Once Upon A Time…

Few struggles have been more ready for conversion into the format of a storybook than the struggle against apartheid. For many, in particular activists, the official story of that struggle has been smoothed of any imperfection. It has been sanitised. In activist literature, particularly the kind that seeks to inspire and mobilise, the social movement is a fairy tale hero of the unimpeachable kind. In the effort to tell a useful story – useful to a particular kind of audience in a particular kind of context, a story that subverts tales told by capital – it is easy, some say necessary, to elide the contradictions, imperfections, interactions that interrupt the flow of what feels like a sharply defined counter-hegemonic narrative.

There's no better place to start deconstructing fairy tales than Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece of twentieth century American musical theatre, Into The Woods.2 As with the musical, the first half of this chapter begins with a number of stories, with characters whose lives and themes feel familiar, and whose stories end largely happily except for the villains’. If in the first set of pre-interval stories, you’re irked by my rather cavalier use of terms like ‘activist’, ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘resistance’, this is only because I’m writing to form, to a style common among a certain set of activists, occupying certain class positions, writing certain kinds of narrative. After the interval, however, we hear the same stories in minor keys, jumbled and interacting (for no story is an island) with darker themes, themes we know from the less romanticised lives, yet more familiar for all that. Terms become far trickier, with moorings not quite as firm as they initially felt. Not only is there a change from major to minor, but in Sondheim's second act, as in real life, the narrator assumes a far more causal role.