Wits University Press

Summary

In 1960 the Swedish missiologist Bengt Sundkler published a book that addressed the position of the pastor in Africa, and the question as to what a theological college should be. This was a year of great change in Africa. Even as apartheid was being consolidated, no less than 17 states gained independence during the course of that year, ‘and the cry “Africa for the Africans” [could] be heard everywhere’. A professor at the University of Uppsala, Sundkler was married to a South African woman, and had spent time teaching at the Lutheran Theological College at Oscarsberg in Rorke's Drift in the early 1940s. In 1948 his book Bantu Prophets in South Africa secured Sundkler's ‘international reputation as an Africanist’. His appointment as research secretary of the International Missionary Council enabled him to conduct the survey for the IMC Commission on Theological Education in Africa in 1953, 1955 and 1957, which also provided the basis for the book published in 1960. The IMC survey results were widely disseminated and discussed in South Africa, and formed an important part of the background to the establishment of both Fedsem and Umpumulo.

As suggested in the previous chapter, this provided missionaries who were losing their schools to the state with a substitute, enabling them to re-direct their energies. Sundkler sketched a vision of an alternative educational project which aimed at raising the standards of a hitherto neglected theological education. He argued that this could be achieved by addressing both the Eurocentric content and also the dull and uninteresting teaching methodologies of existing educational approaches. To succeed, it was necessary to create an atmosphere in which education was experienced as ‘the enjoyment of good company’, and to teach African Church History in a way that would bring out the creative tension between national and universal dimensions of education. Rather than this history being taught as ‘a catalogue of names and dates’, it should bring out ‘the main trends, the great ideas and movements’. The tendency to treat Church History as a catalogue of unrelated data, or ‘historical facts’ was, he argued, a reason why students found Theology so difficult to learn. For this reason, too, thorough research and the study of local history needed to be a central element of the new theological college. Sundkler's vision inspired, and was also visible, in Umpumulo's approach to the curriculum.

Summary

The question of transition is central to how we understand educational change in moments of rupture. South Africa's great moments of rupture, change and transition in the twentieth century occurred in 1910, in 1948 and in 1994. Each transition was accompanied by dramatic processes of social and educational change. The first, Union in 1910, created a unified system of state control and provision for white education. Mission education was increasingly directed and financed by the provinces on vastly inferior terms to those for an expanding white system. The second, the shift to apartheid in 1948, brought mission education under full state control. This change officially ended more than a century of provision by a number of different mission societies which had become a growing power in the land. By 1994, the third moment, when apartheid was officially dismantled and a democratic state brought into being, new crises borne of inequality were tearing the society apart. A democratic state set about resolving these tensions. The process of this transition has been fraught, its results an apparent failure, the continuities with the past still painfully present.

This book focuses not on the ‘why’, but the ‘how’ of educational change over time. It does so by addressing this historically, at another moment of great rupture and change, and specifically, through the experience of one mission institution involved in change. The period of change is that of the transition from segregation to apartheid, from mission to Bantu Education. The transition from mission to Bantu Education was a traumatic process with long-term consequences. It is commonly understood as constituting a deep break between liberal segregationism and apartheid. Yet what it meant for specific missions and schools in practice is poorly understood.

This book approaches the question of the transition from the perspective of how the transnational, colonial project of mission education was, perhaps paradoxically, both part of, and transformed, during the apartheid period. The project crossed geographical, national and racial boundaries. Notably, the casestudy is not the larger, well-to-do and prominent mission societies and schools whose opposition to apartheid was vocal, but rather the smaller, less-visible German mission schools of the Hermannsburg Mission Society in Natal and the Transvaal. The Mission was active in providing education in KwaZulu- Natal and the Transvaal from the time of its arrival in South Africa in 1854.

Summary

A bang came from the window of a cell on the upper floor. It sounded like a knock to the seal that persisted for some time and was loud enough to catch the attention of Andrew Mlangeni as he went through his regular morning ‘oefening’ outside. He fixed his eyes high up but didn't see anything or anyone. He decided to walk again past the place where he had heard the sound, and looked up again. This time he saw a small piece of paper being released from the window, probably the one from which the attention was sought. As it flew down to the surface like a butterfly, the warder who was supervising his exercise picked it up and he never saw its contents, nor knew, at the time, who was trying to send it to him. He was then hurriedly taken back to his cell.

