by Naomi Andre
Winnie: The Opera Onstage
The world premiere of Winnie: The Opera at the State Theatre in Pretoria on April 28, 2011, was an important and triumphant event. The theater was packed and even the “real” Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was in attendance. At the end of the opera, after the final curtain call and with the entire cast and production team onstage, she took her place with them and spoke from prepared remarks as well as extemporaneously. Raising her fist to the sky, she shouted “Amandla!” (Power!). The audience rose to their feet and shouted “Ngawethu!” (The power is ours!) right back in response. After an exhilarating performance, Madikizela-Mandela’s presence added further excitement. She said that she liked the opera and felt this was the biggest honor and the best praise she had ever received from South Africa, her home country. She also admitted to not having ever been in the State Theatre before that night; however, she revealed that she had considered bombing it before, during the years of apartheid.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, known as “Mother of the Nation,” is a controversial figure who is beloved and fierce, heroic and infamous. Yet Winnie: The Opera is not entirely alone in presenting such a formidable leading female character on the international opera stage; a few recent works also defy this stereotype, and Winnie fits right in with these strong willed women: Madame Mao (Bright Sheng [2003]) and Powder Her Face (Thomas Ades [1998]), based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll.
Winnie: The Opera also belongs to a handful of canonic operatic heroines who challenge the traditional suffering damsel in distress and present an alternative to the innocent who is unjustly punished in the end. There are a few repertoire operas that defy conventions and showcase a different type of heroine. Winnie evokes the drama behind the contested positions of both sixteenth-century Tudor heirs to the throne (Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart) in Donizetti’s 1834 Maria Stuarda, the forcefulness and violence of Puccini’s Tosca (1900), and the steadfast vengeance of Strauss’s Elektra (1909).
Winnie the woman has become a legend in her own time. Thrust into the public eye for decades while her husband Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner for twenty-seven years on Robben Island (1963 to 1990). As a new bride and in her twenties, Winnie Mandela raised their two girls when Nelson was away; she faced intense public scrutiny, several arrests and imprisonments (including eighteen months of torture in a death cell). Yet while much of her life has been lived publically, there is also an enigmatic side that causes us to wonder how she can hold such contradictions. Neither her heroism nor the controversy surrounding her can be denied, and it is these qualities, the intertwined victim-perpetrator-heroine, that ask who Winnie Madikizela-Mandela really is. Winnie does not answer these inquiries unequivocally but allows the intensity of these questions to fuel the drama embedded in the story of the opera.
As mentioned above, Winnie is not a stand-alone opera in South Africa after 1994; it belongs instead to a larger movement in South Africa that involves how the new nation sees itself as well as how it aspires to be seen. Several major opera companies have either begun or gained new momentum in South Africa since 1994: Opera Africa in Durban, the Isango Ensemble opera company (in Cape Town), Black Tie Ensemble (based in Pretoria), the Gauteng Opera (based in Johannesburg), the Cape Town Opera (the professional opera company), and the very active opera program at the University of Cape Town that produces its own season and sometimes collaborates with the Cape Town Opera.26 All of these opera companies, including more that are starting up, receive state and private funding and are supplemented by multiple young-artist programs that train young students and help finance their musical education in country and abroad.
Winnie: The Opera came out of an independent production company (Vundowil) that was founded as the opera was being completed. The project started out as The Passion of Winnie, a digital opera (projections of photos, chamber orchestra of sixteen, two soloists—Winnie and Columbus, her father—and chorus of eight who also double on smaller solo parts) and premiered in Toronto on June 8, 2007.27 At that point the work was one act and Mfundi Vundla had not yet joined the creative team. Madikizela-Mandela was invited to the premiere but was publically denied a visa due to her political troubles and was unable to attend.
Winnie as an opera is a deliberate undertaking that received generous national and private funding, premiering in one of the leading venues, the State Theatre, in the country’s capital city of Pretoria. As an especially attractive feature in the post-apartheid world of South Africa, the work brought together a large interracial group collaborating on the same project behind the scenes (in the creative team of the composer and librettists), the production team, and onstage with the singers, dancers, and actors. While the singers were black (except for the few white characters), the orchestra and production crew (lighting, sound, costumes, and make-up) were for the most part white. Shirley Jo Finney, an African American visitor new to South Africa, was the director. Bongani Ndodana-Breen is Xhosa and mentions in his program note that he is the first black South African to write and orchestrate a full-length opera. Warren Wilensky, a South African Canadian film director, wrote the first version of the libretto for The Passion of Winnie and was joined by South African media mogul Mfundi Vundla in the revision for the full-length opera.28
Winnie: The Opera is not an opera that simply shows a good-faith effort. Nor does it attempt to “try” to be an opera. Winnie is an opera that both belongs in the canonic opera repertory and shows new directions for the future of the genre. I write these words realizing that at this point the opera has only been performed four times during its initial run (with the premiere on April 28, 2011) and I am making a rather bold statement. I stand behind this assessment and I hope this opera gains the wider recognition it so richly deserves with continued performances. It has captured the movement for bringing together an event and characters that are timely, topical, and political. The opera is relevant—not only for South Africa but also for the United States, Europe, and any other operatic tradition in the twenty-first century. It has brought a compelling humanity and depth of drama to several of its characters—especially its leading lady—that makes it feel like an opera, as opposed to a musical or operetta.29 We get to know their motivations and we care about them, even if we do not agree with them or are particularly sure if we can like them for their controversial actions. It is a work that brings together a full Western orchestra and tonal/post-tonal tunefulness combined with a postmodernity that uses TV media clips and projected animation screened in the background.30 It also presents an insider’s view of African traditions, from the ilobolo bride price negotiations and rituals at the end of act 1, to the adaptation of a Xhosa song sung by the Madikizela women in Pondoland in the beginning of that scene (act 1, scene 3). Musically and linguistically (with text sung in English and Xhosa) the opera presents an intertextuality that shows a syncretic coming together of traditional South African and Western European elements into something that references each population and is relevant to a new mixed audience that reflects the global reach of these issues.
