‘This woman is not for burning’: performing the biography and memory of Cissie Gool

Between 1935 and 1963, Zainunnessa ‘Cissie’ Gool was probably the most politically powerful woman of colour in Cape Town, yet her history has remained largely undocumented and unknown even in her own city. This article traces a skeleton of the biography of Gool and offers a few reflections on the process of making two theatre pieces, Cissie (2008) and This Woman is Not for Burning (2011). Both works were oriented around Gool’s life and the world of her constituency, District Six. Like the two plays it focuses on, this article is concerned with the efficacy and limitations of restorative archiving and historiography through performance and the potential seductions of hagiography. I suggest that both plays were acts of feminist biography, governed, in part, by the (often silent, sometimes unacknowledged) narrative of auto/biography. The article is also an attempt to forge a critical and creative cohesion between the multiple forms of inquiry (imaginative, anecdotal and theoretical) that underpinned both works.