Since the late nineteenth century South Africa has conjured up the image of a dramatic spectacle in the popular imagination. The defeat of the British army in 1879 by the forces of Cetshwayo kaMpande Zulu (Cetshwayo, son of Mpande of the royal Zulu clan) at the battle of ISandlwane; the South African War of 1899–1902; the racial policies that informed successive governments, and their crystallisation in repression which involved the large scale resettlement and banishment of Africans; the varied forms of social response embraced by Africans, from the muted to the audacious; these are just a few of the social spectacles that typified South African history in the first half of the twentieth century. H.I.E. Dhlomo, after teasing out the manner in which the social order was being enacted by the state and its oppositions, likened the charged racial politics of the country to the ‘prelude to a bloody play. Dhlomo's observation, coming as it does from a premier African dramatist, gestures to the intricate ways in which societies are reliant on the ‘vocabulary of drama’ in trying to narrate and comprehend the ‘dramatisation of social action‘. Art, as Marechera points out, is the quintessential terrain where the haphazard fragments of events are given a formal coherence that invests them with ideological significance.

What drama shares with other literary and non-literary genres is the organising principle of narrative. Narrative, according to Roland Barthes, is the ‘international, transhistorical, transcultural’ human predisposition to recount historical reality in the form of a story. The act of narration involves complex processes of mediation as the events, their unfolding and significance, are transformed and reinvented under the social pressure of imbuing experience with particular meanings. Narrative, Jameson has argued, is a socially symbolic act whose textualisation or narrativisation of history does not obliterate the ideas or facts of history, neither does it reduce history to the endless slippage of being a text among other texts as some post-modernist accounts would have it.