The drama of country and city: tribalization, urbanization and theatre under apartheid

In an ironic reversal of the classic modern paradigm where the city represents progress and the agency of citizens against the ‘idiocy of rural life’, the Africanized city, especially Johannesburg, came in the apartheid period to signify barbarism for white South Africans, the very group that saw itself as the vanguard of modernity in Africa. Fearful of the hybrid urbanity of the ‘city native’ in Sophiatown, Afrikaner Nationalists and their English‐speaking fellow‐travellers in the 1950s proposed a counter‐civitas, a perverse modernity defined not by urban civility but by isolation in the country. This essay takes the tensions between and within the racial appropriations of country and city in apartheid's perverse modernity as the point of departure for a critical revaluation of the affinities and differences among African, Afrikaans, and white English drama and performance in South Africa.