A “Jail Bird's Eye View:” Workshop 71’s SURVIVAL in South Africa

Early on a January morning in 1977, South African actor Seth Sibanda went for a walk in Orange County, California. He and the rest of the cast of Survival had arrived in the United States the night before to tour their production. This was his first trip out of southern Africa and his first experience staying in a white neighborhood, “a John Wayne area,” as he describes it. While walking through the suburbs, Seth was stopped by two patrolling policemen and asked to present identification.

He reached into his pocket, and took out his “passbook” – the Apartheid-era document carried by black South Africans declaring the limited urban area in which they had been approved to work and live. Failing to produce a pass, or digressing from its assigned area, was an offense punishable by fine or incarceration.

“What the fuck is this?” the policemen asked, and Seth recognized his error – it was his passport, not his passbook, he should carry to assert the legitimacy of his presence to US law enforcement. After a journey of over 10,000 miles, Seth found himself back in the familiar scene: a black man presenting his “pass” to a white officer.

Over the following months and years, the remarkable journey of Survival would highlight the resonances and disjunctures between racial oppression and resistance in South Africa and the United States. There is the strong resemblance between Apartheid and “Jim Crow” legislature; the Cold War era US’s tacit support of an anti-communist white nationalist stronghold in Southern Africa; and the undermining of South Africa’s democratic revolution by neoliberal economic reforms that were imposed by the US and other Western powers.

But more pertinent to Survival is the interconnected nature of black, anti-colonial, and anti-racist struggle that this incredible production brings into sharp relief. As activists today look to the anti-Apartheid boycott and divestment movement for inspiration in resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and historical allegiances are re-ignited in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, the global dimensions of resistance and solidarity are as crucial as ever. With surprising hilarity, Survival exposes the absurd violence not only of Apartheid, but of the contemporary militarized police state more broadly. Underlying the humor is an unrestrained expression of black anger and frustration. At that time, such raw emotion (without an attempt to present solutions or idealized revolutionary figures), had not been seen on the South African stage.

In 1976, when Seth Sibanda, Fana Kekana, Salaelo Maredi, Themba Ntshinga, and director Robert “Mshengu” Kavenaugh set out to make Survival, they wanted to depict the reality of prison life in South Africa. Seth, Salaelo, and Themba all had direct experience of incarceration through both underground political activity and the relentless criminalization of black life. Soon into the creative process, they realized that they would need to expand their lens, because in Apartheid South Africa, the country itself was the prison. Fana Kekana explains: “[We realized] when you look at the country, the country is a prison for all the people that live in it, black and white. You know. It’s like everybody is just locked into that. And then we started improvising.”

Referred to playfully as a “jailbird’s eye view,” Survival would come to tell the stories of five prisoners – Vusi, Leroi, Edward, Slaksa, and Habbakuk – as they struggled to survive in the prison of South African society. The performers decided to focus on “criminals,” rather than political prisoners, to emphasize how the criminalization of every aspect of black South African life was inherently political. In Seth’s own life, for example, because he had moved from Soweto to Alexandra (two different areas of Johannesburg) as a child, upon finishing highschool he could not get government approval to work. Trapped in an absurd bureaucratic loop, he would need to live in Alexandra for ten years in order to get permission to work there, and yet not working was criminalized by vagrancy laws. Any encounter with the police – who would regularly stop him to inspect his “pass” –  would see him incarcerated. Simply moving from one area of the city to another had criminalized his existence. This bureaucratic impasse was not a malfunction of the system, but rather its design: Seth was being forced into a position where his only option was to work in Johannesburg’s gold mines. Instead, he became an actor.

Exposing the carceral nature of the Apartheid state was the impetus for Survival, but the play’s creation process and experimental form also broke down theatrical barriers. Formed in Johannesburg in 1971, Workshop71 was the first interracial theater company in South Africa. It was an early innovator of what became known as “workshop theater” or “protest theater” – a practice of collaborative, improvisational theater-making that grew out of the anti-Apartheid movement. Drawing on indigenous oral storytelling traditions and global political theater practices (such as Theater of the Oppressed), workshop theater developed a distinctive style combining physical storytelling, clowning, ensemble performance, song, and minimal but innovative use of props and costume.

