Around the same time playwright, performer and director Kgomotso “MoMo” Matsunyane launched her first volume of published plays in late 2025, playwright, director and screenwriter Amy Jephta was nominated as a finalist for the 2026 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play A Good House.
The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the biggest and oldest award recognising women playwrights writing in English since 1978.
Jephta and Matsunyane are Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners for Theatre in 2019 and 2023, respectively. Amy is co-editor of Contemporary Plays by African Women (2019) with Yvette Hutchison, published by Bloomsbury for the Methuen Drama Play Collections.
At the time of publication, there was a scarcity of published plays by women in Africa. The status quo persists. The editors noted women playwrights are very productive in creating new works for the stage and are active in many community projects, but there is a significant imbalance in what is published by women in Africa.
This is the literary milieu within which Momo’s book Plays by MoMo Matsunyane Vol 1 exists. It also exists within an environment where South African theatre specialist publishers such as Diartskonageng, a publishing house founded by Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre 2017 winner Monageng Vice Motshabi, have an agenda to shift things.
In addition to Plays by MoMo Matsunyane, the publisher’s roster includes an anthology of contemporary plays by South African women titled Hauntings, a partnership with The Writers’ Lab SA.
Many of the plays were created for playing rather than for readi so their publication becomes archival activism because it is important to not only document what they did, but make it accessible for transmission into the future.
— Nondumiso Msimanga, cultural scholar and performance artist
“The publishing of Matsunyane’s work is a partnership between Matsunyane and myself, based on years of collaboration and mutual support but defined primarily by a shared compulsion to rebel and to make work driven by resistance as an agenda,” Motshabi said.
Motshabi’s writing sits in the mode of township theatre, which allows her to provocatively reflect the harsh realities of young women’s lived experiences in a visceral and colourful way.
She said: “It is a gritty, raw, beautifully tragic and unfiltered theatrical world which gives us a chance to see how geographical and spatial oppression has had an impact on how we process inherited systemic trauma in today’s world.”
She contributes to a lineage of township theatre playwrights including Gibson Kente, Paul Grootboom and Selaelo Maredi.
“The publication of black theatre or township theatre plays in South Africa was political in the literary landscape because many of the plays were created for playing rather than for reading. Their publication becomes archival activism because it is important to not only document what they did but make it accessible for transmission into the future,” said cultural scholar and performance artist Nondumiso Msimanga, who contributed a contextual introduction to the book.
“Matsunyane fits into this type of storytelling tradition, where plays like Have You Seen Zandile? by Gcina Mhlophe also reside. It’s a world of storying and performing that is important to have in publications because, even though Mhlope’s work is not classified as township theatre, it has become part of the canon of black South African theatre, which values playmaking as much as the written play.”
Together with contemporaries such as Jefferson Tshabalala, Matsunyane’s employment of township theatre reveals it to be a site for new language development and artistic innovation. She works with the youthful township storytelling form Maskitla as the framework for her theatre-making and writing process.
“Maskitla is a township storytelling game we played when we were young which has evolved over time. Originally, we’d draw boxes representing houses on the ground and allocate stones to each box. These stones, which represented the different characters, including the narrator, would be moved around according to how the story unfolded. I transpose this model on to stage and my writing,” Matsunyane said.
“It allowed me as a child to access the scale of my imagination. In my most recent years as a creator, it’s become a valuable tool to uncover story, unpack characters and improvise.”
The plays included in the book are the two one-handers Penny and Unlearn and the award-winning ensemble production Ka Lebitso La Moya. They work with tragedy and comedy as fluid sides of the same coin. Unlearn (with MoMo as writer, performer and director) and Ka Lebitso La Moya (as writer and director) showcase her vigour in settling into her artistic style. Both plays interrogate young women’s bodies as sites of violence and how the church, with society’s enabling, adds to the damage.
Matsunyane incorporates dark stand-up comedy (another passion of hers) into Unlearn in a gritty and raw script that allows her immersion and improvisation on stage. What could be mistaken as caricature is the visceral texture and colour of township life that is as charming as it is trauma-ridden.
The comic-tragedy in Ka Lebitso La Moya weaves in irony and music to drive its dramatic point. In a somewhat Brechtian manner Matsunyane’s protagonists don’t get justice, so you’re left with the discomfort of the realities of the world we inhabit.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.