Theorizing Ubuntu

Cultural openness plays a major ethical role in contemporary African cultures, because—as thinkers like Achille Mbembe and Chielozona Eze (“Empathetic Cosmopolitanism,” “Rethinking African Culture,” and “Transcultural Affinity”) argue—African nations are increasingly hybrid and multicultural.Footnote ³ Many scholars refer to this complex cultural hybridity as “Afropolitanism.”Footnote ⁴ In his formulation, Mbembe defines Afropolitanism as a dynamic awareness of both Africa's connections throughout the world by means of the diaspora and, simultaneously, an acknowledgement of how diverse immigration onto the continent has reshaped African cultures. As Mbembe puts it,

This interweaving of forms and signs is precisely the intertextual process at the heart of Molora. What makes Afropolitanism distinct from other strands of cosmopolitanism are the complex power relations involved in both the outflux of Africans (often as slaves) and the influx of other ethnic groups (often as colonizers or workers).

African cultures have adapted both to diaspora and to multicultural contacts at home. These new perspectives produce hybridity, strengthening intercultural connections through the domestication of new forms and signs, as Mbembe says. Homi Bhabha points out that spaces of cultural contact open possibilities for renegotiating both individual and communal identities (2). Encountering a new culture or worldview reminds us that our own culture is contingent and that there are different ways of looking at the world. Even the traumatic and unequal cultural violence of colonialism, enslavement, and apartheid opens up potential sites of contact. As Bhabha puts it, hybridity “displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identification in strategies of subversion” (159–60). In other words, as colonialism brings cultures into contact—though violently and unequally—and they are influenced by one another, the ostensible differences undergirding colonial power relations diminish, albeit slowly and unevenly. Ethical Afropolitanism based on empathy, hybridity, and cultural interconnection—as advocated by Mbembe, Eze (“Rethinking African Culture” 234–35), and Emma Dabiri (209–10)—embraces African traditions of communalism and mutual support.

South Africa's own distinct notion of communalism is ubuntu. Like the best incarnations of Afropolitanism, ubuntu ideology understands community as central to human identity. Derived from a Bantu philosophy, ubuntu posits that people derive meaning and purpose from acting morally within communities. As Desmond Tutu—the chairman of the TRC—explained, “A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed” (qtd. in Nield 10). Ubuntu posits that in an interconnected world one's humanity depends on relationships with other people. As Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle put it, “the flourishing of one human being is not separate from the flourishing of all others. And, therefore, in this sense individuation is valued as individuation within the greater context of a collective struggle. The fantasy of a self-contained and self-determining human being is denied” (5). Many other theorists describe ubuntu in similar terms.Footnote ⁵ One of the ways in which ubuntu differs from cosmopolitan thought in Europe and the United States is precisely its emphasis on the embeddedness of relationships—unlike Kantian cosmopolitanism, which centers the abstract awareness of the other, ubuntu centers positive action toward others.Footnote ⁶

A person with ubuntu will work to build a better world for others, understanding that becoming human—a key concept for ubuntu—means creating a world where others can also become human. One challenge in attempting to define ubuntu in concrete terms is that the philosophy's ethical reasoning is circular regarding what being or becoming human or a person actually means.Footnote ⁷ A subject is not a priori human but becomes human only through ethical relations to others. Munyaradzi Felix Murove writes that “the definition of Ubuntu as humanness is dovetailed by this presumption—namely that humanness is our existential precondition of our bondedness with others” (37). And as Mvuselelo Ngcoya puts it, “Ubuntu stresses the importance of community, altruism, solidarity, sharing and caring. This worldview advocates a profound sense of interdependence and emphasizes that our true human potential can only be realized in partnership with others” (253). Perhaps the most important way in which ubuntu differs from comparable Western philosophies like cosmopolitanism is that ubuntu does not presume that the atomized individual is the key social unit, instead asserting that human beings exist as such only through their interactions with others. More specifically, human beings exist as such only when they actively work to create a just society.

Ubuntu requires concrete action. Ngcoya states that “ubuntu opposes structural dehumanization and focuses on creating conditions in which more and more people can expand their capacity to be human” (255). Similarly, Cornell and Van Marle emphasize the activist agenda of the worldview: “ubuntu clearly has an ideal edge. There is no end to the struggle to bring about a human world and to become an individual person who makes a difference in it” (2). It is in this sense that we should understand Tutu's phrase “Yu, u nobuntu”—roughly translated as “Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu” (qtd. in Eze, “Transcultural Affinity” 221). Seeing ubuntu exclusively as a philosophy or worldview misses a fundamental dimension, and Eze argues for thinking of it (at least in part) as a quality one acquires by acting humanely, even comparing it with the ancient Greek concept of virtue: “The fact that it can be said of one person and not of another implies that it is an acquired trait, that is, it is not an essential characteristic of only the people of a certain society. It is like arete, which means moral virtue or excellence” (“Transcultural Affinity” 221). A corollary of ubuntu's emphasis on becoming human is that one can lose their humanity through the antisocial or destructive treatment of others. Colonialism and apartheid were diametrically opposed to ubuntu because the settlers denied the rights of indigenous populations. The perpetrators of colonialism and apartheid lacked ubuntu, lacked full personhood, because of their destructive behavior. However, personhood is not static, and ubuntu ethics encourage antisocial subjects to reform and work for the good of society. Ubuntu is simultaneously a cultural imperative to behave humanely, an activist imperative to help others become human, and the virtue of being fully human through one's actions. In other words, the collective social good is all.

