“Zulu music has a way finding its place in people’s hearts and souls,” Mbongeni Ngema announces, having burst onstage dancing to Maskandi music.
“Zulu music has a way finding its place in people’s hearts and souls,” Mbongeni Ngema announces, having burst onstage dancing to Maskandi music.
After 27 years, the theatre and music icon is making dramatic return to the stage as an impassioned storyteller in The Zulu.
Standing before a dusky African landscape, Ngema launches into history, invoking the spirit of Shaka Zulu, or gesturing into the distance as vast armies clash and cities burn to the ground.
Despite the grand scale of the narrative, the mood is feels intimate, as Ngema invites the imagination to fly through the passion, bravery and intrigue of the Zulu kings and warriors which make up his heritage.
It’s a play which takes theatre back to its roots, storytelling which remembers the dead and affirms social identity, revealing every merit of the continent’s great oral tradition.
One story unfolds fluidly into the next as The Zulu takes a bird’s-eye-view of over a century of history, from the childhood of Shaka to the climactic battles of the Anglo-Zulu War.
An astonishing feat of rhetoric interspersed with delicately plucked guitar refrains. Some memorable moments are Ngema’s dramatization of Shaka’s murder and his prophetic dying words, Piet Retief’s gruesome execution and Lieutenant Durnford's defeat at Isandlwana.
The play is also highly personal. Ngema tells the tales which permeated his childhood and he describes his own grandmother and her late-night yarns.
Ngema ploughs through an energetic and impassioned performance with the ease of a seasoned artist.
There is little to indicate what director Christopher John describes as the physically, spiritually and emotionally challenging process of creating the piece.
John told Grocott’s Mail what interested him in rehearsal was Ngema’s strong work ethic.
“Ngema is a very hard worker, which I think is something that people don’t know about him. He’d work as if possessed, often though the night. He was constantly rewriting,” said John.
“These stories have been inside him since he was a child, and it was as if he was channelling the story in a very particular spiritual place.”
In Friday’s post-performance discussion, Ngema noted that he had wanted to narrate this story for years, but had not felt the time was right until now.
“I wasn’t ready to tell these stories in my other work. Maybe I need to be more mature, but I knew it was something one day I would have to tell,” said Ngema.
Following its shows at the Festival, The Zulu will tour to Empangeni, the Swaziland Theatre Club in Mbabane, and the Rostrum Theatre, in Gauteng.
