Abstract
A number of plays have been staged about the South African Border War. Some of these plays have been uncritical in their representation of the war and have promoted a kind of restorative nostalgia that glosses over the South African Defence Force’s (SADF) share in upholding apartheid. In staging the Border War in South Africa’s new democracy, the playwright has to portray perpetrator trauma in a way that engages the audience to critically examine the past. I wrote a play about the South African Border War, “Bloed en Bodem”, as part of a larger study about this phenomenon. I employed a research-based art approach and used social media discourses on Facebook to examine veterans’ memories of the war and the event’s reverberations in South Africa’s current democracy. Themes in the collective memory were identified from these discourses and were reflected in the newly written drama. This paper focuses on the strategies that emerged in the process of writing which can aid in avoiding restorative nostalgia. The three strategies are mythology, binary voices, and the present. By using these strategies to contradict and expose the veteran’s views of the past, the master narrative of conscription in apartheid South Africa is destablized. This destablisation through performance has lead to opportunities for responsible meaning-making to emerge in a young democracy still coming to grips with the complexities of the past.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Apartheid, Perpetrator Trauma, Theatre of war, Border literature, Research-based art