As a practical application, ubuntu promotes (not always successfully) an idealistic, locally grounded, empathetic collectivism. However, some scholars—like Nyasha Mboti—take issue with this conceptualization of ubuntu, arguing that it often fails to accurately chart Africans’ behaviors. Mboti argues that ubuntu has been defined too vaguely and that the usual definitions erase the complexity of Africans’ lived experiences and complex multiethical character (132). While I agree with Mboti's caveats about definitions that treat Africans as naturally and exclusively cooperative (126), I take issue with his argument that the practical failures of many Africans to embrace or enact communalism requires a rethinking of ubuntu as an ethical imperative. Mboti compellingly argues that Africans are multiethical and that ubuntu often fails to predict how Africans encounter real world situations (133). However, I disagree with Mboti's claim that when “normal human relations cause ethics to bend, reflect, diffract, refract, scatter, and travel in several directions,” the concept of ubuntu should be redefined to actively promote negative or antisocial relationships (133). It is important to keep in mind that while ubuntu is a powerful ethical principle, it does not guarantee good behavior any more than the Christian imperative to charity or the Confucian ethic of respect does. Mboti reminds us that context matters in discussions of ethics: “It is quite possible that ubuntu is really just another word for ‘good citizenship’ for African persons, an (impure) ethics of good citizenship based on independent thought and action, individual freedom, critical good sense, and informed choice in context” (134; emphasis in original). What Mboti fails to sufficiently appreciate is that “good citizenship” in many African communities is deeply rooted in collectivism and mutual support.

Many scholars argue that collectivism is central to African ethics, especially in South Africa. Antjie Krog reflects that despite her extensive work documenting the TRC and trying to artistically assess and express its effect on South Africa, it was only by seeing the proceedings through the lens of ubuntu philosophy—rather than her Afrikaner-inherited individualist worldview—that mass forgiveness began to make sense (“Research into Reconciliation” 208). While ubuntu predated colonialism as a social principle, the lack of humanity shown under colonialism and apartheid changed and strengthened the importance of collectivist humanity for indigenous South Africans. Murove claims that “the African revolt against colonialism and slavery was based on the conviction that such brutal systems were the antithesis of Ubuntu because they were systems of ultimate dehumanization to the Africans” (38). Additionally, locally grounded ethical concepts are “successful in engaging the populations within processes of social transformation wherein they can consider themselves as active participants, as co-producers of the meanings and significations associated with these transformations” (Sarr 96). In other words, a localized ethical principle like ubuntu encouraged ordinary South Africans not only to identify with the goals of the TRC but to participate in it and see themselves as actively shaping the new South Africa. However, in a society as riven by racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic divisions as end-of-apartheid South Africa, achieving such human togetherness in practice was a monumental task.

The TRC chose to begin the processes of healing with storytelling as a means to construct mutual human recognition. People gave public testimony, describing their experiences, feelings, fears, and so on, and their testimonies were seen by attendees and heard by listeners throughout South Africa. Krog links the publicness of the testimony with the TRC's goal to build empathy for the suffering or guilt of others (“Research into Reconciliation” 216 and “‘This Thing Called Reconciliation’” 354). As people spoke publicly about their own experiences, audiences found common ground in suffering under apartheid. The arts are widely recognized as a way of promoting cultural openness.Footnote ⁸ This premise is central to Dan Rebellato's argument that theater is fundamentally cosmopolitan. Rebellato claims that theater promotes empathy when we engage emotionally with characters, either as actors or as spectators: “Acting a character involves a level of imaginative engagement with another (fictional) person, a determination to occupy and understand that person's actions, whether that is psychologically or socially. Acting might itself be considered a valuable rehearsal for the ethical principle of universal equivalence between all people” (71). Similarly, in her book on emotional intelligence, Martha C. Nussbaum compares empathy to the actor's process: “empathy is like the mental preparation of a skilled (Method) actor: it involves a participatory enactment of the situation of the sufferer, but is always combined with the awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer” (327). In other words, performers imagine becoming someone else—imagine what that person feels, what they think, what they want, how they see themselves in society. Rebellato claims, further, that audiences’ sympathetic engagement with characters on stage primes viewers for empathetic decision-making in the world (72). There are, however, obvious limits to this empathetic imagining. Especially in South Africa, seeing people of a different race as legitimate beings worthy of ethical concern went radically against the logic imposed on society by apartheid for almost half a century. And some people did testify—especially to the amnesty committee, which heard from perpetrators of police, military, and paramilitary violence on behalf of the apartheid system—merely for official forgiveness, without any signs of remorse, contrition, or empathy (Cole 14–15). Officially, the TRC did not require restitution or evidence that a perpetrator had changed, which is debatably a major weakness of the process. But this was also probably the only way to mount a nationwide public campaign to purge the demons of apartheid and begin moving toward the (still unrealized) goal of an equitable South Africa.

