It’s still early morning as I make my way by taxi across Cape Town, traveling from our ship in the harbor to the Artscape Theatre Center on the Foreshore. It’s a sharp, blue-sky day in late March. And so Table Mountain—named both for its shape (the top is two flat miles across) and the way in which moisture condenses and forms a “tablecloth” of cloudcover that drapes over the plateau, spilling down the sides, when the warm, southeasterly winds are forced up the steep cliffs and meet the cooler air above—is perfectly visible, towering postcard-beautiful three thousand feet above the city, which sits in a kind of geographic amphitheater below. It’s a dramatic and perhaps fitting backdrop for a place that has seen the rise and fall of apartheid, a city whose history is inextricably bound to the equally dramatic and inspiring life of Nelson Mandela, a figure whose presence and influence is still deeply felt in this city less than a year now after his death on December 5, 2013.

I am headed to Artscape to meet Michael Williams, a writer and the managing director of the Cape Town Opera, where he has worked since it was established in 1999. Today is the first day of rehearsal for Mandela Trilogy, a folk opera—part musical, part opera—that Williams wrote and will once again be directing. The show had its world premiere at Artscape in June 2010 as African Songbook: A Tribute to the Life of Nelson Mandela, conceived both as a celebration for Mandela’s then upcoming ninety-second birthday and as a cultural highlight in conjunction with the 2010 World Cup Soccer Tournament taking place in South Africa.

Despite critical success and subsequent touring in Europe, though, Williams was never quite happy with Act One of the show. “It lacked a kind of dramatic push to it,” he will explain to the company later that morning in the ballet studio of the Joseph Stone Theater, which the Cape Town Opera has rented for the coming weeks so the singers will have the opportunity to work with the new set once it’s completed. Then everything will be torn down and sent via container ship to Munich, where the newly reimagined show will premier at the Deutsches Theater München three months later in June.

But for now it’s still March, and upon my arrival to Artscape, as instructed, I make my way to the stage door and I’m led to a small waiting room on the fourth floor, near the offices of the opera company. I can hear Williams on the other side of a frosted glass door talking in animated tones, but I can’t make out what is being said. In the waiting room is a handsome young man in his early twenties with sandy brown hair that’s artfully disheveled, sporting a neat beard. He’s wearing teal-colored skinny jeans and bucks, a white button-down shirt and a dark blazer. He’s got what looks like a script in his hands.

From opposite sides of the room we assess one another with polite smiles and nods. He looks like he’s here for an audition, and I wonder if he thinks I’ve come for the same part.

In reality I’ve come because the week before I’d heard Williams give a speech aboard the MV Explorer, the ship upon which I’ve been teaching as part of the Semester at Sea (SAS) program’s Spring 2014 voyage around the world, serving as one of about 40 faculty members working with more than 550 students from nearly 250 colleges, universities, and international institutions. In early January, we set sail from California; four months later we are to disembark in the United Kingdom, via ports in Hawai’i, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Ghana, and Morocco. Think study abroad, but moving.

Williams is a faculty alum of the SAS program, and had embarked with his family in Mauritius as we bunkered for a twelve-hour refuel, half way through the two-week sail from India to South Africa. Prior to each port, the program brings on an interport lecturer whose role is to spend several days teaching the community about their home, country, and culture prior to arrival. In Williams’s case, he also auditioned, casted, rehearsed, and performed a one-act play with some of our students—all in less than a week’s time.

On his second night aboard, Williams gave a talk titled “South Africa After Mandela.” In his introduction, he tried to capture what it was like to grow up in a country with institutionalized racism, a place where a black woman named Beauty lived in a single room behind his family’s house and helped cook, clean, and raise him; a place where his father had to regularly post bail for black men who worked on his job sites who’d been arrested simply for not having their passbooks in their possession; a place where, in the 1970s, in Somerset-West, where Williams grew up, a 7:00 PM curfew was put in place for all for non-whites, in which black and “colored” people (the apartheid government’s term for the Malay, many of whose relatives had been slaves brought to South Africa from parts of Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company, or anyone of mixed race) had to be off the streets and in their townships or they would be arrested on sight; a place where blacks and whites were not allowed to share schools, theaters, shops, or park benches. “I grew up in a land where racial segregation was law, where it was legislated, and carried the power and backing of the state,” he told the assembled students and faculty. “No wonder, then, that I grew up as a racist.”

