Playwrights From South Africa

"Why don’t they do something so we can handle this once and for all! They’re wearing me down!"

"My chubby little brother! Perhaps he’s having a little ‘crisis of conscience’!’ perhaps, because of their culture."

"For my grandmother, Esther Makatini, who washed white people's clothes so that I could learn to write."

"In a few days I am to die. Strange, the idea neither shocks nor frightens me…"

"We were lovers in everything but in name."

"Apartheid? We had defeated apartheid. We had finally perfected a method of making love even without making contact, utilizing empty space like two telepathic media exchanging telegraphic messages through sexual airways."

"...as I was to later find out, the skin was neither soft nor the hair so smooth as I had first imagined."

"Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?"

"Why believe the word of the girl against mine,... Except for the whiteness of her skin, a color that has caused more trouble and unhappiness in the world than the color of any other skin, what particular claim to virtue can this girl be supposed to have?"

"The day you come across my uncle Sekala no-one will need to point him out to you! Try to imagine a monster six-foot-ten, with a face like a train locomotive or the front of Mount Taba Situ, and you have the exact image of my uncle. Children have been known to cry when he has but looked at them; an attempt at a smile from him is likely to send children running for shelter behind their mother's skirts. When he makes a joke he smiles so hard that his eyes seem to close up and vanish, bringing to perfection his exceptional ugliness!"

"Bulane was dressed in faded old khakis, somewhat soiled and torn and sprinkled with mud, and although this was the height of summer on the highveld and the sun would soon be scorchingly hot, he was swathed in a thick army coat that looked frayed and moth-eaten, like something which might have been bequeathed to an importunate servant by a jokey employer."

"Oh Mr Bulane, what a sight to greet the plains of Tabanyane!"

"Lunga Tubu's voice coming from the waves, singing a Pavarotti song," he muses wistfully that "maybe one day Pavarotti will adopt him""

"Yet there is nothing that rises, phoenix-like, out of the ashes. All the Whale Caller can do at the scene of the explosion is sit "silent and still as blubber rains on him. Until he is completely larded with it""

"They rig Sharisha with dynamite. [...] the emergency workers place more than five hundred kilograms of dynamite in all the strategie places, especially close to Sharisha's head. Like a high priest in a ritual sacrifice a man stands over a contraption that is connected to the whale with a long red cable. With all due solemnity he triggers the explosives. Sharisha goes up in a gigantic baU of smoke and flame. [...] [The Whale Caller] is looking intently at the red, yellow and white flames as Sharisha rises in the sky. It is like Guy Fawkes fireworks"

"He has neither touched a whale nor even Sharisha, except with his spirit - with his horn. He knows absolutely that this boat-based whale watching will be abused"

"For instance, when the Whale Caller wants to consummate relationship with his wife, images of whale interfere at the moment of ex- citement and he goes limp"

"They do not like to be called squatters. How can we be squatters on our land, in our own country? Squatters are those who came from across the sea to steal our land"

"Conversely, Noria’s memory of the village is the pale herd boys, with mucus hang- ing from the nostrils, looking after cattle whose ribs you could count, on barren hills with sparse grass and shrups. The lean cattle and barren hills are partly result of overgrazing, which is in turn due to shortage of land for black people."

"The boats are now restored to their former glory as a reminder of a bygone era and bygone manual practices so that present and future generations can see how fishermen of the old endured the stormy seas in small open boats powered by their own muscles."

"The villagers will actually lose more than they will gain from the few jobs that will be created. Very little of the money that is made here will circulate in the village."

"Camagu has no heart to tell her that Athens is a college town that is even smaller than the nearby town of Butterworth*."

"Yes, Bhonco carries the scars that were inflicted on his great-grandfather, Twin-Twin, by men who flogged him after he had been identified as a wizard by Prophet Mlanjeni, the Man of the River. Every first boy-child in subsequent generations of Twin-Twin’s tree is born with the scars.”"

"The Cult of the Unbelievers began with Twin-Twin. Bhonco Ximiya’s ancestor, in the days of the Prophetess Nongqawuse almost one hundred and fifty years ago. The revered Twin-Twin had elevated unbelieving to the heights of religion.”"

