white ethnic-nationalist apartheid rule to multiracial democratic elections predicted that the elected leaders of the transitional government would dismantle the existing judiciary, police, and penal systems because they had become notorious for indefinite detentions without charge, false prosecutions, and the torture, disappearance, and murder of detainees. During the period of transition, hope soared that women and blacks would be able to participate as full citizens at every level of society. Activists imagined that as blacks and women were elected to positions of government leadership, they would transform the judiciary, decriminalize black life, and allow indigenous African forms of justice to be (re)incorporated into the criminal legal system, diverting most people away from penal facilities into restorative social justice initiatives.Footnote ¹⁶ In subsequent years, it has become clear, however, that the “new” neoliberal South Africa has instead continued to rely upon the old penal infrastructure as a critical node of governance.Footnote ¹⁷

Before democratic elections were held in 1994, South Africa's criminal legal system did undergo significant (albeit limited) restructuring. Former president Frederik Willem de Klerk ended the use of police and detention facilitates for exclusively political purposes and dismantled some of the most sadistic security units.Footnote ¹⁸ And in 1998, when the Correctional Service Act formally reorganized the prison system, legislators adopted a “strong human rights/liberalizing discourse” that advanced a new approach to penal discipline “based on behaviour modification rather than punishment.” The structure of the police became less militaristic, a change that was accompanied by pledges of greater transparency and accountability, new uniforms, and the change of the prison system's name to the Department of Correctional Services.Footnote ¹⁹ Most important, DCS adopted a new mission that no longer attributed illegal activity to the “born criminality” of blacks—that is, an inherited racial-biological, evolutionary defect that the Italian eugenicist and criminologist Cesar Lombroso had incorrectly identified in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁰

More recently, the pervasive sense of fear and instability in the country has been attributed to the emergence of a new class of organized, intelligent, and utterly immoral black gangsters. Kynoch writes it is popularly understood that these “politicized militant” men and women have opted “to live by the gun” because their “expectations were not met in the first years of democracy.”Footnote ²¹ Representing criminal(ized) men and women in this way diminishes both the historical brutality of the apartheid system and the challenges facing contemporary South Africans.Footnote ²² To survive, blacks have often been required to use violent force. Violence has been an effective tool to get and maintain honor and respect from white employers, from political leaders, and from other black community members. As the effects of decades of state repression continue to reverberate and inequalities persist, the cultural strategies necessary to protect black life have endured. Framing this new class of tsotsis as the greatest threat to the state and its citizenry has enabled contemporary South African leaders to disavow responsibility for implementing neoliberal economic policies that perpetuate the impoverishment of the majority. Gordon concludes that the recent adoption of get-tough measures—aggressive policing of targeted poor black communities, longer sentences, higher bail, and supermax cells—is evidence of political decisions to “prioritize” the demands of the global free market over the needs of ordinary South Africans.Footnote ²³ The identification of a new class of tsotsis has allowed the state to recuperate the old penal system, despite its history of abuses, as the only institution that can reliably contain and control what it identified as the criminal element.

Within the contemporary neoliberal context, the rehabilitated prisoner, or “‘corrected’ subject,” writes Gillespie, is articulated through “the most heteronormative of Christian family values.”Footnote ²⁴ Individual moral ineptitude is seen as the cause of crime, with roots traceable to the failure of the family—especially of mothers—to instill appropriate African Christian values.Footnote ²⁵ More ethical behavior is considered the only proper cure. Thus, in recent years, DCS has initiated a “special focus” on the “upliftment of the female offender,” and worked to ensure that the “conditions and circumstances” of incarceration “respect … their human rights.”Footnote ²⁶ DCS must now provide safe and secure confinement for women and all other prisoners that is infused with educational, vocational, recreational, and religious life-skills programs that will enable them to return to free society as moral citizens.Footnote ²⁷ It is hoped that these measures will reestablish proper Christian patriarchal authority and inoculate the mothers of the nation and their children from future criminality.

During the past twenty years of both heightened hope and heightened insecurity, however, the department has been constrained in its ability to act, due to rising rates of imprisonment, crumbling infrastructure, serious overcrowding, and inadequate funding for staff training, programs, and supplies.Footnote ²⁸ Because women make up only a small portion of the total prison population, they are often overlooked when already scarce resources are allocated. Unpaid Christian missionaries and other volunteers such as theatre program facilitators are tasked with completing the penal system's mission. Sutherland and Young-Jahangeer report that the theatre and customary dance programs they facilitate have been valued by DCS warders not for teaching art history or technique but for providing prisoners with opportunities for “recreation.”Footnote ²⁹ Sutherland says that her work has been at times so misconstrued that some warders have praised it only for providing gratifying entertainment for visiting dignitaries on special occasions, often at the last minute.Footnote ³⁰ Gillespie finds that warders offer such presentations as proof that they are themselves performing up to standard, doing their jobs of rehabilitating the prisoners by making them sing or dance on command. She warns that the pageantry of these staged events dangerously masks the role of the past and present state in the criminalization and incarceration of the poor black majority, whose living conditions have not changed substantially since the end of political apartheid. The country's brutal history of colonial and state violence is obfuscated when prison theatre and dance shows arrange the imprisoned in celebratory “diorama[s] of a new, carceral order;” such images not only misrepresent the past but disavow the “perduring hold” of white supremacist neoliberalism “over the real conditions of the country's prisons.”Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, by uncritically performing what I call the state's rehabilitative script, the arts programs misrepresent the role of black performance practices in the struggle to end apartheid and forge a more democratic and inclusive nation. To paraphrase James Thompson, prison arts programs in South Africa, as in other parts of the world, risk becoming only a slightly “less explicit” aspect of the prison's regular punitive function when they operate in this way.Footnote ³² If DCS, and by extension the state, responds to the deep impoverishment and exploitation of the African majority not with comprehensive structural change but with programs that train the criminalized black poor (tsotsi) to act in the most superficial manner like “properly performative” moral citizens, prison arts programs offer no opportunity for individual or systemic transformation. Instead, they help ensure that deep gender and racial disparities persist.Footnote ³³

