Buhle Ngaba Actor, author and theatre activist
Visual artist
Like many of her contemporaries, Buhle Ngaba is immersed in multiple modes of creative expression that produce a visibility and voice concomitant with the age of the rise of the modern black woman practitioner.
This combination of attributes means one can’t and usually doesn’t just do one thing. This 25-year-old’s hands are full.
Ngaba studied acting and contemporary performance at the University Currently Known as Rhodes (or what some prominent academics call Cecil’s College), the process of performance at the University of Leeds and was the first black woman recipient of the Brett Goldin Bursary, which resulted in a residency at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
But it wasn’t her stage endeavours that beamed Ngaba into the scene of the virtually visible — it was a children’s story that she accidentally wrote and published in 2016, The Girl Without a Sound.
“Accidental” because she meant to write a five-page children’s book to give to her aunt as a birthday present. When she told her friends about the story she had written, they also wanted copies and the rest is a downloaded-45 000-times tale.
Perhaps the reason for the book’s success is the intentionality of the writer’s approach. “The lens through which I work is focused on telling the stories of women of colour, as our voices are not heard and finding echoes of ourselves in history books is impossible,” she says. There are plans to translate the book into several indigenous languages.
For the 2017 theatre festival circuit, Ngaba is in the process of developing The Swan Song, a one-woman show she wrote on odd afternoons when she would stare at the swans on the River Avon. It’s a story that plays on the meaning of swan song both as an elegy to Goldin (a promising actor who was murdered in Cape Town in 2006) and as metaphor for pain and love lost. The show premieres at Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn in April. At the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in June, she will present a two-woman show that she is devel- oping with another director.
In the spirit of wringing out all that she absorbed in Stratford, Ngaba is piloting workshops called Shakespeare Grounded with the aim of making William Shakespeare’s writing accessible to children who have never been exposed to his work. This she is doing through her production company KaMatla Productions.
“My feeling is once kids can comprehend the elements of a story through experiential learning, then they can begin to comprehend how all great classics are only named as such because they tell a basic story of what it is to be human. Flawed and all,” she says.
“Once you grasp this, you begin to realise that Romeo and Juliet are the equivalent of Sipho and Jabu who live in a township, fall in love but can’t be together because their families have been in taxi wars for centuries.”
Ngaba says she works from a place “of wanting to contribute to a movement (led by women of colour) to a world where we are seen and heard”.