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Sorrows and Rejoicings

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This South-African play written after the big change that came with the liberation of Nelson Mandela is interesting to know something about the mood of this country in this new phase now nearly two decades old. Three women meet after the burial of one man. The man was a white South Africans, a poet and writer, who was forced into exile by the apartheid regime. The three women are his official wife and widow who followed him in exile, his black paramour and his daughter with this black paramour. The play describes very well how the man was destroyed in his ambition to be heard and to change the world by his very exile that made him a solitary and abandoned alcoholic who could not remember Afrikaans and could not write a line. His wife resisted better apparently but left him after a while, first because they could not have children because of the mumps he caught in England, and second because of his alcoholism that got him fired from his good teaching job. But leukemia struck and the man came back several years after the liberation of Nelson Mandela to die in his family home. The three women meet in this house and confront their feelings. The widow has forgiven all the past and will respect her late husband's will to give the house to his unrecognized daughter who would become recognized then. The black paramour had kept the house for his homecoming and had cried all her life long because of his being banned away from her. The daughter was hating him for his abandoning her mother and not having the courage to go against apartheid laws, but on her final confrontation with him on the day before he died, he did not recognize her, of course not, and she did not have the courage to tell him she was his daughter because her mother had forbidden her to call him "father". This short play gives in a nutshell the direct and collateral damage apartheid inflicted on everyone, blacks and whites alike, and the great difficulty for the new order to come to life because of blocking attitudes acquired in fear and fright and that cannot find their final end. Apartheid sacrificed at least two generations, if not three, for an unjust and untenable objective.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID