The Theatre of Post-Apartheid Society in South Africa

177

RUSSELL WEST -PAVLOV , Pretoria and Tübingen The Theatre of Post-Apartheid Society in South Africa: Reading Ubu and the Truth Commission after the TRC The disabused narrator of Johannesburg author Ivan Vladislavi ć's Double Negative (2011) recounts an odd moment of déjà vu that takes him back to the mid-1990s in the early days after the abolition of apartheid. He sees his former boss, the Afrikaner spray-painter cum signwriter Jaco, on TV selling expensive cookware: "Back in the nineties, when the TRC hearings were on television, I'd watched as much as I could stand […] Among the perpetrators, a long line of men whose memories were as badly made as their suits, I'd always expected to see someone I knew, someone like Jaco" (Vladislavi ć 2011, 183). The expected recognition does not take place. Instead, in a farcical repetition of the past, the famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been recycled in the form of consumer kitsch: "And here [Jaco] was, ten years too late, giving truthful testimony on the Paragon range of non-stick cookware" (ibid.). 1 Vladislavi ć's satirical jibe is not aimed so much at the reconciliatory idealism which underpinned the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), though this sustained much biting critique (see Charlton 2011, 114), nor its role in making public the gruesome human rights abuses perpetrated mainly by the police and security forces (see Truth And Reconciliation Commission of South Africa 2003) during the final decade of apartheid. (This a period where Vladislavi ć's protagonist is overseas in the UK, whence his even greater need to "plug the gaps in [his] knowledge" (Vladislavi ć 2011, 183)). Rather Vladislavi ć targets the way, during the intervening period, the world-famous memorial work carried out by the TRC in its monumental and historically unprecedented achievement has since then been obscured by the amnesiac forces of neoliberal consumerism and a culture of trivia. In this article I read one of the performance artworks which accompanied and responded to the work of the TRC, Jane Taylor and William Kentridge's 1997 play Ubu and the Truth Commission (Taylor 1998), for the ways in which it archives some of the impact of the Commission at a moment when it was still carrying out its investig-ations, but also for the manner in which it can equally be read as presciently sensing the cultural pressures which, over the coming two decades, have contributed to obscuring the erstwhile work of the TRC. I suggest that we need to read a play such as Ubu and the Truth Commission today with a double focus: on the one hand, in relation to its 1990s context, for the critical commentary it obliquely offered on many aspects of the TRC as it investigated human rights violations of the apartheid era; and on the other, for early indices of the neoliberal social order which, by the time the Commission published its report, had effectively stymied most of the egalitarian and reconciliatory goals which had guided its establishment, and continues to be the cultural dominant of South African society today. For if, as its title suggests, Ubu and the Truth Commission looks back to Alfred Jarry's absurdist theatre of the previous century, conversely, the play can be read today

1 Significantly, Vladislavi ć has recorded his reluctance to write too directly about the TRC, in an

interview with Christopher Warnes (Warnes 2011, 106).

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 25.1 (March 2014): 177-194.

as looking forward to the new South Africa of the incipient 21 st century where it has become increasingly clear that few of the promises of liberation have been kept: We smile, we laugh […] we celebrate our supposed Rainbow Nation status, but beneath the surface we remain a divided people. […] Has it all been a mirage, a figment of the imagination of an iconic archbishop [Tutu] or the unrealised ambition of an even more iconic statesman [Mandela]? Have we stood still or gone backwards since May 1994 […] ? (Makhanya 2009, 15) This article argues for a 'contrapuntal' reading of the possible contexts in which the play might have been performed, those of its mid-1990s stagings and those of its contemporary readings as a play-script, claiming that the various preoccupations of Ubu and the Truth Commission allow it to speak to both in multiply intertwined ways. It acknowledges "the critic's situatedness in the present, the social present from which we look, and look back, at the objects that are always already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture" and it "seeks to understand the past as part of the present, as what we have around us, and without which no culture would be able to exist" (Bal 1999, 1; original emphasis). Acknowledging the past in the present, it thus seeks to counteract the amnesia which infuses that same present.

The TRC and Art Winter Journals Taylor and Kentridge's Ubu and the Truth Commission was remarkable because it was one of the more experimental art works to explore the complications and convolutions of the TRC. The Taylor and Kentridge production was truly a late-modern exemplar of the Gesamtkunstwerk . The play appropriated images and echoes of Jarry's scatological classic Ubu Roi , and used puppets alongside human actors, as well as

for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution projected animations and film excerpts on to a back-stage screen, to create a grotesque, at times burlesque framework for modern concerns. Through that intertextual and multimedia framework, the production refracted multilingual extracts from victims' testimonies at the TRC hearings, at a time when the Commission's task of

providing an accurate picture of the 1980s and early-1990s abusesPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) was still in full swing. As a large number of commentators and critics very rapidly pointed out, the task of the TRC – to give a public platform to the accounts of victims of the gross human rights violations of the apartheid era, as well as offering amnesty to perpetrators of abuses in exchange for a full account of their actions – was riddled with contradictions and surrounded by controversy. Its brief of achieving national reconciliation by a public rendering of the truth of the apartheid era was overshadowed by debates about the danger of victims' traumas being exacerbated rather than exorcised by the act of their narration, about the problematic veracity of many accounts given during its hearings, about the exclusive emphasis upon gross violations of human rights, about the relative weight accorded to victim and perpetrator testimonies, later about delays in material reparation for victims, and finally about the efficacy of "truth" as a means to "national reconciliation" (Gibson 2006). Not only these controversies, but the central topic of the relationship between trauma and narrative of course sparked a series of artistic interventions. A number of literary works, most famously Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), but also a number of other novels such as Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit (2001), Gillian Slovo's Red Dust (2000), or Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2001) and Playing in the Light (2007), as well as Antjie Krog's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional memoir Country of My Skull (2002), responded to

