Performing the Struggle Against Apartheid

Abstract

Tyler Fleming’s book provides an account of the first production of ‘King Kong’ — a musical theatre production based on the life of the boxer Ezekiel Dlamini — in 1959. This musical rankled the apartheid state partly because it affirmed the aspirations of a Black urban class against an official state narrative which preferred a Black rural population. As a story of Black urban life that crossed over for mainstream white audiences, and became part of the canon and lore of South African theatre and popular music, the play stands as a landmark in South African cultural history. Fleming’s wellresearched study considers the ways in which the multiracial production confronted petty apartheid legislation. The author offers an abundance of empirical detail on the play’s production, its human and sociopolitical context, and furthers our understanding of African participation in cultural trends — in this case, musical theatre — by invoking Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ to argue for a multiplicity of perspectives on cultural production. Yet Fleming’s narrative exegesis remains firmly within the discipline of social history, at the expense of accounting for broader theoretical implications of the work. Chapter One considers the story of the character whose life is fictionally depicted in the play — the middling South African boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, whose fortunes and mishaps featured in local news and who died tragically by suicide in 1957. Dlamini’s story inspired a group known as the Union of South African Artists, which had been established earlier in the 1950s to support emerging Black creatives and advocate for better working conditions. Chapter Two picks up their story, tracing — from news and other sources — ways in which the leaders and members of the Union of South African Artists developed the play. It also includes fascinating detail about the organization’s work, such as efforts to secure royalties for Solomon Linda’s evergreen tune ‘Mbube’ (1939), popularised by the Weavers as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ (1951). The union suffered a blow in 1954, when its founder and patron, the British cleric, Father Trevor Huddleston, was recalled to England. Yet Huddleston’s massive popularity in South Africa also ensured that his farewell event raised enough revenues for the union to acquire premises at the famous Dorkay House in downtown Johannesburg. Chapter Three considers King Kong’s popular reception in the media and, in the process, reads the production for the germs of shared nationhood and the potential for multiracialism in South Africa during the first decade of apartheid rule. This is the story that Fleming sketches in broad strokes, intercut with closely observed empirical examples. Ultimately, he argues that King Kong was critical for how it performed the potential for multiracial and more harmonious futures. As other studies have argued, perhaps, Black popular music, theatre, and cinema promised the possibility of a ‘better’ life (in the material sense) in early apartheid South Africa. We might say that King Kong in this sense rode on the cumulative impact of both cinema and jazz, placing the production into a longer genealogy made vivid in the work of scholars of colonial popular culture since Veit Erlman.