Truth dulls Marikana musical
Plays it by the book and foolishly aims for the single story
Marikana — The Musical is a decent production, but that is beside the point. What keeps the show prosaic, denying it the opportunity to enter the realm of entertainment, could be a function of its format.
In saying that, I become one of the sceptics about whom director Aubrey Sekhabi writes in the programme’s Director’s Note: “Sceptics have asked: ‘Why a musical?’, and by this question they argue that it would be distasteful for such a tragic story to be told in the upbeat form that a stage musical [requires]. My answer is a simple one. During the Marikana strike, the miners expressed their frustrations, miseries and poverties through song … But also, importantly, the musical format in theatre cannot be restricted to the saccharine idea of upbeat storytelling.”
Watching the show on the occasion of its opening for a second season at the State Theatre in Pretoria, I thought hypothetically of how it might be possible to resolve the tension between format and material. The director would have to have a clear allegiance to the vision he is trying to pursue.
Sekhabi, long at the helm of the vast behemoth that is the State Theatre, knows a thing or two about placing bums on seats. So, it figures that at several moments while watching the show, I did find myself being whisked away from what ought to have been quiet moments by the brisk pace of the music format.
Marikana — The Musical is based on reportage and recollections from the book We Are Going to Kill Each Other Today, cowritten by journalists Lucas Ledwaba, Athandiwe Saba, Sebabatso Mosamo and Thanduxolo Jika, with photography by Leon Sadiki and Felix Dlangamandla. Most of them were working for Media24 and some for Primedia at the time of the massacre.
The massacre unfolded during the course of a strike at platinum producer Lonmin. In the week leading up to the August 16 2012 massacre, about 10 people lost their lives. The victims were mineworkers stationed at Marikana, in the North West, as well as police officers and security guards deployed there.
The journalists who co-authored the book were present during the episodic unfolding of the strike and this doubtlessly influenced the making of the musical. One can feel their insistence on precision throughout the rendering of this tale.
Sekhabi, having already chosen his source material, went a long way to render it as faithfully as possible, while remaining mindful of the fact that he had an audience to entertain. At the risk of sounding insensitive, the result is that there are moments when one feels like the facts are getting in the way of a good story.
So burdensome is the weight of history on Sekhabi that the opportunities for a light-hearted laugh are few and far between. He seizes on an unlikely one in the show. In the days leading up to the August 16 massacre, Mohammed Cassim, a shop owner trading in Marikana, did a roaring trade in pangas. Having already been shot at by guards protecting the National Union of Mineworkers’ office in Wonderkop, Marikana mine workers — who usually carried sticks and metal rods to marches — took to arming themselves with pangas for safety and, perhaps, for menace.
“I usually kept at least 30 pangas in the shop at a time, but they ran out in no time and I had to go buy more stock” is how he was quoted by City Press. In what is a cringeworthy moment of cheap laughter, a character meant to represent Cassim (he wears a taqiyah) pushes a trolley of pangas, conducting a brisk trade while merrily singing his Fanakalo panga anthem. For all I know, Cassim could be a South African citizen, but the way in which he is othered in the play could also have been Sekhabi’s cursory way of introducing the socioeconomic circumstances in small towns such as Marikana. Having bombarded his audiences with so much sombre truth up to this point, Sekhabi has to pander to their need to laugh it all out at some point.
In another scene worked out in a 1990s-style R&B duet, a police officer shares a tender pre-work moment with his wife. There is a premonition about what will happen.
“I am scared, I wonder/ Oh I wonder./ I must go my darling. I am scared that I may die. Or I may kill someone’s father or friend./ No, you can’t go, yes, I must go.”
In a play partly driven by the performance of masculinity, this is one of the few moments in which we see a male character exhibiting any sign of vulnerability. Furthermore, it is one in which a break from the upbeat format brings an emotional timbre befitting the horror of the Marikana massacre.
A criticism I had heard before watching the show centred on the presentation of the mine workers as one mass, whereas only the policemen were afforded moments of homely intimacy. Although the facts of the story and the complexities of staging may account for this, Sekhabi goes some way in trying to mitigate against this.
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian a few days after the opening of the second season, Sekhabi explained that the musical treatment he went for was meant to match the epic scale of the tragedy that Marikana was. The arc of the story, with its episodic twists and turns, and the climax that is the volley of fire at “scene one”, Sekhabi felt, came almost structurally complete. Quite a number of the songs, he explained, contained actual dialogue from the confrontations and conversations that occurred in Marikana.
The instances of poetic licence that he went for — such as the circumstances surrounding the donning of Mgcineni Noki’s now iconic green blanket and the instances in which he led gatherings — do not materially change the thrust of the story. If anything, it is not less poetic licence that is needed here, but elements that make the story breathe more.
A fine example of this is how the bodies of the “miners” are used to convey the scale of the massacre. They are transported, on a levered deck, up and down the rear wall of the stage. The sight of their assembled bodies, bereft of life but not of movement, is evocative and ingenious.
But elsewhere, there is too much about Marikana — The Musical that is hamstrung by its realist portrayal of history. Having said that, the audience reaction told me that there was enough in there to keep them cathartically entertained.
To be removed from the setting of the theatre, however, is to be confronted with the real horror of the Marikana story. On radio one morning, I overheard Joseph Mathunjwa, president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, explain that Lonmin’s approach to educating the children of mineworkers killed in the massacre was to put all of them in one school. The effect of that action has been that the bereaved children cluster together in this new environment, unable to shake off the stigma of being the living ‘victims’ of Marikana.
To try to tell the single story, based on an important but rapidly produced book in the face of a morphing, complex reality, means that Sekhabi’s play may not be able to withstand the test of history.
“The opportunities for a light-hearted laugh are few and far between”