Dark voices ring: Grade 12

The setting for this play is a Boer potato farm during the apartheid regime. The labourers, including prison workers, rise up against the “Baas” and his induna, an older black man who is in charge of the workforce. The old man’s life changes through what happens as does that of his wife and daughter. The story is told through the conversation of the induna’s wife and the young man who was to have married the daughter. The rebellion on the farm hints at a far larger con flict looming “up north”, as the young man leaves the farm to go and fight for the freedom and dignity of his people. Zakes Mda wrote the play in 1979 when he was in his early twenties.