‘Crowing of Cock – Three times with intervals.’
2 ‘Andorra schedule of sounds and music’.By the 1960s and 1970s, Afrikaner Nationalism was largely sympathetic to Judaism, notwithstanding historical attitudes. ‘Nazism flourished in South Africa’ before 1948, the most obvious incarnation being in the
Ossewabrandwag, a nationalist Afrikaner movement openly sympathetic to Nazi Germany.
3 Robert G. Weisbord, ‘The dilemma of South African Jewry’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 5, no. 2 (1967): 235. During the war, the government placed aggressive curbs on Jewish immigration. D. F. Malan, later the first apartheid prime minister, ‘made no secret of his hope that Hitler would win’.
4 Ibid. Nevertheless, after the National Party’s rise to power on the ticket of apartheid, these attitudes shifted to the point where, in 1953, Malan ‘returned from a visit to Israel full of praise and admiration for the “Jewish People”’.
5 Milton Shain, ‘“If it was so good, why was it so bad?”: The memories and realities of Antisemitism in South Africa, past and present’, in Memories, Realities and Dreams: Aspects of the South African Jewish Experience, eds. Milton Shain and Richard Mendelsohn (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2002), 88.Several developments contributed to this. As Afrikaners consolidated their power, the Jewish presence came to be seen as less of a threat. The creation of the State of Israel, regarded by some as ‘the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies’, was equally important.
6 Weisbord, ‘The dilemma of South African Jewry’, 236. Economically, anti-Semitism made little sense in apartheid South Africa. Given that whites were always a numerical minority, neither did emphasizing the distinction between those who were officially regarded as white. Ultimately, it was not difficult for Afrikaners to feel an affinity with a people as deeply religious as the Jews, and, in the words of Malan, with a ‘race-conscious nation’ proud of its identity.
7 See Malan’s foreword to Israel Abrahams, The Birth of a Community: A History of Western Province Jewry from Earliest Times to the End of the South African War, 1902, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, 1955).Writing in 1967, Robert G. Weisbord lamented the price that South African Jewish communities paid for this rapprochement: their support of apartheid’s policies and share in its benefits. Noting the ‘unspoken, but ever-present fear of a possible revival of anti-Semitism in South Africa’, he nevertheless argued that ‘the Jews, both collectively and individually, have an obligation to oppose actively the inhumanity of the Nationalists, not because such opposition is likely to be successful, but because it is right’.
8 Weisbord, ‘The dilemma of South African Jewry’, 233, 241. Some of apartheid’s most vocal opponents would come from the local Jewish population. Nevertheless, as Weisbord concluded, the majority would not actively oppose it. Although they will not support the oppression of the black majority ‘with great enthusiasm and energy’, he wrote, ‘they will play the role of non-political, law-abiding, patriotic bystanders silent in the face of evil’.
9 Ibid., 241.This, alas, is precisely the role played by the citizens of Frisch’s Andorra
. When the curtain rose on Schiess’s production, the play’s provocation might as well have been aimed at the country’s Jewish population, now silent witness to the systematic oppression of blacks. They certainly took note of its staging, with the
Southern African Jewish Times reporting: ‘this Pretoria production lights a torch for compassion and intellectual honesty […] In this translation it loses nothing.’
10 In Mario Schiess to the Director of the Performing Arts Council in Bloemfontein, correspondence, 29 September 1964, private collection. Those who couldn’t understand Afrikaans had an opportunity the following year to see the play in English at the Little Theatre in Cape Town, in a production directed by Fred Engelen. They had another opportunity in November 1968 when Schiess realized his longstanding ambition to direct
Andorra in English, in a three-week run for the Jewish Guild Theatre Group in Johannesburg.
11 Schiess first obtained the English rights in 1964 but encountered difficulties in mounting a production, including having the play turned down by the state-funded Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal.This ironic twist might well have appealed to Frisch. He remained adamant that
Andorra was ‘not about anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism is taken as an example for a general situation – of the problem of human relationships’.
12 Max Frisch, dir. Anthony Farrar, 1997. Indeed,
Andorra’s warning about the failure of
Nächstenliebe was particularly apposite for South Africa. Considering love as an antidote to prejudice, another passage in another playwright’s notebook comes to mind, this one written by Fugard in 1963: ‘South Africa is starving to death from a lack of love. This country is in the grip of its worst drought – and that drought is in the human heart.’
13 Athol Fugard, Notebooks 1960–1977 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 83. As J. M. Coetzee, too, has pointed out: ‘It is ultimately in the lair of the heart that apartheid must be approached.’
14 Coetzee, ‘The mind of apartheid’, 2.