Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 51

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likens to the newspaper headline where underpaid workers are misused in
expanding the products of the car plant, is useful in emblematising the oppressed’s
tragic livelihood. This recalls Fanon’s assertion that ‘[a]ll forms of exploitation are
identical because all of them are applied against the same “object”’: in this context,
the object is the black person.44
Referring to European colonisers’ exploitative apparatus, Fanon writes that:
[t]he oppressor, in his own sphere, starts the process, a process of
domination, of exploitation and of pillage, and in the other sphere the
coiled, plundered creature which is the native provides fodder for the
process as best he can.’45
This colonial stratagem reappears in Styles’ narration of his bonded servility to the
factory owner. Ford considers Styles a consumable inferior resource for his act of
plundering: he exploits Styles’ labour ruthlessly. Styles symbolises ‘fodder’ for Ford’s
‘pillage’. Bradley’s statement that Ford ‘owns the plant and everything in it’ is a
verification of Ford’s masked violence.46 This articulation induces Styles to identify
himself as a puppet which is moved and controlled by strings from above his
position, in his words, like a ‘bloody circus monkey! [s]elling […] to another man.’47
Styles’ perception that his life was possessed – and that he was at the mercy of his
employer – culminated in his departure from the factory: he begins a small business
of his own – the photoshop in New Brighton. Brink notes that Styles’ story ‘beats’ the
brutal apartheid system.48 He intends to become an independent person, ‘[t]o stand
straight in a place of [his] own;’ in Fanon’s terms he wants to stop being ‘the coiled,
plundered creature’.49 Read as a fictional reconfiguration of Fanon, Styles’ story in
the play generates its own theatrical intervention into postcolonial cultural politics.
To conclude, although this analysis refers to the apartheid segregation in
postcolonial South Africa, it creates a space to reflect on the biopolitical operations in
the contemporary world where human existence is subject to diverse aspects of
segregations - racial, linguistic, religious - and to ‘political killings’. This condition is

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Fanon, 2008, 65.
Fanon, 1963, 51.
46
Fugard, 1999,153.
47
Ibid.,156.
48
Brink, 1997, 168.
49
Fugard, 1999, 157; Fanon, 2008, 51.
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