When he was cutting his teeth as an actor, the only place James Ngcobo knew equality was on stage. "Towards opening night you sit with the director, getting notes, and then you look at your watch and you just know, 'My last bus has gone, I can't get back home,'" he recalls. "I had moments where you finish rehearsals at night and you go with the white actors and have a glass of wine or two and go and sleep in the park because I didn't drive then, there were no buses going back to the township and sometimes it was dangerous to go back to the township."

Two decades on, apartheid is dead and Ngcobo has landed the most prestigious job in South African theatre. The 44-year-old Zulu is the new artistic director of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Despite the venue's celebrated history of protest plays during white minority rule, when it was known as the "theatre of the struggle", Ngcobo is the first black person to fill the position full time. His appointment follows a prolific directing career that has included sitcoms, a festival spanning 14 European cities, a big-budget extravaganza marking the centenary of the African National Congress and a musical starring Hugh Masekela bound for Carnegie Hall in New York next year. A workaholic who sleeps four hours a night, he was, according to insiders, the outstanding candidate by a mile.

But asked during a recent interview about the symbolism of his appointment in a country where race is still the dominant prism, Ngcobo played down his importance. "It's a daunting task because I'm reaching out to people," he said. "You have to be completely delusional to think you can do all this on your own. I collaborate a lot with people because my mantra in life is that things that I can't do are not a weakness if I know somebody else who can do them very well."

Like any South African his age, Ngcobo's youth was scarred by apartheid. He grew up in KwaMashu township, the 10th of 12 children, the son of a maid and factory worker who also "painted white people's houses". He recounted: "During that mad time I grew up when townships were burning, but the one thing I remember about my childhood is just the love I come from. I lived in the same house as my mother and father and grandmother and they nurtured a love for words in me. The one thing we did during the struggle at that time was read."

But humiliations were engrained in daily existence in countless ways. "When we went to town during that era there were certain beaches where black people swam. My father would three or four times a year take me to town and he would buy me a Chelsea bun and orange juice. I remember as a kid wanting to play when I arrived at the park and my father would always say no, this is the boring part of the park, we must go up there, it's nicer there. What I didn't know then was my father was taking me to the black section and he just didn't want to tell me this.

Mpho Osei-Tutu and Thami Mngqolo in Athol Fugard's The Island, one of the many groundbreaking plays staged at the Market Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

"I remember going to work and seeing a young white guy being completely rude to my father, who was a man that you didn't mess with. These were things at a very young age that made one realise that something was not right. By the time I was around 10 it was that era when the ANC had intensified the struggle and were making this country ungovernable. I am of the generation that experienced those dark years."

The Market Theatre was immersed in that history. It opened five days after the 1976 Soweto uprising with Chekhov's The Seagull and caused uproar by portraying an inter-racial kiss in a 1987 Othello. It nurtured collaborations between Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona such as The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead, saying things that could not be said in parliament or the press and raising anti-apartheid consciousness around the world.

Apartheid-era revivals still draw audiences to the Market whereas new works can be a tougher sell. Classics from the western canon are an endangered species, although Molière's The Miser was a surprise hit last year. Ngcobo intends to build audiences in the Indian and coloured (mixed-race ancestry) communities and black middle class.

His plans are nothing if not diverse: including Steven Berkoff performing his Requiem for Ground Zero; David Mamet's Race; a one-man show about Zulu identity a Czech company's adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank and a hip-hop act. He also aims to direct an opera and bring in a dance company from Zimbabwe.

"We need to realise that South Africa is a country that is in a continent called Africa."

James Ngcobo, 44, who has directed sitcoms, festivals and a musical, was the 10th of 12 ­children brought up in a township. Photograph: Market Theatre

Ngcobo's favourite playwrights include Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter and he rejects the notion that Shakespeare is "colonial" literature that no longer speaks to post-apartheid South Africans. "I always say that's rubbish. You can't look at Shakespeare in just that one dimension. I'm yet to meet a writer who says they're not inspired by Shakespeare. I'm yet to meet an actor who doesn't want to do a Shakespeare. I've always been of the belief that if theatre is done very well it doesn't matter where it comes from. When I was growing up, people loved Brecht in the township, people loved Shakespeare."

But the endlessly energetic, fast-talking Ngcobo believes it is also vital for theatre to keep excavating his country's difficult history. It would be damaging, he believes, for South Africa to wish its past away. "One sits at dinner tables now and people say, 'We shouldn't tell our kids about apartheid.' I've got two boys and I tell my boys about apartheid, because I just think otherwise it's taking away memory from them, and the most successful nations in the world are nations that walk with the memory of who they are.

"When you don't tell your kids where you've been in this country, I think it's a terrible disservice that you do to them. It's not giving them my baggage of the time, it's just saying to them: 'This is what happened.'"