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Gibson Kente passed away yesterday. Click here to read the article on News24. - Erns Grundling

The call: A reflection on Gibson Kente's township theatre innovation - past and present

Sabata Sesiu*

Township Theatre 1950s-1970s: A brief history

Introduction
South African theatre has been extensively written about. It has been categorised into many compartments, such as apartheid theatre, theatre of the liberation, protest theatre, and so forth. This is because they were centred on the lives of people in black residential areas known as townships.1 The stories in the plays revolved around the confrontation between blacks resisting apartheid and the government trying to maintain the system of white hegemony.

Two theatre streams existed in South Africa during the apartheid era. These were protest and township theatre. The most popular was protest theatre, also referred to as town theatre2 and the other, township theatre.

In the present, post-apartheid era, the theatrical terminology for both streams has changed. Protest theatre has died and mainstream theatre has emerged in its place. Township theatre is now being referred to as community theatre.

Protest/town/mainstream theatre was and still is based in the city and in suburban areas previously designated as whites only areas by the apartheid regime. Mainstream theatre operates and is resident in the central business district (CBD) areas, where it enjoys financial support from donors, arts subsidies, small and big business, and the government. It also enjoys extensive local and international exposure in the white- controlled media. On the educational side, this stream receives extensive reviews and publication in academic journals and commercial books. The management and administrative benefits include lavish and exquisite performance venues.

Township or community theatre, in contrast, is based mainly in underdeveloped black residential areas. Its area of operation and residence consists of dilapidated multipurpose community halls, local churches or schools. This stream receives little or no financial assistance or sponsorship from government, and local or international funding bodies. The media in most parts of the country largely ignores it. It also lacks publishing opportunities and literary criticism from academics and scholars; this is evident from the minimal or absence of publication or information on it in local libraries and educational institutions. Township theatre is highly localised, regionalised and marginalised. It operates within a small, specific periphery, and it is burdened with poor management, administration and leadership.

Despite being faced with the constant threat of fading into oblivion and extinction, township theatre continues to survive under these constraints. What also seems to be a wonder is that it has continued since the apartheid era to feed mainstream contemporary theatre with talented and experienced theatre practitioners. One such practitioner is Gibson Kente.

This paper is a tribute to Gibson Kente, the innovator, "godfather" and icon of black and township theatre.

Kente has written and produced more than twenty plays, all performed in black townships around South Africa since the 1950s. He has also initiated drama training schools, township dance bands and choirs in various educational and theatre institutions in the country.

Kente is currently in a Soweto hospice, dying from AIDS. The Soweto Sun newspaper paints a dismal picture of the man dubbed as "king of the theatre", saying he is alone and forgotten, and that

HIV-Aids has reduced the 74-year old theatre icon into a skeletal invalid, and because it is an advanced age, Kente cannot do anything for himself … Aids has reduced the once sharp-minded writer to a proverbial absent-minded professor. He can hardly remember dates or acquaintances' names.3

Kente's misery is compounded by the fact that his friends and colleagues have deserted him:

I am all alone. Everyone has abandoned me. The trust fund they said they were going to start for me has no money. When I die, I will die alone because no one is there for me.4

Most theatre practitioners in South Africa, particularly those resident and operating in the townships, are familiar with Kente's anguish. The current arts and culture infrastructure in South Africa has no mechanisms to take care of the practitioners' welfare and benefits. A number of artists have died paupers in the post-apartheid South Africa. There is a glimmer of hope, though. President Thabo Mbeki announced on television recently that the government was working on "seeing to it that no artists will die poor."5

This paper is an exploration of Kente's township theatre innovation during the apartheid era and it is also a reflection of the contemporary post-apartheid theatre in black residential areas.

The paper will be divided into two parts.

The first part will discuss Kente's innovation in township theatre during the apartheid era and the focus will be directed towards: (a) the actors and characters in his plays; (b) the space in which his productions were performed; and (c) the audience response to the themes and subject matter in his plays.