These words were hard to hear. Yet I found Williams’s honest portrayal of the institutionalization of distrust and the hate that apartheid had sown particularly moving, in no small part because he used it as an occasion to encourage our students to think in complicated ways about the intersection of race and identity, how the construct of race was so often used to divide ourselves from one another.

“Knowing that I was capable of being conditioned to view people of color as second-class citizens has forced upon me a keen sense and the vigiliance to acknowledge every racist thought that I might have. To dissect it, eradicate it,” he said. “This constant process of ridding myself of this propoganda has been the tenure of my upbringing, and has really shaped my consciousness for the last twenty or thirty years.”

Williams went on to urge the students to think of the exceptional costs that xenophobia—this fear of “the other”—had wrought across the globe during the twentieth century. “Think of World War II, think of Vietnam, think of Korea, think of the Rwandan genocide, think of the Armenian genocide,” he urged. “The amount of people who have died in the last century is phenomenal. And all of the killing was done by human beings against other human beings of different colors, different cultures, faiths, ethnicities, or ideologies. Against the ‘other.’”

But Williams perhaps pressed students the furthest when he asked them to consider the mass displacement and migrations taking place right now due to international conflicts, poverty, and the lack of opportunity from corrupt or failed governments. “The wretched of this earth are migrating from the poorer lands into the richer lands…and as this happens, the rich and the comfortable are trying to keep the great unwashed out. They are building borders, they are building walls, they’re building fences. They are doing everything they can to stop people from coming—requiring expensive visas and passing stringent immigration laws. These are pass laws. This is influx control. This is,” he said, pausing to let the word sink in, “apartheid.”

The violence associated with xenophobia is something that has influenced much of Williams’s writing, particularly of late. In addition to his work at the Cape Town Opera, he is also the author of almost a dozen novels—most recently, two young adult novels, both of which were released in the U.S. by Little, Brown: Diamond Boy (2014) and Now Is the Time for Running (2009). Each centers, in part, on characters attempting to make the dangerous—and often fatal—journey from Zimbabwe into South Africa. The comparative social and economic success that followed Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, and the subsequent end of apartheid, has drawn many refugees, from places like Rwanda, Somalia, and Zimbabwe, seeking better circumstances. “There’s a great deal of hatred for the foreigner coming into our country from the black people who themselves were oppressed and victimized during the apartheid regime,” Williams said during the Q&A aboard the ship, noting that what drives most of this hostility is the fear that the migrants will steal jobs. “It’s resulted in a lot of serious violence; a lot of refugees were killed.”

[Photos, from top]

Photo 1: View from the top of Table Mountain toward Robben Island.

Photo 2: View of Table Mountain from the MV Explorer.

Photo 3: Cape Town

In fact, it was a news story about the deadly wave of xenophobic attacks in South Africa in May 2008 that Williams cites as the source of inspiration for Now Is the Time for Running. As part of an author’s note in the back of the novel, he writes, “I wanted to imagine what it must be like for two brothers to successfully make it to Johannesburg after a dangerous journey, only to face the hatred of the local people upon arrival.”

Now Is the Time for Running is the story of teenage Deo and his older brother, Innocent, who flee their village in Zimbabwe after it is destroyed and their family is murdered by soldiers. “I stand in a village that is no longer the place where I live,” Deo narrates, after the soldiers have left. “There is nothing left of that place. There is nothing left of our neighbors. Nothing left of babies playing in doorways. Nothing left of fires cooking food. Nothing left of the smiles and greetings of people who know you. Nothing left of Grandpa Longdrop’s stories. Nothing left of the touch of my amai [mother]. I find her in the dust.”

