Phew. They used to sing: “Soon one morning, death comes a-creeping in the room.”
Lindelani Buthelezi’s sudden death from a combined stroke and heart attack (one doesn’t know which preceded which) has taken the wind out of the sails of the rest of the week for me and for many of us.
Lindelani was taking a morning constitutional with fellow actor James Ngcobo, as was their wont, in the Johannesburg suburb of Parkview on Tuesday morning. I have always said that sport and exercise are not necessarily the best way to conduct your life and, of course, Lindelani was quite a hefty and not particularly sporty fellow.
But it was Ngcobo who, for a good couple of years, had persuaded him that this was a good way to keep in shape. And Buthelezi, game fellow that he was, had always willingly gone along.
And then he dropped down dead, pretty much right there in the street, and there was nothing much anyone could do about it. His old friend Ngcobo was at his side as he lay on the sidewalk, and did whatever he could to get the emergency services to come and help.
After some time, it was the crew of a passing fire engine who intervened. By the time they were able to apply first aid and try to get his vital signs stabilised, Lindelani was more than halfway gone.
He was declared dead at around seven that same evening — although he had probably passed away long before that.
There is something special about the relationships between actors, although probably not more special than the closeness of most friends and comrades. Ngcobo and Buthelezi had come up through the tough but exciting training ground of the Loft Theatre in Durban, part of the Durban Playhouse complex. As Ngcobo describes it, it was a daily challenge, but nevertheless an uplifting one.
It was the late 1980s. Black boys and girls were entering formerly forbidden ground. They were stepping into new territory as the country that they had been born in was changing around them.
They were the new future. And, for some of them, acting and being able to articulate stories in several genres — from adaptations of traditional folklore to musicals to “modern English” to rusty old Shakespeare told in a language that could be comprehended here and now — was part of the journey.
When I first met Lindelani in Johannesburg in the mid-1990s, he had a wry take on all of this.
I recall him talking about the slog to take on a “proper” English accent in order to make himself more adaptable on the boards at the Loft in that most pukka British of South African cities called Durban (while everyone was trying to turn a blind eye to the fact that it had long been overrun by Zulus and Indians).
Ngcobo, of course, could not be bothered with all of this. But this did not stop them from becoming firm friends, co-conspirators in the complicated world of thespians, and life-long buddies and collaborators.
Like generations before them, they were both eventually sucked into the chaotic world of Johannesburg. That is where the acting possibilities were, and that is where I eventually met both of them. It was impossible to avoid one another.
Yet at the same time, all the possibilities we talked about were insubstantial, compared to what we could have done together and what we expected of one another.
Such is the nature of sudden death from out of the skies.
I saw Lindelani wearing a terrible Afro wig and trying out an improbable African-American accent in Hair at the Civic Theatre some time around then. I didn’t blame him entirely, because showbiz makes its own demands and we were already friends. But we carried on talking about theatre and what could be done about it.
Lindelani and Ngcobo hijacked me in 2004 for a stage project I had been threatening to write and which I spoke about enthusiastically, but reneged on at the very last moment.
Not daunted, like the two-man impi that they were, they pursued me as we found ourselves working together as actors on the second series of the successful television drama Hard Copy.
They had this clear idea in their heads that I should direct Athol Fugard’s 1950s play Nongogo, a project that finally took flight at Johannesburg’s Actors’ Centre and had a full production at the Market Theatre a year ago.
I had directed Lindelani before in a television series called Saints, Sinners and Settlers, and knew that he had many qualities that I would like to work with again. The feeling, I guess, was mutual.
And so we worked together to extract a wonderful performance from him as the put-upon, helpless, serial-child producer Patrick in Nongogo at the Barney Simon Theatre.
It was the last time that we would work together.
There is a Latin saying, Ars longa, vita brevis est, meaning “Art is long, life is short”. It seems kind of prophetic now, considering how long a road we still had to travel if we had had the time.
Go well, Lindelani. All your friends and the people you touched wish we had been able to say that to you in greater length — and had taken more time to share your talents and your thoughts.
And, as Ngcobo says, your sheer cussedness and warmth, inextricably intertwined.