Nine lives. One river. One suitcase tied with wire.

About the Play

Bazobuya is a monologue and song-driven stage play about migration, border precarity, and the complex grief of return.

Structured as intimate monologues and songs bound by a recurring Narrator — an elder, musician and living archive — the play maps the human landscape behind headlines of xenophobic displacement.

We meet: Gogo, 17 years invisible in Johannesburg; Thabani, a history teacher turned Uber driver counting permit expiry dates; Simba, a spaza owner with 180 seconds to decide what a life is worth; Blessing who refuses to slash his crops; Mama Nomsa who hides children under her floorboards; Chipo, 17, born here but claimed by neither; Bona who carries the silent weight of the Limpopo; and Thando who returns home with a suitcase lashed with wire that contains not money, but seeds.

Lyrical, political and deeply tender, Bazobuya is both archive and ceremony. It ends not with arrival, but planting.

By Mgcini Nyoni | 70 mins | 2-3 performers + Narrator/percussionist |