The brothers set out on a journey to South Africa, hoping that their crossing will bring them to a better life. But it is a dangerous and costly trek. And despite the book being a young adult novel, the issues it addresses—political corruption, HIV/AIDS, militia violence, child trafficking, displaced peoples, homelessness, and more—are weighty ones for any novel. Yet Williams infuses his work with such humanity, showing us the communities and patchwork families that are forged in crisis, that we feel the buoyancy of hope that keeps the characters struggling toward a better future. It is a future tempered by reality, yes, but it is a hopeful one nonetheless. For the humanity of these characters burns too bright to be extinguished.

So it is with both awe and pleasure that I discovered midway through my reading of Diamond Boy that Williams’s most recent novel not only shares many of the themes of his previous book, but its narrative quite literally intersects with the previous story. How Williams arrived at this narrative decision is perhaps the most inspiring part of the story.

In 2010, Williams received a letter from a seventh grader in New Hampshire named Madolyn Bouchard, who’d been impressed by Now Is the Time for Running—so much so that she’d tracked down his address in South Africa to mail him a letter written on red stationary, sealed in a red envelope. “It was three pages, typed,” Williams tells me later, over lunch, mid-way through the first day of rehearsal. “In-depth analysis, including what she thought was wrong with the book, what she loved about the book.”

“It was incredible!” his wife, Ettie, adds. We are sitting outside under a table with an umbrella, on the back patio of their modest home in the Pinelands neighborhood, less than a ten-minute drive from the Joseph Stone theater. The food is delicious: fish in a sweet Cape Malay curry sauce, sweet potato salad, fresh made bread, a spicy yellow curried chicken, and more. Dishes fill the small table. Coffee soon follows.   

Williams continues, recounting Madolyn’s letter—in which she urged the author to write a second book—with both pride and pleasure. “She was wonderful. And I was so inspired because it was so articulate. I shared that letter with the publishers and they said, ‘No, no. The book is too literary to have a sequel. We don’t like sequels at Little, Brown.’ I said, ‘Excuse me, you’re the publisher of Stephenie Meyer!’

“Different division,” says Ettie, who works in publishing herself, correcting her husband warmly. The two have a wonderful, collaborative relationship, and throughout our conversation they often start and end one another’s sentences.

Little, Brown asked Williams to consider a companion piece instead. “And I’d never heard this phrase—where the book is related, it’s of the same universe, but not necessarily a prequel or a sequel,” Williams says. “So I was intrigued by that. And then I thought about it and I read the book again and I came across Patson. And I thought, ‘That’s kind of odd, this character arrives, he disappears, you don’t know what happens to him.’ And then, at the same time, I stumbled upon the Marange diamond mines. And, bang!” He claps his hands together, grinning. “This notion of all the teenagers that would go to Harare and try to find their fortunes in Marange was just…the story just had to be told right then.”

But at this moment in the story I’m still waiting for a lift to the theater. The young man sitting opposite me in the waiting room outside the Cape Town Opera is bouncing his leg in anticipation. And then Williams appears, striding into the room, smiling. He’s wearing sandstone-colored slacks, a black and white print shirt open at the neck, his shirt sleeves rolled up as if he’s already been hard at work this morning—which he most likely has. In addition to beginning rehearsals for Mandela Trilogy, he’s got another production, Show Boat, opening in a little over a month here on the Opera stage at Artscape.

The young man and I both stand up as Williams enters. He calls my name, extending his hand to shake mine firmly. “You made it alright, eh?” I nod, a bit pleased to have been greeted first. That is, until he claps his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “All set, Matthew?” It turns out that Matthew is the assistant director of the show, a recent graduate from Cape Town University, who Williams has taken on in a mentoring capacity. Matthew nods, though I can see there’s some nervousness there. He’s here for an audition, it turns out, just not the one I’d originally imagined. And having spent several days on the ship watching Williams work—a prolific writer, director, librettist, and novelist visiting classes as a guest speaker, giving evening lectures and stagecraft talks, staging a performance, and finalizing last minute details for this new production—I’m certain that the young apprentice is in for an immersive experience.