Although this is a story that has an international reach, it is still rooted in South Africa. Perhaps most important, it is told by South Africans about South Africa. I had the privilege of witnessing this story being told for the first time by South Africans—a fully South African cast (a situation that would probably change when the opera is performed in different countries). At a time when Apartheid was less than fifteen years in the past and the people being depicted were still living, I was able to watch this opera debut in Pretoria—the capital city of a country where most of the cast and audience members vividly recall what this system of oppression felt like firsthand.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings had multiple meanings for South Africans and elicited many emotions and strongly held ideas about how South Africa was pursuing justice in its new form of government. For the new nation, and especially relevant to this opera
, the TRC was an important moment for understanding who Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had become. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and based in Cape Town (though they convened at several locations throughout South Africa), the hearings ran from April 1996 through the end of July 1998. Madikizela-Mandela was subpoenaed by the TRC and testified in September and October 1997.
After having been banished to Brandfort in the Orange Free State in 1977, Madikizela-Mandela moved back to Soweto in 1986. That same year, she helped resolve an internal conflict within the Orlando West branch of the Soweto Youth Congress [SOYCO] that led to the development of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC),31 an organization that played soccer matches as well as provided a personal security detail for Madikizela-Mandela. It was through the MUFC that her alleged activities took a more violent turn, primarily the disappearance and presumed accountability for the deaths of many people. The most notorious and tarnishing charge was the abduction and murder of alleged police informer, fourteen-year-old Stompie Seipei (also known as Stompie Moeketsi and James Seipei). In its report on the matter, the TRC admitted to the difficulty of parsing out the details of what really happened; they received three versions of the killing from multiple witnesses (Jerry Richardson, Katiza Cebekhulu, John Morgan, Johannes “Themba” Mabotha, and Paul Erasmus). Even though “each version was explored in the Investigation Unit’s report to the Commission,” the commission said that it had “not been able to establish conclusively the veracity of any of these versions.”32 The TRC found Ms. Madikizela-Mandela responsible for Stompie Seipei’s abduction and that she “was negligent in that she failed to act responsibly in taking the necessary action required to avert his death.”33
Winnie: The Opera mentions Stompie Seipei and includes a role for his grieving mother. For the first South African audiences who saw the premiere, the opera relives some of a process that was pivotal in the creation of the new South Africa at the end of apartheid. For future South African audiences and non-South African audiences, the depiction of the TRC hearings for Madikizela-Mandela document a specific historical moment that articulated a way of coming to deal with a horrendous past that also wraps gender, politics, and nation together. Given the prominent position of the TRC in Winnie: The Opera, after the opening prologue it is the first and last scenes that bookended the opera with real SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) television footage discussing the TRC and juxtaposes so many of the public and private, personal and political personae of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
More than any other part of the opera, these scenes at the TRC with Madikizela-Mandela have a direct immediacy. Unlike the rest of the opera, which moves back in time to explain what shaped Winnie’s experiences in the past, the opening of act 1 and the opera’s conclusion represent the present time of the opera (1998) and are supplemented by media coverage both in the paparazzi chorus of the opera as well as in the SABC real television footage of the event. For many people at the opera’s first performances and into the present, Madikizela-Mandela’s reputation has been altered and shaped to include this horrific information. The prominence of the Truth and Reconciliation process in the opera brings an unsettling issue to light. Despite the best energies and intentions of those involved with the TRC, sometimes the “truth” is not recoverable. And despite the spectacle and pageantry of opera—a genre we all know is staged and not “real” life—it sometimes provides the most compelling presentation of multiple truths when a single truth does not feel fully viable.
