BULAWAYO’S first comedy club, Umahlekisa, this month celebrates its seventh anniversary with several events lined up as part of the celebrations set for March 26 at the National Art Gallery of Bulawayo.
BY SINDISO DUBE
The club will host a workshop to recruit female comics before the main show.
Founded by award-winning Ntando Van Moyo (pictured) in 2013, the self-sustaining Umahlekisa has done fairly well in the arts and culture sector.
“We will host our main show on March 26 at the Art Gallery with performances from myself, female comic Nomsa, Babongile Sikhonjwa, Nama award-winning Mandla Simbarashe, Zwe and Edgar Langavelt,” Moyo said.
Prior to the March 26 show, participating comics will perform at their respective former schools as a way of promoting comedy in schools and will also help set up comedy clubs in schools. “We are taking back what we have built and learnt in the seven years back to the communities we came from. We also extended a call for female comics to join us and we are currently registering entries and we will hold a workshop to equip them before they join us,” Moyo said. He noted that they started off small, but have grown into an arts hub bigger than the comedians themselves.
“The club came into existence after the realisation of a gap in the arts industry. We wanted to create spaces for comedians in Bulawayo to practise. We can’t have our artists going to Harare for everything yet Bulawayo is the hub of arts,” he said.
We started small with others like Clive Chigubhu and now we have a sizeable family, groomed many and still have many we are grooming under our watchful eye.”
