BORN IN THE RSA
When freedom comes, Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, a troupe launched by Barney Simon in 1973, can be proud. South Africa’s only integrated company, the Market Theatre has pounded a lot of nails into the coffin of “apart-hate”–nails called Asinamali!, Sophiatown, A Lesson from Aloes, Woza Albert!, and Born in the RSA. Even the staid London Times calls their work “tantamount to a revolutionary political manifesto in South Africa.” Market Theatre is Mandela dramatized.
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Asinamali! and Sophiatown played here–triumphantly–in 1986 and 1988 as part of the International Theatre Festival. Born in the RSA, a powerful Northlight Theatre offering produced in association with the 1990 festival, pounds in more nails. Far from distorting truth into propaganda, its political agenda adds urgency to its heartfelt and universal witnessing.
Thenjiwe’s schoolteacher sister Sindiswa Ngube (Ora Jones) rages at the lies the police tell. In order to justify the atrocities they plan, for example, they falsely accuse children of stoning buses. Zacharia Melani (Seth Sibanda) is a quiet musician, disgusted at having to swallow a lifetime of anger. We only glimpse his rage. After seeing a battered black boy released from jail, Melani imagines doing terrible things with a baseball bat to some little white girls blissfully playing in a school yard. As he says, each has a nanny who can never know if she’ll see her children alive or dead at the end of a day that she spent toiling for her enemy’s kids. In South Africa innocence isn’t impossible, it’s just unforgivable.
