Artist Spotlight: Refilwe Pieterse
Picture of Refilwe Pieterse, taken during unrest in South Africa. Photo by Lutwana Media
We Sang and Molded Hope into a Melody
By Emilie Diouf, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of English; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; African and African American Studies, and Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation, Brandeis University
“Our songs were hope molded into melody. Song was our greeting, a melody that carried warmth before words ever arrived. Silence was our companion; it was not a cage. We spoke only when our words carried weight and could plant seeds of meaning in the hearts of others. Today, as our paths cross, even momentarily through this text, I welcome you in that same spirit. May this moment be more than a meeting, may it be a chorus of wisdom, laughter, and purpose. Let us walk softly, speak with deep care, and honor one another through the possibility offered by this moment of connection.”
Refilwe Pieterse, in conversation with Emilie N. Diouf
Alexandra and Apartheid Legacies
The township of Alexandra “described by Nelson Mandela as ‘exhilarating and precarious,’ sprawls some 12km northeast of the Johannesburg city center. Alex is referred to as ‘Dark City’ because it did not have electricity for over 50 years. It’s surrounded by wealthy suburbs like Sandton, Kelvin, and Wendywood.”1 Shortly after arriving in Johannesburg in 1940, Nelson Mandela rented a room in what is now known as Yard 46 at the corner of 7th Avenue (Lucille Davie). Alex has been dubbed the “parliament” because it was home to four African presidents: The late President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, former Mozambican President Samora Machel, Nelson Mandela, and former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe. It was also home to some of the most famous anti-Apartheid artists and activists like world renowned jazz musician Hugh Masekela, and former First Lady Zanele Mbeki, among many others. While other neighboring townships, like Soweto, have captivated the interest of social scientists, little attention has been paid to Alex beyond the depiction of episodic xenophobic outbreaks that stem from segregation legacies in the Apartheid era. This lack of documentation has contributed to the unrecording of the township’s histories of anti-Apartheid struggle and resilience. To this day, Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftadodien’s book, Alexandra: A History (Witwatersrand University Press, 2008) is the only social history study that features Alex.
Photo taken during a stage performance of South African poet Mongane Wally Sirote’s Praise Poem for Oliver Tambo, Sikhahlel'u OR Tambo at the State Theatre in South Africa.
The Role of Art, Culture, Community in Reparative Quest
In the new wave of the decolonization movement in South Africa, the most internationally known being the 2015-2016 #FeesMustFall student protest, and more recently, #CorruptionExposed, or #MyHandsAreClean, so much ink has been spilled about the contemporary valences of Indigenous approaches to justice and conflict transformation. While this line of inquiry is not new to South Africa and the African continent at large, my conversation with Refilwe Pieterse highlights that in the context of post-Apartheid commemorative events such as National Youth Day, observed on June 16, a national day of remembrance of the 1976 Soweto Student Uprising, a political discourse of indigeneity often removes the cultural significance of such approaches by reducing them to mere performative speech acts that deviate from addressing the systemic structures that continue to sustain the material legacies of Apartheid and thereby contribute to re-traumatizing Black South Africans.
I spoke with Refilwe Pieterse a few days before the 50th anniversary of the June 16, 2026, Soweto uprising amidst the latest onslaught of anti-African xenophobia and immigration enforcement operations in Alex Township, Pieterse’s home and place of birth, where she runs the Refilwe Pieterse Foundation, a community non-profit organization that works with youth to provide a space for nurturing their talents. During our conversation, Pieterse emphasized that she was not telling her story to traumatize the readers, but to show the urgency of curating spaces of dialogue that allow people to discuss their pain and to preserve their memories. In this long journey toward reckoning with the injustices of the Apartheid era and their enduring legacy, she also discussed her work in human and community development, her grandfather’s role in political organizing, including the use of his church for underground meetings during the anti-Apartheid struggle, and for organizing the burials of children killed by the violent repression of the Apartheid government. She connects the lessons learned from her grandfather’s political activism with her ongoing efforts to promote peace and resilience through poetry and theater.
