Heart of a Strong Woman: A memoir

By Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema

Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema loved the theatre and dreamed of being an actress. She soon discovered that acting wasn't for her – managing productions was. She meets rising-star, Mbongeni Ngema and they marry.  

As his success grows, they start a company that births the hit Sarafina! But beneath the stardom, Xoliswa experiences constant abuse.  

With Fred Khumalo, she tells her powerful story. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780795709845

Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema

Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema is the CEO of the Joburg City Theatres (Joburg Theatre, Soweto Theatre and Roodepoort Theatre). She is also the former CEO of the South African State Theatre and former MD of Bassline. Xoliswa has a social science degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and lives in Joburg.   

Book preview

Prologue

The wedding

20 December 1991

Hesitantly at first, dawn probed the dark horizon with its light grey fingers. Encountering no resistance, it gained confidence and pushed the dark curtain further back. The city began to stir, ever so languidly. Happy it had done its job, dawn made a hasty retreat, making way for older brother morning. Dressed in shimmering yellows and bright blues and burnt oranges, morning took over. It started dancing, like a sprite, on the roofs of tall buildings, on the glittering faces of skyscrapers, on the recently cleaned pavements. But morning soon vacated the stage, handing it over to swarms of people – on foot, in sleek sedans, singing songs of joy from buses – surging around the corner of Smith and Aliwal streets.

‘Who are these people?’ someone asked.

‘Sarafina is getting married, I hear!’ someone else offered.

‘Which Sarafina?’

‘Mbongeni Ngema’s Sarafina.’

‘But Sarafina is a stage character.’

‘Yes, the woman behind the stage character is getting married.’

‘Hawu! She’s so young and fresh and pretty, who’s the lucky guy?’

‘Mbongeni Ngema himself, who else?’

‘Hawu, isn’t Mbongeni a bit too long in the tooth for this girl – he’s like in his 40s and she is only fifteen, if not younger?’

In fact, Mbongeni Ngema, creator of the Broadway smash hit musical Sarafina!, was 35 and ‘Sarafina’ was 21 at the time they were set to walk down the aisle this warm Friday morning, but their story had begun in 1986, when Leleti Khumalo, got the leading role. Beautiful, dynamic, precocious Leleti would become a star and Sarafina! an international success on stage and, later, on screen.

With shooting for Sarafina! the movie beginning early in 1991, and with the cast in South Africa that year, Mbongeni decided he would use the opportunity to tie the knot with Leleti in flamboyant style. His bride was now a spunky young woman whose face regularly graced the pages of glossy magazines in South Africa and abroad.

By the time the sun was high enough to be a nuisance that summer’s day in Durban, the Central Methodist Church at the corner of Smith and Aliwal had become a hive of activity. Although the groom and the bride had not yet arrived – they were 75 minutes late – the many well-wishers were milling around outside on the pavements and the street.

Reverend William Bohlmann, who was to conduct the marriage service, was a bunch of nerves, it being in the nature of members of the clergy sometimes to take these ceremonies personally – but that wasn’t the only reason for his anxiety. Earlier that day the priest had received a three-page faxed message from a firm of lawyers in Pretoria and he needed to make a decision.

The sun was high in the sky when a cavalcade of sleek cars stopped outside the church, bringing lunch-hour traffic to a halt. Celebrated musician Hugh Masekela, the chief umkhongi or emissary, got out of one of the cars and hurried inside to announce the arrival of the bridal couple.

Singing started in earnest. Out on the streets, passers-by who had spotted Ngema and his bride stopped to stare, to ululate and sing in congratulation. That’s how these things are done, after all. Joy is shared. Or, as they say in Zulu, ‘akudlulwa ngendlu yakhiwa’ – when you encounter a party of people building a house, you don’t just pass by; you ask if you can be of any help – even if that only means uttering words of encouragement to those who are engaged in the physical act of building.

Masekela remained inside for a long time. The bridal couple and the guests waiting in the cars grew restless. What was keeping Masekela so long? When he finally came out, he was in an agitated state. Clearly something was afoot. He whispered into Mbongeni’s ear. There was a quick verbal exchange between the two men. Then a smiling Masekela, trying to play it cool and more or less succeeding, whisked everyone into the church. The singing and ululating crescendoed.

Inside Reverend Bohlmann said a few non-committal words and that was it. The service came to an end. Some of the people who walked out of the church afterwards could be forgiven for wondering what had just happened, while others, who thought they knew what had just happened, said the official exchange of vows had been done in an earlier ceremony. The brief ‘service’ inside the Methodist church was just meant to bring the couple inside the house of God.

