The elder Pliny’s famous dictumFootnote 1 gives a hint of what Africa has in store for Classicists, for they are likely to find something ‘new’ in the form of Classics and the development of the classical tradition and reception in some of the most unexpected places at some of the most unexpected times in the history of the European colonization of the African subcontinent and in its postcolonial aftermath.Footnote 2 Grant Parker has made precisely this observation in respect of South Africa: ‘Classicism has been evident in some unexpected places, and it has been part of the lives not merely of those whose elite education enabled them to learn Latin at a young age’.Footnote 3 Indeed, the development of the classical tradition and reception of Classics in AfricaFootnote 4 has a long and varied history.Footnote 5 Classical culture has played a visible role among various African cultures in different regions of the subcontinent.Footnote 6 Scholars have attempted to examine the role of Classics from the perspectives of the classical tradition and classical reception, with the inherent associations of either of these approaches having the potential to affect the interpretation of specific literary, architectural and other types of works examined.

Encounters with Classics in Africa are evident in such diverse areas as literature, law, education, architecture, sculpture and museology, with some of these encounters first being apparent from as early as the sixteenth century, which postdates the earliest adapted citation of Pliny’s aforementioned dictum by the humanist Vergilius Polydorus of Urbino in the late fifteenth century.Footnote 7 From the vantage point of some dominant racial and social groups on the subcontinent, classical ‘influences’ have had a positive and even ‘civilizing’ dimension. From the standpoint of various subordinate racial and social groups, the classical tradition and classical reception have been perceived as a positive or negative development in Africa, depending upon their experiences and encounters with manifestations of classical culture. Regardless of their feelings about and perspective on their classical encounters, various dominant and subordinate groups have used classical ideas and motifs for diverse social, cultural and political purposes, as reflected, for example, in the cultural area of drama. Examining one of these dramatic texts from South Africa -- Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island -- by using the models of the classical tradition and reception reveals the potential for different readings to be produced as a result of these disparate approaches. Such an investigation also reveals the theoretical usefulness of a new term to describe the dynamics involved in both of these approaches -- that of the classical ‘traception’.

The African Context: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

‘Classics’ has (or ‘the Classics’ have) sometimes been associated negatively with colonialism, elitism and oppression, as argued, for example, by Mike Lambert in The Classics and South African Identities.Footnote 8 Its adjectival form ‘classical’, which scholars of Classics (or Classical Studies) generally use in reference to their investigation and teaching of the Greek and Roman worlds, has sometimes been viewed as being meaningless, as no less a scholar than Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff thought,Footnote 9 and even undefinable, as suggested by James Porter.Footnote 10 Even so, the use of ‘classical’ in this essay refers both to the actual works created in Graeco-Roman antiquity and more generally to the idea of classicism and its constructions in western thought. Despite what Porter alleges is the indefinability of the term, he remarks that ‘the idea of the classical has a cachet that continues to translate into cultural prestige, authority, elitist satisfactions, and economic power …’.Footnote 11

With respect to the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘reception’, which have been used often in conjunction with ‘classical’, there has been considerable debate.Footnote 12 Most scholars who examine the role of Classics in Africa have done so from the viewpoint of either the ‘classical tradition’ or ‘classical reception’, though in practice these terms have sometimes been used broadly with little, if any, appreciable difference in their definition and interpretive application. This approach is followed by Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most and Salvatore Settis in their recent dictionary The Classical Tradition, whose first sentence (in the preface) makes obvious the title’s synonymity with the ‘classical reception’: ‘This book aims to provide a reliable and wide-ranging guide to the reception [my emphasis] of classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures’.Footnote 13 The difference between the classical tradition and reception is partly one of perspective and perception. The classical reception model attempts to examine how modern African writers, thinkers, artists and architects, among others, have appropriated and adapted classical themes to suggest continuity with the past or to challenge its perspective;Footnote 14 this approach is highly selective and refractive, since modern African dramatists, for example, choose specific aspects of the classical world or its subsequent hypertexts to appropriate and to adapt in shaping their works.

The ‘traditional’ model of the classical tradition is arguably more rigid ideologically than the classical reception approach in that greater emphasis is placed upon the past and what it has had to offer to a subsequent period or culture, as is suggested by its derivation from Latin traditio (‘a handing down’). The classical tradition does have the potential to emphasize both the foundation and ‘influence’ of classical civilization and ideas upon African societies in such a way as to suggest both the continuity of and the passing on of eternal ideals, truths and forms to successive generations up to the time of the present age.Footnote 15 Even though the notion of a direct link between the west European classical and modern African worlds may be inherent in the approach, the classical tradition may also suggest an indirect link or a ‘refraction’, that is, a connection to the ancient world through the intermediary of a previous encounter.Footnote 16 Although the classical tradition suggests the ‘handing down’ of ideas from the past, African societies have drawn upon this tradition and adapted its elements for their own political, cultural and social purposes in a manner that is more akin to the paradigm of classical reception.Footnote 17

The perceived negative associations of the phrase ‘classical tradition’ has been the subject of much discussion, especially by advocates of the term ‘classical reception’ and its variants. One of the criticisms of the classical tradition has been that it is laden explicitly or implicitly with Eurocentric assumptions and values.Footnote 18 Indeed, the supposed civilizing aspect of the classical tradition and its ‘influence’, which is a frequent theme of Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition,Footnote 19 constituted a part of the ideology of postcolonial education in Africa. At first, Classics did not form part of the education of indigenous Africans, however, since in the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa, for example, the first evidence of classical education emerges in the Latin schools in the early eighteenth century for the white sons of Dutch, German and French settlers.Footnote 20 For this demographic group the knowledge of Latin was not only required for those who wanted to enter the legal professions since the courts functioned in terms of Roman-Dutch law, but such knowledge also was a social marker of being educated and ‘civilized’. This is reminiscent of the idea of cultural capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, in which knowledge and education, including knowledge of the Classics or the classical languages,Footnote 21 become an instrument of political power and social success,Footnote 22 to which can be added social control.Footnote 23

Recently edited volumes such as Craig Kallendorf’s A Companion to the Classical TraditionFootnote 24 and James Porter’s Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and RomeFootnote 25 avoid drawing an overt association between the classical tradition and its imagined ‘civilizing’ aspect and influence. Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard and Rosemary Barrow’s The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought,Footnote 26 not only avoids making this association but also asserts that the ‘classical tradition’ has ‘arguably’ always had ‘strongly positive connotations’, is a wider concept than ‘classical reception’, and vies for essentially the same contested content, topics and themes.Footnote 27

Following in the wake of Silk, Gildenhard and Barrow’s strongly favourable perspective on the term ‘classical tradition’ and its subject matter, Grant Parker, a South African-born scholar of Classics, nevertheless maintains that some classicists have rejected the concept of the classical tradition in favour of that of reception on the basis that the former ‘implies uncritical celebration’, but, as he observes, this is not entirely the case.Footnote 28 Parker further argues that ‘it has become axiomatic, at least in the historical disciplines generally, that the notion of tradition deserves some measure of scepsis, and that the term has lost its supposed innocence’.Footnote 29 Indeed, one of the reasons that classicists began to favour the use of the term ‘classical reception’ is not just because the ‘classical tradition’ can imply ‘uncritical celebration’, but because it can also suggest other ideologically questionable positions and evoke various negative associations with colonialism, imperialism and racism. In regard to South Africa, Parker himself observes that ‘the classical tradition … has been associated with colonialism’;Footnote 30 Federico Freschi mentions its association with British imperialism (p. 65);Footnote 31 and Lambert relates the study of Classics to an alleged racist past.Footnote 32 These associations apply just as much to West Africa, where the classical tradition has had an equally long history and exerted a similar ‘influence’.Footnote 33