The immediacy of devising allowed these productions to directly respond to their socio-political contexts, but improvisation was also an important survival strategy. When government officials were in the audience, actors could improvisationally change the content mid-performance to avoid censorship or arrest, and when asked to submit scripts for censorship review, they could honestly respond that there was no script. By dismantling the hierarchy of text-based theater productions, workshop theater became a rare environment in which non-racial equality could be rehearsed.

Survival was commissioned by the Space Theater in 1976, with a total development budget of R600 ($32 in today’s terms) – a meager amount even then! For two-and-a-half months the cast workshopped intensively, drawing on every aspect of prison life in South Africa. They built characters based on newspaper articles, as well as drawing on the lives of people they knew and their own experiences. They deepened the material through explorations with song, dance, writing, drawing, and dialogue improvisations, which were tape recorded. Both Richard Wright’s Native Son and James Baldwin’s Notes on a Native Son were influential texts. The process was so generative that a second play, Small Boy, emerged from the material. The administrative load was equally shared, with all production decisions collectively made and executed.

Over the following months they continued adapting, based on audience responses, developing it into an experimental, irreverent, and searing piece. Survival opened at The Space theater in Cape Town in May 1976, before touring extensively around the city, as well as to the historically white, Afrikaans, and conservative Stellenbosch University (where the cast found an unexpectedly receptive audience).

In the midst of this tour, on June 16, 1976, the anger and frustration that Survival encapsulated erupted in a student uprising. When the Apartheid government mandated that all black schools should teach solely in Afrikaans, thousands of Soweto school children joined in a peaceful march. They were met en route to the Orlando Stadium by police who fired tear gas and live ammunition, killing and injuring hundreds. Protests and militant resistance quickly spread nationwide, with the brutality of police repression drawing international mobilization. As Robert Kavanaugh wrote, with thousands of black students having seen Survival in June of 1976, it may have played a role in their political mobilization as the uprising spread to Cape Town.

When the production returned to Soweto in July, the area was flooded with militarized police armed with automatic weapons and helicopter patrols, while protestors were erecting roadblocks, stoning police vehicles, and burning down governmental buildings. Survival opened at the YWCA hall – one of the few still functioning buildings – but the run was ended after soldiers stormed the building during the first performance, assaulting staff and closing the hall.

1976 became a turning point in the anti-Apartheid movement, beginning an intensification of resistance that did not let up until the dismantling of the regime began in 1990. It was also a watershed moment in the global mobilization against Apartheid, and the following year a unanimous UN vote made the Arms Embargo against South Africa mandatory. Unable to deny the growing importance of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, the Police and Justice Minister, Jimmy Kruger, dismissively attributed the uprising to the “importation of the Black Power ideology from America.” While the political and intellectual roots of the student movement were absolutely homegrown, Kruger was correct in recognizing the increasingly interconnected identity of anti-imperial, anti-racist, and anti-colonial struggle globally.

The Black Panther Party’s weekly newspaper, for example, headlined the Soweto uprising in its June 26 edition with detailed analysis of the student movement, the UN response, and the US’s complicity via arms trading. In this edition alone, their news coverage spanned black and Chicano uprisings in the US alongside liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, displaying a keen awareness of the diasporic and anti-colonial dimensions of Black Power. An editorial titled “Our Struggle is One” directly connects the US, South Africa and Palestine: “The fact of the matter is that White racist cops in South Africa shot and killed Black schoolchildren with impunity; in a similar manner as their counterparts in Israel murder youthful Palestinians; in a similar manner as their counterparts in the US killed Tyrone Guyton in Oakland and Clifford Glover in New York.”

After the military closure at the YWCA hall, Survival transferred to The Box theater in Johannesburg, playing to largely white audiences, where reviewer Roy Christie described it as “a laceration of the soul.” Survival iterated what the Soweto uprising had made clear: the downfall of Apartheid was a matter of when not if. It was here that visiting Orange Coast College professor James Bertholf saw the production. Recognizing both its stylistic edginess and its resonance with black America, he committed to bringing the cast to California, thus changing their lives forever.

Click here to continue to the second part of this series on the history of Survival.