HOME IN SOUTH AFRICA
Centaur founder closes circle
After 28 years as artistic director of Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, Maurice Podbrey suddenly gave it all up to discover the meaning of life.
He found it 13,000 kilometres away in the impoverished township of Khayelitsha near Cape Town, helping kids find matching shoes and computer time to do their homework and a chance at a decent life through the sports and education club he helps manage.
A holdover of South Africa’s apartheid system that segregated citizens based on race, Khayelitsha is among the largest and poorest of the many townships that still exist, with roughly one million blacks living in a space built for 200,000.
More than 50 per cent of residents are unemployed and the majority live in tin-roofed shacks. With limited opportunities, many young people turn to drugs or gangs. Membership in an organization like the City Masters Sports and Education Club can provide a ticket out.
“It’s life and death for these kids,” said Podbrey, 83. “It’s basic in a way that we have never seen or experienced.”
His new vocation represents a closing of the circle for Podbrey, who was born in South Africa, and a means to resolve a guilt that niggled for more than half a century.
A way, he says, “to complete the story of my life.”
Podbrey splits his time between his Montreal home, with his wife, Elsa Bolam, founder of the Geordie Productions youth theatre company, and South Africa. He’s giving a talk at the Atwater Library Tuesday along with George Bowser and Rick Blue of the musical duo Boswer and Blue titled The Kid Who Gave it All Away For Nothing. The venue is fully booked.
“It’s a bit of a report back, a reconstruction of my life, to tell people why I went back to South Africa, what happened, my search for meaning.”
And to raise funds to ensure kids have shoes and a safe place to study.
‘I’M GOING HOME’
Born in Durban, South Africa, into a socialist family of Lithuanian-Jewish refugees, Podbrey recoiled at the dehumanizing effects of apartheid. As a student radical, conditions in the 1960s became so bad he had to make a choice.
“The pressure was growing — you either had to go extremely radical and risk the world, risk everything, or you had to leave,” he said. “And I left. I thought I was going for a couple years. It stretched to 40.”
He moved to England at 27, then came to Montreal, eventually cofounding the Centaur Theatre in 1969 to address the lack of Englishlanguage theatre in the province.
He stayed for nearly three decades. But the call of home remained strong. He found himself crying during the 1995 World Cup rugby finals between South Africa and New Zealand attended by president Nelson Mandela.
“I found myself awash with emotion and tears, and I told my wife ‘I’m going home.’ And she said ‘OK, I’ll make you some sandwiches.’ ”
He left his wife and three grown children in 1997 (they still live in North America, including his daughter Alison Darcy who runs the Scapegoat Carnivale theatre company in Montreal), and became involved in theatre in Cape Town, creating the Mopo Cultural Trust to raise funding to develop plays.
The work was satisfying, but wasn’t fulfilling his goal of truly connecting with his homeland.
“When you grow up white in South Africa you are excluded willy nilly no matter what your politics are,” he said. “You are excluded. You see things from a bubble of reputation. You can’t really get out of that. That was my experience, despite the fact my family was very left wing. I left the country with only a partial knowledge of what the country was about. So I needed to go back and discover.”
PAULINE PODBREY FOUNDATION
At a memorial for his sister Pauline in 2010, brothers Lennox and Ellias Matiwane asked him to help the sports club they started out of their home eight years earlier in Khayelitsha. They created the nonprofit Pauline Podbrey Foundation.
Moved by the project and Podbrey’s credentials, which include the Order of Canada, the Canadian government kicked in $10,000 to create a proper clubhouse at the Matiwane homestead, putting in an office, solar panels for electricity, a library and computers.
Today the club has 200 members playing soccer every weekend through an eight-month season. Because the conditions at the leagues in their township are precarious (referees’ lives are threatened, female players harassed, belongings stolen) they bus their nine teams to a safer league 12 kilometres away, the costs covered by a local charity. There is money for uniforms and a couple of hundred meals at the games. Funding to cover the club’s $60,000 in annual expenses comes from a wide array of sources, including Switzerland, Germany, Britain and South Africa. Friends of the Centaur have been generous. Their success allowed the sports club to expand opening tutoring services, offer full meals three days a week and provide health care. And to win several soccer league titles. The clubhouse has become a community centre, providing services for the handicapped, and sewing machines and baking machines to grant economic independence to residents. “The kids are still in a tough situation, but now at least they have a place to do homework, and teachers to help for those with no parents to guide them,” Podbrey said. “It’s humbling and inspiring. If nobody is doing something, they go into gangs, and they have short lifespans.” For Podbrey, doing what he calls “a small thing in a big country ” has brought a sense of peace. “It’s just turned me around. I was living a comfortable life here (in Montreal) doing what I loved. It was fun, exciting. It was nice. But it wasn’t what I really wanted. I wanted to know what South Africa was all about. I’d left too early and I needed to go back and rediscover this. “I always say there were four columns to my life: South Africa, England, Canada — where my family were all born, where I married — then going back to South Africa, and completing the circle.” For more information on the Pauline Podbrey Foundation and the City Masters Sports and Education Club, go to ppfoundation.net. Those wishing to contribute can contact Maurice Podbrey at mpodbrey@gmail.com rbruemmer@postmedia.com twitter.com/renebruemmer