Thabo Ndlovu grew up in Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town's largest townships, in a family that carried deep wounds from apartheid. His grandfather had been imprisoned on Robben Island. His mother had lost her job during forced removals. Thabo himself was too young to remember the worst of it, but the stories were part of the air he breathed. He studied drama at the University of Cape Town and became a playwright — sharp, political, and angry. His early work was full of rage. Audiences applauded. Critics praised his "unflinching honesty." But Thabo felt hollow.
The Commission Transcript
In 2022, while researching a new play, Thabo read the full transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings from the late 1990s. He expected to find only pain. Instead, he found something that broke his understanding of the world: testimony after testimony of Black South Africans forgiving the people who had tortured them, killed their families, and destroyed their communities. Not forgiving as a political strategy. Forgiving as an act of faith. One woman, testifying about the murder of her son, said: "I forgive because Jesus forgave me. And I want to be free." Thabo — who had considered himself spiritual but never Christian — read that sentence and could not stop thinking about it.
The Play
He wrote "Ubuntu of the Cross" in six weeks — the fastest he had ever written anything. The play depicted two families: a Black family from Soweto and an Afrikaner family from Pretoria, connected by a killing during the 1976 uprising. The play did not excuse the killing. It did not minimise the suffering. But it showed — through three acts and forty years of fictional time — what happens when one family chooses to forgive. The final scene was a meal shared between the two families, set in the present, with the grandchildren of the victim and the perpetrator sitting side by side.
The Night Both Sides Wept
The play premiered at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town in March 2024. On opening night, something happened that Thabo had not planned: during the final scene, audience members on both sides of the racial divide began weeping simultaneously. After the curtain, a white woman in her seventies approached a Black man in his sixties in the lobby. They had never met. She said: "My father did terrible things." He said: "My father forgave people who did terrible things." They embraced. Thabo watched from across the lobby and felt the hollow space inside him fill. He was baptised at a church in Khayelitsha two months later. "I wrote a play about forgiveness," he says. "And forgiveness wrote itself into me."