Gibson Kente

Gibson Mtutuzeli "Slick" Kente (1932-2004) [1] was a South African playwright, actor, director, musician, composer, impressario/manager and teacher.

Fondly known to many as "Bra Gib" ("Brother Gib") he was widely recognised to be the foremost black playwright and one of the leading cultural icons of his time.

Biography

Born Gibson Mthuthuzeli Kente on July 25 (some sources say July 23), 1932, in Duncan Village, the black township near East London, Eastern Cape.

He has two sons, Feza and Mzwandile.

In 2004 he was celebrated as a ‘living treasure” by the National Arts Council of South Africa, but sadly in the same year he declared himself HIV positive and, while working on his 24th play (an Aids awareness work entitled The Call), he died in Soweto on 7 November 2004. After his death the Gibson Kente Foundation was founded, i.a. to seek to have more of his work published.

Training

Attended a Seventh-Day Adventist college in Butterworth, South Africa (early 1950s), and Jan H. Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg (mid-1950s) where he learnt choral music. He formed a gospel jazz group called the Kente Choristers while in Johannesburg, and eventually abandoned his studies altogether after joining a black theater group called the Union Artists.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Kente initially worked as a talent scout for Gallo Records, where he began by writing music for singers like Miriam Makeba. This led to his first efforts at playwriting. Gibson Kente is the best known and most popular black playwright inside South Africa.

His prolific musical productions, staged between the mid-1960s and 2004, were enthusiastically received by township audiences throughout South Africa. In the mid-'50s he worked with popular entertainers like Miriam Makeba and Letta Mbuli. In 1967 he became the first black artist to own a theatre company, GK Productions. His influence on the industry in general has been strong, for example he was at one stage paying his performers four times what they could earn in the manufacturing sector and he thus drew many young people into the business. It is estimated that he trained and launched the careers of an estimated 400 black performers in the South African industry, including Brenda Fassie, Nomsa Nene, Peter Se-Puma, Sello Maake ka Ncube, Mbongeni Ngema.

As an actor

Kente starting as a young performer in King Kong and a member of Union Artists at Dorkay House.

As a playwright and producer

What makes Kente such an iconic figure in the history of South African theatre is not only his phenominal commercial success as entrepreneur and entertainer and his prophetic belief that the real need was for theatre about black life by black performers for black audiences, but his seminal role in the development of a distinctively personal style of musical theatre and theatrical production which has come to be known as the “township musical”. Based on the variety tradition pioneered by Griffiths Motsieloa and Todd Matshikiza, it utilizes an eclectic mix of melodramatic plots, African variety dance and music to tell simple but emotionally charged stories about black life in South Africa. It reflects the dislocations, poverty, and rootlessness of black South African urban life. (Wakashe, 1986b).

Kente’s touring township shows came to define South African township theatre and provided the base from which much black – and other – South African theatre was later to flourish. He produced more than 20 plays in this style, most of them immensely popular between the 1960s and 1990s. Picked up by a few other artists (notably his primary rival, Sam Mhangwane), Kente’s style has ultimately had an enormous impact in the form of South African theatre was to take in the 1980s and later, as can be seen in such productions as Sophiatown.

However, revered as he has been, his own plays are seldom taken seriously as literary or “relevant” works, despite a brief flirtation with more serious “political” work, just before and during 1976. His work of the 1970-1980s was in fact rejected as cheap escapist entertainment by SASO and the intellectuals of the BCM movement. As a result, only two plays have been published to date, though there are recordings of How Long?, Too Late and Sikalo. His plays were frequently banned and his actors arrested. In September 1976, he was detained by security police. In 1989, his Soweto home was firebombed.

With the end of apartheid and the first free and democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, Kente's plays finally began to receive official support and funding. By then, however, he was on the fringes of the South African cultural scene.

His work to date has been poorly documented and the records of all but one of his plays were lost in a fire in 1989.

Plays/musicals

Manana the Jazz Prophet (1963)
Sikalo (or Sikhalo) ("The Lament") (1966, Musical)
Lifa (1967/68)
Zwi [“Alone”] (1970)
How Long? (1973)
The Train was staged at Dorkay House (1974)
Too Late (1974)
I Believe (or Our Belief) (1974)
Can You Take It (1977), a township love story
La Duma (or Luduma) ("It Thundered") (1978)
Mama and the Load or The Load (1979)
Lobola (1980)
Hard Road (1981)
Now is the Time (1982)
Bad Times Mzala (1984/85)
Sekunjalo, the Naked Hour (a musical) (1987)
Give a Child (1990)
Mfowethu - Songs and Dance (1994)
Ezakithi ("It is us") (2001)
The Call (2004)

Also:

Beyond a Song (date?)
Poor Ma (date?)
Sea Pearls (written with Sam Mhangwane) (date?)
She Fears the Night (date?)
Taximan and the School Girl (date?)

Screenplays

The film How Long Must We Suffer (1976) (banned and Kente imprisoned for 6 months).

In the 1990s Kente began writing drama series for SABC Television. Kente wrote a 13-part television project in 1995 titled Mama's Love. It earned such scathing reviews that it was nearly cancelled after just two episodes, and Kente's critics called him a disgrace to black theater. Despite the initial bad press, the project did remain on the air in its entirety, and one of its lines even entered the vernacular and became a popular soccer stadium chant.

Legacy

On 26th of February 2023, the Red Theatre auditorium at the Soweto Theatre was renamed the Gibson Kente Theatre in his honour. In 2018, Hudson Park High School in East London also named their school theatre The Gibson Kente Theatre.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Kente

Solberg, 2011

City Press, 9 January 1994.

Tribute by Melvin Whitebooi, Die Burger, 4 December 2004.

http://ukznpress.bookslive.co.za/blog/2011/09/05/introducing-bra-gib-father-of-south-africas-township-theatre-by-rolf-solberg/

Kavanagh, 1984

Larlham, 198*

Hauptfleisch and Steadman 1984

Kruger, 1999

Tucker, 1997

'Obituary: Gibson Kente'. The Guardian. 10 November 2004.

'Gibson Kente remembered as the greatest changemaker and storyteller of our time'. IOL. 27 February 2023.

Xaba, Andile. 2021. 'Collective memory and the construction of a historical narrative, analysis and interpretation of selected Soweto-based community plays (1984–1994)'. Unpublished PhD thesis.

https://dwrdistribution.co.za/the-magical-story-of-the-gibson-kente-theatre/

Go to South African Theatre/Bibliography