H.I.E. Dhlomo

H.I.E. Dhlomo (1903-1956) was a South African actor, writer, dramatist, director, animator, journalist and cultural theorist.

Biography

Born Herbert Isaac Ezra Dhlomo at Siyamu, near Pietermaritzburg.

He became a journalist on Bantu World and Ilanga lase Natal. Organiser of the Carnegie Library in Germiston.

In 1933 he founded the Bantu Dramatic Society in Johannesburg, serving as its vice-president for a period.

In 1983 a group of artists, aware of the contribution made by Dhlomo, founded and named a theatre after him: The Dhlomo Theatre (situated a hundred yards from the Market Theatre). It opened on 21 March 1983 with Night of the Long Wake by Dukuza ka Macu.

His biography (The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo) was writtten by Tim Couzens and published in 1985. (See: Couzens, 1985, De Beer, 1995).

Education

Graduated of Amanzimtoti College,

Dhlomo as writer

Plays

Dhlomo wrote a number of plays during his lifetime, many of which allegorised black African history for his contemporaries. Only one play - Nonqause: The Girl who Killed to Save - was published in his lifetime (in 1936). It was also the first published English play by a black South African. The rest of the plays were only published posthumously in 1985 as a collection entitled H.I.E. Dhlomo Collected Works. (Edited by Tim Couzens and Nick Visser)

Dhlomo wrote the following plays in English:

Historical plays:

Nonqause: The Girl who Killed to Save

Ntsikana

Dingane

Cetshwayo

Moshoeshoe

Shaka (the text of this play is lost)

Urban plays:

Ruby and Frank (1939)

The Workers

The Pass

The Living Dead

Malaria

Other works

He wrote a number of important articles on “African theatre” (see References).

He wrote a considerable body of dramatic theory & criticism.

The 1985 Collected Works includes collections of his poetry (including the autobiographical-political poem, Valley of a Thousand Hills, first published in 1941) and ten short stories(under the collective title When Evening Falls).

Dhlomo as actor and/or director

Directed his brother Rolfes’s “dramatic sketches” for the Emancipation Centenary Celebrations at the Bantu Men's Social Centre in 1934.

Sources

Tim Couzens. 1985. The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Visser and Couzens (eds). 1985. H.I.E. Dhlomo Collected Works. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Mona de Beer. 1995. Who Did What in South Africa. Johannesburg: Ad Donker.

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