Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part 10: “Memory”
He sat at one end of the table down there in the Waiting Room. The rest of us, five in total, were on either side of the same table but it was as if we were in two different worlds.
For a start, we were white, the Mine Captain, the Supervisor, the Shift Boss and me. He was black, this young man, and as we talked, he remained silent, eating his early break snack, scarcely raising his eyes to look at us.
Secondly, our conversation took place for the most part as if he wasn’t there, this young black man, as we talked of shifts and machines and safety and the culture in this world where so much had changed in recent years, they claimed, not least in safety.
From time to time, I would ask him a question and he would reply but never more than the minimum possible.
Sat back at my desk in London or at home in Oxfordshire, it was this image of isolation that came back to me most strongly of my time down the mine in South Africa. More so even than the smell of the coal dust, impregnated into the pages of my notebook. And so very much more than the statistics and the rhetoric of “change”.
He became the central character of my story, this almost invisible young black man, in the play I had to write as the engine of our safety training programme for the mining company in question.
His name?
I was to call him “Lucky”.
I had been invited to go underground in a “board and pillar” mine for extracting thermal coal in the Mpumalanga region in South Africa.
Just three months before, 9 miners had been killed in a “cage plunge”, as the newspaper described it, in a South African gold mine when the rope lowering them to nearly 3,000 metres underground failed and the metal cage crashed to the bottom of the shaft, killing all those inside. This was but one incident in a week of disaster at Gold Fields mines that left 14 people dead and the reputation of the mining industry – particularly in the deep mines involving the extraction of gold, platinum and other minerals – yet again in shreds.
In a world which had seen 96,000 miners killed between 1909-1994 and more than a million mineworkers injured during that time, 2007, the year before I visited South Africa to research my play, saw a 10% increase in fatalities.
The South African Minister for Mines commented following the cage disaster that this was “totally unacceptable” and the recently appointed Chief Executive of a major mining company operating in South Africa decided that she, too, would no longer accept the current level of injury and death “on her watch”. As a consequence, we found ourselves engaged to help to do something about it.
Which is why, one fine clear day in October 2008, I found myself underground in a South African coal mine in the area they call the “Waiting Room” at 6.30 in the morning.
Down here, it was pitch black, except where “George”, the vast, gleaming Continuous Miner machine was waiting to grind his irresistible way like Godzilla through the seam they were working, the water flying in rainbows around the whirling cutters where they were lit by powerful lamps. The smell of damp coal, still faintly persisting in my notebook 13 years on, filled my nose like the remains of an old bonfire after rain.
In the Waiting Room, the place where the miners came for prayers and briefing in the morning and their breaks during the day, we were lit by a single fluorescent tube. The harsh and revealing light picked up every crack and fissure on our dust-caked features if you were white. Less so if you were black.
The journey here had actually started some years before with yet another of that select band of brothers and sisters who supported and called on us to help them in the various challenges they faced in the world of safety in major hazard environments.
John had stumbled on us while working for a major global organisation with whom we had been engaged over the previous couple of years. Liking what he saw and being a man with a taste for innovation, he came up with an idea he thought we could bring to life in an original, not to say, theatrical way.
This programme that my colleague named “Train of Events” took us from Holland to the UK, Singapore and the Middle East. It was the start of a productive and successful relationship with John and his associates that spanned three major global organisations over a period of some 10 years or so and took us to North America, Norway, West Africa and, in this particular case, South Africa.
Mining, as you might have gathered, is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. In addition to the risk of explosion from methane gas, coal dust, or flying debris from the frequent use of explosives itself, “fall of ground”, flooding and electrocution are all common causes of serious injury or death. But these are only the most immediate “swords of Damocles” hanging, literally in many cases, directly over your head.
More insidious is the coal or silica dust which causes death from pneumoconiosis which may take years to develop and eventually take its inevitable toll, as does lung cancer and silicosis from long-term exposure to dust, radon gas and exhaust fumes underground. And if you are fortunate not to suffer from any of the above, carbon monoxide and other potentially lethal gases lie invisibly in wait should ventilation prove inadequate or fail within the mine.
Although deep mining for gold, platinum and other minerals presents the highest risk of fatality, coal mining, particularly “retreat pillar mining”, though much shallower as a rule, has all the hazards described above and three times the likelihood of roof collapse of other forms of mining.
After the spike in the fatality rate the year before, the new Chief Executive of this particular mining company engaged John to help her with this major challenge and he, in turn, thought we might provide a means of “winning hearts and minds” of not just the people most at risk – the miners themselves – but the people at the top.