Later that evening, hundreds of well-wishers crowded into a five-star hotel on the beachfront where booze flowed and food was plentiful. It was a spot-the-celebrity jamboree that would be the talking point of South African celebrity for a long time. Members of the Sarafina! cast had taken a break from the hectic shooting of the movie in Soweto and they were all at the party, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Lebo M and Whoopi Goldberg, Tu Nokwe, Somizi Mhlongo and Dumisani Dlamini. Hugh Masekela flitted from table to table, the gregarious side of his nature in full parade. Musician Thembi Mtshali sparkled. Sister Bucks, who had designed the bridal couple’s outfits, pranced around like a peacock, brimming with satisfaction and joy. Different bands treated the guests at this private party to an eclectic smorgasbord of musical offerings. The groom himself took to the stage with his band and wowed everyone with his hit song Stimela SaseZola. It was definitely a party that Durbanites would speak about for a long time.

The most spoken-about aspect of the whole thing was to come two days later, however. The front page of the Sunday Times Extra edition published a full-colour picture of the bride and groom being congratulated by the producer of Sarafina! the movie, Anant Singh, but it was the headline that caught the attention: ‘Priest Refuses to Marry Sarafina Bride and Groom’. In colourful detail, the story, written by veteran reporter Marlan Padayachee, unravelled the mystery that had confounded those who’d been at the church on Friday. The Sunday Times explained how Xoliswa Ngema, the long-time wife of Mbongeni Ngema and also his celebrated creative partner, had been in the dark about the wedding plans until the last minute. When she discovered what was about to happen, she consulted her lawyers, who moved swiftly to block the official ceremony. They drafted a letter which they faxed to Reverend Cooper of the Methodist Church who in turn forwarded it to Reverend Bohlmann just hours before he was to have tied the couple in holy matrimony.

Only those in artistic circles knew who Xoliswa Ngema was. To the average newspaper reader, the questions that arose that Sunday were: Who is this Xoliswa? And why did she have to wait until they got to church before she stopped them?

I am Xoliswa. And I am going to tell you my story.

Chapter 1

Shell-shocked

I was not there to witness the excitement of the wedding ceremony. Even though I was in Johannesburg that day, almost 600 kilometres from the action, I was singed by the fire that was burning down there in Durban. I knew that what happened in that church was to change my life forever. It had to change because the man getting married, Mbongeni Ngema, was at that time still my lawfully wedded husband. I was the mystery woman whose name got tongues wagging and tempers rising. I was, and still am, Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema. I was not about to let Mbongeni get away with it just like that. I wanted him to be accountable. If he wanted to marry another woman, fine, but he had to do it the proper way. That was why I stopped that wedding. I was not being melodramatic or attention-seeking. I had to fight.

But of course, that is not how you start a story. First of all, it has to be clear that this book is not only about my marriage to Mbongeni Ngema. It is also about the birth and triumph of Sarafina!, the production we birthed together; the production that changed the face of South African theatre; the production that gave impetus to the careers of many artists – actors and musicians – who will continue to be reference points in cultural production in this country. This book is about how theatre can actually make a people.

However, in telling the story of Sarafina! it’s inevitable that the narrative includes the personal. Had I not met Mbongeni Ngema, Sarafina! probably wouldn’t have happened. Or it wouldn’t have taken the character it did at the end. Because Mbongeni and I fed into each other. He was, and still is, a great artist; but every artist needs a muse. I was that muse. But also more. I was the person looking at the finances. I was the one acting as mother, sociologist, sister and teacher to members of the cast who came to us at ages as young as fifteen – staying with us for months, years, before they went back to see their biological parents. So, you can already see that ours was not a conventional approach to theatre. We looked after the actors and actresses beyond the lights and glamour of the stage. Which is to say, at the core of this book is the confluence of our artistic and personal lives; how one fed the other, how they bled into each other. Art cannot happen in a vacuum. Art is a human endeavour. Or rather it is an attempt to probe the meaning of life, what it means to be human. All of this informed my decision to start this story with a human drama, one that has remained embedded in the minds of many and which gets invoked whenever and wherever my name gets mentioned.

But to answer the question ‘Who is this Xoliswa?’, we have to go back to the past, to the township of Daveyton, on the East Rand, where I was born in July 1962.

Daveyton, like most black townships in South Africa, was created as a labour reservoir to serve white people in neighbouring towns such as Benoni and Boksburg. In the case of Daveyton, the black people who settled there came from all corners of the country – and beyond – looking for work in the City of Gold and its environs. The mines in Benoni and surrounding areas on the East Rand were the impetus for this migration. Once the towns had been established around the mines, other kinds of industries, textiles, for example, soon mushroomed. While the men worked on the mines, the women served the factories. Many women also worked as domestic servants for white families.

