1.3: Theatre as Social Mirror and Political Tool

Case Study: Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and Anti-Apartheid Theatre in South Africa

Theatre has an uncanny ability to tell the truth under difficult circumstances and get away with it. For example, in South Africa under the legally sanctioned system of racial segregation known as apartheid, it was illegal for people of different races to gather and make theatre. In the early 1970s, Black South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona reached across the color barrier to collaborate with Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright and director. They met in secret and rehearsed what would eventually become the landmark protest play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.[i] To provide cover for their collaboration, Fugard hired Kani and Ntshona as his gardeners.

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[i] The play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead was developed collaboratively by South African artists Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Produced during the apartheid era, it used minimalist staging and actor storytelling to critique the pass-law system that restricted the movement and identity of Black South Africans.

The play emerged from their rehearsal room discussions about having seen a picture in a photographer’s window—or perhaps in a friend’s photo album—of a well-dressed, handsome Black man with a big smile on his face, smoking a cigarette in one hand and a pipe in the other. The pipe was a prop meant to signify the man’s wealth and status, but he apparently forgot his own cigarette and appeared to be smoking with both hands. The image asked of the collaborators: Why is he smiling? What does a Black man living in South Africa under apartheid have to be happy about? They answered the question: He must have his passbook in order. The passbook was a document that all non-white South Africans were forced to carry. It had their picture in it and controlled all aspects of their lives, including where they could live and where they could seek work. Native South Africans could be asked to show their passbook at any time and if they could not produce it, they would be immediately arrested.

Through their rehearsal room explorations, Kani, Ntshona, and Fugard devised a situation in which Ntshona played Sizwe, a country bumpkin who comes to the big city of Port Elizabeth to look for work without the correct work-seeker’s permit in his passbook. Sizwe is caught by a passbook raid and endorsed out of Port Elizabeth, which means he must go back to his hometown of King Williamstown where there is no work. Looking to drown his troubles, Sizwe and his friend Buntu (Kani) spend a night drinking at a shebeen, an illegal bar. The two men relieve themselves in an alley and discover the body of a murder victim, Robert Zwelinzima. They check his passbook and discover he has the correct work-seeker’s permit. Buntu changes the pictures in Sizwe and Robert’s passbooks so that Sizwe Banzi dies and is reborn as another man’s ghost. The play ends with Sizwe-as-Robert, handsomely dressed in a suit bought with the money from his new job, visiting a photographer (also played by Kani) and taking the photo that initially sparked the drama.

Sizwe Banzi Is Dead opened at The Space Theatre in Cape Town on October 8, 1972, and subsequently toured South Africa. To avoid censorship, Sizwe’s producers formed private theatre clubs. After purchasing their memberships, spectators were told when and where to appear to view the play. Still, there was an element of danger. At any moment, the venue could be raided by the Special Branch, the South African Secret Police, and audience members could not be sure that state agents weren’t among them. Sizwe transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in London, England. There, Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona devised The Island, a companion piece about the imprisonment of political prisoners on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town. Sizwe Banzi and The Island then transferred to Broadway where in 1975 Kani and Ntshona received unprecedented joint Tony Awards for Best Actor. On their return to South Africa, they were detained while performing Sizwe and spent twenty-three days in solitary confinement until they were released after an international outcry.

Anti-apartheid plays such as Sizwe Banzi Is Dead contributed to the eventual end of apartheid by carving out a multi-racial space where a post-apartheid future could be collectively imagined. In the years since South Africa’s first free democratic elections on April 27, 1994, the play has entered the South African consciousness. Many young South Africans discover the horrors of apartheid’s passbook system by studying and discussing Sizwe in school. The play is regularly revived and performed in South Africa and abroad. In 2006, Kani and Ntshona reprised their roles in a production of Sizwe that toured internationally. Another notable revival in 2015 featured Kani’s son Atandwa in the role his father originated alongside the late great Mncedisi Shabangu as Sizwe. Globally, the play has been translated into many languages and performed in many countries. Its framework and subject matter have proven particularly adaptable to situations of state oppression. For example, famed British director Peter Brook directed a French-language version in 2006 that addressed France’s migrant crisis.

Sizwe Banzi Is Dead shows how theatre can be a mirror and a weapon—reflecting and raising global awareness of the oppressive realities of apartheid while creatively resisting them. By dramatizing the dehumanizing logic of the passbook system, the play speaks not only to its historical moment but also to the enduring power of identity, resistance, and survival under regimes of control. That it emerged from collaborative improvisation, in secret, between Black and white artists—under threat of arrest—reminds us that theatre is not merely entertainment. It is a social practice. Sometimes making theatre can be an act of courage and a means of political intervention. To create, to perform, or even to gather around this story was to risk something.

Discussion Questions \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. What does Sizwe Banzi Is Dead reveal about the relationship between identity and state documentation? How does the play complicate the idea of who a person is?
2. How did the specific political and social conditions of apartheid shape the way the play was created, performed, and received?
3. In what ways does the act of assuming another identity become both a form of survival and a loss in the play?
4. How does this case study help us think about theatre as more than entertainment? Can you think of a contemporary parallel where performance intersects with protest?
5. How might the play’s impact change when performed in South Africa, in London, or on Broadway? Does the meaning of the play change when it is performed today? How does context shape interpretation?