StageIn retelling the story of students dismantling a colonialist statue in Cape Town, a vibrant dance-filled production carries prescience for contemporary America
“Rhodes was suspended in the air and he swung a few inches above the plinth like he wasn’t sure if he should get off, or not. It looked like his ghost was fighting back, trying to make him topple over and crush our black bodies one more time. But he was gone … he was finally gone … I felt as if our land had just heaved a giant sigh of relief; a space to breathe, at last.”
This is how a character in The Fall, a hit South African play staged by seven student protesters turned actors, recalls the cathartic moment when the British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes was knocked off his perch at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2015. It was the culmination of a five-week campaign that was about not only the bronze statue of a long dead white man but the university’s failure to diversify its staff and “decolonise” its Eurocentric curriculum.
The rhymes with America, locked in its own debate over Confederate-era statues and the legacy of slavery, are inescapable. “These are conversations that happen globally,” says Ameera Conrad, 25, a co-curator of the show and member of the ensemble. “Statues and symbols of oppression globally need to fall. It doesn’t matter if it’s Robert E Lee, Christopher Columbus, Cecil John Rhodes, Captain Cook – all must fall.”
But there are also parallels in the drama’s fascinating dissection of the Rhodes Must Fall movement: divisions between men and women, cis and trans, light-skinned and dark-skinned, suburban and township, westernised and African. Anyone concerned about identity politics and intersectionality should see this play.
At the time the statue came down, only five out of more than 200 full professors at UCT – rated the best university in Africa – were black and none was a black South African woman. Rhodes, a mining magnate and unabashed racist, donated the land on which the UCT campus is built. His statue, unveiled in 1934, had long been an anachronism and was pelted with excrement shortly before its demise.
Cast member and co-creator Sizwesandile Mnisi, 27, who was a UCT drama student and participant in the Rhodes Must Fall movement, recalls: “For me that statue had to come down because it reminded me of what Cecil John Rhodes had in mind when he built the university. He didn’t have me in mind, and seeing it every day made me uncomfortable.
“For me it really had to go because if a group of students in 2015 can finally get the statue removed then we have so much power to decolonise the university even more. That’s why we were calling for the decolonisation of the curriculum, what we’ve been taught, the fact that fees are so high and education is not free and that’s a thing that was promised to us. The statue itself was a symbol, but the removal of it was such a big symbol for us that, wow, we have this power.”
Conrad adds: “I think that we can get lost in vortexes of conversations. People think that you can just talk and talk and talk about an issue and that’s enough but at some point you actually have to get up and do something. You can’t just sit down and be like, yeah, racism is bad, and feel really good about the fact that you know that racism is bad. But what are you going to do about it? Are you going out into the streets and punching Nazis? Because you should be.”
But the statue’s removal was not so much a full stop as a semi-colon. It was succeeded by another protest, Fees Must Fall, taking aim at the prohibitive cost of education. It also exemplified how sudden symbolic change is important but easy compared with the gradual grind of reforming fundamental structures. In South Africa, 24 years after the end of apartheid, there have been massive political and symbolic changes but racial inequality remains stubbornly entrenched.
The cast of The Fall were born after that zenith of hopes and dreams, the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. But like America, South Africa is now filled with angst and self-doubt, with some even questioning Mandela’s legacy. Raatus reflects: “I think the idea of this rainbow nation began disintegrating around 2009. Everyone feels something is wrong but, until they can see that it’s actually happening, they’re not going to believe themselves. I also think that Nelson Mandela made a lot of agreements to keep the peace in 1994 and that came at a cost, and the repercussions of that decision are beginning to really take shape.”
Nor could the triumphant overthrow of Rhodes’ statue disguise how the movement had plenty of abrasive identity politics of its own. There was a sharp gender split for a start. Mnisi recalls that during a building occupation, the women wrote “one patriarch, one bullet”. He says: “The women were angry at the men. They were tired of being oppressed in the movement by the same people that they are fighting with.”
These conflicts are recreated onstage in riveting fashion, sometimes with direct quotations of what was said in the heat of the moment. Mnisi adds: “Conversation is what’s needed, men and women talking together is what’s needed, and what happened in the movement is that there were talks that women had together. I went to one of the talks with the guys and all they did was play soccer and I think that’s what’s missing in the world, that men are not talking to each other. We’re not talking about our problems. Instead we go shit on top of our women.”
Raatus, who portrays a transgender student struggling to break down gender binaries, says: “When the healing would happen between men and women, it would happen without the trans collective. They would arrive and suddenly everyone’s all good and they’re like, ‘What’s happening? Did we actually deal with the issues?’ So these two larger groups of cis people mend their issues and then the minority within starts having an issue.
“I think the way this system is built is we get together and we start talking about our issues and the next thing you know it’s like, ‘But you don’t experience what I experience because you have a different kind of privilege being a light-skinned person,’ and then that starts creating issues within a larger movement. The system is very smartly built, I don’t think on purpose sometimes, but to the extent that it’s hard for people to create change when there are so many differences within that particular group.”
Another wedge issue was “colourism”, Conrad adds. “Lighter-skinned black people or coloured [a South African term] or mixed race people were sort of extradited from the movement for not being ‘black enough’. So it also raised the question of what blackness is and what is the difference between being [Steve] Biko black, ie being from any sort of oppressed and marginalised group, and being black African and how those two differences play out in the world and how, as a historically mixed race/coloured person, does my privilege exist within the world versus a black African person’s.”
The themes have resonated internationally as the play toured the UK, Australia and the US (it is currently at the Studio Theatre in Washington), thrilling audiences with dance, struggle songs and snatches of African languages at their most muscular and theatrical. This is also a piece about the nature of protest and how far it can go (there is debate over grinding the university to a standstill and shutting down the toilets – “The shit must overflow.”)
Mnisi reflects: “It’s been very special. We were in Australia and we could feel the energy there. Our opening night, when we storm in with the opening song, people were cheering. They needed the story, they needed to see seven people of colour taking up space and speaking their pain, and their strength as well. And coming here to perform for these young black kids, I sometimes feel like a superhero. I’m like: ‘I hope you’re getting something from this.’”
In 2016, Britain got its own version of Rhodes Must Fall when students campaigned for the removal of Oriel college’s statue of the old colonialist. It did not succeed. Conrad smiles: “In my heart of hearts I knew that it wasn’t coming down. I was like, there’s no way that at Oxford, the British white men are going to take down a statue of Grandpa Rhodes. I was super hopeful and I retweeted as much as I could.
“I think that the whole world is coming towards the same way of viewing things in that we all know and recognise that the world is fucked, to put it very crudely, and the only way for us to actually undo some of those things is if we truly try to be intersectional and deal with LGBTQIAP+ issues, patriarchy, racism and class issues and systems of power and all of these terrifyingly huge things that seem impossible to deal with.
“But I think that it’s not impossible in the sense that we have people all over the world working at these things and trying really hard and failing sometimes and succeeding sometimes. I think that if I look at specifically the US and people like [Democratic House candidate] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are literally using the power of the people to win office and make structural changes in government, I’m very hopeful for the state of America and for the state of the rest of the world.”
The Fall runs at the Studio Theatre in Washington until 18 November
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKuklrSme5FpaHFnnqTDcHyQaKuhnV2brq24jKucr6GVrHq0u9Stn2aZlqe2pK2MqaOasV2srrS0yKeeraee