Playwright, screenwriter and director Amy Jephta has spent her career exploring the contradictions of belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Her landmark film Barakat made history as the first feature filmed entirely in Afrikaaps, a uniquely South African dialect blending Afrikaans with other linguistic influences. Jephta’s latest work looks at the complex intersections of property, privilege and identity in modern Cape Town. In A Good House, her provocative new play for London’s Royal Court theatre and Bristol’s Old Vic, a shack mysteriously appears in the middle of a quaint suburban community, causing consternation among the residents. At the centre of the play is the question that echoes throughout Jephta’s work: “To whom does the land belong? Who gets to call it mine?”
For as long as I’ve lived in Cape Town, My City has angered me. Angered me in a way I suppose is only possible when your knowledge of a thing is intimate, fossilised by decades of well-worn conflicts that etch the same familiar grooves. My City and I have been locked in this war of attrition for some time now. The familiar tug between fierce loyalty – love, even – and utter disenchantment. I call it mine because I was born here. I tread its ground with a casual sense of ownership. Here – my neighbourhood. Here – my local cafe. Here – my house. Look how beautiful. Everyone who visits wants to stay. When they arrive from elsewhere, they are enamoured. I can never see My City that new again, but sometimes I squint and suspend my disbelief at the breathtaking natural beauty – places where seas meet mountains meet endless horizons. Crisp, freezing ocean water. Vistas – God, the vistas. And good coffee. Don’t forget the good coffee.
When I leave My City, I yearn for it. South Africa’s weighted history haunted me during the writing of A Good House. It lay beneath, a dog at my own heels as it is at my country’s. That apartheid casts a shadow is obvious; working from beneath it was the real challenge. Cape Town, of course, sits in that shadow, though it would sometimes prefer to forget that; comfortably on the rim, occasionally presuming itself part of the ocean rather than the “South Africa” of it all. Because to be part of South Africa, truly part of it, you need to be comfortable with ugly. And My City doesn’t do ugly. Cape Town is a shiny-side-up kind of city, a playground for tourists, for the well-moneyed, a haven for those who have the means to keep themselves sheltered from the reality the rest of us live in.
But as I write this play, I find that moving through Cape Town means wading knee-deep in hauntings. Houses, homes, dwellings, property, land, lines of ownership – these words carry weight. To whom does the land belong? To whom does the city belong? Who gets to claim it, who gets to call it mine? These are the shifting terrains that my play’s characters traverse daily, just as I do. Their story began as something universal, but it became clear that its power lay in specificity – in the particular thorns of being middle class and Black in post-apartheid South Africa.
Here they are, moving through the streets of their leafy suburban paradise, negotiating their Blackness in spaces where they’re often the first, and indeed only, ones of their kind. And here I am, moving through inner-city Cape Town, through the southern suburbs, through the sun-faded north, knowing every twist and turn like a lover’s skin. I move deeper into its belly, into the Cape Flats, the area where I’m from, witnessing how My City treats those without the luxury of four cement walls and a roof with casual brutality.
So I chose to write about what defines a house, what a house represents. About what makes a house acceptable, palatable. Who gets to decide? I wanted to write a play about race, but one that is more gnarly than the usual binaries. The play follows Bonolo and Sihle, a young couple, as they navigate the friction of community, as outside forces invade their private space. In their most intimate moments, they’re grappling with how to exist in the mostly white spaces they find themselves in, grappling with how to maintain their identity while shape-shifting. There are no heroes or villains here – just the knotty complexity of being born free, 30 years into democracy, still stumbling through conversations we haven’t had about our shared history. What does it mean for us to negotiate being Black and being white in this country, now?
Fifteen kilometres from the paradise you know as Cape Town is my real city – a township in the Cape Flats called Bishop Lavis, known in the national census as a “sub place”. Population 55,000, unemployment rate 26%, with 47% of residents earning less than £140 per month. Geographically, the Cape Flats is unremarkable. Squat houses tightly huddled together, racially homogenous pockets of community living in close proximity to one another. This area was apartheid’s dumping ground during the 1950s, designated for “non-whites” as part of the Group Areas Act. Those who live here were forced to do so, evicted from Cape Town’s CBD and District Six areas from the late 1960s to the 1980s. This is where I grew up, and I want to tell you about one particular house where my own life took form.
In my grandmother’s backyard, I’m small and caked with the black sand endemic to the Flats. Her house always held several families under its heaving tin roof: three rooms total; built from cinder block; floors of naked concrete and cracked vinyl sheeting. Low to the ground, it sat under a flight path. Perhaps you’ve seen houses like this one if you’ve ever flown into Cape Town international airport, or on the drive between the airport and My City – that stretch where shacks jostle for space at the edge of a national highway. This is my Cape Town.
after newsletter promotion
Now, I own a house in Bo Kaap, the historic Malay quarter where my family once had its roots. A singular community that escaped forced removals, only to face erasures of a different kind decades later. To live in Cape Town is to inhabit haunted spaces; every site a palimpsest, my own house a kaleidoscope of lives before mine. My great-grandfather grew up in this neighbourhood. An elderly couple lived their entire lives between these walls before new German owners cracked its bones and ribs, refashioning it in their own image – one that I, years later, with my European-influenced sensibilities, took a liking to.
The strangeness doesn’t escape me: buying this house, imagining myself a custodian while being an outsider myself. A gentrifier, part of the wave of upwardly mobile, middle-class, educated South Africans seeking comfort and reconnection in this place where a part of me once belonged. Seeking to own the land of my birth by wielding the blunt tool of capitalism.
Here, I make my own good house, in this haunted contradiction of a city that will never love me – or people like me – back. This is the story of how we live alongside one another, how neighbourhoods become communities, how communities make societies. It’s as particular as South Africa and as universal as anywhere people share a fence, negotiating that daily friction of proximity and belonging. That’s what I want an audience to find in this play. Even if parts of the story are specific to South Africa and its unique context, the themes of A Good House will connect with anyone who lives next door to someone else.
A Good House is at the Royal Court: Jerwood theatre to 8 February; then Bristol Old Vic, 14 February to 8 March.
