Goodbye Duma Joshua Khumalo, friend, colleague and comrade. I was unable to speak at your memorial service at the Market Theatre, or at your funeral service in the Vaal. I simply had no words. Me! Who always has so many words! I listened to the things people said about you and marvelled at what an extraordinary soul you were, Duma Joshua Khumalo. I write to say goodbye.
“Why do I want to tell my story?” asked Khumalo. “On death row, my cell was on the way to the gallows. I would hear the chains of the condemned men as they passed to be hanged ‘by the neck until you are dead’. I made them a promise. If the Sharpeville Six were released, I would tell everyone what happened on death row.”
Night after night, in the play The Story I am About to Tell, Duma told his tale about the three years he spent on South Africa’s notorious death row of the 1980s, part of the eight years he spent in prison, wrongly accused and convicted for the 1984 death of a councillor in Sharpeville, the place of his birth.
The journey of the play, with three professional actors and three “real” people (with a taxi as a metaphor, number plate TRC 1652), was life-altering for everyone who participated in it. Following each performance, the actors engaged in discussion with the audience around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — issues of justice, amnesty, reparations and reconciliation.
Night after night, the three “real” people from the Khulumani Support Group — Catherine Mlangeni, Thandi Shezi and Duma — together with human-rights activist Thoki Mofokeng, would discuss and answer questions about their personal experiences. When Duma looked frail after telling his harrowing story, and a professional actor in the cast (that included the late Ramolao Makhene, Dan Robbertse and Kenneth Nkosi) would attempt to protect him, he would say “No, I must answer that.”
I remember how fraught we were working on the script at the Market Theatre Laboratory, where it opened in July 1997. I wondered at the wisdom of what we were doing, and for whom? “We need, first and foremost, to respect the stories of the survivors,” said director Robert Colman, and so we ensured that the stories remained absolutely authentic.
Duma thrived on the project. From the hope of a three-week run, the play ran for five years, from 1997 to 2001, and played nationally and abroad. We travelled to community halls and churches across the country. Wherever we went, whether to the small church on the hills surrounding Mphopho-meni in KwaZulu-Natal or the Tricycle Theatre in London, or to Robben Island for the 2001 International Conference Against Racism, the commitment was the same.
The acerbic and insightful lines of Lesego Rampolokeng, which linked the stories, carried the group’s socio-political concerns, questioning the context in which the TRC was taking place, with little changing in the material lives of the majority of South Africans.
Central to the play was the question: “Reconciliation at whose expense, and for whom?” This was very much in line with Duma’s poli-tical position. He never lost sight of the issues people were facing at a grassroots level, and remained a committed activist in the Vaal that he loved so much. He was disappointed at the ethics of the black middle class, and the speed with which the struggle of the 1980s was to be “put behind us”.
Duma always had an amazing sense of the theatrical. Maggie Fried-man of the Khulumani Support group, who was integral to the project, remembers him going to the TRC hearing on prisons, armed with a rope and asking the prison official at the hearing to show him how he was going to tie it around his neck to hang him. No one there could walk out without that image imprinted on their minds.
While he never said as much, I imagine he was an enormous inspi-ration to others on death row. There was 18-year-old Koos, who bought Duma a packet of BB tobacco and a packet of humbugs with the R7 he received to spend at the tuck shop when he received his notice of execution.
When The Story I am About to Tell travelled to the London International Festival of Theatre in 1999, we took a packet of BB tobacco and a packet of humbugs. Today it is still in the theatre archives, something by which the play will be remembered.
Then there was Tshepo, who was hanged alone when the Sharpeville Six were given a reprieve just hours before execution. Duma always spoke of his pain that Tshepo went to the gallows alone.
But it was the three young African National Congress Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) operatives, Andrew Zondo, Sipho Xulu and Lucky Payi, about whom Duma spoke most often. “They were so young!” (all were under 20 years old). He told of how they brought hope to the inmates on death row, politicising the “criminal” inmates, “They sang as they went to the gallows, those young men.”
I have always been clear as to why I make theatre: it is a very power-ful medium for debating human rights and political issues. Duma saw this potential and became involved in other projects, most recently The Bones are Still Calling with Seputla Sebogodi.
We all journeyed together and now your journey has come to an untimely end. Perhaps your heart was too heavy to bear anymore, perhaps you had simply had enough pain, I do not know. What I do know is that your spirit is with those three young comrades, Zondo, Xulu and Payi.
Go safely, brave and compassionate friend.
Bobby Rodwell is the producer of The Story I am About to Tell