Buyela

BUYELA A new production by Empatheatre in partnership with Groundwork

What if the story of our city could be told through what we throw away?

On the final afternoon of one of Durban's last working landfills, two women meet amid mountains of discarded things. Mam Nothemba (Mpume Mthombeni) is a waste picker, matriarch, and daughter of the dump, a woman who has spent forty years transforming other people's rubbish into a livelihood, a brick house, and eight grandchildren.

Nokwanda, a journalist (played by Minenhle Sikhosana) arrives claiming to want her story, though she carries a quieter desperation she's slow to admit.

What unfolds between the two of them is part detective game, part oral history, part fairy tale: the two women read the lives of strangers from their rubbish, trace glass back to mountains and plastic back to ancient seas, and weave mythological and very real stories together, all threaded through their conversation is the looming arrival of an incinerator and the knowledge that the gates to the landfill will close at five, for good.

Buyela, the Zulu word for return, is a play about what we throw away and what refuses to disappear: grief, knowledge, solidarity, a