Isidlamlilo / the Fire Eater (Paperback)

Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater is a one-woman play inspired by the true story of a woman who served as a political assassin in the build-up to South Africa’s first democratic elections. Zenzile Maseko, the protagonist, is a 60-year-old grandmother living in a women’s hostel in Durban. Falsely declared dead by the Department of Home Affairs, she finds herself cast into a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces her to confront her past.

Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightning bird), in Zulu folklore a shapeshifting bird associated with witchcraft and the harbinger of storms and death, Zenzile’s story weaves a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism and traditional beliefs as she shares the realities – at times brutal, at times forgiving – of survival in South Africa. Her story touches on what it means to live through political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutality of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments.

Ultimately, Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater offers a critical and unflinching look at the eddying cycles of violence and revenge that play out across generations. Yet it is most of all a story about regeneration and redemption that speaks to both the country’s haunted past and its present-day complexities.

Written with pathos and empathy, this playscript will appeal to teachers, high school learners, and tertiary students in theatre, drama and English studies.

Neil Coppen is an award-winning playwright who lives between the cities of Durban and Johannesburg where he works as a writer, director and designer. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama in 2011 and was nominated on the 2011 Mail & Guardian’s 200 most influential Young South Africans. His play Abnormal Loads won the 2012 Naledi Award for Best South African Script. Other works include Tree Boy, Sugar Daddies and Animal Farm.

Mpume Mthombeni is an award-winning stage and film actor from Umlazi, Durban. She has performed multiple roles in theatre, radio, film and television, and first received international acclaim for her one-woman performance in Tin Bucket Drum, which toured to New York. She is a co-founder of Empatheatre.

Kira Erwin is a sociologist and Senior Researcher at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa.