Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!”, questioned and mocked his home country’s long-standing racial apartheid policies, died in a hospital on Wednesday in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.

According to a family statement quoted in South African news media, Mr Ngema was a passenger in a car that was hit head-on as he returned from a funeral in Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape province.

“His masterfully creative narrative of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a post on X following Mr Ngema’s death.

In the decade before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s, South Africa’s system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern for Mr Ngema. In this decade he co-created the play “Woza Albert!”, wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”

“Sarafina!” grew out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was married to Mandela at the time.

“I sat with Mama Winnie Mandela and started thinking, ‘This country is on fire'” he told South African television show The Insider SA. in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, “Mom, what do you think will ultimately happen to this country?”

“Mom looked at me and said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the little ones’ faces so they don’t see this bitter end.'”

Mr. Ngema soon began to imagine young people running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song he wrote for “Sarafina!”, a musical that featured black high school students in Soweto township during the 1976 uprising accompanies against the government’s introduction of Afrikaans instead of Zulu as the official language in schools.

“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. In the fall it moved to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center then, in early 1988, to Broadway at the Cort Theaterwhere there were 597 performances.

In his review of the production at Newhouse Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema “has produced a musical that transforms the oppression of black townships into liberating song and dance that nearly raises the roof of the theater.”

The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a black society at once oppressed and defiant, simultaneously condemned to hard work and ignited by dreams of social justice.”

“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), for best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and for best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).

“Sarafina!” was also nominated for Best Musical and Best Lead Actress in a Musical.

It was adapted as a film 1992 with Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.

Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955 in Verulam, a town north of Durban.

According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!”, he was separated from his parents at the age of eleven, then lived for a while with a large family in Zululand and later alone in the slums around Durban. He taught himself to play the guitar from the age of 12.

“Growing up I just wanted to be a musician and was heavily influenced by The Beatles,” he told The Insider SA.

While working at a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a colleague asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.

“And then I fell in love with the role of the main character in the play.” he told Africa Report magazine in 1987. “When he was on stage, I would imitate him backstage, making the other musicians laugh.” One evening, when the actor didn’t show up, he played the role.

Mr. Ngema and the playwright began working together, which led Mr. Ngema to direct and write his own small plays. In 1979 he started working in Johannesburg Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic of his productions. After two years he left the band and began working with performer Percy Mtwa.

He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!”, a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa from Jerusalem on a jumbo jet, on the lives of ordinary people , powerfully played for 80 minutes by Mr Ngema and Mr Mtwa.

The white government tries to take advantage of Morena, then labels him a communist and imprisons him on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were imprisoned.

The play premiered in South Africa in 1981 and was performed over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and in the United States.

In the Washington Post: wrote critic David Richards in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “Deals with such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope than the subject usually inspires.” He added that Mr Mtwa and Mr Ngema “can conjure up a landscape, a society, a story” “just with their wonderful, far-sighted talent”.

Mr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five black men in a single South African prison cell describe – through acting, dance, song and pantomime – why they were incarcerated and how they became victims of racist laws, unemployment and police brutality became.

The name of the piece (which means “We Have No Money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in Lamontville Township in 1983.

Mr Ngema said: “Asinamali!” was so alarming to authorities in Duncan Village in the Eastern Cape that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.

“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in a 2017 interview on a South African podcast.

He shouted “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.

“It shows that victory is inevitable, no matter how bad things get.” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play premiered in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people will prevail.”

Released later that year, Asinamali! was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.

Information about Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to wife Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!”, ended in divorce.

Mr Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was embroiled in a controversy in 1996 as its sequel to “Sarafina!”, “Sarafina 2” – commissioned by the South African Ministry of Health to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic – led to a government corruption investigation amid allegations that the costs were excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that the message was inadequate.

He defended the show’s price and said it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to black townships.

“People said it was a waste of government money,” Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “I think that’s a stupid criticism.”