Cry, the Beloved Country

King Kong brave as a lion

King Kong hundred feet tall

King Kong champ without trying--

That's me, I'm him. King Kong.

With notes as big as thunderheads starting and falling low at the end of the lyric, South Africa's King Kong was introduced last week to the London musical stage. Drawn from life in the shantytowns around Johannesburg, it gave its West End audiences a chance to see the result of a big event in theatrical history: a superb jazz opera written, directed and produced by South African whites, scored, sung and acted by South African blacks.

With raw flair, swivel-hipped sex, lurid color and fundamental rhythms. King Kong has clapped a rough hand on English shoulders to lead its new audience through the shebeens (speakeasies) and back alleys around black Johannesburg. Great gum-booted miners dance with precision, township spivs glitter with menace as they re-enact a primeval war dance; shebeen Delilahs strut their stuff in the sinuous dance of the patha patha (touch, touch). Racy, swinging rhythms interweave tribal chants, European liturgical music and 1925 Dixieland stomps. Such certified-hit solos as The Earth Turns Over alternate with pennywhistle blues and a road gang's traditional chant. Wrote Critic Bernard Levin in the Daily Express: "Certainly the show lacks the fine cutting edge that the Americans grind onto their musicals. But the more sophistication, the less vitality. And King Kong triumphs in the end by its bursting, smoking, glowing life."

Against Odds. Built on a legend, the opera has itself become one. Its central theme follows the life and death of a Zulu giant named Ezekiel Dhlamini, a prizefighter of the 1950s who became the heavyweight champion of black South Africa and was known throughout the union as "King Kong." A hero until his death four years ago, he has since become something of an African god. He would clobber his challengers in the ring and later pulp them for good measure in the street outside. Braggart as well as warrior, he let his crown slide, ended up as a dance-hall bouncer who jealously murdered his mistress. Begging for capital punishment, he was given twelve years at hard labor and drowned himself by a prison dam.

To many, he symbolized the wasted power of his people in his country in his time, and his life was a readymade libretto. The music, too, was at hand--in the jazz concerts of the shantytown shebeens. A group met soon after the fighter's suicide and planned what may have seemed an impossible production: book by white Lawyer-Novelist Harry Bloom, lyrics by white Journalist Patricia Williams, score by black Jazz Composer Todd Matshikiza, direction by white Actor-Director Leon Gluckman, a veteran of London's Old Vic. When rehearsals began, they had to be conducted against odds: the curfew, threatening Johannesburg hooligan gangs, the rules of apartheid.

Cracked Barricade. Opening Feb. 2, 1959 in the Great Hall at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand (the only place in the city where an opera-sized production could be staged before a mixed audience). King Kong was an instant hit, and played before 120,000 persons--two-thirds of them white--in Johannesburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town. Then, as now in London, heavyweight Jazz Singer Nathan M'dledle (pronounced Muh-dead-ly) played "the King." His girl was played by Miriam Makeba, whose success in the role catapulted her to solo spots in U.S. nightclubs; she has been replaced in the opera by 29-year-old Peggy Phango. From the beginning, the semipro chorus has been filled with carpenters, shop clerks, schoolteachers, messengers, housemaids, typists, even an X-ray technician.

Surprisingly, the government granted passports for King Kong's trip to London (it may come to New York as well) and, slightly cracking the apartheid barricade, the mayor of Johannesburg gave a farewell party for the cast. In London, moving out tentatively from their modest hotel near Notting Hill, cast members were welcomed by everyone from underground conductors to Princess Margaret, and few in the show's enthusiastic audiences could resist the African rhythms:

King Kong bigger than Cape Town

King Kong harder than gold

King Kong knock any ape down--

That's me, I'm him. King Kong.

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