Dressed in a sharp black three-piece suit and a dapper yellow bow tie, Lubelo Mthenjana stands alone on a dark stage, taking in the last few seconds of quiet before the curtain opens. He takes a deep breath as his name is announced. Then he opens his arms wide and flashes a bright smile.
My name is Lubelo Mthenjana, and I will be performing for you … some magic!" The audience of about 30 children and parents is spellbound. They laugh out loud as he makes a string of paper clips vanish into a plastic cup and gasp with surprise as the clips reappear inside a matchbox. Then comes his best trick: He conjures sweets out of thin air and tosses them into the crowd.
As Lubelo takes his final bow to thunderous applause, his mom beams a proud smile at the 11-year-old apprentice magician. On this cloudy Saturday morning in September, Cape Town's College of Magic is buzzing with energy as dozens of students are competing in the annual junior magic contest. Heading to their classrooms, children in top hats, crisp white shirts and ties dash up and down a staircase decorated with a riot of brightly colored posters.
On every floor, display cabinets overflow with magic wands, sparkly hats, silk scarves, handcuffs, dice, Rubik's Cubes, toys, photographs and dozens of trophies earned by students in competitions all over the world. Outside the old red-brick Victorian mansion, framed by palm trees, two teenage boys zip around the car park on unicycles. Balls, clubs and diabolos shoot up into the air as a handful of kids practice juggling on the porch.
Tucked away in a peaceful suburb, this extraordinary school is a real-world Hogwarts: Africa's only school for youthful stage magicians and illusionists. Every Saturday morning, about 190 starry-eyed students ages 10 to 18 attend classes in everything from puppetry, mime and clowning to juggling, card tricks, illusions, mentalism, stage magic, theater production and escapology. "All the skills that will make a good magician," sums up David Gore, the school's founder.
In 1980, Gore was studying law and paying his way by performing at private magic shows when he and a friend came up with the idea of starting a magic school. "We walked into our local newspaper house with our top hats and tails, told our story about how we were starting the College of Magic, did magic for the journalists in the newsroom, and they published an article," he recalls. "From that article, we had 34 young people who started attending formal weekly classes studying magic." At the time, South Africa was still in the grip of apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation that dictated almost every aspect of daily life.
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