Foreword - Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater: This Fire Burns Within us All

Summary

How do we South Africans make sense of the violence that marks our past? This play, Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater, forces us to engage seriously with this question. No matter your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realisation that history is a living, breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater is set in present-day South Africa but traverses the past as the protagonist, Zenzile Maseko, brings to life her own memories of the dying days of apartheid and the transition to democracy. Some South Africans may think they know the history of this time. Others would like to forget that history so they can pretend they are not affected by or made complicit in the events of that period. But this play is here to remind us that there are many things we do not know about our past. It reveals to us how the stories of countless black South African women can be a liberating force as we process our relationship to a violent and painful past. Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater is thus a gift, an offering, a reckoning, an awakening to the discomfort and necessity of embracing the complexities of a ‘history from below’, a history we must sit with and with which we must coexist. We need stories like Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater in order to heal. Healing stories refuse to fit into the neat versions of history that we use to justify our current actions.

Reclaiming and redressing our past through recording and making visible the histories of black South Africans and the struggle for liberation remains an important political project. The project of producing history can, however, take many forms, both liberating and oppressive. Historian Noor Nieftagodien points out that the production of public history since the 1990s has focused on ‘grand national[ist] narratives’ that can marginalise local experiences, or only recognise their contributions to change if it serves the dominant narrative. In its ‘narrower and most popular form this exercise of historical rewriting has inclined to justify the current regimes of power’. Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater challenges the grand narrative of what it was like to struggle against apartheid. It does so by telling an unfamiliar story woven into the familiar horror of apartheid. In this account we can no longer easily find who to blame.