Sol Rachilo could make a classroom feel like a theatre, a rehearsal feel like a life lesson, and a frightened young artist feel capable of greatness. Solrah gave generations more than performances and books; he gave them confidence, a sense of belonging, and the courage to believe their stories deserved to be heard.
By Themba Khumalo
We gathered in classrooms that smelled of floor polish, old paper and damp winter rain, and we knew exactly who was sitting before us.
Long before his name would appear on official letterheads in the quiet, formal language of grief, we already understood that Solrah was a giant, not because anyone had bestowed the title upon him, but because we had experienced his greatness at close quarters.
We knew it in the way younger voices softened when he began to speak, in the warmth of his hand on a shoulder when a line fell flat, and in the patient attention he gave to a young person who had not yet discovered the worth of their own voice.
His greatness was not something death would reveal to us; we had lived alongside it.
To those who knew him through screen credits, faded stage programmes, photographs, books and the history of South African theatre, he was Solomon Cedric Rachilo: pioneer, actor, playwright, poet, author, teacher and living archive, a man of that extraordinary generation of Black artists who created and sustained a cultural life in a country determined to deny them the freedom to do so.
But to those of us who sat at his feet, heard his laughter, absorbed his lessons and watched him coax courage out of uncertain young people, he was simply Solrah.
There was something beautiful about that simplicity. He did not carry his accomplishments into a room demanding that we marvel at them. Whatever he had learnt, he seemed to believe, was of little value if it could not be passed on to someone coming behind him. He did not need us to stand in awe of him; he wanted us to discover that we could stand on our own feet.
Perhaps that is why his death feels so personal.
We knew, of course, that a man born on 22 February 1929 could not remain with us forever, but knowing that intellectually is very different from being emotionally prepared for the disappearance of someone who has become part of the landscape of your life.
At ninety-seven, Solrah had lived through enough history to fill several lifetimes. Yet something was reassuring about knowing that he was still somewhere in the world, sitting in his chair, leaning slightly forward, his eyes bright with that sharp, knowing humour, still capable of listening, remembering, correcting and reminding us that our stories mattered.
He was a man of tenderness and steel, and neither diminished the other. When life pressed particularly hard, he would look at us with that familiar twinkle, clear his throat and deliver his famous declaration: “I can beat caustic soda.”
We laughed because Solrah could make defiance sound almost mischievous, but beneath those words was the wisdom of a man who had endured a country designed to corrode the dignity of Black people, without allowing it to determine the final character of his life. He understood that suffering could leave scars without being allowed to become an identity, and that survival demanded more than staying alive—it required holding on to one’s humanity.
That conviction ran through his relationship with books, theatre and storytelling. Solrah understood that literature was not an ornament and culture was not decoration. For people whose history had so often been distorted, suppressed or told by others, stories were a means of remembering who they were.
Apartheid understood the danger of that memory. A people who could tell their own stories could not easily be persuaded that they had no history, no culture and no claim to dignity.
So Solrah told ours.
He took to the stage in No-Good Friday, Nongogo, Sponono and Boesman and Lena, and took up his pen to give us The Township Housewife and Grounded in Mshenguville.
After 16 June 1976, when the streets of Soweto were stained with the blood of children demanding a different future, he did not turn away from the horror. In Nostalgic Waves from Soweto, he gathered memory, grief and history into a literary record of the uprising and its aftermath.
His artistic life extended far beyond the theatre. He appeared as Sonny in Joe Bullet in 1973, as Percy Tshabalala in Bullet on the Run, and took the lead in Charlie Steel and played Victor Mahlangu in Stoney: The One and Only, both in 1984. He appeared in Game for Vultures, the international thriller set against the political conflict in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and decades later in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, filmed in Botswana. South African audiences also encountered him in Collision and the SABC1 drama Lisenethini, in which he played Capone.
Yet even that list tells only part of the story, because Solrah was never simply an actor waiting for somebody else to create work for him. His professional stage debut came in No-Good Friday in 1958, after Ken Gampu urged him to audition, and he went on to appear in Sponono, Boesman and Lena and various stagings of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead. His work in Maishe Maponya’s Gangsters placed him within the tradition of politically engaged South African protest theatre.
He was also a writer and producer. He wrote and produced Three in Number in 1967, later gave us The Township Housewife and Grounded in Mshenguville, works rooted in the social realities of Black life under apartheid, including the struggles of women, informal settlements and the housing crisis.
He understood that theatre could entertain, but could also confront power, preserve memory and force an audience to look at lives that the dominant culture preferred to leave unseen.
Yet the deepest measure of his contribution cannot be found in a list of plays, books and performances, because some of his most consequential work left no archive. It happened in classrooms and rehearsal spaces, in conversations with frightened young artists and in the patient business of persuading people who had been taught to doubt themselves that they had every right to imagine a larger life.
