Tololwa Mollel, Anthem of Life part 1, Theatre Propsero. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A swirling, full-blooded Zulu epic comes to the stage next week when Tololwa Mollel’s Anthem of Life premieres in a Theatre Prospero production, part 1 of a planned trilogy.

The ideas, the lush images, the stories, the extravagantly idiosyncratic characters — humans, gods, animals — all have been lodged in Mollel’s mind for … as he says, decades. Ever since the Tanzania-born Edmonton-based storyteller and playwright discovered Mazisi Kunene’s re-imagining of Zulu cosmology and mythology in his 12,000 line 15-book 300-page poem Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic, published in the early 1980s. “I was blown away, captivated.”

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Actually, even before that. Mollel credits his introduction to African literature as an undergrad at the University of Dar es Salaam in the ‘70s. “It was an eye-opener,” says the genial and engaging Mollel, a literature and theatre major at the time. He’s remembering the seismic shift in cultural sensibility away from colonialist proprietorship toward an Africa-centered focus, as he describes. “We’d thought of literature as English literature, Dickens and Shakespeare.… Then, wow! you can have African literature, politics, history, mythology….”

“I came across Kunene’s poetry, mostly in Zulu,” says Mollel of the late South African poet, oral historian, and scholar who became the African National Congress representative in Europe and taught at UCLA. Kunene had translated some of his work into English, “but didn’t like to do that unless he had to,” says Mollel.

playwright Tololwa Mollel, performing in the 2017 workshop production of Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Mat Simpson.

“All I knew of Zulu creation myths and cosmology at the time,” he says of his younger self, “was that mankind came out of reeds in a marsh. I knew that some gods, and a goddess who brings blessing like rain and fertility, were involved, including the Supreme Creato who was a bit aloof…. That’s all I knew till I read Kunene,” in English translation (Mollel is a Swahili speaker, whose mother tongue, one of 120 in Tanzania, is Maasai).

Worlds opened up.  He discovered that the Zulu gods, a fractious bunch, have a certain affinity with their Greek counterparts: “they had their strengths and their flaws, their weaknesses, their intrigues, their self-interest…. Some are confident and brag about their power; sometimes they can be pretty insecure. Some are spelled out clearly, others not.” There’s a god of pleasure whom “we see only briefly, only when there’s a party to be organized….”

As Mollel explains, the central conflict of Part 1 of Kunene’s Anthem of the Decades, and one that runs through the entire epic, is the momentous and controversial decision to create mankind (Abantu in Zulu). There is no consensus in heaven about this: “some of the gods did not like the idea.”

“The god and goddess of thunder and lighting are on board. The goddess of death, however, a leading opponent, “leads a campaign of terror against mankind.” This includes conjuring wild dogs. “The goddess who gives blessings tempers them but can’t eliminate them  since they’re children of heaven.”

The question of mortality/immortality for mankind is the crux. Not only is the goddess of death not in favour of immortality for them, “if she had her way she’d destroy mankind altogether,” says Mollel. The deal the other gods reach with her is that “destruction is part of creation. Men are going to die, yes, but one by one instead of wholesale.”

Mollel, who first came to Canada in 1976 to do a master’s degree at the U of A — as a theatre researcher rather than an actor; “my thing is storytelling” — kept going back to Anthem of the Decades over the years. “It’s a really good, challenging read! When I first read it I was a young man without much life experience, and I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about; it’s deep, profound, philosophical.”

Then he had the chance to meet Kunene himself on a research trip through the U.S. The encounter was inspirational. “he talked about poetry and epics, Mayan, ancient Egyptian, Chinese…” — and their conversation sent Mollel back to Anthem of the Decades. Since Mollel was working with Theatre Prospero on their new festival, he gave it to artistic director Mark Henderson to read. And it was Henderson who wondered, persuasively, if it could be a play. The result was a short workshop production in 2017.

playwright Tololwa Mollel, in 2017 workshop production of Anthem of Life Part 1, Theatre Prospero. Photo by Mat Simpson.

As Mollel describes, Anthem of Life Part 1 seems a natural for theatre, of the freewheeling multi-disciplinary kind built into the Tanzanian theatrical tradition. The production we’ll see next week has music and storytelling “and dance of course to go with the music,” as Mollel puts it. “Every other page there’s a celebration! Ah, and masks. Lots of masks (created by Randall Fraser) for nine very busy performers who are embodying gods, humans, and a slew of animals too.

“I made four songs in Swahili,” says Mollel, “tunes I remembered from when I was growing up.” There’s Indian music and dance, too (“with the same zest as African”), since there’s a South Asian artist in the cast. The play is not in verse (“I didn’t want to compete with Kunene”), except when “the drama calls for ‘a poetic effect’,” Mollel says. “In some parts I let my voice take over.”

“It’s a great story and I wanted to bring that to the fore…. In Anthem of the Decades, Kunene doesn’t really care whether it hangs together; storylines appear and disappear.…” Theatre has certain requirements: “I had to have it cohere.”

“When the time comes to take a message to mankind that (people) won’t live forever, the gods have to find a worthy messenger, and it has to be an animal.” The different animals must audition,” a knockout theatrical premise for a scene. Mollel laughs, “I’m glad it happens at the end; it’d be hard to top that!”

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 in future Theatre Prospero seasons.

PREVIEW

Anthem of Life, part 1

Theatre: Theatre Prospero

Written by: Tololwa Mollel, adapting Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic by Mazisi Kunene

Directed by: Mark Henderson

Starring: Brennan Campbell, Patricia Darbasie, Lebo Disele, Andrés Felipe, Mark Henderson, Sokhana Mfenyana, Vwede Oturuhoyi, Enakshi Sinha, Valentine Ukoh

Where: Alberta Avenue Community Centre, 9210 118 Ave.

Running: June 19 through July 6

Tickets: edmontonarts.ca