Cries of the Silenced

By Pico Iyer

Call it revolutionary theater. Five black men, heads shaved and clad in khaki prison fatigues, fling themselves across a small stage, jumping, singing, spitting their way through a series of stark, spotlighted vignettes of life in their native South Africa. Then, without warning, they turn on the audience, fingers pointed. "It's not only about the rent increase," hisses one. "It's not only about the vote. It's not only about the bloody passbooks . . . What is it?" Silence, broken by a few nervous giggles. "Stand up!" The actor glares at a confused ticket holder in the front row. "What is it?" A terrible quiet. "What is it?" The flustered victim mumbles an answer. With a bitter laugh, his interrogator dismisses him. "My friend," he enunciates fiercely, "you have got to look for it: it is deep down in your heart!"

Call it the theater of revolution. Five plays, put on by some 30 black actors, directors and playwrights, storm the U.S. with urgent bulletins from the townships of their native South Africa. Last week Asinamali! (Zulu for "we have no money") opened the first festival of black South African drama ever to play outside its homeland. Mbongeni Ngema's group portrait of five prisoners, together with four other plays of protest, will run for four weeks in New York City and Washington. The series is entitled Woza Afrika! (Rise Up, Africa!), and the exclamation point is not redundant. Mixing shouts of rage with eruptions of folkloric exuberance, the guerrilla drama aims to win hearts and minds by broadcasting the cries of the silenced.

At home, the Committed Artists, the Earth Players, the Bahumutsi Drama Group and the other black groups featured in the festival work largely in the dark. Since theaters are nonexistent in South African townships, the companies operate like the mystery players of medieval England, wandering from shantytown to shantytown and staging their dramas in churches, schoolrooms or whatever space is available. And since printed texts might be considered subversive, they commit little of their improvised theater to paper.

Even so, Asinamali!, for example, has been under constant threat. Apparently its angry art -- including a dead-on description of fire and bloodshed in a township attack -- too closely shadows life. One night, at a performance outside Durban, two busloads of counterrevolutionary blacks, armed with guns, spears and bush knives, drove up to the auditorium. They were looking for Ngema. The playwright was not in attendance, he recalls, "and the actors escaped death by inches, while the audience fled into the streets." The promoter of the company, says Ngema, was hacked to death.

Glimpses of the enduring agony of South Africa's blacks have long been afforded to Western playgoers by Athol Fugard, two of whose works -- The Island and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead -- also emerged from township improvisations. But Woza Afrika! promises to hurl its viewers onto the other side of the fence, in the midst of the fray. Though far less polished than a Fugard play, Asinamali! is far more charged; its fury lies in its energy. Fugard's eloquent dramas turn upon the moral and emotional conundrums facing whites who wish to choose the right way; Woza Afrika! dwells on the more immediate sorrows of blacks who have no choice at all.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York