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Tyler Fleming. Opposing Apartheid on Stage: King Kong the Musical. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020. Bibliography. $125.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1-58046-985-2

In Tyler Fleming’s Opposing Apartheid on Stage, the reader follows two concurrent composite histories: a layered biography of the production and reception of the landmark jazz opera King Kong, and the life histories of boxers at the center of the theatrical productions, along with the musicians, cast, and crew, from the 1950s to the late 70s. King Kong, a theatrical enterprise of the musician Todd Matshikiza with lyrics by Pat Williams and Matshikiza, based on a book by Harry Bloom, follows the rise and fall of a heavyweight boxer, EzekielDlamini. Fleming’s exposition is an opportunity to explore the history of prize fighting, racial discrimination with the rise of apartheid, urbanization, cross-racial artistic collaborations, and exile. This is an extraordinarily rich and ambitious work, and quite unlike anything in recent African historiography. Fleming begins his book with an incisive question: was King Kong a moment or movement? What he means by this is, how do we fairly historicize the inception, successes, and failures of this remarkable artistic collaboration, which triumphed in South Africa in 1959 before touring abroad and scattering its Black African cast across Europe and North America? The subject himself, Dlamani, was a momentary phenomenon. He was a fighter and gangster of but brief notoriety, albeit generously reconstructed by Fleming. Yet his legacy as a theatrical creation is profound, because as Fleming reveals, it offers an unusual, possibly unique, vehicle with which to transect the complexity of urban race relations and tentatively optimistic national selfnarration even as apartheid consolidated, just prior to the horrific violence of Sharpeville that put an end to almost every form of genuinely interracial collaboration. While Fleming himself does not definitively answer his own question (and there is no epilogue or conclusion), the book strongly suggests the latter is a more accurate description, not the least because it spawned quintessentially South African Black Atlantic jazz genres by launching the careers of Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, and others.