Introduction

A commission is tasked with distinguishing between the ‘schwarzen Weissen’ and ‘schwarzen Schwarzen’ or ‘black Whites’ and ‘black Blacks’.1 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, ‘Die Virusepidemie in Südafrika’, Das Magazin 25, 20 June 2020, 16. Henceforth, these groups are required to wear enamel signboards designating their race. As this measure proves ineffective, Dürrenmatt dreams up increasingly absurd solutions to the problem of distinguishing between what are no longer distinguishable races. This includes changing the colours used on the signboards, issuing medical certificates, and requiring all ‘black Whites’ to provide a ‘black Black’ witness to their whiteness.

Dürrenmatt’s relentless and obsessive recitation of racial labels in this piece makes for somewhat heavy reading. It is also a pointed comment on the absurdity and fundamental impossibility of racial classification. No surprise then, that these bureaucratic measures prove futile, with the number of ‘black Whites’ soon far exceeding the formerly white population. Even worse, the black-skinned population eventually begins to produce white-skinned children. Labelling these individuals ‘white Blacks’, the president flips apartheid regulations around, now applying them against those with white skins. ‘Wir sind schwarz,’ he proclaims, ‘gleichgültig, ob wir nun weisse Schwarze oder schwarze Schwarze sind […] Es lebe das schwarze Südafrika!’(‘We are black, regardless of whether we are white Blacks or black Blacks […] Long live Black South Africa!’).2 Ibid., 19. In response, ordinary South Africans revolt, leading, finally, to the end of apartheid.

‘Die Virusepidemie in Südafrika’ was remarkably timeous. Written just as the apartheid state was beginning to dismantle its legal apparatus and free imprisoned black resistance leaders, it was published posthumously in 1994, on the eve of South Africa’s first democratic election. But Dürrenmatt’s parable didn’t only comment on events playing out on the other side of the world. Right in the middle of it, he placed a delegation of Swiss bankers. Opposed, in principle, to apartheid, they have come to South Africa to continue business as usual, having reassured themselves that undermining anti-apartheid sanctions and supporting the white population through financial trade would also serve the interests of its black population. On arrival, however, they find not a single white South African. Convinced that the black majority has finally revolted and murdered the whites, the bankers flee on a Swissair plane, but not before contracting the virus themselves. Back home, they, too, turn black. Meanwhile, Swiss banks panic and withdraw millions from investments in South Africa.

The argument from Swiss financial institutions that imposing sanctions would only hurt the black population is not fiction and so Dürrenmatt’s story is also a comment on the historically friendly attitude of Swiss business towards the apartheid state. The Swiss were among the country’s most important investors: during the tense 1980s, there were as many as 17,000 individuals in South Africa working for Swiss firms.3 See Lucas Marco Gisi, ‘Verstörende Aktualität: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “Die Virusepidemie in Südafrika”, heute wiedergelesen’, Das Magazin 25, 20 June 2020, 19. These facts are well established. In 2000 the Swiss Federal Council commissioned a historical study on Swiss-South African relations from 1948 to 1994.4 The findings of this investigation were published in Georg Kreis, Switzerland and South Africa 1948–1994: Final Report of the NFP 42+ Commissioned by the Swiss Federal Council (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). It revealed that Swiss authorities had allowed their corporate sector the freedom to conduct business regardless of the political consequences. Having ‘supported, aided and abetted the apartheid state’ in this way, Swiss corporations also benefitted from sanctions imposed by countries that took a stand against the regime.5 Ibid., 514. The report also revealed contacts between the two countries’ intelligence services and the existence of private arms deals, concluding that Swiss science and industry made considerable contributions to South Africa’s covert atomic weapons programme.6 See Ibid., 511–12.

‘Die Virusepidemie in Südafrika’ may have earned Dürrenmatt the title of ‘literarischer Totengräber’, the ‘literary gravedigger’ of apartheid.7 Gisi, ‘Verstörende Aktualität’, 20. But despite poking fun at binary thinking about race, Dürrenmatt wasn’t immune to using racist tropes in his own writing, playing on white fear of black sexuality, and relying on stereotypical representations of blackness. At its conclusion, he describes a black banker dancing non-stop to jazz and beaming with such joie de vivre as is not found among the inhabitants of Zürich. There is also the fact, inconvenient perhaps, as Dürrenmatt crowed the end of apartheid, that he and his contemporary, Max Frisch, had long allowed their plays to be staged in South Africa under circumstances considered unacceptable to their international counterparts.

