It is a tragedy that of the over sixty plays staged by South Africa’s greatest ever theatre impresario and playmaker, Gibson Mtutuzeli Kente, only four scripts survive. Of these only one is based on an authentic script. The other three were put together by actors who did a wonderful job recalling the words. Gibson Kente began his stage career in the mid-sixties and never stopped producing until shortly before he died in 2004. The four plays in this volume – Sikalo, Lifa, How Long and Too late – all date from the heyday of his career, namely the years leading up to the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The rest is silence.This, the first collection of Kente’s plays, and the individual plays themselves are all preceded by detailed introductions and accompanied by virtually the only surviving photographs of scenes from the plays.