The second part will discuss contemporary post-apartheid township theatre in the same way Kente was discussed, ie by way of actors and characters, space and audience. The second part will, however, focus on a critical evaluation of contemporary post-apartheid township theatre and its relationship to Kente's innovation. The case studies will be drawn from township theatre practice and practitioners in Cape Town's black residential areas.

The overall discussion will refer to issues such as theatre administration, funding, theatre-making, performance and play production. All this is done with a view to opening up a discourse on the role and function of what is referred to as township or community theatre in South Africa.

PART ONE

Gibson Kente's innovation in Township Theatre

Who is Gibson Kente?
In 1955, Gibson Kente moved from Lovedale in the Eastern Cape to Johannesburg, where he formed a band of choristers called the Kente choristers. They sang a repertoire of religious music known as ngcwele-ngcwele6.

He became a talent scout for Gallo Music and started writing songs for local bands such as the Manhattan Brothers7 as well as for singers such as Letta Mbulu8 and the legendary Miriam Makeba.

Kente's interest in the theatre arose out of his boredom with writing the same style of music that contained repetitive three-chord sequences. He wanted to write something innovative and challenging, something that deviated from the conventional musical genre of the period. He wanted to write creative songs that had impact. This process led to his thinking of writing a play in order to break away from the monotony of writing the same type of music. As his inspiration for writing plays grew stronger, he approached contemporary writers such as Casey Motsisi9. Kente recalls:

I wanted to get hold of a good script. Well, I ran from pillar to post, trying to get township people to write a script. Casey Motsisi was one of them. He just made promises but they never materialised. I decided just to sketch something of my own. That was the birth of Manana The Jazz Prophet10.

Sikhalo eclipsed The Jazz Prophet. Kente recalls feeling confident:

I felt now before tackling Sikhalo I had to have a bit of know-how, about the stage and all that it entails. I started buying books, mainly by Stanislavski, let us say Russian, French, English and American. When I tackled Sikhalo I had some knowledge. At least I could make out stage right from stage left, downstage from upstage11.

Kente began to establish himself as a commercial theatre entrepreneur. Through Sikhalo he set in motion a theatre trend and genre that became a dominant force and inspiration for black township theatre practitioners in South Africa:

Many playwrights, actors and directors working in theatre in South Africa have at one stage worked under him. His method has therefore diffused itself even in other categories of theatre that are not township theatre.12

Kente's influence is evident in popular protest theatre productions such as Woza Albert, Sarafina! and Bopha13.

Mshengu holds the view that

Kente's is a popular theatre so it would be useless to try and judge it by the standards of more pretentious minority drama. It aims to fill venues in townships all over South Africa. It does. Therefore it is a success. This point must be made at the outset.14

Gibson Kente's stylistic innovation
The theatre of Gibson Kente is clearly elucidated by Zakes Mda's description of township theatre. This style of theatre is

very formulaic and like the European and American Melodrama of the 19th century … the plot would involve a church service, usually of the African independent churches known as the Zionists, a wedding, a jail scene and a funeral. There would be plenty of slapstick humour and of weeping.15

The themes in Kente's are simple and

reflect everyday life. His character types are drawn from the environment. The plots centre around family life and are often strongly melodramatic. There are conflicts between older and younger generations, conflicts between traditional and urban life, domestic intrigues, family quarrels and clandestine love relationships.16

Sikhalo, Kente's second play, dealt with domestic issues and the conflicts between gangsters and "good guys":

Sikhalo was a generation gap story. Sikhalo's father, who had a country upbringing and whose father has been killed by his own son, attempts to impress on him a sense of inferiority and a need for obedience … Sikhalo is clever and his wide-awakeness attracts the attention of gangsters … He refuses to join them.17

Sikhalo is framed for a murder he did not commit and he is imprisoned. The saga goes on until, at the end, Sikhalo's innocence is proven and he is acquitted.

Simplistic as they may sound, the themes and stories represented a creative retelling of real-life accounts and experiences of the townships' common people. The main thrust in Kente's writing was that he used local jargon and comedy that made audiences forget apartheid realities around them. In his plays, situation comedy and comic drama are interwoven with intervals of music, dance and song18.

