Hlomla Dandala chats about his role as Khanyiso Phalo in the mini-series
Land of Thirst, which premieres on SABC2 on Tuesday 29 January.
How did you hear about Land Of Thirst and the role of Khanyiso Phalo? Initially Madoda (Ncayiyana, of Vuleka Productions) gave me a call and said there's this story, Land of Thirst. I had read the book that it's based on (Margaret Harding by Perceval Gibbon) some moons ago. And I knew Madoda from long ago. In fact he once played my father, back in 1988 (in the SABC series Viva Families Viva.)
How had you come to read the book, Margaret Harding when it is a rather obscure South African historical novel? I'm a reader. I read whenever I can. I am reading more scripts then books lately, but I come from a family of readers. My father (Mvume Dandala, former head of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and now President of the All Africa Council of Churches) is a book collector of sorts.
I remember back in my university days he gave me a copy of Margaret Harding, and I actually thought, there's a role there to keep in my back pocket. So when Madoda called, I remembered the book, and eventually when I went for the audition it was like I was working on a project that I had been interested in from way back.
What attracted you to this central role in the TV mini-series and film? I liked the story. I'm attracted to people with passion - for anything. That's what really defines life. I especially liked Meg's (the director who adapted the novel into a screenplay) take on it, when I read the screenplay and saw how the main character, Khanyiso Phalo, was portrayed, I thought "There's a guy who's got drive, who's got fire - those are the interesting roles to play, the ones that last forever."
Tell us about your portrayal of Khanyiso Phalo, the main character in Land Of Thirst. He's a mix - on the one hand he has this fury, if you will. I think he comes from a place of great pain - watching his mother die in the fighting (with the colonial forces), seeing his father being taken away. Then growing up alone in England - that is absolute pain.
But he's a character who didn't dwell in the pain, but allowed the pain to give him direction. The society he comes from is one of great restraint, so he has had to focus that energy, and see that in his work as a doctor. He has had to do menial doctor work when he worked in England, before returning to South Africa, only because of the colour of his skin, but he hasn't let that drag him down.
To do that you have to have powerful drive - you need to be motivated by something more than the immediate.
What do you think drives your character? What drives him is a very strong sense of duty - vested in him at a particularly impressionable age. He's about 14 when his father places this duty on him. He's a chief, it's in your blood. And he was told by his father: "You have to fulfil that." He carries that memory with him all the time.
Apparently, like the character you play you spent some of your life in England? I was born in East London, in Mdantsane, but we moved to Cambridge when I was a small child. My father was studying theology at Cambridge University and we lived there for the first four years of my life. In fact, the first language I ever spoke was English. But my parents always spoke to me in Xhosa so that never left me.
When we moved back to South Africa we lived in Esikhaweni, in Empangeni (in Northern KwaZulu-Natal). My father was the leader of a Methodist congregation there. Then we moved to PE in 1983-4 and we lived in New Brighton, where he led a congregation. And then we lived in Johannesburg where again my father worked as a church minister.
My mother is a businesswoman, who's become more of a perpetual scholar. She is in London studying yet again. This is her fourth degree. I am the oldest child in the family. I have one younger sister.
Did you always want to be an actor? I wanted to do drama from about the age of 12 or 13. My principal used to say, "School is getting in the way of your career!" I was pretty good at maths and science but then my interest waned - it was the drama bug. I did school plays, everything there was to do in high school and then I went to Wits University and studied drama.
The character you play, Khanyiso Phalo, is taken away from his Xhosa village shortly after his circumcision ceremony. Did you go through Xhosa initiation? Yes, I did get circumcised as a young man. It was a great experience, we went to the mountain. What happened with us was that it was very specifically to learn about where you come from, your origins, you learn a great deal about that.
Your "fathers" - my father, my uncles - come and talk to you. You're not a man if you're not circumcised, it's basically taking on a great responsibility of being a man amongst the family, so the destiny of the family lies on your shoulders.
When I turned 18, when serious family issues were to be discussed among all the Dandalas, I would be there and make a contribution. So you learn to take responsibility, with the idea that there will be a time when they hand over and you will be the man of the family.
How do you feel about Xhosa language and culture? It's home. It's difficult to put into words. The language is my home, I think in Xhosa, I dream in Xhosa - it's very funny, when I get upset, even at home, they know when I am speaking Xhosa that, "Alright, he's not filtering any more."
