Children as Bearers of South Africa’s Future in Post-Apartheid Opera

South African society was deeply traumatized by the apartheid regime that lasted from 1948 to 1994, and since nonracial democratization the nation has struggled to provide the redress and social justice needed to sustain hope for a new, united nation. Over the last three decades, new opera and music-theater have been instruments of South African nation-building. This chapter explores how representations of childhood have developed several significant functions in the South African context in relation to the culture of memory, the traumatization of society, and its processes of transformation. It therefore examines conceptions of childhood in new compositions as well as representations of childhood in selected productions of canonical operas. The chapter focuses on three themes deployed in selected works and marks them as performative archives of memory: childhood and innocence, children and communities, and children and trauma. Most representations of childhood in South African music-theater productions do not aim to present or understand “authentic voices” of children, which is a subject of some debate in childhood studies. This suggests that the socio-political study of childhood in South African music-theater productions would benefit from defining the criteria of repertoire selection in broader terms than those used in the work of Andrew Sutherland and Richard Peat. Furthermore, the chapter interrogates the extent to which representations of childhood in these operas reflect developments away from the nineteenth-century Western notion of passive childhood toward agency, and ultimately toward a decolonial perspective.