‘The country was already burning.’
2 ‘Die land was al aan die brand.’ Pieter Fourie, author interview, 16 October 2020.‘Dis daarom dat ek nie koerante lees nie’ (‘That’s why I don’t read newspapers’), Frisch’s Biedermann explained from the stage of the Nico Malan in April 1978.
3 Max Frisch, Die Brandstigters, trans. Merwe Scholtz, manuscript, 1978, in the possession of the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), scene I:8. His reasoning was simple: ‘Omdat dit altyd dieselfde ou storie is’ (‘Because it’s always the same old story’). Not much had changed since the Afrikaans premiere of
Biedermann und die Brandstifter sixteen years earlier. Many white South Africans remained blind to the evil around them – either for their own comfort or because, in their insular and homogeneous communities, they had never fully developed the capacity to see. Yet, as Schmitz points out in the play, ‘dis tog geen oplossing om jou oë vir die koerante te sluit nie; ’n mens moet tog ten slotte weet wat vir hom voorlê’ (‘Surely it’s no solution to close your eyes to the newspapers; one must, at the end of the day, know what lies in store’).
4 Frisch, Die Brandstigters, scene I:8.By the time Pieter Fourie programmed
Biedermann in 1978, the stench of petrol was everywhere. Two years earlier, the Soweto Uprising had left the domestic landscape indelibly changed. On 16 June 1976, black schoolchildren in the township of Soweto had protested against the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools. Not only was Afrikaans known as the ‘language of the oppressor’, but very few black schoolchildren were fluent enough to feel comfortable receiving tuition in it. Antoinette Sithole, fifteen years old at the time, remembers thinking incredulously: ‘The very same subject that you are struggling with in English, we are going to do them in Afrikaans?’
5 In Aryn Baker and Time staff, ‘This photo galvanized the world against apartheid. Here’s the story behind it’, Time Magazine, available at https://time.com/4365138/soweto-anniversary-photograph/. Together with an estimated 20,000 students, Sithole packed her bag with placards and joined a planned march to Orlando Stadium. That morning, amidst clouds of teargas, falling rocks, and the strains of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, bullets were fired. One of the first to fall was Antoinette’s twelve-year-old brother, Hector Pieterson.
That day sparked widespread unrest in which arson was a powerful tool: in the aftermath, protestors burnt down government buildings, schools, libraries, beer halls, and clinics. It was also the catalyst for longer-term violent opposition against the regime. Protest culture became widespread in black communities, paving the way for the demonstrations, boycotts, violent sabotage, and states of national emergency that characterized the 1980s. In the middle of that decade, Winnie Mandela infamously declared: ‘With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country’, ‘necklaces’ referring to a method of execution during which a rubber tyre drenched with petrol and forced around a victim’s torso was set alight.
6 In Johanna Ball, ‘The ritual of the necklace’, research report written for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, 1994, available at https://www.csvr.org.za/wp-content/uploads/1994/02/The-Ritual-of-the-Necklace.pdf.The events of 16 June 1976 didn’t send shockwaves through South Africa alone. Thanks to Sam Nzima, one of the photojournalists present that day, they reverberated around the world. When he ‘saw a little boy fall down’ during the increasingly chaotic and violent march, he picked up his camera.
7 Baker and Times staff, ‘This photo galvanized’. One of the photographs he took turned the world’s indignant gaze on South Africa at a crucial point in the Struggle. First published in
The World, it was soon carried on front pages of newspapers around the world.
8 See Shaun Smillie, ‘Hector Pieterson and the 16 June photograph that changed everything’, Daily Maverick, 12 June 2021, available at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-06-12-hector-pieterson-16-june-1976-youth-day-photograph/; see also Milton Nkosi, ‘Sam Nzima: The man behind the iconic photo of the fight against apartheid’, BBC News, 14 May 2018, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44082115. Yet that wasn’t the only shocking photograph Nzima had taken that day. Another captured the violent death of a policeman during the ensuing escalation. ‘The students got hold of one policeman and they put him down on the ground and they slaughtered him like a goat’, Nzima recalled. ‘They set him on fire. He was burnt beyond recognition.’
9 Baker and Times staff, ‘This photo galvanized’. That particular photograph was destroyed when police forced Nzima to open his camera and expose all his films except one that he had hidden in his sock. Years later
Time Magazine reported that Nzima often reflected on the two scenes he had captured, although they were hardly equivalent. He wondered at the course of history had both photographs survived to be put in front of the world.
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Figure 23: Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of Hector Pieterson carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo and with Hector’s sister Antoinette Pieterson running alongside, 16 June 1976.
As it was, international opinion hardened decisively against the regime. South Africa was already isolated on the world stage. No longer buffered by colonial territories governed by European powers, most of its neighbours were now independent black states. Whereas the systematic racism that characterized its society had once mirrored the status quo in other countries such as the United States, it was now alone in pursuing its increasingly expensive policies of institutionalized racism and segregation. The Soweto Uprising gave the world an image of police brutality against Africans, forever stamping in their minds proof of the terrible human cost of apartheid. International bodies responded with increased economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, giving the international boycott renewed impetus.
When, eighteen months later, Frisch was again approached for the Afrikaans performing rights to
Biedermann und die Brandstifter, he granted them on the condition – made for the first time – that ‘jedermann’ (‘everyman’) should have entry to the theatre and the possibility to purchase a ticket.
10 In relaying the request for the Afrikaans performing rights, Helene Ritzerfeld of Suhrkamp Verlag had written to Frisch as follows: ‘Wir wissen, daß dafür eine selbstverständliche Voraussetzung ist, daß jedermann Zutritt zum Theater hat und die Möglichkeit, eine Eintrittskarte zu kaufen, also niemandem der Eintritt verwehrt wird’ (‘We know that a clear precondition is that everyone has access to the theatre and has the possibility to buy a ticket and, therefore, that no one is denied entrance’). In his response, Frisch agreed, but only on those specific conditions being met. Helene Ritzerfeld to Max Frisch, correspondence, 31 January 1978; Rosemarie Primault to Helene Ritzerfeld, correspondence, 4 February 1978, Max Frisch Archive, ETH Zurich. With the Nico Malan open since 1975 to multiracial audiences, it was a condition Pieter Fourie could readily meet. This was the first Afrikaans production of a Swiss play over the course of sixteen years that a black or coloured South African could attend. Yet whether the new policy had a measurable effect on the audience makeup when the curtain went up remains unclear. Coloured patrons whose first language was Afrikaans could and did see plays at the Nico Malan after 1975, if they could afford the price of a ticket. Whether black South Africans who could do the same would have been interested in attending Afrikaans theatre is another question. Yet another: Would they have been interested in attending Swiss theatre in Afrikaans?