The playwright, the school teacher and the lost Xhosa king

When Fatima Dike was a child growing up in Langa township, Cape Town, in the fifties and sixties, she accepted apartheid as normal. She’d never known any other life. Her mother worked as a maid for a white family: but so did many black women. Her school was underfunded and overcrowded: but all black schools were. History lessons, meanwhile, were about Britain, and Europe, never South Africa’s black history. Until one brave school teacher took risks to teach his pupils about their own, suppressed history – the history of Xhosa kings and African empires.

Fatima went on to become South Africa’s first published black female playwright in 1978 with the release of a play that she describes as “a bomb”, The Sacrifice of Kreli. She tells Outlook’s Mpho Lakaje about the ingenious lengths she had to go to, to avoid censorship, and about bearing witness to some of the darkest days of apartheid.

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Presenter: Mpho Lakaje
Producer: Laura Thomas

(Photo: Fatima Dike. Credit: Courtesy of Fatima Dike)