the TRC in multifarious ways. Poets such as Ingrid Kok in her collection Terrestrial Things (2002) also engaged with the Commission. A number of films, some of them based on literary works, such as Red Dust (2004), directed by Tom Hooper, or In My Country (2004), directed by John Boorman (based on Krog's memoir), attempted to make more accessible contributions to the debates around the TRC, as did For- giveness (2004), directed by Ian Gabriel. ( Disgrace was filmed much later, in 2008, by an Australian team, and thus was much further, both temporally and geographical- ly, from the debates of the 1990s; but by the same token it may undertake the same sort of recontextualization that I ascribe here to Taylor and Kentridge's Ubu play). The TRC was notable for the fact that it was the first of such inquiries dealing with human rights violations in post-authoritarian contexts to hold its hearings in public places such as schools, churches, and municipal halls, and to broadcast its hearings publicly on TV and radio. As Hayner remarks, [t]he South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission succeeded in bringing this subject to the center of international attention, especially through its public hearings of both victims and perpetrators outlining horrific details of past crimes. Although quite a few of such truth commissions existed prior to the South African body, most did not hold hearings in public. (Hayner 2001, 5) Similar inquiries, for instance in South America, have been held in camera . From the outset, then, the TRC's nationally and internationally visible character as spectacle and performance could not be overlooked, as it "embraced performance as a central fea- ture of its operations" (Cole 2007, 167). 2 Commentators around the world explicitly identified the "theatrical" aspect of the TRC (Posel 2004). Unsurprisingly, then, theatre was one of the most prominent modes in which South African artists chose to couch their interventions into the TRC process, thereby inher- ently responding to the spectacle quality of the Commission's hearings. Ubu and the Truth Commission 's director William Kentridge wrote at the time in his "Director's Note," "The Commission itself is theatre, or at any rate a kind of ur-theatre" (Taylor 1998, viii), and the production was one of many to integrate such resonances into its own fabric. Several such productions were directly contemporaneous with Taylor's and Kentridge's Ubu and the Truth Commission : Duma Khumalo's 1997 play The Story I am About To Tell , in which three former victims retold their TRC stories on the stage (Graham, S., 2009, 34-39), and Paul Herzberg's play of the same year, The Dead Wait (2002) which spoke about the TRC indirectly through a narrative about South African military participation in the war in Angola, played at Johannesburg's Market Theatre. Other later productions continued to explore the TRC: Khumalo embarked on a later collaboration with Yael Farber resulting in the 2002 piece He Left Quietly (Graham S. 2009, 34-39; see also Farber n.d.); Truth in Translation , created and produced by Michael Lessac in 2006 (see Truth in Translation Project, n.d.), focussed on the interpreters at the Commission's hearings.

Ubu and the Truth Commission : Theatre vs. Drama, Performance vs. Script, Then vs. Now Jane Taylor and William Kentridge's Ubu and the Truth Commission , undoubtedly the best known of these productions, played at the Market Theatre in 1997. Since its ini-

2 Several scholarly publications have now explored the performance aspects of the TRC; see e.g. Cole

(2010) and Goodman (2009).

tial stagings, it has attained something of a canonical status (Gready 2009, 163), partly through its "experimental syncretic form" (Kruger 2012, 122; original emphasis), which was perhaps better suited than other plays to refract some of the problematic issues around trauma and narrative representation raised by the TRC hearings. Its prominent status has also been cemented by the fact that directly subsequent to the play's fairly brief run in South Africa and abroad, the script appeared in published form. The South African premiere at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, in May 1997, and world premiere at the Kunstfest in Weimar in June 1997, were followed by other performances in Munich and Hannover, and by a North American tour in September 1998, with short performance runs at UCLA Los Angeles, and the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. The play's performance runs were short in contrast, for instance, to those of The Story I Am About To Tell , which ran for five years. Interestingly, though, the eponymous Ubu figure featured in Kentridge's almost contemporaneous film Ubu tells the Truth (1997), and his later multimedial work Shadow Procession (2001) (Duncan 2011, 56; Auslander 2003, 622). 3 Ubu and the Truth Commission 's permanence as a cultural artefact is thus somewhat different to that of other theatrical works which responded to the TRC. Though theatre may be "closer to life as men [sic] actually live it than any other form of artistic expression," as one of the founding pioneers of modern African drama, Joe de Graft, claimed (de Graft 1976, 3), or perhaps indeed precisely for that reason, theatre is by definition dogged by potential ephemerality. It is the publication of the script that, though redu- cing theatre to the impoverished genre of drama, in which only stage directions and stills may give some indication of the dynamism of the live performance (Elam 1980, 2), which guarantees its permanence over time. The play's publication by the University of Cape Town Press in 1998, with intro- ductions by Jane Taylor as script writer, William Kentridge as producer/director, and Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler as the participating puppeteers, along with a rich selec- tion of illustrations, has meant that Ubu and the Truth Commission , though having only a short-lived performance history which ended as it began its textual 'afterlife,' continues to resonate as a cultural artefact in a way which makes it possible to read the play, two decades after the abolition of state-sponsored apartheid, not only as a tribute to the work of the TRC, but also as a thoroughly contemporary text. The 'double exposure' of the play that I am seeking to instantiate in this exposé thus aims to do justice both to the work of art's "inherited status" and to recognize its contemporary "agency […] within society" (Bal 1996, 17). For, as Gadamer says, "all encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event " (Gadamer 2004, 85; original emphasis; cf. Gadamer 1965, 94). Thus, though theatre is a marginal cultural form in South Africa (Krueger 2003, 64-65), where literature in general is consumed by a very small sector of the population, this theatrical work retains a considerable status as one of the aesthetically most ambitious attempts to approach the vexed moral and representational issues thrown up by the TRC. Its 'afterlife' as a quasi-literary text perpetuates and cements, albeit in a different generic guise, that standing. This ongoing status makes it worth asking the question: What does it mean to read a text of this sort a decade after the tabling of the final report of the TRC, at a moment when the apartheid era has already begun to fade into the past for the majority of South Africans today?

