came back to South Africa. He immediately got busy setting up new bands, resuscitating the African-jazz tradition in South Africa.
While the King Kong cast were busy wowing audiences in the UK in 1959 up to 1960, after which many of them started their own individual careers – some of them became legends – back home the music never stopped. But more importantly, a local man, who, ironically, had helped discover many musicians while he worked for Gallo Africa as a talent scout, was busy carving himself a career as a writer of musicals in the tradition of King Kong. That man’s name was Gibson Kente. By 1971, when I around nine years old, Kente had become such an influence in local theatre that everyone who was interested in acting sought him out. Those who thought they were playwrights were producing what were then called ‘sketches’, which, as would later be discovered, were actually what we would today call cut-and-paste jobs of Kente’s productions.
Very young as I was, my parents allowed me to join the local drama society. They were generally protective, and dismissive of those who thought they could make a living through the arts. ‘I don’t mind when you sing over the weekend, or at church, but don’t tell me you think singing or acting in those stupid sketches is a real job’ was how my mother would respond whenever any of us children excitedly announced that we wanted to get involved in the arts. The only reason my parents allowed me to join the dramatic society was because my brother had joined; it was something he did over the weekend.
The dramatic society grew very fast. In no time at all it was staging productions at the local community hall, attracting huge paying crowds. My brother was hired as a doorman – he collected gate takings. Even though they still hadn’t featured me in any of the productions, I had become an appurtenance, an inevitable presence at the performances. I watched grown-up actors and actresses, and aped their movements and recited their lines. I also sang. In the Gibson Kente tradition you cannot act if you can’t sing. I assigned myself parts which I rehearsed religiously. I made it a point that the director and also my brother, who was close to the director, could see I had the resources. So, eventually, this ten-year-old was given a part.
On the day of the performance the Tsakene Hall in Brakpan was packed. Together with the other cast members, I sat backstage while the director tried to get the excited crowd to quieten down so that the performance could begin. Finally, he succeeded and the first act started – a group which exploded into a music and dance act. Then came my scene. I was gently guided towards the stage. I emerged from behind the curtain, ready for my moment. But when I saw the sea of faces, and heard the whispers, and smelled the sweat of the crowd, I froze. All of a sudden I didn’t know what I was doing there. Tears started falling down my face. I think I heard some people giggling; others went Shhhhhh! I ran backstage without uttering a word. The director tried to cajole me into going back to deliver my lines. No, nothing doing!
That was the end of my acting career, over before it started. It didn’t end my love of the theatre, though, and it was the director himself who saw a new role for me. ‘Xoli, you’re smart,’ he said, ‘and quick with figures. Maybe you should take over from your brother in managing the box office.’ And so I became the money person for the dramatic society. As a doorwoman, I was strict: no money, no entrance, no discount. Unbeknown to me, I was laying the foundations for a highly successful career as a manager in the theatrical world.
*
Over the years I have watched hundreds of theatrical productions locally and internationally. Some of them have been excellent, others mildly successful, while the bulk were trashy. It takes a lot to write and produce a play. It takes even more work and guts if you get into the industry with very little training, and absolutely no money, and still hope to pull off a successful production.
Towards the end of 1974 something happened in the theatrical world which I think had a slight bearing on a decision by my parents to remove me from my school in Daveyton. That year, Gibson Kente staged a play called I Believe. In the production, Zwelitsha (played by Peter Sepuma) is a rebellious youth leader, constantly fighting the main security cop (played by Darlington Michaels). Zweli has a vision of a violent confrontation between young people and forces of government. The play ends tragically. I guess you can already tell where this is going. Yes, Kente foresaw the student revolution of 16 June 1976. In 1975, the language of tuition of most subjects was changed to Afrikaans, and this caused the 1976 riots.
At the beginning of the 1976 school year my parents took me to Nzimankulu in Queenstown and enrolled me at a junior secondary school there. Although later I would realise that the move to the Transkei was a blessing in disguise, the transition from urban Daveyton to Nzimankulu was a shock and I missed home terribly.
On 16 June 1976 I was at Park Station in Johannesburg, having travelled home from Queenstown for the mid-year holidays. The station was swarming with soldiers and policemen. I couldn’t understand why. But the next day, 17 June, I understood. Daveyton, along with the rest of the East Rand, erupted into violence. There were running battles between township youths and the police. It would go on for quite a while, people dying left, right and centre; children disappearing, some of them fleeing into exile, others dying in police custody and their bodies simply vanishing into thin air. Of course, I did not know all of this at that time; it was something that one would learn about at a later stage – through newspaper reports, word-of-mouth accounts and, much later, books that put the story of 16 June 1976 into its proper context.
At any rate, I stayed in Daveyton for three weeks after the explosion of violence, and then went back to the calm and tranquillity of Transkei. The painful irony was that while many parts of black South Africa were in flames, the homeland of Transkei was loud with song and celebration. Under the leadership of Paramount Chief Kaiser Daliwonga Mathanzima, Transkei had been granted independence from Pretoria. People who lived in Transkei, who, a few weeks before, were fully fledged South African citizens, were suddenly told they no longer belonged to South Africa. They now belonged to the Republic of Transkei, a self-governing state with its own national anthem, its own radio station, its own flag, and its own passport – incwadi yokundwendwela. In other words, if you were travelling from Transkei to South Africa, you needed to produce this passport which proved that you were a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. To make a bizarre scenario even more laughable, the Republic of Transkei even had its own embassy in South Africa.
In preparing this book, I went back and read some of the reviews of Gibson Kente’s many productions and the impact they had on people of my generation. In my search, I was pleasantly surprised to find a biography called Bra Gib: Father of South Africa’s Township Theatre, written by Rolf Solberg. In the book, there’s a reproduction of an interview with Kente, in which he is giving context to his arguably most prophetic play, I Believe: ‘I was saying I believe that if the government can take note of the attitude of the youth, of the simmering impatience of the youth, the anger of the youth – if they can act now we might save ourselves a lot of hardships in the future. And for that play I was called “the Prophet” because of what happened later on – there were these strikes and the kids, and 16th [June 1976] and all that, you know, and they said, “Gibson Kente said it would happen!”’
This was what appealed to me about Kente’s work; about theatre and its role not only in entertaining crowds but in contributing towards nation-building conversations. Even as a kid I thought I wanted to be part of that conversation. Just how I would do this was not at all clear in my mind, but I continued to frequent the theatre. When 1976 finally happened people couldn’t help saying, ‘Wow, Gibson Kente saw this first!’ We simply could not believe the accuracy of his vision. But of course, the extent of the violence, the bloodbath the country became was far more nightmarish than Kente’s play. Mind you, by 1976 Kente had done other productions, including Beyond a Song and Too Late.
The school I attended in the Transkei was an old, run-down boarding school in the village called Qoqodala. It wasn’t what I had expected when the words ‘boarding school’ were first mentioned. I had grown up in a township, where we had running water, a toilet just outside