A day or two later, in his cell, Andrew climbed onto his toilet bucket to peep through his cell's tiny window and saw a white man being led to exercise in the white section of the prison. It was Ben Turok who, like many other members of the SACP, had joined MK. He had evaded arrest during the 1960 state of emergency, and gone underground. Andrew had not seen him since he came back from China but had been briefed about his fate.

Andrew had learned the trick of communicating messages since the intercepted piece of paper from the upper cell window. He picked up a piece of paper and wrote the message ‘Percy is here’, confident that his code name had circulated among the leadership of MK. He banged on his window to gain Turok's attention and threw down the note, then watched with frustration as the warder guarding Turok picked it up and quickly rushed Turok back to his cell. Within a minute, the warder was in Andrew's cell, questioning him about the name Percy. Andrew insisted on his real name and denied any knowledge of Percy. Furious, the warder left with the piece of paper. Andrew did not read much into his sight of Turok because he knew the man had been convicted in 1962 under the Explosives Act and sentenced to three years in prison. Unlike Andrew and Motsoaledi, he was therefore a convicted prisoner.

Summary

PA, a Boere-Rambo, shot to ribbons. He looks a lot older than his 48 years. Diseased, debauched and prone to Dallas and dronkverdriet.

EVIE, his daughter, mid-twenties. There is a brittle quality about her facade of independence. Out of place (as was her English rose of a mother) in a harsh, unforgiving landscape.

JJ, son of Rambo. Heir apparent to the smallholding. A regular 23-year-old stormtrooper – possessing neither the skills nor the intellectual capacity to take on much more than tasks requiring power-saws, power-drills, jackhammers and the like.

GIDEON, a black farmhand, mid-twenties. Very aware of the fact that his father and his father's father worked Sweetfontein long before it was a smallholding.

CHRISTIAAN, a young Afrikaner, late-twenties. High up in the Post Office. Godfearing, and of sober, compassionate habits.

The action takes place on the smallholding Sweetfontein on the outer reaches of the far East Rand. The time is 1989.

Smallholding was first performed at the Standard Bank Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown on 6 July 1989.

A national tour followed, culminating in a highly successful ten-week season at Johannesburg's Market Theatre.

At Grahamstown and on tour, Nicky Rebelo played Christiaan, Paul Slabolepszy, Pa, Sello Maake, Gideon, Martin le Maitre, JJ, and Kate Edwards, Evie. At the Market Theatre, the role of Gideon was played by Louis Sebeko. The production was directed by Bobby Heaney with set design by Nadya Cohen and lighting design by Mannie Manim.

TREKLIEDJIE

Met jou aan my sy

O liefste van my

Dan vrees ek g'n gevaar

Die wildernis in

Om die vryheid te win

Daar word ons drome waar

On 6 May 1987, the National Party (in power since 1948) again won a general election that was characterised by a swing to the right. On the day the results came through, I stumbled upon an untitled poem by Matsemela Manaka:

Let us create and talk about life

Let us not admire the beauty

But peruse the meaning

Let art be life

Let us not eye the form

But read the content

Let creativity be a portrait of one's life …

I immediately set to work on Smallholding.

Paul Slabolepszy

Note on music:

The old Boer folk song ‘Trekliedjie’ was used by Glynn Storm as the basis of the sound track.

Summary

Cast

STIX LETSEBE, a city slick black dude in his mid-to-late twenties. Streetwise, charming-when-he-wants-to-be, but as dangerous as a sharpened bicycle spoke when the chips are down.

HENRY STONE, a white country bumpkin, also in his twenties. Slow and somewhat nerdish, he is out of his depth in Jozi and flat-broke.

The action takes place in a bachelor flat in a rundown Hillbrow (Johannesburg) tower block.

The time is 1993.

