MIKE VAN GRAAN is a name and a personality synonymous in South Africa with a biting keyboard and angry, strong political opinion. For many years he hosted a regular and important column on the artslink website amongst other platforms, and he has so far written over 30 plays, vital to a South Africa in the process of finding its feet amid a slurry of contradiction, disappointment and disinformation. Indeed, it could be fitting to describe van Graan’s work as a sub-genre of its own, within politically conscious theatre-making. When you read his anthology of plays, Bafana Republic and Other Satires: A Collection of Monologues and Revues published by Wits University Press in 2020, this is all apparent. Or is it?

This book of five monologues containing dozens of sketches is a useful piece of text for students of theatre and performers alike, but for generalist reader, not so much. The wit ranges from political one-liners that make you hear the proverbial “Ba Dum Tss” at the punch line in your mind’s ear, to brilliant and quick sketches that reverberate with the presence and accent of the actor you may have seen performing it onstage. The work is filled with electricity in its diction, in how it tweaks popular songs to become political jibes and in its cleverness. But political humour has one great flaw that is both necessary and also gives it mortality, and that is time itself.

The neural network that keeps this type of theatre alive is its relevance, which, any comic will tell you, shifts and upends itself on a daily basis. As we rattle and speed through the Fourth Industrial Revolution with ways of doing things flipping on their ear and turning inside out every couple of milliseconds, so do the nuances in our unfolding political convictions or understandings. Or so they should. Van Graan’s writing style is dense with a diversity of reference, from cultural nuance, to blips on the screen of day-to-day existence, to events that actually happened, big or small.

To this end, when you read lines from van Graan’s 2016 work Pay Back the Curry, for instance, there is a whole litany of cross-references and allusions to realities of the time when former South African President Jacob Zuma was running amok with taxpayers’ monies and sculptures in the honour of some people were being smashed, defecated on and cancelled by others.  

In 2024, this all feels like ancient history. While the publication has a glossary and some contextual input, as well as an introduction by the author pointing to the evolution of the works, it feels insufficient. To the theatre reader five, ten, 20 years from today, there is no developed grounding as to who van Graan is and why he matters, here.

There is also a patent lack of dates in the contextual explanation of the ideas. It’s a basic courtesy in writing that has been ignored: When, for instance, did Hlaudi Motsoeneng nearly destroy the SABC? When did Helen Zille disastrously tweet about the benefits of colonialism? When did pop star Madonna go to Malawi and adopt two children? All of these historical facts are compromised with no proper dates to hold onto. And some of them are so fantastic and surreal that they feel like van Graanisms, whereas they are truths.

On the other hand, in the introduction, van Graan mentions the no-under-13-age-restrictions slapped onto several of the pieces when they debuted, due to sexual innuendo and/or bad language. The curious thing is, as a hard copy publication of this nature is out in the world and grows and ages with its readers, many of those young people, precluded from seeing the work in the flesh then, will now be old enough to read it, learn about South Africa from it, and maybe perform it.

But the real story behind who the author is and why he is important remains an omission here. A similar type of work, South African veteran jester Pieter-Dirk Uys’s MacBeki, published in 2009, a riff on Shakespeare’s Macbeth coupled with an understanding of moral flaws in the Mbeki government of the time, saves itself from obscurity by introducing itself not as a theatre exercise only, but as a potted foray into Uys’s modus operandi, personal fury and methodology in making the work. Bafana Republic stands alone. More’s the pity.

• Bafana Republic and Other Satires: A Collection of Monologues and Revues by Mike van Graan is published by Wits University Press, Johannesburg (2020).