Matthew is to follow us in his own car to the Joseph Stone Theater, but Williams first wants to give me a quick tour of the beautiful Artscape complex, which hosts performances not only by the Cape Town Opera, but also the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, the Cape Town City Ballet, and others. “It’s a good space to work in,” he says. Recent productions have ranged from Verdi’s Otello, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly on the Opera House stage, to original productions from famed South African playright John Kani and a reimagination of Macbeth set in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa on the Theater stage. There is also a black box theater for staged readings, one-man shows, and such. Passing one room, we see more than a dozen elementary school–aged children in animal costumes. “What are you?” Williams asks one girl, enthusiastically. “I’m a mouse!” she explains with equal enthusiasm.

What Williams also reveals to me during my tour is the complex history of the place. When it opened in 1971 as the Nico Malan, the first multi-venue complex for the performing arts, it was a “whites-only” building. The subsequent protests and boycotts—from both artists and the public—forced the apartheid government to revise this policy. But a stigma lingered for some time, nonetheless.

This was during a period of particular racial tension. On February 11 of 1966, District Six, a section of the city overlooking Table Bay, was declared “whites-only” under the Group Areas Act of 1950. And in 1968, the government began forcibly removing people of color from the area, the majority of whom were Malay, many of whom were Muslim. At the time there were also some black Africans, Indians, and a small population of white residents living in District Six. During the process of displacement, which lasted more than a decade, the non-white residents were eventually relocated to the townships of the Cape Flats some twenty miles away.

[Photos, from top]

Photo 1: The word Ubuntu in South African can be translated as “A person is a person through another person,” an affirmation of each person’s humanity through the recognition of others.

Photo 2: A Mural in the Bo-Kaap Area, formerly known as the Malay Quarter, a thriving, predominately Muslim neighborhood on the slopes of Signal Hill, above the city center.

Photo 3: City Hall in Downtown Cape Town, where Mandela made his first public speech after being released from prison on February 11, 1990.

Photo 4: Inside the District Six Museum: a display of the everyday lives of District Six residents.

As we enter the highway and begin our drive out of town, Williams points to the area where District Six once was. “See there, just below those red roofed houses,” he says. “All of that area used to be part of the city.” Even from the highway I can see what a beautiful neighborhood it might have been, tucked in the bowl of the city, at the foot of Table Mountain. “That’s where they were living,” Williams says. “Look at all the access to the city and access to the harbor and the gorgeous views.” The only thing that remains, he tells me, are places of worship—a few churches, some mosques. Most of the homes were razed with bulldozers as part of the relocation process. “It was all charming Cape Dutch tenement housing, small houses. There’s a mosque you can see.” He points. “And another mosque.”

He explains that the government argued its actions were justified due to gangs and theft and an unhealthy population density. “But the reality of it was: ‘Let’s make our city white,’” Williams says. It is estimated that some sixty thousand people were forcibly removed between 1968 and 1982. Yet because of the controversy surrounding the act and the subsequent international and local pressure, redevelopment by the government was largely halted—and continues to be complicated to this day. In the twenty years since the fall of apartheid in 1994, there have been numerous discussions and negotiations about how to best invest in and redevelop the area, especially considering claims for restitution by those who were relocated. And while there has been limited progress in returning some of the former families to the area, the issue remains a highly contentious and politically complicated one.

