Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longstanding policy of racial apartheid, died Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He is 68.
Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that crashed when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in the Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited by South African news media.
“His brilliantly creative narrative of our liberation struggle honors the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposes the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a post on X after the death of mr. Ngema.
In the decade before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, South Africa’s system of institutional racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he created the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”
“Sarafina!” evolved from a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.
“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is on fire,'” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is going to happen to this country?’
“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the little children’s faces so they wouldn’t see that bitter end.'”
It didn’t take long for Mr. Ngema the youth, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song 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 imposing Afrikaans, instead of Zulu, as the official language in schools.
“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, on Broadway, at the Cort Theaterwhere it played 597 performances.
In his review of the Newhouse production, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema “released a musical that transmuted the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that almost raised the roof of the theater.”
The score, he added, “evokes the absurdity of life in a Black society that is both oppressed and defiant, simultaneously sentenced to hard labor and fueled by dreams of social justice.”
“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, shared his with Ndaba Mhlongo (Michael Smuin won for “Anything Goes”).
“Sarafina!” also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.
It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who has starred in South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.
Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.
According to her official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” she was separated from her parents at the age of 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on her own in poor neighborhoods in around Durban. From the age of 12, he taught himself to play the guitar.
“When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was be a musician, and the Beatles influenced me a lot,” he told “The Insider SA.”
Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a co-worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he was writing.
“And then I fell in love with the part of the main character in the play,” he told Africa Report magazine in 1987. “When he’s on stage, I’m imitating him backstage – making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor didn’t show up, he played the role.
Mr. started working together. Ngema and the playwright, which caused Mr. Ngema directs and writes his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kent, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and started working with performer Percy Mtwa.
He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that contemplates the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, on the lives of ordinary people, energetically played for 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.
The white government tried to exploit Morena, then labeled him a Communist and imprisoned him on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were held.
The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was performed for the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and across the United States.
In The Washington Post, wrote critic David Richards in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “Discusses harsh realities such as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject usually inspires.” He added that “just by their wonderful, wide-ranging talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon a landscape, a society, a history.”
Mr. Ngema wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single cell in a South African prison describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mimicry — why they are in prison and how they are victims of racist laws, unemployment and police violence.
The name of the play (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of the strike strikers in 1983 in Lamontville township.
said Mr. Ngema that “Mistake!” enough to alarm the 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,” said Mr. Ngema in a 2017 interview with a South African podcast.
He called out “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.
“It shows that no matter how bad things are, success is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people will prevail.”
Later that year, “Assinamali!” is part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.
The information about the survivors of Mr. Ngema is not readily available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended up in divorce.
Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was embroiled in a controversy in 1996 when her sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — tasked by the South African Health Department with raising awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption probe over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.
He defended the show’s price tag, saying Broadway-quality shows needed to be brought to Black townships.
“People said it was a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema to The Associated Press in 1996. “I think it’s a stupid criticism.”
