Kuyanuka and other Plays

Gha-Makhulu Diniso

Description

Kuyanuka and other Plays by Gha-Makhulu Diniso is also a collection of three one person plays; Kuyanuka was first performed in 1991, Koropa in 2000 and Shoeville in 2005. As critic Darryl Accone observes: �It is precisely because of his conscience and commitment to true freedom that Diniso remains an artist neglected in his own country. Not for him complacency about the much lip-serviced Rainbow Nation, a least not while the stench of inequality not only persists but grow fouler by the day. There is no extravagant escapism imported from abroad and peddled to the nouveaux riches and petite bourgeois of the New South Africa.� Instead though the creation of multiple characters reflecting the harshness of life under the neo-liberal economic order, Diniso expresses the problematic of celebrating political freedom when most black people find their living standards under threat and soaring unemployment and casualization undermining much of the early liberation promise.

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• Drama

Informations

• Publié par: Botsotso Publishing
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781990922459
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

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KUYANUKA

K O R O P A

SHOEVILLE

Three plays by

Ga-Makhulu Di-niso

Botsotso Publishing

PUBLISHED IN 2008 BY BOTSOTSO PUBLISHING BOX 30952, BRAAMFONTEIN, 2017

Email:[e-mail] Website:www.botsotso.org.za

©in the text: Di-Niso Ga-Makhulu

ISBN 978-0-9814068-6-2

We Would like to Thank the National Lottery Development Trust Fund for its support.

Acknowledgements

Cover and text design

Katherine Finlay

CONTENTS

Kuyanuka /11 Koropa /47 Shoeville /65

Darryl Accone

In older theatrical parlance someone who could act, sing and dance was dubbed a triple-threat man. A grand accolade, it was given only to the few. South African playwright, actor and director Gamakhulu Dinoso presents a triple threat of an- other kind: he is a versatile maker of theatre who takes his words, images and ideas from the page powerfully to the stage, invariably with wonderful and indel- ible effect.

To appreciate fully Diniso’s stage universe is to be in the audience when the lights go down and the curtain rises on one of his trademark opening scenes. Often you will be transported to, and thrust into, the teeming life of Sharpeville, the township that is Diniso’s home and the locus of so much pain, sorrow and memory in South African history. But the Sharpeville that is Diniso’s is not an endless recapitulation of that awful day in March 1960, when scores of protesters were gunned down by the police. Rather, it is a place of continuing contestation, where the People take on the State, both old and new, in a ceaseless battle for social and economic justice.

It is precisely because of his conscience and commitment to true freedom that Diniso remains an artist neglected in his own country. For his is not the advertis- ing agency fantasy or Brand South Africa image of this country. Not for Diniso an endless theatrical sunset clause that guarantees happy musicals, so-called glitz and glamour, and extravagant escapism imported from abroad and peddled to the nouveaux riches and petite bourgeois of the New South Africa. Not for him complacency about the much lip-serviced Rainbow Nation, at least not while the stench of inequality not only persists but grows fouler by the day.

It is no accident that the earliest of the three plays collected here is titledKuy- anuka – Stink For Us All(1990). There is perhaps nothing so universally leveling as the bodily need to expel waste matter. But some excreta are more exalted than others, such as the products of those with access to sanitation and running water. Kuyanukais among the most scatological works written for and performed on the South African stage. It is, to put it bluntly, steeped in shit.

For the queasy, it is not easy to watch and hear in performance or to read on the page. Night soil, the buckets that contain it, the newspapers chosen with relish to serve as loo roll — Diniso spares the audience nothing. And then there is the in- sistent iteration of who is making this fetid pile. It is, writes Diniso, the Stinking System. Eighteen years afterKuyanukahit the stage with such visceral effect, the system remains poisoned and poisonous. Re-reading the play in 2008 reaffirms that Diniso is a rare type of theatrical prophet — and reminds one that he is, as with all such soothsayers, not understood.

There is little excuse for this lack of comprehension and withholding of apprecia- tion, for Diniso is not a strident and humourless playwright, director and actor. Quite the opposite. His plays range from wild scatology to subtle irony, deploying

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humour in many guises and shades. There is a different, truer sort of rainbow nation in his work, an overarching spectrum of believable characters typified by realism and verbal dexterity.

