ALLOW ME TO TELL MY STORY

It doesn’t get more exciting than this. For this term I am producing a radio drama. The tittle of the drama is ‘Amaxesha ngamanye’ translated the times have changed. This drama is inspired by what is going on in and around the world in contemporary society. It is undeniable true that the times have changed, this means that new ways of doing things have emerged and the way South Africa operates is sort of different from how things were back in the days. Let me spare you the lecture and tell you more about the process thus far.

I’m now at a stage where I have finished writing the script and I have sent it to my mentor, Toffee Zitshu, uMhloboWenene drama producer. She looked at the script, made a few corrections and she liked it a lot: “I’m looking forward to listening to the final product,” she said. Last week Friday I met for the first time with the actors (Pumelela Nqelenga, Avuyile Maselwa and Anelisa Mente). They are the three main characters in the story and the drama consists of five characters in total. I was very pleased to see the excitement in their faces; this in return brought a smile to my face. Any writer will tell you that there is nothing as humbling as seeing people appreciate the work that you have done. It was like that with me as well, in fact I still feel good.

In our meeting we discussed how things are going to work, with regards to the rehearsals and we also set down and looked at each other’s time tables. Speaking about time, I think this will be one of the challenges because all my characters are senior students with very busy schedules. However this is not much of a problem because I would like to believe that they are professional actresses because they have done drama. This means that it will not take them a lot of time to read the script as they are used to reading and writing scripts. This drama is written in isiXhosa; one of the things on the agenda was to get a sense of how they feel about the use of language and using the language to record. Fortunately they were happy and very excited to do it in their mother tongue as they believe that it will not be difficult for them to improvise where needed. This makes things a bit easier for me.

I explained each character to them, I spoke to them about the inspiration behind this drama and they also agreed that the way contemporary society works and the way households operate has indeed changed. One of them, Pumelela asked me a very interesting question – she wanted to know whether this story falls under comedy or not, because she finds some parts a bit funny. Mmm well, I never thought of it as comedy. I cannot say it is a comedy; it is a fictional story that has a deep message embedded but there are comical scenes. On that note, that is where I am for now and I will be spending the next week working closely with Umhlobo Wenene’s drama department in Port Elizabeth. I shall tell you about that as well; look out for my next update!

Ciao!