Sketch 1

TIME TRAVEL

Essentially, in this sketch the character is a tour guide, with the audience as passengers on his time-travel machine. He moves (slowly but constantly) like an astronaut floating in a capsule. When he speaks, he does so dreamily.

The actor is on stage as audience arrives.

The lights come up.

TOUR GUIDE: Welcome aboard our time-travel machine.

First, we travel to a land of the future

Where scrums are reserved for the rugby field, not Parliament

Where jobs are desperate for matriculants

And dogs also bark at white people

Let me take you to a museum

It is only there that you will see

Black pain and

White privilege

For ubuntu and equity are now easy bedfellows

And black people are genuinely happy

Even in Cape Town

Let us walk along un-littered streets

Named after flora and fauna

Rather than fawning some flawed victor

And living monuments are the people whose dignity

Has been affirmed with

Spacious houses

A plot of land

Safe neighbourhoods

And taxis have been smelted

Into public art

Come with me to the world-class stadium

To watch the national rugby team

With its six black forwards and its one white wing

The three-quarters Blacks beating the All Blacks … again

Stay on to watch the fully transformed

National soccer team

Now replete with Somalians, Zimbabweans, Congolese

The much-loved

Bafana Kwere Kwere

Ranked number one in Africa

It is a land in which electric fences

Have been exiled by welcoming lawns

Where women walk freely

And return home without fear

Where corruption is manifest only

In computer software

In this future land

The president is a woman

Who speaks Afrikaans …

And Pedi, Sotho and Zulu

She serves not a family

Not a party

But the people

[Change in tone/mood.]

Now travel back in time with me

To another country

When black people had more passes between them

Than today's matriculants

Forced from the land

By law

By gun

To offer

Their bodies to the violence of

Cheap labour

On farms

Down mines

In kitchens

Sacrificed on the altar of white privilege

The collateral damage of white affirmative action