Monday, April 18, 2005

Alex Throws Down on Politics and Performance

Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry, and Song in Southern Africa. Liz Gunner.

Unique to South Africa, in a sense, is the fact that the art form described in this article to fight back against white-imposed apartheid is theatre, a practice absorbed by blacks from their experiences with white missionaries. The negation of the State’s imposition of a false South African history was the primary motivation in much of the revolutionary black theatre discussed in the article between 1973 and 1986.

As a result of apartheid policies and educational disparities, performance art was more accessible to the general population than other forms like writing. This was integral to the success of arts in social movements like South Africa. The point then is, education through drama.

The theatre and its performances were often indicative, depending on time and place, of the general atmosphere within the anti-apartheid movement. Sometimes it was easily an indicator of militant nationalism but it always espoused self-awareness and self-determination.

At various points black performance was synonymous with the Black Consciousness
Movement and other times not. Regardless, though, black initiative, self-definition, determination, liberation and sometimes trans-ethnic solidarity were all characteristic of activist theatre. It would not have been uncommon, for example, to see a performance where one of the central themes was that cultural contact and exchange across racial classifications is seen as a process which could facilitate the construction of a nonracial society.

At times, the state has even tried to usurp the theatre for political motives. It might put up a performance with a mixed cast. The most authentic of these attempts made use of black cultural themes and black initiative – the historical narratives, however, usually implied ahistorical concepts like homelands as the original way of life. Other times, the state has allowed radical performances in city-based theatres because it was deemed that attitudes of 'tolerance,' such as the notion that the expression of grievances often acts as a safety valve for pent-up feelings.

Under such policies, theatre tended to mellow until the formation of the United Democratic Front, the UDF in 1983 when black theatre again made its way, after a brief respite, to political rallies. As an activist art form, performance represented a challenge to the apartheid policies of the South African Government. The representation of history and themes of oppression and exploitation in South Africa have been important preoccupations of black performance.

Some of the most common events witnessed in theatre of the time were depictions of pass arrests, the humiliation experienced at the medical examinations, petty bureaucracy, police violence, prison conditions, examples of racial discrimination, struggles of migrant workers, conditions in the hostel compounds, and the breakdown of moral and cultural values in the townships. Although questions of class and economy are always latent if not explicitly stated in black theatre, they are rarely explored prominently.

One of the most important aspects of theatre during this period is the fact that playwrights committed to negating Eurocentric utterances on African history and to advancing the modern correlative struggles for psychological and social liberation. Some major plays are known to present links between current oppression and exploitation of Africans with the processes of colonial conquest. The article ends in concluding: Theatre is meant to reveal what is being repressed, to say what is being whispered and to demonstrate what will or must happen.

Monday, April 04, 2005

On Chapter Eight of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, By Barbara Ransby [Elissa Vinnik]

Elissa Vinnik
Freedom Movements
Peter Rachleff
April 4, 2005

On Chapter Eight of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, By Barbara Ransby

Mentoring a New Generation of Activists: The Birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1960-1961, chapter eight of Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, provides an intimate glimpse into Ella Baker’s life and her integral role as model and mentor to the student movement and SNCC. Ransby discusses Baker’s motivations, strategies, and goals as she coordinated SNCC’s development; she addresses other young activists who were greatly influenced and inspired by Baker as well. Ransby’s reliance on primary sources—those who interacted closely with Baker during the movement—speaks to Baker’s profound positive and life-changing impact on those who knew her. Her strong personality, ability to work with diverse groups of people, and her leadership won her the respect of many. Ultimately, it was her unwillingness to succumb to established ideas of leadership, gender roles, class and resistance of established structures that made her a model for men and women of both races. Rather than analyze or criticize, this chapter summarizes events with which we have already become familiar: the Freedom Rides, division within SNCC, and student work within local communities. Instead, it is a tribute to the Ella Baker the woman, the individual, the leader, the revolutionary, and the mentor.

When Ella Baker called for the leaders of sit-ins to convene for a conference at Shaw University on April 16-18, 1960, the zealous, but disorganized, students had no reason to “embrace [her] with open arms” (241). As Baker set out to earn their trust, she was acutely aware of the students’ determination, radicalism, courage, and fervor. She believed that, with guidance, their passion and untapped strength could reenergize the civil rights movement. It was Baker, not Dr. Martin Luther King, who offered a consistent approach to the students’ beliefs and expectations. She embraced the principle of self-determination, refusing to allow the elite and expert politicians to overpower locally conceived movements because these experts saw themselves as more capable and experienced. She wanted to protect the burgeoning student movement’s creativity, energy, passion, militancy, and development from being stifled and consumed by the more established SCLC. Therefore, she sought to provide a “gentle mentorship” and develop a direction that she might influence but not determine (243).

