Word: asinamali
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Call it the theater of revolution. Five plays, put on by some 30 black actors, directors and playwrights, storm the U.S. with urgent bulletins from the townships of their native South Africa. Last week Asinamali! (Zulu for "we have no money") opened the first festival of black South African drama ever to play outside its homeland. Mbongeni Ngema's group portrait of five prisoners, together with four other plays of protest, will run for four weeks in New York City and Washington. The series is entitled Woza Afrika! (Rise Up, Africa!), and the exclamation point is not redundant. Mixing shouts...
...Even so, Asinamali!, for example, has been under constant threat. Apparently its angry art -- including a dead-on description of fire and bloodshed in a township attack -- too closely shadows life. One night, at a performance outside Durban, two busloads of counterrevolutionary blacks, armed with guns, spears and bush knives, drove up to the auditorium. They were looking for Ngema. The playwright was not in attendance, he recalls, "and the actors escaped death by inches, while the audience fled into the streets." The promoter of the company, says Ngema, was hacked to death...
...playgoers by Athol Fugard, two of whose works -- The Island and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead -- also emerged from township improvisations. But Woza Afrika! promises to hurl its viewers onto the other side of the fence, in the midst of the fray. Though far less polished than a Fugard play, Asinamali! is far more charged; its fury lies in its energy. Fugard's eloquent dramas turn upon the moral and emotional conundrums facing whites who wish to choose the right way; Woza Afrika! dwells on the more immediate sorrows of blacks who have no choice...
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