I was going through my archives and I saw this scanned postcard image. It was from a play I watched in 2005 for my English class. I remember being so moved by it. I was trying to remember what the play was about, but I couldn’t remember. I had to refresh my memory by reading up about it.
The play was written by South African director and playwright Yael Farber. It features five actors who tell of their moving stories about growing up in apartheid South Africa through narration, dialogue, physical theatre and the sweet sounds of acapella. The flow of the stories is a combination of power, truth and humour.
SOURCE: WALKER ART
Bongeka Mpongwana’s disarmingly bright smile adds poignance to her history of deprivation. She and her older sister were abandoned by her parents and forced to beg for food in their village at a time when none of their neighbors had much to spare. A child’s need for emotional succor is piteously illustrated by her searing affection for an alcoholic grandfather. He was useless as a provider and a caregiver, but she loved him desperately anyway.
Roelf Matlala’s mixed blood was his burden. His persecution at the hands of other children is familiar schoolyard cruelty, but the phantasmagoric illustration of the physical abuse meted out by the school principal is the stuff of lasting nightmares, amusing though Ms. Mpongwana is as a punishing gorgon with the incongruously comic name of Popo.
The social dislocations caused by apartheid wreak slow havoc on the family of Phillip Tindisa, whose warm comic style and mischievous eyes flavor his reminiscences. The family was forced to relocate when the government arbitrarily decided to segregate its black citizens by tribe. Phillip’s father never made the emotional adjustment; he gradually withdrew from the new homestead, both emotionally and physically, eventually removing all his possessions piece by piece, day by day, in a plastic bag.
The most disturbing story of survival is told by Jabulile Tshabalala, who grew up — yet again in a broken home — in one of the most violent sections of the infamous Soweto township, where the absence of authority meant the tyranny of brutal gangsters. Violence also ripped a hole in the life of Tshallo Chokwe, whose dreams of escape from poverty as a soccer star are supplanted by political activism during his teenage years.
– NY TIMES
I wish Amajuba could be turned into a movie!!!
Comments