The Refilwe Pieterse Foundation, which used to operate from a small room in Refilwe’s grandfather’s home, where she held rehearsals for five years, focuses on building transferable skills in scriptwriting, directing, and choreography. The foundation collaborates with local artists, activists, and researchers to collect the forgotten and erased stories of Alex. It also offers reading and writing classes to children who don't attend school due to a lack of official documentation. Refilwe Pieterse works with immigrant women from other African countries, military veterans, and survivors of the 1976 and 1986 uprisings. It is from this background that Unifyer Dyer (Witwatersrand University), Dorothy Kim (Brandeis University), and I embarked on a collaborative journey to co-create The Alex Storyteller’s Hub, a community-based oral history project run by residents of Alex.
By situating archive-making within a community where the reverberating afterlives of Apartheid are tangled with the more recent reality of unemployment and poverty, the Alex Storytellers Hub contributes to documenting the ways through which residents of Alex engage in a process of archival reappropriation of their lived experiences in the afterlives of Apartheid. Refilwe Pieterse and residents of Alex aim to restore dignity in the minds of the Alex community, create awareness about their present conditions, remember those who fell in the struggle against Apartheid, and facilitate dialogue following community theater interpretations of deeply traumatic events such as the February 1986 Alex 6 Days of War. The latter marked another episode of violent clashes between police and residents of Alex, following the dispersal by police of a funeral gathering for a 19-year-old activist on February 17, 1986. It was one of the horrendous episodes of repression featured in one of the Human Rights Violation Hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that took place in Alexandra on October 29, 1996.
The memories of this Alex 6 Days of War are cemented in Refilwe’s mind. As she begins recounting her childhood with her harrowing experiences of this time, she remembers being a very little girl forced to hide in a hole that her grandfather had dug out and covered with pieces of wood and rubbish on top of this wood to make it look like a heap of waste. With much resolve and resilience, she recalls how her mother had disappeared during the protest and her grandfather’s agony over not knowing whether Pieterse’s mother was dead or alive. She also witnessed the destruction of her home during the repression of anti-Apartheid resistance and saw her grandfather turn their home into an informal internally displaced people’s camp as many fled Apartheid terror from other provinces and sought refuge in Alex. As a result of this, Pieterse was kidnapped by a woman who found shelter in her grandfather’s house. The woman took her to Mafikeng and introduced her as her daughter. Reflecting on this experience, Pieterse speculates with empathy that the woman must have been desperate for a child. Her poem titled “Alexandra to Mafikeng” muses on this experience by speaking from the perspective of a childless woman.
They said her womb was a ghost,
a dry calabash,
a hollow drum that never sang.
At the borehole, their laughter spilled
like water from cracked buckets.
sharp, cold, unkind.
She learned to walk with her head bowed,
not from shame,
but to listen for God in the dust.
in the midst of these terrors, we sang when there was no hope. The township was all songs. These songs and movements united the people. The whole country sang together, and despite the horrendous violence, Black people were united around this song for peace. Some people could sing, and others could not sing, but we all sang together. I have memories of people across the country wearing white T-shirts with a blue dove on the front or back of the T-shirt. It was very symbolic for me as a child to see the people around me sing the song with tears in their eyes. I remember that every time it showed on the television, everyone in the house would keep quiet. Although not many people had TV sets, we would all sit together around a small TV set in someone’s yard to watch this moment.
Pieterse emphasizes the importance of unity, community, and healing. For it is this deep sense of responsibility toward one’s community that led the late international playwright and former artistic director of the Julian Theatre in San Francisco, Selaelo Maredi, to teach her about poetry and theater. Maredi was a political exile who had left South Africa in 1977 to perform his co-authored play Survival (1976) off-Broadway. He returned to South Africa in 1994 to contribute to the reconstruction efforts. He taught Refilwe how to read poetry and invited her to recite his poems “Black Child” and “Speak in the Name of Africa” at one of the national meetings of the Pan African Congress. Reflecting on her training under Maredi, Pieterse remarks, “He was teaching me leadership and even at this point, I had not realized that I was in the struggle.”South African Protest Theater and Smart Decolonization
It was not until 2013 that Pieterse realized that she was knee deep in the continuous struggle for Black freedom as she joined the Community Military Theater (CMT), a group of about 20 young women who conceived of a collective theater-based organization as a creative Women's Liberation Movement with the mission to combat the psychological wounds stemming from decades of political violence.