3 Kentridge performed himself in a production of Ubu Rex in the mid-1970s; see Kentridge (2005, 38).

The play alternates episodes focusing on Pa and Ma Ubu, the apartheid era power- monger and nocturnal interrogator-torturer and his canny wife, with extracts from TRC witnesses' testimonies attributed to mute victim-puppet figures, and spoken in Zulu or isiXhosa and translated into English by the puppeteers. Thus a witness testimony, reporting on police violence towards township demonstrators in Queenstown (Taylor 1998, II.2) is followed by Pa Ubu hearing about the TRC and the possibility of the commission offering amnesty to perpetrators willing to give an account of their actions: "these brilliant mathemunitions […] can beyond all ambiguity indicate when a vile act had a political purpose. […] Then they can and must absolve. The righteous have to forgive the unrighteous. […] But a full disclosure is what they demand" (Tay- lor 1998, 17; II.2). Similarly, II.7 has a witness puppet recounting police mutilation of children whose eyes have been gouged out and skulls partly removed; in the following scene (II.8), Pa Ubu attempts to destroy evidence of his acts of torture by feeding papers, films and tapes to his accomplice Niles the crocodile. Pa Ubu himself gives evidence about torture methods ("tubing") and brutal killings to the TRC (II.3), alternating with another testimony about the killing of a child (IV.2). IV.4 contains further testimonies about beatings and genital electrocutions, while IV.5, and V.1 and V.2 show Pa Ubu successfully having his henchmen the politician, the general, and the foot-soldier/security-policeman (embodied by the three-headed dog-puppet Brutus) prosecuted and then done away with to prevent them from giving evidence in the amnesty procedures. This partial synopsis of the play's alternating action lays bare a number of central structural contrasts which are already in the play's binary title, Ubu vs. the Truth Commission: the oscillations between brief extracts from the victims' testimonies at the TRC detailing gruesome violence and torture, and Pa Ubu's grotesque, at times burlesque performance as an apartheid power-broker and criminal seeking to cover his tracks under the new dispensation; the contrast between the human actors Pa and Ma Ubu, and the victims and henchmen puppets (human and animal figures respectively) whose duo of puppeteers remain visible at all times; and finally, the specific reports of violence and torture carried out during the apartheid era, and keyed into that era by the spine-chilling details of abuse, as opposed to the anti-realist tenor of the machinations of Pa Ubu which, as I show below, are susceptible of a much broader reading spilling over into the contemporary context. While the victims' testimonies in their verbal textual content stay closely associated with the apartheid period itself, despite the defamiliarizing effect of the puppetry, the elements associated with Pa Ubu, I claim, tend to cut themselves loose from the specific context of apartheid and its immediate aftermath, resonating rather, in quite uncanny ways, with the subsequent history of South Africa.

Ubu and the Truth Commission and the TRC Accordingly, my argument bifurcates at this juncture. In what follows I ask two questions in succession: first, how did Ubu and the Truth Commission speak to the immediate context of the TRC in the mid-to-late 1990s? And second, how does Ubu and the Truth Commission , in its continued 'afterlife' as a significant cultural artefact, speak to South Africa today? First, the play, through its usage of avant-garde theatrical techniques, was able to address central issues of trauma and narrative in the process of 'working through' that the TRC, in its original brief, saw as part of a project of national reconciliation. The

implementation of puppets alongside human actors, in particular, facilitated a complex representation of traumatic memory which eluded, for instance, the banalization of witnesses' narratives which set in via the rehearsal and repetition of victims' trauma accounts in Khumalo's The Story I Am About To Tell . The narratives related in this latter play were authentic to the extent that they were relayed by non-actors who had experienced directly the horrors they recounted. But the act of retelling as rehearsed and memorized lines a "frozen" version of what they had "spontaneously" recounted at the TRC paradoxically deprived their narratives of "authenticity" (Graham, S. 2009, 43-49). Eschewing any commitment to 'authenticity,' by contrast, Taylor and Kentridge opted for an explicitly defamiliarizing medium through which to present narratives of traumatic suffering, drawing upon Handspring Puppet Company's "own experiments in non-naturalistic idioms;" as Kentridge notes "[t]he puppet draws attention to its own artifice" (Kentridge, "Director's Note" in Taylor 1998, vii). Likewise, their refusal to domesticate the trauma narrative to the self-mastery of an apparently sovereign subject-'actor,' was mediated through the 'splitting' of the victim roles into a non-figurative but life-size puppet and two visible puppeteers manipulating the puppets. The puppeteers were responsible for the victim's lines, dividing the Zulu original and the English translation between them: "Ba ne se utlwisa bonn jwa me botlhoko ka motlakase. / They electrocuted my private parts" (Taylor 1998, 55; IV.4). Through this disjunction among the various elements of the victim roles, the play was able to performatively figure the utter dislocation wreaked upon African subjects by torture and violence. By the same token, however, its performance could display not only the loss of agency of those whom torture had reduced to 'bare life;' it also gestured towards the restoration of agency effected, in many cases, by the opportunity to construct a publicly mandated and welcomed narrative of experiences which had until then remained unutterable. Indeed, Kentridge appears to be particularly interested in the performative mode itself, in its difference from language, perhaps as a result of his early training in mime in Paris (Godby 1999, 76). This disjunction of performance and language, ostended by the separation of puppets and speakers, may provide a clue to the manner in which, at the TRC itself, according to Catherine Cole, "the performative dimensions of public hearings" enabled witnesses "to express the inexpressible and to humanize people's experiences of extreme dehumanization" (Cole 2010, 17). Finally, the processes of translation which were crucial to the workings of the TRC within the framework of the nation's eleven official languages were thus given a place within the performance, jolting out of it any sense of complacency about English as its own particular high-culture, minority middle-class idiom which might have emerged from the play (Sanders 2007, 18-21). As Taylor noted, summarizing these issues, "[p]uppets also declare that they are being 'spoken through.' They thus very poignantly and compellingly capture the complex relations of testimony, translation and docu- mentation apparent in the processes of the Commission itself" (Taylor 1998, vii). Turning from the victims to the perpetrators, the play's mix of grotesque and burlesque allowed it to launch a highly satirical attack on the documented reluctance of perpetrators and power-holders in the apartheid era to admit responsibility for their actions (the Dutch Reformed Churches refused to cooperate with the Commission, as did the former Prime Minister P.W. Botha). The play satirizes the torturers' cynical calculation of their own advantage: the three-headed Brutus appeals for amnesty in order to avoid prosecution for human rights crimes (Taylor 1998, 63; V.1), also claim-

ing "extenuation from post-traumatic stress disorder" (Taylor 1998, 61; IV.5). All these aspects of the drama made up its overall achievement of illuminating the workings of the TRC and contributing unusual perceptions about the complex and problematic nature of witnessing to trauma. Shane Graham has claimed that the TRC, "ostensibly a mechanism for registering and preserving a record of the past [...] might instead," through its production of a massive documentary archive now relatively inaccessible to the public and a number of selective and distorting sound- or image- bites purveyed to and by the media ultimately meant that the Commission "serve[d] as a mechanism for obscuring and forgetting [the past]" (Graham S. 2009, 30-31). If this is true, and there are reasons to suggest that this is indeed the case, then the play, if only in published script form, can potentially resist the creeping amnesia which increasingly threatens the erstwhile memorial endeavours of the TRC.

