How Buhle Ngaba turned the Cullinan diamond into a hit play

Buhle Ngaba does not do one thing. Actor, writer, theatre activist, children’s author, founder — and yet when you ask her how she holds it all together, the answer is disarmingly simple.

“All of these identities converge on what I feel defines me most deeply,” she says. “Being a storyteller.”

That definition has taken her far: a Brett Goldin Bursary residency at the Royal Shakespeare Company, two Kanna Theatre Awards, a debut play that sold out in Vienna and Basel — and now, seven sold-out shows in Cape Town and Johannesburg for her production BLING!

Has she allowed herself to say she’s really good at this? She laughs. “I’m not sure if I have got to that point yet; maybe I never will.”

But those seven shows gave her something else. “It did cause me enough pause to consider that I might be doing something very right.”

The seed of BLING! was planted not in a theatre but in a Beyoncé and Jay-Z advert. Watching their 2021 Tiffany & Co campaign, Ngaba recognised the famous canary diamond extracted from the Kimberley mines in 1877, not far from where her maternal family is from.

“I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I will ever get a chance to wear it, or even see it in person?’ Surely it isn’t such a ridiculous notion; that someone associated with the place from which it was extracted should be able to wear it?”

The absurdity of that question became the engine of everything. She decided to become the diamond herself.

By the time she was awarded the Market Theatre Barney Simon Residency in 2024, she had already been performing the character of Phatsima Khullinan in public, testing the appetite and building a fearlessness around the idea. The archive deepened the work further — a photograph of her great-aunt Ruth Mompati alongside American political activist Angela Davis at a miners’ workers conference in Namibia.

“I love the process of combing through the archive and creating stories that reflect and refract as the archive does.”

From residency to rehearsal to stage, it “has been nothing short of thrilling”.

BLING! holds colonialism, repatriation and genuine comedy in the same frame. That balance, Ngaba is clear, is a matter of craft — hers and her director Ilana Dlangalala-Cilliers’.

“She directed and designed the show with such fine precision that it all became possible and beautiful to watch. She is immensely talented.”

South African audiences, when the show finally arrived, did not hesitate.