Mitchells Plain is one of the predominately “colored” townships, built in the 1970s for the families who were forcible removed from their previous residences, such as those inhabitants of District Six. Today it is home to nearly three hundred thousand people and is one of the largest townships in Cape Town and South Africa. The Joseph Stone Theater is located in Athlone, a suburb of Mitchells Plain, approximately fifteen miles from Cape Town. When we arrive, it reminds me of any number of slightly depressed, midwestern, middle-class cities in the U.S.—wide traffic arteries with medians that could use a mowing, parking lots in front of businesses with rough pavement, sun-faded siding on buildings, modest ranch homes.

No doubt there are parts of this township that are poverty striken. And in two days, after spending an afternoon walking the suburb of Langa—a township built in the 1920s, before apartheid, as one of the many areas that were designated for black Africans, which today has a populated of approximately fifty thousand residents—I will witness it first-hand. Led by a young man in his twenties, who lives in Langa and works as an interpreter and guide, he will present his home as a study in the diversity of economic class: We walk through quaint parts of the suburb that have modest, single-family brick houses, front yards, and one-car garages; past apartment buildings with laundry strung across balconies and children playing out front in the street; and around one-room claboard houses where women tend open fires to make sheep’s head soup, the heads of the animals lined up on makeshift plywood tables nearby. Near the end of our tour, as a way of illustrating the depth of poverty in which some people live, our guide will take us to Langa’s slum, a place cordoned off from the rest of the township, pinned between the rushing freeway and a wall of cyclone fencing and razor wire, where residents squat in wooden shacks and modified shipping containers, the hodgepodge of buildings creating a labyrinthe of winding, narrow, dirt alleys that one could lose oneself in with only a single wrong turn, a place where the only source of sanitation is a line of port-a-potties several block long, where children wander barefoot between the sun-bleached buildings, where the only adults hide inside in the dark, unlit, single-room buildings (the nicest of which might have a piece of old linoleum laid down over the packed-dirt floor), and where, when we leave, three young girls who have made jangling bracelets out of old beer bottle tops strung on coat hanger wire, which they’ve wrapped around their ankles, will dance, pounding the brown earth with their feet, the bottle caps rattling together in a kind of music, the song they’re singing a language I don’t understand, yet whose message—what can you spare to alleviate this poverty?—is as clear as their eyes and voices.

But I haven’t been to Langa yet, so when we park in front of the modest theater, I won’t fully appreciate what I glimpse as we enter the Joseph Stone. Not yet. On the side of the building, next to the entrance, are dozens and dozens of children’s handprints pressed against the whitewashed cinderblock wall—bright greens and reds and blues and oranges—even more vibrant today in the white glare of the sun. Painted above is a message: “Hands Off Our Children.” And below, the number for a help line.

I also don’t immediately realize how appropriate it is that we’re rehearsing here today—this theater a refuge of sorts for children—because Williams’s breakout book, Crocodile Burning, is a coming-of-age story about a poor boy from the townships, on the verge of becoming a criminal, who stumbles into an audition and discovers he has a talent for singing, landing a part in a musical about young people trying to break free from poverty, a show which eventually becomes successful enough to make it to New York. However, because of its less-than-flattering portrait of life under apartheid, the book wasn’t initially picked up by publishers in South Africa. In fact, it ended up published first in the U.S., in 1992, subsequently winning a Library Assocation Award. Two years later, Oxford University Press took a gamble on the novel and released it in South Africa. The book is now in its thirty-fifth printing, and required reading in many schools.

Part of the reason I don’t make this connection immediately, however, is that I’m rushing to keep up. Williams strides into the theater, out of the bright morning sun, and down a dark hallway to the back of the building, where the company is awaiting his arrival in the dance studio. I am introduced to the set and costume designer, Michael Mitchell; the conductor and chorus master, Albert Horne; and the choreographer, Sbo Naka; as well as the lighting designer, Peter Halbsgut, and the stage manager, Marianne Halbsgut, who happen to be married. These two also happen to have worked for many years in Munich—part of the reason they’ve been brought on for this particular show.

