THEATRE
Animal metaphors lay bare the manipulation of democracy
Playwright, artist and academic Kgafela Oa Magogodi promotes the jackal to king of the jungle
He has travelled the world as a spoken word poet and musician, performing in big cities in Europe and the US. Kgafela Oa Magogodi still performs abroad, but he is also an academic at the Wits School of Arts, a writer and increasingly a playwright who crafts and directs some of the most incisive and subversive pieces of theatre. As a musician, his sound is quite complex, difficult to categorise and therefore simply called folk punk. He combines African folk sound with exotic modern beats and lyrics mainly in his mother tongue Setswana. Oa Magogodi, who first raised eyebrows in the mid-1990s when he published a poetry anthology controversially titled Thy Condom Come, has again penned a piece that is bound to get people talking and asking uncomfortable questions about SA’s body politic. His new theatrical piece, Chilahaebolae, is a commentary on the country’s state of affairs — the leadership or lack of it, depending on which side of the fence you are seated. He uses animals as charact...
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