1. The lack of official judicial attention to black South African women is not an indication that women's behavior was unimportant or went completely unremarked. For a history of the treatment of women by the criminal legal and prison systems during the colonial era, see Florence Bernault, “The Politics of Enclosure in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa,” in A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, ed. Florence Bernault, trans. Janet Roitman (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 1–53, at 20–2. For a history of the criminalization of women in the twentieth century, including modifications to signature apartheid laws like the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, see Shireen Ally, From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 34. Ally contends that before instituting these legislative controls, “the state enacted its efforts at control through third parties with whom they shared an interest,” in particular churches and their armies of missionaries, who developed and ran Christian religious hostels and domestic service training schools to channel black South African women into household labor for whites (34). This forced-labor program exposed black women to greater scrutiny in white domestic spaces than perhaps on the streets or in other more public institutions that police regularly patrolled. For a more contemporary analysis of women's struggle to achieve citizenship rights through legal processes, see Albertyn, Catherine, “Defending and Securing Rights through Law: Feminism, Law and the Courts in South Africa,” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 32.2 (2005): 217–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. In South Africa, the police, courts and prisons were established to protect the white ruling minority with little emphasis on conventional policing practices. The apartheid regime (1948–1994) deployed these institutions in horrific ways against the black majority and never defined its acts of brutality as illegal. Record keeping was inconsistent and many offenses went unreported, undocumented and/or undiscovered. To convert the police, courts and prisons into community-oriented institutions dedicated to protecting the full citizenry, as mandated under democratic rule, required radical restructuring. Some twenty years into the process, bureaucratic and administrative changes continue to impact reporting. In some years, the Department of Correctional Services provided little to no information about women behind bars in its annual reports. Yet these are the available official records. Rather than dismiss them out of hand, I site them hoping to encourage a discussion of the larger developments they may reveal. For an evaluation of the challenges facing law enforcement in South Africa in the early years of democratic rule, see Policing the Transformation: Further Issues in South Africa's Crime Debate. Eds. Mark Shaw, Lala Camerer, Duxita Mistry, Sarah Oppler, Lukas Muntingh. Institute for Security Studies. Monograph No. 12 (April 1997). For a comparative analysis of sentencing under apartheid and democratic rule, see Super, Gail, “Punishment in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa: A Story of punitivist humanism,” Theoretical Criminology 15.4 (2011): 427–443CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. The Republic of South Africa Department of Correctional Services reports that in 1994 the daily average number of adult women behind bars was 2,867. This number represents women sentenced to incarceration and the unsentenced women who were being held in pre- or posttrial detention in DCS facilities; see Republic of South Africa, Department of Correctional Services (hereinafter RSA, DCS), Annual Report: [In Review] 1997 (Pretoria: Department of Correctional Services, 1997), 9, table 3. In 2011–12, the average “female inmate population” was 3,765 for sentenced and unsentenced prisoners combined; see RSA, DCS, Annual Report 2013–14 (Pretoria: Department of Correctional Services, 2014), 27. (These and other DCS annual reports are online at www.dcs.gov.za/Publications/AnnualReports.aspx, accessed 4 September 2015.)

4. On 1 October 2008, a few weeks before the Medea Project began at Sun City, DCS reported it confined a total of 3,426 sentenced and unsentenced women; RSA, DCS, National Offender Population Profile in the Department of Correctional Services (Pretoria: Department of Correctional Services, 30 June 2009), 13, table 8 (available online at www.dcs.gov.za/Publicans/Other%20Publications/National%20Offender%20Population%20Report%2030%20June%202009.pdf, accessed 4 September 2015). By the end of the reporting year 2011–12, there was a daily average of 3,765 sentenced and unsentenced women in DCS facilities; see RSA, DCS, Annual Report 2013–14, 27. The number of men prisoners reached 162,047 on 1 January 2008, then began a steady decline to 155,177 at the end of the 2011–12 reporting year; see RSA, DCS, National Offender Population Profile, 13, table 7; and RSA, DCS, Annual Report 2013–14, 27.

