YET another excellent Premier's Concert at Hamilton City Hall has entered the record books and without doubt or fear of contradiction the performance of Dellwood Middle School, we would say without being trite, was super.

Students from all levels of the school performed an excerpt from the award-winning Broadway play Sarafina.

The students gave a dramatic and emotional portrayal of the suffering of South Africa's children during the wicked reign of the apartheid government. They brought the audience to tears. They sang in Swahili, spoke English in a perfect South African dialect, and depicted Boer police with an Afrikaner accent.

It was simply remarkable seeing the youngsters effortlessly going through their changes.

The Design and Technology Department at Dellwood designed and built the prison setting, which had reality with bloodied clothing and dead bodies on the stage.

The stage lighting added to the impact. We think the accolades rendered the students by the sustained applause from the audience were well deserved and a credit to the director, Ms Sheryl Ricardo. She is the director of music, dance, theatre, Spanish and business studies at Dellwood.

Ms Ricardo gave the background to the drama, citing how the government of South Africa declared a state of emergency in 1976.

For the next 13 years the country's schoolchildren carried out a campaign of resistance against the apartheid law that brutally enforced the separation of the races. More than 750 students were killed and more than 10,000 arrested. Many more were tortured and assaulted.

In 1986 Nelson Mandela had been in prison for 23 years. He was adored by the schoolchildren, especially by Sarafina, portrayed by Ronelle James. She went thought some heart-rending changes with her imagination of emotions she believed engrossed Mandela on the eve of his release from prison on February 11, 1990, and his ascendancy to the presidency of South Africa two years later. The singing of Freedom Tomorrow was soul-stirring.

We would say the super-stars in the cast were the lead singer Latonea Smith, Charles Skater, the Afrikaner interrogator, Stefan Dill, Dante Cooper, Ashley Isaac, Tahirah Grant and Amir Ming.

Our pictures by Leslie Todd of Government Information Services show the cast taking curtain call. Below, Premier Jennifer Smith is seen commended all participants in the concert, and made a special presentation to the MCs, David Bean and Nishanthi Bailey.