Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, together with the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime coverage of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a automobile accident. He was 68.
Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a automobile that was struck head on when he was getting back from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Japanese Cape Province, in keeping with a household assertion cited within the South African information media.
“His masterfully artistic narration of our liberation battle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and uncovered the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa stated in a publish on X after Mr. Ngema’s dying.
Within the decade earlier than the discharge of Nelson Mandela from jail in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid within the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an awesome concern to Mr. Ngema. Throughout that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”
“Sarafina!” advanced out of a dialog he had within the Nineteen Eighties with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a distinguished anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.
“I used to be sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I began considering, ‘This nation is in flames,’” he informed the South African tv present “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I requested a query. I stated, ‘Mama, what do you assume is lastly going to occur to this nation?’
“Mama checked out me, and he or she stated, ‘I want I had an enormous blanket to cowl the faces of the little ones so they don’t see that bitter finish.’”
Mr. Ngema quickly started to ascertain younger individuals, working and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a track that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black highschool college students within the township of Soweto in 1976 through the rebellion towards the federal government’s imposition of Afrikaans, quite than Zulu, because the official language in colleges.
“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Middle and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, on the Cort Theater, the place it performed 597 performances.
In his assessment of the manufacturing on the Newhouse, Frank Wealthy of The New York Instances wrote that Mr. Ngema had “introduced forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that just about raises the theater’s roof.”
The rating, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society each oppressed and defiant, directly sentenced to arduous labor and ignited by goals of social justice.”
“Sarafina!” obtained 5 Tony nominations, together with three for Mr. Ngema: for finest path of a musical (gained by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), finest unique rating (gained by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and finest choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (gained by Michael Smuin for “Something Goes”).
“Sarafina!” was additionally nominated for finest musical and finest featured actress in a musical.
It was tailored as a movie in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred within the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational instructor and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mom.
Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a city north of Durban.
In line with his official biography for the movie “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his mother and father at 11, then lived for a time with prolonged household in Zululand and in a while his personal within the poor neighborhoods round Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.
“After I grew up all I wished to be was a musician, and I used to be influenced drastically by the Beatles,” he stated on “The Insider SA.”
Working in a fertilizer manufacturing facility within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, a fellow employee requested him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.
“After which I fell in love with the a part of the lead character within the play,” he informed the journal Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I might mimic him backstage — making the opposite musicians chuckle.” One evening, when the actor didn’t present up, he performed the position.
Mr. Ngema and the playwright started to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to begin directing and writing his personal small items. In 1979, he started working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to grasp the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and commenced working with the performer Percy Mtwa.
He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the influence of the second coming of a Christ-like determine, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, via the lives of unusual individuals, vigorously performed over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.
The white authorities tries to use Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, the place Mandela and different political prisoners had been incarcerated.
The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the subsequent three years in Europe, Off Broadway on the Lucille Lortel Theater and round the US.
In The Washington Publish, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, however does so with much more spirit, humor and, sure, hope, than the topic typically evokes.” He added that “with solely their fantastic, wide-eyed expertise,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a panorama, a society, a historical past.”
Mr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), by which 5 Black males in a single South African jail cell describe — via performing, dancing, singing and mime — why they had been incarcerated and the way they had been victimized by racist legal guidelines, unemployment and police violence.
The play’s title (which suggests “We’ve got no cash”) comes from the rallying cry of lease strikers in 1983 within the Lamontville township.
Mr. Ngema stated that “Asinamali!” was alarming sufficient to authorities in Duncan Village, within the Japanese Cape, that they arrested the viewers for attending a efficiency.
“They stated it was an unlawful political gathering,” Mr. Ngema stated in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.
He referred to as “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.
“It reveals that irrespective of how dangerous issues get, victory is inevitable,” he informed The Instances in 1986 throughout rehearsals earlier than the play opened in Harlem on the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the individuals shall prevail.”
Later that yr, “Asinamali!” was a part of a South African theater competition at Lincoln Middle.
Data on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not instantly out there. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” led to divorce.
Mr. Ngema, who wrote a number of different performs, was concerned in an issue in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Well being Division to lift consciousness concerning the AIDS epidemic — led to a authorities corruption investigation over accusations that its price was an extreme “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was insufficient.
He defended the present’s price ticket, saying it was essential to convey Broadway-quality reveals to Black townships.
“Individuals have stated it’s a waste of presidency cash,” Mr. Ngema informed The Related Press in 1996. “It assume that’s a silly criticism.”