‘Reception’, which Charles Martindale noted has been preferred instead of ‘tradition’ or ‘heritage’ in order to emphasize the ‘active role played by receivers’,Footnote 34 constitutes a critical response to the perspective of the classical tradition. Even so, the use of the term ‘reception’ itself is anything but new: August Buck used it in a relatively straightforward sense over four decades ago to refer to classically based Romance-language materials of the Renaissance in a volume titled Die Rezeption der Antike in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance.Footnote 35 Some recent scholars of the reception approach have favoured the terms ‘receptions’,Footnote 36 ‘reception studies’,Footnote 37 or even ‘recipience’.Footnote 38 In recent times the concept of classical reception has gained critical predominance in which the ideals and models of the classical period constantly speak in different ways to subsequent ages in different parts of the world. Although the use of ‘reception’ has been criticized on the grounds that it ‘implies too simplistic a model of departure and arrival’,Footnote 39 the related phrase ‘reception studies’ conceptually allows more readily than ‘tradition’ for the reception of a hypertext by a hypotext.Footnote 40 Therefore it is possible to argue that the model of the classical reception produces a greater range of potential responses to the texts and ideas of the Graeco-Roman world. In any event, the result of the shift in critical perspective to ‘reception’ (and its variants) has fostered much creativity and originality on the African subcontinent, especially in classically derived drama, in relation to the expression of modern ideas about postcolonialism, democracy, multiculturalism, religion and social issues.

The ‘reception’ approach to the classical past, as suggested above, is not without its own conceptual issues and problematic associations -- and not just in relation to African cultures. In addition to the aforementioned oversimplicity attributed to ‘reception’ as a theoretical model (of departure and arrival),Footnote 41 the term has been criticized for suggesting a ‘relatively weak or passive mode of acceptance or recognition’.Footnote 42 Martindale challenges the latter perception and responds in turn that ‘tradition’ ‘might [my emphasis] imply that the process of transmission is comfortably uncontested,Footnote 43 but this need not be the case, as Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard and Rosemary Barrow suggest through their broad and diverse conception of the ‘classical tradition’.Footnote 44 Some scholars, including Lorna Hardwick, criticize the concept of the ‘classical tradition’ while attempting to establish their own case for the use of the term ‘classical reception’.Footnote 45 Even so, Silk, Gildenhard and Barrow’s expansive and multifarious concept of the ‘classical tradition’ presents a direct challenge to Hardwick’s view of the ‘classical tradition’ as being based upon a ‘narrow range of perspectives’ and capable of assuming an ‘unproblematic’ signification that needs only to be comprehended and applied to situations remote from its Greek or Roman context.Footnote 46

In the midst of this debate and the problematic associations of the phrases ‘classical tradition’ and ‘classical reception’Footnote 47 (and such variations as ‘receptions,’Footnote 48 ‘reception studies’Footnote 49 and ‘recipience’Footnote 50), some scholars have employed other terms and coined new ones. Of the traditional terms used in Anglophone scholarship, the most common one probably has been ‘classical heritage’, which is not new and, like the concept of the ‘classical tradition’, is invested with its own ideological baggage. As Parker notes, ‘heritage’ can function as an expression of ‘a legacy, in the sense of an enriching survival or bequest’.Footnote 51 The title of R. R. Bolgar’s The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries,Footnote 52 for example, suggests explicitly that those subject to classical ideas inherently must benefit from them. Indeed, at least in the way the phrase ‘classical heritage’ has been used, the emphasis usually has been placed upon the enriching cultural ‘legacy’ of Classics rather than on its potential to function as a negative cultural burden or collective memory. But the concept of the ‘classical heritage’ is no less immune to the charge of cultural bias than that of the ‘classical tradition’. As Parker observes, the term ‘heritage’ can function ‘as a burden, either on the lines of inheriting a debt or of traumatic collective memory’.Footnote 53 More specifically, Goff criticizes the ‘classical heritage’ for playing ‘a part in European cultural arrogance and in the corresponding intellectual subjections among colonized peoples, the “mind-forged manacles” of cultural dependency, which anti-colonial writers have so often decried’.Footnote 54

Among other traditional terms, Nachleben is a German (and thus Eurocentric) word,Footnote 55 whose translation ‘afterlife’ is frequently used Anglophone scholarship,Footnote 56 while even a term like ‘influence’ has been laden with Eurocentric assumptions and values through its association with the ‘classical tradition’, as evident in the full title of Highet’s tome The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature.Footnote 57 The term ‘legacy’ has also been used to refer to the ‘influence’ of classical ideas and works upon subsequent civilizations and their cultural, artistic and intellectual achievements, as evident in Moses Finley’s edited volume The Legacy of Greece and Richard Jenkyn’s The Legacy of Rome.Footnote 58 Another term used by critics in discussing classical texts is ‘adaptation’,Footnote 59 which refers to a hypertext that is derived from or alludes to a hypotext, has been used, as in the phrase ‘reception studies’,Footnote 60 to refer to a bidirectional process of influence and change.Footnote 61

Yet other scholars have suggested new phrases, which have had inter alia the effect of affording variety and avoiding the potentially pejorative or detracting associations of the aforementioned phrases. While Shane Butler has proposed ‘Deep Classics’ as a tertium quid between ‘tradition’ and ‘reception’,Footnote 62 the phrase is not immediately graspable by readers unfamiliar with his conception of Classics. Lawrence Venuti uses the term ‘domestication’ to refer to the process of translation,Footnote 63 but his discussion is relevant to the model of the classical ‘reception’. The translation of a text from a ‘foreign’ language results in a new text laden with linguistic and sociocultural markers that are comprehensible to a ‘domestic’ audience. The process can be likened to the ‘re-writing’ of a classical work so that the themes and characters of the hypertext resonate with a contemporary audience because of recognizable or even shared experiences, though, as in the case of Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island,Footnote 64 there is the problematic issue of attempting to distinguish between ‘foreign’ (classical) and ‘domestic’ (South African) elements arises because of its culturally hybrid nature. Barbara Goff has suggested a model of ‘pulling’, whereby the classical work can be conceived as being ‘pulled’ into the present by a power that makes use of the work for its own ends, but as such this term suggests a unidirectional model of reception.Footnote 65 Yet another concept is Emily Greenwood’s ‘frail connections’, which is a concession that the connections between modern and classical literature will sometimes be tenuous or ‘frail’.Footnote 66 Sometime the connection may exist only in the imagination of the reader, since a contemporary work is not always derived from an apparent classical hypotext. Such an example is the Nigerian love ‘chapbook’ (Balladenbücher), which may seem to be composed in the spirit of Ovid´s Ars Amatoria in order to introduce the reader to the art of love,Footnote 67 though there is no evidence that Ovid served as the actual inspiration for this genre.

The theoretical distinction between the most frequently used terms ‘classical tradition’ and ‘classical reception’ may seem artificially rigid, especially given the tendency by some scholars to use them synonymously.Footnote 68 This tendency may suggest that these terms overlap to such an extent in terms of their scholarly use that there is no need to distinguish between them, but other scholars who prefer the ‘classical reception’ stress the semantic and methodological differences between this term and the ‘classical tradition’.Footnote 69 Probably no term is without its own problems and baggage, but one can conceive of a paradigm of classical ‘influence’ that is based upon a more fluid relationship between these models.

My proposed neologism to describe this suggested paradigm is classical ‘traception’. Some classical scholars have stretched their conception of the classical tradition or the classical reception to include the other.Footnote 70 The concept of the classical ‘traception’ patently embraces the ‘traditional’ models of both the classical tradition and classical reception -- the former through its suggestion of linear descent and the latter through its ‘receptive’ and reconfigurative associations -- and therefore obviates the need for critics to expand their conception of the traditional models. The cross-pollination between ‘original’ works and their later adaptations is reciprocal and shifting in nature. What is required, according to Whitmarsh, is a critical term that suggests ‘a richer sense of the constant shuttling back and forth between text, interpreter and intermediaries’.Footnote 71 The term ‘traception’ makes clearer the dialogic nature of the transactional forces involved in this process of linear descent and reception.

