By Scott Baldauf

Staff Writer

If you can imagine a musical about a human rights tribunal, complete with details of gruesome torture, where the lines between innocence and guilt remains blurry, then you have a pretty good idea of the play I saw in Johannesburg, South Africa, the other night.

"Truth in Translation" is about the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a monumental attempt to bring closure to the apartheid era, with all its horrible murders and crimes on both sides, without putting South Africa into a downward spiral of vendettas and violence.

As an American reporter who has just arrived here, I hoped this would be both an excellent entree into the South African arts scene, and a primer on its recent politics. It would have been so if I had known a bit more Zulu. And Xhosa. And Afrikaans. Even the bits of English went by so fast, in that machine-gun South African style, that I'm not even that sure I understood the quarter that I did understand.

Yet, after living in India for five years, I'm used to linguistic vacuums. And there are things that you pick up even without knowing the language.

For one thing, as I watched audience members convulse with laughter as actors mimicked top South African politicians, or shrink with horror as the cast acted out sadistic torture techniques on stage, it became clear to me that South Africa was a place where many of the wounds have just begun to heal.

But it was the easy joking banter among the characters on stage – black and white, English and Afrikaner, Zulu and Xhosa and “Colored” – that somehow reminded me of another post-conflict zone far away in Afghanistan.

In the early days after the Taliban fled, I shared a house with several other reporters in the pricey neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan. Our translators would clown around and hang out, having tea in the staff quarters, and to all outward appearances, their easy relations were a sign that Afghanistan was heading inevitably toward peace. There were Pashtuns and Tajiks, city boys and country bumpkins, Sunni and Shiites, and they all clowned around, played badminton in the garden, and acted like bosom buddies.

Until one day, when the cook, a grizzled Tajik everyone called Uncle Qudrat, declared that he didn't trust my driver, a Pashtun, because he had once been a member of a radical Islamic party called Hizb-I Islami. "I'm afraid he might poison the food," said Qudrat darkly. Immediately, Farsi-speakers sided up with the cook, while Pashto-speakers sided with my driver, and the rift hardened. Within weeks, I moved out, unwilling to fire a man who had saved my skin many times. In a conflict zone where the past is not that distant, bloodlines, language, and culture seemed to trump mere friendship everytime.

Likewise, in "Truth in Translation," it's frighteningly clear how quickly chummy relations turn into something much more violent. Push a character a bit too hard, and he'll come back with surprising ferocity. Soothing moments swiftly follow, often accompanied by the lilting jazz of Hugh Masekela, the jazz trumpeter best known outside South Africa for composing the song, "Free Nelson Mandela."  Tempers can flare, but they also fade. Fatigue keeps South Africa from explosion.

It would take a madman, or an American sit-com director, to turn a controversial and plodding human rights tribunal into a musical drama. In the case of "Truth in Translation" it took Michael Lessac, who lists "Taxi," "The Drew Carey Show," "Just Shoot Me," and "Everyone Loves Raymond" as past directorial credits.

The story is driven by the reactions of the translators who bear the burden of translating the tribunal into all the country's major languages, following word for word some of the darkest moments in African history. As intelligence chiefs, ANC rebels, and top politicians admit to heinous crimes, or get off scot-free, it's inevitable for everyone – characters and audience members – to take sides.

Whenever there is a particularly gruesome bit of testimony (translated of course into Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, et al), the cast breaks into song, repeating the testimony word for word. With Masekela composing the tunes, it feels jazzy and upbeat, but it's hard to imagine humming along to vivid lyrics about war-time atrocities while making the evening pasta.

"Truth in Translation" has already made its first run out of South Africa, debuting in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, where audience members broke into spontaneous discussion groups to talk about their own genocide of 1994 when members of the Hutu majority began a killing rampage of the Tutsi minority. The director, Michael Lessac, also talks about creating a documentary about the play, and taking the show to "other countries in conflict transition."

It’s 3 a.m. and we’ve been driving since 5 p.m., pounding, slipping, and splashing through rural Liberia on what have to be some of the worst roads known to man.

It’s the last bit of the rainy season, and many roads are impassable, even to the newest 4-wheel drive vehicles. Yet, I’m with five others in a rickety 1980s Land Cruiser that belches exhaust into the cabin and has more sketchy noises than Click and Clack from “Car Talk” would know what to do with.

But, I need to get back to the capital, Monrovia, to make my flight out of the country, and, thanks to a rain storm that forced the UN to cancel a scheduled chopper flight, this was the only option. So here we are.

I have to give it up for the driver. Every time he plunges the truck into a mini-lake in the middle of the road, putting out the headlights temporarily, and every time we putter diagonally uphill through 6-foot muddy ruts or slide sideways downhill, I think, “This is it. We’re going to get stuck, and there’s no one coming for us. It’s the middle of nowhere. I won’t make my flight out of the country.” After all, I’d been stuck three times already in the three weeks I’d been in Liberia, and I hadn’t yet seen any roads nearly this bad.

And then there were the makeshift bridges. Barely the width of the vehicle, they didn’t look like they could hold a wheelbarrow, much less a truck with six people. We’d made it over a few, but when the right rear wheel busted through the plank wood fifteen feet above a small river, I wondered if I’d ever make it back.

As I shook my head, the driver calmly said something in Mandingo (one of the local languages) to his assistant in the back, who quickly clambered up to the side of the truck to help rock it back and forth until we could get to the shore on the other side.

After hours of this, I stopped being nervous and started enjoying it.

Then, all of a sudden, the mud ruts gave way to a smoother, reddish-brown surface that broadened out to the girth of an American highway.

“Mack trucks,” said the driver, anticipating my question. “The US timber companies brought Mack trucks up to here when they were operating.”  Aha. No wonder I hadn’t seen roads like this anywhere else in the country’s rural southeast. Shows what a little foreign investment can do, I thought.

But, thanks to UN sanctions on timber exports since 2003 after former leader Charles Taylor had taken over the timber industry to fund his brutal war against rebels, no foreign companies had been operating here full-scale for a while.

There were no Mack trucks here now, and even these wider, smoother roads were deteriorating. But, despite the UN sanctions, there were other weaker trucks, weighed down with way more logs than it looked safe to carry, puttering up the muddy hills past UN check points manned by sleepy Ethiopian soldiers. And there were long stretches of road, lined with large piles of plank wood and felled trees. This is what the environmental activists were warning about, I thought: Widespread logging, without active regulation.

The UN and the government say they allow small-scale timber operations as long as it is only distributed within the country. It’s needed for reconstruction after decades of instability and war, they say.

Reconstruction could go faster if the sanctions against timber exports are lifted (see story) and the Mack trucks once again ply these roads. But the country will also have to balance the protection of one of the largest remaining blocks of virgin rainforest in Africa. That could be as tricky a maneuver as anything my driver pulled off on the road to Monrovia.