Ulwembu

Ulwembu ("spider web" in isiZulu) is a workshopped play by Empatheatre and The Big Brotherhood.

The original text

The idea for the play was initially developed by Big Brotherhood in 2014 and the play created over the two years (2014-2015) through collaborative improvisation with playwright Neil Coppen, actress and ethnographer Mpume Mtombeni and educational sociologist Dylan McGarry, with mentorship from academics at Durban’s Urban Futures Centre[1].

The play tells the story of six people caught in the whoonga web. (The drug whoonga[], also known as nyaope, is a street concoction of B-grade heroin, rat-poison (strychnine) and various other chemical components.) The characters include Bongani, a drug dealer; Portia, a police lieutenant on the front line of the fight against the scourge; her son Sipho; his friend Andile; and Emmanuel, a Mozambique-born shopkeeper.

The play text, published in 2018 by Wits University Press, also contains the production’s research and outcomes.

Performance history in South Africa

Zenzo Msomi as "Sipho" and Ngcebo Cele as "Andile"

Sources

Dylan McGarry. 2021. "The South African play that’s tackling the scourge of the street drug whoonga" The Conversation February 21, 2021[2]

https://www.dut.ac.za/faculty/engineering/urban_futures/

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