Using the example of Homer, Martindale argues that the ‘original’ itself is transformed by its later iterations and in the process opens up the text for new readings:Footnote 72 ‘Homer has been changed for us by Virgil and Milton, who have left their traces in his text, and thereby enabled new possibilities of meaning’.Footnote 73 The same can be said for Sophocles’ Antigone, whose numerous adaptations over the centuries have provided ‘refracted’ perspectives for reading and interpreting the ancient drama. In addition, the protean model of ‘traception’ facilitates the integration of various hybrid cultural elements that reflect a work’s diverse origins and multi-faceted aspects,Footnote 74 not all of which may be defined as ‘classical’, as can be seen through an examination of the South African Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island.Footnote 75

Areas of Classical ‘Traception’ and First Classical Contacts

The main areas of classical ‘traception’ on the African subcontinent are drama, specifically political drama and non-political drama, poetry and prose, literature in Latin, law and architecture. Many scholars working in these areas have focussed upon specific literary genres, especially Greek drama;Footnote 76 particular modern literary works and their classical antecedents;Footnote 77 various politicalFootnote 78 and religious themes;Footnote 79 and mythological and historical figures from the classical world and their modern equivalents.Footnote 80 Tangential concerns of the classical tradition have included not only the history of Classics in regions and particular countriesFootnote 81 but also especially the study and teaching of the discipline.Footnote 82 In general, though, broad overviews that attempt to cover a number of these areas in the classical tradition on the African subcontinent have been rare.Footnote 83 A brief overview of these main areas and concerns of the classical tradition in Africa, including how and when classical ideas and texts reached and extended into various regions of sub-Saharan Africa during different periods, will serve as a prelude to the presentation of one ‘case study’ in the area of drama. The purpose of this case study is to illustrate not only some of the interpretive consequences of using the classical tradition as opposed to that of the classical reception but also the methodological advantages of employing my proposed model of the ‘classical traception’.

The main geographical areas in sub-Saharan Africa of early classical encounters and activity, including the writing and teaching of Latin (and to a much lesser degree Greek), were in west Africa, notably the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone;Footnote 84 southern Africa, especially the Cape of Good Hope in what is now modern South Africa;Footnote 85 and east Africa, principally Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika (now Tanzania).Footnote 86 From the time of the sixteenth century black and white African poets and writers have used Greek and Roman references in their poetry and prose works. Literature by African writers first appeared in Latin and consisted predominantly of legal, philosophical and historical works.

The earliest black African writer was the poet Juan Latino, who was born as the son of black slaves in a sub-Saharan African territory named by him as Aethiopia in 1516–1518, in Baena (Córdoba, Spain) to ‘Guinean’ parents who were slaves, or to an enslaved black woman and a master.Footnote 87 A translator of Horace, Latino was known especially for his Latin poetry, of which five published works, mainly panegyrics with mythological allusions, are extant. Latino’s major poetic work was the Austrias Carmen, an epic poem that narrates the victory of Don Juan of Austria over Ottoman forces at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.Footnote 88 The Austriad, which consisted of two volumes, was the first book of poetry to be published in Latin by a black African. Composed in Latin hexametric verse, the epic contains an opening invocation to Apollo and occasional formulations from classical Latin works. Latino’s Epigrammatum Liber (‘Book of Epigrams’), which was composed mainly in elegiac couplets following the Ovidian model, celebrates the birth of Prince Ferdinand in 1571.Footnote 89 Other works of LatinoFootnote 90 in Latin include a poem on the relations between Pope Pius V and Philip IIFootnote 91 and a short elegy to Philip II,Footnote 92 which appear in the same volume as Austrias Carmen and Epigrammatum Liber;Footnote 93De Translatione, in which Philip II is praised for his filial devotion;Footnote 94 and a short poem eulogizing the deeds of Don Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the third Duke of Sesa.Footnote 95

Another well-known black West African writer who wrote in Latin is Anton Wilhelm Amo (circa 1703–post 1753), who was born in Axim in the Gold Coast (Ghana). He was taken to Germany a few years after his birth and educated there. Amo wrote works on legal and philosophical subjects,Footnote 96 including a lost thesis asserting the rights of the Moors in Europe and the equality of all races.Footnote 97 Amo also wrote a doctoral thesis arguing that it is the body, not the mind, that perceives and feels,Footnote 98 and a work discussing the art of philosophizing.Footnote 99

A black West African writer known especially for his elaborate style of classical Latin prose was Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein (1717–1747), who was born in the Gold Coast and taken to the Netherlands at age eleven. After being educated in the Netherlands, he returned as a schoolmaster and preacher to the Gold Coast.Footnote 100 Capitein published some of his sermons and lectures.Footnote 101 In a dissertation he argues on theological grounds, despite his own status as a former slave, that slavery is not incompatible with Christian freedom.Footnote 102 This is a remarkable argument for a black African intellectual to make, even considering the prevailing social attitudes of his time, and it stands in distinct contrast to his black African literary predecessor Juan Latino, who rejected the concept of natural slavery and asserted the worth of black Africans in his epic Austriad.Footnote 103 From the perspective of black emancipation, Capitein’s stance illustrates the social phenomenon of a subjugated black man accepting the dominant ideology of his white master for his own advancement.Footnote 104 The circumstances seem at least tangentially reminiscent of the situation discussed below in Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island, where John (in his role of Creon) adopts the argument of his subjugator in order to justify his own oppression.Footnote 105 Further evidence of west Africans with facility in Greek and Latin also emerges from the British colonial era, for example, with the epistolographer Philip Quaque (circa 1740–1816), the son of an indigenous chief in the Gold Coast, who in 1765 became the first African ordained in the Church of England after being bought to England by an Anglican missionary organization in 1754.Footnote 106

In the southern part of the African subcontinent the first signs of encounters with Classics are evident in the use of Latin in the historical and legal documents of the seventeenth century, namely in accounts of the native Khoikhoi populationFootnote 107 and in South African law. The arrival of Latin in southern Africa can be said to have occurred in 1652 with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope; the doctoral thesis of his son Abraham van RiebeeckFootnote 108 was the first Latin text produced by a white native-born South African.Footnote 109 Discussions of the Cape in Latin include those of the Dutch settlers Wilhelm ten Rhyne (1647–1700) and Jan Willem van Grevenbroek (1644–circa 1725). Ten Rhyne discusses the Cape of Good Hope, its animals, plants and the Khoikhoi people,Footnote 110 while van Grevenbroek (1644–circa 1725) composed a letter to a friend in the form of a quarto volume of 120 pages describing mainly the Khoikhoi but also the animals, climate, fertility and other features of the Cape;Footnote 111 the latter was also the author of a much longer Latin treatise dealing with the native population that does not survive.Footnote 112 Gysbert Hemmy, who was a native-born white South African,Footnote 113 not only delivered a Latin oration titled ‘On the Cape of Good Hope’ at the Hamburg Academy,Footnote 114 but he also used Latin to write his doctoral thesis (the norm at the time), which discusses the ability of non-Europeans to testify in legal proceedings.Footnote 115

The first Latin school, founded in the tradition of the elite Latin schools of Protestant Europe, was opened for the sons of Dutch and other white settlers in the Cape of Good Hope in 1714.Footnote 116 Although it later closed, it was followed by the opening of another Latin school in 1793 devoted to the teaching of both Latin and Greek.Footnote 117 During this time it is evident that Latin was used in the Cape, since a knowledge of the language was required for admission into the legal profession and lawyers often made reference to Roman law. The influence of Roman law upon Roman-Dutch law in South Africa from the middle of the seventeenth century is one of the more significant cultural developments in African society. Certain aspects of Roman law, which were rearticulated in the Roman-Dutch sources brought to South Africa after the middle of the seventeenth century, were applied in a wide range of legal situations. In fact, in 1672, which was only twenty years after Jan van Riebeeck’s establishment of the first settlement in the Cape of Good Hope, the Fiscal cites directly from Justinian’s Digest and Institutes with precise references.Footnote 118 The ‘influence’ of the classical tradition in southern Africa was also apparent in the eighteenth century through the use of classical names for black slaves and free indigenous individuals,Footnote 119 thereby associating the classical tradition with hegemonic colonialism.

