Madiba’s Song: Opera and the state in post-Apartheid South Africa

After watching the latest stage work about the life and times of Nelson Mandela, J. BROOKS SPECTOR contemplates the place of opera in today’s South Africa.

Way back in those supposedly halcyon days of the Apartheid state, opera (along with ballet) was purposely used to prove the importance and vitality of European high culture right at the southern tip of Africa, thousands of kilometres from its presumed spiritual home, way to the North. As South Africa’s cultural isolation took hold with a vengeance from the late 1970s, it became even more imperative to Apartheid’s cultural commissars to make the case to an increasingly worried population that South Africa’s segregated culture was still strong, was still safe, and, most importantly, perhaps, was still white.
Then, as the old regime finally collapsed in the 1990s, its long-time cultural critics, arguing for support for a new and increasingly authentic South African culture, took out their ire on the relics of the old regime. While there were no tumbrils or guillotines providing an ultimate dramatic ending to Apartheid-era cultural leaders (or pretty much anybody else), the new cultural nomenklatura aimed for the bureaucratic equivalent. They decried opera, ballet and most other classical performing arts as hopelessly Eurocentric, worthy only of being cut off at the financial knees. In succeeding years, the PACT (Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal) opera program was wound down, the ballet company likewise. Behind these choices was the idea that a new country deserved a new cultural universe – and the old ways of doing grand opera would not be part of it.

Of course things were never quite as simple and clear-cut as the old Apartheid regime – or the new authorities – made it out to be – or wanted it to become. For example, the Eoan Group, a Coloured music and dance ensemble based in Cape Town, regularly produced full-scale operas and ballets, even, on occasion, touring to Johannesburg with a clutch of full-scale operas performed in repertoire in one tour. It continued performing until political and financial vicissitudes effectively wound down most of its activities by the 1970s.

And until Apartheid strictures finally put an end to them as well, there were regular seasonal performances of works like Handel’s Messiah with thoroughly integrated casts in Johannesburg (although audiences were segregated at alternate evenings). Up through the present, black choral groups have routinely included excerpts from the most popular grand operas and oratorios, together with traditional hymns and secular choral works.

But an intriguing paradox in South Africa, even as opera was being effectively denigrated as un-African and retrograde politically, an entire generation of gifted young singers, most recently including such stunners as Pretty Yende and Kelebogile Boikanyo, were finding their way to the operatic repertoire, and then on to serious training in the opera programmes at universities, even if their professional futures were problematic. Meanwhile, in spite of official reluctance to embrace opera in funding terms, several entrepreneurial cultural organisers began producing operas in the country’s major cities – and even commissioning some new works.

Most notably, after its debut in South Africa, Mzilikazi Khumalo’s Princess Magogo has been performed abroad and – after several rewrites - is probably South Africa’s best-known locally written opera. Drawn from the true story of a daughter of a Zulu king who was ordered to compose her music in order to rally a conquered, shattered society, thereby surrendering her desires for love and a family, the work made use of more usual operatic conventions as well as inspiration from Magogo’s actual compositions.

From its enthusiastic reception in South Africa as well as a favourable reception at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, Khumalo’s opera (orchestrated by others) seems to have led the way for a rethink for South African officialdom – and a real volte-face about the uses of opera in the battle to sculpt a new nation. No longer just for those Eurocentric wannabes, opera was now a tool to demonstrate that the new South Africa could play in the cultural big leagues – that this so-called provincial nation could also do the operatic dance. Khumalo’s Princess Magogo has been followed by a work like Phelelani Mnomiya’s Ziyankomo and the Forbidden Fruit, offering an entire opera in isiZulu as part of the national project.

In one sense, this growing embrace of opera has meant that South Africa was now recapitulating some of the ways opera evolved in Europe and America during the past century and a half. Sponsors with big pockets vied for supporting expensive productions in increasingly lavish venues – and as the most talented singers became popular entertainment stars. Increasingly, too, operas were composed along nationalist themes – often drawing upon the recognisably indigenous music of the respective countries of the composers. And now in South Africa, quite suddenly, not one but four new operas have been written about the late Nelson Mandela – or Winnie.
J Brooks Spector