Mooi Street Moves was first performed at the Great Hall, Grahamstown Festival Fringe in June 1992, with Seputla Dan Sebogodi as Stix Letsebe and Martin le Maitre as Henry Stone. The production was directed by Paul Slabolepszy (assisted by Lara Foot). This final, full-length version was first performed at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, on 27 January 1993, with the same cast. It was subsequently showcased at the Theatre der Welt festival in Munich in June 1993 and at the Glasgow Mayfest in 1994 with Zane Meas as Stix and Martin le Maitre as Henry Stone. The first American production of the play took place in September 1993 at MetroStage in Alexandria, Virginia. The production was produced and directed by Carolyn Griffin, with Doug Brown as Stix and Jeffrey Yates as Henry.

A large, sparse room. An old mattress lies on the floor. Around the room are pristine cardboard boxes, all shapes and sizes – marked Telefunken, Sanyo, Panasonic, and so on. Milk crates serve as chairs, there are pictures of Orlando Pirates on the walls. If the place resembles a squatter shack, so much the better. On lights up, we find a white man in his late twenties standing room centre. He is wearing an open shirt, slacks and well-worn shoes, and clutching to his breast a large brown paper bag with New York (or some such American logo) on it. Facing him, holding a tin plate of steaming pap, is a black man of the same age, flashily dressed. The black man silently offers the white man the food. There is no response.

STIX: Thata. [Pause.] Take it.

HENRY: It's okay.

STIX: Take it.

HENRY: It's okay.

STIX: For sure, it's okay.

STIX holds out the plate. HENRY clutches his paper-bag-suitcase. There is a pause – a frozen tableau.

Summary

1956–1957

Government ministers are talking of communist plots to poison the water supplies and overthrow the government. We are expecting new arrests, but they have cried ‘wolf’ too often and there is no panic in the movement. The Congress movement is quietly adopting the Freedom Charter as the definitive statement of aims of the whole liberation struggle.

It could be the best of times except for the regular police raids on homes and offices, with the seizure of books, documents and typewriters. Everything seems tranquil, though the seizures go on without any explanation or discernible purpose.

At the end of 1955 the police arrive at our house again in the early morning. We have been raided and searched several times before, but nothing like this. Plain-clothes police study every book on our shelves. They seem unsure about what they are doing and ask each other questions like: ‘Do we want books by Karl Marx?’ They study every piece of paper they can find in files and drawers and pile up suspect items for confiscation. Amid the political matter on the pile there is a children's tale of a horse, Black Beauty, and A Post-War Plan for the City of London.

They are slow readers and slow to decide. As the morning passes I no longer find it funny and grow angry and hostile. At midday they are still working doggedly through the desk and shelves in our livingroom, with the rest of the house to come.

There are books in every room. It is going to be a long siege. If we do not starve them out they will never finish. The family take their meals and afternoon tea in the kitchen. I take mine on my lap, ostentatiously, watching them at work in the livingroom and offering them nothing. By late afternoon they begin to wilt, with two bedrooms, a garage-junk room and outbuildings still unsearched.

They get ready to pack up and go, but I am not ready. I insist on an itemised receipt for everything in the removal pile. It is dark before they have painstakingly written a receipt for over three hundred books, papers, letters, documents and two typewriters and carried it all away.

Summary

Sylvia's wedding was scheduled for 27 and 28 March 1982 and there was no doubt in Andrew's mind that it was going to be a ceremony to remember. African wedding ceremonies are beautiful moments to showcase the people's roots: colourful dresses, ululation, dancing, bragging and whistling as well as food and drink. It is a moment for parents to claim glory for having successfully brought up their children, and a moment for the father to prove to his extended family, friends and members of the community that he is a man among men. It is perhaps a moment in which family members, close and distant, relinquish all their differences to make the occasion memorable not only for the bride and groom, but also for themselves as part of that occasion. In essence, it is the moment for everyone to shine and bask in the glory created by the bride and groom.

Andrew accepted that his absence from family affairs was inevitable. His priority was the freedom of his people. His family, too, respected the course he had taken and chose not to be mere spectators in it, but to be willing participants in the gallery of events that constituted the struggle for the masses. Their participation in the struggle was not merely to support him, but the opportunity for them to assume a responsibility for their country.

