Vele everyone knows that kuyanyiwa emjolweni and Amaxelegu, directed by award-winning performer, theater-maker and activist Qondiswa James, is for those yearning for a piece specifically about the treachery of situationships in SA. A provocative play that took place at The Market Theatre in August 2024, thanks to the Market Theatre’s Play Development Programme, under Artistic Director Greg Homann, the production blends English and isiXhosa, pushing the Programme’s mission to cultivate emergent and urgent talent.
Up until recently, Qondiswa James, was a Cape Town hun with a stunning resume. James has directed Emhlab’Obomvu (2016) and Silindile (2017) and received 2019 Fleur du Cap Award nominations for her reimagining of Athol Fugard’s Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act. Her acclaimed Emalehleni also appeared in the Centre for the Less Good Idea’s “On Air: Visual Radio Plays” and Xobula Inxeba (2021), a story about violence affecting a rural couple in post-TRC SA, was recognised for using a vendor stand for public storytelling.
But let’s go back to Athol Fugard real quick. His play Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act was set during apartheid in South Africa, when interracial relationships were still criminalized. The story follows a Man and a Woman who, after debating their love for an hour, are caught and interrogated by law enforcement. The play memorialises their desires for personal and emotional freedom, critiquing the oppressive nature of apartheid laws. Well I find it interesting that James should choose this specific play to reimagine and now that I think about it, it would seem Fugard’s influence is central in her practice.
James’ vision impressively adapts across different spaces, cities, and venues, seamlessly adjusting to diverse crews, budgets, and ambition levels. Having already been featured at the National Arts Festival, Amaxelegu marks a sophisticated leap, with its production quite readily evoking Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. The team behind this feat includes set designer Onthatile Matshidiso, sound designer Jannous Aukema, AV designers Jurgen Meekel and Andrea Rolfes, and lighting designer David Themba Stuart.
The play stars Shalima Mkongi, Luxolo Ndabeni, and Nambitha Mpumlwana. What’s particularly exciting is how much of James is reflected in the work. When I hear themes like polyamory and interracial dating, I see James. Even the casting of Mkongi sexily rocking a bald head just like James herself. There is a gallant commitment to the personal when considering its director and her process. The play explores class and gender in private spaces, but with Amaxelegu, James is even meddling with what private spaces even mean.
Because at the end of the day, as much as it has so much of James’ DNA all up and through, Amaxelegu remains a distinctly South African story, exploring the lives of a young couple and their housekeeper in an unspecified yet oh so familiar South African city. The play stares directly into the slippage between these dynamics of their intimate relationships and social interactions. If the title, roughly translating to “Messy People,” hadn’t delivered the hint, then the sitting through its sometimes excruciatingly messy moments will.
Shalima Mkongi, a graduate of UCT, AFDA, and Waterfront Theatre School, portrays the lead character Thabisa with a rawness that never betrays her otherwise hard persona. Her love interest, Azola, is played by Luxolo Ndabeni, known for his roles in Lockdown (S1), Surviving Gaza, and Gomora (S4). Thankfully there is no hint of overacting here, and we expect no less from James. She commands grounded performances so nuanced that the characters seem ready to leave with us after the show and join our commute, going on about their daily lives as young, upwardly mobile Black South Africans, perplexed by the failure of freedom.
In Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs contend that the 1960s sexual revolution, often viewed as male-centric, was fundamentally a women’s movement challenging traditional male dominance. The 1986 Washington Post article by Anthony Astrachan shows how the backlash in the 1980s was a counterrevolution against women redefining sex and power. This resistance reflects ongoing tensions in sexual and political power, and the pushbacks shape contemporary dynamics.
Locally, the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, which started around 2015, ignited calls for decolonization and challenged white supremacy, beginning with Cecil Rhodes’ statue removal at UCT. Expanding to advocate for decolonized education, these movements resonated across universities, including Oxford in the UK. Rooted in Pan-Africanism and Black radical feminism, they revealed deep racial inequalities, but internal conflicts, tensions among student groups, and state repression often overshadowed the broader objectives, eventually the movements imploded and violent gender dynamics persisted.
In this context, Amaxelegu is crucial as it fictionalized real-life encounters where gender minorities grappled with their marginalisations while navigating complex dynamics with cisgender heterosexual male counterparts. Subtly, the play explores whether true safety and understanding are viable within these personal and political intersections and questions if integrating political issues into intimate relationships is a naive or misguided delusion. Through its biomythographic narrative, Amaxelegu provides a platform for reflecting on these nuanced and often silenced experiences, echoing that old saying that the personal is political.
Carol Hanisch coined that phrase in 1970, suggesting that personal experiences should be truer than systemic truths. When second-wave feminism came along Black feminists followed suit. Figures like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins still advocate for lived experience over theory. This tenant of feminist discourse lives fiercely in Amaxelegu, a responsible yet brutal socio-political essay that’s a beautiful blend of local and universal references, producing a compelling reflection on contemporary relationships and the loneliness of liberated love.
