Manenburg is the kind of suburb where hunger, gunshots and gangs keep you up at night. Where apartheid kept the people separate and caramel coloured.
And where young, newly nubile girls trail gang members through dark, dilapidated streets in the hopes that a favour will earn them enough favour to tag along, stay safe, bum a smoke. In 2003, I am in Manenburg.
I’ve taken a University of Cape Town bus from its antithesis with a privileged party determined to brave the danger, the wolf whistles and the deep derisive looks reserved especially for the bright whites, brilliant blacks and clever coloureds who have come to teach their children drama.
Not how to lie flat when gun shots shatter their windows and a bullet bursts open a jar of mayonnaise in the cupboard above their head. Not how to run fast enough to duck below their father’s blows when his corner shop has been robbed for the first, the fourth and fifth time and he is back boozed and broken.
Just drama.
Make-believe.
Games for children who haven’t been children since the first time they saw someone battered, shared their sandwich with a classmate who hadn’t brought one in two days or witnessed their mother crumple to the floor in tears because her son all but tore her wedding ring off her finger. Wild-eyed. Shameless. On tik.
Under their glares we feel ashamed.
Their derision settles on our shoulders and hunches them. It weighs heavily on our heads which bow below the level that allows us to look them in the eye and we make a beeline for the community centre.
The manager is enthusiastic.
He introduces us to a knot of children slightly darkened by the dust they have been playing in for hours and who giggle at our accents before inquiring if we are American.
We aren’t but a few.
Most of the volunteers are their fellow South Africans and as the weeks pass and when they progress from laughing at our every word and refusing to do anything that isn’t rewarded with one of the bulk-buy biscuits that are devoured at the end of the lesson to volunteering, sometimes fighting to be group leaders, narrators and lead actors, we know we are on to something good.
Not because playground productions of ‘The Three Little Pigs’ are essential to human development. But because for a few hours they are not in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are not wandering the streets mere seconds away from proving that thing about idle hands and they’re not trailing trouble hoping he’ll throw them a Mama’s Pie for their job as lookout, diversion or sentry. Instead they are learning about expression.
They are learning that they have ability to create stories and imagine themselves doing better than they are in places that are 20 minutes away in reality but over a rainbow in their heads. They are learning to understand human nature and motivations by playing heroes, villains and helpers and they are beginning to see themselves and the path that they, their friends and families are on through the eyes of archetypes.
The year goes on.
We play pigs, big bad wolves, dragons and princesses and at the end of the year, we decide between two. A story about a princess and a frog or about Abiyoyo. A great beast terrorising a village who is defeated by a boy with an ukulele after he is initially banished for annoying people with his art.
The children choose the latter. With gang wars waged in their streets and them slowly building a weapon within themselves through art, they choose ‘Abiyoyo.’ A story in which a creature terrorising a village is defeated.
And that’s when we are sure.
That things like drama and art are always metaphors for real life. That they are screens through which you can observe your community and yourself… and the children get it. They get it and they’re going to use it to write about their world, build confidence and the ability to speak out and act against what is troubling them.
Last week Namibian theatre director Sandy Rudd presented ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ starring five children from the Van Rhyn Primary School and said:
“Hats off to the Van Rhyn Primary school for embracing this project with such enthusiasm and allowing a drama club to take place in the school. I really salute the school for celebrating and teaching the arts. The learners at that school are very lucky to be there.”
Her comment made me remember Manenburg and it made me hope that in our own country with as many problems and children similarly struggling with poverty, abuse and unstable home situations that educators are considering drama.
As an escape, an educating tool and screens through which we can see ourselves as we are and as we could be.
