North West Province playwright Omphile Molusi has certainly been effective in drawing attention to the plight of his township home near Lichtenburg. Many festival-goers had never heard of Itsoseng before. When the place does make the national news, it’s for all the wrong reasons: homicide, high rape statistics, and then there was the case of the mortuary failing to cope with a stockpile of unclaimed decomposing corpses.
Not that its citizens aren’t vocal. Some time ago, they managed for a whole day, to delay Thabo Mbeki (then Deputy President) from meeting his Chinese counterpart. Things have been bad in Itsoseng for a long time; hope is ebbing away and patience is running at an end. As Molusi says, “You can’t eat politics”.
Molusi’s play, Istoseng: My Township…My Home, is billed as ‘a scathing indictment against the government’s indifference, cynicism and incompetence’.
When the people of Itsoseng shrugged off Bophutatswana, they burned down the shopping mall – with its library and cinema. Molusi was then a toy-toying 14-year-old. The wreckage remains a symbol of the failure of any renewal after twelve years of democratic government. Officials fly in and out promising to rebuild it.
Molusi tells the story as Mawilla, a man who loses the love of his life, a pretty girl called Dolly, to prostitution. Mawilla rejects her; then helplessly watches Dolly’s steady dissipation, which ends in her death. The play is narrated from her graveside. Vice Motshabi, who works with the company, says “Their love affair doesn’t function because of the political situation in the township”.
Molusi shies away from calling this protest theatre. What we get is an oral history related with disarming sincerity and illustrated with loose dramatics. Mawilla impersonates the other characters – in a way you and I might do impressions of our friends – but he never becomes them in a dramatic sense.
It remains an overwhelmingly political work – “a cry for help” says director Tina Johnson. But unlike much rhetorical theatre, Molusi manages to preserve a fragile emotional core. He wants the love story to reveal the politics, but he hasn’t yet solved the problem of how to relate a story about the shattered lives of the people in Itsoseng, in a manner that becomes the biography of a blighted township.
Clearly, Molusi has a story worth communicating, and an over-riding compulsion to tell it, despite the pain it brings him. This is an important dimension to the Festival experience; the work – though somewhat over-written – is good enough to open to the paying public, but it is ‘work in progress’. It has undergone radical changes (and continues to change) since its airing at the Wits Amphitheatre in May.
Itsoseng deals with an issue of crucial national importance that has not yet found its way into our theatres, never mind the national conscience: a sense of helplessness inculcated by several generations of systemic pauperisation. Frustration stems from a complete loss of agency amongst the poorest.
Molusi asks: “Is it the government that is a problem, or is it the people? Is it our spirit that we have fought so hard and burnt down our own shopping complex, that maybe now everyone is angry?”
The despair of the township – “that dryness within” – is quenched by alcohol. As Mwala says in the play, “Drink on Friday, funeral on Saturday”.
“Its like people have been hypnotised to believe that nothing is going to happen, so people live with that fact.”
Perhaps the cruellest irony was when Molusi performed it in Mmabatho, there was nostalgia amongst the older audience members for the days of apartheid-puppet Mangope. These references have subsequently been cut, because the younger audience didn’t know who Mangope was.
Molusi says his township is not unlike Rhini here in Grahamstown: “All these townships are going through the same things”. Molusi concludes, “There is no art (in Itsoseng). But I know there are a lot of kids with potential…They have hope in wanting to get out, they know what the problem is, but it is difficult for them to challenge the problem.”
Review: Itsoseng and For the Right Reasons by Omphile Molusi
Junket Press 2008
North West Province playwright Omphile Molusi has certainly been effective in drawing attention to the plight of his township home near Lichtenburg. Many festival-goers had never heard of Itsoseng before. When the place does make the national news, it’s for all the wrong reasons: homicide, high rape statistics, and then there was the case of the mortuary failing to cope with a stockpile of unclaimed decomposing corpses.
Not that its citizens aren’t vocal. Some time ago, they managed for a whole day, to delay Thabo Mbeki (then Deputy President) from meeting his Chinese counterpart. Things have been bad in Itsoseng for a long time; hope is ebbing away and patience is running at an end. As Molusi says, “You can’t eat politics”.
Molusi’s play, Istoseng: My Township…My Home, is billed as ‘a scathing indictment against the government’s indifference, cynicism and incompetence’.
When the people of Itsoseng shrugged off Bophutatswana, they burned down the shopping mall – with its library and cinema. Molusi was then a toy-toying 14-year-old. The wreckage remains a symbol of the failure of any renewal after twelve years of democratic government. Officials fly in and out promising to rebuild it.
Molusi tells the story as Mawilla, a man who loses the love of his life, a pretty girl called Dolly, to prostitution. Mawilla rejects her; then helplessly watches Dolly’s steady dissipation, which ends in her death. The play is narrated from her graveside. Vice Motshabi, who works with the company, says “Their love affair doesn’t function because of the political situation in the township”.
Molusi shies away from calling this protest theatre. What we get is an oral history related with disarming sincerity and illustrated with loose dramatics. Mawilla impersonates the other characters – in a way you and I might do impressions of our friends – but he never becomes them in a dramatic sense.
It remains an overwhelmingly political work – “a cry for help” says director Tina Johnson. But unlike much rhetorical theatre, Molusi manages to preserve a fragile emotional core. He wants the love story to reveal the politics, but he hasn’t yet solved the problem of how to relate a story about the shattered lives of the people in Itsoseng, in a manner that becomes the biography of a blighted township.
Clearly, Molusi has a story worth communicating, and an over-riding compulsion to tell it, despite the pain it brings him. This is an important dimension to the Festival experience; the work – though somewhat over-written – is good enough to open to the paying public, but it is ‘work in progress’. It has undergone radical changes (and continues to change) since its airing at the Wits Amphitheatre in May.
Itsoseng deals with an issue of crucial national importance that has not yet found its way into our theatres, never mind the national conscience: a sense of helplessness inculcated by several generations of systemic pauperisation. Frustration stems from a complete loss of agency amongst the poorest.
Molusi asks: “Is it the government that is a problem, or is it the people? Is it our spirit that we have fought so hard and burnt down our own shopping complex, that maybe now everyone is angry?”
The despair of the township – “that dryness within” – is quenched by alcohol. As Mwala says in the play, “Drink on Friday, funeral on Saturday”.
“Its like people have been hypnotised to believe that nothing is going to happen, so people live with that fact.”
Perhaps the cruellest irony was when Molusi performed it in Mmabatho, there was nostalgia amongst the older audience members for the days of apartheid-puppet Mangope. These references have subsequently been cut, because the younger audience didn’t know who Mangope was.
Molusi says his township is not unlike Rhini here in Grahamstown: “All these townships are going through the same things”. Molusi concludes, “There is no art (in Itsoseng). But I know there are a lot of kids with potential…They have hope in wanting to get out, they know what the problem is, but it is difficult for them to challenge the problem.”