Contrapuntal Reading The second question I wish to address cannot, strictly speaking, be divorced from the first, as the ubiquitous forms of subtle historical amnesia inculcated by contemporary culture (as much through as in spite of its persistent musealization of the past) are part of the insidious phenomena that a "presentist" reading, one oriented towards the today's context, would need to confront (cf. Hawkes 2002; Grady and Hawkes 2006). Similarly, the two contexts, that of the original productions, and those of their contemporary reception, cannot be entirely disentangled from one another. In accord with the paradox sketched by Derrida, it is precisely the fixity of the textual artefact which allows it to retain its identity from one context to another, its "iteration" in ever new frames of reception; yet at the same time, that fixity allows its implementation or reception in the various contexts which, paradoxically, in turn mean that its meaning as constructed by the spectator, and later the play-script-reader, will be each and every time slightly different (Derrida 1972, 378). This principle, obviously more valid for some aspects of Ubu and the Truth Com- mission than for others, was inherent in the TRC's work from the outset. The TRC itself tended to generate unexpected results which meant it took on responsibilities exceeding its original brief, such as the exhumation of victims' remains on behalf of relatives. It was the language of testimony itself, according to Sanders, which acted as "a switch for directing the legal proceedings [of the commission] towards goals not anticipated" (Sanders 2007, 4; 9-11) – towards unknown futures which revealed un- suspected means of dealing with the past. Similar principles underlay the theatrical production of Ubu and the Truth Commission in its response to the TRC hearings. In his prefatory "Director's Note," Kentridge documents the aleatory and contingent manner in which the play emerged out of the collaboration between Taylor, himself and the Handspring Puppet Company (Taylor 1998, xi); he also recognizes that no one theatrical performance is the same as another, depending upon contingencies of actor behaviour and audience response "it is only on the stage, in its moment, that one can judge how the material is given its weight. This changes from performance to performance and from audience to audience" (Taylor 1998, xiv). Such variability is amplified, however, rather than constrained, when the performance text is frozen in the form of a drama script, for the range of contexts of reception will be extended potentially to infinity. Not only the theatrical origin but equally, the dramatic destinations of the play-text are susceptible of high degrees of contingency generating meanings unanticipated at the outset. For

these reasons then, we should read a text such as Ubu and the Truth Commission with a double vision, looking back to its moment of conception, but also asking with Foucault as he imagines the enquiring Enlightenment subject, "What is my present? What is the meaning of this present? And what am I doing when I speak of this present?" (Foucault 1994, 141). For, even a mere reading of the text constitutes a reiteration of its performativity, one that, via its own cluster of attendant contingencies in the present moment of "re-activation," "concretisation" or "application" will have effects upon those who are its recipients (Vodikca 1975, 87-125; Gadamer 2004, xxix; 308; cf. Gadamer 1965, xviii; 292). Such an interpretation, because it departs from a strictly contextualizing analysis of the theatrical text, might be understood as "catachrestic," or abusive, in the sense defined by Spivak ( 1993, 26; 29; 64) . This assessment, though not entirely wrong, would ignore much of the play's inherent potential, as it already instantiates, in many subtle ways, the continuity of Pa Ubu's power across the putative caesura of the end of apartheid and beyond, aspects of which will be detailed in what follows. More accurately, such a reading may be characterized as "contrapuntal" in the dialectical manner of Said's multi-contextual textual analyses (Said 1994, 49, 97). Said however stresses that the dominant tenor of 'contrapuntal reading' is spatial rather than temporal. Spatial analysis is of course of central importance to South African history and culture, and to contemporary political and cultural debates (see for instance Barnard 2006, Beningfield 2006, Bremner 2010, Graham, J. 2009, and Nuttall and Mbembe 2008; see also West-Pavlov 2010). 4 My interest here, however, is in the manner in which disparate temporal strata, non-identical and 'non-synchronous' within themselves, resonate all the more intensely with one another within the perspective of an artistic creation (Bloch 1962, 104-26; Bloch 1977; see also West-Pavlov 2012). Nuttall has recently argued cogently that there are continuities between the apartheid past and the present […] Apartheid social engineering did and still does work to fix spaces that are difficult to break down in the present. […] But, we [contend] there are also enough configurations in various spheres of contemporary South African life to warrant new kinds of exploration and tools of analysis. (Nuttall 2009, 19) In a somewhat different manner, Coetzee's Disgrace explores the tension between the perfective and unfinished, iterative aspects of historical injustice and/or reconciliation (Sanders 2007, 168-185). It is at this 'seam' of temporal continuity and temporal difference that a reading of Ubu and the Truth Commission can most profitably be done.5 A 'presentist' reading of Ubu and the Truth Commission must begin with questions of agency, for it is there that the play most insistently stresses the continuities between its original and its present contexts of 'production' (in whatever form the latter may take, and reading is indisputably one of these). Perversely, agency, in Ubu and the Truth Commission , is reserved clearly for Pa Ubu (even if, as Stephanie Marlin-Curiel (2001, 82) justly remarks, "Never are the witness puppets conjured at Ubu's own volition"). The title itself asserts a clear sequential hierarchy, and curiously elides

4 For explorations in the visual arts, see Keith Dietrich's (2011) artists books: Many Rivers to Cross: Conflict Zones, Boundaries, and Shared Waters (Book #1), and the accompanying three volumes. , accessed 18 September 2012. 5 I owe the concept of the seam to Leon de Kock (2001). As with Said, I am temporalizing, and thus tampering, with a fundamentally spatial concept.

those victims who spoke before the Commission. Bennett remarks, "the Ubu text is a sadistic one, reflecting the consciousness of the perpetrator, not the victim […] it cannot be modified to reflect the victim's story" (Bennett 2005, 117). Similarly, the cover of the published version of the play features Pa Ubu flanked by his brutal three- headed dog-henchmen, rather than the victim puppets. And it can hardly be irrelevant that while Pa and Ma Ubu are played by human 'actors,' the victims are 'puppets;' both terms should be allowed to resonate here with the full range of their connotations. This unequal distribution of agency in part reflects one of the problems that dogged the TRC in its media relations: namely, that the perpetrator figures tended to steal the limelight. At times they publicly turned the tables on their former victims: Jeffrey Benzien, while being examined by his former victim Tony Yengeni, displayed his interrogator's skill in techniques of intimidation to the point where he could reveal Yengeni's betrayal of former comrades (see Krog 2002, 73; Sanders 2007, 99-102). Even more chillingly, Benzien willingly re-enacted the torture methods he had em- ployed, demonstrating on a member of the audience the infamous 'wet-bag' method. Pictures of Benzien sitting astride a black member of the public with the victim's head in a bag 6 became one of the spectacular media images which dominated the public impression of the TRC's work, at the expense of other aspects of the Commission's activities. Such events also instantiated the tendency of avatars of the apartheid-period power relations to resurge in the era after apartheid, as the hearings for brief periods morphed uncannily into the past being evoked. The question of agency, thus, is heavi- ly imbricated with that of trauma, where the experience that has destroyed the victim's subjectivity returns again and again in nightmarish form. What emerges here is a temporality of power and powerlessness which eschews the sort of closure celebrated by the rhetoric of historical caesuras and new beginnings. Such a temporality of continuing apartheid-like structures, I suggest, continues on into the present in South Africa, where minor incidents persistently suggest that the legacy of the apartheid past is not so easily banished. The change of government in 1994 put an end to political violence; yet in 1997 the government called out the army to patrol Hillbrow in Johannesburg, and in February 2011 Cape Town townships such as Khayelitsha (Bremner 2010, 227; de Vos 2012); in August 2012, police fired on demonstrating mine workers at Marikana near Rustenburg, killing 34 of them and wounding many more (Gibson 2012; see also Alexander et al. 2012). Since 1996, freedom of speech has been embedded in the South African constitution (Republic of South Africa 1996, chapter 2, section 16), but in early 2012, Jacob Zuma was calling for the constitutional court to hand down only decisions upon which its members were in unanimous agreement (South African Press Association 2012), signaling a move to reduce political debate at the highest level of legal consultation. Less dramatic but immensely more concerning are the everyday indices of inequality which have barely changed since 1994 (see Terreblanche 2002, 371-474). Clearly South Africa is a more democratic society than under apartheid, in principle treating all its citizens as equal, abolishing discrimination in all its forms, making available equal access to services and education to all, and offering the potential for self-realization to every person regardless of gender, age, religious belief or sexual orientation (see Republic of South Africa 1996, preamble). Its black middle class is

6 For images, see for instance ; , accessed 11 September 2012.

reputedly now larger than its white counterpart (Nuttall 2004, 731). Yet, the sector of the population living under the poverty line has remained much the same as before the end of apartheid; indeed, in the period 1996 to 2009 it actually rose from 17 million to 20 million (or to 41.3% of the population) (Plaatjies 2011, xxvii). The average income of black households fell by about a fifth in the early years of democracy, while that of white households rose by 15% (Butler 2009, 90-91). Unemployment remains daunting, at around 25% according to official statistics; however, this conceals an immense informal sector of precarious employment, as well as such euphemisms as 'discouraged job seekers;' an 'expanded definition' of unemployment brings the figures for the majority black population up to a level between 40% and 50%, though exact data are hard to come by (Statistics South Africa 2012; Butler 2009, 92-93). The education system, a vital resource in the attainment of rising levels of prosperity, continues to suffer from the legacy of the erstwhile segregated Bantu education policy, with catastrophic educational infrastructures hindering outputs and standards (79% of all South African schools have no library, 68% have no computers, 60% have no laboratory, 15% have no electricity, 11% no water, and 5% no toilets). Matric (year 12) completion levels are no higher than before 1994 despite considerable financial inputs from the state (Bloch 2011, 211). The public health system is in crisis, with many hospitals in a state of nearly total dysfunction (Marais 2011, 309-322; Makhubu 2012). These indices reveal a society which, though it has abolished racially-based inequity, has opened access to services to all citizens and is governed according to the principles of a multi-party parliamentary democracy, appears to have become caught in 'stalemate' (Mbembe 2012). "The baseline reality for a large proportion of South Africans, the large majority of them black, is distressed and insecure with very little ability to withstand the shocks of serious illness, injury or death" (Marais 2011, 203). In its broader contours, South Africa is no more equal than at the demise of apartheid. Political agency has been passed from a white elite to a black elite, and economic agency remains largely in the hands of a white minority. The great majority of the population remains economically disenfranchised and politically only nominally enfranchised. In the blunt words of Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, "The Struggle's not over" (Gordimer 2012, 64). Ubu and the Truth Commission , written and performed only three years after the transition to democracy, appears to have registered this state of affairs very early on (just as many social commentators did). Notwithstanding the racial coding of the char- acters in the play, Pa Ubu represents the post-apartheid custodians of power, regardless of skin colour or racial/ethnic alignment. For the play, despite its avowedly critical stance towards Pa Ubu and his hypocrisy, continues in subtle and thus all the more insidious ways to grant him an uncontested place within the hierarchy of power relations, and to withhold it from the victims of apartheid. This, indeed, was the impression that a large section of the population had, as perpetrators already facing criminal charges for violations of human rights were granted amnesty in return for full confession, while erstwhile victims sometimes had to wait years for meagre reparation (Wil- son 2001, 15); at the same time, the new political elite appeared to enjoy the benefits of power, while those who lived in poverty saw little real change in their situation. To re-read the play in successive subsequent moments is to have this impression of post- apartheid critique strengthened, not diluted. Every subsequent reading of the text re- activates this hierarchy, and a 'presentist' approach to the text cannot but interrogate this persistent bias in terms of the contemporary South African context. In what fol-

lows I argue that it is precisely these disturbing dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa which are refracted across Ubu and the Truth Commission . The play appears to be speaking simultaneously of the apartheid era, the moment of transition, and of today's postcolonial polity: a situation in which, under the aegis of neo-liberal economic inequalities rather than officially legislated discrimination, something resem- bling the old dispensation of the apartheid state lives on, manifested in the continued poverty and disenfranchisement of the majority of its citizens.

Ubu and the Truth Commission today Ubu is an "anachronism" in the words of the script-writer Jane Taylor (1998, iv), and yet, by virtue of his capacity to resurge in later literatures, he is timeless. The timeless quality of Jarry's reincarnated figure allows us to read him not only as a torturer, then an amnesty applicant, but as an anonymous instantiation of the post-apartheid capitalist order. Indeed, the political compromise which ushered in the post-apartheid social order with remarkably little bloodshed was a deal which included, as one of its constituent elements, the deal done with the erstwhile perpetrators of human rights abuses. The two deals were in many ways isomorphic. Former security officers were offered amnesty at the price of a full account of their actions; the white minority elite was offered continuing economic control (i.e. the incoming black majority opted for a neoliberal economic order which would be managerial/monopolistic enough to allow them to cream off considerable benefits, but would leave white economic elites in their positions) at the price of a hand-over of political power (Marais 2011, 67-79; 90- 93; Butler 2009, 91). Thus Ubu stands primarily for political-military agency in his apartheid-era mode, but the play also implies that he has a continued and not unhappy existence under the new dispensation. There are strong hints that Pa Ubu survives the putative victimiza- tions of the post-apartheid era. Pa Ubu's dog-henchman Brutus/Head 2 advises: "Keep quiet, lie low, and in a year or two we'll all have our old jobs back" (Taylor 1998, 59; IV.5). And the play finishes with the trio of Ma and Pa Ubu and their accomplice Niles the crocodile merrily sailing into a rosy future: "MA UBU: [...] enough of the past. What we need is a fresh start. / NILES: A clean slate. / MA UBU: A new begin- ning. / PA UBU: A bright future" (Taylor 1998, 71, 73; V.5). In this way, the play, far from celebrating the sort of closure that the TRC's 'Final Report' would later intimate could be placed upon the past, opens onto a future post-apartheid dispensation in which the sufferings of the victims of human rights violations are effectively upstaged, indeed perhaps even indirectly perpetuated, by socio-economic configurations analo- gous to Pa Ubu's continuing, albeit as yet undefined, career. It is worth making these claims a little more specific. In order to do so, I will address two instances of Pa Ubu's identity in which parallels with a contemporary South African managerial/neoliberal socio-economic and political order are manifest. The first concerns a relatively peripheral scene in which Pa and Ma Ubu pillage a spaza shop (an informal township shop usually set up in the front room of a residential building) (Taylor 1998, 25-9; II.5). The spaza shop pillaging is apparently marginal to the play's more central preoccupation with Pa Ubu's activities as an apartheid functionary engaged in fighting a putatively terroristic "swart Gevaar" (Taylor 1998, 45; III.2). Indeed, the scene is documented almost exclusively in the form of stage directions, meaning that it survives only as an ephemeral trace of the performance 'mime.' Yet in its apparent marginality, it is perhaps an index of one of the unintended

side-effects of the TRC, which was to focus attention on the more extreme aspects of white oppression under the apartheid regimes, namely the 'gross violations of human rights' that the Commission's hearings were designed to bring to light. Yet perversely, this not unjustified focus upon 'gross' human rights abuses documented in several thousand victims' testimonies elided the myriad of 'trivial' or 'minor' abuses suffered by the entirety of the black population in everyday life over half a century of apartheid: systematic economic exploitation, constant police and bureaucratic harassment, forced relocations, poor service and utility provision in the townships or in rural areas, family separation because of migrant labour conditions (or as a lesser evil, onerous and lengthy commuting patterns from townships to work with unreliable public transport), second-class education, poor access to medical and social services, and so on. This elision of the less acute but more sustained war of attrition waged by the apartheid regime on the bodies, souls and psyches of millions of South African subjects was enhanced even more by the media's tendency to snap up spectacular moments or images of the TRC process and to purvey them as representative. By contrast, the spaza shop scene bespeaks the everyday indifference and contempt with which black subjects were treated by white officials, bureaucrats, or employers. To this extent, the spaza shop scene possesses a potential temporal resonance which is far greater than the "horror pornography" of the witnesses' testimonies (Taylor 1998, xvii). As a case in point, it may be worth noting the inroads recently made into the townships by major supermarket chains such as Pick'n'Pay, threatening the income and livelihoods of tens of thousands of spaza shop owners (Bisseker 2006). No single individual of course stands behind such initiatives on the part of large globally networked corporate instances. Rather, it is the constantly expanding dynamic of neoliberal capitalism itself which drives such trends. This renders all the more eloquent, then, the image of the "limited arc of vision" available to the spaza shopkeeper, his "unaware[ness] of who steals his belongings" (Taylor 1998, 27; II.5) – lines that evoke the helplessness of the small vendor twenty years after apartheid faced with the anonymity of a ruthlessly expanding major retail chain. Paradoxically, the marginal place of the spaza shop scene within its original context of theatrical production in 1996-1998 is in inverse proportions to its ongoing contemporary relevance, as an impoverished majority population continues to eke out a precarious existence under conditions of ever-more rapacious global capitalism. The second aspect of Pa Ubu's readability as an index of late-post-apartheid society is the grotesque element which Taylor and Kentridge derived from their Jarry- template. In his classic commentary upon the transition from apartheid, with its focus on spectacular violence and oppression, Njabulo Ndebele posited that the transition to democracy would permit a return to an aesthetics of the ordinary (Ndebele 2006). Though Ndebele's claim has in some ways been confirmed, in other ways, paradoxically, quite the opposite has occurred, as the political scene in particular becomes increasingly the stage for displays of excessive and vulgar consumption or even public obscenity. Such vulgarity, Achille Mbembe has claimed, is a characteristic of the postcolonial polity: "the grotesque and the obscene are two essential characteristics that identify postcolonial regimes of domination" (Mbembe 2001, 103); postcolonial "commandement derives its 'aesthetics' from its immoderate appetite and the immense pleasure that it encounters in plunging in ordure" (Mbembe 1992, 10). A contemporary South African example of such vulgarity in the public domain would be president Jacob Zuma's 2005-2006 rape trial. During the trial, Zuma repeat-