Like so many others, my parents came to Johannesburg lured by promises and hopes of work and an easier life. My father came from the Ciskei, ku Qoboqobo near Alice, and my mother from Graaff-Reinet, both in the Eastern Cape. After moving around different parts of the Greater Johannesburg area, they settled in Daveyton, where I was born on 21 July 1962. My parents were what we would call working class, in that my father was a labourer and my mother a domestic worker and, later on, factory workers. We were no different from the bulk of our neighbours.

Like many townships, Daveyton had sections segregated along tribal lines, in keeping with the grander scheme of apartheid whose motto was ‘separate development’. Naturally, I grew up in the Xhosa section of the township. It’s tragic what the apartheid architects did. As a result of those divisions, a measure of resentment for those outside our tribal circle set in. It was not uncommon for a person to be beaten brutally – sometimes killed – for having strayed into the ‘wrong’ section.

However, with increased politicisation, the racial stratification backfired on the apartheid architects as our people soon realised how interdependent they were. The Bhaca and Zulu people were generally highly regarded when it came to manual work, fixing things, and their skills came in handy across tribal lines.

Over and above the commercial aspects of people’s relationships, culture became a catalyst for a conversation which defied the imposed tribal boundaries. One of the most famous musicians from Daveyton was Victor Ndlazilwana. The multi-instrumentalist and singer came from our section of the township. He was Xhosa. I must admit that I was too young to have been au fait with the kind of music he played, but I knew he was highly regarded not only in the township but all over the country because his music was played on radio. It also helped that his daughter Nomvula was my classmate at Ntsikana Primary School. Even at the age of thirteen, she was already playing in her father’s band, which travelled all over the country. I have seen a picture of her playing the piano to excited crowds in the United States, at the tender age of thirteen.

Although Ndlazilwana was, as I have said, of Xhosa stock, in his musical journey he inevitably worked with people from across the tribal divide. As a result, in his band the famous Jazz Ministers he had the likes of trumpeter Johnny Mekoa, who was Sotho speaking, Boy Ngwenya, who was Zulu, and so on. Apart from formal bands like the Jazz Ministers, the township thrummed to the sounds of music from different parts of the South African cultural melting pot. This was especially so over the weekend. You’d be on your way to church and you’d come across a group of Zulu men, sometimes dressed in the complete traditional regalia of amabheshu and imbadada, and they would suddenly be dancing for your own personal pleasure. Somewhere down the road Basotho men in their ubiquitous blankets and conical hats would be shimmying to the music of the concertina.

Music was a way of life. It was central to black life. Funerals could not be conducted without there being music at the centre. Weddings, traditional feasts and ordinary parties offered people an outlet for the frustrations born of their bleak daily existence – frustrations which they channelled through music. Even the chain gangs who fixed our roads did everything to the thud and beat of music. You would see them lined up on the side of the road, their picks and shovels making love to the stubborn earth. With every thrust of a sharpened pick into the ground they would grunt rhythmically: ‘Abelungu oswayini! Basincish’itiye basibize ngoJim.’ (Whites are swine; they deny us tea, and call us Jim.) The white overseer would be standing not far from these men, smoking his pipe or drinking something from his flask, oblivious to what was being said about him and his fellow whites.

Music. Everywhere you went there was music. When I began to be conversant with the different musical traditions I couldn’t help noticing that the name of Ndlazilwana was mentioned constantly; and wherever he was mentioned, the name of King Kong, a musical stage play, was also mentioned. Ndlazilwana had been part of the cast of King Kong that travelled to the United Kingdom in 1959. However, unlike most members of the cast – including Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Jonas Gwangwa – who stayed on in the UK after the production ended, Ndlazilwana came back to South Africa. He immediately got busy setting up new bands, resuscitating the African-jazz tradition in South Africa.

While the King Kong cast were busy wowing audiences in the UK in 1959 up to 1960, after which many of them started their own individual careers – some of them became legends – back home the music never stopped. But more importantly, a local man, who, ironically, had helped discover many musicians while he worked for Gallo Africa as a talent scout, was busy carving himself a career as a writer of musicals in the tradition of King Kong. That man’s name was Gibson Kente. By 1971, when I around nine years old, Kente had become such an influence in local theatre that everyone who was interested in acting sought him out. Those who thought they were playwrights were producing what were then called ‘sketches’, which, as would later be discovered, were actually what we would today call cut-and-paste jobs of Kente’s productions.

Very young as I was, my parents allowed me to join the local drama society. They were generally protective, and dismissive of those who thought they could make a living through the arts. ‘I don’t mind when you sing over the weekend, or at church, but don’t tell me you think singing or acting in those stupid sketches is a real job’ was how my mother would respond whenever any of us children excitedly announced that we wanted to get involved in the arts. The only reason my parents allowed me to join the dramatic society was because my brother had joined; it was something he did over the weekend.