Molora and Its Classical Intertexts

Farber's play intertextually organizes three major sources: Greek tragedy, the TRC, and Xhosa folk singing. Most prominent among Farber's Attic sources, Aeschylus's Oresteia dramatizes the transition from a society ruled by violence and feuding to a society ordered by the rule of law. The first play, Agamemnon, shows Agamemnon's return from the Trojan War and murder by his wife Klytemnestra as revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia at the beginning of the war. Next is The Libation Bearers, in which Orestes and Elektra, the children of Klytemnestra and Agamemnon, murder their mother and her new husband, Ayesthus, to avenge their father. The final play, The Eumenides, begins with the Erinyes (the Furies) pursuing Orestes for matricide, until Athena intervenes and establishes a trial by jury to determine whether Orestes was justified in spilling his mother's blood. This is the fundamental shift marked by the play: from a “primitive” and “barbaric” culture of bloody revenge (situated in and represented by Argos) to a “civilized” and democratic jury trial (located both physically and ideologically in Athens). After the trial, Athena commands the Athenians—simultaneously the twelve serving on the play's jury and the audience at the Dionysia—to maintain the system of jury trials and uphold the laws (Aeschylus, Eumenides 187–88). She informs the citizens, “This bench and this tribunal in the future / is perpetually set up for Aegeus’ people” (187). The play dramatizes the (mythologized) moment that established Athenian values: democracy, equality before the law, and justice. Both ancient and modern democratic and social-justice movements can use the ritual repetition of democracy's founding gesture as an ideological tool to shore up liberatory ideologies:

In other words, repeating the transformative moment helps establish a new ethical center through ritual.

Farber's 2003 adaptation—first performed at the Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts—reimagines the Oresteia with a hopeful message carrying forth the work of the TRC in healing postapartheid South Africa. Inspired in part by Aeschylus's prodemocratic aspirations, Farber's play expresses a vision for the new South Africa: to collectively transcend the violence and racism of apartheid and build a just future. This is a play that proves Lanrele Bamidele's point that “the use of myth and folktale in post-colonial drama in Africa serves as social critique and offers a utopian vision” (72). Molora's utopian vision is based largely on the events of The Libation Bearers, with testimony and flashbacks drawn from Agamemnon. The opening portion of the play focuses on the conflict between the white Klytemnestra and the black Elektra. As he does in The Libation Bearers, Orestes returns from exile to wreak his revenge. However, unlike in Aeschylus's play, in Molora the children do not kill Klytemnestra. As Farber said:

Instead of closing Aeschylus's sacrificial cycle, the chorus—performed by the Ngqoko Cultural Group—embrace Elektra and Orestes, giving them the choice not to kill, the choice to choose ubuntu rather than revenge. Instead of imposing Athena's top-down justice from The Eumenides, the chorus democratically establishes reconciliation through empathetic support. Ubuntu emphasizes the importance of human interconnection. To sacrifice the democratic possibilities of postapartheid South Africa would be, to some extent, to betray the dream of ubuntu and the TRC.

The influences in Farber's play are not limited to Aeschylus, and Farber freely draws from other Attic retellings of the Orestes myth.Footnote ⁹ In “A Note on the Quotations,” published with Molora, Farber lists her sources for direct quotations from the Greek: two translations of Agamemnon, one of The Libation Bearers, two versions of Sophocles's Elektra, and one version of Euripides's Elektra (16). In addition, as both Betine van Zyl Smit (129–30) and Elke Steinmeyer (471) point out, Farber drew inspiration from Jean-Paul Sartre's 1943 Oresteia adaptation, The Flies. Farber's choice to combine and draw from various translations of a range of Orestes and Elektra plays echoes those classical reworkings of a shared body of myth. Farber freely plays with culturally powerful myth structures without fidelity to one particular version. As Mbembe suggested, Farber domesticates the various cultural elements present in contemporary South Africa to produce a distinctly Afropolitan play.