As Shakespeare said: “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King”. Although in this instance, it was the Queen who wanted to catch the consciences of the team around her, many of whom were not convinced that her approach was best for the company given the competitive environment within the constraints of the South African economy and the safety improvements they believed they had already made – code, of course, for: “this could cost us”.
The founder of Easyjet, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, once said: if you think safety is expensive, just try having an accident. Ask BP. With something similar in mind, whatever improvements may have been made in the general standard of safety within this particular company, our queen stood her ground. She would not have “production over safety” said of her legacy and off we went.
When I arrived at the colliery, it was the first time I had ever visited a mine. I was ushered into a room where all around me were the proud statements of the achievements they had made in safety and the culture as a whole. It was an impressive gallery that spoke the messages of integration and care for fitness and well-being – particularly where the widespread ravages of AIDS was concerned. But what stood out above all was the message that “Lost Time Incidents” or LTIs, the acronym often used to refer to stoppages caused by accidents to people working there, and injuries as a whole, let alone fatalities, were at a record low. The inference was that this was a harmonious and healthy environment for all concerned. Compared to the “bad old days”, this was a transformed world. And, on the surface, so it was.
South Africa had just been through a revolution. With the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years of incarceration, the collapse of Apartheid, and the subsequent election of the African National Congress, or ANC, with Mandela now the President of South Africa, everything had changed. Or had it?
I had never been to South Africa before, let alone down a South African mine. My only knowledge of this distant world in earlier times came from an uncomfortable awareness of the moral challenge of apartheid, particularly in sport and, to a lesser extent, work. I had once been conflicted by the lure of a South African “commercial” dangled by my agent at a time when money was short as a jobbing actor with a growing family but it had never materialised.
But through my daughter who had taken off into the blue aged 18 on her “gap year” adventure and come back with the young man she would make her life with thereafter, I began to get a sense of some of the complexities of this world.
This handsome, spectacularly dreadlocked, part-Belgian, all-South African life-saver – that was his job on the beaches near East London – not only gave me insights into his experience of growing up in the contrasting worlds of privilege and deprivation according to the colour of your skin but also introduced me to the music of Miriam Makeba.
Once heard, her voice, let alone her story, stays with you forevermore. This iconic woman, sometimes called “Mama Africa”, spent her first six months in jail as a new-born babe after her mother was imprisoned for brewing illicit beer, being unable to afford the fine. She had an abusive first marriage and her first child while still a teenager and then survived cancer more than once in a life which encompassed several marriages, the tragic loss of her daughter, Bongi, and ended with a heart attack, aged 76 in 2008, doing what had made her famous all over the world during her lifetime – singing.
From Swazi and Xhosa parentage, Makeba became a figurehead of the anti-apartheid movement through her songs and celebration of her African tribal heritage. This led to her exile from South Africa for many, many years until, with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, her triumphant return in 1990 at Mandela’s request.
Her music was to take a complementary role in my play, thanks to my son-in-law, but there was one other insight I had had before arriving in South Africa itself and well before my daughter set off on her life-changing adventure.
When my colleagues and I started our first embryonic company, the notion of safety training was still a long way off as a potential area of development. Diversity and Inclusion, on the other hand, with their antitheses Discrimination, Prejudice, Harassment and Bullying, were emerging as new and powerful themes in the vocabulary of training and development in the context of leadership and culture. And it was in 1993 that we were invited to tender for the most unusual job we had had to that date, if not ever since.
I had written a play the year before called “A Bit of Fun”. Its subject was discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, hence a level of irony in the title. It marked the first time I had brought to bear the kind of interactive theatre approach that I had learned in my work in Theatre in Education in which the audience become active participants at key points in the drama.
This became a popular item in police training where many of the issues described in the play were uncomfortably prevalent at the time. Take the question: “stockings or tights?” – one of the less subtle examples of the kind of sexual harassment masquerading as “banter” that emerged as being common in the culture. The participants were able to use the play as a prompt for sharing their experience from both sides of the divide in the interests of raising awareness and, ultimately, changing unwanted behaviour in these areas.
Extend these less subtle, yet often highly distressing, potentially traumatising issues into the whole question of respect for the dignity of your fellow human being, no matter what gender, sexual orientation, race, colour, or creed they may have, you begin to see how this has some bearing on the greater task in hand.
But when we were approached by what was then the Civil Service College in Sunningdale to see if we would be interested in contributing to a residential leadership development course for a group from South Africa in preparation for the election of a new government – the first multi-racial, fully enfranchised election in South Africa’s history – we knew this was not just something special but potentially historic.
So it was we found ourselves working with the recently violently opposed, very senior members of the warring African National Congress and Inkartha parties and various elements of the South African Police and military – all of whom would be potentially holding responsible positions, some at the highest level, in the new government in South Africa; not a few of whom were face to face with their Robben Island jailers, each having seen the other as oppressor or terrorist.