When I began researching the work of the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women in South Africa, I wondered if this program too subscribed to this reduced role for the arts behind bars. In 2006, after nearly two decades of working in women's correctional facilities in the United States, performing artists Rhodessa Jones and Idris Ackamoor were invited by Roshnie Moonsammy, producer of the Johannesburg-based Urban Voices Festival, to join with other equally talented and dedicated South African artists to develop a theatre piece at Sun City. The collaboration was the first time African American and black South African artists codirected an arts program at a women's facility. Jones, an accomplished actress and director, had been devising original theatre for incarcerated women since the late 1980s through the Medea Project, an initiative produced by Cultural Odyssey, the San Francisco–based nonprofit arts organization she and Ackamoor co-own and administrate.

Though the Medea Project is often overlooked in histories of prison theatre programs, in U.S.-based feminist, community-based arts settings, it is the standard against which other programs for imprisoned women are measured.Footnote ³⁴ Emerging from a broad continuum of black women's activism, including social justice organizing against police brutality and sexual violence, Medea Project productions are known for doing more than merely replaying the rehab script that involves remorseful accounts of imprisoned women's crimes and staged confessions.Footnote ³⁵ Nina Billone finds that by using song, dance, monologue, and scene work embedded in a distinct black feminist performance praxis, the Medea Project restages the multiple and interlocking social, economic, political, and judicial processes that put women behind bars and render them civilly and socially dead.Footnote ³⁶ The Latin root of the word incarcerate (carcer) “denote[s] not only those acts of ‘enclosure’” as in a jail cell, “but also the process of ‘cancellation’” of subjectivity, autonomy, citizenship and dignity that is experienced by people who are relegated to the lowest rungs of white supremacist capitalist patriarchies.Footnote ³⁷ Under the pretext of a rehabilitative arts program, the Medea Project in the United States has been able to put the real lives, creative stories, and independent thoughts of incarcerated, overwhelmingly black women at the center of criminal legal justice discourse. I wondered if Medea would have the same effect in South Africa.

The Process

Jones and Ackamoor were excited to partner with Urban Voices Festival producer Roshnie Moonsammy and choreographers Sonia Radebe and Joy Sidibe of the pioneering South African modern dance company Moving into Dance Mophatong. With the DCS and some thirty women confined to Sun City, their goal was to develop a new performance piece the Sun City women were willing and able to present. In an interview with the Johannesburg City Press, Jones explained her vision for the project:

For Jones, there is always a sense that women belong to other people—children, parents, spouses, employers, and the nation.Footnote ⁴² They are repeatedly blamed for South Africa's failings, for black South African women are expected to embody and uphold the nation through their reproductive and domestic labor while avoiding the appearance of “‘independent subjectivity.’”Footnote ⁴³ While popular African Christian explanations argue that a lack of morality is the impetus for crime, positivist theories that were forged under colonization and apartheid still linger, even though they have been discredited. These theories argue that women are inherently bad by virtue of their biology, that they inherit a degenerate (bitch) nature. Like the mythical Eve of the Garden of Eden, they are believed to be plagued by poor decision making and “cheeky” attitudes that “force” men to correct them through everyday acts of repression, including rape and other forms of sexual and gendered violence.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Serious Fun production staff met the “bad” women of Sun City during an intensive two-month rehearsal process in October and November of 2008. Jones, Ackamoor, Radebe, and Sidibe worked closely with them to craft responses to a series of prompts Jones provided into a cohesive script.Footnote ⁴⁵ To get to the “bad girls,” the Serious Fun at Sun City production team had to wind through the sprawling Sun City prison campus. The women's facility was one of several reddish-brown, brick buildings set in the red dust of Soweto behind a tall wire fence. After one enters its cramped visitor receiving room, a metal gate swings open onto a cement ramp that spirals around the heart of the prison. Segregated cellblocks fan out like the spokes of a wheel in a classic panopticon design. The team wound its way through the building to reach the rehearsal/performance space, a small outdoor courtyard at the center of the prison. Down one hallway a young black or coloured woman might be standing over an unsteady toddler learning to walk in the Children and Mother's Unit, while in another corridor black and coloured women in white aprons, gumboots, and hairnets might be unloading heavy wooden crates of food into a whitewashed kitchen.Footnote ⁴⁶ Sometimes we heard Christian gospel songs sung in complex harmonies as we threaded our way through, carrying scripts, boom boxes, pencils, and paper—the materials for a theatre project for incarcerated women in the works.

Like the zoos introduced in the 1800 and 1900s to exhibit the exotic and strange, the Sun City penitentiary was built to make hypervisible the bodies of the prisoners it contained; though originally these were men, nowadays the prison holds women.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, a narrow side door that led to a cement-paved, open-air courtyard on one side of the panopticon made a shift possible for the cast members—a move, even a momentary escape, from the position of the observed into that of an observer. The production team met the cast before this locked metal door flecked with white paint that opened into the courtyard. We waited there for a warder to let us out. When its bars swung open, we were released into the sunlight. A thin line of blue sky stretched overhead. High red brick walls dotted with hundreds of barred windows blocked out almost every other sign of life except the occasional mangy pigeon perched in the gutter above. As rehearsals began, however, I noticed that behind the barred windows rimmed with jagged, broken glass other imprisoned women's faces peered at us from the adjacent cellblocks all day, every day (see Fig. 1). This attentive, nearly invisible audience watched and listened as the ensemble (re)worked the prison's technologies of cancellation and immobilization for their own purposes. In Jones's words, rehearsal provided a space for the cast to examine their lives and “slide into their own mythologies.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Figure 1.