In 1977, in the aftermath of the student uprisings, he founded the Children of Soweto Action Centre (COSAC) Drama Academy. Through COSAC, and later through Inner Eye Productions, he offered free tuition and created a haven where young people could act, write, make music, learn and begin to imagine themselves beyond the limitations imposed upon them.
Many great artists emerged from COSAC, carrying into their own careers something of the discipline, confidence and creative freedom that Solrah had worked so hard to cultivate. Some became household names; others remained known mainly within the creative communities they enriched.
What mattered to him was never the fame that might follow, but the possibility that a young person who had once doubted their own worth could discover, through the arts, the courage to imagine a different life.
That is why his teaching went beyond technique. He taught us that acting was not about pretending; it was about truth. When he encountered a nervous youngster in a dusty hall, he seemed to understand that what stood between that young person and their potential was often not a lack of talent, but the absence of someone willing to believe in them long enough for them to begin believing in themselves.
Sometimes that belief came through encouragement, sometimes correction, sometimes a stern look and sometimes laughter, but it was always rooted in the conviction that young people deserved to be taken seriously.
Some people leave memories behind, and then there are those whose presence becomes woven into the person you eventually become. Solrah belonged to the latter category. That is why his absence hurts in a way that cannot be adequately expressed by saying that South Africa has lost a pioneer, actor, playwright, poet or cultural activist. Those belong to the public record.
The private grief belongs to those who knew the man behind it: the elder, teacher and father figure whose greatness never prevented him from making you feel seen.
And then there is the part of his story that makes remembering him honestly even more difficult.
After a lifetime devoted to theatre, literature, performance and the development of younger artists, Solrah reached old age without the financial security that should have accompanied such a substantial contribution to South Africa’s creative life.
He was living in a backyard shack because that was what his circumstances allowed. Then the shack caught fire. He suffered burns, and the little shelter he had was destroyed. By the end of his life, Solrah was without a home.
There is a painful contradiction in that reality. The man who spent so much of his life creating spaces where other people could discover possibility ultimately reached the end of his own life without a secure place to call home.
We should not hide that beneath beautiful words simply because we are mourning him.
Solrah was not an unknown artist whose importance was discovered only after his death. We knew who he was. The people he taught knew who he was. His work had already entered the history of South African theatre, literature, film and television. What was painfully absent was not evidence of his worth, but the material security and dignity that ought to have accompanied a lifetime of cultural service.
We are often eloquent when our elders are gone, finding the photographs, revisiting the archives and assembling beautiful tributes around lives whose value was known long before the funeral. Yet, recognition after death cannot provide the home that an elderly artist should have had while alive, nor can it undo the vulnerability and hardship of his final years.
That should trouble us, because honouring the people who build our cultural life cannot begin when there is nothing left that our gratitude can change.
His life, however, was larger than the backyard shack in which he lived, larger than the fire that destroyed it, larger than the burns he suffered and larger than the hardship of his final chapter. Those were the circumstances of his ending; they were never the measure of the man.
The measure of Solrah lives in the artists he nurtured, the stories he preserved, the young people whose confidence he helped build, the stages on which he performed, the books he wrote and the countless lives altered because he decided that another person’s potential was worth his time.
It lives in those classrooms with their smell of floor polish, old paper and damp winter rain, where a younger generation sat before him and slowly learnt that having a voice meant having the courage to use it.
We never needed his death to tell us that he was a giant; we had known it all along. What we could not have known, while he was still sitting among us with that familiar glint in his eyes and warmth in his voice, was how profoundly his absence would alter the texture of our lives, because some people become so deeply woven into our memories and our sense of who we are that we only discover the full measure of their presence when we are forced to confront the space they have left behind.
Hamba kahle, Solrah, with all the gratitude that words can carry and all the sadness that words cannot quite contain. You gave generations of South Africans far more than performances, books and productions; you gave young people somewhere to stand when the world was telling them they did not belong, opened doors for those who had been taught to believe there were none, and helped preserve stories that might otherwise have been swallowed by the deliberate forgetting of our history.
When I think of you, I do not want the fire, the burns, the backyard shack or the hardship of those final years to have the last word. I want to remember the man who sat in those classrooms, the teacher who could listen to a hesitant young voice and somehow make it stronger, the elder who understood that art without truth was empty and that a people who surrendered their stories surrendered something of themselves.
I want to remember the laughter, the wisdom, the stubborn resilience and that unmistakable twinkle in your eye when you told us, with complete conviction and just enough mischief, that you could beat caustic soda.
We knew you were a giant, Solrah, and we always knew. What we did not know was how profoundly we would feel the world without you, because some people become so deeply woven into our lives that their absence leaves more than an empty chair; it leaves a silence where a familiar presence once made the world feel a little more anchored.
Uphumule ngoxolo, Solrah Incorporated. May those who come after you prove worthy custodians of what you spent your life building, and may your story continue through the voices of those who, because of you, found the courage to speak.