Thamyris/Intersecting No. 19 (2008) 119–138

Antigone on the African Stage: “Wherever the Call for Freedom is Heard!”

Astrid Van Weyenberg

Rejoice with us Rejoice heartily with us The tyrant Who gives wicked orders We have conquered him! Oh yes, we have beaten him. We have seen his back! Fémi Òsófisan, Tègònni

The popularity of Sophocles’ Antigone in Western literature, art, and thought has been discussed at length, most famously by George Steiner who classifies it as “one of the most enduring and canonic acts in the history of our philosophic, literary, polit- ical consciousness” (preface). However, Antigone’s popularity is no longer restricted to the West. The tragedy is particularly striking on the African stage, where different playwrights have adapted the text to a variety of settings.1 This paper will discuss two of these plays: Athol Fugard’s The Island (1973) and Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: An African Antigone (1994). After examining Antigone’s representative value within her new surroundings and the (meta)theatrical aesthetics that characterize her cultural migration, my final focus will be on the political implications of Antigone’s transloca- tion for her status as a Western canonical figure.

Antigone’s Migration Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explains that Sophocles’ Antigone “can be adapted into any situation in which a group is oppressed, or in which, in the aftermath of struggle, the

Antigone on the African Stage: “Wherever the Call for Freedom is Heard!” | 119 forces of community and social order come into conflict with the forces of personal liberty” (Athenian 170–71). Athol Fugard’s The Island and Fémi Òsófisan’s Tègònni: An African Antigone both fit this description. Fugard’s play is about two prisoners of apartheid, who are locked away on Robben Island and together try to maintain their humanity in the face of continuous physical and mental cruelty. Òsófisan’s play is set in Nigeria under British colonial rule, while also referring to the military dictatorships that have held Nigeria in its grip almost incessantly since its independence from Britain in 1960.2 Both playwrights dramatize moments of severe oppression, and both employ Antigone as a representative of the struggle against this oppression. Their motivations for migrating Antigone to Africa are primarily political. The Island premiered on July 2, 1973, in a small Cape Town club. It was the result of a collaborative project by playwright Athol Fugard (of white English and Afrikaner descent) and two young amateur black actors, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, undertaken in a time when apartheid’s segregation laws forbade such collaboration between whites and blacks. As precautions against government intervention, the per- formance lacked a script and was presented under an alternative title, Die Hodoshe Span (‘The Hodoshe work- team’), chosen because the intended “The Island” would have referred to Robben Island too explicitly. Those familiar with its connotation nonetheless recognized the implicit reference to Robben Island, as ‘Hodoshe’ (Xhosa for ‘carrion fly’) was the nickname of an infamous prison warden there (Fugard xxix). Surprisingly, the South African authorities allowed Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona to take the production to London only five months after its premiere, which suggests that neither the powerful anti-apartheid message it promoted, nor the effect it could have on international opinion was fully recognized. Whereas the Cape Town perform- ance was closely supervised by the police, concealed its criticism of apartheid and reached only a limited audience, the London performance was accompanied by play- bills with details about apartheid and loudly called for the release of South Africa’s political prisoners. Only after its production abroad did it become possible to perform the play more publicly in South Africa and to have it transformed into a written text under the name The Island (Blumberg and Walder 105–6). The Island is one of Fugard’s five Township Plays, which were produced between 1958 and 1973, and reveal, as Dennis Walder states, a “uniquely fruitful and influen- tial instance of creative interaction between urban black modes of expression and ‘out- side’ or Western cultural modes; an interaction which took place despite the divisive pressures of the apartheid state” (Fugard xi).3 Though the play demonstrates Fugard’s acknowledgement of the existence and suffering of those who were excluded from the dominant discourses, political dramatist Robert Kavanagh Mshengu finds fault with him for not using traditional African forms. He considers this to be not a mere “tragic result” of the South African situation, but evidence of a conscious lack of involvement with the struggle of the oppressed majority. In his opinion, “Kani and Ntshona’s real knowledge

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