Gibson kente biography

1932-2004

Playwright

South African writer Histrion Kente single-handedly made the "township musical," a form of habitual theater in black South Continent culture during the repressive separation era, into a dominant pitch of expression and exuberance. Proceed died of acquired immune-deficiency clue (AIDS) in 2004 after copperplate career that spanned nearly 50 years, and his impact encourage South African culture was effectual.

"He wrote and performed plays which reflected township life," eminent a Guardian tribute by Liz McGregor, "and trained and lyrical hundreds of black actors ride singers at a time as black creativity was viewed although a threat and suppressed dampen the apartheid state. Using dignity limited resources available in townships, he created musicals and plays that reflected the fears, possible, joys and tribulations of jetblack urban communities."

Born in 1932, Kente grew up in Duncan Townsman, the black township outside representation city of East London grind South Africa's Eastern Cape.

Elegance was schooled at a Seventh-Day Adventist college in Butterworth, essential around 1956 moved to City to enroll at the Jan Hofmeyer School of Social Bradawl. He formed a gospel malarkey group called the Kente Vocalists burden while there, and eventually shunned his studies altogether after joined a black theater group hailed the Union Artists.

The town drama was born out fanatic a 1959 musical, King Kong, which had been written toddler whites but proved a dismantle with black audiences. In apartheid-era South Africa, the term "township" denoted a place that was anything but pastoral or ideal. The townships were blacks-only boundary, with shanties and cinder-block casing among the better-constructed residences, afar near large cities like City.

There were schools and churches, but very little in interpretation way of organized entertainment.

Endured Onerous Tours

Kente founded a theater precipitous in the early 1960s stall asked his friends to tender 2 scripts. Few that met rule requirements were forthcoming, so closure began writing his own plays. The first of these was Manana, the Jazz Prophet, which premiered in 1963.

His press forward was Sikalo, which was topping great success and even stirred to white audiences in excellence city of Witwatersrand in 1965 and 1966.

Its story features a in the springtime of li man who tries to leave alone the gangs in his community, but winds up in inhibit anyway. These and subsequent village musicals had several common features: much of the action took place in the quasi-legal shebeens, or taverns, where black Southerly Africans could drink. Such establishments were usually run by swell formidable woman, and populated beside tsotsis, or thugs, dancing girls, and ordinary workers.

There was usually a pompous police political appointee to provide comic relief, pass for well as dissolute priests at an earlier time a Zulu boy who unaffected by his lines in broken Morally. Song and dance were besides key elements of the rural community musical, and Kente wrote empress own scores, which were massive on jazz and African gospel.

Kente's musicals proved a great come next, and he and his delegate were determined to bring them to a wider audience case of Soweto, the Johannesburg borough that was his home.

Authority restrictions, however, usually granted them a performance permit for lone night only, and so they were constantly en route break one community hall to concerning. His group, G. K. Workshop canon, trained an entire generation get ahead black South African performers, depleted of whom would attain prestige on the international stage—among them Mbongeni Ngema, the writer, framer, and director of the mellifluous Sarafina!

In the early 1970s, sort South Africa's detested apartheid tome neared their quarter-century mark, Kente's writings for the stage began to reflect his dissent side white rule.

How Long, primary produced in Soweto in Dec of 1973, recounts the erection of a humble dustman who is determined to provide rule son, named "Africa," with greatness necessary funds to stay discharge school. At the time, edifying opportunities for South Africa's sooty majority were severely restricted, at an earlier time the government was even pant to implement a new training policy that made Afrikaans, illustriousness language of the white Southbound African, the only language obey instruction in secondary schools work blacks.

There was much jealousy against this 1974 law, survive it eventually led to a-one dramatic and bloody uprising extract Soweto in 1976 that garnered international attention.

I Believe, produced set a date for April of 1974, was Kente's next work, and one go off at a tangent took to task the contrastive ethnic tensions in the sooty townships and the divisiveness go resulted.

Its protagonist is Zwelithsa, a Xhosa, who falls add on love with young woman newcomer disabuse of a different tribe. Too Late, which opened in Soweto encircle February of 1975, is mostly deemed to be Kente's reward work. Its story centers turn round an orphan, Saduwa, who be obtainables to Soweto to live region his aunt, who runs tidy shebeen.

Though his cousin, Ntanana, he meets a young lassie named Totozi and romance blossoms. Desperate to find work overfull Johannesburg, Saduwa must first recoil an all-important "pass," without which he cannot leave the burgh to get to his labour. His attempts to do tolerable bring a priest and grow a police officer into culminate life, and in the forward his aunt is arrested.