June had promised to make the occasion special, not only for Sylvia but for her family as well, vowing to bring together distant friends and relatives. Maureen was heavily pregnant and would be unable to travel from Botswana to the wedding. None of her brothers was going to be there either as they were in exile, and with her father also in jail, the only member of the immediate family was her mother. As Andrew would later put it, June became the mother, father and siblings to Sylvia on that occasion. Her only surviving grandparent, Wilhemina, was expected to miss the event through ill health. Her proxy, Maria Moabelo, June's aunt and sister to Wilhemina, was risking missing the big day too, having to visit her ill sister; June was trying to get a passport for her. Andrew hated the fact that all these challenges lay directly on the already overloaded shoulders of his wife.

Summary

The 2015 academic year seemed to begin on a familiar note as students struggled to find sought-after places at South Africa's top universities. Then a protest broke out in February at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The target was the prominent statue of Cecil John Rhodes (the arch-imperialist of the British Empire) which had occupied a central position in the university for nearly a century. The trigger for the protest was the deep sense of injustice felt by black students by this ‘celebration’ of the symbol of colonial conquest, exploitation and land dispossession. The demand, named ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, rapidly spread across South African universities, culminating in the dramatic removal of the statue. In October a demand for no university fee increases – ‘Fees Must Fall’ – took centre stage. By the end of the year the protest had developed into a broader call for the decolonisation of universities, with the issue of race at the centre of nationwide campus protests (Habib, 2015).

Seized with the challenge of the present, the architects of this new movement, not surprisingly, seemed impatient with the narratives of the past. But we have to grasp ‘the present as history’ (a phrase drawn from The Eye of the Needle by political philosopher and anti-apartheid activist Richard Turner, initially published in 1972). The National Question – the drive to build one united, democratic nation – is a ‘century-long discourse on South Africa's nationhood’ (Mistra, 2014: 49) framed by a number of popular narratives or stories:

Summary

1950–1951

May Day had been celebrated in Johannesburg for as long as I could remember. It was the ‘workers’ day of unity’, celebrated in a uniquely South African way, with rigid black-white separation.

On May Day mornings white trade unionists would parade through the city with union banners and slogan-decorated trucks. In the afternoon they would adjourn with their families to a sports meeting, with beer and speeches, before going home. Then, after working hours, black workers would gather in thousands for their May Day at the Bantu Sports Ground.

The white event was regularly organised by a so-called ‘United May Day Committee’ composed of representatives of all the supporting bodies – mainly white trade unions. For some years I represented the Labour League of Youth on the committee, and then later the Communist Party.

Between summers the committee would hibernate until summoned back to life by its perennial honorary secretary, Cissy Grootewal. If she had a life beyond the committee I heard and saw no sign of it. She would vanish like the cuckoo on a Swiss clock as soon as the day was past and reappear only when the next one was coming close. She was a gaunt, schoolmistressy lady, who nurtured and managed the committee and annual celebrations almost singlehandedly. She was tireless, and meticulous over detail. Without her white May Day would probably have vanished into dust.

My own part on the committee was slightly schizophrenic. For weeks beforehand I would take active part in the design and construction of the decorated motorised ‘floats’ for the parade. There my involvement with the ‘United’ May Day ended and the excitement of the black rally at the Bantu Sports Ground at the bottom of Eloff Street took over.

The starting time was flexible and waited for enough men and women to arrive after a full working day. Singing started in the great open-air stadium while the tiers filled slowly with thousands of people. By the time the master of ceremonies, Gana Makabeni, opened the formalities the sun would be down and the audience in total darkness under an amazing canopy of stars. A flat-bed truck parked in the centre of the arena served as the speakers’ rostrum, with speakers and master of ceremonies spot-lit by the headlights of two cars.

Summary

This book contains ninety-eight longer or shorter texts in which individuals who would later be considered Khoesan gave their opinions on the political, social and ecclesiological events and proposals of largely the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from around 1828 to the 1860s, with outliers in both cases. This, then, is a continuation, or perhaps a reformulation, of work which I have conducted over the years, notably on the Griquas of Philippolis and the Kat River Settlement.

