WOZA AFRIKA!
An Anthology of South African Plays
Duma Ndlovu, Editor
New York: George Braziller, 1987
272 pp., $8.95
"Woza" is Zulu for "rise up." Even if the reader skips over the foreword of Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka and the preface of American black militant playwright Amiri Baraka, this detail should alert him to the polemical nature of this collection of plays from South Africa.
If this clue that the reader is in for some heavy slogging through political theater is not enough, the words Sonqoba Simunye, in capital, the letters, appear at the end of each of the six plays in this collection. The translation from Zulu, according to the brief glossary included in the text is: "United We Will Conquer."
Four of these six plays were performed in the fall of 1986 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in New York's Lincoln Center and at the New Playwright's Theater in Washington. "Call it the theatre of revolution," cried Time magazine. The Washington Post, apparently less dazzled by radical fervor on stage, termed the plays ""rudimentary and amateurish...arduous to sit through."
Another of the plays, Asinamali! is currently running on broadway to quite extraordinarily enthusiastic reviews.
The eponymous sixth play, Woza Albert (Rise Up Albert), Which ran for a few weeks in 1984 in Greenwich Village, was deemed "a decent idea for a 20-minute sketch…stretched to fill out an evening" by New York Times' Frank Rich. Woza Albert, like the other five plays, was composed - rather than written - by black playwright/directors living in black townships of South Africa.
Originally these plays were performed in makeshift theaters in churches, community centers, and schoolrooms for black audiences in the townships outside Johannesburg, Capetown, and Durban. Improvisation was integral to the creative process, as in the beginning few of these texts were ever printed for fear of being judged subversive, and consequently subject to banning by the security police.
The playwright/directors credited here for the authorship have fared well. Their plays have been presented at international theater festivals in London, Edinburgh, and Berlin, as well as in New York and Washington. Even in their native South Africa they seem to be flourishing. Mbongeni Ngema, coauthor of Woza Albert and author of Asinamali!, won the A.A. Mutual Life Vita Award for Excellence in Direction and shared the award for Most Promising South African Playwright. In addition, Asinamali! won the award for Best Play of the Year in South Africa.
The Market Theater
Since the early eighties, these plays have all been presented at Johannesburg's multiracial Market Theater, which is where I saw a performance of Woza Albert. The Market Theater, founded by Barney Simon, (its artistic director) is housed in a large, handsome old building - formerly the produce market of the city - converted into an arts complex in
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