Mbongeni Ngema, 68, playwright known for ‘Sarafina!’

Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist, and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.

Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.

“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, after Mr. Ngema’s death.

In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he co-created the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!,” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”

“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent antiapartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.

“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’

“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”

Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.

Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.

“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.

“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).

“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.

It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.

Mbongeni Ngema was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.

According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.

“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”

While he was working in a fertilizer factory in the mid1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.

“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.

Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with performer Percy Mtwa.

He, Mtwa, and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mtwa.

The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.

Mr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing, and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment, and police violence.

The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.

Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.

“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.

Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce.