i

BRA GIB

Father of South Africa’s

Township Theatre

Rolf Solberg

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 Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Foreword by David B. Coplan xi
Preface xv

PART 1: Kente the Playwright 1

1. The formative years 3

Dorkay House 5
2. The 1960s: the early plays 8
Manana the Jazz Prophet 8
Sikalo 10
Lifa 14
Zwi 17
3. The ‘Political Trilogy’ 23
How Long? 24
I Believe 27
Beyond a Song 29
Too Late 30
4. In the heat of the Struggle 32
Can You Take It? 35
Laduma 37
Taximan and the School Girl 38
The Load/Mama and the Load 41
The early 1980s 44
Hungry Spoon 44
Lobola 45

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 Hard Road 46
Going Back/Looking Back/Marakalas 48
5. Time out, and return 51
Now is the Time/My Troubled Land 55
Bad Times, Mzala/Things are Bad, Mzala 56
6. Vision of a promised land 59
Sekunjalo/The Naked Hour 59
7. End of an era 71
WeMame! 71
Give a Child/We Are the Future 72
8. The new dispensation 75
Mfowethu 78
Mama’s Love 82
Lahliwe/What a Shame 88
Ezakithi 91
How Long 2 96
9. End game 100
The Call 101
10. The curtain comes down 103
11. Gibson Kente’s legacy 108

PART 2: ‘The Person Gibson Kente’ 111

Professor Vilakazi’s letter of recommendation 113

Kente the Theatre Artist 115
Kente the Teacher 127
Kente the Musician 139
Kente the Entrepreneur 147

Photo Insert between pages 110 and 111

List of Plays 157

Endnotes 159
Index 168

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 1

PART 1

Kente the Playwright

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1
The formative years

Gibson Mthuthuzeli Kente was born on 25 July 1932 in Duncan Village

near East London in the Eastern Cape. He was of the Madiba clan, and thus
related to Nelson Mandela, who was his uncle. He was the second of five
children, one of whom died in infancy. Despite not having much to do with
his father, his childhood was carefree and he was, as he admitted, badly spoilt
as the favourite boy child.
The family was comparatively secure financially. They had two houses
in Tsolo, and Gibson’s mother, Ellen (whose African name was Nonzophi),
ran a little business selling fruit and vegetables. She was a generous woman
who readily shared what she had with others. Gibson’s older sister, Frances,
says that he was very close to his mother.
His maternal grandparents owned a sizeable farm at Stutterheim. When
they died, his mother moved there with her family. Gibson spent many
childhood holidays on the family farm and it was doubtless there that he
developed the almost religious rapport with the world of nature that stayed
with him for the rest of his life.
Schooling for Kente began at the local St Philip’s Primary School.Always
an inventive child and prone to mischief, in 1939 he was moved from
Class 2 at St Philip’s to the primary division of Bethel College, a strict
Seventh Day Adventist boarding school in Butterworth.2 Secondary schooling
followed at Lovedale College in Alice, where the original plan was for him
to complete his secondary education and then stay on in the teacher training
division of the College with a view to qualifying as a teacher. In 1951,
however, after clashing with the Lovedale authorities over political
involvement in ‘oppositional activities’, Kente found himself briefly expelled,
along with other students; the authorities subsequently relented and the
students were readmitted.
Among his accomplishments in the Lovedale years, Kente showed promise
as a sportsman, excelling in athletics, boxing, rugby and table tennis, playing

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4 Bra Gib

college rugby at provincial level and showing sufficient promise in boxing

for a sports coach to suggest that he go professional. ‘I turned his offer down
because education had a stronger appeal to me,’ said Kente in an interview
with Metropolitan Digest in 1987.3 In 1953 he was the ‘black South African’
discus champion and came second in shot put.
More significantly for our story, at Lovedale Kente also learnt to play the
piano. From early childhood, music was a central part of Gibson Kente’s
universe. As he put it in the 1987 interview, although he was ‘not really
trained to compose music’, musical ability was for him ‘an in-born talent’.4
Preserved in family legend are stories of herdboy Gibson hearing melodies
in the air when he was out in the veld with the cattle; it’s probable that such
a child would have absorbed and enjoyed the traditionally strong musical
culture of the Seventh Day Adventists during the time he spent at school
with them. Reminiscing in an interview with the Marxist critic Robert
McLaren Kavanagh about his schooldays at Bethel College in Butterworth,
Kente recalled that:

Every Sunday was like the typical revival meet in the States. We
yelled with piety. We yelled till we had to speak in whispers the
following day. Man, we yelled!5

