‘Soweto’s Burning’ Takes a Close Look at the Roots of Racism

Children aren’t born racist. As “South Pacific’s” Lt. Cable sang: “You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late, before you are 6, or 7 or 8, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

“The parents mold you,” says South African playwright Ross Kettle. “They give you up to the school system, and then they give you into the army. By that time, it’s a very difficult process to cleanse that individual. I’m trying to figure out what does one do with those individuals who have been brainwashed, in fact.”

Kettle’s drama, “Soweto’s Burning,” which opened Thursday at the Hudson Backstage, is part of that investigation.

The author-director-actor left South Africa for good in 1984. Before then, he had studied for three years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. In South Africa, he worked as first assistant director on numerous features and acted as co-artistic director of the Hermit Theatre. Since his move to the United States, Kettle has worked as an actor, particularly as a regular on “As the World Turns,” and “Santa Barbara,” for which he was nominated for an Emmy.

“Soweto’s Burning” makes a particularly personal statement, he says. Its writing was not labor. With a chuckle, he says he dreamed the whole play one night, then wrote the first draft during the next five days.

The story concerns two members of a South African theater company--Emma, a white woman, and Joseph, who is black. It is past curfew for Joseph, a dangerous situation for the young man. He can’t safely go home, so Emma invites him to sleep at her place. There is no romance, just a gesture from which a friendship develops. But Emma’s boyfriend, Steph, played by the author, returns home at the wrong time.

It’s a situation that bares deeply felt emotions in all three--emotions that are well-known to the participants in this first production of Kettle’s drama.

“The play has a very important meaning for me,” says Musetta Vander, the South African actress who plays Emma. Vander has been in the United States for three years. “Growing up there--somehow when you’re in a situation like that you don’t really see it objectively, because you’re surrounded by it. When you go out of the country and look back, you can see what you were actually in, kind of blinded while you were in it.”

Vander, from an unusually liberal Afrikaner family, agrees with Kettle. “They weren’t born like that. They were made this way by the situation, by the government. They’ve been warped by living there.”

Vander, who was host of a weekly pop video show called “Telemuzik,” South Africa’s equivalent of MTV, turned to acting in television and feature films. After relocating to Los Angeles, she appeared in music videos with the likes of Tina Turner and Elton John, and can be seen in “Hoffa” with Jack Nicholson, and with Nick Nolte in “I’ll Do Anything.”

She shakes her head when talking about her school days. “We were so separated in school, strict and so protected. It was like being in a little Nazi camp. You were trained to think in certain ways. But because I was very into theater and dancing, yes, that brought me into contact with a lot of black Africans.” She says she realized that “somehow a big mistake has been made, and we have to change it.”

Ron Kunene, co-producer and technical adviser for the production, had a different view. He grew up black in Soweto, a black township next to Johannesburg. “It’s something that can happen,” he says about the friendship between Emma and Joseph in the play, “but very seldom. The way the system functions, at a certain time there are curfews, at a certain time people have to be gone from one area to another, and the government is very vicious in dealing with that. Also, they have always had a way of finding an excuse to lock you up.” It sounds familiar.

Kunene, who was in the original Broadway cast of “Sarafina!” and has recorded with Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, and teaches African languages at Berlitz, can be heard on the soundtrack of Disney’s new animated feature, “King of the Jungle.”

“Growing up in Soweto,” he says, “as blacks in Africa, we used to have our own humor. That has transcended into this play too, like how we view white people, because racism is such a big joke.”

It isn’t much of a joke to American actor Terrence Ellis, who plays Joseph. He says many young African-Americans are put off by the image they are given in American schools of black Africans. When he was in grade school in Chicago, he says, he learned an important lesson.

He recalls, “The teacher said, ‘The British soldiers were trying to make sure that the savages had an opportunity to learn.’ I raised my hand and said, ‘I don’t understand something here. The British are going into this country to take this land, and they have on nice suits and you call them soldiers. Now, the African is trying to defend his land and create a home, and you call him a savage. Why isn’t he a soldier?’ You know what she said? ‘Terrence, that’s not what we’re teaching. You’re out of line, go down and see the principal.’ ”

Ellis, who starred in Negro Ensemble Theatre’s Obie Award-winning production of “Zooman and the Sign,” and will be remembered for his fine performance in “East Texas Hot Links” at Los Angeles’ Met Theatre, believes that “we all contribute to the problem, but we all don’t seek a solution.”

That racism and prejudice are passed from generation to generation by parents is no secret. No one has an answer to how they can be flushed out of childhood training. But the ignorance and fear that breed them, says Kettle, somehow have to be erased. He remembers that television didn’t arrive in South Africa until 1975. He also remembers the reason--a South African prime minister who commented, “We don’t want this little black box, because it will incite the masses.” That sounds familiar today also.

The message in the play is openness, and it’s a message of hope.

As Kunene says, “That is why I believe, that whatever we do, maybe more emphasis should be on the future, the brighter future. Maybe it’s pessimism, but what else can we do? We can’t sit here and apologize to each other. ‘Oh, I’m sorry I killed millions of your people.’ The main thing is to create a brighter future.”