It was the interactive element that found its fulfilment in what could have been seen as a trivial or irrelevant story in the greater scheme of things. To watch these people work together to engage with their chosen protagonist in the drama, whether harasser or harassed, manager or managed, and build the bridges of empathy, awareness, negotiated meeting points, remorse and resolution – a humble form of “truth and reconciliation” if you like – was quite simply joyful. After all, it was these very qualities that would be so critically important in the weeks, months and years to come. But what really broke the ice and prevented the ever-present potential for blood on the Sunningdale floor, was one simple, human virtue – humour.
We laughed. They laughed. We all wept and howled with laughter, often at the most inappropriate moments or in those improvised interventions that arose.
For example: one of the participants suggested that a conversation could take place in the Gents toilet between a mediator and the harasser. This informal, seemingly accidental encounter when things were at an impasse, might just break the ice and set up a next step towards resolving the crisis. Well, it doesn’t take much of a twitch for two men standing side by side with their backs to the audience to provoke a snort, a rumble and then a cascade of rising hysteria. If ever there was proof of the cathartic value of laughter, we demonstrated it.
But, arguably, in between some hard-nosed leadership and business models of the kind to do with policy-making, budget-forming, governmental administration and all the rest of it – none of which was our responsibility, thank goodness – we provided something unique to the course that just might have contributed to a kind of cultural glue between intractably opposed forces. Who knows?
What I took away from the experience was something that reminded me vividly of my experience over 20 years earlier, aged 22, when hitch-hiking 2,000 miles back up East Africa, from Zambia to Kenya. It was a uniquely African sense of human warmth and humour, or so it felt to me at the time.
I refer to the humour and warmth that comes from a free spirit, no matter how poor in material wealth. A spirit sure in its human dignity, its worth as a being of equal value to its brothers and sisters on this planet. The tragedy, of course, is when that spirit is not free, its dignity is debased, its worth devalued. That’s when the warmth and humour disappears. Hence Black Lives Matter today.
And finally, before I left for this first visit to South Africa to research the background to our safety culture programme for the mining company in question, I read one key book, first published in 1994. Not, as it happens, a book about mining but a book about resilience, determination, courage, an unshakeable belief in the capability of human beings to change for the better and, perhaps above all, the power of dignity, tolerance and forgiveness to overturn its opposite. I am, naturally, referring to Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk To Freedom”.
Thus armed, I embarked on my journey that led to the performance, a few months later, in March 2009, of our production of “Lucky” on the penthouse floor of the towering office block in Johannesburg in front of the Chief Executive and her executive team.
We turned almost the whole of this uppermost floor into a kind of promenade stage, divided into “Above the Surface” and “Below the Surface”.
“Above” consisted of either the General Manager’s office or the Visitor Centre-cum-Classroom where the audience participants would be able to consider and discuss what they’d learned after each scene, with the help of a facilitator, my role that day. This included an opportunity to engage directly in a supportive, coaching capacity with the protagonists in the drama at the point in which each was struggling with a personal dilemma on the critical next step in question.
“Below”, it is dark. We are in the mine. Underground. In the Waiting Room, there is bright fluorescent light when it comes into play. Elsewhere and at other times, we have only torches sometimes to show faces in the encounters that take place, particularly in the final scene, in which Jim, the General Manager goes to find Lucky down in the mine. He fears that Lucky may have decided to take matters into his own hands to resolve a safety issue, in much the same way that Lucky’s father had, fatally, when Jim was his supervisor some 20 years before. Little did I suspect when writing it that this scene would come back to haunt me later.
In the play, Jim and Lucky, down there, in the dark, have the kind of conversation that in real life one rarely gets to have. The risk – that Lucky may try to resolve a flooding issue without isolating a live cable in the area concerned – is averted. But the deeper issues remain unresolved.
How, for instance, do you humanise “The Rules” in a culture in which matters are rarely “black or white”, any more than humans are, however much it may serve certain purposes to make it so, for better or for worse?
In my story, Lucky wants to go to the funeral of his “brother” who had been killed in a disaster much like the “cage plunge” described earlier in this chronicle. Because the word “brother” does not necessarily imply a family or blood connection in the African culture, and because Lucky has been known to be economical with the truth when it suits his philanderings, his supervisor says, no, I’m sorry, Lucky, but the rules say it must be a close relation for you to take bereavement leave to attend a funeral (in this case a day’s journey away).