The heteroglossic coexistence of Aeschylus, other Athenian authors, various translators, and Farber is a dynamic model of intertextuality that can be traced throughout Molora. The play's final speech, given by Klytemnestra, suggests this kind of hybridity:

Setting aside its political and ideological content, this speech demonstrates a complex intertextuality, which linguistically models a potential for empathetic coexistence. Farber wrote the first seven lines, though they echo Portia's “quality of mercy” speech from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The final five lines come directly from the third choral song of The Liberation Bearers (lines 1199–202). This means that coexisting in this fairly short speech are lines translated from the Oresteia, echoes of Shakespeare, and Farber's original composition. The passage enacts a polyvocalism that borrows freely, recontextualizes, and builds meaning from textual interplay. Molora makes meaning for postapartheid South Africa by putting this heteroglossic language and the agonistic conflict of the Oresteia into the structure of the TRC.

Molora and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In Performing South Africa's Truth Commission, Catherine Cole argues that performance fundamentally shaped how the TRC was presented to South Africans and the world. Performance, particularly storytelling, was central to the TRC (and its various theatrical and artistic afterlives) because stories can establish empathetic connections between performers and spectators. Farber's dramaturgy often works to build links that uplift and prompt empathetic action in the world. As Farber herself said, “The barriers we construct to differentiate ourselves from one another, collapse under the weight of the evidence that we all inevitably share these fragile ‘once-upon-a times’” (Interview 21). Her larger body of work reveals the TRC's importance for a new national identity for postapartheid South Africa, particularly her plays dramatizing original testimony.Footnote ¹⁰ Her testimonial plays include A Woman in Waiting, Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, and He Left Quietly. Each play artistically reworks a TRC testimony to create a coherent impression of apartheid suffering. Both A Woman in Waiting and Amajuba present the day-to-day experiences of life under apartheid—separation from loved ones, deprivation, poverty, and humiliation—showing apartheid as an existential condition. In He Left Quietly, Duma Kumalo recounts his experiences on death row as one of the famed Sharpeville Six, whose arrest and conviction were widely held to be racially motivated.Footnote ¹¹ One of the most powerful aspects of these plays is that their initial performances were acted by the person who originally gave the testimony. Farber worked with the testifiers—none of whom were professional actors—and the testimonies to both remain true to the apartheid experience and shape the story for subsequent performances. Retelling these stories in a forum other than the TRC continued the commission's project of storytelling and empathy building. Tutu echoes this empathetic storytelling project in his foreword to Farber's Theatre as Witness, where these testimonial plays were published: “True story-telling helps us reach beyond the damage, and into the future . . . to touch every human heart that longs to hear and be heard” (7).

Given Farber and the TRC's faith in the power of stories to prompt empathetic action and remake the world in new and better ways, Farber's choice to adapt both the Oresteia and the TRC's storytelling project makes perfect sense for the new South Africa, a nation trying to establish both forgiveness and restorative justice. The Oresteia enacts a moment of social redefinition, and in 1994, at the end of apartheid, the Republic of South Africa (RSA) found itself in a similar liminal moment. The TRC became the tool of redefinition. Because the TRC was a foundational ritual, it is necessary to artistically repeat the ritual to provide grounding for the new society.Footnote ¹² Farber's repurposing in Molora of the TRC's performative practices illustrates two of the play's most important characteristics: reenactment and the heteroglossic play of language.

Reenactment or reperformance supports a world-building project by providing new ways to engage with, understand, and redefine the past and its implications for the future. Unfortunately, the commission's work remains unfinished—South Africa remains deeply riven by racial, socioeconomic, and ideological divides that preserve hierarchies of power, often along lines similar to those under apartheid. As Rebecca Schneider asserts, reenactment highlights the continuing presence of the past, or our inability to get past the past. As she explains, “it is the very pastness of the past that is never complete, never completely finished, but incomplete: cast into the future as a matter for ritual negotiation and as yet undecided interpretive acts of reworking. In this way, events are given to be past, or to become past, by virtue of both their ongoingness and their partialness, their incompleteness in the present” (33; emphasis in original). In other words, we reenact the past because our present and future are shaped by continual negotiation over what past events mean. In her book on memory and performance in South Africa, Yvette Hutchison echoes this sentiment, explaining that the continual reperformance of the TRC highlights gaps between the ideals of the new South Africa and the actual conditions of the nation (182).

