Dr Van Graan's address (23 April 2018)

Dr Mike Van Graan’s Address

 “This is my first graduation ceremony. I was part of the apartheid-must-fall generation. To attend the University of Cape Town – a “white” university - I was required to apply for a permit from the Department of Coloured Affairs. In terms of the separate-and-unequal policies of the time, it was deemed that people of my classification would attend the University of the Western Cape. In order to qualify for a permit to UCT, I had to do a subject not offered at UWC. My permit subject was…drama.

By the time of my application, I had never been to a formal theatre; the state-subsidised Nico Malan Theatre in Cape Town where I lived, was boycotted first because it started as a whites-only facility and restrictions were placed racially mixed casts, and then when it received a permit to allow people other than those classified white, as audience members, this was deemed an affront to those who self-identified as “black”.

Similarly, many in my generation boycotted our graduation ceremonies; while we were obliged to apply for permits to obtain what we considered to be better education offered at institutions like UCT at that time, we viewed graduation ceremonies as symbolic inductions into an essentially unjust system.   

We live in different times.  And yet, we are no less shaped as individuals by the context in which we live, and we are no less graduating into a society wracked by deep inequality.

As a playwright, I seek to interrogate contemporary moral questions we encounter in a society in transition.

A white woman alleges that she has been raped by a black cabinet minister, slated to become the new deputy minister after the 1999 elections. The minister plays an important role in quelling the political violence in KwaZulu Natal, the province from which he hails. The ruling party sends a delegation to convince the woman not to go through with the charges  because of the potential consequences of removing the minister from the political turmoil in his region. Women activists urge her to charge the minister.  Violence that could claim hundreds of lives in political battles is juxtaposed to the pandemic of violence against women. The individual’s right to justice is contrasted with what some would consider the greater good of society. What will the woman – herself a committed political activist - decide?  These are the questions posed in Green Man Flashing.

During the state of emergency in the 80s, a young black trade unionist is detained without trial, and is brutally tortured before his lawyer, a young, white Afrikaner manages to get him released on a technicality.  The detainee wants to leave the country, take up arms and wreak vengeance on a system that has brutalised him. The Afrikaans lawyer convinces him otherwise, obtains a bursary for him to pursue legal studies, and they eventually form a legal firm together, specialising in human rights. Twenty years after they first meet, the roles are reversed in “the new South Africa”. The Afrikaans lawyer is in jail and his black legal partner is there to defend him. The white lawyer’s pregnant wife was killed in a hijacking. Three young men are arrested but are released on bail in terms of a law that these lawyers helped to draft, to make the law more consistent with the country’s human rights paradigm. A few months later, the youths are in court again, charged with another hijacking. The white lawyer goes into the courtroom, and shoots them.  The violence of the apartheid era is juxtaposed to the criminal violence rampant in contemporary South Africa, and the choices that individuals make, and the positions they take when confronted by these forms of violence.  This is the theme of another play, Some Mothers’ Sons.

I am deeply conscious that while I am able to write and produce these plays, in a society in which more than half the population lives below the poverty line, with official unemployment at 26%, many of my fellow citizens will be unable to access these plays, and not enjoy their fundamental right “to participate in the cultural life of the community and enjoy the arts” as affirmed in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In such a divided society, with its inheritance of division, whose stories are told?  Whose values and interests are served by theatre? Whose standards are used to evaluate theatre?  Who acts, who directs, who designs the lighting, the costumes, the sets?

It is not enough simply to write and produce within the system, within the structures as they exist; it is necessary simultaneously to work for systemic and structural changes within the theatre sector itself, and within our broader society that shapes both the theatre industry and the opportunities afforded our citizenry, always working towards a more just, more humane order.

As with the characters in these plays, we are shaped and affected by the macro conditions in which we live, but we have agency, we have individual choice: how will we act within our society? How will we use the education, the skills, the opportunities we have been afforded?

To those who deemed how I have sought to answer these questions worthy of today’s recognition and who nominated me, to the University of Pretoria and its decision-making structures who have seen it fit to bestow this singular honour, thank you.

We each write our own stories; we are not simply victims of fate, nor are we history’s useful idiots. We must each choose how we will live, who or what we will serve in our communities, our country, our continent and indeed, in the world. 

As we do so, I offer the tools of the playwright: human empathy: the capacity to put yourself in the shoes of the other; intellectual rigour: the courage to ask the hard and uncomfortable questions, and imagination: the freedom to dream the impossible.

Thank you for listening.”