Word: mavimbela
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...torture, the tear gas, the murders of schoolchildren that Sarafina! depicts, and for all the agony of apartheid that its players have experienced, America, in its midtown-Manhattan incarnation, seems far from utopian. "Before I came, I thought the U.S. would be like a small heaven," said Thandani Mavimbela of Hlabisa, a rural village in Natal province. "I thought it would be like on TV -- The Boat of Love. Love Boat? Or Dallas. But then you see places like Harlem. I was shocked. The empty, burned buildings. On Broadway, very poor people sleeping on the street. In South Africa, when...
...Mavimbela, 26, is the broad-shouldered son of a house painter. He dropped out of school at 17: the family lacked the money to pay school fees for six children. Drifting from township to township, he found no steady work. Two friends invited him to act in a play about a youth who fled after the Soweto uprising of 1976 to join a guerrilla army. Furtively, the three would perform in community halls in black townships, ready to escape through a back door should police arrive...
...Mavimbela's ambition is to go to college. Of all the Sarafina! cast, he is the most faithful in attending thrice-weekly after-hours classes held at Martin Luther King Jr. High School. On a recent afternoon, he was at the blackboard trying to figure out fractions. "Which one is the numerator?" the teacher asked. He pointed to it and then, on cue, to the dividend, the quotient, the remainder, the divisor, the denominator. His fellow cast members gazed intently at the blackboard chalked full of figures. On the wall was a poster from another Broadway play, For Colored Girls...
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