Mpore mpore?
Be strong, be strong
Mpore wararaye?
You have risen from darkness
The call and response song above, warm greetings, poem reading, images created in the room are followed by a hard hitting experience of April to July 1994 Rwanda. A story teller, Prince Totto Théogène Niwenshuti shares about his brush with death, being beaten and sliced with a machete on his back, unable to choose a better devil; a machete or being gunned. “This is it, this is the end, I whispered to my soul” and then a voice emerging, commanding; “… leave him … protect him.” Now a survivor and facilitator, Totto visited Rhodes University drama department, as a scholar and practitioner to interact with applied drama and theatre students, and with his story echoed the fluidity characteristic to the discipline.
Earlier in the month, the department’s head, Dr Heike Gehring made an open invitation about collaboration during their open house showcasing, and through Totto’s performance-process workshop, an array of faculties as well as community based organisations came together to shape the narrative being presented.?
After a brief introduction, participants separate and are invited to imagine the Rwandan story. Totto remains with volunteers in the room. Outside, other participants witness the horror of betrayal, manipulation, colonialization, idiocy, effects of trampling on people’s culture and livelihood, human skulls, decay, mutilated bodies, graves, laughter, the words “never again!” flicking, projecting the past. When they return to the room, there is a different demeanour. The volunteers are now ‘dead bodies’, scattered amongst clothes, Totto’s clothes, “every inch, covered with lakes of blood”. Shock, and paralysis burdens for a moment, other participants step in the mayhem to cover the corpses, others look away, repulsed, and like a phoenix rising from ashes, Totto has begun a dance, he flaps his arms, gracefully approaches the scattered bodies, ‘takes their spirit’ to a sacred space, where together the genocide turmoil is retold. Within no time a history lesson, unavailable in books, but archived in the body of a survivor is shared. Coincidentally this workshop happens at the backdrop of the Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga’s announcement about recommendations for history to be made compulsory in schools, and contemplating how that would be done. Perhaps this presents an opportunity to choose arts education as a vehicle toward realising the minister’s vision about the teaching and learning of history in schools and beyond. ?
About the story of what brought about the genocide Totto notes the complexity of the narrative and invites us to do our own research “I would like to encourage you to dig deeper, and make conclusions for yourselves”, he says adding that he uses the arts to tell stories of humanity and hope, taking a route less travelled; the psychological healing after trauma and oppression, in many ways contesting the single narrative for any context. This is perhaps a considered answer that recognises the danger of a single story that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about. ?
Applied Theatre student Manoko Tlhako said it was ‘’refreshing to learn across disciplines, and enriching”. Applied drama and theatre discipline offers the flexibility of cross pollination, and it is this principle and embodiment that participants appreciated the most. Witnessing the power of story; “the oldest technology in the world” as writer Ben Okri would argue, bring magic, hope, honouring the past and the present in Rwanda and beyond. Mpore ushers out…Mpore mpore, Mpore wararaye, the call of president Cyril Ramaphosa’s Thuma Mina is brought to mind.
Totto is a scholar and artist in residence at William Humphreys Art Gallery and a PhD candidate at UCT, researching memory, trauma, healing and histories of violence and genocide.?