Remember Apartheid?

Remember the world banding together in protest against a regime that treated people of colour as inferior to white people and actively discriminated against them in all areas of society?

Remember when values mattered in international relations?

I couldn’t help but think of those things as I watched and listened to the Soweto Gospel Choir the day after witnessing a valiant leader trying to save his country from extinction being treated with abject disrespect by a government that was once a beacon of ‘freedom’.

Soweto (SOuthWEstern TOwnship) is at the margins of Johannesburg, but it was the centre of resistance to Apartheid and the hope for change on which this show is constructed. The roots of protest leap out at the audience through the choir’s colourful costumes, the dance movements focused on gyrating hips, legs and punching fists, and the sense that this a march towards a goal.

Soweto Gospel Choir. Photo suplied

The roots of protest are also epitomised in the unity of this choir. There are no stars. Everyone gets a solo, everyone has to...