Although there is a dearth of extant literature composed in Latin or with classical references from east Africa (modern Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), there is still evidence of its educational and social roles. Classics was especially important in east Africa during the nineteenth century in the mission schools established by European missionaries, who taught Latin and Greek to Africans preparing for a career in the church. Latin was even used as a medium of instruction in the seminaries superintended by the Roman Catholic White Fathers,Footnote 120 who produced a Latin-Luganda dictionary and grammar for their Ugandan students.Footnote 121 Students might even study Latin for as long as seventeen years while preparing for a career in the ministry.Footnote 122 The study of the classical languages in east Africa, then, was both preparation for such a career and for religious practice, in much the same way that the study of Latin in the Cape was both pre-professional in terms of being required for entry into the legal profession and of practical necessity in one’s actual career as a lawyer. On a social linguistic level, Latin was even been perceived to serve as a unifier, as when Makerere Univerity in Uganda adopted a Latin motto in place of a Luganda motto, which was seen as representing only a part of the population.Footnote 123

Easily the most visible influence of classical antiquity upon Africa is in the field of colonial architecture, which was the domain of white settlers and their descendants. The form and spirit of classical architecture, with its qualities of monumentality and historicism emblematic of European colonial power and tradition, are evident in the design of hundreds of public buildings in Africa, predominantly in South Africa. From about 1780 a revival of classicism can be detected in South African architecture and included not just the exterior of a building but also its interior design and furnishings. Greek columns with their three orders became common in public and private buildings, as did other Greek features such as porticos and pediments; Roman architectural features, particularly the arch, apse and dome, were also used. Many South African towns founded in the nineteenth century follow the rigid grid pattern of Roman town planning.Footnote 124

Elements of classical myth and drama are evident in the composition of numerous African dramas from the middle of the twentieth century. The second half of this century gave rise to the birth and development of political drama in west and South Africa as a means to express not only a range of political viewpoints regarding power, freedom and justice but also their oppositesFootnote 125 using figures (or their equivalents) such as Antigone,Footnote 126 Orestes,Footnote 127 Electra,Footnote 128 Medea,Footnote 129 Dionysus/Bacchus,Footnote 130 Oedipus,Footnote 131 and Orpheus,Footnote 132 Trojan women,Footnote 133 tyrants and generals.Footnote 134Various non-political dramas since the middle of the twentieth century that are adapted or inspired by plots and characters of Greek drama are concerned with religious and other subjects.Footnote 135

The aforementioned constitutes a select number of examples of how classical ideas and letters reached and extended into sub-Saharan Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Naturally the effect of the reach and extension of the classical tradition has varied throughout the subcontinent but has been most prominent in West and South Africa. While classical ideas were introduced and influenced the development of African society during the colonial period, African peoples and cultures appropriated and adapted them to their own local and national traditions. Classical ideas and texts have the potential to be either oppressive or emancipative in effect,Footnote 136 but this depends upon the particular politico-social context and whether the perspective is that of the colonizer or the colonized or that of the oppressor or the oppressed (or even some combination thereof). Indeed, adherents of classical learning on the African subcontinent tended to be patronizing and even condescending in attitude toward indigenous blacks,Footnote 137 whereas much later black as well as white African writers, notably dramatists, have employed classical themes and references to express a range of activist ideas and viewpoints, as illustrated in the following section.

Africanizing Greek Tragedy: Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island

The conflict that arises in Sophocles’ Antigone involves the political and private worlds and issues of human power and natural justice. The main plot elements include a brother, Polynices, who, having died in a duel with his brother Eteocles, is denied burial by the Theban king Creon, whereupon his sister Antigone performs simple burial rites that result in Creon sentencing her to death by having Antigone buried alive in a cave. Antigone hangs herself in the cave, whereupon Haemon and Eurydice, Creon’s son and wife, respectively, kill themselves. The model of the classical tradition has focussed upon and emphasized inter alia the themes of Sophocles’ hypotext concerning pride; the conflict between the state and individual; the distinction between human law and divine justice; the issue of gender, specifically the position of women; inaction or lack of agency versus agency; and so on. The Antigone’s transmission of values based upon a consideration of these issues has informed subsequent generations of readers. The tragedy is an ideal vehicle to explore the exercise of certain types of political power and its consequences in a modern setting. In a sense, the classical tradition puts emphasis upon the timeless themes of the Antigone that transcend its own age.

Numerous dramatic adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone have been produced over various ages on a number of different continents,Footnote 138 including on the African subcontinent, during the past half century.Footnote 139 A scholar working from the perspective of the classical tradition might look for traces of dramatic structures and themes in the dramas of African playwrights that mirror those in the Antigone.Footnote 140 Arguably the most well-known of the African dramas derived from the Antigone is The Island by the South Africans Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona (1973).Footnote 141 The setting of The Island is, befittingly, Robben Island, the site where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated during the era of apartheid,Footnote 142 the system of institutionalized racial oppression, after being found guilty on four counts of sabotage at the Rivonia Trial in 1964.Footnote 143 In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela relates the story of how he played the role of Creon when performing The Island’s main hypotext of The Antigone (in 1970) while a prisoner on Robben Island and the influence this experience had upon his own political ideas.Footnote 144

The basic plot structure of Sophocles’ tragedy has been followed in the ‘play within the play’ of The Island. For The Islandis not directly based upon the Antigone but rather is a metaplay: the ‘production’ contains a performance of a short and radically redacted version of the original to a group of prisoners and guards, including of the Sophoclean trial scene. Although this metadramatic staging of the Antigone in The Island is only five pages long,Footnote 145 there are discussions of the plot and characters of the original in scene one and of its staging in scene two in which the leading black actors John and Winston argue about who will play the parts of Antigone and Creon.Footnote 146The Island commences with a scene showing two prisoners, John and Winston, repetitively miming the digging of sand in a labour described as ‘interminable’.Footnote 147 The scene is representative not only of the ancient Greek king Sisyphus’ meaningless task of repetitively rolling a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again as soon as it had reached the summit but also of Camus’ absurdist essay titled Le Mythe de Sisyphe.Footnote 148 Whether viewed through the lens of the classical tradition or that of classical reception, the evocation of this Greek myth in The Island shows how a classical idea can be refracted; that is, as suggested above,Footnote 149 the reminiscence can evince a link to the ancient world through the intermediary of a slightly earlier hypertext, in this case, Camus’ existentialist essay on the Sisyphus myth. The fourth and final scene, in which the performance of the Antigone actually occurs, includes the key components common to the Sophoclean original, including an account of the burial (in keeping with ancient Greek and traditional Roman practice) of Polynices and the death of a defiant and heroic Antigone.

In thematic terms, Sophocles’ Antigone is metamorphosed and resonates broadly in The Island through the use of metatheatricality and various African and European transcultural components in order to highlight the themes of political tyranny and oppression, heroic defiance and resistance, racial and cultural prejudice, social and economic injustice, and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds. Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s reinterpretation of the Antigone meditates on the aforementioned themes in ways that have a direct application to political events in modern South Africa. In The Island Creon, played by Kani, embodies the oppressive power of apartheid, while Antigone, played by Ntshona, represents individual freedom and human rights. Fugard, Kani and Ntshona also assimilate into The Island themes from Sophocles’ Antigone, for example, the theme of conflict between the state and the individual and the distinction between human law and divine justice. Antigone’s defiance and heroism in Sophocles’ Antigone are echoed in The Island and, consistent with the model of the classical tradition, Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s hypertext does not challenge the Greek heroic value system.

