The Junction Avenue Theatre Company's Sophiatown and the Limits of National Oneness

Abstract

This paper examines the new post-conflict chapter being written in a postapartheid South Africa. The nation-building discourse of reconciliation, endorsed by both the present government and South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has been a crucial agent of a new collective memory after the trauma of apartheid. But there is, in fact, little that is "new" or "post" in a country that retains apartheid features of inequity. Terms like "new South Africa" and "rainbow nation," popularized by former president F.W. de Klerk and Desmond Tutu, the former chairperson of the TRC respectively, then, not only ignore the "morbid" aspects of South Africa's bloody road to democracy, but they also inaccurately suggest a break with the past. As I will illustrate in my discussion of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company's 1986 play, Sophiatown, the past continues to infringe on the present in disturbing ways. A critique of the dominant discourse of reconciliation, this paper will examine critical responses to Sophiatown as well as consider the relevance of this play for the "new" South Africa. Put differently, how much of an achievement is Sophiatown and to what extent is its focus on reconciliation a model for the future?