As an African American who had not yet spent a lot of time in South Africa, my experience of the TRC hearings as they are presented in Winnie: The Opera felt very close to the way I had heard about them in the United States. I was quite impressed with a country that had just gone through the brutalities of apartheid and was willing to acknowledge head-on the atrocities of racism and undergo the process of restorative justice. This system allows the victims and perpetrators to move toward some understanding of reconciliation rather than an abstract system of punishment. The critique of not prosecuting the guilty seemed to be outweighed by the benefit of having an open conversation about the crimes, to provide evidence against a false retelling of events, and to begin a process of healing through forgiveness.
Anthony Holiday, a South African political activist against apartheid and philosopher, scholar, and journalist, presents a trenchant analysis of how the TRC juggled the difficult combination of amnesty, remorse, and catharsis among the victims and the victimizers. In his essay “Forgiving and Forgetting: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” he outlines two primary functions of what he saw the hearings could do. First, they became a repository for facts, collecting a political legal history about who, what, where, and when. Second, they provided a space for dealing with the “psychological facts, pertaining to how people now felt about what had been done to them.”34 On the first point, the TRC could work well, and there have been pages of testimony recording the experiences and the commission’s findings about what was reported (most of this is publically available online). The second point, argues Holiday, was more difficult to achieve given the complicated nature of how displays of remorse and forgiveness most naturally exist in private settings and appear less successful when conducted in such impersonal, statesponsored venues. Yet despite this challenge, Holiday observed that
it rapidly became clear that these public displays of emotion were an essential part of what Tutu and his commissioners meant by “reconciliation.” They meant a kind of psychotherapeutic “healing,” the efficacy of which largely depended on its taking place, not within the cloistered privacy of a confidential confessional, but in a public arena and under the scrutiny of the mass media.35
A central critique of Madikizela-Mandela after her final TRC hearing is that she did not show enough remorse or compassion for her alleged victims, even though she eventually admitted that things had not gone as planned. Near the end of their special report on the Mandela United Football Club (where most of Winnie’s hearing is addressed), the commission characterized her behavior throughout the process:
She refused to take responsibility for any wrongdoing. It was only at the end of her testimony, under great pressure from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, presiding over the proceedings, that she reluctantly conceded that “things had gone horribly wrong.”36
It is perhaps this feature of the outcome of Madikizela-Mandela’s public experience at the TRC that the opera Winnie can best address. At the very end of the opera Archbishop Desmond Tutu eloquently implores her to show the type of remorse and compassion Holiday wrote about in his analysis of the TRC. In his dramatic scene when he addresses her, Tutu sings:
I speak to you as someone who loves you very deeply
Who loves your family very deeply
. … …
Stand up and say there are things that went wrong
. …
You are a great person
You don’t know how your greatness would be enhanced
If you were to say sorry, things went wrong, forgive me.
I beg you
Cast as a baritone, the same voice type her father Columbus is given, Tutu’s words have a soothing effect on Madikizela-Mandela, and she begins her response: “Thank you very much for your wonderful wise words/That is the father I have always known in you.” She continues with an apology to Stompie Seipei’s mother and then utters her famous words, “Things went horribly wrong.”
In the elevated genre of opera, the public gets to relive this moment in history and contrast it to Madikizela-Mandela’s enigmatic demeanor that was found lacking in real life. Onstage, the opera directors and women who portray Winnie can add their own understanding to how they interpret her words and behavior. In the heightened spectacle of each opera production, Winnie is reinvented and the audience gets to rethink how she was shaped by her ordeals during apartheid. The reconciliatory capacity attached to the public catharsis produced by the TRC once again appears within grasp during each performance as the
country is given further opportunities for national healing.
Organization and Structure of the Opera
There are two ways the final draft of the libretto and the program for the premiere of the opera divide the number of acts and scenes in the work. This final draft of the libretto for Winnie presents the opera’s structure in four acts with various scenes (Table 6.1). The program for the premiere condenses the structure into two acts with three scenes each (Table 6.2). In comparing the two versions, all of act 1 and scenes 1 through 3 in act 2 in the final libretto are called act 1 in the program for the premiere. Both versions then have an intermission. Act 2, scenes 5 through the end of the opera are called act 2 in the program from the premiere. Below are diagrams of each version of the organization. In Table 6.2 I have written short synopses of each scene.37
Table 6.1. Structure of the opera in the final draft of the libretto
Overture
Prologue: Mothers of the Missing
Act 1
Scene 1: A gymnasium, Mayfair Johannesburg
Scene 2: Prison
Act 2
Scene 1: Pondoland (1956), Dawn
Scene 2: Pondoland, Dawn
Scene 3: Columbus’s Vision
Intermission
[Act 2 in program for the premiere]
Scene 5: Train to Brandfort—1950–1980
Scene 6: Brandfort—1981
Scene 7: Brandfort
Scene 8: Brandfort—Dusk
Act 3
Scene 1: TRC Projection
Scene 2: Orlando West, Soweto
Intersticial [grand pause]
Act 4
Scene 1: TRC Hearing Conclusion