Between them, I hope, these texts, properly understood, provide a window into the experience and understanding of European colonial suppression, which the Khoesan were the first people in Africa to undergo. Their reactions to the circumstances in which they found themselves, and which they attempted to forge to their own advantage, were of course highly specific. The conditions under which the Khoesan had to endure colonial conquest and subjugation were significantly different from those of other South African peoples. Nevertheless, these texts provide a commentary on colonial life which is at once unique in its detail and extent, at least for the period, and which also presented a model for later forms of African nationalism. This was devised, in part, on the basis of precolonial Khoesan ideas of worth and right, and so can form an example for those who still, or again, consider themselves to be of Khoesan descent. At the same time, the importance of the conversations between the Khoesan and the missionaries for the formulation of these texts cannot be overstated.

The backstory

Before the European conquest of South Africa, the south-western parts of the continent were inhabited by people who called themselves Khoekhoe and called those around them San. The distinction between the two was economic and, to some degree, linguistic. Neither group practised agriculture, except for some narcotics, but the Khoekhoe had very considerable herds of sheep and cattle, while the San lived as hunter-gatherers and raiders. The wealth of some Khoekhoe formed the basis for political power, and as a result there were a number of long-lasting political groupings. Nevertheless, that power had to be continually demonstrated, and chiefs could lose their authority with their stock.

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Capital accumulation in South Africa started off as a process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2010: 48–49). War, violence, predation, thievery, criminality, fraud … these were the means by which the indigenous people were dispossessed of their communal lands, and by which the basis to wealth in this country passed into the hands of the capitalists.

South Africa was incorporated into the world economy as an enclave – as a colonial economy established by imperialist class interests primarily for the exploitation of its raw material resources (Mhone, 2001). Our economy was typically characterised by a capital-intensive sector co-existing with a capital-starved traditional economy. Although often described as ‘dual’, they are by no means ‘separate’. The capitalist sector, particularly the gold mining industry, was critically dependent on the traditional economy for the ongoing supply of ‘ultra-cheap, ultra-exploitable’ supplies of labour (Johnstone, 1976). By providing a subsistence base, the traditional economy in effect lowered the minimal acceptable wage threshold of labour (Wallerstein, 2003), thereby ensuring the very existence and sustainability of the capitalist system in this country.

Herein lies the root of our so-called National Question for, historically, class rule in South Africa has been about institutionalising ‘systems of duality’ in our society in order to extend and maintain the conditions of exploitation. It is against this background that divide and rule as a fundamental mechanism of class rule needs to be understood.

Capitalism's interests were served by dividing the nation, by perpetuating a core-periphery duality in society and the economy.

Historically, this has created the conditions of struggle in South Africa. It explains why opposition that was predicated on the principle of ‘one single South African nation’ has had revolutionary implications – why a call for a non-racial democracy was a fundamental threat to the very basis of capital accumulation.

Summary

While the mission record provides some access to African voices, and also to the response of Africans to the Hermannsburgers, it is necessary to venture beyond the mission record to gain a clearer understanding of such voices. Here, autobiographies are a useful source, though of course, such writing is not unmediated. Conventional notions of authorship and the subject are challenged in an account which suggests that a ‘host of people’ are normally involved ‘in the making of autobiographical accounts’. The reasons for collaboration in autobiography are varied. Although such textual collaboration ‘mirror[s] an intimacy in personal relationships’, it is necessary to distinguish between ‘advocatory texts, where the writing author speaks on behalf of the oral narrator’, ‘texts in which the writing author plays a mediating role’ and ‘truly collaborative texts in which the participants are on a comparatively equal footing’. This chapter explores two autobiographies in the light of these considerations. Although these autobiographies are not direct reflections on the transition from mission education to Bantu Education, they nevertheless provide insights into, and a sense of, the experiences of Africans with regard to education by the Hermannsburg Mission. In a context where the formal archival records provide little in the way of such experiences, these autobiographies are very useful. In parts, they provide an interesting contrast with Micah Kgasi's Thutô ke eng?, discussed in Chapter 1, which is only partly autobiographical.