Frisch and Dürrenmatt reached the South African stage at roughly the same time. The first Swiss play I could trace was a German-language production of Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter, performed in April 1962.8 See P. A. K., ‘Fire Raisers’, Pretoria News, 27 April 1962. Later that year, an Afrikaans translation appeared under the title Die Brandstigters. Barely a month later, the first Dürrenmatt play opened in South Africa – an Afrikaans translation of Der Besuch der alten Dame, staged during the ambitious inaugural season of the newly built Johannesburg Civic Theatre. It was that very season that prompted South African playwright Athol Fugard to write an open letter to playwrights abroad:

Between 1948 and 1994, Frisch and Dürrenmatt were performed in Afrikaans with notable frequency. Four of Frisch’s plays were translated – Biedermann und die Brandstifter even twice – and six of Dürrenmatt’s – including Die Physiker and Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi, both which were also translated twice – though not all of these translations reached the stage. Frisch and Dürrenmatt were also frequently staged in English. Would these playwrights have achieved such a consistent presence in South Africa, or earned the royalties they did, if over a hundred other authors had not imposed restrictions on the performance of their own works? This situation invites comparison with Swiss-South African business relations, where Swiss parties benefitted from their so-called neutrality.

The benefit certainly accrued the other way, with Afrikaans theatre enjoying ready access to the plays of Frisch and Dürrenmatt. In the second half of the century, Afrikaans theatre flourished as vast amounts of state resources were funnelled into constructing new theatres, cultivating new audiences, training actors and stage technicians, and building a new repertoire. But Afrikaans was still a young language, with comparatively few active playwrights. To add to what was available for the stage, directors and companies continued the established tradition of translating works from other languages.11 See Marisa Keuris, ‘Die veranderende wêreld van Afrikaanse dramavertalings en -verwerkings: Enkele opmerkings,’ Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 60, no. 1 (2020): 3–15. In this way – like other European writers translated into Afrikaans in the twentieth century – Swiss playwrights were co-opted in the project of bolstering Afrikaans itself, a language whose literary growth was tightly bound to Afrikaner nationalism.

Does this make Frisch and Dürrenmatt opportunistic supporters of the apartheid regime? To proponents of the playwrights’ boycott, it may well have seemed so. Yet the boundaries between complicity and resistance are more porous than much historical writing suggests. By appearing on apartheid’s stages, Frisch and Dürrenmatt inadvertently created openings: progressive Afrikaans directors and playwrights seized on their work – and on that of other European writers who allowed their plays to be performed in South Africa – to open small windows of reflection and debate in an otherwise airless cultural atmosphere.

While this book concentrates on the Afrikaans lives of Dürrenmatt and Frisch, it does so with an awareness of the wider theatrical and political landscapes from which their work emerged. In post-war Europe – where West Germany was undergoing waves of protest and moral reckoning in the 1960s and ’70s – Switzerland remained comparatively stable and inward-looking. South Africa, meanwhile, was in the grip of an authoritarian regime that outlawed progressive and supposedly left-wing influences and sought to consolidate Afrikaner nationalist power. The theatre companies that performed Frisch and Dürrenmatt in Afrikaans formed part of that project. Notwithstanding the subversive efforts of progressive playwrights and directors, they remained institutions of cultural affirmation within an exclusionary order whose audiences were drawn from the Afrikaner establishment. This renders the transformative potential of these plays necessarily limited when compared to the openly oppositional, often English-language theatres where playwrights such as Fugard worked outside of government control.

These tensions give rise to a number of questions that run through this book. Can theatre awaken a desire for political change among a socially privileged, oppressive class? And if so, can it translate into meaningful change? In the context of apartheid South Africa, what are the costs, for a playwright, of reaching such an audience? Most pertinent of all: what happens when the theatre called upon to move hearts, minds, and – above all – hands is foreign theatre, especially theatre in translation?