On the other hand, the idea suggested by Highet of the classical tradition serving as a civilizing aspectFootnote 150 emerges in the fact that to the South African wardens on Robben Island, where black prisoners performed both Sophocles’ Antigone and The Island during apartheid, the performance of an abridged version of a classical drama suggested black acceptance of European culture. Fugard has commented on the similarities between the performance of The Island and to Jean Anouilh’s production of Antigone in Paris during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the Second World War:Footnote 151 ‘In an exact parallel to the situation on Robben Island, the first five rows of German jackbooted officers admired what they thought was a straightforward piece of classical culture, but the French audience behind them knew what it was about.’Footnote 152 According to Fugard, when the actor ‘Sharkie’ (Sipho Mguqulwa), who was a member of Fugard’s Serpent Players group in the 1960s before being arrested and incarcerated on Robben Island, performed the Antigone with a cell mate in the prison hall,Footnote 153 ‘the Boers [Afrikaners] were in the first row and enjoyed it, but the prisoners were the ones who got the real message’.Footnote 154 Hence in modern South Africa the classical tradition promoted two very different reactions to the Antigone myth, depending upon the different perspectives of the performers, their audiences and the apartheid authorities.

A classical reception approach, however, involves the consideration of why African playwrights choose to rewrite Antigone over and over again, reinterpreting and reinventing the play with each new incarnation within each new geographical context and period. It also involves the question of how African dramatists appropriate the plot, dramatic conventions and themes of the Antigone to produce plays that have contemporary meaning in their own cultural and sociopolitical contexts. Other issues that this approach raises include how adaptations of the Antigone, which potentially represent polemical calls for collective action and revolution, are problematized by African nationalism, colonialism and feminism. More specifically, in respect of Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island, the classical reception approach invites questions regarding the meaning of these dramaturgists’ metadramatic adaptation of the Antigone to the modern political and social context of apartheid South Africa and what is at stake literally when black South African actors risk arrest in order to perform and when the very act of performing a play about civil disobedience is itself an act of civil disobedience. The Island meditates upon the universal theme of tyranny in ways that have a direct application to political events in South Africa. Read through the lens of classical reception, The Island becomes primarily a political drama that has appropriated and adapted a classical form to explore the theme of human costs of apartheid. Despite (or because of) the classical overtones of this modern play, ultimately its performance involved a political act because the apartheid regime recognized that it was not merely a critical portrayal of its political and social system but also a call for resistance and action against it.

Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone is problematic, however, in the sense that they portray Antigone as a defiant and heroic figure in the face of political oppression, which is represented by Creon, yet these are western figures imported into the African dramatic tradition. The appearance of these characters bears testimony to the intrusion of European colonialism in African culture, to which Winston alludes when he questions the significance of a classical myth to his culture and circumstances:

Go to hell, man. Only last night you tell me that this Antigone is a bloody … what you call it … legend! A Greek one at that. Bloody thing never even happened. Not even history! Look, brother, I got no time for bullshit. Fuck legends. Me? … I believe my life here! I know why I’m here, and it’s history, not legends. I had my chat with a magistrate in Cradock and now I’m here. Your Antigone is a child’s play, man.Footnote 155

Even though Winston’s comments serve to highlight the general issue of the relevance of a European myth to the African stage in the postcolonial era, The Island itself is a hybrid (or fragmentation) of African and European cultural components that reflect the play’s colonial and classical origins. The Island has a split collective (or hybrid) multi-racial ‘author’ -- Fugard is white, while Kani and Ntshona are blackFootnote 156 -- while the names of the drama’s black co-authors, who also perform the roles of classical characters in the metaperformance of the Antigone, are intercultural hybridizations.Footnote 157

A note beneath the list of characters of The Island mentions that in the first performance of this drama on 2 July 1973, John Kani played the part of Creon and Winston Ntshona assumed the role of Antigone.Footnote 158 These characters assume hybrid, multicultural, multi-racial, bigenerational and mixed-gender identities, as evident, for example, when Winston dons a blond wig and false breasts at the beginning of scenes two and four to practice and to perform, respectively, his role of Antigone,Footnote 159 thereby fusing his male black African identity to a female western classical identity. Initially Winston violently rejects the idea of playing the role of Antigone when John laughs at him wearing the wig and fake breasts,Footnote 160 but he finally accepts the part.Footnote 161 Despite the almost fratricidal hostility evident between the pair, their brotherhood, solidarity, and physical bond are suggested in John’s allusion to their ‘marriage’ by the prison wardens at ‘Rooihel’ (Rooi Hel, ‘Red Hell’) prison.Footnote 162 This scene featuring Winston’s refusal to assume the role of Antigone,Footnote 163 which reveals his own fear of being humiliated as a woman, is laden with irony given John’s and especially Winston’s debasement of women with their misogynistic, sexualized comments and gestures:Footnote 164

WINSTON. Haai, man! You got no wife here. Look for the rag yourself.Footnote 165

JOHN. Nomhle played Antigone. A bastard of a lady that one, but a beautiful bitch. Can’t get her out of my mind tonight.Footnote 166

JOHN. Hey, Winston’s asking how are the punkiesFootnote 167 doing? [Big laugh.] You bloody lover boy! Leave something for us, man!Footnote 168

JOHN. [John launches into an extravagant send-up of Winston’s Antigone. He circles ‘her’ admiringly, he fondles her breasts, he walks arm in arm with her down Main Street, collapsing with laughter between each ‘turn’. He climaxes everything by dropping his trousers.] 

Speedy Gonzales! Here I come!Footnote 169

WINSTON. I’m a man, not a bloody woman.Footnote 170

WINSTON. ‘Nyah … nyah… . Here comes comes Antigone! … Help the pool lady! … Well, you can go to hell with your Antigone.’Footnote 171

WINSTON. Who else was here that dressed himself as a lady and made a bloody fool of himself?Footnote 172

WINSTON. All he wants it to make me a ‘boy’ … not a bloody woman.Footnote 173

WINSTON. Here’s Antigone … take these titties and hair and play Antigone… . Take your two titties… .Footnote 174

WINSTON… . so that he can dress me up like a woman and make a bloody fool of me.Footnote 175

WINSTON. Because you’ll need a fuck. A really wild one!Footnote 176

WINSTON. They´ll fix you up with a woman… .Footnote 177

WINSTON. Set you up with her in a comfortable joint, and then leave you alone. You’ll watch her, watch her take her clothes off, you’ll take your pants off, get near her, feel her, feel it… . Ja, you’ll feel it. It will be wet… .Footnote 178

WINSTON. Wet poes,Footnote 179 John! And you’ll fuck it wild.Footnote 180

WINSTON. [quietly] You stink, John. You stink of … poes… .Footnote 181

WINSTON… . your hands on your balls, and poes waiting for you… . you will fuck and forget.Footnote 182

Winston and John impute an inferior status to the female in much the same way that the cruel prison guard Hodoshe ascribes an inferior social position to blacks by considering everything they do to be ‘child’s play’Footnote 183 and by apparently wanting to make Winston a ‘boy’.Footnote 184 Both black male prisoners appear to display a lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy regarding their own sexist attitudes toward and sexual objectification of women -- and it is apparent that it is their own black women they are talking about.Footnote 185 In the genre of protest theatre itself, black women were disregarded,Footnote 186 as reflected in The Island by a male actor playing Antigone’s part, though in the case of this particular play the necessity of a male playing the female role can be explained by the setting of Robben Island, a black male prison.

The denigration of women by Winston and John in The Island elicits the memory of Creon’s misogynism in the Antigone when the king, in speeches to Antigone and her beloved Haemon, belittles not only Antigone as a woman but also more broadly the female sex:

αὕτη δ᾽ ὑβρίζειν μὲν τότ᾽ ἐξηπίστατο,

νόμους ὑπερβαίνουσα τοὺς προκειμένους·

ὕβρις δ᾽, ἐπεὶ δέδρακεν, ἥδε δευτέρα,

τούτοις ἐπαυχεῖν καὶ δεδρακυῖαν γελᾶν.