"Bhonco is different from the other Unbelievers in his family, for Unbelievers are reputed to be such somber people that they do not believe even in those things that can bring happiness to their lives. They spend most of their time moaning about past injustices and bleeding for the world that would have been had the folly of belief not seized the nation a century and a half ago and spun it around until it was in a woozy stupor that is felt to this day.”"

"When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories."

"Men, on the other hand, tend to cloud their heads with pettiness and vain pride. They sit all day and dispense wide-ranging philosophies on how things should be. With great authority in their voices, they come up with wise theories on how to put the world right. Then at night they demand to be given food, as if the food just walked into the house on its own. *When they believe all the children are asleep, they want to be pleasured. The next day they wake up and continue with their empty theories."

"You see, they say they are fighting for freedom, yet they are no different from the tribal chief and his followers. They commit atrocities as well."

"It is strange how things don’t change in these shanty towns or squatter camps or informal settlements or whatever you choose to call them."

"Hymns flow into one another in unplanned but pleasant segues."

"Funerals were held only on Saturday and Sunday mornings those days, because death was not as prevalent then as it is at present."

"In those days, they did not allow people of his colour onto any of the beaches of the city, so he could not carry out his ablutions there, as he does today."

"By the time he has finished, every inch of the walls is covered with bright pictures – a wallpaper of sheer luxury."

"We are like two hands that wash each other."

"You have always been good at creating beautiful things with your hands."

"We go for what we call a joll. All it means is that we engage in an orgy of drinking, raping, and stabbing one another with knives and shooting one another with guns."

"It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened…’ we are the ‘they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit."

"Hally: Anyway, that’s my man of magnitude. Charles Darwin! Who’s yours? Sam: [without hesitation] Abraham Lincoln. Hally: I might have guessed as much. Don’t get sentimental, Sam. You’ve never been a slave, you know. And anyway, we freed your ancestors here in South Africa long before the Americans."

"For all agonies of the joints: Lum¬ bago, rheumatism, tennis elbows, housemaid’s knees;also ideal for bunions, corns, callouses"

"Too many cooks spoil the broth"

"No smell doth stink as sweet as labour, Tis joyous times when man and man Do work and sweat in common toil.When all the world’s my neighbor."

"Ethel Lange, 10 de Villiers Street, Oudtshoom. I am eighteen years old and well-developed and would like to correspond with a gent of sober habits and a good outlook on life. My interests are nature, rock-and-roll, swimming and a happy future. My motto is, ‘rolling stones gather no moss.’ Please note: I promise to reply faithfully"

"Twenty-two and no strings attached. Would like letters from men of the same age or older. My \interests are beauty contests and going out. A snap with the first letter, please."

"Betty Jones. Roodepoort. Young and pleasing personality. I’d like to correspond with gentlemen friends of maturity. No teenagers need reply. My hobby at the moment is histori¬ cal films, but I’m prepared to go back to last year’s, which was autograph hunting. I would appreciate a photo¬ graph"

"I’m sure you’d like to know I got your letter, and the picture. I’d say Oudtshoom seems okay. You were quite okay too. I would like to send you a picture of me, but it’s this way. It’s winter down here. The light is bad, the lake is black, the birds have gone. Wait for spring, when things improve. Okay? Good. I heard you ask about my car. Yes. I have it. We pumped the tires today. Tomorrow I think I’ll put in some gas. I’d like to take you for a drive, Ethel, and Lucy too. In fact. I’d like to drive both of you. They say over here. I’m fast. Ethel I’ll tell you this. If I could drive you, Ethel, I would do it so fast, Ethel, and Lucy too, both of you, so fast I would, do it so fast, fast, fast it would hurt—"

"I notice your brother got boots. All policemen got boots. Good luck to him, any¬ way, and Lucy too. Write soon. Zachariah Pietersen"

"I like the thought of this little white girl"

"I took a good look at my life. What did I see? A bloody circus monkey! Selling most of his time on earth to another man. Out of every twenty-four hours I could only properly call mine the six when I was sleeping. What the hell is the use of that?"

"This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statutes erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn’t for Styles. That’s what I do, friends. Put down, in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children’s children will remember a man."

"Burn that book? Stop kidding yourself, Sizwe! Anyway, suppose you do. You must immediately go apply for a new one. Right? And until that new one comes, be careful the police don’t stop you and ask for your book. Into the Courtroom, brother. Charge: Failing to produce Reference Book on demand. Five rand or five days."