In the Sun City courtyard, Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones (both standing to the left) rehearse a woman's monologue. Hidden behind the barred windows, other prisoners observe rehearsal. Photo: Lisa Biggs. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

Participation in Serious Fun was voluntary, but cast members had to have been sentenced to at least five years in this medium-security facility and had to be in good standing, with no infractions on their record.Footnote ⁴⁹ Direction was conducted in English, with translation provided as needed into isiZulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and other local languages. Writing prompts and intense in-rehearsal group discussions about how the women got to Sun City, their visions of themselves, and their dreams, needs, and desires formed the basis of the script. The result was an episodic, two-hour production built upon a spine of women's monologues and augmented by ensemble-driven narrative song, customary dances, and scene work that balanced predictable preventive messages (say NO to drugs) with cautionary tales about the real dangers women face in the struggle to survive.

When Serious Fun at Sun City premiered in November 2008 in the courtyard of the women's prison to an audience of more than three hundred imprisoned women as well as DCS officials, warders, and the press, both the participants and the audience responded enthusiastically (see Fig. 2). DCS warders praised the production for allowing the cast to demonstrate that they were being “rehabilitated” and for providing the women with an opportunity for “emotional release” and a chance to “showcase their talents.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In an interview with the City Press in 2009, Samantha Ramsewaki, the communications manager for Sun City, explained that DCS saw the show as a success because it “helped to teach restorative justice, the importance of forgiveness, and has helped them [the prisoners] to address the emotional baggage they brought with them to prison and to make peace with it.”Footnote ⁵¹ Local papers published laudatory feature articles that emphasized that the women were not the “monsters” the reporters expected to meet.Footnote ⁵² The articles often followed a narrative of redemptive suffering, emphasizing that the women had found their time in prison to be productive—an opportunity to examine and better themselves and now seek forgiveness (i.e., mercy, understanding, or pardon) from the community. At a time when Johannesburg had an international reputation for crime and corruption, this coverage offered rare, positive proof that DCS, and by extension the entire government, was working.Footnote ⁵³

Figure 2.

Joyce strides into place during a 2009 performance of Serious Fun in the prison courtyard. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

South Africa's prison system is not unique in its appropriation of arts programs for rehabilitative purposes. Ashley Lucas finds that in most carceral facilities, the arts, like the prisoners, are stripped of their histories and complexities.Footnote ⁵⁴ She writes that rehabilitation today is narrowly construed as little more than a state-regulated, three-step process through which prisoners learn to demonstrate the ability to self-reflect, confess past wrongdoing, and express remorse. Day in and day out, the “corrected” (compliant) incarcerated subject is not nurtured or truly cared for but trained to confess and seek forgiveness. Every portrait, poem, song, dance, or scene produced by an imprisoned person is assumed to fulfill the rehabilitative script; it is presumed to be a form of confession that is presented to allow scrutiny of the “deviant soul.” It is never perceived as the expression of an acquired skill or the demonstration of a person's independent “intellectual” initiative, imagination, thought or desire.Footnote ⁵⁵ Mastery of the script of rehabilitated prisoner behavior is essential both for survival behind bars and for securing future freedom. Imprisoned men and women learn to perform it because if they do not, they risk additional punishment until they comply or are rendered obsolete, insane, or dead.

Because the show made the authorities look good, when the unprecedented opportunity arose in August 2010 to tour the work to the South African State Theatre in Pretoria as part of the National Women's Day Celebration, they allowed it. For the cast and crew, the State Theatre performance promised a chance to do much more than fulfill the state's rehabilitative script, which was never their sole intention. The State Theatre offered an opportunity to communicate their core message to a broader audience.

You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock

The State Theatre in Pretoria is a six-theatre multiplex. Construction of the facility began in the late 1960s to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the apartheid republic.Footnote ⁵⁶ Located in the middle of a bustling downtown business district, the three-story cement and mortar complex, “forbidding and once-forbidden” to blacks, takes up a full city block.Footnote ⁵⁷ The six performance spaces plus bars and restaurants under its roof are surrounded by an expansive outdoor plaza filled with palm trees, gurgling water fountains, abstract sculptures, and dining tables topped by red and white canopies. The Drama Theatre where Serious Fun played accommodates an audience of more than six hundred in deep, red-upholstered, cinema-style seats and boasts a wide proscenium stage trimmed with a black marley dance floor, dark heavy curtains, sky-high riggings, and a flawless white projection screen (scrim) forty feet upstage. It could not have been further from Sun City's meager accommodations. Of course, the cast did not get to experience this poshness. DCS transferred them in small, discretely marked, secure vans from Sun City to the local women's jail in Pretoria for the duration of the show, which played from 5 to 17 August 2010. They rode in DCS vans across town and entered the theatre via the loading dock. Warders in light brown uniforms stood guard as they strode to the stage to work. Several days of rehearsal provided an opportunity to restage the work for this much larger venue. This heightened the production's underlying messages calling for an end to social, economic, and political repression and domestic violence against women (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3.

Rehearsing a lift at the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

On a cool August evening in 2010 that was set aside to commemorate the Women's Anti-Pass Law March in Pretoria in 1956—the first large-scale interracial political action by South African women against apartheid—the Sun City women took their places on and around a half-dozen elementary school desks and chairs placed in a half-circle at center stage to, in Jones's words, “tell the truth.” Across the expansive black proscenium stage, they faced a full house of hundreds of schoolchildren; family members, curiosity seekers, arts patrons, legislators, and visiting dignitaries. The multiracial, multiethnic cast wearing facsimiles of customary clothing (Zulu, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Pedi, etc.), interspersed with a few bright orange prison travel jumpsuits, seemed to paint an idyllic picture that exemplified the Rainbow Nation and established them in a shared elementary school classroom setting.Footnote ⁵⁸ It quickly became clear that the students were not there simply to learn. They were there to teach.

