When it opened in the 1970s in a converted fruit and vegetable market in central Johannesburg, the Market Theatre immediately became a focal point of resistance. Its doors opened just days after the 1976 Soweto uprising — when students protested Afrikaans instruction in schools and the state’s violent crackdown left hundreds dead — and the venue quickly earned a reputation for staging work the apartheid regime deemed subversive.
The theater broke another taboo: it drew mixed Black and white audiences in a city where the law rigidly segregated people and spaces. That mingling — and the plays that confronted South Africa’s injustices — made the Market a target for zealous censors. Performances were sometimes raided, actors put at risk, and censors even mounted impromptu interventions onstage, turning official suppression into a grim, public second act of some productions, says current artistic director Greg Homann.
Over fifty years the Market produced plays that gained international acclaim: Woza Albert, Sophiatown, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, and the hit musical Sarafina, about the Soweto uprising, which went on to Broadway and a Hollywood film starring Whoopi Goldberg. It was also the proving ground for South African legends such as actor John Kani and playwright Athol Fugard.
Kani, a Tony Award winner, recalls being skeptical when founders Barney Simon and Mannie Manim proposed an all‑welcome theater in 1975–76. “I thought these two whities were nuts,” he said in a 2014 interview, yet he added that his “entire career fell in place on this stage.”
The Market’s directors sometimes found legal loopholes to keep the integrated theatre functioning. Homann describes one workaround: selling the bar for a nominal sum so it became privately owned, allowing people of color to gather there legally even though stepping a meter into the foyer could still violate apartheid laws. The company weathered censorship and danger, but persisted in telling the national story through theater.
Audience reactions could be visceral. Director Arther Molepe, involved with the Market since its start, remembers white patrons abruptly leaving in anger when confronted by plays exposing the realities of apartheid. But he also recalls a sense of collective purpose in the early years: “There was no black, there was no white. We were just a whole group. So we were making things, making theater.”
The Market marked its 50th anniversary this year. It continues to stage new productions that revisit apartheid-era stories and examine contemporary South African life. Molepe directed a recent revival of the apartheid-era play Marabi, which follows a Black family’s struggles in the early 20th century and ends with their forced removal under segregation laws. The production received wide applause and standing ovations from a largely millennial and Gen Z audience, many of whom never lived under apartheid.
Lead actor Gabisile Tshabalala, 35, grew up in a post-apartheid South Africa, yet she stresses theater’s importance: “Theater is extremely important for young South Africans….especially as Black people…we get to tell our stories.”
Homann says the Market still aims to “tell the South African story, whatever that might be of its day.” In the 1980s that meant chronicling the fight against apartheid; more recently the stage has taken on the challenges of a young democracy — from education and corruption to gender‑based violence — as the theater looks ahead to many more years of provoking thought and reflecting the nation’s struggles and hopes.