5. RSA, DCS, Annual Report 2008–09, 20–2.

6. Coloured people are a distinct linguistic and political group in South Africa. They include people of mixed African, Asian and European descent as well as the indigenous Khoisan community. For a history of coloured people in South Africa, see Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2005).

7. Sutherland, Alexandra, “‘Now We Are Real Women’: Playing with Gender in a Male Prison Theatre Programme in South Africa,” RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 18.2 (2013): 120–32Google Scholar; Young-Jahangeer, Miranda, “‘Less Than a Dog’: Interrogating Theatre for Debate in Westville Female Correctional Centre, Durban[,] South Africa,” RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 18.2 (2013): 200–3Google Scholar.

8. Gillespie, Kelly, “Moralizing Security: ‘Corrections’ and the Post-Apartheid Prison,” Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 2.1 (2008): 69–87Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 71.

10. In Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), Jon McKenzie traces the evolution of performance as a critical lens in the twentieth century, especially the underresearched connotations of “perform” that mandate what he calls “operational efficiency” (14) as a precursor to participation in human society. Failure to perform carries with it the threat of being rendered obsolete or worse (12).

11. For a comparative history of the use of incarceration on the African continent, see Bernault, History of Prison and Confinement in Africa. For more detailed analysis of the use of imprisonment in South Africa, see van Zyl Smit, Dirk, “Public Policy and the Punishment of Crime in a Divided Society: A Historical Perspective on the South African Penal System,” Crime and Social Justice 21–2 (1984): 146–62Google Scholar; and Gillespie, “Moralizing Security.”

12. Bernault, “Politics of Enclosure,” 11–39.

13. Here I refer to black South Africans in the political sense, not the biological or ethnic cultural sense.

14. Gillespie, Kelly, “Containing the ‘Wandering Native’: Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37.3 (2011): 499–515, at 509CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Super, Gail, “The Spectacle of Crime in the ‘New’ South Africa: A Historical Perspective (1976–2004),” British Journal of Criminology 50.2 (2010): 165–84, at 168–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Gordon, Diana R., “Side by Side: Neoliberalism and Crime Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Social Justice 28.3 (2001): 57–67, at 58Google Scholar.

17. Williams, Paul and Taylor, Ian, “Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of the ‘New’ South Africa,” New Political Economy 5.1 (2000): 21–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Gordon, 58–9.

19. Super, Gail, “‘Like Some Rough Beast Slouching towards Bethlehem to Be Born’: A Historical Perspective on the Institution of the Prison in South Africa, 1976–2004,” British Journal of Criminology 51.1 (2011): 201–21, at 210–11, quotes at 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. and intro. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter ([L'uomo delinquente, 1876] Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), quote at 164.

21. Kynoch, Gary, “Of Compounds and Cellblocks: The Foundations of Violence in Johannesburg, 1890s–1950s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37.3 (2011): 463–77, at 463CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Kynoch, 477.

23. Gordon, 60.

24. Gillespie, “Moralizing Security,” 79–83.

25. Ibid.

26. Super, “‘Like Some Rough Beast,’” 211.

27. The Department of Correctional Services defines its mission thus: “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. We are turning our correctional centres into centres of learning. Offenders must read, study and work. We must impact the hearts and minds of offenders so that, upon release, they are in possession of, at least, a certificate in one hand and a skill in the other.” RSA, DCS, Annual Report 2012–13, 13.

28. Super, “‘Like Some Rough Beast,’” 211; RSA, DCS, Annual Report 1997, 4.

29. Sutherland, 122; Young-Jahangeer, “‘Less Than a Dog’”; Young-Jahangeer, Miranda, “Bringing in to Play: Investigating the Appropriation of Prison Theatre in Westville Female Prison, KwaZulu-Natal (2000–2004),” South African Theatre Journal 19.1 (2005): 143–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Young-Jahangeer, Miranda, “LIVING with the Virus Inside: Women and HIV/AIDS in Prison,” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equality 26.2 (2012): 93–9Google Scholar.

30. Sutherland, 122.

31. Gillespie, “Moralizing Security,” 70–1.

32. James Thompson, “From the Stocks to the Stage: Prison Theatre and the Theatre of Prison,” in Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice, ed. Michael Balfour (Bristol, UK, and Portland, OR: Intellect, 2004), 57–76, at 57.