In the 1987 Metropolitan Digest interview he spoke of the strong emphasis

on biblical studies and training at Butterworth, coupled with gospel and
religious music, adding: ‘I also received much pleasure and inspiration from
Negro spirituals.’6
Along with the piano lessons, it was in the Lovedale years that sports star
Kente also learned how to write down the songs that came into his head,
and he began to use them in sketches at the College.
His stay there came to a premature end when he fell out once more
with the Lovedale authorities – this time, more seriously, for ‘militancy’ –
and he was expelled for good. Decamping to East London, he filled in time
for a year or two earning his bread as an uncertified social worker. He also
formed a popular singing group called The Symphonic Five – a sign that
the entertainment world was beginning to beckon.
This trend was set to continue when, in 1955, Kente cut loose from his
Eastern Cape origins and migrated to Johannesburg to register as a Social
Work student at the pioneering Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, housed,
 The formative years 5

along with the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, next door to Dorkay House in
downtown Eloff Street. The founder-director of the Jan Hofmeyr School,
and also founder of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, was the Rev. Ray Philips,
an American Congregationalist with a long history of activism against
segregation. He appeared to be a shrewd judge of character, too, judging by
the way he encouraged the new student Kente’s interest in cultural activities
that could lead to a career in music or the theatre. In the end, Kente never
did come to practise as a professional social worker. As he put it in a 1980
interview with The Star: ‘I went straight into showbiz, and have been there
ever since.’7
The Sowetan journalist, Doc Bikitsha, met Kente as a newcomer to
Johannesburg and gave the following characterisation of the young Gibson:

I first met him in 1956 when I started working for the Bantu Men’s
Social Centre. He was studying at the Jan Hofmeyr School of
Social Work . . . Kente’s niche in history is established. My first
impression of him has never wavered. It confirms the belief that
you can take a Xhosa out of the homeland, but you can never
take the Xhosa out of the man. Soweto has broken many a rustic
or yokel, but failed when it came to Kente. Instead he broke the
country down. The whole country copied his style of music, dance
and theatre . . . With hindsight, I can hazard that Kente’s infectious
art form and style has contributed to kwaito, pantsula and other
genres today. You cannot overestimate his contribution. He might
have appeared eccentric to some people, but he was never
egocentric. He had his shortcomings, but was the ultimate
professional.8

Dorkay House
Kente’s earliest paid job in the entertainment industry was with Gallo Africa,
subsequently Gallo Recording Company, where he was employed as a talent
scout between 1957 and 1959. Gallo was working hard in those days to hold
onto its position as the leading South African recording company, and the
job put Kente in touch with many top musicians – including luminaries
like Miriam Makeba, Caiphus Semenya, Letta Mbulu, Hugh Masekela, and
the Manhattan Brothers – for whom Kente also wrote songs and melodies.
Later he came to know pianist and bandleader Chris MacGregor, and learnt
6 Bra Gib

much from him about music and composition. It wasn’t long before Kente
wanted to strike out on his own. Dorkay House was where this first came
about.
Dorkay House was a rallying point for up-and-coming artists in South
Africa during the 1950s and 60s, and its history was closely bound up with
that of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre next door at 1 Eloff Street.The Bantu
Men’s Social Centre was originally established in 1924 to provide recreational
facilities, including a library, for young black men. One of the organisations
which conducted its early activities at the Centre was the Bantu Dramatic
Society, founded by Herbert Dhlomo,9 whose plays were performed there
in the 1930s and 40s. It was Dhlomo who first invoked the concept of ‘the
New African’ – upwardly mobile, black, urban and middle-class. Another
organisation that began its life at the Social Centre was the ANC Youth
League, launched there in 1944 by some of those who were to become the
future leaders of the ANC: Nelson Mandela; Walter Sisulu; Oliver Tambo;
and others.
Funded with proceeds from a farewell concert at the Bantu Men’s Social
Centre for Sophiatown’s beloved English clergyman, Father Trevor
Huddleston,10 Dorkay House, formerly a clothing factory, was secured for
the arts in 1956 by Ian Bernhardt, a white theatre enthusiast who had helped
to launch the Bareti Players for an all-black Shakespeare production in 1955.
Bernhardt was a co-founder of the Union of South African Artists, also
known as Union Artists. Its off-shoot, the African Music and Drama
Association, which was housed at Dorkay House, rapidly established itself as
a hub for young, ambitious black artists and writers. Dorkay House became
the launch pad for a number of distinguished careers in South African theatre.
Along with Gibson Kente, the Dorkay roll of honour includes names like
Barney Simon; Athol Fugard; Mbongeni Ngema; and numerous others –
although, in time to come, quite a few of those would also have been through
the training ground of Gibson Kente Productions.
Ian Bernhardt’s involvement in black theatre was important for black
artists, particularly in the turbulent 1960s, when it was easier for a white
person to keep the authorities at bay in conflicts involving black entertainers.
When the prohibition against mixed theatre casts and audiences began to
take effect in the early 1960s through the implementation of the Separate
Amenities Act,11 Dorkay House was almost the only venue in the Johannes-
burg area, apart from private houses and university halls, where black theatre
practitioners could operate without government interference.
 The formative years 7

