Man on a mission

In 1996, Chief Gcaleka of the African Xhosa tribe arrived at Heathrow airport. His mission was to secure the skull of his ancestor King Hintsa KaPhalo.

According to Gcaleka, KaPhalo was decapitated by the British during the Sixth Frontier War in 1835 his head subsequently buried in the Scottish Highlands.

Gcaleka's trip, for which he wore full tribal gear, including leopard skins, was the cause of much amusement in the British press, especially when the skull, having been retrieved and taken back to South Africa, turned out to be that of a white woman. The chief was later tried on unrelated fraud charges by tribal elders and the episode became just another little piece of African exoticism to be consumed as entertainment by the Western world.

To be fair, the South African press were also sceptical of Chief Gcaleka's exploits, but one South African, Brett Bailey, was intrigued. 'Contrary to belief, we don't have many witch doctors in South Africa, so I was attracted to that,' he says.

'But the story also held great symbolic value. More and more black South Africans are interested in reclaiming the spoils of colonial wars displayed in museums across the world.'

As artistic director of theatre company Third World Bunfight, Bailey has always been drawn to stories that combine the surreal with a deeper social interest.

In 2001, his production of Big Dada at the Barbican BITE festival was applauded for daring to parody Idi Amin as though he were a cartoon character, albeit of the most gross proportions. iMumbo Jumbo - which opens this week - tells the story of Chief Gcaleka's adventure, but this time deliberately couched in terms of its spiritual significance for South Africa's emotional heartland.

It's perfect territory for Third World Bunfight, who are oddly rare in South Africa for incorporating traditional African theatre and ceremonial rituals with other art forms in their work. Bailey, who is white, although the company is black, has been accused of artistic colonialism in daring to appropriate black African myth and mysticism in his plays.

'It is my role as an artist to constantly extend the boundaries of theatre and the parameters of society,' he says. 'And there's a wealth of black art in South Africa that's largely perceived - when it's perceived at all - as low culture by other civilisations.

'African music has genuine credibility, but few people outside the continent take African performance seriously. For me, using native dance and theatre, with all its ancestral and mythical resonance, makes the resulting piece far more empowering, on an emotional and social level, than a piece of straight, didactic, textbased realism.'