edly sang the liberation song Awalethu Mshini Wami , ('Bring me my machine gun'), offering to the public a "calculated performance of hyper-masculinity" vaunting provocative connections between military and sexual violence, and neo-tribal identities: supporters outside the court wore t-shirts bearing the slogan "Zuma 100% Zulu Boy" (Jolly 2012, 152; 153; 146). Pa and Ma Ubu's vulgarity and obscenity are unintention- ally proleptic indices of such a phenomenon: MA UBU: What are you going on about, you great bladder? […] PA UBU: Do you think we were born yesterday? […] My father always said never trust a woman unless you can fill her purse. MA UBU: He wasn't talking about money, Pa! But what do you know of a woman's needs? PA UBU: We know they need to be beaten and then scrambled. (Taylor 1998, 65; 67; V.3) Rita Barnard has commented, "Père Ubu (who is transmogrified into an absurd but terrifying apartheid-era power monger in Taylor and Kentridge's adaptation of Jarry's surrealist classic) can be seen as the perfect embodiment of the postcolonial commandement , with its cruel belly politics" (Barnard 2004, 292n11). Placing this in the contemporary South African context, she has observed "an element of tasteless display on the part of the new ANC leadership evident before many years of democratic rule had gone by." She adds that "[t]he literature of the transition" – and here we must include Ubu and the Truth Commission – "responsive to such matters, seems increasingly to record a sense of the vulgarity of power. It begins to represent the agents of apartheid not in terms of their supposed Calvinist rigor, but in terms of the same crude physicality that characterizes the corpulent strongmen of Mbembe's postcolony" (Barnard 2004, 292). There is little of the Calvinist defender of pristine racial purity in Pa Ubu. Ubu's grotesque comments, include those taken from a TRC amnesty applicant's testimony about burning victims' bodies: "the burning of a body to ashes takes about seven hours […] whilst that happened we were drinking and even having a braai [i.e. barbecue] next to the fire" (Taylor 1998, 45; III.2). Such grotesque comments reveal the vulgarity of apartheid, but the plethora of other markers of vulgarity foreshadow the ostentatious displays of consumption and populist power- mongering among the new elites of the democratic South Africa. Such foreshadowing has perhaps from the outset been inherent in the play's temporal complexities. Asked by an interviewer what he felt was his most controversial piece, Kentridge replied, "it would probably be the Ubu production. […] A lot of people said, 'how can you do any theatre about this material? It's too soon, it's too early'" (Kentridge 2005, 41). The multiple temporal imbrications of the play are intri- guing. It was produced while the TRC was still carrying out its investigations, and it was heralded as coming too early. The excessively 'precocious' character of Ubu and the Truth Commission may be the obverse of its capacity, however, like all genuinely provocative art, to also speak beyond its immediate context of initial staging. In Kentridge's thought, a central tension can be made out between a rejection of the pre-programmed 'good idea,' the 'best of intentions' which go awry in the process of implementation, and an avant-garde belief in the unpredictable creativity of the artistic process itself, whether it be linguistic or performance-based. Thus Kentridge identifies two 'polemics' in his work: on the one hand, "to trust in the inauthentic, the contingent, the practical as a way of arriving at meaning" (Taylor 1998, xi); and on the other, "Mistrust of good ideas in the abstract. Mistrust of starting with a knowledge of

the meaning of an image and thinking it can be executed. There is for me more than an accidental linguistic connection between executing an idea and killing it" (Taylor 1998, xii; original emphasis). These two principles underlie, as it were, my reading of the play. The advocacy of the contingent, the unpredictable, the unexpected or untime- ly as a creative principle underpins my temporally 'contrapuntual' reading of Ubu and the Truth Commission so as to understand it both in a mid-1990s and a mid-2010s context. The distrust of 'good ideas in the abstract' in turn sanctions the critique which can be found in the latter contextualization of the play, as a dramatic text rather than a performance piece, in its capacity to speak critically of the ways many of the much- celebrated emancipatory and egalitarian aspirations of the 'Rainbow Nation' have been derailed, tragically, by two decades of democratic misrule. 7

Works Cited Alexander, Peter, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell and Bongani Xezwi. Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer . Johannes- burg: Jacana, 2012. Anon. "Zuma wants Constitutional Court powers reviewed: report." 13 February 2012. Times Live . 3 September 2012 . Auslander, Mark. "Rev. of Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa , by The Rose Art Museum." American Anthropologist (n.s.) 105.3 (2003): 621-623. Bal, Mieke. Double Exposure: The Subject of Cultural Analysis . New York: Routledge, 1996. —. "Introduction." The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Inter- pretation . Ed. Mieke Bal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 1-14. Barnard, Rita. "On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African Transition: Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying ." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 37.3 (2004): 277-302. —. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Beningfield, Jennifer. The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2006. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Bisseker, Claire. "Retailers Drive into the Townships Threatens Spaza Shops." 22 September 2006. Financial Mail . 18 September 2012 . Bloch, Ernst. "Ungleichzeitigkeit und Pflicht zu ihrer Dialektik (Mai 1932)." Erb- schaft dieser Zeit . Expanded ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962. 104-126. Bloch, Ernst "Non-sychnronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics (1932)." Trans. Mark Ritter. New German Critique 11 (1977): 22-38. Bloch, Graeme. "Basic Education: A Development Perspective. Where Are We Go- ing?" Future Inheritance: Building State Capacity in Democratic South Africa . Ed. Daniel Plaatjies. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2011. 205-215.

7 For 'non-thetic' or non-discursive panoramas of post-apartheid society in all its heterogeneous multi- plicity, see the photographic essays of Mofekeng (2011) and Yudelman (2012).

