Corruption is still the main dish
Zakes Mda’s 22-year-old play is set in Lesotho but is topical for SA, writes Christina Kennedy
CORRUPTION is a subject that never goes out of fashion, says Makhaola Ndebele. It is true: the Zakes Mda play he is directing, which opens at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg on Friday, may be set in 1980s Lesotho, but as an exposé of government greed it is timeless and, in present-day South Africa, extremely topical.
As the country reflects on an election in which opposition parties dined on accusing those in power of self-enrichment, the revival of Mda’s satire, The Mother of All Eating, promises to provide food for thought by placing the culture of gross materialism or “eating” in perspective.
Explaining the play’s title, Ndebele said: “In Sotho and Zulu, when you’re wealthy, they say you are eating — you are nourished, full.” But in this cautionary tale, a corrupt official’s greed ends up consuming him.
Despite recently being honoured by President Jacob Zuma with the Order of Ikhamanga in silver, celebrated novelist and playwright Mda remains openly critical of the president.
Mda, a professor of English at Ohio University in the US, said a meaningful work of art might be informed by contemporary events, but could outlive them.
“The secret is to focus on human beings [the characters] and their foibles rather than on the politics,” he said. “This means the story must be driven by the characters and their conflicts rather than by political issues . . . That is why this play is applicable to South Africa, even though it was informed by the corruption in Lesotho long before South Africa was liberated.”
Mda believes South Africa has strong institutions in place to root out corruption, “but, of course, wily politicians will always try to subvert those checks and balances”.
For Ndebele, the son of writer and academic Njabulo Ndebele, the play strikes particularly close to home. He grew up in Lesotho, where it is set, before moving to South Africa in 1992 just as the winds of political change were starting to be felt.
“Being a teen in exile in the ’80s, I knew what a closed society was like, where there’s one idea, one type of thinking,” he said during rehearsals for The Mother of All Eating in Brixton, Johannesburg.
The playwas first produced in Lesotho in 1992 and, as Ndebele related, this send-up of bent officialdom “caused a huge hooha”. As a young drama student
In Sotho and Zulu, when you’re wealthy, they say you are eating — nourished, full
at the University of Cape Town, he did not realise at the time that, some 20 years later, he would be at the helm of this controversial work.
After several years of acting in movies and television series, scriptwriting and running an industrial theatre company, Ndebele went to teach at the University of the Witwatersrand. There he started flexing his directing muscles.
“The [prevailing South African] environment was not really nurturing for actors ... actors were not really seen as part of the creative process, which frustrated me,” he said.
Besides, this young creative likes to think visually, in images, and see his vision materialise on stage.
During the past four years, he has directed seven plays — by South African playwrights such as Mike van Graan and classics by Anton Chekhov and August Strindberg.
The opportunity to direct the Mda play came as part of Wits’s Drama for Life programme in 2010. He trimmed the “fat” off the play, reducing it to 75 minutes and homing in on the core issues. It was even staged in Lesotho again, where it was enthusiastically received.
When reimagining this oneman play for the Market Theatre run, Ndebele hit on the idea of casting not one actor but two (Mpho Osei-Tutu and Jerry Mntonga) as The Man, the civil servant who is consumed by greed. “The character has evolved into two sides of the same person,” he said, “showing his conscience. And given the idea of excess and opulence, he’s literally too much — twice as much, in fact.”
Ndebele is taking the visual metaphor of the duality, or multiplicity, of man’s nature through to the set design, which will feature mirrors that reflect different facets of the actors, as well as the audience.
The Mother of All Eating, he said, featured humour ranging from the “laugh-out-loud funny” to the “unsettling”.
“I try to do work that has some relevance,” he said. “I’m a very reflective person. Hopefully, as an artwork, it might inspire something or change someone’s perspective. It’s important to talk about political things through art.”