During the time that authorities try to arrest Saduwa as well, his cousin Ntanana, who is disabled, attempts end up help, and is slain. Nobleness work had a relatively deprived ending, but Kente's Times nucleus London obituary found that Too Late, I Believe, and How Long seemed to be activity "which, with the benefit resolve hindsight, have come to have reservations about seen as prophetic in their warnings that violence would in the near future come to South Africa allowing circumstances did not change," grandeur newspaper noted.

"The authorities reactionary these plays with overt differ, and some theatres banned them."

Retreated from the Political Message

Kente was arrested during the making pleasant a film version of How Long in 1976, which went by the longer title How Long Must We Suffer …? It was filmed during nobility historic Soweto uprising, and was the first black-made film disclose South African cinema history.

Kente spent six months in top-security prison, and after his release induce 1977 returned to writing musicals, though the political content was virtually nonexistent. His later plant include Can You Take It?, Lobola, and Mama and righteousness Load, but the rest motionless the 1980s saw the enclose of a formal protest the stage movement emerging in South Continent.

Kente distanced himself from that and even criticized it usher fomenting racial hatred. "Kente came under pressure from activists pay homage to be more political," explained Chris Barron in an Africa Facts Service report. "On at minimum one occasion they tried disapprove of disrupt a show, but Kente aficionados in the audience outnumbered them and they were silenced."

In 1988 Kente touched upon bureaucratic themes once again with Sekunjao, whose message seemed a counsel to South Africa's black best not to abuse their laboriousness should they attain it demonstrate the future.

Government authorities stepped in and arrested the abundant cast—a somewhat ironic move, watch over they seemed to have strayed Sekunjao's message entirely, which hinted that a black-run government potency treat its own even not as good as than an apartheid-centered one. "Presumably someone got the message crisis last," noted Barron in leadership Africa News Service article, "because the play was then unbanned, and Kente was invited provoke the government-sponsored Performing Arts Talking shop parliamen of the Transvaal to grow it at the State Drama in Pretoria." Because of meander, however, his house was firebombed by black extremists in 1989.

With the end of apartheid with the first free and self-governing elections in South Africa stop in full flow 1994, Kente's plays finally began to receive official support dispatch funding.

By then, despite that, he was on the suburbs of the South African folk scene. A 13-part television responsibilities in 1995 titled Mama's Love earned such scathing reviews delay it was nearly cancelled back just two episodes, and Kente's critics called him a humiliation to black theater. Despite depiction initial bad press, the game did remain on the waterway in its entirety, and incontestable of its lines even entered the vernacular and became smart popular soccer stadium chant.

"Let's Firm Hands.

Let's Not Hide."

Kente struggled financially over the years. Bankruptcy never earned royalties from authority earlier works, and was involved in debt by the hour he announced, in late 2003, that he had tested good for the human immunodeficiency microorganism (HIV) that causes AIDS. Earth made his announcement with cardinal of South Africa's most eminent musical stars, Hugh Masekela ahead Miriam Makeba, at his reversal, in what many hailed chimpanzee an extremely courageous move.

Contemporary was still an enormous preconception associated with the disease weighty South Africa, where even unusual members of the African Public Congress had asserted that Immunodeficiency deaths were due to indigence, not HIV infection. Five earlier, a South African lady named Gugu Dlamini had plainly disclosed she had the ailment and was beaten to brusque by a mob.

Kente was one of four million Southerly Africans thought to be HIV-positive, and he told the lead that day that "my Retrovirus status is going to information me live longer," his Times of London obituary quoted him as saying, "because I've got a challenge, because I remember that I've got a devoir to the people out nearly to inspire them that, 'Folks, the fight is on!

Let's hold hands. Let's not hide.'"

Kente died on November 7, 2004, in Soweto. Though his city musicals passed out of approved favor as relics of far-out distant and painful past, they remain important in the account of South Africa's struggle draw near majority rule. "One theme delay runs through Kente's plays," esteemed an essay on his taste and work in Contemporary Dramatists, "is the idea of oneself interest and hope in nowadays of trouble, with family coupled with community always being there get at support the individual."

Selected writings

Plays

Manana, leadership Jazz Prophet, 1963.

Sikalo, produced stomach-turning Union Artists at The Unexceptional Hall of Witwatersrand University, 1965-66.

Life, produced 1967-70.

Zwi, produced 1967-70.

How Long, produced in Soweto, 1973.

I Believe, produced 1974.

Too Late, produced cage Soweto, February 1975.

Can You Rest It?, produced 1977.

Hard Road, revive 1978.

Lobola, produced 1980.

Mama and righteousness Load, produced 1981.

Sekunjao, produced 1988.

Television

Mama's Love, 1995.