The Afrikaners who were heavily defeated by the British in the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog (Second Freedom War), also known as the South African War (1899–1902), and who stumbled into the twentieth century were the descendants of the Dutch who had settled at the Cape of Good Hope from 1652 onwards, later joined by French Huguenots and German immigrants. Having resisted both Dutch and English colonial powers during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they had come to consider themselves a colonized people. They had also come to consider themselves natives, ‘although separate from and elevated above the original indigenous population’.12 ‘maar dan los van en verhewe bo die oorspronklike inheemse bewoners’. Henriette Roos, ‘Perspektief op die Afrikaanse prosa van die twintigste eeu’, Perspektief & profiel: ’n Afrikaanse literatuurgeskiedenis Deel I, ed. H. P. van Coller (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 1998), 29. They were not reconciled to black South Africans, the real losers of the centuries-old tussle for the tip of Africa. Nor were they reconciled to the English-speaking white population who had arrived after Great Britain first captured the Cape from the Dutch in 1795. In the Afrikaners’ future lay a period of economic struggle for survival that went hand in hand with their political and cultural aspirations. Eventually they would consolidate enormous power in the system of apartheid, implemented between 1948 and 1994.

Central to this process was the rise of Afrikaans, spoken in several varieties since at least the nineteenth century. Its development into a muscular literary, political, and academic language took place in a milieu long dominated by English and Dutch. Spearheaded by the First and Second Afrikaans Language Movements (1875–1900, and 1905–1925 respectively) which promoted the language by campaigning for a Bible translation, establishing Afrikaans-medium schools, newspapers, and publishing houses, it gradually grew in stature. By 1925 the official definition of Dutch was broadened to include Afrikaans, which was still very much an emerging language. By 1961, when South Africa became a republic, the status of Afrikaans and Dutch was reversed – henceforth, Afrikaans was deemed to include Dutch.

But those who came to be known as Afrikaners were not the sole – or even the primary – progenitors of the language. The earliest Afrikaans books, a total of eleven by the end of the nineteenth century, were actually published in Arabic script.13 See Achmat Davids, The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims, ed. Hein Willemse and Suleman E. Dangor (Pretoria: Protea, 2011), 84–7; see also Abdulkader Tayob, Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 28. Once pejoratively known as ‘kitchen Dutch’ due to its origins among the enslaved and servant populations of Cape farms and households, Afrikaans emerged as a lingua franca, shaped by seventeenth-century Dutch and the languages of enslaved people – including Southeast Asian Muslims and Africans.14 See Robert C. H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994), 40–6, 58–65.

But as the Afrikanervolk constructed itself, so-called Standard Afrikaans became a potent symbol of whiteness, while the variants spoken by those who would be designated ‘coloured’ during apartheid were marginalized and stigmatized as inferior.15 See C. S. van der Waal, ‘Creolisation and purity: Afrikaans language politics in post-apartheid times’, African Studies 71, no. 3 (2012): 449. This strategy turned out to be hugely successful. Later it even became possible to forget that when Arnoldus Pannevis was still advocating for an Afrikaans translation of the Bible in 1872, it was already the religious language of the Cape Muslims, functioning as the medium of instruction in the Cape’s madrassas since the 1840s.

In the twentieth century, Afrikaners successfully harnessed Afrikaans to further their economic, political, and social goals, with its literature eventually seen as inseparable from the just and good aspirations of the white Afrikanervolk. When critic P. C. Schoonees looked back on twenty-five years of Afrikaans literature from the perspective of 1927, he declared, ‘everywhere we see the desire towards growing independence, the disassociating of spiritual and economic bondage, the continual development according to own nature, the lush growth of a volk’s emerging soul.’16 ‘orals sien ons die drang tot meerdere selfstandigheid, die losmaking uit geestelike en ekonomiese knegskap, die gestadige ontwikkeling volgens eie geaardheid, die welige groei van ’n ontluikende volksiel.’ P. C. Schoonees, Die prosa van die Tweede Afrikaanse Beweging (Pretoria: De Bussy, 1927), 40.

Translation played no small role in the rise of Afrikaans literature, and by extension, of Afrikaner nationalism. Nationalism here should be understood not merely as a set of historical events but as an ideological project that transforms language, culture, and institutions into instruments for imagining and consolidating a specific group of people.17 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016). Nationalist ideology creates a bounded political community by promoting certain myths of origin, hierarchies of belonging, and cultural orthodoxies – often through the medium of print. In the case of Afrikaner nationalism, the institutional promotion of Afrikaans was central: the language became both a badge of identity and a tool for social and political inclusion and exclusion.

Through much of the twentieth century, translation contributed to the intellectual scaffolding of Afrikaner nationalism. Early on, it was enlisted to develop the fledgling language, an indigenous one created by a colonized people. Afrikaans writers came to understand that bolstering the canon of Afrikaans-language works through translation and simultaneously claiming the world of international literature could place that language on the same level as the colonial. Ultimately, it could further ‘the ideal of elevating Afrikaans and the readers of Afrikaans in the march of the nations’.18 ‘die ideaal om Afrikaans en die lesers van Afrikaans op te stoot in die vaart van die volkere.’ Etienne Britz, ‘Afrikaans as vertaalmedium is twintig jaar agter’, Die Burger, 5 August 1999.

A vast quantity of world literature was translated in the first half of the century. This includes the first Swiss book translated into Afrikaans – Gottfried Keller’s Kleider machen Leute, rendered by Antoinette Elizabeth Carinus as Vere maak die voël and published in 1929.19 Gottfried Keller, Vere maak die voël, trans. A. E. Carinus (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1929). Subsequently, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi was translated by schoolteacher and translator Francois J. Eybers and published in 1945 and 1947.20 Johanna Spyri, Heidi, trans. F. J. Eybers (Pretoria: Unie Boekhandel Uitgewers, 1945); Johanna Spyri, Heidi: Deel II, trans. F. J. Eybers (Pretoria: Unie Boekhandel Uitgewers, 1947). Several other translations of Heidi would follow, ensuring that the Afrikaans child could encounter the most famous German-language Swiss work in their mother tongue.21 See Johanna Spyri, Heidi, arr. Florence Hayes, ill. Erika Weihs, trans. Bartho Smit (Johannesburg and London: Paulton, 1955); see also Johanna Spyri, Heidi, trans. Pieter W. Grobbelaar (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1968).

In the second half of the century, Afrikaans writers shifted their focus. Frustrated with a stagnant original literary culture, they turned to translated literature as a foundation for a new, modern Afrikaans literature. It was in this context that the plays of Frisch and Dürrenmatt began to be translated. Their prose works, too, found their way into Afrikaans translation. At least five of Dürrenmatt’s novels – Das Versprechen, Die Panne, Grieche sucht Griechin, Der Richter und sein Henker, and Der Verdacht – as well as Frisch’s novel, Stiller, were translated, injecting European modernist influences into the Afrikaans literary landscape.

Nationalism had namely left a peculiar mark on original Afrikaans literature. In 1936, the influential writer N. P. van Wyk Louw criticized what he labelled as the ‘cozy local realism’ that had come to characterize Afrikaans prose.22 ‘gemoedelike lokale realisme’. N. P. van Wyk Louw, ‘Berigte te velde’, Versamelde prosa 1 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1986), 6. He called for a literature that instead of idealizing reality, reflected it honestly and in its totality, concluding, ‘everything, absolutely everything that moves modern man, that gives him joy or pain, must also find its way into our literature’.23 ‘Alles, maar ook alles wat die moderne mens roer, wat sy vreugde of smart maak, moet ook in ons literatuur sy neerslag kry’. Ibid., 9. For him, too, language and literature were inseparable from national goals. Should Afrikaans literature fail, he wrote, ‘we will be a disgrace among the nations and our language will disappear from this country’.24 ‘sal ons ’n smaad onder die volke wees en ons taal uit hierdie land verdwyn’. Ibid., 11. Yet, twenty-two years later, in 1958, he was still using the same label to describe Afrikaans prose, lamenting its stagnation as a threat to Afrikaner culture and, by extension, to the continued existence of the Afrikanervolk.25 See N. P. van Wyk Louw, ‘Stilstand in ons prosa?’, Vernuwing in die prosa (Pretoria: Academica, 1967), 63–72.

Louw clearly thought in ethnic terms and was deeply committed to Afrikaner nationalism, yet he also grappled with its ethical implications. In crucial ways his vision differed from that of other Afrikaner ideologues.26 See T. Dunbar Moodie, ‘N.P. van Wyk Louw and the moral predicament of Afrikaner nationalism: Preparing the ground for verligte reform’, Historia 54, no. 1 (2009): 180–210 for the impact of Louw’s ideas on Afrikaner intellectuals, enabling F. W. de Klerk’s move in 1990 to end minority white rule. Whereas much Afrikaner historical writing used culture to legitimize political domination, and this premised on Western superiority, Louw believed that in order to justify their ‘right to existence’, a people had to strive for work worth defending.27 ‘bestaansreg’. Louw, ‘Berigte te velde’, 3. He also cautioned against a nationalism that forgot that Afrikaners were a people among other peoples, warning against ‘the last temptation: to believe that mere survival is preferable to survival in justice’.28 ‘die laaste versoeking: om te glo dat die blote voortbestaan verkieslik is bo die voortbestaan in geregtigheid’ (Louw’s italics). N. P. van Wyk Louw, ‘Liberale nasionalisme’, Versamelde prosa 1, 462. With remarkable foresight he recognized that oppression ultimately harms both oppressor and oppressed, asking as early as 1952: ‘How can a small volk continue to exist, if it is something hateful and evil for the best within – and without – it?’29 ‘Hoe kan ’n klein volk lank bly voortbestaan, as hy iets haatliks en iets boos is vir die beste binne – of buite – hom?’ Ibid., 463.

If Louw’s ideas were to influence the younger set of writers, it was also because he was one of the first to recognize the emergence of the Sestigers (literally ‘sixtiers’), South Africa’s very own modernists.30 See Louw, Vernuwing in die prosa, 101–38; see also Roos, ‘Perspektief op die Afrikaanse prosa’, 56–8. Named after the decade in which they gained prominence, this loose collective emerged out of that stagnant literary landscape to become the enfants terribles of the conservative literary establishment. They included Bartho Smit, Etienne Leroux, André P. Brink, Jan Rabie, Chris Barnard, Adam Small, Breyten Breytenbach, and Ingrid Jonker, whose poem ‘The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga’ was read by Nelson Mandela in 1994 at the opening of the first democratically elected parliament of South Africa.

In the Sestigers, the project of Afrikaner nationalism eventually got more than it had bargained for. The work of these writers addressed subjects hitherto avoided in Afrikaans literature: the life experiences of black South Africans, for example, or sexuality, disparagingly chalked down by critic A. P. Grové as substituting for the loss of ‘the fatherland, history, religion’ as sources of inspiration.31 ‘die vaderland, die geskiedenis, die godsdiens’. A. P. Grové, ‘Inleiding tot die literatuur van sestig’, Die Afrikaanse literatuur sedert sestig, eds. T. T. Cloete, A. P. Grové, J. P. Smuts, and Elize Botha (Cape Town: Nasou Beperk, 1980), 4. But far more decisive than political events or ideological differences was when laws governing the arts culminated in 1963 in the formation of a Publications Control Board that could ban publications for various reasons. While it took ten years for the first Afrikaans novel (André P. Brink’s Kennis van die aand) to be officially prohibited in this way, opposition against censorship became a node around which the Sestigers gathered, exposing a literary establishment caught uncomfortably between literary merit and nationalist ideals.

Frisch and Dürrenmatt appeared in Afrikaans at roughly the same time as the Sestigers, in a literary landscape that looked very different from the one that preceded it. The divergent pulls of nationalism and literary experimentation had created spaces in which subversive content could take root and grow, but writers also had to find their way around censorship. After 1963 any publication could be banned if found ‘undesirable’ according to a broad list of criteria that included causing religious offence, bringing ‘any section of the inhabitants of the Republic into ridicule or contempt’, and being ‘prejudicial to the safety of the State’.32 Publications and Entertainments Act 26 of 1963, available at https://theliteraturepolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/publications-and-entertainments-act-1963.pdf. Similarly, public performance of a play could be prohibited for a variety of reasons.