33. Gillespie, “Moralizing Security,” 70–1.

34. Standard histories of the prison arts movement after 1960 include Balfour, Theatre in Prison; James Thompson, Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998); Lawrence Tocci, The Proscenium Cage: Critical Case Studies in U.S. Prison Theatre Programs (Youngstown, OH: Cambria Press, 2007); and Jonathan Shailor, ed., Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2011). For histories of the Medea Project, see Rena Fraden, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Billone; and Sara Warner, “Restorytive Justice: Theater as a Redressive Mechanism for Incarcerated Women,” in Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars, and Artists, ed. Jodie Michelle Lawston and Ashley E. Lucas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 229–46.

35. Rhodessa Jones points to the mid-1970s efforts to liberate Joan Little, an African American woman tried for killing the corrections officer who tried to rape her while she was confined to a small jail in North Carolina, as one catalyst for her own work (personal communication, June 2012).

36. Billone, 273–4.

37. Rebecca McLennan, “Citizens and Criminals: The Rise of the American Carceral State (1890–1935),” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999, 9, quoted in ibid., 262–3.

38. The three locations were as follows: at Sun City in the small courtyard where rehearsals took place (2009); in a large vaulted auditorium at Sun City for selected members of the general public (2010); and then at the South African State Theatre in Pretoria later that year. In 2012 the production was remounted in another courtyard of the women's prison where it had begun.

39. Several members of the original cast continued to participate throughout the length of this study, but others were released from the prison, and new ensemble members were recruited. Participation was predicated upon the approval of the warders.

40. When the production moved to the performance phase, I helped prepare the theatre spaces by doing everything from picking up litter in the women's small courtyard to clearing dressing rooms at the State Theatre and handling props, microphones, and furniture. To support the cast further, I placed personal phone calls to friends and family members, offering complimentary tickets to the show. During each performance, I served as a core member of the backstage crew; in fact, for the prison performances in 2009 and 2012, I was the only backstage crew.

41. Gail Smith, “Rogue Mothers and Deviant Daughters,” City Paper (Johannesburg), 1 November 2009, 25. (Available online at www.news24.com/Archives/City-Press/Rogue-mothers-and-deviant-daughters-20150430, accessed 4 September 2015.)

42. Rhodessa Jones, personal communication, 12 May 2015.

43. Moffett, Helen, “These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them: Rape as Narrative of Social Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 32.1 (2006): 129–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoting sociologist John Moland at 138. See also Gillespie, “Moralizing Security,” 75.

44. Moffett, 138.

45. The women were asked to respond in writing to prompts that asked them to consider “Me at My Best,” “The Last Time I Saw Love,” “One Thing You Should Know about Me,” “What I Know Now,” and “How Do I Honor Myself?” Other prompts provided opportunities to address specific family members, such as “A Letter to My Mother” or “To My Children.” At no point did Jones encourage the women to seek forgiveness by Jones. In fact, discussions leading up to and in response to the letters to family members challenged the notion that all women are good mothers. Jones conducted frank discussions with the ensemble about how their mothers cared for them and voiced the sentiments of many one afternoon when she declared, “Some of our mothers, they were lousy and they left us.” These frank discussions signaled that the women could express their dissent from the norm and challenge popular notions about women behind bars. I believe that within the prison system, however, prisoners make a calculated choice about what to say to whom. To remain in good standing and perform their rehabilitation, many chose to craft confessional-sounding, apologetic responses.

46. DCS annual reports do not identify prisoners using racial classifications.  A few Afrikaner and Asian Indian women were sentenced to Sun City. Two—Wendy and Lustacia—played integral roles in the show from its inception in 2008. But they were in the minority.

47. Sun City does hold men who are detained for trial or are serving various sentences in other buildings on the grounds.

48. Personal communication, 13 May 2015.

49. The 40 percent of the population at Sun City awaiting trial were ineligible to participate; only women who had been convicted and were serving sentences could participate (Gail Smith, 25). Some prisoners were selected, encouraged, and/or coerced to participate based on the warders’ sense that they had strong dance skills, but most volunteered.

