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Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid. By Belinda Bozzoli. New African Histories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii, 326; 6 illustrations. $28.95 paper.
Theatres of Struggle explores the historical context, lived reality, and implications of the 1986 rebellion in the African township of Alexandra, South Africa. The revolt, in Belinda Bozzoli's artful assessment, was part morality tale, part Utopian dream, in which Alexandra's youthful revolutionaries envisioned a world with "no crime, decay or alcohol, no oppression, no suffering. The power of whites," privileged by the apartheid state, "would almost miraculously diminish to nothing" (p. 2). To explore the "syncretic" elements of the "six-day war" (p. 67) that broke out in the township in February 1986, Bozzoli draws on a trove of police and defense attorneys' archives, and trial transcripts, to illuminate the "social and cultural creativity and richness, ... extensive moral economy, ... surviving particularism and patterns of proto-traditional identity" (pp. 6-7) that made the experience of the people of Alexandra distinctive.
Established on the north eastern edge of the city of Johannesburg in 1912 to accommodate black workers and segregate them from the...