Once in place, the performers introduced themselves, shouting out their first names in a quick roll call. Then Xoliswa, a petite, 30-something woman standing atop one of the desks at center right, ignited the performance. Stepping into the role of Teacher, she called out to the ensemble, “Attention!” They responded: “Mamela!” (Listen!). As Xoliswa exchanged calls and responses with the ensemble she interwove gumboot dance choreography to punctuate her words, alternatively placing one hand then the other behind her ears as she rocked left or right. The ensemble responded by repeating Xoliswa's gestures. With each repetition, the momentum and excitement of the dance built. Soon Xoliswa replaced the arm gesture with dynamic footwork. Crossing one leg slightly behind her, she slapped the inside of her ankle as she called out “Attention!” The ensemble responded with “Mamela!” and echoed her choreography. Words and footwork repeated and built until the ensemble came to the phrase, “Mame mame mame mame mamela!” which they accented on each syllable with quick slaps to the inner ankles, alternating right and left. The combination of sound and movement repeated across so many bodies reinforced the imperative to pay attention, calling the cast to work well together and inviting audience members to engage, listen, and learn.Footnote ⁵⁹

In keeping with the form of popular prison theatre programs in South Africa, an imbongi (praise singer or poet) stepped forward from the ensemble with a short invocation, which was followed by several ingoma (black customary) dances in rapid succession. The Zulu-inspired indlamu-style ingoma that initiated the series built from a preparatory, very contained rhythmic walking pattern that moved back and forth in a straight line toward the audience.Footnote ⁶⁰ After several passes forward and back, the three dancers stretched their left legs back to catch the pickup of the beat.Footnote ⁶¹ A rapid series of straight-legged frontal kicks using only the left leg, then alternating left and right, exploded from the hip and rose toward the sky. Each kick struck the ground like a bolt of lightning with the downbeat of the music, embodying, according to Meintjes, the Zulu concept of isigqi (artistic power) (see Fig. 4).Footnote ⁶² Again and again, the Serious Fun dancers lifted their legs skyward, each time with greater height, speed, and force. Then, just as the Zulus appeared to tire, they suddenly turned their backs on the audience with a dismissive wave of an arm and were replaced in rapid succession by Xhosa, Pedi, and Tsonga dancers who showcased their own customary ethnic dances. The sequence ended with a rump-shaking solo by Joyce, a boisterous Venda woman who served as the de facto captain of the ensemble. With each dance, the choreography positioned the women as the driving forces and central protagonists of the work.

Figure 4.

Jabu, Nonhlanhla, and Lindiwe demonstrate their isigqi (artistic power) in a customary Zulu dance at the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

Gillespie warns that South African prisoner presentations of customary song and dance often evoke a fictitious, idealized past devoid of the black liberation struggle. In the contemporary context, they seem to imply that a sinful lack of knowledge of one's social place and pride in the country's history leads to illegal activity, a move that masks the role of the penal system as a central repressive apparatus of the state that subjugates Africans. By placing the women as the central protagonists and forces behind these performances, Serious Fun opens up the possibility of an alternative reading of the effect of the customary dances performed by prisoners. Lisa M. Anderson states that one of the hallmarks of black feminist performance is the positioning of black women and their lives, experiences, knowledge, and stories at the center of the narrative. Feminist artistic works explore the world from their perspectives, often operationalizing the intersecting optics of race, sexuality, gender, and class that shape black women's lives. Feminist plays, choreopoems, songs, dances, performance art pieces, storytelling, and other interdisciplinary works strive to advance the causes of black women and of others who face oppression. They do so by establishing a distinct and identifiable “Black women's” style of art, distinguished not only by the centrality of black female protagonists but also by the use of language (relying upon black vernacular), perspective, tone, musically, and choreography that enflesh and articulate the experiences and perspectives of black women in their time. With these strategies, black feminist performances intervene in privileged discourses that undervalue black women's lives, intellectual contributions, and labors.Footnote ⁶³

Serious Fun met the penal system's expectation that the women rehabilitate through customary dance by appearing to train them to express racial and heteronormative gender identities in these socially acceptable ways. Opening dances represented cast members as upright, moral women and mothers of the nation through the choreographic (re)connection to their “roots.” Because women are the symbolic conservators of ancient South African customs, their ability to perform customary song and dance is understood to preserve black South African culture.Footnote ⁶⁴ Embracing this potent symbol of women as the mothers of the nation enabled the cast of Serious Fun to enter the public sphere as their foremothers did in the 1956 Pretoria march, which the show was meant to commemorate. Once onstage, however, they worked to assert isigqi (artistic power) and political power. The theatrical frame, imbued as it is with a sense of playfulness, alleviated anxiety that the women would challenge directly the fixity of gender roles; but as the piece unfolded it became clear that they have repeatedly had to defy expectations about appropriate female behavior in order to provide for themselves and their families, at great cost to themselves and to others. The play was an opportunity to complicate the dominant narrative about life in South Africa for men, women, and children through personal narratives authored by those women who have had to be “bad” to survive and have paid the price for doing so.

