The Big Hole Swallowed Our Precious Men

Moagi Modise somehow found space on his brimming cap to add another feather with his well-received play, Big Hole. With a successful run of four nights, the play opened the artistic season for the Northern Cape Theatre in Kimberley, where ART STATE publisher Mpho Matsitle is currently exiled. He brings us this reading.

“Koko!” A young woman launches an attack on the walls of Jericho, threatening to tear them down with her pleas. Her cries have no effect on the wall, nor its watchers. But her wailing does manage to irritate the other women, who like her are keeping vigil for Godot outside the mine gates.

“Tshilo!” Her demand is quite a simple one, one that any human would be inclined to acquiesce to: to see her fiancé, her first love, her soulmate — Tshilo. Except, as the sex worker Maserurubele never tires to point out about all of them and the men they’re keeping vigil for, she’s naive to think humans — batho — were on the other side of the fence. In there were what Mantwa referred to as boKalajane; tricksters, swindlers, devils.

“Enough!” The women can no longer take her screeching. You don’t understand, she tries to win them over to her side. Child, they dismiss her, we understand more than you can ever imagine. But, she insists, she and Tshilo are in love. She says the word as if it means something. “You think Tshilo is the author of love?” One of the women chides her.

It may not mean much to the world, or to boKalajane — the monstrous creatures euphemistically called capitalists and colonialists — keeping her Tshilo and his colleagues and/or their ‘unalived’ bodies hostage. But the word does mean something to her, and despite their protestations to the contrary, it means the world to the women. That is why they have left their homes to camp at the site of the disaster, to hear the fate of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.

The fated-when

The play is set at the site of the 1888 mining disaster in what was then called New Rush that, per Maserurubele, claimed the lives of 245 black men. In an interview with the DFA^[1], Big Hole’s playwright and director Moagi Modise bemoans the fact that this horrific incident barely gets a footnote in the history records.

“This mining disaster is probably the first mining disaster to occur in South Africa but it was never recorded in any of the history books,” he is quoted as saying.

A voice over narration that kicks off the play maps out the root cause of the tragedy as the dwindling of the eureka moments in the colony’s new and most advanced city that led to boKalajane — the likes of the devils Rhodes and Oppenheimer — to force black men “sixteen hours or more a day for almost no pay, deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth” into “digging and drilling [for] that shiny mighty evasive stone.”^[2] The devils are today probably called innovators of deep hole diamond mining or other such whitewashing in the history books.

The inevitable death of the black men deep underground, their fated-when^[3], is not a remarkable event that would interest the annals of history. Not now, and definitely not then. It is, as cultural critic Frank Wilderson puts it, like a tree falling in an empty forest; goes unaudited^[4].

Blackwashing monuments

Modise refuses to let history retain its clean audit. With Big Hole, a valiant attempt is made to at the very least complicate the story a little more. One suspects that even the simple titling of the play is to sully the whitewashed reputation of The Big Hole, Kimberley’s claim to fame and biggest monument. Modise here, I posit, pushes us to think about the real image of this monument. To really see it as what Nkgono — echoing writer Sabata-mpho Mokae’s characterisation — calls a “gaping wound”.

Serendipitously, I begin my meditations on Modise’s masterpiece earnestly at The Big Hole Museum, in a corrugated iron building that was the mine’s debris washer, now a space held by a spiritual maroon^[5] as a liberated/ing zone, an oasis — sediba se maphodi, se monate — right in the middle of that monument of black death. She schools me on the history of the women who worked as sorters in the mine who would be executed for so little as gazing too longingly at a diamond, and their bodies dumped in the hole or, time and budget permitting, dissolved with acid.

I find in the play a similar sort of appropriating the space/language of the monument to undermine it. When I told a friend the name of the play, they responded sarcastically; ‘how creative!’ Without seeing the poster for the 8th to 11th February Kimberley run of the play, with its on-the-nose images of tearful women clumsily superimposed on the inner walls of the big hole, one would react the same. At face value, it seems like easy pickings; a play from Kimberley called Big Hole, big whoop! But what that title does is to appropriate the monument’s pull precisely to piss on it. The poster, however, undermines this attempt with its unnecessary insistence to explain the plot.

Meeting of the women

Modise is not only content with bringing the story to the fore, he is after all an artist. Which means, necessarily, that he is drawn to novelty. Such stories would usually have men in glistening sweaty bodies breaking their backs with ‘n pik en ‘n foshol, littered with work songs, banter, and brown bottles (or whatever the equivalent of that in 1888, seven full years before Charles Glass’ eureka moment).

This mould is broken by telling the story from the vantage point of the women directly affected by — excuse the tautology — the mine disaster.

The women, apart from Mamokete (Thato Phirisi), or affectionately Kete, are unnamed in the play. The sex worker, who acts as our and the rest of the “naive” characters’ guide into the realities of the mine, is mockingly christened ‘Maserurubele’ by the old woman (Jemima Julius) who everyone refers to by the reverence ‘Nkgono’. Maserurubele’s mogadikane (Winnie Selemogo) too has a throw-away name ‘Mantwa’, given to her by Kete in a heated exchange after breaking up her fight with Maserurubele (Bonolo Nteo). We will keep this nomenclature in our reading. Our affable fool, the would-be mmaTshilo (Boipelo Mokaila), and one other woman (Naledi Mkoko) remain nameless.

Men on the agenda

Whatever pretensions the all-female cast and characters may engender, Big Hole is a story about men. The women’s pain — real, well written, and brilliantly portrayed by the extremely talented thespians — is limited to the loss of their men. The three acts, each punctuated by the most majestic pieces of music, centre around an absent-omnipresent man.