Who can fail to laugh with the “gladiator domestic worker” inKoropa– scrubfloor scars (1996), as she passes verdict on the well-intentioned but ill-fated Recon- struction and Development programme?  Oh yeh ...R D P ... yes  I must phone Mr Min-Naidoo of ... Rescue Domestic People And one must savour how Diniso encapsulates old and new in the pithiest, wittiest way, when the same character reflects:  I long for the old stuff snuff, That used to make ussss ...  (she sneezes)  (loud sneezing) ... heitshiyaaa ...  ... and open up our senses...  BLACK COCAINE!

Koropa is a profoundly feminist work. Diniso, in a deliberately extravagant de- scription of its content, writes that it is “about a woman robbed by white apart- heid and raped by black democracy ... a gladiator domestic worker destroyed by reality ... a crusader church woman damaged by religion ... a comrade combatant drowned by revolution ...”.

It is indeed all of these and more. Most of all, it has a tone and a voice that is un- failingly funny and grippingly amusing. Beneath this is Diniso the social activist, as engaged with his battered but irrepressible protagonist as he is with the workerist and workers’ causes that form the subject of the second half ofKuyanuka.

In the sympathy and empathy that he shows his working-class characters, Diniso recalls the principled and theatrically compelling work of the US Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s. The fractious and treacherous dealings between bosses and workers that play out in “Strike Steel”, the second half ofKuyanuka,are an ana- logue of those in Cradle Will Rock. In Cradle, arguably the greatest Federal Thea- tre play, the unscrupulous capitalists and perfidious bosses of Big Steel gang up with the Establishment and the police to bash and bully workers into submission. Here is Diniso’s actor-activist inKuyanuka,and you can almost hear the character, and his creator, sing out the words as you read them: You see, change the load from one shoulder,  And put it unto the other shoulder,  And that’s how to give them better positions,  And then ... stick sweet candy salaries in their mouths,  Just to shut their big mouths from ...  Shouting political slogans.

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Six years after the unforgettable heroine(s) ofKoropacameShoeville–Struggle for Survival(2002). Diniso sub-subtitled it “a socio-political prophetic play”, which description applies to all his oeuvre. Significantly, it carries the following poignant declaration.  My art is strangling me ...  My art is choking me ...  My art is killing me ...  (silence)  My art is me  Me I am my art  Art though me This is as close to a statement of Diniso’s artistic praxis, if not intent, as you are likely to get. It captures the unswerving and selfless dedication that Gamakhulu Diniso has brought to his triple vocations of playwright, director and actor. Ulti- mately, it revels in the artist’s ability to endure and survive.

In another Diniso play,Izitha, that capacity is strikingly evoked. An apparently hapless artist, Khabs, is confronted by three Furies of the Arts Establishment, robed in black and sporting surgical masks. Keeping him at more than an arm’s length, they clutch aerosol insecticide cans and chant a deadly mantra, “You want Freedom. We give you Free Doom”, before spraying him mercilessly.

But, as with the nuclear bomb-proof insect, Khabs will live tofight another day. He crawls off stage in the manner of a temporarily incapacitated Parktown prawn (for non-Johannesburger readers, the Parktown prawn is a nasty, indestructible insect).

It is, after all, the imperative of the artist to survive. The artist may be a cockroach to the Establishment — he or she will yet outlive society’s ephemeral power. In- deed, the plays collected here will outlive the public whose only theatre-going is to casino complexes offering the fodder of foreign musicals. They will do so because of the blood knot that Diniso has with his art, a covenant akin to Ernest Hemingway’s brilliantly brutal testimony on the art of writing: “Writing is easy ... just open a vein and let it bleed.”

In an unforgettable scene inIzitiha,Khabs and his students gather around a stark, bare tree that throws its skeletal shadows against the moon, and swear a blood oath to the arts. Gamakhulu Diniso has done just that with his life’s work in the theatre. Informed and informing, inspired and inspiring, his life in the arts has been lived with immense heart and grandness of spirit.

Johannesburg, March 2008

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