Some of those who translated Dürrenmatt and Frisch did so in the service of Afrikaner nationalism. But others enlisted translation as a vehicle of resistance against the apartheid regime. The ambiguity that is so often a feature of Frisch’s plays had particular power in this environment; so too Dürrenmatt’s scenarios that so often blur the lines between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. As I will show in this book, their plays generally passed muster with the Board of Censors and the government-constituted boards that determined which plays could be seen on apartheid’s stages. Nevertheless, their plays still contained ideas pertinent to the South African situation, ideas that – so progressive directors and translators hoped – could move individual audience members and critics to consider the world around them with new eyes.

Although he did not undertake any of the translating work himself, the driving force behind the vast majority of Afrikaans translations of Frisch and Dürrenmatt in the 1960s was a young theatre director called Mario Schiess. A Swiss immigrant who had come to South Africa in his teens, Schiess eventually realized that Swiss literature had exerted a powerful impact on Afrikaans. Yet he did not see himself as working in the service of Afrikaner nationalism. Quite the opposite. In 1963 – even as the cultural boycott was gathering momentum – he wrote a letter to Frisch in which he petitioned him for the English rights to his play Andorra. ‘The whole world knows where South Africa stands on the racial issue,’ he wrote. ‘It is true that the politics here are very misunderstood in Europe and are also being misused as a kind of whitewash for other issues. Nevertheless, in my opinion the principle on which this policy is based is wrong. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to me to be able to perform Andorra here: because those who have eyes will see what is meant.’33 ‘Die ganze Welt weiss, wie Süd-Afrika zur Rassenfrage steht. Zwar ist die hiesige Politik in Europa sehr missverstanden und sie wird für Übertuschungszwecke auch missbraucht. Trotzdem ist nach meiner Meinung das Prinzip, worauf diese Politik ruht, falsch. Dies ist einer meiner Gründe, warum mir so viel daran liegt, Andorra hier zu spielen, denn jene, die Augen haben, werden sehen was gemeint ist.’ Mario Schiess to Max Frisch, circa 1963, correspondence, private collection.

There is no evidence that Frisch needed convincing to allow his plays to be staged in South Africa, nor, for that matter, that he ever received and read Schiess’s letter. As it happens, Schiess only acquired English rights to Andorra the following year, when they were no longer under license in New York. But he did acquire the Afrikaans rights in 1963, and he and others would continue to stage Swiss plays in Afrikaans and English until the final decade of apartheid. The last Afrikaans production of a Swiss text that I could trace was one of Dürrenmatt’s: an Afrikaans Die Physiker in 1980. Surviving correspondence shows that by the middle of that decade, Frisch, at least, was responding to requests to stage his work in Afrikaans with ‘Bitte lieber nicht’.34 Max Frisch to Helene Ritzerfeld, 29 October 1986, correspondence, Max Frisch Archive, ETH Zurich.

Contrary to how I presented it at the start of this introduction, the playwrights’ boycott was deeply complex. Its debates prefigured the broader academic and cultural boycott of the 1980s, which, coordinated through international organisations and university networks, sought to isolate South African institutions until the end of apartheid.

The issue remained contested throughout the 1960s and 1970s, leading some of its earliest supporters to reconsider their stance. One of them was Fugard himself, who came to believe that the boycott supported the regime’s agenda by isolating the country even further. Eventually, he allowed his own plays to be presented in front of segregated audiences, arguing in 1965: ‘We have each to make a personal assessment of what is going to be most effective – speech under certain conditions or silence. I believe speech is of more value.’35 Lewis Sowden, ‘Atholl [sic.] Fugard explains’, Rand Daily Mail, 9 October 1965. Fugard and other theatre professionals also began encouraging international playwrights to relax their stance and by 1975 prominent writers like Peter Shaffer, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams allowed their work to be staged in South Africa again.

Schiess shared Fugard’s viewpoint, writing his own open letter to playwrights abroad in which he described their works as ‘one of the few weapons left in our fight to retain our individuality, our humanity whether we belong to one race or another’.36 Schiess, ‘Dear Forty-eight’, n.d., manuscript, private collection. Schiess’s argument is worth repeating here at length:

In close readings of the surviving translations, I take my cue from theorist Lawrence Venuti by resisting the notion of ‘the translator’s invisibility’ that has proved so pervasive throughout the twentieth century.37 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 2018). This concept involves two mutually determining practices: the translator’s use of language to create a particular illusion, and the general reception and evaluation of a translation as if it is not a translation at all. Between these two moments, Venuti argues, the translator becomes invisible, and their labour undervalued except to the extent that it succeeds in creating the illusion of linguistic transparency.

