Word: township
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Glimpses of the enduring agony of South Africa's blacks have long been afforded to Western 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...
...widow of Martin Luther King Jr., after an emotional 70-minute meeting last week with Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned South African black activist. Winnie Mandela also admitted to being moved by the American's visit to her red brick home in Soweto, the sprawling black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Calling King "a symbol of what my people continue sacrificing for," she added, "We draw a great deal of inspiration from her strength and courage." For King, who was in South Africa for the installation of Desmond Tutu as Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town...
...bootleg cassette of instrumental music with that intriguing name, subtitled Accordion Jive Hits, Volume II. Simon played it all during the summer of 1984, hearing in its unsprung beat echoes of old rhythm and blues, '50s style. The music on the tape turned out to be mbaqanga, or "township jive," from the streets of Soweto. Simon became obsessed. In January 1985, he took off for South Africa and began to record with Soweto's Boyoyo Boys, Tao Ea Matsekha (a group from Lesotho), and General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters. "It was very interesting," Simon reports, "but very strange...
...Nobel Peace-prizewinning bishop of Johannesburg, last week bid an emotional goodbye to his diocese. But before taking over as Archbishop of Cape Town and primate of the Anglican Church for all of southern Africa, he conducted a final service at St. Paul's Church in the black township of Soweto. In his farewell sermon, Tutu declared, "Despite all that the powers of the world may do, we are going to be free...