Siphiwo Mahala is an award-winning short story writer, novelist, playwright and literary critic. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg and a research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study. He is the editor of Imbiza Journal for African Writing.
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Foreword: 'They Cannot Destroy a People's Experience' by Shane Graham Acknowledgements Introduction The House of Truth Press clippings Glossary and translations Notes on staging The House of Truth: The Playscript Bloke and His American Bantu Press clippings Glossary and translations Notes on staging Bloke and His American Bantu: The Playscript
Siphiwo Mahala does not simply write the archive; he animates it. This work is an act of poetic remembrance, a homage to history, and a testament to the enduring power of storytelling. His plays, Bloke and His American Bantu and The House of Truth, transcend mere performances to become vibrant acts of preservation, revitalising the memories of South African heroes and the worlds they inhabited. Through poetic language, meticulous research, and skilful dramaturgy, Mahala gifts us a theatre that is not only reflective but reparative. - Refiloe Lepere, lecturer, researcher, director, playwright and drama therapist. Siphiwo Mahala brings to life three luminaries of the 1950s and 1960s - Can Themba, Langston Hughes and Bloke Modisane - recreating for the stage their voices, their conversations, their joys and their sorrows. The scripts are a homage to the bonds of friendship and show how connections across class, nationality and geographic distance sustained black artists in their struggles to be creative in conditions of poverty, apartheid, and exile. - Lesley Cowling, Associate Professor at the Wits Centre for Journalism and co-editor of Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason and Rethinking Public Life.