THEATRE: Bafana Khumalo
THE first time I saw Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha was over 20 years ago. The play was well-marketed to the township schools’ audience, and we paid the princely sum of 10 cents to go to the open-air Jabulani Amphitheatre in Soweto. For that we were rewarded with an afternoon out of the classroom, with the wintry sun seeping into our bodies and forcing us to discard our jerseys. On stage a number of half-naked “Zulus”, complete with spears, danced around to drums and Zulu songs — very exotic to us township children.
I did not think much about the production as I was too young to understand it. A few years later I saw a version of Ipi Tombi, and decided it was equally cute. This association of the two productions — an erroneous, unfair association in retrospect — continued for years.
Even when I was at university, Msomi and Bertha Egnos were the villains responsible for glamourising the apartheid fantasy of ethnicity. At that time ethnicity did not exist, and anyone who was seen to pander to the concept was banished to the dog house.
Umabatha was seen as, in a way, even worse than Ipi Tombi: it was an adaptation of Macbeth, one of the blights of Eurocentric culture that had to be obliterated. My view was that it would be better for us to spend our time and energy developing indigenous culture, rather than being proud of translating or adapting European or American ideas.
For me, Umabatha was like country and western music sung in Swazi — cute, but so what; it belonged to an amusement park side-show, not serious theatre.
This was what was in my mind when I went to the Johannesburg Civic Theatre last week. The musical was one of those endeavours that pander to white people’s warped ideas of what we Africans are about. All I was interested in was finding out how “Out damn spot” had been translated into Zulu (that being the only line I could remember from Macbeth).
All my preconceived notions of what the play was about were, however, turned on their heads as I sat and watched Kamadonsela (Lady Macbeth) appeal to the dark powers-that- be to “turn the milk in my breasts into bile”. Dieketseng Mnisi was evil incarnate as she colonised the stage with her presence. For the first time, I understood why some people enter an orgasmic realm when Shakespeare is brought up.
Msomi has taken a playwright who is completely foreign in the way he writes, and rooted him in the Zulu idiom. I doubt there will be an upsurge of interest in Shakespeare in the townships, though, because Msomi has done more than simplify Shakespeare’s archaic language. Umabatha taps into a particularly creative level of the Zulu language, which demands the audience do more than listen. It demands a total engagement with the text in order to catch its sometimes morbid humour.
Msomi also taps deep into traditional Zulu culture. In so doing, he has resisted the temptation to make get-down-and-boogie versions of Zulu songs and dances for a cosmopolitan audience — something I dreaded. The dancing, sexually charged and aggressive, without becoming an Ipi Tombi-style striptease, terrifies and enthralls at the same time.
With its authenticity, some people might view Umabatha as the stage version of a cultural anthropology lecture — but it is far more than that. It is entertainment that goes for the highbrow without alienating the kind of viewer who enjoys listening to Sarafina singing “Freedom is coming … tomorrow” for the umpteenth time.
And how did “Out damn spot” translate into Zulu? By the end of the musical I was gushing so much I did not give it a thought. Shakespeare’s presence had been banished to another place, not the opening of Umabatha.