Isidlamlilo – this fire burns within us all

How do we make sense of the violent histories that mark our past? This play, Isidlamlilo, forces us to engage seriously with this question. Depending on your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realization that history is a living breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo is set in the dying days of Apartheid, and in the present democratic South Africa. Some South Africans may think they know the history of this time. Some South Africans would like to forget so they can pretend that they are not affected or made complicit by this time. This play is here to remind us that there are many things we do not know about this time. To remind us that the stories of countless Black South African women can be a liberating force as we process our relationship to a violent and painful past. This play Isidlamlilo is a gift, an offering, a reckoning, an awakening to the discomfort and necessity of embracing the complexities of a ‘history from below’, that we all must sit with. We need stories like Isidlamlilo to heal. Stories that refuse to fit into the neat versions of history that we use to justify our current actions.

Reclaiming and redressing our past through recording and making visible the histories of “the black majority and of liberation movements in particular” remains an important political project. The political project of producing history can however take many forms, both liberating and oppressive. As Noor Nieftagodien illustrates the production of public history since the 1990s has focused on “grand national(ist) narratives” which can marginalize local experiences, or only recognize their contributions to change if it serves the dominant narrative. In its “narrower and most popular form this exercise of historical rewriting has inclined to justify the current regimes of power”. Isidlamlilo challenges the grand narrative of what it was like to struggle during and against Apartheid. It does so by telling an unfamiliar story woven into the familiar horror of Apartheid. A story in which we can no longer easily find who to blame.

We find Zenzile, alone with her memories, in a small one-room unit in an all-women’s hostel in the city of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal’s largest city. Under apartheid black people were not allowed to live in the city, except in highly regulated hostel spaces. First established in 1923 hostels were, under colonialism and then apartheid, dormitory like buildings run by local municipalities for black workers who provided an exploited work force for urban industries.  Hostels initially only housed men, and no families were allowed in these buildings. However, already by the 1920s, as colonial rule decimated patterns and practices of subsistence in rural area in favour of waged labour, more and more black women came into cities looking for work.   Eventually women only hostels such as the one that Zenzile lives in were built. 

Hostels in South Africa are intimately wrapped up in the IFP and ANC violence of the 1990s. In greater Durban (now eThekwini municipality) some of the hostels become IFP strongholds. These hostels, particularly the large, overcrowded blocks in Umlazi and KwaMashu, become politically contested spaces where party membership and loyalty was strictly policed. Violence broke out both between hostel dwellers and between hostel dwellers and township residents (who were perceived to be ANC supporters). This legacy of violence continues in a few hostels today. Under the democratic government hostels have been renamed Community Residential Units. Hostels remain the first port of call for many people entering the city from rural areas looking for work. Sadly, they also remain marginalized and neglected spaces by many municipalities.  Men’s hostels have opened to families, and women. A transition that has been welcomed by some residents and contested by others. The hostel that Zenzile has made her home, however, remains a women’s only hostel. A feature that the women who stay in it deeply appreciate.  How these socially marginalized spaces were engineered by oppressive colonial and apartheid regimes, and way it shaped life for many people migrating into the city is excellently documented in South African literature.  Paulus Zulu’s 1993 article on the violence in the Umlazi and KwaMashu hostels clearly shows how the “social organisation of the hostels, marginalisation and alienation, predispose hostels to mobilisation and consequently violence on the slightest signs of provocation”. It is important, he argues, to recognise that hostel dwellers are not “inherently aggressive, but [rather] that the social conditions that they live under make them easy prey to political manipulation”.   Zenzile Masuko’s story of how she becomes part of an IFP squad of women assassins is very much a part of these wider political tensions. What isidlamlilo makes clear, however, is that Zenzile Masuko is no pawn swept along in a tide of unstoppable history.  Meaningful public storytelling, such as what Neil Coppen and Mpume Mthombeni have created in this play, instead shows us how our own stories are always in a dynamic conversation with the sociological conditions in which we find ourselves. 

Zenzile’s story is inspired by the lives of real women living in a Durban hostel. These women were part of an oral history project on migration, gender and inclusion run by the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology.  These women shared their stories of arriving in the city of Durban for the first time, and what it means to try and make this place something like home. Oral histories were collected from 30 women. The majority of the oral history participants had travelled to South Africa from other countries in Africa. Importantly, the project also wanted to record the stories of South African women who migrated from rural areas into the city. While women have diverse experiences navigating urban life, there is much that is shared for women across these perceived national identities as they navigate patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and other forms of discrimination.  It is in these women’s oral histories that we learnt that hostels, while difficult spaces with little privacy, are also places of sanctuary for some women. Desiring to move beyond just a recording of oral history,  the Urban Futures Centre collaborated with Empatheatre to move these stories beyond the walls of academia to ignite a public engagement with oral histories that might challenge the problematic narratives around migrants and refugees in our city. This collaboration created a powerful piece of research-based theatre, The Last Country, that was performed across the city in 2018 and 2019.  

In this process of creating The Last Country, the story of one South African woman living in a hostel sat with Neil Coppen and Mpume Mthombeni. It was the story of a Fire Eater. I believe that “sharing stories can change the meaning and experience of the world through reconstituting the social realm, for the storyteller and the listener”.  Over the next two years I watched this story reconstitute Neil and Mpume’s sense of the world. It was a story that refused to sit down and be quiet. It was a story that fascinated, troubled, and expanded their understanding of our social realm. It was a story that demanded to be shared. I am very grateful that they honored the sharing of this story in the beautiful play you are about to now read.  

It is in the richness and strength of women’s experiences, and how these intimate narratives are stitched into, and shaped by the politics of our land past and present, that Zenzile’s story is masterfully told. Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightening bird), in Zulu folklore a shapeshifting bird associated with witchcraft and the harbinger of storms and death. Zenzile’s story is a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism, and traditional beliefs as she shares the, at times brutal, at times forgiving, realities of surviving in this land. It is a performance that touches on what it means to live with, and through, political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutally of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments. It is also the story of an unimaginably formidable woman, a powerful agent in her own right, with a wicked sense of humour. Isidlamlilo reminds us that we are seldom one thing in this world. As we walk with Zenzile through her memories she reminds us of what it means to refuse to die, to refuse to be overcome.