One of the gems of South African theatre, Sizwe Banzi is Dead is back on the boards at the Market Theatre. The Tony Award winning two-man play was originally staged in 1972 featuring John Kani and Winston Ntshona. It is now acted by Mncedisi Shabangu and Atandwa Kani, the son of the originator who also the director. Sizwe Banzi is Dead is an acknowledged South African classic written collaboratively by Athol Fugard and the two above mentioned senior actors. The new find Shabangu at his usual greatness. He is unfazed by the play’s previous performers’ legendary history. This is not the case for his colleague on the boards. For though the play marked a creative break trough for Kani senior, it places the young Kani is a conundrum. The more he is aware of his unavoidable responsibility to pay tribute to his father and predecessor in the role, the further his own artistic voice becomes diminished. It’s as if he is playing his father as he played the role instead of making his own thespian statement. Sizwe Banzi is Dead play explores the madness of apartheid’s bureaucracy and how it unfolded in everyday experience of the oppressed.  It was part of artistic forms concerned with how the regime rendered black life meaninglessness through its absurd laws. Often hilarious as it handled tragic themes Sizwe Banzi is Dead is SA’s theatrical contribution to art history in the Kafkaesque tradition. It works with a simple yet powerful plot. A man called Sizwe Banzi (Shabangu)  is in trouble. His dompass, the compulsory passbook or ID that every black person was required to have by law, need a particular stamp. It’s a stamp that gives him permission to be in the city, Port Elizabeth. However, he needs to go back home to the outskirts of King Williamstown for this to get this stamp.  It’s a documentary detail without which he cannot legally get a job, lodgings, or walk the streets without the danger of being arrested. He is reluctant to leave the city where he has built a life. This simple fact criminalises him. However, while living “illegally” in New Brighton, PE with a new friend, Buntu (Kani) he goes on a night of binge-drinking. It’s is on their drunken walk back to Buntu’s house that they stumble upon the murdered body of a man. His name, they discover from perusing his passbook, is Robert Zwelinzima. Killed by unknown assailants in the night, his murder likely to go unaccounted for, as was often the case with black people during apartheid. Banzi and Buntu also learn that Zwelinzima’s passbook is in order. He is a migrant mine labourer.

The two men begin to a plan. It revolves around a set of key questions. Should Banzi, who desperately needs a stamp in his passbook to remain and work in Port Elizabeth, steal the unknown dead man’s identity? What happens to his own name when he assumes Zwelinzima’s identity? What about his wife and four children back home, who depend on him for their livelihood?

The underlying message speaks to the difficulties of being committed to responsible lawful citizenship in the face of an absurd universe. It’s an exploration of the internal psychological crisis that emerges in a man when the law of the land cannot be relied on for ethical living, but he nevertheless feels obligated to act morally..

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