After the opening montage of praise poems and dances, Jones called from the edge of the stage, “Who has homework?,” appearing briefly in her role as narrator and director.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ellen,Footnote ⁶⁶ a 30-something round, dark-skinned woman with immaculate hair and nails from working in the Sun City beauty salon stepped forward in the role of “Ms. Ellen,” a special guest lecturer before the class. She began her monologue by asking the schoolgirls if they knew where drugs came from. They confidently shouted the names of countries and neighborhoods where illegal narcotics could be procured—“Brazil,” “Colombia,” “Afghanistan,” “Pakistan,” “Hillbrow”—then transitioned into a stage picture that embodied the effects of various drugs (see Fig. 5). Ellen began her lesson with a perfunctory “Just Say No to Drugs” message, then transitioned into a more personal story. As she spoke, the cast formed a moving stage picture of airport security, with two lines of passengers waiting to go through. At the head of each line, women playing security officers armed with imaginary scanner wands patted down the other members of the cast, detecting illegal drugs or other infractions (passport problems, wrong ticketing, etc.) with each one. Each woman was stopped, handcuffed, and then confined in a single, large, imaginary holding cell onstage until every traveler was in custody.Footnote ⁶⁷ Against this backdrop, Ellen related her personal story of how she got to Sun City. In a high-pitched voice she addressed the audience:

Figure 5.

Ellen describes the perils of drug trafficking as the cast restages her arrest at O. R. Tambo International Airport. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

The confession is a formative structure of contemporary Western society and a defining ritual of rehabilitation. With her concise narrative, Ellen appeared to fulfill the state's demand that prisoners confess. Foucault theorized that the confession is understood to produce or yield “intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it,” for the speech act “exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him and promises him salvation.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The role of the witness is critical to the process. Foucault wrote, “One does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply their interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In the case of confessions before police or other state agents, the act is more than a chance for the speaker to demonstrate the ability to self-reflect and describe their own past actions. Confessions gained through interrogations, coercion, and torture are notoriously false, but in many punishment rituals what is actually said means little.Footnote ⁷¹ Of greater importance is the fact that the prisoner speaks, that he or she acknowledges the state's appellation and, following Franz Fanon, recognizes him or herself as the one interpellated—“Look, a Negro! … a nigger!”Footnote ⁷² In the DCS context, “Look, a tsotsi bitch!” The act of the confession (re)constitutes the authority of the state to administer laws and punishment rituals that affect the status of the imprisoned individual, who is put through the ritual repeatedly and forced to answer time and again.Footnote ⁷³ In extreme confessional rites such as those associated with public executions, the prisoner is expected to respond to the executioner's hail and seek absolution or forgiveness from the assembled crowd with his or her final dying words.Footnote ⁷⁴ But observers have long recognized that public confessions offer prisoners an opportunity to divert from the script and appeal to sympathetic onlookers for help instead of for forgiveness or absolution.

Ellen, like so many prisoners before her, appeared on the penal stage to demonstrate that she was rehabilitating and could self-reflect, confess wrongdoing, and express remorse. As she recounted her crime, however, she evoked not the image of a dangerous tsotsi but the image of a single mother who had selectively engaged in international drug trafficking to provide the basics for herself and her children—rent, clothes, food, school fees—when her partner abandoned her. Ellen acknowledged her role in her crime, but she was clearly the least knowledgeable person involved; she was a low-level mule who was set up to carry goods when convenient, easily disposed of when no longer needed. The monologue ends with a bewildered Ellen revealing she never even got paid for her troubles and that the others abandoned her and allowed her to take the fall. Standing backstage every night I wondered, Where were the real drug traffickers? What drove them to traffic drugs internationally, and why was Ellen the only one behind bars? A monologue that was intended to demonstrate rehabilitation instead opened up questions about the legitimacy and efficacy of the police, the judiciary, and penal systems.

With her subtle deviation from the rehab script, Ellen's monologue located Serious Fun within a continuum of black political activism that critiques repressive governments and cultural practices and calls for and enacts radical social change. When they were banned from giving testimony in judicial settings by white supremacists who argued that they were incapable of telling the truth, black South Africans developed a practice of personal narrative, a testimonial performance that recounted their real-life experiences, informed listeners about the urgency of their political situation, and urged collective action. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and other political prisoners used their public trials on charges of treason, incitement, and terrorism to challenge the legitimacy of the apartheid government. They converted the state's mandate that they testify in court into opportunities to indict it for human rights violations. Other artists and activists used song, dance, and dramatic texts to tell the truth about apartheid repression, subvert government discourse, and express their desire that an alternative, more inclusive nation-state would emerge.Footnote ⁷⁵ Black rhetorical and performative practices of truth telling were so integral to the liberation struggle and the constitution of the emerging postapartheid nation that the transitional government employed personal narrative performances of testimony to stage a symbolic reconciliation between the state and injured community members. The transitional state hoped that, within the quasi-judicial settings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings of 1996–8, the ritual of truth telling would bring forth a new and more democratic nation. Because the prison was the “center of apartheid's vortex” of oppression, it was essential for the TRC to open the judiciary and penal systems, the closed doors of police stations and prison lockups, for collective examination.Footnote ⁷⁶ TRC representatives conducted more than twenty-one thousand interviews with those whom TRC commissioner Bishop Desmond Tutu referred to as “the little people”—those whom the public record and history books typically ignored but who bore the brunt of apartheid and provided the critical labor of the liberation struggle from 1960 to 1994.Footnote ⁷⁷ Witnesses came forward to relate their own experiences and give statements about family members who had been brutalized and executed by security forces. Some government officials agreed to recount what they had done or seen done by others, even going so far as to demonstrate the techniques used to disappear, torture, maim, or murder detainees.Footnote ⁷⁸ The individual stories connected disparate people's seemingly isolated experiences to a larger collective narrative and reconstructed the history of the nation with a “complexity, multiple layers of experience, and emotional density” that had previously been prohibited.Footnote ⁷⁹ Oral histories and embodied reenactments unveiled how state power was performed in South Africa through controlling and canceling black people.Footnote ⁸⁰ Testifying publicly before the TRC and the nation restored the subjectivity, citizenry, and humanity of black South Africans by conveying to others the authority and dignity of individual speakers and symbolically articulating the experiences of a multitude of other people who had been similarly repressed.Footnote ⁸¹