Baker dismissed age and gender as obstacles to participate in the civil rights movement; instead, she saw them as viable forces of change. She urged students, despite their young ages of 18-24, to see themselves as capable of having an impact. Baker encouraged them to become actively involved in the movement as participants and organizers in ways dissimilar to their community leaders. She also played the role of puppeteer, pulling young individuals like Bob Moses into the movement because she saw their potential. Further, she served as an important role model to young women of both races. During the 1960’s, there were few female leaders who were as confident, charismatic, and driven as Ella Baker. Indeed, under her influence and direction, Diane Nash, who once lacked confidence and comfort with leadership, became one of the only black female student leaders to receive national attention (246).

Ransby draws from the recollections of people who knew Ella Baker and discusses the character traits that made Baker such a charismatic, admired, and effective leader. Above all, she was generous and humble. She was unwilling to put barriers between herself and the students, literally or ideologically. She rejected any kind of special treatment that might identify her as member of an elite leadership. Baker made knowing the students a priority, finding out who they were, where they came from, and what drove their participation; she made them feel important. She was described by her peers, friends, and students as kind and selfless. Despite persistent health problems, Baker put the movement before her own health, delaying much needed rest and even surgery.

Like the women involved in local movements in South Africa and the United States, Baker was denied a leadership role in the male-dominated, established structure of the civil rights movement. Instead, she sought groups whose ideas and values were similar to her own; she tried to connect with them, and help them develop their ideas. The students of SNCC were a prime example. She acted as a “political mother,” helping to turn students’ “inclinations” toward working with local community members (later termed grass-roots organizing) into “conviction” and finally into reality (251). Bob Moses’ observed that “a woman taking the “dignified and self respecting manner that was a familiar feature of black family life into the rugged political domain was nothing short of revolutionary” (257). Previously, women had rarely challenged the established structure so powerfully or successfully.

Just as Baker rejected traditional modes of leadership, she resisted the ways in which “public female figures were so often defined in conjunction with male partners and in terms of their sexual identities” (256). Indeed, she was extremely guarded about the details of her own private life. Surely, as Ransby suggests, Baker did not want her choice of spouse or lover to become a cause for criticism or impede her involvement in the movement. Similarly, during her time as a SCLC employee, Baker usually wore gray suits, dressing as similarly as possible to the men. She saw no reason to stand out as a female and or a leader. However, her dress made it clear that she was their equal and that they had better understand that her agenda was equally important and serious. Similarly, for many young women entering the movement, Baker was able to offer “an alternative image of womanhood” (256) to those young women joining the movement who came from the middle class where politics and outspokenness were deemed improper.

Ella Baker also rebelled against class divisions within the movement. She played an important role in SNCC’s decision to split with the black middle class and support the involvement of the entire black community, many of whom had been formally been excluded from the greater movement. As with women and young people, Ella Baker and SNCC dismissed preconceived notions of class and saw the lower classes as capable of great leadership. Like Baker herself, SNCC’s dress "code" represented their commitment to resist elements of elitism. Their blue jeans, as opposed to suits and ties, proved more welcoming to those traditionally excluded.
The history books may remember Ella Baker for her compromise that prevented SNCC’s fragmentation or the national attention that she brought to SNCC’s salvage of CORE’s failed Freedom Rides. However, her true legacy lies in her deep commitment to her fellow human beings, her intuitive intellect, her ability to mobilize others, and her refusal to conform to standard ideas of feminism, class, and leadership. Thus, for young people, for people of the lower classes and for women, she offered the possibility of escaping traditional restrictions and conventional roles. She taught women that if they could find their own voice, they too, might define themselves rather than be defined by others. She showed SNCC’s participants a new way of interacting with others from all kinds of communities: women and men, black and white, young and old. Baker’s example taught students to know themselves, voice their passions, and turn their passion into action. Indeed, Prathia Hall, a black women who worked in the south starting in 1962, recalled, “I would see myself in her…I was a wandering pilgrim…[and] the more I talked to her the more I understood myself” (258). Ella Baker was a woman who knew people, and who helped them, individually and collectively, reach for their best selves. Her dedication fostered a new kind of political activism. Led by her example, the students of movement successfully asserted themselves as capable, effective, and dynamic leaders, transforming their movement, their communities, and themselves into stronger, self-reliant, freer entities.

Work Cited

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.