Directed by Christopher John and designed by Sarah Roberts, The Zulu will be presented by Committed Artists Foundation with funding from the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF).

Famed for the string of international stage block-busters, he has created and produced, including Asinamali, Sarafina!, Magic at 4 AM, Mama, The House of Shaka, Lion of the East among others, Mbongeni Ngema last appeared onstage as an actor 27 years ago, in a production of the internationally celebrated Woza Albert.

Now South Africa’s master of theatre and founder of the longstanding, black-owned Committed Artists Company has tapped into his own richly-nurtured background of traditional story-telling, learned as a small child from his great grandmother. He has crafted a spell-binding one-man show that melds memories of his childhood, spent in the heart of Zululand, with the grandeur of his heritage, bringing vividly to life the historic panoply of the Zulu nation.

“The Zulu follows the story of my musical of the same title, only in more depth,’ says Ngema. “My new show has been in the creative pipeline for several years. It is inspired by the experiences I had as a small child, listening to the wonderful stories of heroic deeds that my great grandmother, Mkhulutshana Manqele, shared with me. Her skills as a story-teller kept a wealth of our history alive, both about our family background and our proud roots as members of the Zulu nation. It is due to her that I have followed a career in theatre.”

At the opening of The Zulu, Ngema tells how his great grandmother got her name from her father, who was in King Dingaan’s regiment of Umkhulutshana. When Ngema grew up in the hills of Nongoma in Zululand, she was a very old woman.

“No one knows how old my great grandmother was, but from all the historic events she referred to when she was a young girl we could only speculate that she must have been born around 1862. She married my great grandfather before the Zulu War of 1879. We know that she was over 100 years old when she died in 1972, but no one could tell her exact age ... All we knew was that she was as old as history.”

Indeed, it is the very history of the Zulu nation that will spring to life when Ngema shares his important new play with today’s audiences. The Zulu will open the 2013Main Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, with a premiere run in the Rhodes Theatre from Thursday, 27 to Saturday, 29 June. The production will then inaugurate the new Mbongeni Ngema Theatre, to be situated at KwaZulu-Natal Music House in Durban, with a season running from July through August.

The Zulu then tours to Gauteng, for a season at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria from Thursday, 29 August to Sunday, 15 September. The production can then be seen at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from Wednesday, 18 September to Saturday, 26 October.

Tickets for The Zulu are R250 with R80 concessions for pensioners and scholars. One can book through Computicket on 0861 915 8000 or online at www.computicket.com.

Further dates, to be confirmed, will see the production touring to Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre in early 2014 before The Zulu travels to the United States for a season at New York University’s Aaron Davis Hall in May 2014.