‘ASINAMALI!’: REPORT FROM SOUTH AFRICA

Live every day as though it were your last, and one day you’ll be right.

--Breaker Morant

Psychologically speaking, there’s no true leisure class in South Africa, where everybody, to one degree or another, is embattled. That may in part account for why virtually all of its serious art and literature has an unadorned, penetrating directness, and an edge of sorrow for all that has happened and all that’s about to happen. Everyone knows that time is running out--for many, it already has.

Certainly we’ve seen that tension expressed in its theater, the latest example of which, the touring “Asinamali!,” moves to the Mark Taper Forum on Tuesday after a two-week run at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. “Asinamali!” shares with “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island” a visceral and physical tension where not a gesture or a syllable is wasted, and with “Woza, Albert!” a crackling comedic energy and speed.

“Asinamali!” was created by “Woza’s” co-author (with Percy Ntwa), Mbongeni Ngema, who also directs this story of five black South Africans who share a prison cell and relate how they got where they are (there’s a good deal of Zulu song and dance, but it’s an impromptu expression of cultural solidarity--this is no campfire sing-along). One had the bad luck to be caught up in a security raid; one took a tumble with his Afrikaner employer’s amorous wife and got caught; one is a migrant worker whose frustrations led him to murder; one is a crafty, hard-boiled pickpocket; one is a political activist who worked with the martyred Misze Dube.

Dube was a resistance leader in the township of Lamontville, outside of Durban, and was gunned down after leading a series of protests against forced evictions and arbitrary rent increases by the government. (“Asinamali!” is Zulu for “We have no money!”) Ngema was a witness to the events, out of which he created the Committed Artists, the group he trained to do “Asinamali!” (One of its members is currently serving eight years in jail for his involvement in the Lamontville strike.)

You’ll remember Ngema as one of “Woza’s” exuberant, extraordinarily inventive performers (he does not appear in “Asinamali!”). He’s a natural for the stage, though he claims that Zulus in general, with their love of music, dance, mime and storytelling, have a built-in sense of theater. It wasn’t an African prototype that led to the genesis of the Committed Artists, however. It was, of all people and things, Luis Valdez and his El Teatro Campesino.

“During our world tour with ‘Woza,’ we visited San Juan Bautista and talked with Valdez,” Ngema said, over lunch at an Indian restaurant. “The history of the campesinos--the farm workers--has a lot in common with the black South African laborers. I was especially interested in how he put on shows for the striking field workers. He’d mount them on truck beds at crossings. The plays would last for only 15 minutes or so, so they could get away before the police came.

“I thought I’d like to improvise plays at home for squatters who didn’t have halls to go to. I was also interested in training people who hadn’t acted or sung before. I taught the techniques I had learned from studying Grotowski, where the whole body is treated as an instrument, a trampoline, and how you develop parts of it called resonators through certain exercises that liberate energy and direct the voice. I train actors like athletes. Also, I think it’s important to have something concrete to relate to when you’re doing a specific role. We walked in the street, observing people. I told them, ‘If you want to play a tramp, go to the street, find such a person and observe him closely.’

“Part of the group became very serious. In ‘83, I wanted to write about poverty. Dube was organizing the rent protest and then was murdered by informers. I went to the funerals. Some of the members of the Committed Artists were social workers and activists. I sent them to Lamontville to observe what was going on, even though it was very dangerous.

“The movement began to spread through the country. In 1985, the army moved into Sebokeng, near Johannesburg. Before, it had been just the police. Now that the army was being brought in, we knew the struggle had come to a point where no one could know what would happen, and no one could step back.”

Ngema brought such a frenetic energy to “Woza” that it’s a bit surprising to find him, offstage, a soft-spoken, innately genteel figure (as opposed to formally polite) with an almost beatific tranquillity--which is often the case with people who have lived close to terror and violence. You often see something like it in rural American blacks in the South, a quiet politesse that masks deep circumspection. Of the rest of “Asinamali’s” cast, in fact, one of the Berkeley Rep’s staffers said: “You see them around, so quiet and shy you hardly know they’re there. But when they get onstage, My God! --I couldn’t believe it!”

Ngema’s soft British accent is also a bit disarming--one of the paradoxes of South African life is that the Boer War, one of the bitterest wars of independence this century of bitter wars has known, and the eventual secession of South Africa from the British Commonwealth of Nations in 1961 didn’t eliminate a deep Anglican cultural influence in South Africa, which today remains bilingual (English and Afrikaans) and retains touches of British imperial formality and manners--though the Dutch Reform way of life still rules. There isn’t much in Ngema’s demeanor to distinguish from that of formal diplomacy; there’s the same calm, and tact, and equipoise, which was probably there before he became one of South Africa’s leading writer-directors.

Ngema, 31, is the son of a policeman (“Nowadays every black policeman is considered an informer, whereas in my father’s day it was just a job,” he offered by way of quick clarification). “My home is in Durban. I started out to be a musician. I play guitar and piano, and I compose. To this day, music is very important in what I do. A friend of mine approached me to write music for a play of his that was touring the townships. I played in the band. When there was a break, I’d make everyone laugh by imitating the fellow who was playing the lead. He turned out to be an unreliable actor and was sacked, and I was asked to do the lead on the strength of my impression.

