Van Graan’s lie of the land inspires paradoxical hope
About 10 minutes into the opening night performance of Land Acts, the latest one-man satirical show penned by Mike van Graan and directed by Rob van Vuuren, entertainer extraordinaire Daniel Mpilo Richards broke out of character to address the audience directly. Perhaps he feared he had competition for our full attention: outside the theatre the rest of the world, it seemed, was watching England and Croatia square off on a football field in Moscow.
“I can give you an update,” he joked. “England are ... um ... 25 for 1 in the second quarter, I think?” Richards needn’t have worried. For the next hour, as he morphed deftly from character to character, shifting from mockery to poignancy, he held everyone rapt.
When my wife and I emerged from the Auto & General Theatre on the Square in Sandton (where Land Acts is running until July 29), England and Croatia were tied 1-1 with a few minutes to play. Perfect, we thought, joining the slightly boozy crowd at Hard Rock Café to watch extra time.
I’d been telling myself that I wanted Croatia to win but, inevitably, after Mario Mandzukic’s winner was followed by the final whistle I felt a pang of – what was it? Pity? Disappointment? It’s hard not to like the team of plucky youngsters steered by Gareth Southgate as far as any England side have gone in a World Cup for almost three decades; the pathos of their dazed faces and shattered spirits was enough to move the hardest of hearts.
But there was something else, some other emotional response I had to guard against. Most white English-speaking South Africans of my generation were conditioned by a proBritish environment from a young age. Our grandfathers fought for Churchill in the Second World War. We imbibed the literature and culture of Britain (more particularly, of England) at home, at school — and somehow this felt like a form of opposition to Afrikaner nationalism, to apartheid itself.
But it was no such thing. Our familiarity with and fondness for all things English not only blinded us to the racism and violence of settler colonialism, it also indirectly made us complicit in the continuation of that past into the present. So I have to be on the alert when I hear apparently harmless ditties like “Football’s Coming Home” or see three lions emblazoned on a white jersey, because just under the surface of my consciousness is a boy in the thrall of British jingoism.
It is precisely such an outdated view of Britain-in-theworld, of course, that drove the Brexit vote and resulted in Theresa May’s inept government.
The British are being forced to confront the political and economic idiocy of Brexit, and the misconstrued national sense of self that enabled it. England making the World Cup final or perhaps winning the tournament would have provided a distraction from this, and may even have revived that dangerous jingoism.
South Africans, too, have had to learn that the best form of patriotism is relentless cynicism about the ideas of “country” — from rainbowism to xenophobia to renewed racial hardlining — sold to us by politicians. Satirists like Van Graan, therefore, are crucial to our progress towards something like equality and justice.
Land Acts is exemplary in this regard. Presenting SA through the eyes of a wide cast of characters, from car guards to spoken-word poets, from neurotic dogs to colonising cowboys, Richards reminds us of the very worst that this land, this globe, has seen and continues to see: cruelty, poverty, opportunism, greed, hypocrisy. And yet, even as the anger driving the satire might lead to despair, there is a paradoxical hopefulness.
We laugh because we recognise the absurdity of it all; the satirist as existentialist is on display here. But we also laugh with warmth, with affinity for these characters, because they are rarely reduced to caricatures. And, at the end, when Richards riffs on John Lennon’s Imagine, it is the opposite of sentimental cliché. Seeing and thinking clearly, because we have confronted the worst parts of being human and have scorned them, we have earned the right to affirm the best parts.