In New York: Children of Apartheid Meet Broadway

Pouring out of the subway into a neon twilight, the band of teenagers shoulder through Broadway crowds. Past the Winter Garden where Cats plays on, past Dunkin’ Donuts’ 46 varieties, past the topless temptresses of movie marquees, past the T-Shirt Express, past the half-hour photo store, past the mendicant * saxophone player on the corner. Decked out, some in black leather jackets, others in pink high-tops and bobby-sox, a jaunty tweed cap here, a brightly colored scarf there, they jaywalk across 48th Street in twos and threes, dodging yellow taxis. Quick! Into an alley, up a metal staircase and through an entrance marked STAGE DOOR.

From the townships of Zululand to the Great White Way, the cast of Sarafina! has traveled 8,000 miles, a sudden trip into future shock. At first the idea had seemed preposterous: a musical about apartheid played by the victims. Twenty-two Africans, ages 14 and up, were recruited from the corrugated-metal and concrete shacks of KwaMashu, Umlazi and other sprawling, neglected settlements separated from the prosperity of white South Africa. Honed into a humming, exuberant whole by Playwright-Director Mbongeni Ngema, they have turned convention on its head with a triumphant spirit and rollicking rhythm that transcend politics. In its ninth month, the show is a sold-out hit, readying spin-offs for Tokyo, London and Kingston.

An hour before curtain, in the basement of the 1,100-seat Cort Theater, the kids assemble for a voice lesson under a maze of heating pipes and lighting wires. Take-out fried chicken, quarts of Tropicana are put aside. “Feel how loose your tongue is! Baaa, baaa, baaa,” exhorts the teacher, an ivory- skinned redhead, hammering on a piano key with her index finger. The kids imitate the sound and start giggling. “Don’t laugh at each other! We’re here to learn!” scolds the redhead. Silence. Then a few whispers in Zulu. “Heee, heee, haaa, haaa!” sings the teacher. More giggles. When class is finally dismissed, the kids clatter up a narrow staircase, whistling and ululating. The doors are plastered with bumper stickers: KIDS ZONE, BABYLAND BLVD, I LOVE MY BOYFRIEND.

Despite the teen trappings, a sense of mission infuses Sarafina!, a portrait of repression and rebellion at a Soweto high school. During “notes,” a 15- minute discussion of finer points in the performance, the kids jump up to argue with the assistant director, Mali Hlatshwayo, in rapid-fire Zulu. He thumps his chest. “Emotion,” explains one of the cast. At the stage door, starstruck American youngsters gather for autographs, but the kids of Sarafina! don’t preen like the show horses of your average chorus line. The girls are mostly hefty. The boys tend toward skinny. Plain faces, remarkably ordinary. Bopping and hopping onstage, they maintain a wary reserve off-hours. Their English is lilting, halting, and political questions are turned aside for fear of reprisals back home. Five minutes before curtain, a hush falls over the backstage. They gather for a nightly ritual, heads bent in prayer. Soft voices rise and fall in a Zulu chant. In the corridor, band members stop short and bow their heads. The doorman, a flush-cheeked Irishman, respectfully removes his cap. “I’ve never seen this kind of dedication,” he murmurs.

The intensity is reflected in the audience, which, unusual for Broadway, is more than 80% black. Black churches, civic groups and schools have bought blocks of tickets, swelling the theater with revival-level enthusiasm. “There’s a family bond,” explains Charnele Dozier Brown, the only American in the cast. During a recent matinee the spectators laughed, stomped, clapped and cried along with the musical’s emotional tide. They lifted their voices to the anthem Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow. “You can relate to it,” said Gloria Brown, a Newark cafeteria worker. Too much time has passed since the children of Sarafina! have seen their parents, their friends, or the green hills of Zululand. In the Hotel Esplanade (where they settled after guests at the Mayflower didn’t take to rock music at 3 a.m.), they visit back and forth like in a college dorm. Their rooms are filled with VCRs, miniskirts, Japanese cameras and fluffy pink stuffed animals, but they are far from feeling at ease. “I miss the chickens that used to play on the ground at home,” said Ntomb’khona Dlamini, 17, the tiniest cast member at less than 5 ft. Her television is turned to MTV, where the rockers gyrate in Day-Glo. Daughter of an evangelical preacher in Umlazi, outside Durban, she sang in a choir with her sister and four brothers. “In South Africa I didn’t know Broadway was so famous,” she sighs. “I didn’t know it was the end of the world.”

Dlamini calls her parents three times a week. Her roommate, Nandi Ndlovu, a 17-year-old with a round face like a happy Buddha, phones home nearly every night. “I can’t do otherwise,” she shrugs. Enfolded in a pink terry-cloth bathrobe, she curls up in an armchair and lets the computerized pages of the phone bill cascade to the floor: $3,967.78 worth of calls in two months. In the kitchenette, the remains of some ipapa, South African-style cornmeal bread cooked here in the wee, homesick hours after the show, lie among empty cans of grape soda.

For all the torture, the tear gas, the murders of schoolchildren that Sarafina! depicts, and for all the agony of apartheid that its players have experienced, America, in its midtown-Manhattan incarnation, seems far from utopian. “Before I came, I thought the U.S. would be like a small heaven,” said Thandani Mavimbela of Hlabisa, a rural village in Natal province. “I thought it would be like on TV — The Boat of Love. Love Boat? Or Dallas. But then you see places like Harlem. I was shocked. The empty, burned buildings. On Broadway, very poor people sleeping on the street. In South Africa, when I was hungry and far away from home, someone would always take me in. I would not have to eat from a dustbin.”

Mavimbela, 26, is the broad-shouldered son of a house painter. He dropped out of school at 17: the family lacked the money to pay school fees for six children. Drifting from township to township, he found no steady work. Two friends invited him to act in a play about a youth who fled after the Soweto uprising of 1976 to join a guerrilla army. Furtively, the three would perform in community halls in black townships, ready to escape through a back door should police arrive.

Now Mavimbela’s ambition is to go to college. Of all the Sarafina! cast, he is the most faithful in attending thrice-weekly after-hours classes held at Martin Luther King Jr. High School. On a recent afternoon, he was at the blackboard trying to figure out fractions. “Which one is the numerator?” the teacher asked. He pointed to it and then, on cue, to the dividend, the quotient, the remainder, the divisor, the denominator. His fellow cast members gazed intently at the blackboard chalked full of figures. On the wall was a poster from another Broadway play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Eight performances a week, lessons, and recording sessions leave little free time. But the cast managed to squeeze in a Sunday-evening trip to Staten Island for a birthday party at the math teacher’s home. On the ferry, amid the hubbub, Dumisani Dlamini, who plays Crocodile, a high-stepping character in the play, was subdued. A striking figure with a Mohawk hairstyle and tribal scars on his sculptured cheekbones, he gazed off into the mist. “My mother passed in March,” he confided softly. “Since then, life has not been the same. I could not go back to South Africa because of the show, there was no one to understudy for me. They sent me a videocassette of her funeral.”

In the distance the outlines of the Statue of Liberty appeared in New York Harbor. Dlamini changed the subject. “Are there sharks in this water?” he wondered.