In 1959 Union Artists scored a spectacular hit with the jazz opera, King
Kong. Written by Harry Bloom to music by Stanley Glaser and Todd
Matshikiza, the show was resoundingly successful in South Africa as well as
abroad – and a huge source of inspiration to young and ambitious talents
like Gibson Kente.
Although King Kong, Alan Paton’s Sponono and other plays focusing on
South African black life were rehearsed, produced and financed by multi-
racial Dorkay House, the entertainment industry overall was still controlled
by whites; blacks might sing, play, dance, act and produce banners and props,
but organising and running the whole show was a different matter.
This was still the prevailing attitude in 1959 when Gibson Kente gave
up his job as talent scout for Gallo Africa to become director of Union
Artists. Inspired by the success of King Kong, he was impatient to tackle
something challenging and creative and decided to try his hand as a composer/
producer. By this time he had formed the Kente Choristers, the vocal group
for which he composed pieces in the popular Zionist ngcwele ngcwele style.12
He had also written several songs for Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and
other rising stars and composed a big hit, ‘Somandla’, for the Manhattan
Brothers; so he was not without show-business experience.
For someone like Kente, it would have been hard to resist the buzz of
Dorkay House and he was soon firmly hooked by the stage. Looking for
new challenges, he determined to try his hand as a theatrical producer. He
invited writer friends to come up with a story he could use and, getting no
takers, set about writing the script himself. Manana the Jazz Prophet was the
first offspring of his new passion.
8 Bra Gib

2
The 1960s: the early plays

Manana the Jazz Prophet (1961)

This is the story of how jazz musician Manana tackles a bunch of young
toughs who abuse their women and flash their knives at the slightest
provocation. On stage with Manana, appearing here for the first time, is
a fair sample of the stock characters that, over the years, came to populate
the typical Kente township scene: the hoodlums themselves (the tsotsis);
the local shebeen queen; the good-time girls; and the local preacher/
priest. Manana’s answer to the tsotsi problem is to persuade the preacher
to, literally, jazz up his services with gospel song and catchy beat and thus
lure them into church in the hope that they will put their wicked ways
behind them.
The leader of the tsotsis, Tom, is constantly in trouble because he is
married to church-going Ma, while remaining a faithful patron of the
local shebeen with its beckoning girls. Tom and his cronies, The Group,
decide to take their girls to church to see what it’s all about. In due
course, they all (the preacher, too, evidently) get won over by Manana’s
jazzed-up version of the service.All the girls fall in love with the ‘prophet’
and the boys are madly jealous.

Kente once described himself as a ‘moderate Christian’ and he never sought

to disown his mission-school upbringing. Dixon Molele, who worked in
some of the earlier Kente productions, recalls that God got a mention in
every one.13 This hints at a side of Kente’s personality that may square a little
oddly with his reputation as bon viveur but perhaps should not be too lightly
discounted. In Manana, the Dorkay House protégé plainly sets out to entertain
and beguile, but a didactic purpose is not far beneath the surface. Like his

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 The 1960s: the early plays 9

stage character Manana, Kente appears to have found township churches a

bit too staid for their own good.
Manana attracted little media attention when it was first performed in
1961 in the Wits University Great Hall, since Gibson Kente was, as yet, a
relatively unknown name in theatre circles. Two years later, when it was put
on at the Mofolo Hall in Soweto, the initial township audience loved it. But
the production faltered, with the run being cut short owing to, as Kente saw
it, inadequate publicity and poor administration on the part of the Dorkay
House management. The townships lacked permanent theatre facilities; a
production such as this needed to be set up as a travelling unit, with one-
night shows in schools and township halls. It’s likely that no-one was quite
ready for this earliest moment of what came to be the rolling Kente jugger-
naut!
Nonetheless it was a shrewd decision for Kente to focus his sights on
township audiences – and not just in order to sidestep the madness of the
Separate Amenities Act, with its prohibition of racially mixed audiences, as
well as mixed casts. This meant that for a black performer to be able to sing
in a play with white actors, it now had to be done unseen, from the wings.
During the first public run of Manana in Soweto, the reviews, though
generally positive, seem somewhat bemused by this novel creation, referring
to it variously as: ‘a straightforward musical performance’; ‘a restatement of
daily life’; and ‘an extremely colourful disjointed musical circus’.
One critic declared that the rough language of the play:

