During the key apartheid years of the 1970s and 1980s, South

African theatre practitioners attracted attention internationally with their uncompromising dramatisations of the evils of racial oligarchy. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s actors, directors, creative writers and theatre scholars purveyed to international audiences and readers theatrical images of the aspirations of South Africans affected by apartheid. As apartheid began to erode in the 1990s, theatre practitioners had to search for new targets and new methods, and much of the anti-apartheid theatre began to appear formulaic and dated. Nevertheless, the legacy of anti-apartheid theatre influenced post-apartheid theatre: the years of ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’ theatre bequeathed to later practitioners in the theatre a voice that was uniquely South African, and contemporary South African theatre cannot be understood without reference to the years of protest and resistance.

One of the prominent anti-apartheid theatre voices was that of Maishe Maponya.

Maponya was born in 1951, the son of a painter in the township of Alexandra adjacent to Johannesburg. When he was eleven years old the family was forcibly removed and resettled in Diepkloof, Soweto. Maponya began writing plays in 1975 when he was a clerk in one of South Africa's giant insurance companies, and the theatre offered him some relief from the routines of work in that institution. His writing career commenced in 1975 when he joined Medupi Writers Association which was later banned along with nineteen other organisations in October 1977. In 1977 he co-founded Bahumutsi Drama Group with whom he was later to produce most of his plays. In 1978 he co-founded the Allahpoets, a group of performance-poets, and wrote plays and poetry for performance in the townships.

His first play in 1976 was The Cry, which was written before 16 June, when Sowetan schoolchildren spearheaded one of the most important attacks on the apartheid state, and this was followed by Peace and Forgivein 1978, which was performed first in Soweto and later at The Market Theatre. In 1978 Maponya was the recipient of an award by the British Council and attended a course organised by the British Theatre Association in England.