Collaborators across Apartheid’s Artscape: History, Memory, and Cross-Racial Artistic Partnership

In spite of formal regulations, widespread social self-policing, and significant cultural obstacles, cross-racial artistic collaborations flourished during ‘high Apartheid’. Musicians, writers, filmmakers, performers, artists of all types and levels of talent transcended the supposedly rigid color-bar of the 1950s and 60s, producing remarkable and timeless works of passion, energy, and originality. While apartheid era legislation restricted private ‘racially mixed’ social gatherings, even policing domestic alcohol consumption, and mandated segregated performance venues, fierce resistance by artists in South Africa, and by their supporters abroad, gave voice to extraordinary talent, such as Todd Matshikiza, who composed the jazz opera ‘King Kong,’ Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane, who co-wrote the docufiction film ‘Come Back, Africa,’ and the inscrutable Dugmore Boetie, author of Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost. Each of these masterpieces represents a direct, collective, collaborative act of authorial resistance to the colonial status quo. We examine white-authored post hoc representations of cross-racial collaboration with a view to discern the significance of apartheid as axis of memory. We compare the account of Barney Simon, Boetie’s editor, with Pat Williams’ memoire of her experience writing the lyrics for ‘King Kong, and Michael Rogosin’s recollections of his father Lionel’s time in Johannesburg filming ‘Come Back, Africa.’ We are interested in deciphering patterns of behavior, memory, and affect that speak to the bargain of collaboration, a foundational axis for the articulation of colonial power. Simon’s first explanation of his role and relationship accompanied the 1969 edition of Boetie’s book. While he revisited and tweaked his narrative several times in the decades before his death in 1995, his description of cross-racial activities in deeply marked by apartheid. As Rogosin’s and Williams’ memoires, from 2014 and 2017 respectively, post-date the white supremacist state’s collapse, the reflective narratives are informed by a distinctly globalized, almost post-racial vocabulary.