Ancestral rendezvous: leveraging the San culture in Botswana contemporary theatre

Abstract

Young producers of popular culture in Africa are positioned at the ironic axis of lack and luxury. Enticed by the lure of hope, these cultural producers are cashing in on the power of new media and popular culture as creative resistance to marginalisation and a highway to self-assertion. Building on Karen Barber’s notion of creative expressions as ‘social facts,’ this paper examines the theatre of Moratiwa Molema as a performative articulation of young people’s desires for alternative African futures. Molema’s play, The Rebirth of the Ostrich, and her short cyborg semiotic film, The Cosmic Egg, are illustrative of how young people reassemble narratives of the past to create imagined and futuristic landscapes within which they can participate productively. In the play, African tradition meets postmodern technology to symbolise hybrid interconnectivities between genres, genders, and genealogies of African-ness. The Cosmic Egg expresses Afrocyborg consciousness. The film is part of The Afrocyborg Virtual Reality Film Collective, a cinematic initiative based in South Africa that seeks to reinterpret and represent African mythologies through Afrofuturistic lenses. Molema deploys the aesthetics of cyborg semiotics to create a post-modern representation of Botswana history and forms of identification that exemplify futuristic alternative experiences of citizenship for Botswana youth. She borrows tropes of origin from the Tswana and San people of Botswana and conjoins these with Greek performance aesthetics to imagine and articulate possibilities for the current young and future generations. These works elaborate on how young African citizens express discontent with the lingering legacies of colonialism, but most importantly how young artists of African popular culture reimagine emancipatory practices and strategies for political change. In this paper, I argue that Molema’s creative work epitomises the use of popular culture by African youth to express the pressures, pleasure, and power of the marginalised generation.