Reenacted negotiations with memory produce physical knowledges capable of redefining perceptions of the past, and Molora reenacts one of the most iconic images of violence from the TRC. In scene 8, Klytemnestra tortures Elektra to reveal Orestes's location. Elektra lies face down, and Klytemnestra puts a plastic bag over her daughter's head and pulls it tight around her throat. The performers hold this pose dangerously long to make the audience viscerally aware that they are witnessing the torture of a human being. According to the stage directions, “This form of torture should be a direct visual reference to the ‘Wet Bag Method’—graphically demonstrated at the Truth Commission, and used by South African Security Police to torture political activists during the Apartheid regime's rule” (Farber, Molora 44). In his 1999 amnesty hearing, Jeffrey Benzien graphically described and reenacted the wet bag torture of Tony Yengeni, an incident that has become infamous in South Africa (Amnesty Committee). The YouTube video “MoLoRa (Trailer)” shows Klytemnestra's torture, which visually and ominously echoes Benzien's demonstration. The wet bag scene is especially chilling because of how infamous Benzien's testimony is. Why include such a violent and disturbing image in Molora? I think the answer has to do with the ongoing process of social redefinition. The dream of the Rainbow Nation—a term for the aspiration of a racially and ethnically inclusive South Africa—is unfulfilled, and reenactment becomes a way of performatively renegotiating the meaning of Benzien's demonstration. As Schneider claims, the past haunts the present because it remains full of potentials, and reenactment becomes a quest to solve current problems by getting these pasts right.

Through its mise-en-scène, Molora visually evokes the TRC, which had a distinct staging and performative style. Farber's stage directions explain that “the ideal venue is a bare hall or room—much like the drab, simple venues in which most of the testimonies were heard during the course of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Two large, old tables—each with a chair—face one another on opposite ends of the playing space. . . . Upon each table is a microphone on a stand” (19). The proximity of the audience to the performance space re-creates the experience of attending commission hearings, which were purposely set up to evoke empathetic responses from the audience. Farber suggests that an amphitheater with raked seating is the ideal orientation because “contact with the audience must be immediate and dynamic, with the audience complicit—experiencing the story as witnesses or participants in the room” (19). TRC hearings were often crowded with local people who had come to see, hear, and support those giving testimony, so seating the audience close to the play's events puts viewers in the position of TRC spectators.

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in other countries had always been private; South Africa was the first nation to hold open hearings. South Africa's TRC was, therefore, resolutely public, resolutely audience oriented (Cole xii). The TRC “was designed to restore voice, to give people who had often suffered in isolation an opportunity to publicly articulate their experiences through embodied, face-to-face encounters with audiences who listened, heard, and acknowledged” (63–64). This communal experience embodied the ethos of ubuntu. The public orientation of the TRC allowed concentric circles of local, national, and even global audiences to experience the testimony and move collectively toward reconciliation. Krog argues that the rationale for public hearings, along with a testimonial forum shared by victims and perpetrators and individual, rather than collective or automatic, requests for amnesty, “can be traced back to the desire to restore the interconnectedness of a community: because people share each other's pain, the audience has as much right to be in the presence of the testimony as the testifier—hence public hearings” (“Research into Reconciliation” 216). Public testimony allowed the South African community as a whole to create empathetic connections intended to allow perpetrators of apartheid violence to change for the better by reincorporating themselves into a human community (212). Without such a community, ubuntu holds, a person cannot properly be human.

Elektra repeatedly accuses her mother of isolating and silencing her. In the first part of her testimony, Elektra says, “So I pay you back with / these words I could not utter before” (Farber, Molora 24; my emphasis). For the first time, Elektra has a forum to speak out and denounce her mother. Her voice has been restored by the microphone and its invitation to tell her story. This ability to speak—and specifically to speak in public—about her oppression offers Elektra opportunities to reconnect with a community she had otherwise been isolated from. This is, of course, one of the fundamental—though still unfulfilled—aspirations of the TRC: to bring together South Africans to move as a nation toward a shared future. Elektra's bondage had separated her from the communities represented by both the chorus of Xhosa women and the audience members (who stand in for TRC spectators, who in turn stood for the imagined national community of the new South Africa). The stakes for this isolation are high because Elektra could gain ubuntu only through interconnection with other people; captivity cut her off from personhood. Testimony and reintegration into a public offer Elektra (and Orestes as well) a path away from violence.

One of the major goals of the TRC was to allow South Africans to express themselves by speaking to local audiences, the nation, and the world. Whereas apartheid repressed indigenous peoples, the ideal of the Rainbow Nation was to restore dignity and value to the vast array of peoples and cultures that occupy South Africa. Ubuntu emphasizes intercultural empathy and the interconnectedness of cultures. In ubuntu thought, it is not that static cultures exist alongside one another—the pluralist or multicultural position (Hollinger 93)—but that cultures and human beings grow from empathetic contact. These premises are implicit in the TRC, which attempted to reshape South Africa's national culture around empathy and openness while contesting apartheid white supremacy.

The quest to value South Africa's cultural heterogeneity is a fundamentally Afropolitan goal, and one way the TRC moved toward this goal was by taking testimony in witnesses’ native languages and translating it in real time into a multitude of other languages. In a country like the RSA, with eleven official languages and dozens more unofficial languages and dialects, these imperatives can seem mutually exclusive. Speaking in one's own language—Xhosa, for instance—may profoundly limit communication with speakers of other languages like Afrikaans, Zulu, Swazi, English, and Shona. The TRC attempted to resolve this problem through translators, dozens of whom worked in real time converting live testimony into major South African languages and local dialects. The aural experience of testimony layered languages on one another while simultaneously drawing attention to the act of mediation. Molora sets up a similar interplay of languages. Klytemnestra's opening lines come from the watchman in Agamemnon: “A great ox — / As they say — / Stands on my tongue,” which the translator—a member of the chorus—immediately renders in Xhosa: “Ndise ndayinkukhw’ isikw'umlomo” (Farber, Molora 22). The translator—who disappears after the first major speech—highlights contemporary South African linguistic politics.

