South African playwright uses art in fight for justice

Donna Bryson

LONDON — Apartheid pushed and Hollywood beckoned, but South African actor and playwright John Kani stayed put.

He was using his art to fight for justice, the Tony Award winner said. And besides, from what Kani had glimpsed of the lives of South Africans who had chosen exile — or had it chosen for them — leaving was no solution to the challenges of being an artist and an African.

Kani, 63, explores one more challenge those he calls “in-xiles” have faced in “Nothing But the Truth,” a play he wrote and starred in and brought to Britain this year.

“Truth’s” Sipho Makhaya is too consumed with resentment to cry when his brother, Themba, dies in exile after achieving the status of hero of the anti-apartheid movement. The bitterness springs in part from Makhaya learning that the job he had wanted — the town’s head librarian — will go to a young, returned exile.

Kani, as Sipho, delivers the play’s most powerful moment, recalling the death of his father in an angry, anguished soliloquy. Themba arranged from London for the funeral to be turned into a political rally. After the crowds flee police tear gas, Sipho alone shovels dirt onto his father’s coffin.

Sipho is a librarian, by nature a conservator, not a revolutionary.

After the struggle to bring down apartheid, “there was a need for understanding and acknowledgment on both sides that both sides played a critical role in the liberation of South Africa,” Kani said during an interview in London, where he brought “Nothing But the Truth” this year.

Like Sipho, Kani has a dead brother who was an anti-apartheid activist. As a young man, Kani had been accepted at university and planned to study law, but his family spent the tuition on lawyers for his brother.

Kani’s brother went to Robben Island — the prison of Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders. Kani went to work on a car assembly line on South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

Kani also found theater. Curious about a new troupe, he went to a township meeting and found the Serpentine Players discussing “Antigone,” the Greek tragedy about the justice of breaking unjust laws. It was like stumbling onto a cell of revolutionaries.

Through Serpentine, he met Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. The three collaborated in the 1970s on “The Island,” in which two Robben Island prisoners present “Antigone” for their fellow inmates, and “Sizwe Banzi is Dead,” the story of the theft of a dead man’s pass book — and of blacks feeling robbed of their humanity under apartheid. Kani won a best actor Tony award in 1975 when “The Island” and “Sizwe Banzi” were performed in New York. In London, the plays won the London Theatre Critics award for best play in 1974.

The Tony Award led to invitations to come to Hollywood. But Kani stayed in “in-xile.”

“I was a patriot, a combatant … using art as a powerful weapon for change,” he said.

(Associated Press)