50. These insights were gained through personal exchanges with DCS warders during rehearsals in 2009 on the prison grounds. Warders expressed these comments about the women's “talents” with great sincerity as a point of pride. Theatre for incarcerated people in South Africa, like other performance forms, is confronted by the pervasive myth that Africans are natural-born entertainers. Repeated emphasis on the importance of the performance as a “showcase” for the women's “talents” evidenced a lack of knowledge or awareness of the hard work and professional expertise it took to compose, stage, and present the piece.

51. Gail Smith, 25.

52. Ibid. See also David Smith, “Theatre of Burden,” Mail & Guardian, 13 November 2009, http://mg.co.za/article/2009-11-13-theatre-of-burden, accessed 24 September 2015.

53. There is also the very real possibility that crimes against whites have increased as blacks dissatisfied with the pace of change and the lack of real redistribution of material resources have decided to seek reparations individually. The fear may also be the result of an ongoing sensationalization of blacks’ crimes by media outlets that are still disproportionately controlled by the former colonists.

54. Lucas, Ashley, “When I Run in My Bare Feet: Music, Writing and Theatre in a North Carolina Women's Prison,” American Music 31.2 (2013): 134–62, at 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Lucas, 135–6.

56. Peterson, Bhekizizwe, “Apartheid and the Political Imagination in Black South African Theatre,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16.2 (1990): 229–45, at 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight!: South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 375.

58. Less clear for audience members and the theatre crew were the orange coveralls. These were DCS uniforms assigned to incarcerated men or women when they were outside their cellblocks. A dignified elderly black theatre usher chastised me at one show for not using the appropriate doors to enter the house from backstage until I told him that they were locked, blocked, and guarded because the show consisted of real women prisoners, not actors playing a prison drama. The front row of the auditorium to the backstage loading dock was a temporary carceral space that warders from Sun City attentively guarded.

59. Rhodessa Jones, dir., “Serious Fun at Sun City,” 2010, unpublished manuscript, 3.

60. According to Viet Erlmann, ingoma are choral song and dance performances that have histories that predate conquest and signify belonging to one of the many black ethnic communities. Indlamu are usually performed by men and pay homage to a proud and free Zulu heritage. See Erlmann, Viet, “‘Horses in the Race Course’: The Domestication of Ingoma Dancing in South Africa, 1929–39,” Popular Music 8.3 (1989): 259–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For consideration of how Zulu customary dance has developed since the early 1800s, see Firenzi, Tara, “The Changing Functions of Traditional Dance in Zulu Society, 1830–Present,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45.3 (2012): 403–25Google Scholar.

61. Meintjes, Louise, “Shoot the Sergeant, Shatter the Mountain: The Production of Masculinity in Zulu Ngoma Song and Dance in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Ethnomusicology Forum 13.2 (2004): 173–201, at 174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. According to Meintjes, the concept of isigqi refers to the “magic moment” of synchronization when all the disparate elements of a performance suddenly coalesce into the groove. She continues, “A performance has isigqi when dancers, singers, drummer and clappers – leaders and team members – meld sound into a dense experience that is at once coherent and imminent: it is dense with internal tensions almost out of balance.” She concludes the power lies in the tension between the known, the “danger,” and “its potential.” Meintjes, 175.

63. Lisa M. Anderson, Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 11–13, quote at 12.

64. James, Deborah, “‘Bagagešu’ (Those of My Home): Women Migrants, Ethnicity and Performance in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 26.1 (1999): 69–89, at 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65. On several occasions Jones broke the fourth wall to provide direction and encouragement to these novice performers. Her side coaching from the edge of the stage galvanized the performers and emphasized to audiences that this was a production created by incarcerated women. While the show was complete, the seemingly open structure in which the director might give direction from the front row revealed that the show was live, in the process of being created before witnesses in the moment. Her call in the opening moments for “homework” referenced both the classroom scene and the rehearsal process. Jones often referred to the writing and other assignments she gave the cast as “homework.” Her call for “homework” here has multiple layered meanings, some of which were not apparent to audiences.