Williams is informed that some of the singers are late because of cabs, and while he and several others try to sort things out, I sneak a look at the director’s table. Spread out across it are the artistic visions of what the show will become, from renderings of the stage, to fashion drawings of the new costumes, to scripts annotated with minute-by-minute timing penciled in the margins. There’s even a miniature model of the stage, no larger than a laptop. It’s a simple design, intended to evoke the inside of a prison: a catwalk across the back; railings for guards to peer down into the yard; and two sets of stairs that ramp down on either side, flanking center stage, descending to the floor to allow the singers access to the structure from either side.

I find a chair in the corner, out of the way. The ballet studio is a big space, with an enormous ceiling that reaches up to the industrial framework overhead. It has honey-colored hardwood, brick walls, and mirrors at opposite ends of the room. The cast sit on plastic yard chairs—white, yellow, blue—in a rough semi-circle, talking and chatting, facing the desk. The majority are black. Some are perhaps of Indian or Malyasian descent. Only one man and one woman in attendance are white. Most of the company appear to be in their late twenties and early thirties.

Within a few moments Williams is clapping his hands, calling everyone’s attention. He has talked with excited animation the entire car ride over, and I know he is eager to begin. He welcomes them back, there is a bit of bantering, and then, following some necessary introductions, he launches into the explanation for why there is a new Act One. He wants to share both his thinking and his enthusiasm with the company, and as he talks he paces the floor, gesturing and speaking with his hands.

There are practical reasons for the changes: In order to make the show more flexible and appealing to European venues, he’s had to reimagine it as an ensemble cast, meaning there will only be thirty performers instead of the original cast of forty-five. This also means that most performers will now play multiple roles. But beyond the pragmatic retooling, the biggest change has come from the inspiration to tell the story of Makhanda, a tribal leader from the early 1800s who’d fought the British and had been imprisoned on Robben Island—just like Mandela, though more than a hundred years earlier.

“And when Makhanda got to Robben Island,” Williams recounts to the company, “he was amazed to find that there were other prisoners from other tribes who were also there. And so he understood that the whole notion of the white imperial forces of Britain coming in to South Africa was not isolated to Grahamstown. So there was a conscious, conscious effort by Makhanda to make them understand that they had to try to break away from the tribal identity and think more of the black peoples of southern Africa.”

Williams goes on to tell how Makhanda and several other men planned an escape together on Christmas Day of 1819. But unfortunately there was a storm and Makhanda was lost overboard and never seen again. However, the people who survived spread word of a prophetic return one day. “There was a saying,” Williams tells the company, “‘When Makhanda returns, we will receive our freedom.’ The spiritual Makhanda. ‘Because with Makhanda’s return, he will liberate us.’

[Photos, from top]

Photo 1: The Bo-Kaap area.

Photo 2: Outside the Guga S’thebe Cultural Center in Langa.

Photo 3: Women tending cook fires for sheep’s head soup in Langa.

Photo 4: The director’s table ready for rehearsal.

Photo 5: Williams shares new costume designs for Act One with the company.

“And Mandela was stirred by this story,” Williams continues. “He saw Makhanda as the first freedom fighter against white domination. So it struck me as being ironic that Mandela was aware of this man and that he himself was then imprisoned and went about the same fate as his hero. This irony—this echo of history that comes down—I thought was so interesting.”

Williams explains that through the writing of the piece he’d also realized that the first half was about the mistakes Mandela had made as a young man—stealing cattle from his surrogate father in order to run away and avoid an arranged marriage; his infidelity during his first marriage and eventual divorce; and promoting violent change, which was against the wishes of the African National Congress—and that the second half was about the success that he had—his courage and leadership at the 1956 treason trial and the years he spent in prison; the gentle manner in which he dealt with the increasingly radical demands made by his second wife, Winnie; his firm but conciliatory handling of the negotiations with De Klerk’s government; and his vision of a new, non-racial South Africa when he became President. So the piece was really about looking back, about seeing the arc of a life in the context of all this history.

