Congo Hadebe’s first staged play, about a group of women living in a park, covers everything from religion to sleep deprivation Merle Colborne The small man with the brown, knobbly face, wearing a GUD labourer’s jacket and a lean, infrequent smile, seems discomfited sharing a table at the Playhouse Coffee Shop with this umlungu poking about in his life. Like he’d rather be sweeping a factory floor. Or having a few pulls on a skyf. It’s a loopy land we live in. This man, who lists Inside B.O.S.S., by Gordon Winter, as a favourite book, is Congo Hadebe, international award-winning actor and co-founder of Poor Theatre Productions, who scooped a NAACP Theatre award in Hollywood for best supporting actor in the movie Sarafina!, performed in the show at the Lincoln Centre, New York, and then on Broadway for two years, before spending another couple touring the United States and Europe. Right now he’s deep into rehearsals with his first staged play, Women of Afrika, part of the South African Women’s Arts Festival 2000 sponsored by Transnet. The play, which took two years to research and write, is about a group of women living in Albert Park, Durban, washing the odd car, scavenging in dust-bins and telling noisy lies about their pasts until the quieter truths come sidling out. Plaiting their bodies together in the night they find comfort in a shared animal warmth and, with staggering beauty, sing themselves to sleep. Surrounded by seven actresses, some with appropriate lived-in faces, director Bheki Mqadi is cooing like a dove, screeching like a raucous peacock, to illustrate his point about tonal variation. Actress Thandi Ntuli responds to his coaching: “I once had dreams, beauuuuuuutiful dreams … Then those dreams were shattered by my husband. He was a bum. He was a bum then! He’s a bum now! God knows, he’ll always be a bum!” It’s enough to scare off the hadedahs. “Stand by. Focus. Pace,” says the fellow in the Coca- Cola cap, the stage manager, preparing to time the show. He clicks his clock. “Now I am the only man here,” he says, meaning, I gather, “I am the boss.” It seems odd. These strong women and the lbrave characters they play, docilely doing what the men tell them to do. As though they believe Hadebe’s lines: “Women who like arguments are in Parliament. This is not Parliament.” It is the large room at the Playhouse where these women have been working hard, nine to five, Monday to Friday, since the beginning of March. The piece, which runs for just over an hour, is decidedly an “issues play” covering everything from religion – “Church is like a petrol-filling station” – to sleep- deprivation and is crammed with contemporary concerns around sexual and child abuse, Aids, prostitution, and the constant war between the sexes. But it does go further than merely hinting at the reason why “everything became a mess”. One character reasons that though their “stupid grandmothers” might have been subservient to men, eventually things would have changed at their own pace and in their own time “smoothly, peacefully”. But the Boers came. And the Brits. And “we forgot our traditions”. The umlungu put “fences around the forests” and reduced the number of cattle a black man could have, forcing him to go work on the mines and in the cities, where living was expensive. Often the men only came home once a year. And then the government built townships where “men lost their cultures and became drunkards and thugs; women, shebeen queens and prostitutes”.
Londiwe Xaba, who plays the kohl-eyed prostitute who is such a bad businesswoman she can no longer even cadge a cigarette in exchange for her favours, has golden braids cascading from her beanie, a gap between her teeth and the kind of fluid body that even she can’t keep her hands off.
Tu Mvumba is moving as the hard-working daughter-in- law – “I was like a walking laundry” – who couldn’t conceive and was eventually kicked out of the family home because of her mother-in law who said: “My son is working very hard trying to make babies – and you, on the other side, are preventing it.” As an Aids survivor who is said to be rallying before she dies, curly-mopped Sthembile Zwane, with dancing gold hoops in her ears and gold fillings in her teeth, looks rather too sleek and plump to be convincing, but she acts with gusto, changing her story from that of a religious healer given to great whoops of “hosannas” and “hallelujahs” to a multi-manned mistress: “Remember me, baby, at the Holiday Inn.” The stories – which include that of an office worker raped at gunpoint by her white manager, which resulted in the disgrace and shame of bearing “a white man’s child” – are skilfully spliced together and the play avoids being didactic. Right until the end, that is, when “the government must do something!” is balanced by “women must pull together”. Who can argue? Though Hadebe misses the rush he gets from acting -“I like it when people laugh” – he wants to continue writing and producing plays and hopes to take Women of Afrika on tour in KwaZulu-Natal. Catch the double bill of Women of Afrika preceded by Masquerade, of Mannequins, at 11.30am and 6.30pm on August 12 at the Studio Theatre, the Playhouse, Durban