Posted on May 7, 2012
Anthony Akerman's recently revived play Somewhere on the Border enters into an increasing set of emerging narratives and discussions regarding the South African/Angolan Border War. It stands as the first break in the recent generic trend of veteran narratives which have been predominantly biographical or autobiographical in nature, and largely depicting the experiences of South African Defence Force soldiers who participated in the war. What is different about this kind of narrative as it appears in theatre is that, by the nature of performance, this play has emerged as a platform for public, collective observation and discussion by a live audience.
I spoke to Ndinomolo Ndilula, who plays the Black Actor in the play, on 13 March 2012 about growing up in Namibia hearing stories of the liberation war and how he has drawn on those stories to create his characters in the play. His experiences contrast sharply with what little discussion there is of the details of the liberation war in South Africa, especially on the side of those who were conscripted into the South African Defence Force.
One of the things Ndilulo expressed was his surprise, during the initial production phases of discussion and research, at how little knowledge his fellow white cast members had of the experiences of the white conscripts involved in the Border War, especially as many of the actors are, like himself, part of the generation born to veteran fathers: "It's strange because even in rehearsal, I could feel how difficult it was for them to try and get into it [...] I'd grown up with stories told with pride. About how we overcame." Ndilulo's colleagues all asserted that there had been a significant silence around the experiences of the SADF conscripts, even among those they knew or were related to, and this meant doing considerable amounts of research for their roles. Part of this involved reading the autobiographies and biographies to get a clearer picture of "what things were like back then", and speaking to their fathers and uncles for the first time ever about the war. In contrast, 24-year old Ndilulo asserts, "I have 24 years worth of stories."
Ndilulo, raised in Namibia, partly in a township with his mother and stepfather, and partly in a suburb with his father, relates how the stories about the historical period of the Border War are common place and integrated into daily life, "the father's would always tell you a story about when they were in the struggle… even in mid conversation it would be like, 'You know what? We were in the struggle!' He expresses easily the familiar stories about various events occurring in the lives of his parents. He remembers a story told to him about how the first time what he thinks was a South African police helicopter came to the homestead looking for his uncle, and no one had ever seen this "creature" before, and people had hidden in the millet stores. He remembers the story of how his mother had run away to join the resistance movement at the age of fourteen:
My mother for example was gone for 16 years. And she had wanted to go say goodbye to her parents just before, but they thought it might raise suspicion. The school teacher had heard about how everything works, how to get over to Zambia where the SWAPO base was and he spoke to the whole class about it. That was a Monday. She has exact dates. That was Monday and she went home and she thought about it. She had wanted to do it but she wasn't sure, so she spoke to a friend of hers and they decided they should do it. So they went, they decided to go that same day. So she went back home, put on whatever clothes she could to make sure that she could get away but still look reasonable. She took her only pair of shoes and they left. They left. At fourteen [...] The next day, the Tuesday when they went back to school, the teacher was no longer there. He had gone, and the principal came in and said he was ill. But she says that she's pretty sure someone had spoken to somebody and someone had gone to the police. Because he's recruiting people to go to the war. Recruiting children to go over, you know, so he had disappeared.
His stories also express an overall understanding and awareness of the consciousness of the time and the reasons behind the actions of his parents. This is something which he says comes to him through the stories he was told and through the observation of his parents, and the ways in which this consciousness continues to live on in them now. He says:
It was like breathing. It was a desperate need to be free. Just looking at both my parents. There was no other way to live. You could not live this way [...] SWAPO which was the political party, the resistance party at the time, was I think also a sort of mythical place, as opposed to just an organisation, where they wanted the same things you wanted, and what they wanted was freedom, you know? So you could go there, go there and there you would also find other people who wanted what you wanted [...]There were a lot of people who went through the exact same things as my parents for example and didn't make anything of themselves. My parents carried - way past independence - they carried that sense of freedom with them.
These are the stories, the history, and consciousness of the time, from which Ndilulo draws in order to construct his characters. And it is this which he feels is an indication of the difference between himself and his fellow cast members; he has been told the stories. The telling of stories is something he feels is important, especially in a South African context where "there's something about the idea of "Rainbow Nation" that is actually quite silencing I believe. People were just told to be happy. As a foreigner, that's that what it seems like to me. So there's still a lot of friction." This is something which he feels the stories can contribute towards alleviating.
Ndilulo sees the play and narratives like it as a "process of mediation". The coexistence of multiple realities can be facilitated through an ability to find a common middle ground, where old identities can be maintained, but new identities can be simultaneously fostered. He says that what is required is a sense of movement, an ability to fluidly move between past and present, a process of "continual circulation, this idea of going back and forth between spaces. Between the history, one's history and one's present - the way we live now. And what is that space in between there? Where do you go through? What happens in between? What is the negotiation that needs to take place?" He feels that this is something he has experienced among black people but not white, "My friend Tsepi would always wear her headdress. Some people didn't understand that, that was her way of sort of negotiating the past and present. A process of mediation [...] And then when I got some of the white kids and I'd ask them you know do you move? A lot of them say no, no one wanted to go back. No one wanted to engage with that. Especially in Pretoria with Afrikaans, some of their parents were too ashamed to speak about it, or didn't want to or felt that they had lost the war, there was this sort of stigma to being a boer or Afrikaans and I found that quite interesting."
As such, the play Somewhere on the Border functions as a performative instance of history in the present. It is also an offering of multiple versions of history in one moment, registering as discomfort or anxiety within the audience, and the actors themselves, symptomatic of the sense of new, often contradictory yet coexisting insights on the versions of history each one of us thinks we know. The ways in which these histories coexist, intersect, and yet are simultaneously mutually exclusive and contradictory, highlight an interesting potential in a South African context for the understanding of the past and the ways in which it shapes and is negotiated the present.
Ndilulo's final comment on the willingness to "move" resonates: "It's a strange situation for a lot of young people to figure out who they are and how they come to be who they are. And then to see the show, to understand that we are all people we are all equal. To have the history, and then to see the show and still be willing to allow themselves to go beyond the history go beyond the construction of "˜My Self' and to get to the sense that these are just people who were taken from their homes, brought to this situation made to kill other people. That's why I do the show. Is to do that sort of experiment." It is not clear, nor important, to which history he was referring.
Nicola Lazenby is a post-graduate student at the University of Cape Town.
