Gibson Kente, who died this week in East London at the age of 72, was controversial and individualistic. His role as a playwright and director was to rebel, not only against apartheid, but also against the standards set by Black Consciousness influenced artists of the Sixties and Seventies.
Before the arrival of the agitprop dramas that would characterise the era of protest art, Kente was at work with his brand of popular aesthetics, combining melodrama with song and dance. Kente was born in Duncan Village outside East London, and came to Johannesburg in 1955 to study social work. He never completed his studies but maintained a concern for issues of survival under adverse conditions, which he brought to his work.
A reviewer who saw his play Too Late in 1975 wrote: ‘Old people in the audience moaned during a scene where a mother, arrested for selling liquor, comes back from jail to find her invalid child killed by policemen.”
Actress Gcina Mhlope said in an interview in 1994: ‘He’s been our university. He doesn’t write big political plays. He makes social comment.”
Having arrived in Johannesburg, Kente took up with the artists in the hub that was known as Dorkay House, where he learned about musical theatre, becoming director of the group Union Artists for whom he produced such plays as The Jazz Prophet in 1963 and Sikhalo in 1966. By 1974 he had founded three repertory companies without subsidy. In 1976 he was detained for attempting to film his work How Long. The work had been banned, before being altered, for its depiction of homosexuality in a jail cell.
In the late Eighties Kente lost the limelight to artists he had fostered — names such as Mbongeni Ngema, Brenda Fassie and Sello Maake ka Ncube. But he re-entered the spotlight last year with the confession that he was HIV-positive. For his bravery he won praise, and a visit from Nelson Mandela. Kente’s personal response to his circumstances was to direct an Aids themed play, The Call, which he staged last year in Pretoria.
Gibson Kente born 1932, died November 7 2004