The audiences were given nothing that was thought-provoking about their situation under the apartheid regime. The plays avoided confrontation with government.

Kente's stage characters
The characters in Kente's plays were strategically sketched. They were skilfully presented on stage as larger than life and grossly exaggerated. They were given simple dialogue, sensationalised lifestyles and extremely comic features, similar to those of the commedia dell'arte.

Mda sums up Kente's definition of characters as

a dim-witted policeman, often brutal, a priest, a comical schoolteacher, a shebeen queen, a township gossip who is also a relief character, a diviner, a streetwise fast-talking hoodlum and beautiful "sexy" girl.19

The world of Kente's characters was complemented by the simple, inexpensive costumes that were based on the poor working-class communities' dress codes that were colourful and bright. Each character dressed in a specific eye-catching way that made him or her grow in stature. Costume was complemented by the somewhat dull set that used minimal colours.

The lack of adequate facilities in the township halls … together with the countrywide one-night stands characteristic of Kente's productions, dictate to a large extent the stage setting, props and costumes he created for his huge casts.20

The set seemed to be a replica of the township, consisting of a painting on a huge canvas, constructed of movable screens, sheets of corrugated iron, small raised platforms and draped canvas that depicted the drabness of the townships21 and dominated the stage. The symmetry between the actors and the set was striking in that the characters seemed to fit and belong in this imaginary world. The costumes and set were complemented by lighting from the floodlights.

The lighting was economical and consisted of a white spread-light against a few coloured spotlights. As a strategy to increase the height of his characters, Kente used minimal spotlights and a lot of floodlights. The huge floodlights were placed on the front part of the stage on the floor so that the actors were illuminated from below. This seemed to increase the height of the performers.

Other important features in Kente's plays were music and dance. Music was Kente's powerful medium. Kente came into the theatre with extensive musical experience.22 Young, beautiful women were cast to strut their stuff, backed by beautiful music from a huge band of not fewer than ten musicians.

Kente employed a cast of between fifteen and twenty and sometimes even more performers in his plays. The actors were paid from the performance takings and their salaries were not enormous.23

In addition to the costumes and lighting, the actors were provided with humorous dialogue. The comic, witty and sometimes exaggerated dialogue was the main feature of Kente's plays. The writing was basic, sometimes unintelligible, raw and street-wise. The dominant language was English.

When asked why he used English as the dominant language in a situation where most people found it difficult to understand or speak (because the township consisted of an illiterate majority) Kente's response was:

Kid, you're asking me a helluva difficult question. I suppose we all like our languages to stay pure. In a cosmopolitan situation like ours you just have to accept it … they may not understand the words, but by the time the production reaches them, it is already coupled with movement, action and all the business that goes with it … if you remember in Sikhalo Kenny never used any Zulu, but he was very popular … got a lot of laugh lines in English. I wouldn't say it's because he's using Zulu lines. It's the part as such. It's a comedy part.24

Despite his defence of using English, Kente bowed to the demanding pressure of incorporating black languages into his plays. His later plays included a mixture of English, Afrikaans, local languages and the infamous "tsotsi-taal" (gangster language).25

The themes and messages in Kente's plays were clear: be subservient to the apartheid system; look stupid, laugh at yourself and forget that apartheid's police and army are killing, imprisoning, and raping women every day.

The question of power, politics, space and performance
Kente's plays were performed mainly in township halls26. These are multipurpose venues used for church services, funerals, wedding and assorted community services. These halls were generally built to accommodate about a hundred to three hundred people. Most of these buildings were badly managed and administered during apartheid. The legacy of such maladministration is evident in their current ugly, dirty and dilapidated state.

The stages in these venues consisted of a badly designed proscenium model which was either too big or too small, without curtains, lighting structures or anything to support audio-visual resources. They were built to accommodate about twenty people. For some reason, the apartheid stage designers chose to ignore the fact that a minimum number of performers on these stages was thirty or forty (this includes choirs and traditional dancers!). Kente's cast, band, choir, dancers and actors, totalling about thirty or so, were forced by the poor design of the apartheid stages to endure such impossible constraints. The designers also failed to assess the number of patrons that would use these halls at any given time because their two to three hundred patrons per event were made risible by Kente's productions which drew at least one thousand patrons a night.