To capture this, Williams has decided to set the entire show in the prison yard of Robben Island, where Mandela spent eighteen years of his twenty-seven-year imprisonment. An older Mandela, looking back on his life, would both summon the memory of those prisoners like himself and summon their memories—of their youth, their indiscretions, their passions, their struggles—made even more poignant by the prison walls in the background, which despite the evolving time and place of each scene would linger in the background. For there is both liberation and limits to memory; the imagination can soar over walls but remain aloft for only so long. It is the tension between these two forces which creates meaning.

For the first hour and a half of rehearsal, however, most of the work is devoted to the new music, and Williams sits on a chair in front of the desk, following along as the conductor walks the singers through their parts. An accompanist on the piano provides the melody. There are duets between a young Mandela and his brother, Justice, the son of the Thembu Regent Jongintaba Dalindyebo, in whose family Mandela was a ward, as they consider fleeing their arranged marriages; there is the upbeat tribal song celebrating the intiation ceremony that the young men must go through; and there is a soaring aria by a woman playing Mandela’s mother, who must say goodbye to her son twice—once as he leaves the village as a young man, and again (perhaps for good) upon his imprisonment—a song that even in rehearsal brings two of the female cast members to tears, and leaves the room ringing all the way to the steel beams of the rafters. It is, in a word, amazing.

That said, the performance doesn’t truly come alive until Williams begins the blocking process—that is, working with the performers to direct the action that will take place on stage. Shortly before we break for lunch, Williams brings the company together to start exploring the opening of Act One. The chairs have been pulled aside and the dance floor of the rehearsal room cleared. The cast stand in a semi-circle in front of the mirrored wall, some leaning up against the barre, and Williams begins evoking the stage. He does so by moving across floor, gesturing the shape of the set with his hands as he speaks—here is the catwalk where the guards will watch the prisoners, there and there the two set of stairs that will flank the stage; here is where the men will enter in their prison dress, and over there where an older Mandela will stand, looking on.

As Williams explains to the performers how the stage will be configured, how they will physically interact with one another and the set, an entirely new energy begins to fill the room. Not simply because of the excitement of the new opening act, which the performers seem to enjoy, but because the process of blocking the stage is such a collaborative one; Williams clearly has a vision for the performance, but I’m inspired by the easy way the company weighs in with suggestions about entrances and exits, how the choreographer works with Williams and the performers as she begins to turn his ideas into movement and dance, and how Williams himself coordinates with the rest of the staff on everything from props to lighting to costumes to timing so that their input might help bring Act One to life.

And even as the performers begin weaving the music and action together on stage, Williams stays on his feet, walking them through each moment, coaching the singers both in terms of motivation and the mood. At times he suggests a particular inflection, or pushes them into a deeper emotional register, helping them find the character in the music and vice-versa. It is a magical thing, this delicate balance of coaching while managing to stay out of the way of a performer’s own exploration of a scene. Throughout the process Williams solicits feedback from the cast, and urges them on with excitement when they stumble upon something new. Together, they are uncovering the mystery and movement of the show as they rehearse. 

Finally, after the cast has practiced isolated bits and pieces of Act One, Williams decides to run straight through from the beginning. The scene is to open with half a dozen men in prison uniforms sitting in the prison yard. They are Mandela’s memory of his own past, one he views from the wings. The lights are dim, and from the back of the prison comes the flicker of a candle. The candle is held by a woman, a memory of village life. Mandela steps toward her, welcoming her into this dream, summoning her into the scene. One by one women follow her slowly across the stage, each holding a small bowl with a candle. They circle two galvanized wash tubs that sit in the center of the stage—tubs that a young Mandela and his brother, Justice, will soon use to wash the white clay of their initiation ceremony off their bodies. But the memory of that past hasn’t been fully evoked yet. The prisoners, watching the women now, slowly begin to stand, and as the scene unfolds, these prisoners will shed their prison garb, revealing the Xhosa tribal clothes they once wore, the memory of their younger days burning bright enough to conjure their younger, freer selves to life. For the memory of the village punctures the reality of the prisonyard, transforming it—evolving—before our eyes from incarceration to home.