The TRC dedicated itself to ensuring that witnesses could speak their own languages while being heard and understood by as many people as possible. In South Africa, language marked social and ethnic status, so the TRC's live translation was a crucial means of empowering those whom apartheid had oppressed. Elektra and Orestes speak both Xhosa and English, and they are spoken to in Xhosa by the chorus. The ability to code switch signals the young people's hybrid position—belonging both to the anglophone world of Klytemnestra's palace and to the Xhosa-speaking community of the chorus. When Elektra begins her testimony, her first five lines are in Xhosa, followed by four in English, one in Xhosa, and then the remainder in English (24–25). Language marks Elektra as distinct from Klytemnestra, who speaks only English. This linguistic difference mirrors their differences in social status under the racially defined regime of apartheid—Dorothy Ann Gould, who played Klytemnestra in the original run, is white, while Jabulile Tshabalala, who played Elektra, is black. However, this bilingual play undermines the linguistic hierarchy propped up by apartheid by enacting Xhosa as a theatrical and poetic language to rival English (or Afrikaans) and linking Xhosa language and culture with Greek tragedy and the cultural capital it carries. Molora's linguistic and performative hybridity connects indigenous South African language and art with Greek tragedy, contesting the hierarchical boundaries between Greek or European cultures and African cultures.

Although the play's physical and ideological space is oriented to evoke the TRC, it diverges to accommodate the agonistic structure of Greek tragedy. Unlike the trial of Orestes in The Eumenides, the TRC did not have competing parties who tried to win their cases; people testified before commissioners (and larger audiences) for compensation, justice, amnesty, or simply truth. In Molora, however, the agonistic conflict between Elektra and Klytemnestra structures the play, which is why there are two tables and two microphones from which they speak their competing testimonies. Glenn Odom argues that Molora's blend of reconciliation and tragedy is a structural weakness, preventing either reconciliation or catharsis:

Odom thinks this is a structural fault of the play, but I disagree. Instead, I would argue that the liminal position between these two forms purposely rejects closure because completing the liminal ritual of the TRC or the play would define the new society, would delimit its potential. The hopeful aspiration of Molora is to embrace continual possibilities for human and humane improvement—a hope still necessary in an RSA that remains profoundly unequal.

The Humane Power of the Xhosa Chorus

The generic tension between tragedy and reconciliation becomes most apparent at the end of Molora, which puts ubuntu and the healing power of human togetherness center stage. The chorus becomes the catalyst for forgiveness; the common people of South Africa impel Orestes and Elektra to renounce the cycle of violence, offering them the support necessary not to take revenge. In scene 15, Orestes ritually performs the killing of Ayesthus (who never physically appears on stage) by twirling Klytemnestra's pickax around his body and striking the blood-filled boots that stand in for Ayethus. Orestes plucks the usurper's heart from the bloody mess, only to find himself covered in gore (Farber, Molora 69). The YouTube video “MoLoRa (Trailer)” shows Sandile Matsheni—who played Orestes in the original production—sinking to the ground and cradling his head in his bloody hands. He is in despair over what he has done. Ma Nosomething, one of the chorus women, chastises Orestes:

After Ayesthus dies, Orestes urges his sister to renounce the demand for their mother's blood. Deeply troubled by the experience of murder, he drops the pickax, swearing to shed no more blood (75), but Elektra is determined to have her revenge, even if it means killing Klytemnestra herself. Orestes pleads, “There is still time, Sister. / Walk away. / Rewrite this ancient end” (75–76). But Elektra declares herself a member of the cursed house of Atreus, meaning that she must answer violence with violence.

Probably the two most powerful gestures in the play are when the chorus embraces Elektra as she charges at her mother, and when Orestes and Elektra lift Klytemnestra to her feet. These two moments renounce violence in the play and, symbolically, in South Africa. The stage directions at the beginning of scene 19 describe the moment when Elektra charges at Klytemnestra: “The WOMEN of the CHORUS move swiftly as one. They grab ELEKTRA and overpower her. ELEKTRA screams in rage as they wrestle the axe from her hands. They restrain her and she finally breaks down and weeps for all the injustices done to her, her brother, and her father” (77). This frees Elektra from the cycle of violence inherent in both the tragic form and the Manichaean logic of colonialism. In this gesture, this communal embrace, the chorus of ordinary South African people—performed by members of the Ngqoko Cultural Group, who themselves lived through apartheidFootnote ¹³—reject their own potential violence, choosing instead the path of reconciliation. This collective gesture enacts the ubuntu principle that through connecting with other people a person becomes human. The chorus demonstrates the virtue of ubuntu by collectively creating the conditions for Elektra, Orestes, and Klytemnestra to regain the humanity they have lost.