Frustrated by the refusal, the headstrong Lucky takes it upon himself to be absent without leave to attend the funeral of his childhood friend, aka his “brother”, thus causing a series of headaches for all concerned. Not least Jim, the General Manager, who is preparing for a visit by the “Transformation Team” (effectively our audience), despite an exemplary safety record compared to other mines and the usual mass of parallel initiatives, including a new emphasis on “Empowerment” which, to Jim, runs in the face of all his efforts to enforce his somewhat paternalistic style of “Compliance”, all happening at the same time. And now the Union are saying that he can’t sack Lucky for breaking the rules and yet they still want their performance bonus despite Lucky’s absence causing them to miss the target. ’Twas ever thus.
But underlying all these issues, common to many if not most industrial worlds both in South Africa and elsewhere, lies something brought home to me in that image that stayed with me from the moment in the Waiting Room underground.
Namely “isolation” – which also has the double meaning of the means of rendering a live electrical current safe. And the problem with non-electrical isolation is that it implies some kind of barrier, or wall, or removal from connection and communication or, more recently, infection.
Isolation is, by definition, profoundly lonely, however perceived as protective from within, or excluding from without; a state where one cannot hear beyond the wall, and those beyond may think there is nothing to listen for. For all the changes that had occurred since the collapse of apartheid, the barriers, the walls, the gulfs in understanding remained vast, particularly under the surface. And while the political face had changed from white to black, the face of industry, with all the wealth and power it controlled, remained very largely unchanged.
“How did you know?” said one when the curtain came down. “That was my story!” said another. “So powerful for me to open up to deeply held prejudice.” And: “Change only comes from shifting historic perceptions.”
The Chief Executive had tears in her eyes. The participants were both visibly and audibly moved and affected by our work on their behalf. Yes, we thought. It was all worth it, the hard work, the lonely nights waiting for the words to come, the struggles to create a coherent narrative that achieved the purpose of the brief, the frustrations and breakthroughs of the rehearsal process, the wonderful work of the actors and the director despite being bullied and harassed by the writer.
When I got the call a week after returning to England, still glowing from our achievement in Johannesburg, I immediately recognised the voice of someone who had become my “brother” over the time since my first arrival in South Africa to begin my research. Eliphas is a poet and union activist, most recently senior executive of a miners’ union in South Africa, with whom I have had a special if all too intermittent correspondence since meeting him that first time.
“Hello, my brother,” I said. “How good to hear from you!”
There was a pause and then he said:
“You too, my brother, but I have some sad news.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that. Tell me. What’s happened?”
“It’s someone from the mine.”
“What do you mean? Has someone been hurt?”
“It’s worse, my brother. I’m so sorry to bring bad news but I knew you’d want to know. His name was Memory. Memory Ndlangamandla. He was killed in an accident in the mine.”
Now there was silence from my end.
“What happened?” I asked after a moment. “How did he die? Please tell me.”
“There was some flooding. He was trying to fix it but there was a cable. It wasn’t isolated. It was still live.”
At that moment, the image came back to me of the young black miner in the Waiting Room, sitting there at one end, isolated, excluded from the conversation of the white managers around the same table where we all sat. It was he who had given me the start to “Lucky”, even if my character had turned into a feisty individual, not afraid to give as good as he got.
It could have been him. Memory.
John confirmed the details in a later call but I will never know, of course, if it was the man I met who died. I always made a point of asking people’s names when I was interviewing or just talking to people I met on the way but for some reason this young man in the Waiting Room slipped through the net and I have no record of his name, unlike a real Lucky I met elsewhere in the mine.
But what sent a shiver down my spine was that Memory was killed in almost exactly the same way as I described my fictional “Lucky”’s father dying, from an imagined scenario of my all-too-often clairvoyant colleague’s at the beginning of the writing process. The same imagined way in which I feared “Lucky” might fatally make history repeat itself. Instead Memory made fiction fact.
The moral of this chronicle that I have called “Memory” is, of course, to never, ever think that you have “cracked it” or somehow magically cast a protective spell over those with whom you have been working. People get tired. People get distracted. People make mistakes, no matter how much they may persuade themselves they won’t. Which is why you have to keep on reminding them – and yourself – how these things can happen.
So the story of Memory stays with me – the story of someone who maybe with the best intentions or maybe because they were angry, sad or just tired and unthinking, or even because someone told them it would be ok, or worse, made them do it, did something all the rule-books and procedures say you mustn’t, no matter what the circumstances. And on this particular occasion, perhaps having done it before without harmful consequences, even, perhaps, rewarded for it in some way, as is often the case with what can be known as “short cuts”, they were not “Lucky”.
For this reason, every time I stand up to begin or end a safety programme, I think of Memory and dedicate it silently to him. After all, with a name like Memory, it’s not hard to remember. And somehow, I feel I owe it to him.