This is, of course, not exactly what I see in the dance studio during rehearsal. It’s what I remember now, months later, the memory taking its own shape through the magic of the afternoon. But somehow it feels real. And I know it’s what will have been born on the stage in the weeks and months that follow my departure.

I think to the other lecture that Williams gave on our voyage, this one on the history of African theater. He began by saying, “As you all know, theater is an act. To brush one’s teeth in public is not theater, but to mimic someone brushing ones’s teeth becomes art and that is theater—the urge to imitate, the need to act out life, and the belief that in this act, in this acting out, in some mysterious way, this affects the natural world—our world—that we live in.”

I feel that transformative power in the Joseph Stone theater. And in witnessing this opening scene as it is practiced over and over throughout the rest of the day, I think I finally glimpse Williams’s larger vision for the play, see it flicker as those candles would on stage. For what’s most inspiring about this vision of Mandela’s story is that by structuring the entire piece as a memory built around the prison, one is asked to see how the present and the past collapse into one another, how they become inseparable, forming and informing one another, gesturing toward a future that has happened and has yet to happen. That opening scene illuminates the way in which the past lives inside us, how it can both drown us and set us free.

That was Mandela’s gift, after all, wasn’t it? He was able to forgive those who had imprisoned him in the prime of his life. “His way was to conquer fear of the other in South Africa,” Williams had said at his first talk. “So that he could bring the warring factions together in the spirit of reconciliation. He found a way to do that. He succeeded because he was able to give himself as an example of forgiveness.” And perhaps, in doing so, liberate himself from that past as well.

At the end of rehearsal, as the company gathers its things to leave, Williams thanks me for the visit. He has to stay to work late with the stage manager and to oversee the completion of the set. If all goes well this evening, the company will begin to rehearse on stage tomorrow. I still need to get back to Cape Town, so Williams arranges to have me ride back with some of the company, who are taking the Cape Town Opera van back to the city. I’ll be dropped at Artscape, and from there I can get a taxi to the ship.

The van is already waiting for me, so I say my goodbyes quickly. I wish Matthew well, thank the rest of the crew who have let me observe, and haul myself and my camera bag into the vehicle. The only seat available is at the very rear, and I excuse my way to the back of the bus.

The cast is tired. A day worth of summoning their voices and learning new choreography and stage directions has clearly worn most of them out. They speak a little—mostly Xhosa, I’m guessing, with a stray line or two in English—and occasionally someone half-sings a line in practice, adjusting a note slightly, then trying again. But mostly they are quiet. I manage a “thank you” for letting me observe, and offer some very genuine words of admiration. They offer small gratitudes in return. But it’s clear from everyone’s body language that they are exhausted and not up for conversation.

So I lean back in my seat, as well. I stare out through the dust on the window at the light striking down from the sky. Williams’s novels are full of dust and light. “Outside, the sun rested above the thorn trees and the air filled with amber dust,” Patson narrates on the first page of Diamond Boy. He, too, was staring out the window of a car, headed somewhere new. In the distance, the back side of Table Mountain is coming into view, a side of it I haven’t seen before. It feels strange to see it in this way, so different and yet so much more intimate than the perfect, postcard images one always sees taken from the harbor.

Jeremiah Chamberlin is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

[Photos, from top]

Photo 1: Michael Williams with some of the company members (back, left) during a moment of levity. Albert Horne, conductor and chorus master (back, right) reviewing the score.

Photo 2: Williams and choreographer Sbo Naka (immediately to Williams’s right, back to camera) talking to some of the company about a scene in Act One.

Photo 3: Two of the company members awaiting their cues during rehearsal.

Photo 4: Williams during rehearsal.

Photo 5: The back of Table Mountain.