Durban - To the outside world, he was nothing but a thug. However, to his son Anele, Justice Sibusiso Nene was a man who loved music, telling jokes and talking about life into the wee hours of the night.
Now, Anele Nene has immortalised the memory of his father through his one-man show, The Hymns of a Sparrow, which debuts at the Playhouse Theatre on Tuesday.
Nene, an award-winning actor, says he wrote the play to deal with mountains of suppressed sorrow resulting from the death of three people close to his heart.
He might be a laugh-a-minute, switching accents as he tells his story, and his dad always told people that “my son is studying comedy”, but Nene is intimately familiar with fear and pain.
His dad was a taxi boss, and throughout his childhood, they moved from house to house across the province to escape the violence in the industry. It caught up with them, and he saw his dad die in a hail of bullets outside their home in Inanda.
It was on the same day his grandmother’s funeral was scheduled to take place, and a few days after his best friend had died in a road accident.
Nene says the ultimate message woven into his drama is that people must acknowledge and deal with their emotional pain.
In the script, he laid bare his soul.
When he initially sat down to write the show, he made up a fictitious rural area, eKuphileni, and set out to relate the troubles of Babu Mngadi, who had an ongoing battle with his neighbours because their cattle would constantly feast on his garden.
Narrated by Nene in the character of 10-year-old Simlindile, it takes the audience on a journey of loss, pain and healing.
Although he had a storyline when he started out, the tale took on a life of its own, and soon he had various scenes, like the one in which a landlord would knock on his tenants’ doors while only wearing underpants and demand his rent.
He soon realised that all the stories making up the show contained elements of his dad in it.
“I miss him every single day,” said Nene.
Quoting liberally from German spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, who teaches about the power of presence, Nene says: “Whenever you feel something, feel it, but don't become that feeling.”
And at the end of the play, all he wants to know is: “How does it make you feel?”
Now 27 years old, Nene says he has learnt that people should follow their hearts and not the bidding of others if they want to be happy.
He says men, especially, carry many suppressed emotions, and through his show, he wants people to access their buried feelings and deal with them, just like the writing process was cathartic for him.
The script is littered with affirmations, and he hopes his show will lift the “vibrations” of all those who see the performance and give them an outlet for their pain.
As a youngster, he and his brother had dreams of becoming soldiers, probably because of the life they had lived, but his mom said, “not my kids”.
An avid cook, he then decided to become a chef, but the fees were too high. Eventually, he followed in the footsteps of his brother and ended up in the arts.
The name of the one-man show, The Hymns of a Sparrow, came about because, for the entire year that he worked on the script, sparrows would enter his home, sing outside the window where he was writing, or fly into the kitchen when he wanted to eat.
“All I wanted was peace, but they wouldn't stop sparrowing,” he laughed.
That, too, became a lesson because he learnt that birds just carried on with what they needed to do and were not easily distracted like humans.
The Hymns of a Sparrow runs from Tuesday to Saturday at the Playhouse Company’s Loft Theatre. There are three shows daily, 9am, 12pm and 6pm.
Tickets are R80 and available from webtickets.
The Independent on Saturday