An un/timely re-reading: the first South African by Fatima Dike

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dc.contributor.authorFlockemann, Miki
dc.date.accessioned2025-08-06T13:50:10Z
dc.date.available2025-08-06T13:50:10Z
dc.date.issued2025
dc.description.abstractIt has been suggested that re-staging iconic performances from the 1970s and 1980s over the last three decades has become a way of reflecting on the ‘now,’ and recouping previously desired futures that have failed to materialize. Local audience responses to the 2022 revival of Fugard’s The Blood Knot, 60 years after its first production noted how it still spoke powerfully to the present. But instead of seeing this familiarity as a stark indictment of the entrenched legacy of racialiszd identity politics, the play was described as potentially ‘hopeful.’ This apparently counter-intuitive response uncannily brought back to mind a character from another less well-known family drama from the late 1970s, provocatively titled, The First South African by Fatima Dike. Despite similarities in their broad thematic focus on apartheid identity politics within intimate settings, the two works use very different performance aesthetics. The primary aim here is thus to return to Dike’s The First South African in order to explore whether the earlier assessments of a sense of historical ‘stuckness’ evoked in her play can be challenged by paying attention to what can be described as the polyphonic modality employed in the text. Moreover, I shall explore how the representation of the bi-racial white–black protagonist’s psychic break speaks to the concept of ‘political death’ when looking at the play again from the vantage point of the present.
dc.identifier.citationFlockemann, M., 2025. An un/timely re-reading: The First South African by Fatima Dike. South African Theatre Journal, pp.1-15.
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2025.2454560
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/20658
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherTaylor & Francis Group
dc.subjecttemporality
dc.subjecttransition
dc.subjectpolitical death
dc.subjectpolyvocality
dc.subjectidentity politics
dc.titleAn un/timely re-reading: the first South African by Fatima Dike
dc.typeArticle

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