Zakes Mokae

Published on Wednesday 23 September 2009 21:10

Actor

Born: 5 August, 1934, in Johannesburg.

Died: 11 September, 2009, in Las Vegas, aged 75.

ZAKES Mokae was a Tony-winning South African actor whose partnership with his countryman the playwright Athol Fugard in plays such as The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena and Master Harold ... and the Boys, brought the insidious psychological brutality of apartheid to the attention of audiences across the world.

Mokae, who was black, and Fugard, who is white, were part of a drama collective in South Africa in the 1950s. In 1960, when they performed together in Fugard's play about brothers with skins of different hues, The Blood Knot, it was the first time black and white performers had appeared on the same stage in South Africa.

The play not only defied a national taboo, but also propelled Fugard to international fame as a playwright and Mokae to a rich and varied career in theatre, film and television.

The play's local fame persuaded an English producer to open it in London, where Mokae continued to act in it, though Fugard did not. It was a sensation (despite a scathing review by Kenneth Tynan).

As Fugard continued to explore the corrosive effects of racial separatism on the individual psyches of both blacks and whites in subsequent plays, Mokae took on key roles in several of them. In Boesman and Lena, about a mixed-race couple migrating from one bleak settlement to another, both emotionally embittered and inextricably yoked by their predicament, Mokae appeared in the 1970 American premiere, with Ruby Dee and James Earl Jones.

Mokae first played an old black man, nearly incapable of communicating, who nonetheless befriends Lena, and later took over for Jones as Boesman.

In A Lesson From Aloes he played a political activist who confronts a white man, a former friend he fears may be a government informer, taking the role in regional theatre and appearing as an understudy to Jones in the Broadway production.

And in 1982 he won a Tony for his performance as Sam, one of two servants working in a tea room in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in Master Harold, the first of Fugard's works to have its world premiere outside of South Africa.

In the play Sam looms as a surrogate father for a spoiled white teenager, whose frustrations with his biological parents result in the eventual manifestation of his ugly, racist upbringing. The play had its roots in his own childhood, Fugard said, and the character of Sam in two men he had known.

"I knew I wanted Zakes in that defining role in the play," Fugard said.

Zakes Makgona Mokae was born in Johannesburg in 1934. In vicious times in South Africa, he was jailed several times as a young man. He was playing saxophone in a jazz band in the late 1950s when he was introduced to Fugard by a black journalist, Bloke Modisane, who was helping Fugard create a theatre that was specifically about South African life, a type of theatre that did not exist at the time.

Mokae had no previous acting experience, but Fugard, sensing a bond between them, cast him in two plays even before The Blood Knot. When The Blood Knot was revived by the Yale Repertory Company in the United States in 1985, with Fugard and Mokae again acting together, it was, Fugard said, among the most emotional occasions of his life.

After The Blood Knot opened in London, Mokae was barred from returning to South Africa. He did not return until 1982, when he learned his brother James was to be hanged for murders committed during a robbery, though it was unclear whether James was present during the killings. Mokae, who learned of the death sentence on the night he won his Tony award, returned to Johannesburg in time to witness his brother's execution.

Mokae's many films included The Comedians, Darling, Cry Freedom and A Dry White Season. in 1993 he was nominated for a Tony for a supporting role in The Song of Jacob Zulu, a first play by a white playwright, Tug Yourgrau, about the South African trial of a black activist. Mokae played a man who had spent much of his life in prison.

"If you're a black man in South Africa and you've never been in prison there's something wrong with you," Mokae said in an interview with the New York Times at the time, adding that a tirade spewed by his character had grown out of conversations he had with Yourgrau.

"Tug hasn't been in prison a lot with black folks, so I had to talk about it with him," Mokae said. "It's true that when they count you at night they walk on your face with their boots. And they do it all night. All night, somebody's being beaten. Somebody's screaming. That stuff to me, it's real. You have to tell a white person, 'That's what it is,' so that he gets it, the filth and the stink, the kind of poetry that comes out of that."

Mokae, who died following complications of a stroke he had in May, had previously been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

His wife, Madelyn, said they moved back to South Africa in 2005, while his mind was still mostly intact, "so he could live under freedom there and have some memory of it".

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, divorced in 1978 and then remarried in 1985, he is survived by two sisters, two brothers, a daughter and three grandchildren.