In New York: Children of Apartheid Meet Broadway

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Now Mavimbela's ambition is to go to college. Of all the Sarafina! cast, he is the most faithful in attending thrice-weekly after-hours classes held at Martin Luther King Jr. High School. On a recent afternoon, he was at the blackboard trying to figure out fractions. "Which one is the numerator?" the teacher asked. He pointed to it and then, on cue, to the dividend, the quotient, the remainder, the divisor, the denominator. His fellow cast members gazed intently at the blackboard chalked full of figures. On the wall was a poster from another Broadway play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

Eight performances a week, lessons, and recording sessions leave little free time. But the cast managed to squeeze in a Sunday-evening trip to Staten Island for a birthday party at the math teacher's home. On the ferry, amid the hubbub, Dumisani Dlamini, who plays Crocodile, a high-stepping character in the play, was subdued. A striking figure with a Mohawk hairstyle and tribal scars on his sculptured cheekbones, he gazed off into the mist. "My mother passed in March," he confided softly. "Since then, life has not been the same. I could not go back to South Africa because of the show, there was no one to understudy for me. They sent me a videocassette of her funeral."

In the distance the outlines of the Statue of Liberty appeared in New York Harbor. Dlamini changed the subject. "Are there sharks in this water?" he wondered.