This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

6th July 2008

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There are struggle heroes, and then there are struggle heroes.

Martin Koboekae’s Biko: Where the Soul Resides has opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, eliciting a mixed response to its attempts “to show the man behind the icon”. Also debuting at the Festival is Nadia Davids’ new play, Cissie, which offers an intimate biography of one of this country’s more enigmatic political figures. Whereas Biko is internationally renowned, Cissie Gool – though she campaigned tirelessly against the racist laws of the Union government and subsequently against the apartheid state – remains unknown to most South Africans outside of the Western Cape. She was quintessentially a Capetonian, born and bred there by her Scottish mother and Indian-Malay father, and it was for the rights of the disenfranchised people of Cape Town (most famously for the people of District Six) that she fought throughout her life. 

Cissie is an ambitious work, aiming to document not only Gool’s life, but also the collective and individual stories of those affected by one of the most infamous forced removals of the 1960s. This is achieved through an apposite narrative device. In researching the play, Davids found herself more dependent on informants and oral testimonies than she was on the limited written archive of newspaper clippings and other texts. Her process of discovery is mimicked in the play – the audience is addressed by various people who knew Cissie (or know something about her) as if we are the “young lady” who has come to enquire about Mrs Gool. A series of vivid character portraits emerges: straight-talking historians, socialites, pseudo-activists and various people who once lived in District Six but have spent three decades on the Cape Flats, “which will never be home”.

Of course, not everything said about Cissie was kind. The gossip-mongers also have their say in the play. Gool (née Abdurahman) was a controversial figure to some within the Muslim community – she was agnostic; she “lived in sin” for many years with Sam Khan, a Jewish fellow-Marxist, even though she was married; and there were those who felt that her political commitments made her negligent as a wife and mother (in fact, her husband Abdul never appears on stage, and remains a peripheral figure in the play’s version of her life story).

She was also a victim of shifting tides within the liberation movement: early in her career, she was cheered as the first South African woman of colour to be elected to public office, but towards the end it was this link to the city council that made her vilified by radicals for ‘collaborating’ with the apartheid regime.

This turn of events ironically echoes another generational conflict that we witness in the play – that between Cissie, the strident young revolutionary, and her father, who was also a vehement opponent of segregation but hoped to bring about change through existing institutions. They may have argued, but Cissie owed most of her political convictions to her father (as to her mother, who was a suffragette). The play’s multi-level set is strewn with books, metonyms of the intellectual environment of the Abdurahman household.

The costuming and incidental music are evocative in creating a sense of period, but as the play not only spans the sixty-odd years of Cissie’s life but is also set in the twenty-first century, there is a constant tension between past and present. This is a reflection of Davids’ intention to continue the “process of reparative history-making”, unearthing the stories that were “deliberately hidden, suppressed and distorted under apartheid”.

Although Sara, the narrator-figure whose journey of uncovering information about the life and times of Cissie Gool frames the play (and who is thus, inevitably, a reformulation of Davids herself), describes the cosmopolitan life of District Six in lyrical terms, Cissie as a production is honest enough not to sentimentalise it. We are reminded by some of its erstwhile inhabitants that it was, in places, a slum. We are also chastised by the Abdurahmans' “nanny” for assuming that the ethnic diversity of District Six did not include black people; and, conversely, for being so captivated by the removals there that we tend to forget the thousands of others who were forced from their homes across South Africa.

Cissie is a dynamic staging of a remarkable life story. The ensemble work of the cast creates a rich tapestry of characters. After an unconvincing first appearance as Sara, Rehane Abrahams delivers a powerful performance in the title role, mapping out Cissie Gool’s development from a young prodigy frustrated by her skin colour to a champion of the poor and oppressed.

In a moving penultimate scene – that should, perhaps, have been the last in a play that runs for almost two hours without an interval – two callous young white reporters, unaware of her importance, come to take her photograph for a newspaper after she has been awarded an honorary degree from the University of Cape Town. She is caught in the phosphorescent flash as an ageing woman who, in one sense, failed in her attempts to bring justice to her community (District Six was demolished shortly after she died), but who retained her pride and dignity even in the face of racism and ignorance.