66. Throughout this writing I refer to the incarcerated women of the cast by their first names in order to reduce their chances of encountering stigma due to their imprisonment. The South African Department of Correctional Services allowed their full names to be used in publications, but out of concern for their ongoing well-being I chose not to disclose them.

67. The holding cell was designated by an area of light.

68. Jones, 11. Twenty thousand rand would be approximately $1,900. The average South African earns about $50 a week.

69. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 62.

70. Ibid., 61–2.

71. For analysis of the practice and effects of torture, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

72. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 111–14.

73. Scarry, 29.

74. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 66–67.

75. See Peterson; Coplan; and Loren Kruger, The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Publics since 1910 (London: Routledge, 1999).

76. Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010), x.

77. Ibid., xii.

78. The South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) aired live coverage of the early hearings and the testimony of prominent figures such as Winnie Mandela. Most South Africans learned about the commission's work through live radio broadcasts or by watching hourlong highlights broadcast on the SABC on Sunday nights from April 1996 to June 1998.

79. Cole, 164.

80. For additional analysis of the TRC, see Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2002); and Yvette Hutchinson, South African Performance and Archives of Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

81. Cole, 164.

82. Oboe, Analisa, “The TRC Women's Hearings as Performance and Protest in the New South Africa,” Research in African Literatures 38.3 (2007): 60–76, at 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83. Ibid., 64.

84. Rosemary Jolly, “Engendering Violence: An Analysis of the Dictates of Masculinity in TRC and Related Narratives,” paper presented at conference “The TRC: Commissioning the Past,” 11–14 June 1999, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; quoted in ibid.

85. Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 58.

86. Jones, 17–18.

87. In rehearsal, Alouise was more forthcoming about the specific circumstances related to her decision to get the gun and pull the trigger. She chose to not detail them in her monologue, and I will only say, out of respect for her privacy, that she was once again engaged in a fight for her life.

88. Thanks to Austin Jackson for insights gained in conversation about this monologue.

89. Smitherman, 118–19.

90. In the 1990s, with the prospect of large numbers of people being released from the prisons, the nation became embroiled in a heightened debate about the distinctions between “true crime” and “crimes committed against the apartheid regime” that might be framed as political and therefore legitimate acts. See Super, “‘Like Some Rough Beast,’” 208–9.

91. Thanks to Mbongeni Mtshali for help with this translation.

92. Shireen Hassim, Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 26.

93. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “The Songs are Free,” Bill Moyers: World of Ideas video, prod., director, co-writer Gail Pellett, Public Affairs Television, Thirteen-WNET, 1991. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/watch3.html. Accessed 26 September 2015.

94. See Gilbert, Shirli, “Singing against Apartheid: ANC Cultural Groups and the International Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” Journal of Southern African Studies 33.2 (2007): 421–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunner, Liz, “Jacob Zuma, the Social Body and the Unruly Power of Song,” African Affairs 108.430 (2008): 27–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Grant Olwage, ed., Composing Apartheid: Music for and Against Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008).

95. Fred Moten, “Black Optimism/Black Operation,” manuscript (Word file), Chicago, 19 October 2007, 4, 5–6, in author's possession. (Also available online at http://drive.google.com/file/d/1JibplhWrGnE9V1tHjpae8U0FloGf9TQAJCoK0J5gi8SepzSS2ubLcAkc6txB/view, accessed 4 September 2015.)

96. Albie Sachs quoted in Marcia Blumberg, “Re-Staging Resistance, Re-Viewing Women: 1990s Productions of Fugard's Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena,” in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 123–45, at 131–2.

97. McEwan, Cheryl, “Engendering Citizenship: Gendered Spaces of Democracy in South Africa,” Political Geography 19.5 (2000): 627–65, at 629CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98. Lisa Vetten and Kailash Bahana, “The Justice for Gender Campaign: Incarcerated Domestic Violence Survivors in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, ed. Julia Sudbury (New York: London: Routledge, 2005), 255–69, at 256–9.

99. D. Soyini Madison, Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12.

100. Pamela E. Brooks, Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women's Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 210.