ἦ νῦν ἐγὼ μὲν οὐκ ἀνήρ, αὕτη δ᾽ ἀνήρ,

εἰ ταῦτ᾽ ἀνατεὶ τῆιδε κείσεται κράτη.

……………………………

ἐμοῦ δὲ ζῶντος οὐκ ἄρξει γυνή.

……………………………….

ἐκ δὲ τοῦδε χρὴ

γυναῖκας εἶναι τάσδε μηδ᾽ ἀνειμένας.

………………

μή νύν ποτ᾽, ὦ παῖ, τὰς φρένας γ᾽ ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς

γυναικὸς οὕνεκ᾽ ἐκβάληις, εἰδὼς ὅτι

ψυχρὸν παραγκάλισμα τοῦτο γίγνεται,

γυνὴ κακὴ ξύνευνος ἐν δόμοις.

…………………………

οὕτως ἀμυντέ᾽ ἐστὶ τοῖς κοσμουμένοις,

κοὔτοι γυναικὸς οὐδαμῶς ἡσσητέα.

κρεῖσσον γάρ, εἴπερ δεῖ, πρὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐκπεσεῖν,

κοὐκ ἂν γυναικῶν ἥσσονες καλοίμεθ᾽ ἄν.

…………………………………………………

ὦ μιαρὸν ἦθος καὶ γυναικὸς ὕστερον.

……………………………………………

γυναικὸς ὢν δούλευμα, μὴ κώτιλλέ με.Footnote 187

(Sophocles, Antigone 480–85, 525, 578–9, 648–51, 677–80, 746, 756)

This girl was already skillful at being insolent,

when she broke laws that had been established.

Her second act of insolence was to laugh and exult

in the deed after she had performed it

I am no man and she is the man instead

if she achieves her victory with impunity.

… … … … … … … … … … …

No woman is going to rule me while I live.

… … … … … … … … … … …

From this point they must

act like women, free to wander no longer.

… … … … … … … … … … …

Now, boy, do not ever throw common sense aside

for the pleasure that women provide. You know

that a loving embrace becomes cold comfort

when an evil woman shares your bed at home.

… … … … … … … … … … . .

In this way I must defend my authority

and never allow myself to be beaten by some woman.

If I must be cast out, let that be by a man;

I will not be called inferior to a woman.

… … … … … … … … … … …

You foul character, inferior to any woman!

… … … … … … … … … … …

You woman’s slave, do not try to cajole me!

Creon’s misogynistic comments about Antigone and women generally in the Antigone include a sexual reference to the dangerous pleasure they provide to men (648–51). It is this sexual thread in the Antigone that Winston’s sexist remarks about women in The Island seem to pick up on.

Notwithstanding Winston’s misogynistic streak in The Island, his actual performance dressed in drag as a Greek female mythological figure in scene fourFootnote 188 seems transformative, even cathartic, given that he actually enacts by playing this role his own set of experiences as a black victim of a modern white repressive state, thereby helping to bridge not only the faultline between black male and female but also a cultural gap that spans two continents and 2,500 years. With its diverse racial, cultural, geographical, generational and gender-based elements, The Island does not seem merely to reflect the African aversion to apartheid; rather, its message of the immorality and injustice of a political system has broad universal meaningFootnote 189 and appeal, with successful performances (and runs of performances) occurring in various regions and countries within and outside Africa.Footnote 190 Therefore the criticisms mentioned by Hardwick of this ‘countertext’Footnote 191 having been ‘hijacked by middle-class white liberals’ and ‘domesticated into the dominant discourses of European tradition, marginalizing African tradition and practices’ seem misguided.Footnote 192 The use of ‘countertext’ and the similar term ‘counter-discourse’ are problematic within the African context, however, if their meaning is confined merely to the genre of ‘protest´ theatre since, as the Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan has remarked in respect of ‘countertext’, their use inherently suggests both that the African role is ‘subaltern’ and merely an automatous response to the ‘Other.Footnote 193

Ultimately the use of classical reception in the treatment of a figure such as Antigone reflects the postmodern tendency to decentre the cultural works and ideas of Greece and Rome from their western orientation and to destabilize them in terms of their position of cultural dominance,Footnote 194 whereas the model of the classical tradition inherently privileges the position of Greece and Rome through its emphasis upon the influence of its ideas upon subsequent generations, literary forms and specific works. Therefore the perspective of classical reception has the propensity to liberate African versions of the Antigone from the shackles of European cultural hegemony, whereas the ‘traditional’ paradigm of the classical tradition tends to preserve this cultural dominance in ideological terms. As suggested above, this theoretical distinction between the classical tradition and classical reception may appear to be artificially rigid and one can envisage a paradigm of classical ‘influence’ that is based upon a more fluid relationship between these models -- I have proposed the term ‘classical traception’Footnote 195 -- because the story of Antigone both has informed subsequent adaptations of Sophocles’ tragedy as well as been informed by later generations of playwrights.

The crosscultural metatheatricality of The Island is apparent through not only the discussion of the staging of Sophocles’ Antigone that takes place between John and Winston in scenes one and two but also the performance of this play in the fourth and final scene.Footnote 196 This rehearsing and performance of the Antigone serves to remind Winston and the other prisoners of the reasons for their own political acts of defiance and the principles behind them. The working out of the Antigone also becomes the means by which the men attempt to cope with their prison environment and isolation. At the beginning of the final scene, John addresses the theatre audience as if it were the actual prison audience on Robben Island:

Captain Prinsloo, Hodoshe, Warders … and Gentlemen! Two brothers of the house of Labdacus found themselves on opposite sides in battle, the one defending the State, the other attacking it. They both died on the battlefield. King Creon, Head of State, decided that the one who had defended the State would be buried with all religious rites due to the noble dead. But the other one, the traitor Polynices, who had come back from exile intending to burn and destroy his fatherland, to drink the blood of his masters, was to have no grave, no mourning. [… ] It was the law. But Antigone, their sister, defied the law and buried the body of her brother Polynices. She was caught and arrested. That is why tonight the Hodoshe Span, Cell Forty-two, presents for your entertainment: ‘The Trial and Punishment of Antigone’.Footnote 197

The staging of the Antigone immediately makes apparent the contemporary relevance of the performance to South Africa, with the thrice-repeated phrase ‘the State’ serving emphatically as a reference both to Thebes and the South African government, whose representatives have ‘arrested’ Antigone, which conjures up a contemporary, especially South African, context. In the prison the State is represented by Captain Prinsloo, Hodoshe and the Warders, while the ‘Gentlemen’ are obviously the black prisoners.

Immediately after this metadramatic exposition, John commences playing the role of Creon. Within the context of the metaplay, at this point John is no longer a black African prisoner but rather his white apartheid master. Yet John immediately reminds the prison audience in this performance within the play that even when he assumes the role of a king, in fact he is still a ‘servant’ of his privileged white theatregoers:

My People! Creon stands before his palace and greets you! […] Did I hear ‘Hail the King’? My good people, I am your servant … a happy one, but still your servant. […] Creon’s crown is as simple, and I hope as clean, as the apron Nanny wears. And even as Nanny smiles and is your happy servant because she sees her charge … your child! … waxing fat in that little cradle, so too does Creon -- your obedient servant! -- stand here and smile. For what does he see? Fatness and happiness! How else does one measure the success of a state? By the sumptuousness of the palaces build for its king and princes? The magnificence of the temples erected to its gods? The achievements of its scientists and technicians who can now send rockets to the moon? No! Theses count for nothing beside the fatness and happiness of its people.Footnote 198

Thus John’s role is ambiguous: he reminds the audience in his hybrid (or fragmented) roles as Creon and apartheid master that nothing has in fact changed. He is still the black servant of the white members of his audience as he reminds them how black nannies have raised their healthy white babies, with the obvious contrast being the destitute conditions of the black townships.

