This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th June 2008

What does it mean to be ‘coloured’? The narrator of Njabulo Ndebele’s novella Fools describes “the tragic illusion of people conditioned to draw their greatest inspiration from the little white blood in them ... living in the perpetual uncertainty of not knowing whether they are loved or hated.” Guy Butler, one of many white writers who have presumed to write about coloured experience, noted that “the contemplation of this most unethnic of South Africa’s ethnic groups has, from the beginning, evoked a mixed response: mingled affection and contempt, liking and loathing” and, elsewhere, wrote sardonically about “the great disgrace” of “a touch of the tarbrush” in one’s face.

Despite the work of important coloured writers, from Richard Rive and Alex La Guma to Zoë Wicomb and Chris van Wyk, ‘external’ – that is to say, black and white – perceptions of coloured identity in South Africa are still predominant in our literary and dramatic texts, just as they are in the media and in popular culture.

For this reason, a work such as Phillippa Yaa de Villiers’ Original Skin, which runs at the Market Theatre until the 22nd of June, is a welcome intervention. The play presents the unusual story of Alexandra, who experiences and eventually expunges a form of self-loathing as she comes to terms with her status as a young ‘person of colour’ in apartheid South Africa.

This one-woman show (which, one gleans from the promotional material and from Robert Colman’s director’s note, is largely autobiographical) is potentially a particularly interesting exploration of the tension between individual and collective identities because it deviates from the largely inaccurate mono-narrative of Malay heritage and white male/black female miscegenation that seems to inform so many of the narrow assumptions on which versions of ‘coloured history’ are based.

Alexandra, we learn, was born to a white mother and a black father in Australia. To avoid bringing shame to her family, the young mother travelled to South Africa to give up her mixed-race child for adoption. This was a curiously short-sighted decision, De Villiers points out, in the Verwoerdian 1960s – the child’s future welfare could hardly have been foremost in her mother’s mind.

To complicate matters further, she was adopted by a white couple and raised as a white girl with “Mediterranean features”. Her new mother, a scientist with an anthropological approach to race relations that barely disguises her own racial prejudices, keeps Alexandra’s identity a secret. She is told by her adoptive family, repeatedly, that she is white – even as neighbours, bus conductors and cinema ushers tell her otherwise, shunning her and treating her as ‘non-white’ according to apartheid legislation.

Her mother’s attempts at a sheltered, apolitical upbringing are represented by the pink bedroom that begins to feel like a prison for the young Alexandra, who wants everything to be orange (a clash of colours that reflects, perhaps, the dilemma of a child trying to draw different skin colours with crayons). When she escapes this stifling environment by going away to university, Alexandra is immersed in a politically concientised environment. Yet the development of her own political consciousness is delayed further because, rather than being a “try-for-white” – as the black and coloured students she meets assume – she still thinks that she is white, even if she intuits that she looks different to other caucasians.

Her opposition to apartheid remains bound up in a vague adolescent rebellion (hers is more a personal and domestic than a national and ideological revolution), but this nevertheless widens the cracks within her family such that, eventually, her father tells her the truth. The shift from being, technically, one of the oppressors to being one of the oppressed brings with it the possibility of replacing guilt, denial and self-disavowal with affirmation and approbation.

Original Skin joins an established dramatic tradition in South Africa (and, specifically, at the Market Theatre): from the plays of Athol Fugard to Michael Picardie’s Shades of Brown and, more recently, the stage adaptation of Van Wyk’s Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, there have been numerous works that have questioned the categories implied in ‘the colour bar’ by challenging the process of definition-through-negatives that simply classifies coloured people as neither black nor white.

How successfully it does so remains a moot point. De Villiers is perhaps a writer first and a performer second, and at various points in the show that I watched, she stumbled over the lines that she has scripted. Surprisingly, she was more convincing when playing the characters involved in Alexandra’s story – her two mothers, for instance, or the well-meaning Mrs Wilcox who arranges her adoption – than when narrating that story herself. Nevertheless, there are some lyrically evocative moments in the play, and there are healthy doses of humour in the rhyming couplets through which some of her more light-hearted characterisations are achieved.