These venues were controlled by the government's administration boards. These boards were notorious for employing government security agents and private police as clerks and superintendents. Black playwrights and theatre practitioners were subjected to submitting plays to these philistine clerks and superintendents. As a result they would check, censor, ban and ultimately arrest or detain theatre practitioners for subversive or "terrorism" writing.

The superintendents' arrogant attitudes forced playwrights to write naïve plays that tended to direct attention away from the stark apartheid realities. Kente's plays survived this subordination to the whims of government agents because they steered away from the realities of life under apartheid.

Kente's day with the Blacks
The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) became a dominant black political force in the 1970s:

The Black Consciousness Movement arose in the face of increased political and economic discrimination against all South Africans who were not classified as white. It aimed at reaffirming the identity and dignity of the black man in South Africa.27

The BCM manifesto was clear and straightforward - the organisation projected black self-empowerment, politically, culturally and socially. Black self-introspection against the apartheid backdrop was a major feature of the Black Consciousness Movement in attaining the goals of making black communities aware that

ii) the basic tenet of Black Consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity; and

iii) the black man must build up his own value systems, see himself self-defined and not defined by others.28

Gibson Kente was challenged by the BCM theatre activists to write plays representative of the massive black oppression encountered by the township community under apartheid. He was criticised as being out of step with the growing political resistance against apartheid. His works were dismissed on the grounds that they projected the black community in a negative way. He was frequently dismissed by accusations that his work perpetrated false consciousness and reinforced stereotypes. Despite these criticisms, Kente persisted in writing his type of plays and continued to attract large audiences.

Eventually, political pressure forced Kente to succumb. He was pressurised to realise that the role of theatre was changing and that it was being directed towards seeking to address itself to a particular situation or to particular problems, and that its genetics arose out of the politically and economically oppressed communities. That the role of theatre was to address the political situation in one way or another.29

Kente had no choice but to respond to the way the BCM saw the role of theatre. He responded with How Long? This play received rave reviews:

Ask any member of the cast of the musical How Long? what makes the show popular, the chances are that the answer will be: it has a message. Well, I was one of some 1 000 persons cramming the all-purpose hall at Kwa-Thema for the play … And what is the message? As the title says How Long? is the question posed to the white man … He doesn't only say the white man is a mean dog but he shows the inequities of the black man himself in the whole setup … There's always the threat of arrest hovering above our heads. Kente goes a step ahead: the policeman is the spider, which weaves a web in the lives of the township people. And in the end someone must be caught for one reason or another.30

How Long? became an irritating thorn in the side of the government authorities. Kente was placed under a banning order and imprisoned on the notorious Robben Island. This led to a serious disruption of the commercial functioning of his companies and gradually his play-producing power declined as his empire crumbled.

Dealing with Kente's decline: the early 1980s
Kente's decline in theatre left prominent seeds in that his innovation benefited town or protest theatre and contributed to its growth. In the early 1980s young theatre-makers and actors migrated to town theatre, such as the main exponent thereof, the Market Theatre.31

The government's relaxation of certain apartheid laws in the cities saw extensive integration between blacks and whites. As this happened, audiences in township halls began to dwindle. Middle-class audiences and the educated youth flocked to city-based spaces such as the Market Theatre.

Kente's plays were no longer performed and township theatre came under threat. It became inevitable that township theatre would be threatened by a slow death, away from the limelight that Kente cast upon it.

Theatre practitioners remaining in the townships were faced with the task of continuing where Kente had left off. They also had to contend with stiff competition from the liberal white-dominated town theatre structures that seemed to prosper more by the day. Township-based theatre practitioners who had stayed behind were faced with the choice of either rekindling Kente's innovation in the township or simply inventing a new form of township theatre. These were the 1980s and the challenges loomed. The 1990s were knocking at the door.

What remained to be seen was whether Kente's theatre innovation had in fact left an impact or not.