John’s role as Creon requires that he take the side of his white apartheid master in arguing for the necessity of defending the people through violent means against those who undermine the State:

The law defends! The law is no more or less than a shield in your faithful servant’s hand to protect YOU! But even as a shield would be useless in one hand, to defend, without a sword in the other, to strike … so too the law has its edge. The penalty! We have come through difficult times. I am sure it is needless for me to remind you of the constant troubles on our borders … those despicable rats who would gnaw away at our fatness and happiness. We have been diligent in dealing with them. But unfortunately there are still at large subversive elements … there are still amongst us a few rats that are not satisfied and to them I must show this face of Creon …Footnote 199

The geopolitical context is made obvious here, with the troubles mentioned a reference to the various conflicts being fought largely in neighbouring states of South Africa during the time this drama was first performed (1973).Footnote 200 The reasoning adduced resembles that of Creon in his defence of the necessity to protect Thebes from a ‘traitor’ such as Polynices in the Antigone:

οὔτ᾽ ἂν σιωπήσαιμι τὴν ἄτην ὁρῶν

στείχουσαν ἀστοῖς ἀντὶ τῆς σωτηρίας,

οὔτ᾽ ἂν φίλον ποτ᾽ ἄνδρα δυσμενῆ χθονὸς

θείμην ἐμαυτῶι, τοῦτο γιγνώσκων ὅτι

ἥδ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡ σῴζουσα, καὶ ταύτης ἔπι

πλέοντες ὀρθῆς τοὺς φίλους ποιούμεθα.

τοιοῖσδ᾽ ἐγὼ νόμοισι τήνδ᾽ αὔξω πόλιν.

… … … … … … … … … … …

τὸν δ᾽ αὖ ξύναιμον τοῦδε, Πολυνείκη λέγω,

ὃς γῆν πατρώιαν καὶ θεοὺς τοὺς ἐγγενεῖς

φυγὰς κατελθὼν ἠθέλησε μὲν πυρὶ

πρῆσαι κατ᾽ ἄκρας, ἠθέλησε δ᾽ αἵματος

κοινοῦ πάσασθαι, τοὺς δὲ δουλώσας ἄγειν …

… … … … … … … … … … …

τοιόνδ᾽ ἐμὸν φρόνημα, κοὔποτ᾽ ἔκ γ᾽ ἐμοῦ

τιμῆι προέξουσ᾽ οἱ κακοὶ τῶν ἐνδίκων.

(Sophocles, Antigone 185–91, 198–202, 207–8)

I would never keep my silence if I saw ruin,

instead of safety, marching upon the citizens.

Nor would I ever make a friend of a man who is

hostile to my country. Because I know well that

the State is the ship that keeps us safe, and that only

upon sailing a straight course can we make friends.

Such are the laws by which I strengthen this city.

… … … … … … … … … … …

But for his brother, I mean Polynices,

who, returning from exile, wanted to burn to ashes

the city of his fathers and his country’s gods,

and wanted to feed on kindred blood

and to lead the rest into slavery…

… … … … … … … … … … …

Such is my will, and I will never permit the

traitor to be honoured before the just man.

Both John in his role of Creon and Creon in the Antigone make a similar argument to justify the brutality and capriciousness of the state -- the necessity of defending the people against ‘subversive elements’ and ‘traitors’, respectively.

At the end of the metaperformance of the Antigone in The Island, Winston, John’s fellow actor, seems to accept his fate of being immured in Robben Island prison:

Brothers and Sisters of the Land! I go now on my last journey. I must leave the light of day forever, for the Island, strange and cold, to be lost between life and death. So, to my grave, my everlasting prison, condemned alive to solitary death.

Winston’s specific mention of ‘the Island’ serves as a reminder to the audience that the fate of the other prisoners on Robben Island mirrors his own (and that of Antigone). Winston then removes his wig and addresses the audience directly as himself, rather than as Antigone, with these words:

Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home!

Time waits no longer. I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs.Footnote 201

These last lines of Winston’s concluding speech are palpably echoed in the final speech of Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy:

ὦ γῆς Θήβης ἄστυ πατρῶιον

καὶ θεοὶ προγενεῖς,

ἄγομαι δὴ κοὐκέτι μέλλω.

λεύσσετε, Θήβης οἱ κοιρανίδαι

τὴν βασιλειδῶν μούνην λοιπήν,

οἷα πρὸς οἵων ἀνδρῶν πάσχω,

    τὴν εὐσεβίαν σεβίσασα.

(Sophocles, Antigone 937–43)

O land of Thebes, city of my fathers,

and you, gods of my ancestors,

I am being led away now; there is no more delay.

Look upon me, lords of Thebes,

the sole surviving princess of your royal house.

See what I have to suffer at the hands of such men

   for paying reverence toward the gods.

Winston’s appropriation and adaptation of Antigone’s words means that they are neither completely his nor hers.

The same can be said of Winston’s dichotomous identity when he begins speaking at the end of the play: he is neither completely Antigone nor himself. When Winston confronts the audience as himself, he is not just an African male actor playing the role of a Greek mythological figure but a black political prisoner acting out in a self-conscious manner his own fate in a real prison. For Winston a certain liberation is experienced in his dismissal of Creon’s threat even as, like Antigone, he suffers the ‘penalty’ for violating a law of the State in order to obey a higher law of humanity:

What lay on the battlefield waiting for Hodoshe to turn rotten, belonged to God. You are only a man, Creon. Even as there are laws made by men, so too there are others that come from God… . Your threat is nothing to me, Creon.

The evil of the apartheid political system is embodied literally in the cruelty of the prison guard nicknamed ‘Hodoshe’, a Xhosa word for a carrion fly, after whom the drama was originally named as Die Hodoshe Span (‘Hodoshe’s Work Team’); Hodoshe’s presence is pervasive throughout the play as the victimizer of the innocent prisoners,Footnote 202 though he never actually makes an appearance onstage. Winston, like Antigone, courageously braves the consequences of his defiance of the State, though, yet again like her, he accepts neither its authority nor the unjust law, in his case, the passbook law, that results in the ‘penalty’ to which he alludes.Footnote 203 The fate of Winston, who is serving a life sentence for burning his passbook, mobilizes the feelings of the reader or audience against the system of apartheid, which dehumanizes and attempts to suck the life force out of its victims.

In addition to the explicit parallel between Winston and Antigone, Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s hypertext incorporates a number of other Sophoclean elements in a reconfigured form, for instance, John, who plays the part of Creon, though he more closely resembles Ismene, Antigone’s sister. At the beginning of The Island, John attempts to dissuade Winston from provoking Hodoshe and creating more trouble for them:

WINSTON [calling]. Hodoshe!

JOHN. Leave him, Winston. Listen to me, man! If he comes now we’ll be in bigger shit.

WINSTON. I want Hodoshe. I want him now! I want to take him to the office. He must read my warrant. I was sentenced to Life brother, not bloody Death!

JOHN. Please, Winston! He made us run… .

WINSTON. I want Hodoshe!

JOHN. He made us run. He´s happy now. Leave him. Maybe he´ll let us go back to the quarry tomorrow.Footnote 204

John’s efforts to calm Winston and to steer him away from aggravating Hodoshe, which constitute an implicit acknowledgement of their subjugated status, bring to mind Ismene’s attempt in the Antigone to deter her sister from challenging Creon’s decree prohibiting the burial of Polynices’ corpse:

ἀλλ᾽ ἐννοεῖν χρὴ τοῦτο μὲν γυναῖχ᾽ ὅτι

ἔφυμεν, ὡς πρὸς ἄνδρας οὐ μαχουμένα.

ἔπειτα δ᾽ οὕνεκ᾽ ἀρχόμεσθ᾽ ἐκ κρεισσόνων,

καὶ ταῦτ᾽ ἀκούειν κἄτι τῶνδ᾽ ἀλγίονα.

(Sophocles, Antigone 61–4)

We must consider that we are women

by birth and thus should not fight against men.

Since we are ruled by those who are stronger,

we must obey in this, whatever distress it brings us.

