Mbongeni Ngema: A Theater of the Ancestors

Mbongeni Ngema: A Theater of the Ancestors Roberta Uno I was brought up in a tradition where I was not told there was anything called Theater or Poetry or Literature. Rather, every night before going to sleep my grandmother or my mother would tell me a story . . . this was theater in its purest form. —Duma Ndlovu South Africa at that time had shut a lot of our mouths. A lot of us who had stood up had been locked up or killed. There was just a silence, we were like the living dead, we had no color. It was our poets, artists, writers like Mbongeni who gave us our reflection. —Makalo Mofokeng The Zulus are known for their warrior spirit and this warrior spirit is in my plays. It is work which fights for liberation, it fights against apartheid with a sharp edge, it fights in a spirit of heroism. —Mbongeni Ngema Mbongeni Ngema, the South African writer, director, and actor, has created fewer than a dozen works for the theater, yet those works, including Woza Albert! (1982), co-written with Percy Mtwa and Barney Simon; Asinamali! (1986); and Sarafina! (1987) have all challenged and captivated traditional theater-goers and reached out to people who have never before set foot in the theater. With the adaptation of Sarafina! to film and its international distribution , Ngema's work has reached numbers of people unimaginable to even the most successful playwrights. In an era when the commercial theater is characteristically devoid of politics, why Ngema? Ngema's work is a consistent voice of criticism of the South African government, yet he brought a new audience to the American theater. His work contains an unyielding message of black liberation, yet it appeals to the non theater-goer and the critical establishment alike. Why? Like the exclamation points which punctuate his three signature pieces, Ngema is a powerful, purposeful creative force. As Thomas Disch observes in his review of Township Fever for The Nation, 15 16 Roberta Uno Ngema is one of those singular artists who not only take charge of the entire creative operation, like Chaplin or Welles, but who also like Balanchine, have trained a corps of performers in the stringent requirements of their signature style [sic]. It's still more remarkable that he has accomplished this in a hostile political environment and that the central thrust of his artistry is to celebrate the energies of revolution. (174) The creative force of Mbongeni Ngema derives from his aesthetic. The aesthetic is a complex, unique, and revolutionary fusion of discrete origins. Outlined below are these major tributaries flowing into Ngema's aesthetic: South African Theater and its politics; the revolutionary work of Stanislaviski, Brook, and Grotowski; and the Zulu cosmology, heritage of musical storytelling, and warrior tradition. Township and Black Consciousness Theater - South Africa Mbongeni Ngema was born in Zululand, and though he attended school only through the fourth grade, he grew up with music a constant and integral part of his life, learning to play the guitar, keyboard, and trumpet. His father was a policeman, and Ngema grew up a member of a strict Zionist church which held church services on Saturdays, but on Sundays would hold a type of pageant celebration very much connected to Zulu traditions involving costume , dance, and music performed by church members separated according to age, sex, and marital status. While he did not see theater in the formal sense as a child, his church experience provided a basis for his approach to theater as an integrative performance form and as a communal experience.1 Ngema's unique blend of politics, music, and physical theatricality represents a synthesis of two forms of South African theater. South African writer Duma Ndlovu, who enlisted Ngema's support as director of Ndlova's Sheila's Day in 1989, speaks of Ngema's 1982 production of Woza Albert! as a milestone that created a new form of South African theater. Ndlova asserts that Woza Albert! represented the marriage between the township theater of artists like Gibson Kente, who created large musicals purely for mass entertainment, and the radical political South African theater of the Black Consciousness Movement, for which martyr Steven...