Director James Ngcobo’s personality borders on the theatrical. Even in ordinary conversation he moves his hands wildly, dilates his eyes, shuffles his frame forwards, backwards and sideways to make a point.
It’s perhaps natural that he has adapted the equally dramatic Touch My Blood (Umuzi), writer and journalist Fred Khumalo’s at times gritty autobiographical account of growing up in Durban, into a play. This week the work premiered at the National Arts Festival.
We were supposed to meet at about 8am last Sunday at a Rosebank restaurant. He scurried into Fournos a few minutes after 8am and, meeting a waiter on the way to where I was seated, promptly ordered coffee and two glasses of water.
Taking a seat, Ngcobo explained that he was drawn to the story because Khumalo’s account of growing up in the ghetto doesn’t stick to the hackneyed script. Khumalo’s life hasn’t been another life prematurely cut short. He survived the violence spearheaded by Inkatha and lived to tell his story. “I feel we don’t tell many stories about triumph,” Ngcobo says. Most mainstream narratives of life in the ghettos have erroneously given the thugs sole “guardianship” of the township.
Ngcobo, whose assistant director in this production is Makhaola Ndebele, saw “possibilities of memory” in Khumalo’s journey and triumph. Explaining, he says Khumalo’s life evokes the dark periods that came with the unbanning of political parties, the “schism” that occurred when “the political pot started boiling”. It was a time when “friends became sworn enemies. It was a day when you woke up and your neighbours wouldn’t be friends with you anymore because you were now wearing different party colours.”
Khumalo’s book was short-listed for the Alan Paton Prize in 2007.
Like most Bildungsromans, the choices for the young protagonist are always stark: do you hang out with the gangsters and win the adoration of your peers or would you rather become the nerdy student and win your teacher’s approval and the scorn of your friends?
When he was older, about to be washed away in the flood of blood gushing from those mowed down by the political party militia, he was confronted with yet another dilemma. “There were moral questions. Should the writer sit back, observe and record the fighting unfolding before him? Or should he abandon writing — some people thought it was a bourgeois preoccupation anyway — and get on with the fight? Or could the writer do both?” Khumalo wrote in Touch My Blood.
Ngcobo says he wanted the production to have the feel of a witness to that period. He states that this production “can’t be all about theatre. It’s like revisiting the period.” Ngcobo seems to be suggesting that his hands are shackled, that he can’t stray far away from the historical document, set down by Khumalo. “There are people carrying scars [from this period],” he says.
I watched the rehearsals of the production that same Sunday. The Khumalo character is ingeniously played by two characters — Lebo Ntoko and Mothusi Magano. The play was not quite ready but its historical appeal is palpable. I found myself carried up and down the play’s emotional troughs and highs. It’s at once moving, exhilarating and evocative.
This seems to hark back to the interview I had earlier that day. Ngcobo says there seems to be an impulse to drown the country in “collective amnesia”. He says: “We need to talk about who we are. We can’t pretend that there was never apartheid in this country. Our young people should be taught this history.”
The director is keen to portray this history as narrated by Khumalo. “What’s important is Fred’s memory, not my memory. We took his story and turned it into dialogue. But the story should have integrity. We are not telling this story as praise singers.”
The play is quite faithful to Khumalo’s book, but at almost 200 pages something is bound to be left out. The anthropological stuff about the Khumalo clan, thus, has been chopped, and the text about the gangs has been shafted to the margins. Gangsters, because of their snazzy dress sense and their patois, are always colourful, theatrical characters. I felt it would have been interesting to see them on stage.
It could be my bias towards poets, but one of the most powerful scenes in the play is Lunga Radebe’s portrayal of the poet Mafika Pascal Gwala. Gwala, who is coming from Durban for the opening of the play this Friday, was a powerful influence on the young Khumalo. But, like other poets, he has something of the poète maudit about him — the unkempt appearance, a scant regard for convention and a nihilistic distrust for Mammon. It was his injunction — “write about what you know” — that helped Khumalo shake off his youthful imitations of European canonical literary trends.
The action of the play takes place on a circular stage a few centimetres off the ground, around which a steel arc installation revolves, showing the passage of time. The set was designed by Nadya Cohen and Ngcobo says Cohen makes “her design set a character in the play”.
I guess some of those who go to watch the play will think of themselves as part of the cast. The action on the stage will take them back to a sad, sordid period. But this going back is necessary as this country inches forwards.
Touch my Blood plays at the Rhodes Theatre at the National Arts Festival on July 3 and 4 and opens at the Market Theatre on July 8. For festival information go to www.nationalartsfestival.co.za