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What he really wanted to do, he said, was act, but he was repeatedly told that he wasn’t credible in roles for a black actor. After graduating, he enrolled in a film course, where he met Duma Kumalo, one of the Sharpeville Six, who was sentenced to death in connection with a murder that occurred during a 1984 protest march. (Their sentences were later commuted.) Mr. Wa Lehulere said that hearing Mr. Kumalo’s story shifted his sense of black South African history and ignited an enduring interest in its unwritten narratives — its unacknowledged artists, poets and thinkers, whom he frequently incorporates into his work.
After studying performing and visual arts at a local community center, and working for a television production company, he helped found Gugulective, an arts collective in Gugulethu in 2006. He created videos and performance work. (In one piece, he dug into the earth with an Afro comb, unexpectedly finding cow bones.) “Performance frightens me, because I am a very shy person,” he said. “But it also incorporates so many previous experiences.”
He was a founder of another collective, the Center for Historical Reenactments, while earning a fine-arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It was only last year, Mr. Wa Lehulere said, that he first worked individually. “It was a turning point,” he said.
Asked what he felt about addressing a non-South African audience in the Institute exhibition, Mr. Wa Lehulere was briefly silent. “My caution is, always, what kind of story does one tell outside the country?” he said. “You have CNN and the BBC saturated with images of poverty and violence. They want the flames — Africa burning again. But there is peaceful, intellectual protest, too.”
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