This ethical outlook underpins how the choral performers conceptualized their role. In an interview, the members of the Ngqoko Cultural Group explain their role in the drama: “Elektra, she wants to kill her mother, and Orestes, he agrees. We try, the mamas, they try to stop it so it's not tooth by tooth, blood by blood. It's not good because it is a continuous cycle with no end, so we must stop killing, stop violence, stop wars. That's our, that's why we are singing” (“Interview”). The role of the chorus throughout the play—especially in scene 19—is to protect the children from violence as much as possible, including protecting them from their own desire for violence.

Odom argues that the chorus's intervention makes reconciliation or catharsis impossible:

What Odom ignores is the next gesture, which does signal a movement toward reconciliation. After the chorus releases Elektra, she and Orestes turn toward their mother. According to the stage directions, “They crawl towards her slowly. KLYTEMNESTRA—uncertain of what they will do to her—draws back in terror. As they reach their mother, they slowly stand together and extend their hands to help her up. Once on her feet, she is a broken woman” (Farber, Molora 77). This moment frees all the characters—not only Orestes and Elektra but Klytemnestra as well—from the spiral of brutality that had ordered their lives. Klytemnestra's breakdown in her children's arms parallels Elektra's breakdown in the chorus's embrace. Forgiveness creates the opportunity for all three to become more human through their communal act of empathetic support.

Human togetherness, ubuntu, offers new hope and the promise of a new South Africa. The final speeches of Molora reflect this promise, giving voice to an egalitarian dream for the future and the hope that the old South Africa will not dictate the shape of the new. After Elektra and Orestes help their mother to her feet, the diviner steps forward from the chorus and prays in Xhosa:

This prayer carries ritual significance, and rituals have transformative power. Elektra and Orestes give up their vengeance, repressing their aggressive desires for the good of society, but this transition is possible only through the rites of passage—including the chorus's intervention and the diviner's prayer—that ritually mark their reintegration into a reformed society that envisions the potential for a unified South Africa built on empathetic openness.

As Zyl Smit writes, “In addition to the overt links to the TRC, Molora also has a powerful indigenous aesthetic because of the prominence of Xhosa culture” (132). Farber worked with the Ngqoko Cultural Group to incorporate indigenous performance—particularly umngqokolo, or split-tone singing, the group's specialty. Xhosa folk music is the third major form in Molora. From her work on testimonial plays, Farber is keenly aware of the ethical issues around language and self-expression in South Africa.Footnote ¹⁴ This awareness helps explain why in Molora so much of the dialogue and all the songs are performed in Xhosa—the play tries to resist the colonialist erasure of indigenous languages, following the TRC in allowing South Africans to act publicly through their own languages. The Ngqoko Cultural Group's droning umngqokolo lends weight and power to Molora by evoking otherworldly forces. Umngqokolo's rhythmic and resonant sound is reminiscent of other sacred forms like Gregorian chant or Lakota ritual singing—it can be heard in the video “MoLoRa (Trailer).” Farber's goal was “to find a group that could represent the weight and conscience of the community” for Molora's chorus, and the Ngqoko Cultural Group does that (Farber, Molora 12). Umngqokolo punctuates the play, marking scene transitions and providing a backdrop for ritualized performances—for instance, when Klytemnestra washes Agamemnon's blood from her hands (27) or when Orestes kills Ayesthus (69). Unlike Attic tragedians like Aeschylus, Farber does not write out these choral songs, an omission that allows the singers of the Ngqoko Cultural Group, and the choral singers in subsequent performances, to control their own artistry.

The Ngqoko Cultural Group's onstage presence also visually evokes both TRC audiences and a Greek chorus. Stone-faced and omnipresent, wrapped in plaid blankets and head scarves, the women judge the violent acts done throughout the play. They hear Klytemnestra and Elektra's testimonies, like TRC witnesses, and they render moral judgements, like choruses in Attic tragedy. Cole describes the link between TRC audiences and choruses: “The live audience served as a kind of Greek chorus. Its members did not just witness but also often commented on the action” (13). In other words, representatives of the community were directly and vocally involved with the TRC's quest to redefine South Africa in more humane terms. Unlike Greek choruses, which rarely intercede in agonistic conflicts (though they often support one side or the other as having the superior moral claim), the members of Molora's chorus repeatedly involve themselves—almost always to prevent violence. After Agamemnon's murder, Elektra delivers the infant Orestes to the chorus to protect him (Farber, Molora 29); then when Klytemnestra tries to whip Elektra, the chorus shelters her (40). These actions presage the crucial intervention, where the chorus prevents Elektra from killing her mother and facilitates the movement toward reconciliation. The guiding ethical force of the chorus is ubuntu, the spirit of collective humanity that resists the cycle of violence.

