Welcome Msomi, creator of Umabatha, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
The divine justice of it all. When Welcome Msomi took his “Zulu Macbeth” to New York in 1979, he found it boycotted by the African National Congress and its supporters, who claimed that because it was “ethnic” (Zulu costumes, Zulu language, Zulu dancing), it had to be a government plot to promote separate development and the homeland system. The man responsible for the boycott was one Sipho Mzimela.
Now Mzimela is a cabinet minister from a party that built itself through Zulu chauvinism. And Msomi, the ethnicist, receives an on-stage embrace from Nelson Mandela for bringing, to the banquet of South African democracy, a revival of Umabatha.
It was Welcome Msomi who stage-managed many of the public events in the ANC’s election campaign. It was Welcome Msomi who mounted the “Many Cultures, One Nation” extravaganza at Mandela’s inauguration, that rather bilious parade of cultural identities that nonetheless gave South Africans their first taste of National Reconciliation.
And it is Welcome Msomi, now, who swans about the Civic Theatre on the opening night of Umabatha, heartily exchanging backslaps with the powerhouse assortment of blackoisie and ageing white bohemia, and clad in the leopard skins of a Zulu king. “Poetic licence!” he guffaws about his costume. But he is king tonight, triumphantly returned.
And in his hand he clutches a trophy — the rehabilitation of ethnicity, the glory of theatrical spectacle, the neatest possible multicultural overlay, a Zulu Macbeth, with a cast of thousands and a budget of millions and a bassline insistency that will (quite literally) entrance you until, ears ringing and heart pounding after the last, mesmeric curtain-call, you will be able to wipe your brow as you leave the concrete apartheid monstrosity that is The Civic and proclaim: “Thank God! Theatre is not dead in this country after all! Hamba, Antony Sher! Bayete!”
Umabatha is Shakespearean only in so far as Macbeth provides a story-line about betrayal and the vagaries of succession. Using the uniquely South African performance-styles that have already been well-encoded by Gibson Kente and Mbogeni Ngema, it is comedic rather than tragic, declarative rather than contemplative, presentational rather than naturalistic.
The soliliquies are ribald confessions, not agonised introspections. Like the masks of ritual African performance, Umabatha is expressionistic — it distills and freezes emotions into intensely powerful grimaces and gestures. But into his pageant of Zuluness, Msomi mixes both subversive burlesque and rigid, unassailable hierarchy. His chorus-lines of stamping, phallus-waving amabuthi have none of the loose humanism of the kind of boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love 1950s schmaltz that tribal musicals such as Ipi Tombi and Meropa appropriated from Broadway. Rather, they hearken back to a kind of Busby Berkley-style purity, expressing social dynamics through the geometric constellations of
Thankfully, Umabatha has little of either Ipi Tombi’s legendary “Xplosion of Joy!” or Sarafina’s “raw energy!”. Energy it has, in buckets, but so refined is it that there is a powerfully alienating effect to the spectacle (an effect that many Zulu-speaking members of the audience attempt to overcome through constant interaction with the performers). In overseas reviews, critics mistook this elegance for noble savagery and tribal exuberance — the Charleston News and Courier declared, rather lustfully, that “the Zulus came stomping and shuffling through the audience, pounding drums, waving spears and shields, ablaze with barbaric beauty and looking as if they were going to massacre every last one of us.”
Welcome Msomi is accommodating. He agrees to dress up in his kingly skins for a photo-shoot. And so he opens the door of his Sandton flat, ablaze with barbaric beauty. The flat is absolutely bare save inexplicably grand arrangements of blue and pink plastic flowers, and belies its occupant’s repeated assertion that, “I am home at last. I am here to stay”.
He lives here with his wife, Thuli Dumakude. They have been in the flat for a year; their lives must have been either busy or transient or both.
He played opposite her in the original Umabatha and now she is his assistant-director and chief choreographer. She has a voice that puts her in the Makeba league. When they took Umabatha to the States in 1979, they stayed; they came back to South Africa two-and- something years ago, leaving behind their Zulu language and dance school in Brooklyn and their teenage son, who will be joining them shortly and starting up at Michaelhouse.
