'We are all complicit': Inside 'The Blue Album'

Blending performance and storytelling, Vuyelwa Maluleke interrogates belonging, language and lived experience in a work that is as intimate as it is unsettling

- Lesego Chepape

Blending performance and storytelling, Vuyelwa Maluleke interrogates belonging, language and lived experience in a work that is as intimate as it is unsettling One-woman show: Vuyelwa Maluleke delivers a compelling performance in The Blue Album directed by Ernest “Ginger” Baleni. Photo: Supplied

(Photo: Supplied)

English arrives loaded, carrying histories that were never meant to hold black life without distortion. Many artists step away from it for that reason.

Vuyelwa Maluleke does something else entirely. She stays. She insists. She writes into it, against it, through it until it begins to carry the texture of her world.

Maluleke is an award-winning writer, performer and lecturer, recently nominated for Best Performance in a Fringe production at the 2026 Naledi Theatre Awards.

But the markers, neat as they are, struggle to contain the breadth of her work.

Her practice slips between writing, performance and lecturing but its origins are less formal than that. It begins, as many things do, in a kind of quiet.

"I was painfully shy," she says. "But I could do poetry."

Poetry, especially spoken word, offered a loophole. "No one was really examining it. I wasn't getting graded on it. I was getting to author my own things."

In that space, Maluleke began to shape stories, not just as narrative but as enquiry. What does it mean to exist in a world that is constantly trying to name you? To fix you?

The question sharpened over time, particularly as she became more aware of the dissonance between her schooling and home. Like many who moved through Model C and private school systems while living in the township, she describes a kind of suspended belonging.

"Your parents are really just doing their best to buy you out of the township," she says, "but you really don't belong in the private school with its people."