Have you brought your Xhosa identity to bear in playing Khanyiso Phalo? Language is where any culture lives, and the thing about Khanyiso is that he is fully aware of the implications of being Xhosa. He still carries an umbilical link back to that. He was taken from South Africa at the age of 14, and at that age there are things you become so attached to that you don't forget.
So coming home, he is learning to rethink in Xhosa, and part of that is rediscovering a Xhosa vocabulary. So my initial instinct was that Khanyiso speaks Xhosa with an English accent. He pronounces correctly when finds the word, but the words swim just out of reach - it's about learning to familiarise himself with that. I imagined that the first week is him trying to remember that word or the other, and then saying, "Oh, yes, that's the word I've been searching for!"
What about the reaction of his fellow Xhosa? Khanyiso is caught in a bit of a no man's land in that he's not English, yet he speaks like an Englishman, which makes him an oddity, especially in South Africa around that time (1913). So black people don't accept him as fully black because of the way he speaks and whites don't accept him either. So it's him having to reclaim himself, having to prove that he is Xhosa. It's a strange thing.
There's a beautiful moment in the script when Khanyiso meets these little children and they are completely at home until he starts speaking Xhosa, and stuttering in English, trying and then realising he can't find a word. Then they see him as an "other".
But I don't think that otherness is alienation, I don't think it is for Khanyiso. I think the only person who deliberately rejects him is Nqeno (the government-appointed chief who took his father's place), but he has ulterior motives. So Khanyiso is a fish out of water. He is, but he is struggling to get back in the water.
Will he succeed? I think he has the will and the capability. In the time we see him, from the beginning to the end of the story, his grasp of the language improves dramatically.
How did you cultivate Khanyiso's English accent? I spent lot of time with Lucy (Nina Lucy Wylde, who plays Margaret Harding) because she has been living in the UK, and with David (Crichton, who plays an English TB patient), who also speaks proper English.
Why do you think your character fall for Margaret when she arrives from England? I think for a number of reasons. They're kindred spirits in that they are both English and they've come to Africa. But also, as time goes, Margaret gains a passion for life, vicariously, through Khanyiso. He is completely besotted with her because she is all the things he is familiar with, without including the superficial beauty.
It's the English she's incredibly cultured, she is not affected by the race tension that exists in South Africa at the time. She has a hunger for life, which he absolutely identifies with. And I think it's the first time that anyone has ever needed Khanyiso as a doctor as well so it kind of validates his last eight years of studying as a doctor.
In England even a dying man wouldn't turn to him. He would say, "No, don't touch me with nigger hands." But when Khanyiso tells Margaret to take this aloe tonic, she respects him as a doctor.
This is a drama about the land. Does the land speak to you personally? I'm not a city boy by a long shot, I do appreciate the land. My family comes from the Transkei - Mount Ayliffe. And it's fairly arid land where we come from, now when I look at it I see that is arid - but something sparks every time I go there. It feels like I'm going home. And no amount of persuasion could tell me there are better places in the world, they don't do for me what this place does. Home is home.
We still have family gatherings and go back to Mount Ayliffe. Now I have a piece of land there, in a place called Dandalaville - literally, it's a place full of Dandalas! Why does anyone go home? For spiritual refreshment, to ease your mind - that's where my spirit comes from.
How was it working with your co-star, Nina Lucy Wylde (A South African actress who has been performing in London and came out to South Africa to perform in Land Of Thirst)? You always wonder how it will be, if you're going to be spending that amount of time together. And you need to create a chemistry, it is important to create that off camera. She is lovely and incredibly generous, bouncing off each other has been great.
There are people you are around and they get your creative juices going, and she is one of them. She is a phenomenal actor. I didn't know before (as she has been working in England) but I Googled her, as one must, and found fantastic things about her, and saw little clips of her work.
It's great when you see someone like that and you think "I need to step up to the plate and do my character justice because I am confident my fellow actors are going to be doing the same."
And the other actors? How was it like working with them? Well, Ian Roberts has such history, he's done such a volume of work, and all the stuff I've seen of his has just been smack on the button each time. I know lot of Joburg actors, but I had to Google the Cape Town actors and I am wowed by them.
I don't know how else to say it - all of them, highly accomplished actors (Terry Norton, Susan Danford, Stephen Jennings, Poppy Tsira, Pierre Malherbe, Brian Heydenrych, Lesley Mongezi).
This project has managed to attract really phenomenal actors - when I tell people this is who is involved they say, "Wow, this must be a big budget production."
But no, it's just people who are attracted to the project. What attracted me is the story - the story has to speak to you.
EndsFor more interviews with the cast of Land of Thirst,
click here.