Black Privilege
For the past few years, dancer, choreographer, and activist Mamela Nyamza has been stirring up the international scene. In doing so she always puts her personal biography as Black African, lesbian mother in the battlefield of general debates about the failed rainbow nation of South Africa, in which racism and machismo are becoming stronger again as well as the separation of high and tribal culture or those of different language and tribal regions. Instead of approach, reconciliation, and exchange, the exceptional personality born in Cape Town in 1976 diagnoses greater isolation, intensified racial segregation, and a climate of fear that hold the former flagship nation of the postcolonial idea firmly in grip.
In her new work «Black Privilege», Nyamza turns her attention to the hypocritical basic structure of our societies in which everyone is permanently being judged and convicted. Oscillating between a ritual in which she invokes various facets of strong women and a trial in which powerful figures are arraigned for their atrocities, Nyamza blurs the boundaries between spirituality and law. Rejected and misjudged heroines of the African War of Independence are revived, judged, and perhaps also celebrated.
«Black Privilege looks at how you can be celebrated, but still be crawling on the floor. How you can have a PhD, but still be unemployed. It was partly inspired by unthanked heroes like Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and it is essentially asking questions.»
Mamela Nyamza
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