JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Famend South African playwright, producer and composer Mbongeni Ngema has died in a automobile crash on the age of 68, his household mentioned.

“Ngema was killed in a head-on automobile accident whereas getting back from a funeral he was attending in Lusikisiki within the Japanese Cape this night,” his household mentioned in an announcement Wednesday. The celebrated playwright was a passenger within the automobile concerned within the crash.

He was finest identified for creating the hit Sarafina! which first premiered on Broadway in 1988. It was tailored right into a musical drama starring Whoopi Goldberg in 1992, turning into a global success and was nominated for the Tony and Grammy Awards.

Sarafina! advised the story of a younger scholar and the way she impressed her friends to struggle in opposition to racial segregation in apartheid South Africa after her instructor was thrown in jail.

Apartheid was an institutionalized system that discriminated in opposition to non-whites and ensured South Africa was dominated by the minority white inhabitants from 1948 until the early Nineteen Nineties.

Ngema’s physique of labor included the lauded theatre manufacturing Woza Albert, which first confirmed in 1981 and went on to win greater than 20 awards internationally. The political satire explored the second coming of Jesus Christ as a black man, returning to South Africa as a black man.

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Tributes to the famous playwright have been pouring in.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa praised the late Ngema in an announcement.

“The various productions he created or to which he contributed impressed resilience and pleasure amongst us as fellow South Africans and took South Africa and our continent into the theatres, houses and consciousness of tens of millions of individuals around the globe,” Ramaphosa mentioned Thursday.

South Africa’s ruling African Nationwide Congress social gathering and certainly one of its largest rivals, the leftist Financial Freedom Fighters each conveyed their condolences.

The ANC mentioned in an announcement: “He was a globally acclaimed playwright, composer and producer. We have now misplaced a real legend, a doyen, and a real ambassador of theatre.”

The Leftist social gathering described him as “extra than simply an artist; he was a cultural icon, and a beacon of hope throughout a few of our darkest instances”.