Here Ismene expresses the traditional subjugated role of women within the Athenian patriarchal system of governance. Similar to Ismene in relation to Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, John seems more conventional in his thinking than Winston in terms of avoiding further unnecessary conflict with the cruel state apparatus.

The transcultural metadramaticality apparent in the hybrid (or fragmented) roles of both Winston and John needs to be viewed within the sociopolitical context of The Island, which is designed to expose the tyranny of the apartheid system of government, its dehumanizing effects on black people, and the political injustices taking place in South Africa.Footnote 205 South African protest and resistance (or agitprop) theatre emerged in the 1970s as a response to the oppressive political policies of the government and the deprivatory social conditions of the townships.Footnote 206 Although the aforementioned terms are used interchangeably, the black South African playwright Zakes Mda distinguishes between them, with ‘protest’ theatre demonstrating the consequences of oppression to the oppressors and ‘resistance’ theatre striving to mobilize the oppressed into actions against the oppressors.Footnote 207 While Mda has argued against ‘protest theatre’ on the basis that it addresses the oppressor rather than the oppressed,Footnote 208 some scholars also have been dismissive of the notion that productions of classical drama -- and an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone such as The Island -- could have assumed a role in the anti-apartheid struggle.Footnote 209 Other scholars, however, others have recognized the potential for such dramas to have served as a form of political protest in the country.Footnote 210 As Albert Wertheim observed in his review of the performance of The Island held at the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1995, the members of the audience were reminded ‘of the not-very-distant past’ and the production ‘helped them, moreover, to recognize the power of the theatre, of what dramatic works like The Island helped to bring about …’.Footnote 211 In fact, The Island is the most explicitly political play written in Africa, as suggested in its setting of Robben Island, the site where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen years (1964–1982); for Mandela this prison island was the equivalent of Antigone’s cave in which she is immured in the Antigone. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela observes that Creon’s ‘inflexibility and blindness [in The Island’s hypotext of the Antigone] ill become a leader, for a leader must temper justice with mercy’.Footnote 212 Since the figure of Creon in The Island symbolizes the oppressive power of apartheid, it is possible to imagine how Mandela’s experience of assuming the identity of the oppressor could have influenced his own political ideas. According to Mandela, who could be viewed as apartheid’s Antigone, it was she ‘who symbolized our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the grounds it was unjust’.Footnote 213 Mandela explained at his Rivonia Trial how he had often been ‘forced to choose between compliance with the law and accommodating my conscience’, a sentiment that has a particularly strong resonance with the dilemma of Sophocles’ Antigone.Footnote 214

It should be no surprise that The Island received a negative reception from the apartheid regime, which recognized that the drama could serve the purpose of heightening the awareness of its audiences about the immorality, brutality and injustice of the apartheid system. After The Island was performed along with Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is DeadFootnote 215 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, an ‘anonymous’ South African newspaper report of 1974 claimed that the plays ‘contained propaganda aimed at discrediting the South African Embassy in London, the Government, and White South Africans in general’.Footnote 216 The performance of The Island constituted a political act because the regime recognized that it was not merely a damning portrayal of apartheid but also a stance of defiance against the state and a call for resistance and action against it. Indeed, Kani and Ntshona declared over a decade later that ‘every single performance of this play, The Island, [was] an endorsement of the local and international call for the immediate release of Mr. Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners and detainees’.Footnote 217

The rewriting (or reinterpretation) of the Antigone by Fugard, Kani and Ntshona offers an insight into how the ‘traditional’ paradigm of the classical tradition can be brought to bear upon a reading of The Island both from the perspective of the scholar who is searching for traces of classically derived material and from the standpoint of the prison guards who viewed the performance of the Antigone as an example of European (or white) cultural hegemony. While this model of the classical tradition implies a linear mode of descent for such scholars and the prison wardens in The Island, the model of classical reception, through the deconstruction of the original plot of the Antigone, offers Fugard, Kani and Ntshona the opportunity to challenge the apartheid regime. Furthermore, in a metatheatrical sense, the classical reception model offers an opportunity for the prisoners on Robben Island to protest against the inhuman apartheid system before their wardens and fellow prisoners. Stephen Gray charges Fugard with being an ‘irresponsible scholar of the Greeks’ through an indiscriminate use of his classical sources,Footnote 218 but in comparison with the ‘traditional’ model of the classical tradition, the paradigm of classical reception enables Fugard and his co-creators Kani and Ntshona to infuse The Island with contemporary significance by distilling the thoughts, feelings and experiences of black South African political prisoners.

In one important respect the concept of ‘classical traception’ proposed aboveFootnote 219 seems preferable to either the model of the classical tradition or that of classical reception when describing the dynamics of The Island. Both the white and black authors of The Island as well as the Afrikaans prison wardens and their black African prisoners share hybrid (or fragmented) European and African cultural elements that are the result of the drama’s colonial and classical origins. The Island is neither entirely European nor African in its conception and performance; even the performance within the play of the Antigone is replete with African characteristics. In a sense, Sophocles’ Antigone has been ‘decolonized’ in its reconfiguration as a drama highlighting South Africa’s dark history of racial oppression and tyranny.Footnote 220 The idea of ‘classical traception’ spans both the European conception of the original Antigone and its linear descent (the traditional model of the classical tradition) as well as its reconfiguration by its split collective (or hybrid) multi-racial ‘author’ in The Island (the traditional concept of the classical reception). Just as the Antigone has been written indelibly into the text of The Island, so, in a way, The Island seems to have been written back into the Antigone so as to render the hypotext a new work.Footnote 221 Both plays, including their themes, characters and circumstances, share universal qualities in common. As discussed above, proponents of the ‘classical tradition’ or of the ‘classical reception’ have argued for the inclusive nature of these models by extending their original conceptions to embrace the other.Footnote 222 But the phrase ‘classical traception’ not only naturally embraces the forces of linear descent and reception involved in the ‘traditional’ models of the classical tradition and the classical reception, respectively, but it also inherently suggests the cross-fertilization that occurs between the ‘original’ classical work and a later adaptation. The cross-fertilization, for example, between the Antigone and The Island is symbiotic and goes in both directions. The phrase ‘classical traception’ is a more naturally inclusive phrase suggestive of the bidirectional forces involved collectively in the models of the classical tradition and the classical reception.

Epilogue

The investigation of how the classical languages, texts and ideas reached the African subcontinent and affected its development in a range of areas is complementary with an examination of how indigenous Africans and European settlers and their ancestors made use of these languages and appropriated and adapted these ideas and texts.Footnote 223 This can be seen even from the brief discussion of the eighteenth-century west African-born writer Jacobus Eliza Johannes CapiteinFootnote 224 and the extended analysis of the South African modern drama, The Island.Footnote 225 The globalization of the classical tradition and classical reception -- what I have jointly termed classical ‘traception’ -- reflects the expansion of these concepts to geographical areas such as Africa and to modern critical disciplines such as postcolonial studies. The classical ‘traception’ is a complex, sometimes fragmented, seemingly chaotic, web of interconnected works, images and ideas, which naturally has contributed to it becoming an area of cultural contestation. Consistent with broader cultural shifts occurring elsewhere in the world, cultural politics in Africa has resulted in not only a lessening of the Eurocentric focus in the study of the classical ‘traception’ but also the treatment of the modern African work as equal to the original classical work in what is perceived as a dynamic, transcultural relationship.

In the African context my proposed joint model of the classical ‘traception’ is open to challenge on the basis that it is neither entirely classical nor cohesive but rather is a fragmented form of cultural hybridity in which classical and postcolonial components from different cultures -- not just African and European -- converge and diverge. Even so, considering the traditional elements of the classical tradition along with those of classical reception helps to provide a broader view of the ways in which Classics has helped to shape and been received by different African societies and their cultures from the perspectives of both the European colonizers and indigenous peoples (that is, dominant and subordinate groups). Cultural developments in Africa have shown that classical texts, images and ideas continue to provide the basis for much reflection on the subcontinent and to serve as a stimulus for political and social transformation.Footnote 226