Tshilo, whose name becomes rumo ja ntlha for the tickled audience who seemingly can’t get enough of its mention, is the Godot of the first act with all its humour. The first half of the act is dominated by the group’s probing of whether the fiance and Tshilo have gone ‘spinach picking’. Here we are introduced to the women at their human selves; unburdened by the pain of their loss. Connecting with each other, and most importantly with the audience, so that we can truly understand and empathise with them.

The conflict-ridden second act starts with a dialogue between Mantwa and Maserurubele, which ends in the scuffle that earned the former her moniker. The bone of contention is Mantwa’s husband, who tradition imposed on her, and who also happens to be Maserurubele’s client-cum-lover. Maserurubele is keen to leave ‘the streets’ and be with this man, but — despite Mantwa’s deep hatred for him — he is set on going back to her and with his new found riches prove himself a man, and not just the “snivelling rat” Mantwa sees in him. Unaware that Mantwa arranged for him to come to the mine precisely so that he’d meet his fated-when and she’d be liberated from him. Mantwa here breaks the trope so favoured by Maserubele of the naive rural woman with no agency.

Nkgono is another that defies this trope. In the dark and mellow third act centred around her son, she begs the women to be his voice by reading her his letter from six months back, which she hasn’t been able to read on account of illiteracy. All the women, including the would-be mmaTshilo who is extremely fond of the matriarch, find the request too tall an order. They’d hate to be the bearer of bad news, to deliver what they fear to be the last words of a dead man. Nkgono, not out of naivete but in a triumph of hope, refuses to give in to their despondency. No matter, she waves away their protests, she need not read the letter. There’s nothing in it that she doesn’t already know. She knows her son is alive, she can feel him. See him even. A mother knows. The women flank her, embrace her, without disabusing her of what they clearly consider her delusions, because they too still hold strongly onto hope. Hope that their precious men haven’t been swallowed alive by the big hole. And for Mantwa, hope that her tormentor has.

Appendix A: Women

Big Hole limits its scope on the women’s loss of their men in its attempt to bring to the fore this erased story of the 1888 massacre^[6]. Without faulting or demanding too much of the one and a quarter hour play, one must wonder if this doesn’t play into the common, patriarchal reading of women’s role in history as appendages of their men.

We have seen how in the political arena for instance freedom fighters like Nomzamo Madikizela-Mandela and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma have been reduced to misuses Rolihlahla Mandela and Gedleyihlekisa Zuma respectively. And more recently Lindiwe Sisulu to her father Walter Sisulu.

A woman’s worth

There is a moment in the play where a revolutionary possibility threatens to break this cycle. In the second act, the women are rudely woken up by a fight between Maserurubele and Mantwa. After it breaks up, Nkgono comes in as a voice of reason. She extols the women to forget their squabbles, to stop fighting over men. That is, one reads hopefully, to stop centering men. She reminds them that boKalajane may have looted their ‘land, labour, and African being’^[7], but their worth — “Boleng mosadi. Boleng!” she emphasises — remains intact. This they must remember, she counsels, so that they can pick up the gauntlet and continue the fight. Ba “tshware thipa ka bogaleng.”

The revolutionary wet dream here is that the women put out the fire, pack their pots and sleeping mats, leave camp, and go back home where there is life to be lived, families to lead, and communities to build. And Babylon to bring down. All much more worthwhile endeavours as opposed to their waiting for Godot with the ‘patience of stone’^[8].

“We still have a nation to raise,” Nkgono insists. “And nna basadi I will not stand here and bicker.”

But in true South African fashion, this revolutionary possibility is foreclosed immediately. Nkgono’s impassioned monologue makes no impression on the scene, immediately when she yields the floor, Maserurubele goes right back to bickering about how Mantwa’s husband spurned her love. When Nkgono comes in again, her wisdom is a call to prayer. The said prayer, to close out the act and any revolutionary possibilities, being the most harrowingly beautiful rendition of the hymn Modimo wa Boikanyo. So beautiful it may make one forget Bantu Biko’s counsel that “God is not in the habit of coming down to earth to solve people’s problems.”^[9]

If God remains agnostic then the women will look anywhere else but internally to have their problems solved, as suggested by Big Hole’s swan song which pleads to some big (masculine?) other go “utlwa selelo sa mosadi”. And so we leave the women as we found them, pleading — ba “lopa ka tlhoafalo” — and waiting.

Featured image: Utlwa selelo sa mosadi. Credit: Northern Cape Motion Pictures.

Notes:

^[1]Phillips, Benida, and Sandi Kwon. 2023. “Big Hole tragedy comes to life.” DFA, February 9, 2023.

^[2] Masekela, Hugh. “Stimela (The Coal Train).” Genius. Accessed February 16, 2023.

^[3] According to Wilderson, social death is not conditional or temporary but rather “fated”, meaning that it is an inevitable part of the Black experience. Wilderson III, Frank B. 2020. Afropessimism: An Introduction. WW Norton.

^[4] Wilderson III, Frank B. 2010. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press.

^[5] To borrow Jedi Shemsu Jehewty’s concept of intellectual maroon: “a moniker for Black thinkers who have ‘declared their freedom’ from European intellectual bondage.” Hotep, Uhuru. 2008. “Intellectual Maroons: Architects of African Sovereignty.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 2, no. 5 (July).

^[6] We can safely assume that the probable loss of black life in this experiment was considered an acceptable risk by the mine bosses. Which amounts to a massacre.

^[7] Mngxitama, Andile. 2020. Blacks Can’t be Racist: 10th Anniversary Edition. Sankara Publishing.

^[8] Mngxitama, Andile, and Aryan Kaganof. 2013. From a Place of Blackness: A Correspondence Between Andile Mngxitama & Aryan Kaganof. Sankara Publishers.

^[9] Biko, Steve. 2002. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Edited by Alfred Stubbs. University of Chicago Press.