PART TWO

From Township to Community

A brief history: Cape Town's township theatre, 1980s to the present

Drama in Cape Town's black townships provides a good illustration of the current state of theatre since Kente's demise. The apartheid legacy is echoed in a recent production in Langa township. The play was directed by Sizwe Msutu, a contemporary black theatre director.

Msutu sums up the experience as

something that Langa has not seen for a long time - an evening of theatre … people are starving for theatre. This community does not have the money of the average theatregoer … There are no theatres in our townships. Langa is one of the oldest townships and they are feeling that Artscape32 has chosen them as the site pilot for this project. It really gives the feeling that the arts exist outside of the communities.33

Theatre does exist in the townships. It now has another name. It is called community theatre. The current state of township theatre is that it has undergone massive change. There are several reasons for this. The main one is that during the 1980s, theatre projects were established in Cape Town's metropole. These projects were established by theatre practitioners who plied their trade in town theatre.

Van Graan confirms that much of the work that has been done in such communities has sprung from the talent of individuals, their love for their art and their ability to create conditions for ongoing work and through institutions and projects which have been created by members of these communities or symphathetic "outside" individuals or groups.34

These theatre animators brought about a new terminology for township theatre and called it community theatre.

Community theatre in its current state operates differently from the theatre of Gibson Kente. The contemporary approach is unlike that of Kente's individual dramaturgy and commercial entrepreneurship. Current township theatre trends see the role of the practitioner as that of an educator and community-builder.

The uses of theatre in this stream are based mainly around the initiative and theatre-making approaches influenced by the work of adult educators and community theatre practitioners such as Zakes Mda, Paulo Freire, Ngugi-wa-Thiong'o and Augosto Boal. This practice is broadly known as Community Theatre for Development (TFD).

The TFD theatre-makers have moved away from the conventional Eurocentric and American "classical theatre" or "theatre for entertainment" approaches into a new form of practice. The new form is "project-based". TFD directs the "project" activities towards empowering underprivileged and disadvantaged communities, using the theatre as a vehicle to reflect and debate issues affecting their current situation. This form applies the feedback and evaluation process where the recipients (communities) and the agents (service providers) seek ways to work from the same periphery. The skills imparted are envisaged to benefit individuals and community groups or development organisations within the townships.

Unlike in Kente's theatre, where scriptwriting and theatre-making are the responsibility of the individual, community theatre ethics asks for collective contribution towards the work produced. Play production is also different from that of Kente's. The scripts and play-production equipment are minimally utilised, the production sets and props operate on a small and stringent budget, consisting of simple, cheap set designs, costumes and stage-props. This is based on the fact that while they are serving a significant need, such projects are still plagued with problems of funding, the lack of skilled administrators and so forth, so that their potential is limited by internal faculties.35

Unlike conventional Western theatre that requires rigorous performing arts training, TFD is not strict on the training requirement. Non-performers and untrained participants are encouraged to take part in "projects". TFD casts in township plays are composed mainly of non-professional or semi-professional performers. Most community theatre work, when viewed from a conventional professional theatre perspective, is not up to standard. The lack of proper training and the participants' unprofessionalism become so conspicuous that the intended message in the productions or "projects" is often lost on the audience.

While it carries within it positive community-building initiatives, this stream is riddled with fly-by-night unprofessional project co-ordinators, managers and theatre practitioners. Perhaps this is because there are currently no accredited arts training centres or institutions in the townships.

On a positive note, there is a small number of skilled and professional practitioners who have graduated from the city's drama training projects such as the Artscape Educational Resource/Development Centre, the New Africa Theatre Association, the Community Arts Project and academic institutions such as the University of Cape Town Drama School. Professionally trained TFD practitioners commute between working in mainstream and community theatres. Most of the community theatre think-tanks are based in the city, for financial and other reasons.

Although the current socio-political climate in post-apartheid South Africa has come with a new wave, the contrasting dynamics between mainstream and community theatre are the same as those under apartheid. Management and administrative problems have not changed from those in the period from 1970 to the 1990s.

Community theatre is currently faced with a lack of:

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