‘Nobody has to travel more than 15 minutes to a tavern’: Jerry Mofokeng wants a generation of theatre-goers

Jerry Mofokeng wa Makhetha was born in that magic triangle that seems to have produced a remarkable number of great South Africans whose existence has proved so profoundly generative and essential to our nation.

He is without doubt a card-carrying member of our national treasures association, and the renowned director and actor is presently demonstrating the precise location of his house between Orlando West High School and the Hector Pieterson Memorial with sugar packets and salt and pepper on the table at the classically appointed restaurant at 54 on Bath.

The hotel is celebrating its 25th anniversary and it struck me as an apt place to celebrate Dr Mofokeng in a space that has such a gracious vista over the Joburg forest of the near north and the freshly sprouting developments of Rosebank.

The hotel has the imprimatur of a much older building and feels anchored in the city’s landscape — a bit like Bra Jerry.

They treat him with the deference that is his due, crafting a delicious meal around his gluten intolerance, while several guests ask for pictures with him.  

It’s the kind of celebrity that is grounded in a profound knowledge and practice of his craft but that has been practised so thoroughly across the national stages and screens that he is instantly recognisable.   

His love of the stage is rooted in his childhood. He is back to the tabletop geography and shows me where Uncle Tom’s Community Centre was located in Orlando.

“My first interest came from watching Gibson Kente there. As a little boy I would go there in the evenings free of charge and watch him put on plays with his partner at the time.

"He was going out with a model, a beauty queen called Eve. So that is where it all started. When I told my mother I wanted to be an actor, she said: ‘Over my dead body.’”

Her fears were grounded in experience because his absent father had left them in extreme poverty from a life lived large. I could sit and listen all afternoon to the stories he tells. I feel like I am getting a one-person masterclass in stage presence and craft from the best in the business.

The story of how he lost the vision in his eye is tragically telling.

“In 1970 during break at school in Orlando a young man named Billy threw a broken bottle in my direction and I turned. Call it fate, call it whatever you like, but I turned at that moment and it cut my eye, and we went to the teacher and asked him to take me to hospital.

“He says, ‘No, my car is not an ambulance’, so I go home and wait for my mom to come home from work. She came quite late and she took me to Baragwanath Hospital and from there they took me to St John’s Hospital for sutures on the eye … and I have been seeing with one eye since then.”

I wonder how it affected his personality and his perceptions of the world.

“Please understand that kids are cruel — you become identified with your scar … it just killed me, my grades, my view of myself, so combine the scar with poverty. It was so difficult that my mom had to run a shebeen.”

The singular thing that rebuilt his confidence and his sense of self was the student Christian movement he was part of and then the youth group called Youth Alive, which Cyril Ramaphosa was chair of.

“I could be among young people who were not judging me and we had talent programmes where I would start to do talent evenings and I would do sketches and more and more they would start asking for me, and that is how I built myself back up one step at a time.”

His work in the youth group acting, directing, producing and writing allegorical stories built his skill set from the ground up. He had to get permission from the minister of education to get into Wits.

“I got in on the basis of age because I was 27. I guess I was not a threat to them. I was already married [to Claudine; they have been married for more than 40 years].  I wasn’t going to start being silly with the white girls, that is what it was in 1984.”

He was one of a handful of black students in the drama department at the university. It was a baptism of fire in theatre practice. He worked in more than 20 productions and won a Fulbright scholarship to Columbia University in New York.

“We interrupted a production I was directing on Broadway to celebrate Mandela’s release from prison in 1990.”  

We talk theatre in detail, the craft, the moments, the roles, the characters that stand out as the perfect alignment of talent and practice.

He enacts every character from a dozen plays and becomes each one right there at the table, the lunch crowd receding as he instantly creates a spotlight on a dark stage that he fills utterly. It is a bravura performance.

What would he do if he was in a position of power in the department of arts & culture?

“When I was a kid nobody had to travel more that 30 minutes to go to the theatre. Those community theatres are what we should build. Nobody has to travel more than 15 minutes to a tavern …

“Then the local artists get to work, the students can watch productions and we can develop talent from ground zero.

"At Uncle Tom’s you could get karate, boxing, chess, dancing, and with nominal lighting equipment you could transform that place into a theatre. Young people had somewhere to go and grow. Theatre encourages a change of mind, it makes you see things differently.”