THEY’RE LOUD. THEY’RE unabashed. They are confrontational. Sibahle Mangena, Aaliyah Zama Matintela and Thuli Ngcaweni have, for the last couple of years, cynically presented themselves as ‘womansplainers’ for rape culture in South Africa. Subtitled ‘How to avoid being raped and killed’, Text Me When You Arrive is an explosive three-hander, deeply veined with dark humour, sexual nuance, collaborative energy and a series of truths and messages to chill your very blood, as you sit and laugh in the audience. The season at POP Arts Theatre ends on Sunday, but this is a must-see show for anyone who needs to remember the 17 lessons of staying alive.

It’s a work sophisticated in its thinking, bold and crude in its extrapolation and it speaks to you from the belly. While you’re guffawing with an embarrassed sense of recognition, the goosebumps on your skin will rise and you will feel feverish and sick at the narrative underlying the words which subverts the dry face of statistics, reports and numbers and shouts the message out in such a way that it echoes in your head. It changes the way you look at the world as you navigate your way home. And it certainly changes your vision of women you may encounter as you go about your life. What are they struggling to forget? What do they come home to every day?

On a par with works of the ilk of Whistleblowers, directed by the late Rob Murray, a couple of years ago, Text Me… presents the horrendous realities of rape culture and it takes no prisoners. From provocative dress, to lesbians, to nursery school rhetoric, the sexualisation of male Grade 8-year olds just beginning high school to the church itself, the work comprises 17 cynical rules that you must keep, if you want to avoid dying at the violent hands of a man, in this country. Jokes aside.

And they range from keeping a police station in your handbag, to leaving your vagina at home, to praising your man for doing the most minimal things, such as not raping you. It’s a work that you might find yourself screeching at, on the upper rungs of entertainment, and realise on the way home that you’re still screeching, only now in horror and with tears. And without becoming precious in its earnestness, it holds you rough and tight, as it honours the baby named Tshepang who was raped at the age of nine months in 2001, a news story which splayed the epidemic of rape wide and cast aghast global eyes on South Africa. It pays respect to some of the girls and women who recently succumbed to rape, offering their names and ages.

And of course, these cases cited are both a drop in the ocean and everywoman in a country which has the highest rape stats in the world. It’s a vitally important piece, articulated in several South African languages at once, and offering such beautiful harmonies at moments that you feel completely frozen into the material. At times, the various skits feel a little long, a little like they’re hammering home a message too heavy-handedly, but if you look at the facts, maybe the heavy hands of the young women who know the rhetoric as real and not rhetorical is mandatory.

This work takes the spirit of the kind of poor theatre that surged in South Africa’s performance culture veins through the grim years of apartheid and gives them a sparkly and cheeky relevance to a young, social media savvy society. The fire they offer burns the space in which they perform, the message is potent and direct. This play needs to visit not only suburban theatres, but also high school environments, the nesting spaces of the misogyny that facilitates the culture that is destroying us from the inside out.    

Text Me When You Arrive is directed by Sinenhlanhla Mgeyi and mentored by MoMo Matsunyane in its development. It is devised and written by the cast, Sibahle Mangena, Aalliyah Matingela and Thuli Ngcaweni, at POP Arts Theatre, 59 Dorset Road in Parkhurst Johannesburg, until 16 November 2026.