Echoes from the stage

From fruit market to freedom stage — The Market Theatre marks 49 years

- Lesego Chepape

Johannesburg is a city where the pavements speak, if you listen close enough — stories beneath tar, between bricks and rising in spaces that have defied silence.

Among these sacred spaces is a building that once bustled with the rhythms of trade: fruit piled high, hands exchanging change, spices scenting the air.

But beneath that everyday chaos, something deeper was always stirring because the building that housed Johannesburg's Indian Fruit Market would become one of South Africa’s most radical, revolutionary cultural sites — The Market Theatre.

Today, 49 years after that transformation, the Market Theatre still stands. Not just as a venue but as a living archive of resistance, artistry and the unwavering human urge to speak truth to power.

It is no accident that The Market Theatre was born in 1976, a year that ripped off the apartheid regime’s mask of control.

On 16 June 1976, thousands of students across the country rose in peaceful protest against the forced use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools. What followed was state violence that left hundreds, possibly even thousands, dead. That year became etched in our bones.

Just three days later, on 19 June 1976, Mannie Manim and the late, legendary Barney Simon founded The Market Theatre inside the very structure built in 1913 for the Indian Fruit Market.

It was prophetic timing. As the streets burned with rage and sorrow, this theatre opened as a space of artistic defiance, where the suppressed stories of black South Africans could breathe.

The theatre’s existence challenged apartheid laws — multi-racial casts performed for integrated audiences in defiance of segregation. It was a rebellion with stage lights and scripts. It was activism in performance.