Despite the vast scope of the hearings, feminist critics complained that the commission was unable to create a substantial space in which women might come forward to recount their gendered experiences. Most women gave statements from the standpoint of wives and mothers who had witnessed or been impacted by the brutality that male family members had suffered.Footnote ⁸² Testimony that fell outside this narrow purview was relegated to a special commission seated in Johannesburg that met for only two days in late July 1997. During those hearings, women told harrowing stories about personally encountering police and prison warders who used rape and other forms of sexual violence to control, inflict pain and suffering, and humiliate. Oboe writes that speakers connected the brutality of the apartheid and colonial systems to present-day violence women endured in their homes, workplaces, and other community institutions and gathering places. Women from the suburbs and townships, from rural farms to urban business districts, declared that there was no space that apartheid's racist, sexist, and economic brutality did not reach.Footnote ⁸³ Women of all races, the witnesses insisted, had been canceled out as citizen-subjects, brutalized by apartheid-era officials and institutions, and exploited by male friends and family members much closer to home. Women were profoundly degraded under apartheid—reduced to “mere objects of exchange in the territory of the masculine”—and continue to be severely degraded in the post(anti)apartheid era.Footnote ⁸⁴ Their testimony issued a collective warning that more had to be done to recover the negated status of women and restore them to a dignified humanity. Yet women continue to be largely excluded from the political imaginary of South Africa except as symbolic “mothers of the nation,” a position that threatens to cancel their past contributions and compromise their possibilities for the future.

During rehearsals, using techniques honed during over twenty years of composing theatre for incarcerated women, primarily with African American casts, Jones encouraged the Serious Fun women to reexamine their lives and the lives of their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers from their own black feminist theoretical perspectives. Jones insisted that the women identify the narratives that have defined them from the outside, and that they turn the most limiting myths on their heads. The shift from margin to center helped them identify factors other than a lack of morality as motivators for their wrongdoing and incarceration. Activating this alternative, repressed, and fugitive repertoire of women's knowledge and understanding enabled the production to do more than repeat the state's rehab script. Two core members of the ensemble—Wendy and Joyce—who built the show in 2008 and continued with the production through 2012, told me that Serious Fun was the only time they were “treated like human beings.” From this deep place of connection to both their own worth and life struggles and the struggles of other imprisoned women, cast members were able to smuggle, within the framework of prisoners’ confessions, pointed critiques that revealed both their own mistakes and the interlocking social, political, and economic processes of cancellation that contributed to their incarceration. In many cases, the result was personal narratives that uncovered the persistent fallacies of the criminal legal system and the patriarchal beliefs and practices that undergird it. Subtle shifts in words, tone, intention, and emphasis encouraged the women not to confess but to testify, in the black vernacular sense, on their own behalf.

Geneva Smitherman has identified black testifyin as a practice of telling a truth “all blacks have shared” through a spontaneous oral elocution, often but not exclusively in a religious setting.Footnote ⁸⁵ Though she initially called testifyin an African American rhetorical practice, Smitherman located similar oppositional practices throughout the African diaspora, and she theorizes that the practice originated on the continent and spread during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Faced with similar repressive white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal regimes bent on breaking black bodies and spirits, Africans throughout the diaspora developed similar subversive tactics to express their dissent and activate an alternative practice of justice that situated them and their needs in the halls of power and at the center of discourse. While testifyin alone may not elicit immediate systemic change, it provides a means of disrupting practices of domination, displaying injustices, and communicating dissent. Emerging from this complex genealogy of antiracist, antipatriarchal, judicial activism by “bad” black women, Serious Fun became a vehicle through which the Sun City women might disrupt entrenched criminal legal discourse and practices and exercise their rights and abilities as independent human beings and subjects to issue a call for radical social change.

Fifteen years after the last TRC hearings, Alouise, a light-skinned, frail-looking coloured woman in her forties with long braided hair, stepped out of the ensemble and moved purposefully to the microphone at the State Theatre moments after Ellen turned away. Alouise, like Ellen, had at one time worked as a drug smuggler but had been sentenced for murder. When she joined the ensemble in 2010, she was about halfway through her fifteen-year sentence and had never shared with anyone at the facility the details of what happened the night her partner died. One rehearsal Jones asked people to write in response to the prompt “Love Don't Love Nobody” to begin to get at how family dynamics, gendered obligations, and love relationships can entrap women. Alouise responded with the following monologue, which became one of the centerpieces of Serious Fun at the State Theatre. When she performed it, Jones and Ackamoor placed her alone before a microphone located downstage left in a low spotlight (see Fig. 6). The cast scattered around the stage initially in a series of tableaux to enact aspects of her story—a group of children playing ring-around-the-rosy, adults engaged in a violent argument, a few women huddled over an imaginary open fire. Despite the separation, dressed now in identical, bright orange, prison travel uniforms, they read as one person, stood as one body, told one story. Alouise said:

Figure 6.