Translators may be nowhere less visible than in the theatre, where conventional wisdom dictates that translation demands, above all, fluency and intelligibility. Yet this is a sleight of hand. All translators, Venuti argues, absorb elements from the culture into which they are translating – vocabulary, translation traditions, or ideologies – alongside the foreign text and cultural material consulted during the translation process. This heterogeneous mixture inevitably produces discontinuities, not only between the source text and resulting translation, but also within the translation itself. A close ‘symptomatic reading’ that identifies these discontinuities reveals the translation to be simultaneously a ‘violent rewriting of the foreign text’ and ‘a strategic intervention into the receiving culture’.38 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 21. It also lifts the curtain on a living translator working in a specific time and place and making consequential decisions about the text being rewritten.

One way to identify these discontinuities is through the concepts of foreignization and domestication. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s influential theory of translation distinguishes two positions: ‘Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.’39 Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the different methods of translating’, trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd edition, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2012), 49. In Venuti’s framework, the former strategy produces a foreignized text that resists fluency and deliberately alienates by disturbing the cultural and linguistic norms of the target culture. The latter produces a fluent and domesticated text that hides its translator and ‘forgets’ that it is a translation.

Foreignization and domestication represent ethical points of departure towards text and culture; yet their significance emerges only within the cultural discourse in which they operate. A symptomatic reading that attempts to identify and engage with them is therefore of necessity anachronistic, determined, in turn, by contemporary perspectives.

While Venuti’s project links domesticated English translations to the hidden asymmetrical relations between the English-speaking world and the rest of the globe, mine examines the translation of Swiss literature into Afrikaans from a post-post-apartheid perspective. Critiquing ‘an important function of Afrikaans as cultural engine of South Africa’, I hope to offer glimpses into how Afrikaner nationalism and racial segregation were maintained during the twentieth century, as well as into the narrow spaces that began to open in the 1960s and 1970s for dissent and critical dialogue.40 ‘’n belangrike funksie van Afrikaans as kulturele enjin van Suid-Afrika’. Britz, ‘Afrikaans as vertaalmedium’.

Chapter 1 of this book focuses on the first Afrikaans production of a Swiss play, Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter staged by Swiss immigrant Mario Schiess with the amateur Volksteater in 1962, reading it against two pivotal historical moments – the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Johannesburg Station Bomb planted by John Harris in 1964. Chapter 2 examines the first Dürrenmatt play staged in Afrikaans that same year – a translation by Sestiger Bartho Smit of Der Besuch der alten Dame, reading this high-profile professional production as a strategic contribution to the Afrikaans theatre canon. Chapter 3 returns the focus to Mario Schiess and the Volksteater and to two Swiss plays that they subsequently staged in the 1960s: Afrikaans versions of Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker in 1963 and Frisch’s Andorra in 1964. Andorra is read as a warning against the consequences of racial stereotyping, applicable to both apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.

Chapter 4 considers another two Dürrenmatt plays staged by Schiess in the 1960s: Afrikaans productions of Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi in 1966 and Der Meteor in 1967, exploring the potent local resonances of the former, and Schiess’s break with the Volksteater after Der Meteor proved too challenging for the company, given their conservative Afrikaner Christian nationalist ethos.

Chapter 5 introduces a new locus for Afrikaans Frisch and Dürrenmatt plays – the state-subsidised Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB) under the leadership of artistic director Pieter Fourie, examining his first two productions against the background of apartheid censorship: Afrikaans versions of Dürrenmatt’s Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi in 1973 and Frisch’s Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie in 1975. Chapter 6 circles back, as it were, to Fourie’s Afrikaans staging of Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter in 1978, reading it this time against the Soweto Uprising of 1976 to demonstrate the play’s shifting meanings against a changed historical background. It concludes, finally, with a discussion of Robert Mohr’s translation of Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker staged at CAPAB in 1980, considering it as perhaps the most significant of all the Afrikaans Swiss plays staged during the apartheid years.