“Eventually the writer came to me and said, ‘Why don’t we do a play together?,’ since I like to tell stories. I wrote and directed a play called ‘The Last Generation,’ and then went to Johannesburg to join Gibson Kante’s company” (Kante is a highly respected teacher-director, comparable in influence to Lee Strasberg here but not especially well known outside South Africa). “Shortly after, I met Percy Ntwa, who was a dancer and singer. We came up with the idea of what it would be like if Christ came to South Africa, and ‘Woza, Albert!’ was born. Barney Simon, artistic co-director, joined us later.” (It was Simon’s Market Theater in Johannesburg that launched “Woza” to international acclaim, and Simon’s partner, Manny Manim, has designed the lights for “Asinamali!,” which opened at the Market in May of 1985.)

Plenty about “Asinamali!,” with its quick role changes and multiple incidents collapsed in theatrical quick-time, reflects Ngema’s love of invention and his full use of theatrical gestures and body language to tell a story. (His devices are fairly restricted to the body; aside from five chairs and a rudimentary clothes closet, the stage is bare.)

But for all its mirthfulness, there’s no mistaking its political awareness and its sense of suffering and historical moment--or the terms of this particular struggle. At one point, toward the end, the entire cast clusters in a tight embrace that shuts out the rest of the world. It’s one of those moments where they tell us that, for all they share, we can’t presume to know them (Ngema mentioned that “Asinamali!” was in rehearsal for a year, and that there were times when they felt lucky to be able to share a loaf of bread). Their shaved heads pressed together look like the seeds of some strange flower closing in on itself.

“People for thousands of years have refused to look and see each other as human beings all created in the image of God,” Ngema said, and his normally inscrutable face took on a mournful cast.

“In my opinion, God is a spiritual force for goodness. But people, in their self-interest, don’t see that, and one of the things they do is interpret each other by color, or other meaningless differences. It’s caused so much destruction in this world. Christ was crucified over it. It happened in Germany, with the Germans and the Jews. It’s happened in your country--though not as bad.” (Ngema’s assessment of the American character is guarded. “People treated Percy and I like little ET’s,” he said of his “Woza” tour here. “They didn’t know what they know now about conditions in South Africa. But Americans live largely in a plastic world, not a world of the spirit.”)

“The whites have created such a complex situation, not only for South Africa but in other countries, that it will have to be a long time before people realize they don’t have to fight each other to live.

“The complications have also become true of black life. It took the police and the army eight years to try and do away with the Crossroads (the shantytown near Capetown), and they never succeeded. It took only two weeks for the black vigilantes to destroy it--with police support. They had lived there. They knew how to do it.”

Ngema fears that the state of emergency recently declared by the South African government has “turned the townships into concentration camps, where the police have the power to arrest and shoot you--though that’s been happening long before the emergency.” The media blackout is also a concern. Where will it stop? Could it result in the shutdown of the theater?

Another fear, even closer to home, is the internecine strife that has engulfed black South Africans themselves. “One of the black leaders, (Zulu chief Mangosuthu Gatsha) Buthelezi, appeals to the older, more rural uneducated blacks with his Inkatha movement. The feeling in the townships, among the younger, more educated blacks, is that Inkatha is radical. They’re fighting each other now. In certain places, if you support Inkatha, you’re inviting death.”

One of the common stylistic threads of the black South African theater we’ve seen in America these past few years is the enormous compression, the physical tension and the speed by which these stories are told. It’s as though their tellers have to get it all out in a hurry, because time is short, the knock could sound on the door at any moment, and they may never get the chance again.

Ngema and the Committed Artists certainly know that firsthand. Two weeks before they arrived in New York for the begining of their American tour, they were booked for a performance in Natal Province. According to Ngema, a group of vigilantes got wind of the performance and came to the theater, looking for Ngema. The cast bolted the theater and ran to hide in the fields. The group’s hapless impresario didn’t make it, and was hacked to death.

Late in the intermissionless play, the troupe fans out to look for “informers” in the audience, which makes for a tense moment, and Bhoyi Ngema (Mbongeni’s younger brother)--looking like Marvin Hagler seething at a referee’s pre-fight instructions--will pick someone out of the audience to stand up. On the night this observer saw “Asinamali!,” the figure chosen was a slight, graying, academic-looking man who couldn’t quite let go of his seat and stand straight as Ngema yelled “You! Get up! I mean you! Yes, you! Get up, man! “

What followed took us onto another plane, where we’re no longer in the safety implicit in watching a theatrical performance in the dark but suddenly exposed to the terror that annihilates categories. It was a uniquely South African moment--angry, impassioned, eloquent, relentless, climaxing at the edge of a painfully awaited unknown.

“What do you think this is about? It’s not only about the Afrikaans language. It’s not only about diamonds. It’s not about rent increases. It’s not about gold. It’s not about sugar cane plantations in Natal . . . passbooks . . . the Immorality Act . . . the vote. What is it? Do you think I’m playing games with you? Do you think I’m acting ? You have to look for it in yourself, deep down in your heart!”

Bhoyi Ngema looked away, gently releasing the man, who sat down. We felt for a piercing instant what the members of that troupe--and their people at home--have been up against all their lives.