The dramatic society grew very fast. In no time at all it was staging productions at the local community hall, attracting huge paying crowds. My brother was hired as a doorman – he collected gate takings. Even though they still hadn’t featured me in any of the productions, I had become an appurtenance, an inevitable presence at the performances. I watched grown-up actors and actresses, and aped their movements and recited their lines. I also sang. In the Gibson Kente tradition you cannot act if you can’t sing. I assigned myself parts which I rehearsed religiously. I made it a point that the director and also my brother, who was close to the director, could see I had the resources. So, eventually, this ten-year-old was given a part.

On the day of the performance the Tsakene Hall in Brakpan was packed. Together with the other cast members, I sat backstage while the director tried to get the excited crowd to quieten down so that the performance could begin. Finally, he succeeded and the first act started – a group which exploded into a music and dance act. Then came my scene. I was gently guided towards the stage. I emerged from behind the curtain, ready for my moment. But when I saw the sea of faces, and heard the whispers, and smelled the sweat of the crowd, I froze. All of a sudden I didn’t know what I was doing there. Tears started falling down my face. I think I heard some people giggling; others went Shhhhhh! I ran backstage without uttering a word. The director tried to cajole me into going back to deliver my lines. No, nothing doing!

That was the end of my acting career, over before it started. It didn’t end my love of the theatre, though, and it was the director himself who saw a new role for me. ‘Xoli, you’re smart,’ he said, ‘and quick with figures. Maybe you should take over from your brother in managing the box office.’ And so I became the money person for the dramatic society. As a doorwoman, I was strict: no money, no entrance, no discount. Unbeknown to me, I was laying the foundations for a highly successful career as a manager in the theatrical world.

*

Over the years I have watched hundreds of theatrical productions locally and internationally. Some of them have been excellent, others mildly successful, while the bulk were trashy. It takes a lot to write and produce a play. It takes even more work and guts if you get into the industry with very little training, and absolutely no money, and still hope to pull off a successful production.

Towards the end of 1974 something happened in the theatrical world which I think had a slight bearing on a decision by my parents to remove me from my school in Daveyton. That year, Gibson Kente staged a play called I Believe. In the production, Zwelitsha (played by Peter Sepuma) is a rebellious youth leader, constantly fighting the main security cop (played by Darlington Michaels). Zweli has a vision of a violent confrontation between young people and forces of government. The play ends tragically. I guess you can already tell where this is going. Yes, Kente foresaw the student revolution of 16 June 1976. In 1975, the language of tuition of most subjects was changed to Afrikaans, and this caused the 1976 riots.

At the beginning of the 1976 school year my parents took me to Nzimankulu in Queenstown and enrolled me at a junior secondary school there. Although later I would realise that the move to the Transkei was a blessing in disguise, the transition from urban Daveyton to Nzimankulu was a shock and I missed home terribly.

On 16 June 1976 I was at Park Station in Johannesburg, having travelled home from Queenstown for the mid-year holidays. The station was swarming with soldiers and policemen. I couldn’t understand why. But the next day, 17 June, I understood. Daveyton, along with the rest of the East Rand, erupted into violence. There were running battles between township youths and the police. It would go on for quite a while, people dying left, right and centre; children disappearing, some of them fleeing into exile, others dying in police custody and their bodies simply vanishing into thin air. Of course, I did not know all of this at that time; it was something that one would learn about at a later stage – through newspaper reports, word-of-mouth accounts and, much later, books that put the story of 16 June 1976 into its proper context.

At any rate, I stayed in Daveyton for three weeks after the explosion of violence, and then went back to the calm and tranquillity of Transkei. The painful irony was that while many parts of black South Africa were in flames, the homeland of Transkei was loud with song and celebration. Under the leadership of Paramount Chief Kaiser Daliwonga Mathanzima, Transkei had been granted independence from Pretoria. People who lived in Transkei, who, a few weeks before, were fully fledged South African citizens, were suddenly told they no longer belonged to South Africa. They now belonged to the Republic of Transkei, a self-governing state with its own national anthem, its own radio station, its own flag, and its own passport – incwadi yokundwendwela. In other words, if you were travelling from Transkei to South Africa, you needed to produce this passport which proved that you were a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. To make a bizarre scenario even more laughable, the Republic of Transkei even had its own embassy in South Africa.

In preparing this book, I went back and read some of the reviews of Gibson Kente’s many productions and the impact they had on people of my generation. In my search, I was pleasantly surprised to find a biography called Bra Gib: Father of South Africa’s Township Theatre, written by Rolf Solberg. In the book, there’s a reproduction of an interview with Kente, in which he is giving context to his arguably most prophetic play, I Believe: ‘I was saying I believe that if the government can take note of the attitude of the youth, of the simmering impatience of the youth, the anger of the youth – if