. . . reflects the inner violence of the township and is concerned

about the basic issues of human conduct and ways to establish
the word of the Almighty . . . [but] Gibson Kente allows the forces
of repentance to take control at the end of the performance and
the light of humanity to shine in the characters.14

Sydney Matlakhu writes in Post that the show held the audience’s attention
to the last. The songs have:

fire, wit and freedom from clichés . . . The audience was thrilled
to see such young, unknown actors and instrumentalists playing
jazz and gospel ditties and giving full expression to themselves.15
10 Bra Gib

Sikalo (1965)
Sikalo, which means ‘Lament’, is a generation-gap story. The plot deals
with a traditionalist father and his conflict with his township-born son
with tsotsi leanings, and there is also a love story between Sikalo and his
girlfriend Tando. Sikalo’s father, who has had a rural upbringing and
whose father was killed by one of his own sons, attempts to instil a sense
of inferiority in Sikalo, along with the need for obedience, embodied in
the lines of the famous song from the play, ‘If you’ve never been to the
mountain, you’re a boy’.
Sikalo is clever and his alertness attracts the attention of the gangsters
Shushu, Congo and Sida, but Sikalo refuses to join them. Sida falls in
love with Tando, Sikalo’s girl. The tsotsis kill fat man Baduza and frame
Sikalo for the murder, sending him to jail. Tando teams up with Qavile,
Sikalo’s friend, who pretends to be stupid but is as clever and central to
the plot as his name implies.16 They bribe the jail-warden and Sikalo
escapes. When Nonto, Sida’s girlfriend, hears that Sida is after Tando, she
spills the beans; the gangsters are rounded up and Sikalo, one assumes, is
acquitted.

With his first play, Manana, Kente had followed the call to a life in theatre;
his second play, Sikalo, took that calling to a new level. It launched him
unexpectedly into an independent career of remarkable and unprecedented
theatrical entrepreneurship, allowing him to take his special brand of
entertainment to a nationwide stage where, for a number of years, he reigned
supreme.
Like Manana, Sikalo initially came to production under the auspices of
Dorkay House. When it was first performed in late 1965, independently of
Union Artists, it was seen by the Union’s decision-makers. They decided,
over Kente’s head, that Union Artists would take over and produce the play.
This they did in the Wits Great Hall in July 1966. Mindful of Union Artists’
success with King Kong, Kente initially went along with that decision. But
when they declared that Sikalo was to be performed as part of the Lesotho
Independence Day celebrations in September 1966 and also took it upon
themselves to meddle with the casting of the play, insisting on a white co-
director, Kente and the cast rebelled.
 The 1960s: the early plays 11

Kente and his players were unwilling to allow Ian Bernhardt and his
board to ‘destroy’ Sikalo by repeating what the Kente camp perceived as the
management mistakes – sloppy promotion and poor administration – that
had plagued the production of Manana, and they resented what seemed like
renewed high-handedness. Shortly after the opening performance in Soweto,
Kente decided to cut loose from Union Artists, and did so with the full
support of his cast. As Kente himself relates, the incident turned out to be a
moment of high theatre for all concerned:

The cast bus was parked in Eloff Street in front of Dorkay House
ready to transport the Sikalo cast to the show. After an hour and a
half of deliberation with Ian, I stepped out of the building to report
to the cast that my negotiation with Ian Bernhardt and his com-
mittee on our Sikalo had borne no fruit. Vexed and full-to-the-
brim, the cast vowed, ‘No deal, no show’. What happened
thereafter remains one of the most unforgettable and touching
experiences of my life. Ian used threats to try to get the cast to
board the bus and go to the show. I told Ian we had taken a
decision and no amount of threats and force would change that.
Ian called the police, alleging that our actions constituted a breach
of contract. Police arrived with their dogs; they tried their strong-
arm tactics coercing us to board the bus. Hell broke loose.
Emotions seized my cast like a spell. Traffic stopped as my angry
artists [stood in] Eloff Street [ready for] any eventuality, their feelings
and words dunked in tears. They dared the cops: ‘Arrest us. You
can arrest us. We will fight for our rights. Away with white
exploitation,’ etc., etc., etc. I cried too, but not only because of
the drama that was unfolding before my eyes. Burning questions
were rushing through my mind like chickens answering a call for
food. ‘My god, they are prepared to face the unknown with me.’
Embarrassed, Ian Bernhardt had to tell the cops to leave. Revisiting
the events of that day, I always say: that incident had to happen
for me to happen. Fate planned it that way. That was the parting
of the ways with Dorkay. That chapter was closed. Unbeknown to
my cast and me a new chapter with profound and far-reaching
consequences and significance was just about to unfold.17

Relations with Dorkay House were subsequently restored to some degree.