The death in a car accident of Mbongeni Ngema has recalled the playwright, choreographer, actor and musician’s renown for his musical on the 1976 uprising, Sarafina!, the controversy earned by his costly Aids-awareness production, Sarafina 2, and his racially offensive song AmaNdiya.
Ngema died in a head-on collision near Lusikisiki. He was a passenger.
Sarafina! was his signature work.
According to Ismail Mahomed, director of the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, writing in the Daily Maverick, the show was conceived in 1984 and premiered in 1987 at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, having been ‘born against the tide of South Africa’s most repressive state of emergency that prevailed in 1985 and 1986’.
The production’s famous song, ‘Freedom is coming’, became an anthem for young black South Africans at the time.
The musical latterly became an international hit.
Soon after the first democratic elections in 1994, Ngema was commissioned by the then health minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to produce the R12-million Sarafina 2 as an educational touring performance to raise awareness of HIV/Aids at the height of the epidemic.
Mahomed writes: ‘Both the production and the tendering process were mired in scandals of irregular tender processes, corruption and poor service delivery.
‘Despite huge public outrage and extensive exposés by the media, the ANC in government adopted an arrogant attitude of denial, condoning the minister’s failures – a problem that became one of the many seeds that spawned the party’s legacy of corruption and its lack of public accountability.’
Ngema courted controversy with his 2002 song, AmaNdiya, which was banned from broadcast media for what were claimed to be sweeping generalisations about Indians oppressing or dispossessing Zulus.
Ngema insisted that the song was not intended to incite hatred but rather to open a discussion about economic disparities.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/50236996587]