Shell-shocked
I was not there to witness the excitement of the wedding ceremony. Even though I was in Johannesburg that day, almost 600 kilometres from the action, I was singed by the fire that was burning down there in Durban. I knew that what happened in that church was to change my life forever. It had to change because the man getting married, Mbongeni Ngema, was at that time still my lawfully wedded husband. I was the mystery woman whose name got tongues wagging and tempers rising. I was, and still am, Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema. I was not about to let Mbongeni get away with it just like that. I wanted him to be accountable. If he wanted to marry another woman, fine, but he had to do it the proper way. That was why I stopped that wedding. I was not being melodramatic or attention-seeking. I had to fight.
But of course, that is not how you start a story. First of all, it has to be clear that this book is not only about my marriage to Mbongeni Ngema. It is also about the birth and triumph of Sarafina!, the production we birthed together; the production that changed the face of South African theatre; the production that gave impetus to the careers of many artists – actors and musicians – who will continue to be reference points in cultural production in this country. This book is about how theatre can actually make a people.
However, in telling the story of Sarafina! it’s inevitable that the narrative includes the personal. Had I not met Mbongeni Ngema, Sarafina! probably wouldn’t have happened. Or it wouldn’t have taken the character it did at the end. Because Mbongeni and I fed into each other. He was, and still is, a great artist; but every artist needs a muse. I was that muse. But also more. I was the person looking at the finances. I was the one acting as mother, sociologist, sister and teacher to members of the cast who came to us at ages as young as fifteen – staying with us for months, years, before they went back to see their biological parents. So, you can already see that ours was not a conventional approach to theatre. We looked after the actors and actresses beyond the lights and glamour of the stage. Which is to say, at the core of this book is the confluence of our artistic and personal lives; how one fed the other, how they bled into each other. Art cannot happen in a vacuum. Art is a human endeavour. Or rather it is an attempt to probe the meaning of life, what it means to be human. All of this informed my decision to start this story with a human drama, one that has remained embedded in the minds of many and which gets invoked whenever and wherever my name gets mentioned.
But to answer the question ‘Who is this Xoliswa?’, we have to go back to the past, to the township of Daveyton, on the East Rand, where I was born in July 1962.
Daveyton, like most black townships in South Africa, was created as a labour reservoir to serve white people in neighbouring towns such as Benoni and Boksburg. In the case of Daveyton, the black people who settled there came from all corners of the country – and beyond – looking for work in the City of Gold and its environs. The mines in Benoni and surrounding areas on the East Rand were the impetus for this migration. Once the towns had been established around the mines, other kinds of industries, textiles, for example, soon mushroomed. While the men worked on the mines, the women served the factories. Many women also worked as domestic servants for white families.
Like so many others, my parents came to Johannesburg lured by promises and hopes of work and an easier life. My father came from the Ciskei, ku Qoboqobo near Alice, and my mother from Graaff-Reinet, both in the Eastern Cape. After moving around different parts of the Greater Johannesburg area, they settled in Daveyton, where I was born on 21 July 1962. My parents were what we would call working class, in that my father was a labourer and my mother a domestic worker and, later on, factory workers. We were no different from the bulk of our neighbours.
Like many townships, Daveyton had sections segregated along tribal lines, in keeping with the grander scheme of apartheid whose motto was ‘separate development’. Naturally, I grew up in the Xhosa section of the township. It’s tragic what the apartheid architects did. As a result of those divisions, a measure of resentment for those outside our tribal circle set in. It was not uncommon for a person to be beaten brutally – sometimes killed – for having strayed into the ‘wrong’ section.
However, with increased politicisation, the racial stratification backfired on the apartheid architects as our people soon realised how interdependent they were. The Bhaca and Zulu people were generally highly regarded when it came to manual work, fixing things, and their skills came in handy across tribal lines.
Over and above the commercial aspects of people’s relationships, culture became a catalyst for a conversation which defied the imposed tribal boundaries. One of the most famous musicians from Daveyton was Victor Ndlazilwana. The multi-instrumentalist and singer came from our section of the township. He was Xhosa. I must admit that I was too young to have been au fait with the kind of music he played, but I knew he was highly regarded not only in the township but all over the country because his music was played on radio. It also helped that his daughter Nomvula was my classmate at Ntsikana Primary School. Even at the age of thirteen, she was already playing in her father’s band, which travelled all over the country. I have seen a picture of her playing the piano to excited crowds in the United States, at the tender age of thirteen.
Although Ndlazilwana was, as I have said, of Xhosa stock, in his musical journey he inevitably worked with people from across the tribal divide. As a result, in his band the famous Jazz Ministers he had the likes of trumpeter Johnny Mekoa, who was Sotho speaking, Boy Ngwenya, who was Zulu, and so on. Apart from formal bands like the Jazz Ministers, the township thrummed to the sounds of music from different parts of the South African cultural melting pot. This was especially so over the weekend. You’d be on your way to church and you’d come across a group of Zulu men, sometimes dressed in the complete traditional regalia of amabheshu and imbadada, and they would suddenly be dancing for your own personal pleasure. Somewhere down the road Basotho men in their ubiquitous blankets and conical hats would be shimmying to the music of the concertina.
Music was a way of life. It was central to black life. Funerals could not be conducted without there being music at the centre. Weddings, traditional feasts and ordinary parties offered people an outlet for the frustrations born of their bleak daily existence – frustrations which they channelled through music. Even the chain gangs who fixed our roads did everything to the thud and beat of music. You would see them lined up on the side of the road, their picks and shovels making love to the stubborn earth. With every thrust of a sharpened pick into the ground they would grunt rhythmically: ‘Abelungu oswayini! Basincish’itiye basibize ngoJim.’ (Whites are swine; they deny us tea, and call us Jim.) The white overseer would be standing not far from these men, smoking his pipe or drinking something from his flask, oblivious to what was being said about him and his fellow whites.
Music. Everywhere you went there was music. When I began to be conversant with the different musical traditions I couldn’t help noticing that the name of Ndlazilwana was mentioned constantly; and wherever he was mentioned, the name of King Kong, a musical stage play, was also mentioned. Ndlazilwana had been part of the cast of King Kong that travelled to the United Kingdom in 1959. However, unlike most members of the cast – including Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Jonas Gwangwa – who stayed on in the UK after the production ended, Ndlazilwana 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