Play brings land rights to fore

)Bongile Mantsai, Thoko Ntshinga and Hilda Cronje perform in Mies Julie, Yael Farber's adaptation of the August Strindberg play Miss Julie, at the Baxter Theatre. Photo by Rodger Bosch for The Baxter Theatre.

)Bongile Mantsai, Thoko Ntshinga and Hilda Cronje perform in Mies Julie, Yael Farber's adaptation of the August Strindberg play Miss Julie, at the Baxter Theatre. Photo by Rodger Bosch for The Baxter Theatre.

Published Jul 10, 2012

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DRIVING to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival, actress Thoko Ntshinga was struck by the sheer amount of empty land she was passing.

Her family are bound up in a land reclamation issue which she thinks will still drag on for years. The land in question is in Kirkwood, on the banks of the Sundays River in the Eastern Cape, where she spent a good deal of her childhood.

“We’re now living on a small piece of land and then I look across to this large empty piece of land, just sitting there.

“I was telling uMama NoFirst: ‘Why is it that people can’t share this land?’

“We drove along and there’s nothing… nobody. Why is it we can’t make use of the land? The ownerships isn’t as important as the use. Ownership of what exactly?

“The bottom line is that there is this sore that hasn’t healed in the country. We can’t go anywhere, we can’t go forward without healing this wound. I sit here and think: ‘Why can’t I get that piece of land?’ “ said Ntshinga.

That’s not the only reason land was on her mind, though; she was on her way to Grahamstown for the debut performance of Mies Julie, SA-born director Yael Farber’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

When this play was mounted in SA in 1985, John Kani and Sandra Prinsloo created a huge outcry with their cross-colour kiss, but this particular version highlights the very contemporary issue of land ownership.

This time around Farber is delving into the issue of ownership by looking at the relationships between the two characters, Julie and John, who have been raised by Christine, the character played by Ntshinga.

Ntshinga drew on a woman she got to know as a child in Kirkwood for inspiration for Mama Christine, the role she plays in Mies Julie.

This woman taught Ntshinga the finer points of carrying a load of wood on her head, how to cook on a fire and basically survive in a rural setting.

“We had a Christine in that sense. The way she walked, she was never in a hurry.”

For Christine, Ntsinga created a person who is “heavy. She’s tired”, she explained.

Christine is the person who cleans up after everyone else and the two children she’s raised, her own son John (played by Bongile Mantsai) and the farmer’s daughter, Julie (played by Hilda Cronje) fight for her attention.

“They’re very jealous of each other,” she said.

Like much of SA life, the play takes place the kitchen where domestic practicalities converge with issues of power and domination in one night.

The black farm labourer, the master’s daughter and the woman who raised them have it out in a battle of power, sexuality and ownership.

This knot of inheritance and legacy entangles and pushes apart the trio who struggle to adress the reality of what can and cannot be recovered.

There’s also a fourth character in the play – Christine’s ancestor – who wanders in and out of the production and the characters’ lives.

She is played by Tandiwe NoFirst Lungisa from the Ngqoko Cultural Group.

While

travelling to Grahamstown, Ntshinga and Lungisa had a lot of time to think and talk about ownership of land and what it means to black people who have lived on farms for generations, their lives entwined with that of the white owners.

“They’re an extension of die baas,” is how Ntshinga put it.

“They do everything. The farmer will say what he wants and they make sure it happens.”

So, when you look at land grabs and what is happening today, the people believe the land belongs to them, but they were never taught the business side to things, says Ntshinga.

She believes that this disjunct between what ex-labourers know about farming and the reality they face when they suddenly are in charge of a farm has created more problems than it has solved.

“Farming is a business, and a tough one at that, so you get these black people who were taught ‘to do’.

They were never taught administration, or the business side, that was the one area that was hidden.”

She’s hoping this play – which opens this week in Cape Town and will travel to the Edinburgh Festival next month and then the State Theatre in Pretoria in September – will prompt discussion around land ownership.

In the meantime, though it’s been a while since Ntshinga was on stage, having played in MNet’s Egoli and the SABC’s Interrogation Room and Velaphi for many years, she says she still gets butterflies, which surprised and amused her children immensely.

“I had forgotten the adrenalin, the butterflies, the everything. But a good show demands butterflies,” she smiled.

• Mies Julie is at the Baxter Flipside from tomorrow until July 26.

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