In 1971, a London-based publisher, C. Hurst and Company, published Naboth Mokgatle's Autobiography of an Unknown South African, and in 1986 the Killie Campbell Africana Library together with Natal University Press published Paulina Dlamini: Servant of Two Kings, essentially a book of reminiscences, or a memoir, compiled by Heinrich Filter. Kgasi was born in the late 1870s or early 1880s, in the Western Transvaal. Paulina Dlamini, a contemporary of Kgasi, was born near Babanango in Zululand. S. Bourquin, translator and editor of the reminiscences compiled by Filter, suggests that Dlamini was about 67 years old in 1925; thus, she was probably born around 1858, shortly after the arrival of the Hermannsburgers in Natal. Naboth Mokgatle was born in 1911 on the mission station Saron, at Phokeng, in the district of Rustenburg, half a century after their arrival in the Western Transvaal.

Summary

1939–1940

Though the country was at war, nothing much seemed to change – no blackouts, no air raid sirens, no conscription. Young white males were signing on for full-time service and, in the countryside, young black men too, but only for non-combatant duty as cooks, stretcher-bearers and drivers.

There were no calls for full-time service of the Citizen Force part-timers, no gas masks, no food rationing. In Johannesburg a white hooligan mob set out on an alcohol-assisted round of ‘patriotic’ mayhem, setting German cars alight in the streets, beating up German civilians and trashing the German Club. Outside the city a retaliatory spate of random assaults on lone soldiers started. A mob of soldiers from the Potchefstroom camp replied in kind by smashing National Party premises. For a short while it seemed that Lenin's idea of turning imperialist into civil war was coming into its own. But the frenzy passed.

Unthinking mob violence gave way to organised violence by secretive armed pro-Nazi groups, one of them led by an ex-prizefighter, Robey Leibbrandt, who had been trained in Nazi Germany and been returned to South Africa by German submarine.

In parallel with the clandestine groups, a quasi-military organisation was organising and drilling militant white republicans. Calling itself the Ossewa Brandwag (OB) and playing on nostalgia for the Boer Republic commandos, it was rejecting parliamentary politics and preparing for a quasi-military confrontation. The Smuts government showed little sign of concern. It appeared to accept that the OB, for all its militarist bluster, was nevertheless part of a fundamental consensus that political power was to remain a white preserve.

Only the Communist Party stood outside that consensus. The black majority, still mainly rural, lacked an organised voice strong enough to influence the course of politics. That too was changing. War was bringing rapid industrial expansion, drawing armies of rural men and women to work in the cities, especially to the Vaal Triangle. In Johannesburg the black population was growing inexorably into a majority. Once impotent and barely visible organisations were growing in confidence. Trade unionism was spreading, as was a new sense of national identity. Urban blacks were starting to flex their muscles and to make their demands with a new-found militancy.

Summary

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Many of the unions that came together in 1985 to form Cosatu built their power by means of democratic worker organisation (Maree 1986). The form the democracy took was by means of elected leaders who were accountable to their members. This was particularly the case at the level of the workplace, where workers elected shop stewards regularly and the shop stewards held frequent meetings with their members. The shop stewards were given mandates by their members on issues they had to take up with management, and they had to report back on the outcomes of their negotiations with management.

But this did not happen only at the level of the workplace. It was also happening at higher levels of organisation in the unions. When the Western Province General Workers’ Unions (later the General Workers’ Union) was established in 1978, it was structured in such a way that there was workers’ control of the union. The constitution laid down that a controlling committee, consisting of two elected representatives from each of the organised workplaces, took all the major policy decisions in the union. Officials in the union, including the general secretary, then had to implement policies decided by the controlling committee (Maree 1989: 134–135).

