Andries Walter Oliphant
3 October 2008
opinion
Pretoria — The last part of a critical literature analysis and evaluation of the works of Frederick B. Philander
THE last play of the collection, The Bigamist, deals with private matters and relationships in Namibia 18 years after independence.
Set in the house of Reo, the main character, this play with its farcical tenor revolves around misunderstandings, deception and duplicitous intimate situations, which comment on private and political matters.
Once again, the prejudiced manner in which the different peoples and cultures in Namibia view each other permeates inter-personal relations. Reo, a man of mixed decent, refers to himself as a "Baster" ("Bastard") and feels discriminated against because he is not black enough to benefit from the new political dispensation. He returns home from work on a Friday evening.
Thinking that his present Oshiwambo wife has gone home for the weekend, he phones his ex-wife, Baba, and invites her over for a "quickie" or for "booze?"
She used the money she received from him after their divorce to establish a massage parlour. She runs a reasonably successful, if not dubious, concern.
Baba agrees to go over, but before she arrives, a fly-by-night businessman, Kazara, enters the house. He believes that Reo is an influential man working in a government department and suggests to him that he steal blank signed cheques so the two of them could share the spoils. Reo tells him that he is merely a cleaner in the building and cannot help him at all. Undeterred, Kazara tries to sell him other questionable deals.
It is only when Baba arrives and dismisses him as the fraudster he is, that he finally is evicted from the house. Reo has two wedding photos: one with his first wife and another with his second. Throughout the play, he places whichever one is appropriate at the moment in a place of prominence. He does this as easily with the affection he shows his two wives, favouring whichever one he feels affinity for at any given moment.
The sincerity of his outrage at the audacity of Kazara's felonious activities is thus questioned by his own duplicitous actions. From her removed position of ex-wife, Baba panders to all this. She even indulges his love of motor car racing, an obsession she felt threatened by when they were married.
The adulterous couple is inopportunely surprised by the early return of Nadula, however, who had not gone home after all. She is upset by what she sees. Much more vulnerable, she is attacked by the more independent ex-wife. In the ensuing argument Nadula is knocked unconscious.
It is at this moment that Kinnie, Reo and Baba's daughter of whom Reo has custody, enters with a pastor. She is distraught. After a string of misunderstandings in which the pastor's innocence is maliciously called into question, it is established that Kinne had been sexually molested. They call the police. A sergeant arrives only to add even greater confusion to the situation. A Wambo sergeant whose preconceptions of Coloureds lead him to immediately suspect Reo. He accuses the now conscious Nadula of "selling out our Wambo nation" by marrying a "bad baster".
The sergeant himself, however, it is revealed, is married to a "beautiful and sexy European woman from Germany", and thus represents just another form of duplicity.
Unable to sort out this complicated situation, the sergeant calls his superior, who Kinnie immediately identifies as her molester. He had been told that having sex with a virgin would cure him of his impotence.
In the final scene, Kazara returns and is arrested by the sergeant for possession of stolen goods, which he tried to sell to them. Kazara swears that it was all just an act and in the true style of farce. The play ends with the intimate, private and public question: do all the characters and by implication all members of society, desperately need the help of doctors, theatre directors or lawyers to extract them from the various confusions and treacheries in which they are entangled?
The outline makes it clear that the plays collected here are arranged in a temporal sequence, which moves from the past to the present. In the context of Namibia, this entails a historical movement from the era of colonialism as dramatised in Katutura, to the era of post-colonialism The Porridge Queen.
The transition between these to epochs is alluded to towards the end of The Mole People and is made explicit in Election Fever.
In The Bigamist the overt political accents of the foregoing works gives way to the more personal vagaries and problems of everyday life. This shift involves the exploration of private and intimate conduct. It is concerned with personal and wider social ramifications of private life.
This historical and thematic trajectory constitutes fragments of a grand epic depicting the experiences of an entire society as seen by a singularly prolific, engaged and brazenly outspoken Namibian playwright. The moral fervour and outrages, the unflinching bawdiness and starling frankness, which animates Philander's writing for the stage belongs to issues from the ancient communal roots of theatre as a form of a symbolic, yet, frontal artistic engagement with society. Rigorously located, his work is a specific Namibian articulation, not of post-colonial disenchantment, but a hectoring and critical perspective. As such it is a constructive theatrical engagement with the nightmares of past, how they weigh down on the living and the daunting challenges of the present.
Andries Walter Oliphant is a literature academic at the University of South Africa. The series of articles had been published to give serious Namibian students in literature a rare insight into the works of but one playwright in the country.
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