Alouise recounts how divine intervention saved her from an abusive partner. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

Alouise's testimony, which establishes her as a mother and a respectable married woman, reflects upon how impoverishment and abandonment by her husband forced her onto the streets and into the crime that landed her at Sun City. Homeless with three small children to care for, living in a society that did not have a deep network of institutional supports, Alouise had few options other than to accept the “plate of food” and “place to stay” offered by an unnamed stranger. She acknowledged that she stayed with him even after he became violent but framed this decision as the result of her realization that there was “nowhere to go.” In this post(anti)apartheid, neoliberal state that champions self-reliant economic citizens, Alouise's choices and ability to act independently were circumscribed, rendering her in effect a prisoner in a violent home. Within these narrowly defined parameters she eventually found the strength to act. Her description of grabbing the gun and throwing it at her former partner satisfied the penal system's expectation that she would disclose her crime, but her personal narrative stopped short of admitting that she killed him.Footnote ⁸⁷ Though the gun “went off,” Alouise did not confess to pulling the trigger. Instead, his death was framed as the result of unseen and unknown forces or actors—perhaps even divine intervention—beyond her power and control.Footnote ⁸⁸ Alouise's word choices elided the issue of taking the blame for the man's death, and from her telling, it is arguable whether any crime occurred. While on the surface her monologue took the form of a prisoner's confessional speech act, the content and the tone of her words made her actions appear wholly justified. By testifyin not to her own wrongdoing but to the man's brutality and the power of unknown, unseen, perhaps divine forces to intervene, Alouise subverted the state's mandate that she confess to prove she had been rehabilitated. Instead, within the framework of the confession, Alouise (re)established her personal dignity before hundreds of spectators in the audience—as well as the dignity of her young children, who had witnessed the man's brutality and came to the show to hear her tell this story for the first time.

Lovely, or the Return of the Condemned

Lovely, a thirty-something coloured woman with a soft, round face, also smuggled drugs internationally. She joined the show for the 2009 production, and after completing her sentence, she was released. She was allowed to return and present a new monologue at the State Theatre in 2012 that reflected on her time behind bars and, most important, on the experience of being released and returned to her old neighborhood, Hillbrow, an infamous area known for high population density, a large immigrant population, and crime. Rhodessa Jones, Idris Ackamoor, and I would pick Lovely up in the car at a taxi station or other meeting point, and on the way to or from rehearsals, Jones and Ackamoor would discuss and practice what she would say. As Ackamoor drove, Jones and Lovely would debate the content of her monologue while I took notes. In performance, Lovely improvised upon the outline they crafted and interjected new thoughts or commentaries as she felt was appropriate. In Pretoria, her monologue issued forth the most pointed critique the ensemble offered about the position of women in South African society and the responsibility of the community to them (see Fig. 7). She greeted the audience with this:

Figure 7.

Lovely confronts her Hillbrow neighbors and the nation for dismissing women's real political and economic needs. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

Lovely's narrative questioned the presumptions of those who mocked her. By subtly deploying the well-known black rhetorical practice of signifyin,’ Lovely was able to denounce her tormentors and reveal their lack of knowledge about Nelson Mandela. Smitherman defines signifyin as a way to insult or shame another person using a clever, often humorous, turn of phrase. Though the practice is usually associated, like testifyin, with African American vernacular speech, Lovely's neighbors’ mocking hails echo the practice. With their humorous criticisms they “make a point” about Lovely's personal shortcomings by highlighting how far removed from dedication to the struggle and personal sacrifice symbolized by Mandela her own activities had been.Footnote ⁸⁹ The State Theatre performance was an opportunity for Lovely publicly to answer back. She replied to their criticism with a complex argument about women's rights, roles, responsibilities, and duties in the new South Africa that shifted the dialogue from the realm of the confessional into the political and challenged the depoliticization of “common” women's criminal acts in contemporary criminal legal discourse. Lovely argued that by running their mouths against her, especially to her child, the neighbors proved they were less knowledgeable than she was, and as far if not further removed from the values that animated the fight for black liberation. Her claim to have a “duty” to tell her daughter what she had done activated an alternative repertoire of understanding about the responsibilities of mothering today and in the historic struggle. These obligations exceeded the narrow parameters of parenting, citizenship, and productivity the residents of Hillbrow—and, by implication, the rest of society—articulated. It was this wider “duty” to tell her child herself what had happened that brought Lovely to the stage. There, she did not seek forgiveness but called out those faraway Hillbrow neighbors and anyone else who shared their opinions.

Like Ellen and Alouise, Lovely deviated from the anticipated confessional script, in this case by omitting the details of her crime and upbraiding society. Focusing more on the inappropriate actions of others and less on her own wrongdoing, she positioned herself—and, by extension, others in the ensemble—as women engaged in a much larger struggle for respect, dignity, and a better quality of life. Lovely's testimony interrupted and dispelled the clear-cut boundary between so-called common (immoral) criminals and political prisoners whose (moral) actions an unjust state criminalized.Footnote ⁹⁰ Her insistence that she had a “duty” to introduce herself to her child activated an alternative framework of motherhood, responsibility, community, and belonging that is often absent in popular criminal legal discourse and public policy. Her words reminded listeners that much work remains to be done and that the “bad girls” onstage were not the only ones with who had work to do.

The Call to Action

To reinforce the connections between contemporary incarcerated women and the legacy of struggle without engaging in the kind of obvious political work that might raise the ire of prison officials, between the monologues the women's voices rose in songs that signified both a deep religious conviction and the struggle. They enveloped Ellen's monologue within these lyrics:

“Malibongwe” is both a religious hymn and a historic struggle song. It was sung to commemorate the interracial women's march in Pretoria in 1956 against the restrictive Pass Laws, which was a hallmark of women's antiapartheid activism.Footnote ⁹² The song bears witness to women's activism and reminds listeners of their past contributions to the sacred fight for freedom. Like the songs U.S. civil rights activists sang as they entered hostile territories or were thrown into southern jails, today “Malibongwe” reminds singers and listeners of a time when the community was united against the regime. Bernice Johnson Reagon states that American civil rights songs were sung to establish and maintain the community of activists. As marchers moved to reoccupy hostile territories, the songs announced their arrival and sonically prepared the way for black bodies to enter and reclaim the ground for more inclusive ways of being in the world to be enacted.Footnote ⁹³ Shirli Gilbert, Liz Gunner, and Grant Olwage, among others, have documented the efficacy of black popular song and dance forms in galvanizing antiapartheid protestors.Footnote ⁹⁴ To sing “Malibongwe” at the State Theatre was to activate a deep and broad repertoire of black performance practices. Pairing it with Ellen's monologue located the imprisoned women's testimonies within a specific trajectory of women's liberation activism. It framed their current incarceration as more than individual failings, as the result instead of both historic and ongoing inequality and injustice, and it asserted that their actions were the latest front in an ongoing struggle for black women's equality. As the cast raised their voices, they further activated a repertoire of black vernacular performance practices, including black township theatre, in which audience members are expected to participate actively as cocreators of the event. Hundreds of audience members joined spontaneously in singing “Malibongwe,” as they did for other works such as the hymn “Moments of Trouble, Sing a Song” before Alouise's piece; Tracy Chapman's contemporary song “At This Point in My Life” before Lovely's monologue; and the iconic antiapartheid song “Safa Saphel Isizwe” (Our Nation Is Dying) after Lovely spoke, each time adding new sonic layers. In doing so, the audience dissolved the perceived distance between themselves and the incarcerated, establishing, if only for a moment, an instance of communitas. Their actions, I believe, were grounded in shared knowledge of what it takes to resist the “regulative power” of the state and to rise up as an empowered black community resonant with a sense of optimism for the future.Footnote ⁹⁵ The imprisoned are not supposed to act freely, and free people are not supposed to help them, but they do. The Serious Fun women used their prison drama to smuggle out of their closed world their bodies and their life stories, emboldened by black feminist theory and buoyed by hope and a deep desire for a new society to emerge. Further, by singing “Malibongwe” and other “new” South African struggle songs, the ensemble accessed a reservoir of shared knowledge embedded in themselves and the audience and revealed a collective dream for the future of greater inclusivity and women's equality. With themselves firmly at the center of the action, they pointed the way forward (Fig. 8).

Figure 8.

The Serious Fun cast and a DCS warder (bottom center) celebrate after the State Theatre show. Photo: Royal Takalane Mudau. Reproduced with the permission of Cultural Odyssey.

Notes in Conclusion

It is presumed that, since multiracial elections began in South African twenty years ago, there is no longer any need for criminally defiant activity such as that demonstrated by Mandela and other explicitly political prisoners. Yet the stories Ellen, Alouise, Lovely, and other women in Serious Fun shared indicate that women continue to struggle to live in the public and private spheres as full human beings who are respected, seen, heard, and understood. As former Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs has noted, patriarchy has long been the “one of the few profoundly non-racial institutions in South Africa,” one that “brutalizes men and neutralizes women across the colour line.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Black men continue to be overrepresented in legal discourse as both the perpetrators and victims of illegal activity, be it state, corporate, or street crime. This narrow focus on black male perpetrators and victims has foreclosed opportunities to examine more closely the full spectrum of harm done. During the transition to black liberation in the 1990s, women's organizations had to demand a seat at the negotiating table. Ultimately, they were successful in instituting one of the most gender-aware constitutions on the planet; but there is a difference between constitutional change and the reallocation of material resources required to bring about deep structural change. The fall of apartheid did not signal the end of the push for democracy, citizenship, equality, respect, and dignity.Footnote ⁹⁷ In the post(anti)apartheid era, despite the ratification of one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, a masculinist bias continues to obfuscate both the contributions and the needs of South African women. Inadequate state responses to systemic problems, such as chronic unemployment and the poor enforcement of laws prohibiting violence and discrimination against, them have forced some women to take matters into their own hands.Footnote ⁹⁸

The Sun City women's stories evidence the perils of relegating them to the status of rights-bearing individuals on paper only, and of dismissing the efficacy of alternative prison-based arts programs like the Medea Project. Women fight back, furtively, if necessary, or in the open. They procure the goods and services they and their loved ones need to live with dignity, and they will go to prison for doing so. So defiant and determined were they, the Serious Fun women even refused to follow the state's narrow prescription for rehabilitation, and instead issued subtle but pointed demands for access to the full rights, privileges, opportunities, and resources of citizens in the “new” South Africa on their own terms. With song, dance, and personal testimonies that appeared to uphold the state's rehabilitative mandate anchoring the script, the cast was able to subvert the Department of Correctional Service's efforts to rehabilitate them into Gillespie's “properly performative” women. Like other black artist-activist-community members before them, they appropriated the opportunity to perform to express their collective discontent with the status quo and their desire for a different, more inclusive society to emerge.Footnote ⁹⁹ Activating a repertoire of black performance practices, the women (re)inscribed the history of the country and enacted an alternative vision for the future. Due to penal prohibitions against explicit acts of defiance or criticisms of the state, they had to articulate their cause in recognizable “maternalistic” terminology, simultaneously smuggling in an assertion of their rights to equality and full participation on black “feminist terms.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Their stories, songs, and dances revealed popular fictions about women who break the law and complicated the familiar, moralizing, positivist, and patriarchal approaches to crime, safety, security, and justice that predominate. Told again and again before larger and larger audiences of listeners, their testimonies undermined the authority of other tellers of tales about women behind bars, and encouraged audiences to question the motivations and justifications of law enforcers and legislators tasked with providing security to the nation. By challenging, disrupting, and complicating DCS's rehabilitative script and the undergirding logic that sustained it, the Serious Fun cast demonstrated the need for alternative responses to crime in South Africa—with themselves, their lives, and their needs for once at the center of the struggle.