One of the chorus's roles in Molora is to help Elektra and Orestes renounce violence. They offer the children an alternative to the Manichaean violence that might have torn South Africa apart after the end of apartheid, an alternative rooted in the ubuntu-inspired principle of becoming human through social interconnectedness. Like Farber, the Ngqoko Cultural Group sees their artistry as participating in larger global conversations about ethical action and the need to renounce violence. They explain, “What is happening outside in the world now, the wars, the conflict, the defenses, so if we can work together towards love then relationships build on relationships, that's what can be, so there's a place for everybody” (“Interview”). The group envisions the ethical dimension of their art as engaging with global patterns of violence, exploitation, oppression, and dispossession. The ethical project of both Molora and the group transcends the national boundaries of South Africa, suggesting the global applicability of ubuntu-inspired empathy. As black South African women, the members of the Ngqoko Cultural Group grew up experiencing discrimination and dispossession. And while they work to keep Xhosa traditions alive, they also envision their preservation efforts as part of a worldwide resistance to violence and oppression.

In postcolonial theater and the arts, artists negotiate hybrid cultural identities drawing from both indigenous traditions and the traditions of the colonizers. Lokangaka Losambe notes that adaptability and negotiating hybridity are central concerns for postindependence African literature (13–14). For instance, Chinua Achebe's masterpiece Things Fall Apart rewards characters who adapt to the interstitial spaces of contact between the Igbo and the incoming British (46). Classical materials were a major part of the British education system, which is reflected in the proliferation of anglophone African adaptations of Greek tragedy.Footnote ¹⁵ Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides (1973) uses Euripides's Bacchae to critique colonialism and the military dictatorships that often emerged after African nations achieved independence. Perhaps the most famous South African adaptation of Greek tragedy is Athol Fugard's The Island (1973), in which a performance of Antigone inspires two characters to resist and try to escape from an island prison inspired by Robben Island prison.

Femi Osofisan's work exemplifies this hybrid blending of European and African source material more than that of any other African dramatist. Osofisan's Tegonni: An African Antigone (1994) and Women of Owu (2004) place African songs, rituals, proverbs, and values in Attic-inspired tragedies. Tegonni sets the Antigone story in nineteenth-century Nigeria to explore the Yoruba resistance to the British empire. Women of Owu relocates The Trojan Women to Owu, Nigeria, shortly after that city was destroyed by its enemies in 1821. Both blend Greek and Yoruba materials, producing new hybrid plays. The link between Tegonni and Antigone is clear: Antigone even arrives from mythology to counsel Tegonni on whether to comply with the authoritarian British general or to fight for herself and her people's freedom. The Greek storyline is supplemented with eleven scenes where Yoruba songs are sung (2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 26, and the epilogue), and scene 17 includes an African anticorruption fable about a tiger and a frog (Tegonni 95–101). Similarly, in Women of Owu, song and dance are interspersed throughout the play, even serving as tools for the displaced women to maintain their cultural heritage. As the women prepare to be removed from the ruins of their destroyed city, the dirges and ancestral dances remind them who they are as Owus (17). Like Molora, Osofisan's adaptations blend Greek and African materials to explore the problems facing contemporary Nigeria, not just as a postcolonial society but as part of a world in which culture is increasingly hybrid, cosmopolitan, and in flux.

Molora exemplifies the Afropolitan possibilities of ubuntu by blending Aeschylus's Oresteia with Xhosa cultural songs, performances, and language, and with the TRC's theatrical culture. It imagines precisely the kind of encounter Rebellato ascribes to theater, a potentially transformative social space wherein people are encouraged to empathetically encounter other worldviews, ethical systems, cultural practices, and norms. These encounters can open new conceptions of the world, challenging and reformulating how subjects see both themselves and their communities. The ubuntu ethic of Molora particularly emphasizes this moral position. Farber's play encourages human togetherness rooted in an ethical awareness of our connections with and responsibility to others, both to treat other people kindly and to actively try to make the world more just and equitable. The production gains moral and performative strength from the blending of cultures, which highlights and enacts the ability to resist oppression and exploitation through communal action. When the Ngqoko Cultural Group embraces Elektra to stop her from killing Klytemnestra, it is the embodiment of ubuntu, the embodiment of the power of the multitude to counteract cycles of violence through creativity and mutual support. One of the fundamental goals of the TRC, informed by ubuntu philosophy, was to find collective ways of making or revealing truths. Through its heteroglossic play of voices and sources, and through its thematic suggestion that cycles of violence can be broken when communities come together to provide mutual support, Molora promotes this ethic of human togetherness.