African Tragedy and the post-apartheid state: the village, the forest and the ‘hollow’ cave

Since 2019, I have been engaged in a research project to re-imagine tragedy from the perspective of the global South and particularly from Africa. While the project has in one respect focused on the adaptation of extant Greek tragedies in the present conditions of a post-apartheid South Africa, it has also produced work that re-imagines the tragic form from an African perspective without necessarily drawing on the archive of tragedies produced in the 5th century in Athens. One of these productions is iKrele le Chiza by Mandla Mbothwe, based on a fragment from Homer’s Odyssey. The production deviates quite radically from its source text to produce something original that, I would argue, remains tragedy in its content and form.

What is the connection if any between this emergent African tragedy as I am describing it and the classical or European sense of what constitutes tragedy? Is the recourse to the discourse of tragedy reflective of a persistent coloniality in the aftermath of the catastrophe - simply a ‘remnant of a defunct regime’ - or is it a case of active and strategic reappropriation in the ‘politics of the present’ (Stoler, 2013: 11). In my lecture I explore Mbothwe’s dramaturgy in relation to both its African (specifically Xhosa) foundations and to a number of German theorists, from both inside and outside of the discipline of theatre and performance studies, touching on questions of chorality, atmospherics and hope in a state of stasis or suspended futurity.

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