Playwright, screenwriter and director Amy Jephta has spent her profession exploring the contradictions of belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Her landmark movie Barakat made historical past because the first function filmed solely in Afrikaaps, a uniquely South African dialect mixing Afrikaans with different linguistic influences. Jephta’s newest work appears on the advanced intersections of property, privilege and identification in trendy Cape City. In A Good Home, her provocative new play for London’s Royal Court docket theatre and Bristol’s Previous Vic, a shack mysteriously seems in the course of a quaint suburban group, inflicting consternation among the many residents. At the centre of the play is the query that echoes all through Jephta’s work: “To whom does the land belong? Who will get to name it mine?”
For so long as I’ve lived in Cape City, My Metropolis has angered me. Angered me in a approach I suppose is solely potential when your information of a factor is intimate, fossilised by many years of well-worn conflicts that etch the identical acquainted grooves. My Metropolis and I have been locked on this warfare of attrition for a while now. The acquainted tug between fierce loyalty – love, even – and utter disenchantment. I name it mine as a result of I used to be born right here. I tread its floor with an informal sense of possession. Right here – my neighbourhood. Right here – my native cafe. Right here – my home. Look how stunning. Everybody who visits desires to remain. Once they arrive from elsewhere, they are enamoured. I can by no means see My Metropolis that new once more, however generally I squint and droop my disbelief on the breathtaking pure magnificence – locations the place seas meet mountains meet infinite horizons. Crisp, freezing ocean water. Vistas – God, the vistas. And good espresso. Don’t neglect the nice espresso.
After I go away My Metropolis, I yearn for it. South Africa’s weighted historical past haunted me through the writing of A Good Home. It lay beneath, a canine at my very own heels as it’s at my nation’s. That apartheid casts a shadow is clear; working from beneath it was the actual problem. Cape City, of course, sits in that shadow, although it could generally desire to neglect that; comfortably on the rim, often presuming itself a part of the ocean relatively than the “South Africa” of all of it. As a result of to be a part of South Africa, really a part of it, you want to be snug with ugly. And My Metropolis doesn’t do ugly. Cape City is a shiny-side-up type of metropolis, a playground for vacationers, for the well-moneyed, a haven for individuals who have the means to maintain themselves sheltered from the truth the remainder of us dwell in.
However as I write this play, I discover that transferring by Cape City means wading knee-deep in hauntings. Homes, houses, dwellings, property, land, strains of possession – these phrases carry weight. To whom does the land belong? To whom does town belong? Who will get to say it, who will get to name it mine? These are the shifting terrains that my play’s characters traverse every day, simply as I do. Their story started as one thing common, nevertheless it grew to become clear that its energy lay in specificity – within the explicit thorns of being center class and Black in post-apartheid South Africa.
Right here they’re, transferring by the streets of their leafy suburban paradise, negotiating their Blackness in areas the place they’re usually the primary, and certainly solely, ones of their variety. And right here I’m, transferring by inner-city Cape City, by the southern suburbs, by the sun-faded north, understanding each twist and switch like a lover’s pores and skin. I transfer deeper into its stomach, into the Cape Flats, the realm the place I’m from, witnessing how My Metropolis treats these with out the luxurious of 4 cement partitions and a roof with informal brutality.
So I selected to jot down about what defines a home, what a home represents. About what makes a home acceptable, palatable. Who will get to determine? I needed to jot down a play about race, however one that’s extra gnarly than the standard binaries. The play follows Bonolo and Sihle, a younger couple, as they navigate the friction of group, as exterior forces invade their non-public house. Of their most intimate moments, they’re grappling with find out how to exist within the largely white areas they discover themselves in, grappling with find out how to preserve their identification whereas shape-shifting. There are no heroes or villains right here – simply the knotty complexity of being born free, 30 years into democracy, nonetheless stumbling by conversations we haven’t had about our shared historical past. What does it imply for us to barter being Black and being white on this nation, now?
Fifteen kilometres from the paradise as Cape City is my actual metropolis – a township within the Cape Flats known as Bishop Lavis, identified within the nationwide census as a “sub place”. Inhabitants 55,000, unemployment fee 26%, with 47% of residents incomes lower than £140 monthly. Geographically, the Cape Flats is unremarkable. Squat homes tightly huddled collectively, racially homogenous pockets of group dwelling in shut proximity to 1 one other. This space was apartheid’s dumping floor through the Nineteen Fifties, designated for “non-whites” as a part of the Group Areas Act. Those that dwell right here had been pressured to take action, evicted from Cape City’s CBD and District Six areas from the late Nineteen Sixties to the Eighties. That is the place I grew up, and I need to inform you about one explicit home the place my very own life took type.
In my grandmother’s yard, I’m small and caked with the black sand endemic to the Flats. Her home at all times held a number of households beneath its heaving tin roof: three rooms whole; constructed from cinder block; flooring of bare concrete and cracked vinyl sheeting. Low to the bottom, it sat beneath a flight path. Maybe you’ve seen homes like this one when you’ve ever flown into Cape City worldwide airport, or on the drive between the airport and My Metropolis – that stretch the place shacks jostle for house on the fringe of a nationwide freeway. This is my Cape City.
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Now, I personal a home in Bo Kaap, the historic Malay quarter the place my household as soon as had its roots. A singular group that escaped pressured removals, solely to face erasures of a unique variety many years later. To dwell in Cape City is to inhabit haunted areas; each web site a palimpsest, my very own home a kaleidoscope of lives earlier than mine. My great-grandfather grew up on this neighbourhood. An aged couple lived their total lives between these partitions earlier than new German house owners cracked its bones and ribs, refashioning it in their very own picture – one which I, years later, with my European-influenced sensibilities, took a liking to.
The strangeness doesn’t escape me: shopping for this home, imagining myself a custodian whereas being an outsider myself. A gentrifier, a part of the wave of upwardly cell, middle-class, educated South Africans searching for consolation and reconnection on this place the place an element of me as soon as belonged. Looking for to personal the land of my delivery by wielding the blunt device of capitalism.
Right here, I make my very own good home, in this haunted contradiction of a metropolis that may by no means love me – or folks like me – again. That is the story of how we dwell alongside each other, how neighbourhoods change into communities, how communities make societies. It’s as explicit as South Africa and as common as wherever folks share a fence, negotiating that every day friction of proximity and belonging. That’s what I need an viewers to seek out on this play. Even when elements of the story are particular to South Africa and its distinctive context, the themes of A Good Home will join with anybody who lives subsequent door to another person.
A Good Home is on the Royal Court docket: Jerwood theatre to eight February; then Bristol Previous Vic, 14 February to 8 March.
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