Women's Liberation Movement team-building at the National Arts Festival 2016.
Photo by unknown photographer
Alexandra-based theater practitioners Bongani Dlamini and Nhla Mazibuko were the founders of the CMT group who were inspired by the charisma of their mentor Bongani Linda, a leading scholar in South African Protest Theater. For five years, they created space for learning about the history of the Protest Theater movement in South Africa. CMT was a movement that sought to reckon with the traumas and grief caused by the riots of the Apartheid era. It specifically focused on the unknown histories of women. Members of the group excavated women’s histories, especially those of the 1956 movement. Refilwe Pieterse points out, “we carried the stories everywhere in South Africa.” She remarks that while this work was necessary, the process of creating and performing plays about very traumatic historical events whose effects continue to be felt by the artists and their audiences resulted in exhaustion and burn out. From this experience, Pieterse wondered about an alternative approach to protest theater that could attend to the psychological well-being of the artists involved in the process, whose personal experiences often resonate and intersect with the lives of those they portray on the stage. As a result, she thought of the project, “Protest Theater South Africa: The Psychology,” which seeks to center the mental health and well-being of the artists.
The guiding principle for the psychology of protest theater project is to create conditions that allow theater practitioners to engage in periodic debriefing sessions at rehearsals and performances in order to unpack the affective implications of working with painful historical materials. While Pieterse understands the significance of theater in transmitting knowledge about historical violence and its potential in helping imagine more just futures, she posits that it is equally important for South African artists to engage in a practice of what she characterizes as “smart decolonization”: a methodology that foregrounds theater as a form of psychological reckoning with traumatic memory. Protest theater embodies the emotions of communities, their struggles, and their resilience. “Smart decolonization insists that these voices must be recovered, preserved, and re‑imagined to shape alternative futures. When voices fade, history erodes, and the next generation inherits silence instead of memory. A lost legacy breeds poverty of knowledge, a preserved legacy becomes a foundation, a wealth and inheritance for the people.”
Picture taken at the State Theatre performance of Women's Liberation in 2017.
Photo by unknown photographer
Despite rapid technological advances, South African protest theater has not faded; only the voices risk fading when excluded from the digital world. Smart decolonization bridges art and technology, asking, Where is the audience now? Where is the veteran? Where is the writer, the script, and performer? The answer lies in reclaiming space. By rethinking protest theater through smart decolonization, the long years of South African struggle can be transformed into theater heritage, creating new opportunities and attracting new audiences. Protest theater has the power to document the histories of the townships and contribute to community archiving initiatives.
In his book Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park (2020, Ohio University Press), South African historian Jacob Dlamini has addressed the violence that characterizes the Apartheid government’s surveillance archive. Given the Apartheid security apparatus’ infallible attempt to destroy much of its records in 1990-1994, protest theater opens a space for archival recuperation that is yet to be substantially developed in post -Apartheid South Africa. This capacious archival space, protest theater, considers smaller and untidy histories of Apartheid and its afterlives to infuse them with the possibility of countering the fading of these memories. It creates space for residents of Alex to contest, co-create public memory, and be able to use this process to help foster constructive dialogue between the various groups (immigrants, residents, those who had previously resided there) living in Alex. These dialogues are not only a healing and debrief but a transfer of decades of research and materials to the people of origin, developing human libraries while preservation is at the heart of this methodology. Scripts must be collected and catalogued, photographs archived, and oral histories recorded. These treasures constitute living archives that communities themselves can preserve. Each province becomes a custodian of its own theater memory, feeding into an active collective national voice.
[1] Licille Davie, “Why Alexandra Survived Apartheid”. The Heritage Portal, 2025. https://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/why-alexandra-survived-apartheid