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