Msomi’s aunt was the first wife of Zulu King Cyprian, Goodwill Zwelithini’s father. The young Welcome, a slick city kid raised in Umlazi and schooled in Swaziland, spent many a school holiday at the Royal Kraal, and he has always seen himself as living quite comfortably in both his western and customary worlds.
When he started Umabatha in the early 1970s, he remembers, “black academics said, ‘you’re taking us backwards. What will white people say?’ They wanted to be seen only as people who have attained the white culture and didn’t want to go back to themselves. They thought anything tribal was demeaning.”
Then, the territory was fraught at home by the fact that theatres were all-white and abroad by the first stirrings of the cultural boycott. Now, in the era where the battle over who owns Zulu history costs lives and the new black elite flocks to the theatre in the fashion-modified paraphernalia of ethnicity, a revival of Umabatha has other implications. “We have to demystify the whole image of the traditional Zulu garb being associated with Inkatha. Zulus are just Zulus. The richness of a culture can be so easily lost in this whole political conflict, so we have to move away from saying ‘this is Zulu’ and ‘these are the people who control it.'”
Macbeth is the story of an ambitious prince who betrays the king, attains power, and causes chaos in the land of Scotland. “Listen,” says Msomi defensively. “I wrote this in the 1960s! Zulu history has always been filled with plotting — look at Shaka, Dingane, Cetshwayo. People weren’t happy with the royalty so they tried to take over. And those who tried to take over ended up dying by the spear. There is a lesson to be learned for people who are after power and are not supposed to have that power.”
A four-syllabled silence, Bu-the-le-zi, hangs briefly over the air between us before Msomi banishes it by letting loose one of his characteristic eruptions of laughter. “I know what you’re thinking! Don’t push it.”
If Msomi were to ask me what to put, on a visa application, as his profession, I would advise: “Cultural Interlocutor”. Since being back in South Africa, he has been employed by the advertising industry in what cynics would call the “black guru” post — telling white capital how to reach the black market.
He has just set up a public relations company, Msomi Hunt Lascaris, the main function of which is corporate image-building. One of his first clients is Basil Elk Real Estate. We erupt, together, in laughter at the image of an ageing Jewish estate agent clad in skins and surrounded by warrior-like amabuthi as he peers out at the reader from the property pages of the Saturday Star. His laughter indicates some understanding of his difficult position: exoticist, primitiviser. Need an exotic spectacle? Call Msomi!
His work at Hunt Lascarris has largely involved the below-the-line stuff, creating events with an African feel. It was Msomi, for example, who transformed the Cresta shopping centre into a mythical jungle worthy of Sol Kerzner’s febrile imagination, replete with lion cubs and sangomas, for the launch of the Zulu version of Disney Studios’ The Lion King.
He was excoriated by my colleague, Bafana Khumalo, for his use of sangomas to sell a product, and Msomi acknowledges, easily, “I was wrong. There are certain things that are dear to the African people, which one cannot commercialise, not only because it is in bad taste and would thus turn consumers off, but because if we don’t keep those things special, we are selling our
Welcome Msomi — guru or stooge? There’s a clue to the way he works, in his much-expressed irritation with “the conferences and papers and positions about cultural policy. Let’s get down to work!” His plan is to use Umabatha to set into motion a network of regional traditional theatre companies, “and I’m not going to wait for the government to approve of it and pay for it — I’m just going to go ahead and do it, because I know it’s right.”
Just as he did with the first Umabatha, when he had white authorities bellowing on one side and cultural commissars on the other. There’s an unspoken bitterness towards ideologues; indeed, his primary reason for moving to the United States was not an act of political exile to join a liberation movement, but rather just the desire to be able “to live freely”. Msomi, I suspect, will serve a ruling class (be it big business or an ANC government) if it is in the interests of his career and his art, but he will not be beholden to it. He is neither a guru nor a stooge — he makes great