Step into Masai Sepuru’s world — where township life and timeless questions collide
Masai Sepuru is ordinary looking — almost indistinguishable from the many young people you might encounter on an average day in Joburg. He does not have an “artist’s look”. Artists are known to be flamboyant in their sense of style, pushing the boundaries of fashion — that is not Masai. He’s more concerned with pushing a different set of boundaries — those of the spoken word.
I first took notice of Masai around 2018 at one of the World of Words (WOW) extravaganzas when they were held in Queen Street, in the Johannesburg suburb of Kensington. Hector Dibakoane, a 2024 Mail&Guardian 200 Young South Africans finalist, created WOW in 2017 as a platform for poets of various abilities to share a stage.
WOW has grown into a celebration of all things positively African. It is where we witness young Africans, confident in their skins, gender choices and fashion sense, strutting their stuff. A WOW session can be described as a bona fide fashion runway. Dibakoane has created a genuinely safe and free space that all should experience at least once in their lives.
Masai is a standout talent at WOW. You begin to realise very early on that, although he seems talkative, he’s an introvert. He is lost in his head. Consistently wondering about who he is and what exactly the world is about. He is talkative only because he wants answers for the millions of questions he is asking himself. He is a philosopher who uses art to express his thoughts and questions.
Masai is an artist, in the truest sense. He has a veritable palette of talents, not just poetry and spoken word. He has performed in plays he has written, produced and directed at various Gauteng theatre venues. His paintings have also been exhibited in galleries.
He hails from a small village called Makgofe in Limpopo and moved to Pretoria in 2013 to study performing arts technology at the Tshwane University of Technology. Recently, he did the great trek across the Jukskei River and has settled in Parktown, Johannesburg.
Last year, Masai produced a trio of plays in partnership with the State Theatre in Pretoria. They received positive reviews from both audience members and critics. Two of them, Exodus and The Tragedy of Samuel Omunye, have been nominated for the South African Naledi Theatre Awards. Masai has developed the third play, Dark Magic, into an interesting executive summary of sorts, in a series called Fables @ the Market. He is currently performing the series at the First Sunday market at Victoria Yards, in Lorentzville, Joburg.
His work is interesting. It is as if he is making it up on the spot as he goes along, interacting with the audience, without requiring them to speak. Indeed, in the first part of the first “sketch”, you might even think he is finished and is about to talk about Dark Magic. But he fools you and, the next thing you know, he is actually re-enacting various scenes from it.
He begins introducing you to characters at will, while putting the spotlight on the myriad of social challenges South African communities are facing. But he does it without any of the usual pontificating and chest-beating. He seems to be inspired by previous plays about township life where we laugh and enjoy the various characters, like the drunk uncle or the hard-working clerk, the local thugs, and so forth.
But what makes Masai’s treatment of these characters different is that he doesn’t simply introduce them as people he personally knows, he uses them in such a way that both the characters and the issues of township violence and social strife seem to be a side issue — something else. We never ever get to firmly grasp what exactly that something else is but it resonates nonetheless.
This executive summary of a play is hardly 30 minutes long but it hits you with the force of a cheap tequila without the lemon and salt. It is a masterpiece of conjuring emotions and images and leaves audiences with the responsibility of processing it by themselves, in the quiet of their minds and life experiences.
You will find yourself walking out of that venue with a similar introspective disposition to Masai’s.
Masai Sepuru is a force, an authentic force. You must make the time to enjoy his work.
Catch Masai Sepuru’s Fables @ the Market series this Sunday at Victoria Yards, Johannesburg. Tickets are just R50 and are available on Quicket.