Bremner, Lindsay. Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008 . Johannesburg: Fourthwall, 2010. Butler, Anthony. Contemporary South Africa . 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2009. Charlton, Ed. "'Only literature can perform the miracle of reconciliation:' A Resurrec- tion of the Logos in South Africa's Truth Commission?" Research in African Lit- eratures 42.4 (2011): 114-123. Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace . London: Vintage, 1999. Coetzee, Yvette. "Visibly Invisible: How Shifting the Conventions of the Traditionally Invisible Puppeteer Allows for More Dimensions in Both the Puppeteer-Puppet Relationship and the Creation of Theatrical Meaning in Ubu & the Truth Commis- sion ." South African Theatre Journal 12.1-2 (1998): 35-51. Cole, Catherine M. "Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission." Theatre Journal 59.2 (2007): 167-187. —. Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Dangor, Achmat. Bitter Fruit . Cape Town: Kwela, 2001. de Graft, Joe. "Roots in African Drama and Theatre." Drama in Africa: A Review . Ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones. London: Heinemann, 1976. 1-25. de Kock, Leon. "South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction." Poetics Today 22.2 (2001): 263-298. de Kok, Ingrid. Terrestrial Things: Poems . Cape Town: Kwela/Snailpress, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Marges: De la Philosophie . Paris: Minuit, 1972. de Vos, Pierre. "Why are Soldiers Patrolling the Streets of Cape Town?" 16 January 2012. Constitutionally Speaking . 03 September 2012 . Dietrich, Keith. Many Rivers to Cross: Conflict Zones, Boundaries, and Shared Wa- ters (Book #1) , 2011. 18 September 2012 . Disgrace . Dir. Steve Jacobs. Fortissimo/Sherman Films. Australia/South Africa, 2008. Duncan, David. "Autodidacticus." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 33.1 (2011): 51-62. Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama . London: Methuen, 1980. Farber, Yael. He Left Quietly . n.d. 11 May 2013 . Forgiveness . Dir. Ian Gabriel. Giant Films. South Africa, 2004. Foucault, Michel. "The Art of Telling the Truth." Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate . Ed. Michael Kelly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. 139-148. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik . 2nd ed. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1965. —. Truth and Method . trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. rev. ed. London: Continuum, 2004. Gibson, James L. "Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?" Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 603 (2006): 82- 110.

Gibson, Nigel. "The Marikana Massacre: A Turning Point for South Africa?" 1 Sep- tember 2012. Truth-Out. 3 September 2012 . Godby, Michael. "William Kentridge: Retrospective." Art Journal 58.3 (1999): 74-85. Goodman, Tanya. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Afri- ca . Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009. Gordimer, Nadine. No Time Like the Present . Johannesburg: Picador Africa/Pan Macmillan, 2012. Grady, Hugh and Terence Hawkes. Presentist Shakespeares . London: Routledge, 2006. Graham, James. Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa . London: Routledge, 2009. Graham, Shane. South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gready, Paul "Novel Truths: Literature and Truth Commissions." Comparative Lit- erature Studies 46.1 (2009): 156-176. Hawkes, Terence. Shakespeare in the Present . London: Routledge, 2002. Hayner, Priscilla. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity . New York: Routledge, 2001. Herzberg, Paul. The Dead Wait . London: Oberon Books, 2002. In My Country . Dir. John Boorman. Columbia TriStar. South Africa, 2004. Jolly, Rosemary. Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa . Scottsville: University of KwaZulu- Natal Press, 2012. Kentridge, William. "The Image-Time." Interview with Cheryl Kaplan. PAJ: A Jour- nal of Performance and Art 27.2 (2005): 28-44. Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull . 2nd ed. Johannesburg: Random House, 2002. Krueger, Anton. "Theatre in South Africa – 'An Endangered Species:' Interview with Anthony Akerman." Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 8.2 (2003): 60-65. Kruger, Loren. "From the Cape of Good Hope: South African Drama and Per- formance in the Age of Globalization." Theatre Journal 64.1 (2012): 119-127. Lessac, Michael. Truth in Translation . n.d. 11 May 2013 Makhanya, Mondi. "Pulse of the People: Is Our Miracle Rainbow Nation Turning Out To Be Just Another Country?" The State We're In: The 2010 Flux Trend Review . Ed. Dion Chang. Johannesburg: Pan Macmillan, 2009. 11-22. Makhubu, Ntandu. "Hospital on the Verge of Collapse." 10 September 2012. Preto- ria News . 13 September 2012 . Marais, Hein. South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Economy of Political Change . Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011. Marlin-Curiel, Stephanie. "A Little Too Close to the Truth: Anxieties of Testimony and Confession in Ubu and the Truth Commission and The Story I Am About to Tell ." South African Theatre Journal 15.1 (2001): 77-116. Mbembe, Achille. "The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Post- colony." Public Culture 4.2 (1992): 1-30. —. On the Postcolony . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.

—. "Rule of Property versus Rule of the Poor?" 15 June 2012. Mail & Guardian . 13 September 2012 . Mofekeng, Santu. Chasing Shadows: Thirty Years of Photographic Essays . Munich: Prestel, 2011. Ndebele, Njabulo S. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture . Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006. Nuttall, Sarah. "City Forms and Writing the 'Now' in South Africa." Journal of South- ern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 731-748. —. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid . Johannes- burg: Wits University Press, 2009. — and Achille Membe, eds. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Plaatjies, Daniel. "Introduction: Building State Capacity in Democratic South Africa." Future Inheritance: Building State Capacity in Democratic South Africa . Ed. Dan- iel Plaatjies. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2011. xxv-xxxiii. Posel, Deborah. "Truth? The View from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission." Keywords: Truth . Eds. Deborah Posel et al. New York: Other Press, 2004. 1-25. Red Dust . Dir. Tom Hooper. BBC Films, 2004. U.K. Republic of South Africa. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa . 1996. 13 Sep- tember 2012 . —. "Preamble." 1996. South African Government Information . 13 September 2012 . Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism . London: Vintage, 1994. Sanders, Mark. Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission . Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007. Slovo, Gillian. Red Dust . London: Virago, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine . New York: Routledge, 1993. Statistics South Africa. Quarterly Labour Force Survey: Quarter 2, 2012. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa, 2012. 11 September 2012 . South African Press Association. "Zuma Wants Constitutional Court Powers Re- viewed: Report." 13 February 2012. Times Live 03 September 2012 . Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission: From the Production by William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company . Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998. Terreblanche, Sampie. A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002 . Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2002. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Report of the Truth and Rec- onciliation Commission of South Africa (Cape Town: The Truth and Reconcilia- tion Commission of South Africa, 2003), 7 vols. 10 September 2012 . Vladislavi ć, Ivan. Double Negative . Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2011.

Vodicka, Felix. "Die Konkretisation des literarischen Werkes: Zur Problematik der Rezeption von Nerudas Werk." Struktur der literarischen Entwicklung . München: Fink, 1975. 87-125. Warnes, Christopher. "Interview with Ivan Vladislavi ć." Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavic . Ed. Gerald Gaylard. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011. 104-112. West-Pavlov, Russell. Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. —. Temporalities . London: Routledge, 2012. Wicomb, Zoë. David's Story . Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001. —. Playing in the Light Johannesburg: Umuzi, 2007. Wilson, Richard A. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legiti- mizing the Post-Apartheid State . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Yudelman, Dale. Life under Democracy . Johannesburg: Jacana, 2012.