Cont Mhlanga – Full Profile – NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Cont Mhlanga

NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

By Kamangeni Phiri

‘Umkhulu lo Msebenzi’ is one of the most profound Ndebele adages around and for frail-looking arts doyen, Cont Mhlanga, it meant coming up with productions that defied his slightly built frame.

Mhlanga – that quintessential Bulawayo man in Zimbabwe’s theatre, drama and film industry – was the brains behind massive productions like Amakorokoza, Sinjalo, The Good President and Workshop Negative, among many other creative works.

His productions defined him as a man more than words could ever do.

Not surprisingly, little is known about the man who helped transform Zimbabwe’s film and arts industry.

A media shy Mhlanga made a deliberate decision to remain unknown while letting his works do the talking for him.

“These are things that I don’t like talking about. I’m not the kind of person who likes his life splashed around in the papers. I want to be known for my work and nothing else. I am an intensely private person and that’s why people don’t know much about my life,” the late soft-spoken arts guru told local weekly publication, Sunday News in March, 2021.

‘Umkhulu lo Msebenzi’ which literally translates to “The work is great”, is a simple but deep statement adopted by the late arts doyen as a motto for his arts company, Amakhosi Theatre Productions.

The motto, which figuratively can also mean, “the project is bigger and deeper than it appears to be”, became a guiding principle for budding artists who passed through Cont’s hands.

Cont Mhlanga’s journey into the world of arts started by chance way back in 1979 when he formed a youth karate club. He named it the Dragons Karate Club.

A prime athletic Cont Mhlanga was conducting his karate practice sessions alone at the family’s Nguboyenja house when a teenager by the name Albert Mparura asked to join the then karate doyen. Mparura’s friend joined him and within a week the number had risen to six and later to 10 after two weeks. That laid the first seed for the birth of Amakhosi Theatre Productions.

The first generation of Amakhosi Theatre Productions was made up of kids below the age of 19 years.

Mhlanga’s father, Dickson Mbikwa, noticed the number of children coming for karate sessions was growing bigger by the day and advised his son to move to a bigger place in line with city council policy.

Mbikwa teamed up with a local councillor for Makokoba and approached the city council for space.

Dragons Karate Club then moved to Mthwakazi Youth Centre and later to a bigger venue, Stanley Hall in Makokoba as the membership kept growing.

Cont Mhlanga and his students were obsessed with making a kung-fu movie as a way of raising money for their karate club.

But the karate master and his boys had no clue how to write a story.

One day, in 1980, when the group came for their routine training they found the hall occupied by participants attending a theatre workshop. On impulse, Cont decided to join the workshop, probably out of curiosity.

“We were lucky that the National Theatre Organisation, which was made up of mainly white members because black people were nowhere to be seen at that time, came to Stanley Square where we were practising and said they were there to conduct a workshop about acting. I told everyone to go home and I attended the workshop. That’s when I discovered that this was what we wanted in our Kung-fu film – how to write stories,” said Mhlanga.

The decision proved to be a life-changer: Cont Mhlanga the playwright was born and Amakhosi Theatre Productions was established the following year in 1981.

His first drama after the training was Bantwana Bantwana which, however, did not have Kung-fu in it. But Cont was still obsessed with making his Kungu-fu film.

And this needed a lot of money.

Cont opted to do low-budget Kungu-fu plays as a way of raising funds for the production of his Kung-fu movie. His next project, The Book of Lies, had a lot of Kung-fu action in it.

With time, Mhlanga and his team realised that their karate plays were not bringing in enough money to help them realise their dream of making a karate movie. Only kids were coming to watch their works. The playwright then decided to write a drama, Ngizozula Lawe, which featured traditional dance and choreograph as way of luring an adult audience.

The trick worked magic as the drama proved to be popular and made a lot of money for the group. It also resulted in Amakhosi enjoying their first tour.

In the 1990s, Mhlanga and his Amakhosi group travelled abroad performing their play, Stitsha in different European countries. He sourced funding from a Norwegian film company which launched Amakhosi into film production.

Mhlanga again worked with the Bulawayo City Council to turn the council-owned Happy Valley Hotel in Nguboyenja into a studio. The hotel back then was defunct.

Mhlanga named the studio Happy Valley Studios and this marked the crossing over of Amakhosi from the stage to the screen. He also redid Stitsha for TV and it was popular with viewers of different ethnic backgrounds.

“Working at Happy Valley planted the seed that we needed a cultural centre. That is how the idea of Amakhosi Cultural Centre was born,” said Mhlanga in a 2021 interview he gave to Sunday News.

Cont who breathed his last on August 1, 2022 while admitted at the United Bulawayo Hospitals, was regarded by many as an arts genius and Ndebele cultural icon. He succumbed to pneumonia aged 64.

He was born Continueloving Mdladla Mhlanga on March 16, 1958 at Fatima Mission in Lupane. His father was Dickson Mbikwa and his mother was Sarah Danile. Cont was the first born in a large family of 14 boys and four girls, according to his brother Styx Mhlanga.

He learnt at Shabula and Fatima Primary Schools. Cont did forms one and two at Fatima High School before proceeding to Sobokhazi High School in Bulawayo for his form three and four education.

Zimbabwe born British actor, Dr Christopher John, who worked and lived with Cont for three years in Makokoba, described the late arts doyen as a courageous, intelligent, stubborn and very funny creative genius artist.

The two met in 1986 at a time when Cont was still working at Tregers and had just won the National Theatre Festival award with his play Nansi Le Ndoda.

“When Cont wrote Workshop Negative, he would come with two pages to us. We would go through the script fast and act. Our rehearsals were conducted outside with only children sitting around reacting to the play, laughing. We would play a scene, and Cont would watch it, watch the reaction and then go away and write the next excerpts. Cont wrote it in the process of seeing it develop. The play was about a black businessman, a white Rhodesian who had fought in the war and a former freedom fighter in the liberation war and the country was the workshop. Action and humour were very strong. The play changed our lives for the better,” he said in a recent interview with the online AVG News TV.

Dr John said no one could have written a play from such a perspective except Cont.

Most of his plays were politically satiric, witty, unifying, educational and entertaining.

But they also rubbed up government the wrong way, landing Cont and his group into problems with the state machinery.

“We were threatened in various ways. The CIOs were crawling over Amakhosi. Cont said to me at one stage they took him aside and told him they will cut his hands off so that he would not write anymore plays,” said Dr John.

Cont penned 20 extraordinary plays and three good books in his illustrious arts career.

Amakhosi’s polished performances promoted township tourism in Bulawayo. South Africa’s musical couple, Caiphus Simenya and Letta Mbulu, was among the many high profile people who came to watch Amakhosi perform in the townships.

Mhlanga’s politically-charged play The Good President won him an Art Venture Freedom to Create award. The play was judged the best out of nearly 1 000 entrants from 86 countries.

Mhlanga and Amakhosi Cultural Centre also won the Prince Claus award in December 2015, an honour given for outstanding achievements in the field of culture and development.

The arts doyen helped set up independent radio stations, Skyz Metro FM which covers Bulawayo and the Victoria Falls based Breeze FM. He was the founding board Vice Chairperson for the two stations’ holding company, Fairtalk Communications, which also owns Keona TV.

Cont is survived by wife, Thembi Ngwabi, six children and a grandchild.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He wrote more than 20 plays, among them Sinjalo, Workshop Negative, The Good President, Amakorokoza, The End, Children on Fire, Games and Bombs, The Members and Vikela.

Mhlanga also helped set up Skyz Metro FM, one of the first independent radio stations in Zimbabwe.

End