It also happened at the federal level of unions. The Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council (TUACC) was the forerunner of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in KwaZulu-Natal. Elected representatives from the unions on the executive council of TUACC were expected to represent the interests of their union members and to report back to their unions. The reasoning behind this was very well explained by Alec Erwin, who was the first general secretary of Fosatu. In an interview in 1979 about the challenge of building democracy in the unions, he said:

We'd say you must have resilient structures that can hold people accountable in a real sense. We must establish more definite structures of accountability. So what we were trying to build in TUACC, and are presently trying to achieve in Fosatu, is that the democratic structure must be through a process of the factory controlling the shop steward because that man the worker sees every day in the plant, his access to him is far greater. […]

Summary

Apotropaic magic

The problem of witches and witchcraft has been central to anthropology throughout the twentieth century. The anthropological literature is not about whether witches exist but rather about how to account for their purported existence: a cultural question of belief rather than an ontological question of under what conditions their existence can be taken for granted. These are simply the wrong questions. According to bungoma philosophy, witchcraft, like the healer's craft, is predicated on interpersonal exposure to the ‘power’ or ‘shadow/presence’ (isithunzi) of others (see Werbner 2015: 2–3 on the similar concept of seriti in Sesotho/Setswana). Witchcraft derives from a radical theory of the person as inherently infectious and vulnerable. Person-like agents cause illness, but not all agents of this sort are human, and not all are tangible; thus, their agency cannot be given a ‘social causation’ account in all cases.

From the perspective of the sangoma's patient, if not from that of most contemporary social theory, witches are person-like agents, either tangible or intangible. They are not mere ‘representations’ of what could be interpreted as imagined harm triggered by social distress. To be vulnerable to witchcraft, however, one must understand oneself as an ‘exposed being’, exposed to a range of influences that can damage health or prevent ‘good luck’. These influences include other tangible persons, some of whom may be ‘witches’, but also other intangible persons such as ‘ancestors’ and ‘spirits’. The fundamental premise of healing in the southern African healer's paradigm is that if patients/clients can be given protection through apotropaic magics their ‘natural’ health and luck will be able to continue. The ‘exposed being’ – an existential condition of personhood as ‘patient’ rather than ‘agent’ – is vulnerable unless protected from illness, witchcraft and misfortune. In terms of this concept all persons are assumed to be well unless protection fails.

This approach helps us to understand the pragmatic efficacy of logically incompatible medical beliefs in conditions of medical parallelism.

Summary

Paul Slabolepszy is the cartographer of the white male soul facing the abyss. Better than any other South African playwright, he has depicted the dreams, hopes and insecurities, and violences of white male South Africans through the doom-laden days of apartheid's decline. Many of his plays are images of that decline: they convey uniquely the atmosphere of paralysis and paranoia of that time. More recently, in plays like Mooi Street Moves, The Return of Elvis du Pisanie and Pale Natives (1994, not included in this collection), Slabolepszy has depicted the effects of social and political change, his theatre shifting from a social to a psychological focus and, in the process, maturing.

If, as Dan Jacobson said, quoting Olive Schreiner, white South Africans are ‘lower-middle- class philistines’, in Slabolepszy's hands they tend to be depicted as ‘lower-middle- class nihilists’. The Schreiner observation is useful, if only in indicating that the preoccupations of two writers with extensive allegiances to England are not the preoccupations of a Slabolepszy. Slabolepszy is one of a generation of post-colonial writers.

The cumulative effects of time, as well as political and cultural isolation, have made the class and cultural labels which Schreiner used and Jacobson approved seem an historical curiosity, useful only in suggesting the distance between Slabolepszy's world and that of his predecessors.

In Slabolepszy's world, ‘overseas’ is as remote and insubstantial as a TV sitcom, which in fact forms the images of what used to be called in South Africa ‘the outside world’. In Saturday Night at the Palace (1982, not included in this collection), Forsie, who has never been to the sea, insists confidently that ‘everyone knows Jo'burg’. He and Vince imagine overseas as Hollywood.

Throughout Slabolepszy's plays, references to the TV series, Dallas, occur: this, rather than the humane literacy of Bloomsbury, is the characters’ reference point. To Slabolepszy, the implied comparisons which Jacobson and Schreiner make – between here and there, local and foreign, colony and parent country, province and metropolis, along with the class consciousness – are irrelevant. They are not part of his landscape yet Slabolepszy is aware of both the comedy and the pathos in the cultural references of his characters.

The Slabolepszy landscape should be described. Like others of his generation, most of Slabolepszy's life was spent under Nationalist Party rule.

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