Reviewed by Leon Muston, Arts Editor
IT’S great when a creative work like this can not only get across the senseless of the murder of a great South African leader, but can also make it entertaining for the audience.
This drama, which played to a sold out audience on its opening night yesterday, looks at the last 10 years of Steve Biko’s life.
The opening and concluding scenes both show Biko’s (Masoja Msiza) murder at the hands of security police officer Sergeant Hattingh (David Dukas) on September 12, 1977.
But then we go back to 1968, to see Biko’s rise to importance as a student leader, at the point when he opted to break away from the multi-racial National Union of South African Students to form the all-black South African Students Organisation (SASO).
This scene not only shows Biko’s skill as an orator, but also his sense of humour. And when the other activists leave the room, his softer side as well, as he tries to seduce fellow student Mamphela Ramphele (Boitumelo Mothabela).
His attempts fail dismally, particularly when he tries to use his political rhetoric as pick-up lines, telling her that her legs should be an open democracy, to which she replies by crossing her legs and says she prefers centralised power.
Biko’s skill as a political leader is further demonstrated during a powerful and moving speech as he is elected president of SASO in 1968, and in the next scene when he enters into a debate with his lifelong friend Barney Pityana (Patrick Bokaba) in 1970.
But Biko isn’t only portrayed in a positive light. Writer and director Martin Koboekae has chosen to portray him as a rounded human being with faults as well as good qualities, focusing on his excessive drinking and cheating on his wife.
He also allows the production to move beyond the historical to comment on the present, when Biko and Pityana debate what a post-apartheid South Africa would be like. Their comments on personality-driven power struggles within a ruling black elite appears a thinly-veiled attack on the current situation in the ANC between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.
After the brutal final scene in which a beaten and bloodied Biko breathes his final breathe, the audience rose as one to applaud a brilliant piece of theatre, which deserves more than its three day run at the Festival and to go on to tour South Africa and hopefully, internationally.
Tags: apartheid, Barney Pityana, Jacob Zuma, Mamphela Ramphele, South African Students Organisation, steven biko, Thabo Mbeki, Theatre review, world premiere
