Playwright-actor Kani brings 'Truth' out of South Africa
CAMBRIDGE -- When "Nothing but the Truth" was just about to open in Johannesburg's famed Market Theatre, a mysterious woman called on behalf of someone else, saying that person had to see the show that very night. John Kani, who wrote the play and was starring in it, refused, saying audiences weren't allowed in tech rehearsals. The woman called again, so annoying Kani, who was formerly artistic director of the theater, he decided to set her straight.
He picked up the phone. But before he could speak, Kani recalls, "the lady said, 'Could you hold on for my boss, please?' "
As soon as "the boss" spoke, Kani knew who it was: Nelson Mandela. The former president had been told by someone who'd gone to the play in another city that he must see it. Mandela was leaving for Europe the next day, so what was supposed to be a tech rehearsal became a command performance.
"He arrived with his three grandchildren, and a few of the staff came just to make an audience for him," Kani says. "So we did the play, and at the end, he started clapping."
Mandela told him: " 'What a powerful family drama. Political, John' -- he pointed his finger at me -- 'but most important, a family drama. Congratulations.' "
This powerful, political family drama, which won the Fleur du Cap Award -- South Africa's equivalent of the Tony -- for best actor and best play of 2002, opens tonight as part of the American Repertory Theatre's festival of South African theater, film, lectures, and readings.
In the play, set in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 2000, the 60ish Sipho, an assistant librarian, is thrown into turmoil when the ashes of his estranged brother Themba arrive. Themba was a hero of the anti-apartheid movement who fled to London to escape arrest while Sipho stayed in South Africa. Themba dies in London, and his last wish is to be buried next to his parents. The play begins when Themba's daughter, Mandisa, brings his ashes home, bringing up lots of unresolved issues in Sipho, who hadn't spoken to his brother for 25 years.
"It's about sibling rivalry, family secrets, truth, lies, democracy, and newfound freedom," Kani says.
Kani, who lives in Johannesburg, is a playwright, director, and South Africa's best-known actor. In 1975, he gained fame in the US for his Tony-award-winning performances in "Sizwe Banzi Is Dead" and "The Island," which he co-wrote with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. He won a special Obie Award last summer for his outstanding contribution to theater. Before South Africa became a democracy, all art was a tool to fight the repression of apartheid, Kani says. But after Mandela's election in 1994, he, like other artists, had to rethink his role.
"I thought, what will I do now?" he says. "Is it true that we're artists just because of apartheid? Is it true that our art was only confrontational because we had an unjust system? It dawned on me that we can still do the same thing. The Market Theatre became a place where people could come and exchange ideas, interact, find a voice. We still became a voice of the people, who no longer are marginalized or oppressed, but people who have things to say."
But in the first few years after the election, artists' talents were needed to help build a new country. Kani helped the government set up official arts organizations, such as the National Arts Council, which he headed. He became chairman of the Apartheid Museum. He and others put together educational theater programs to teach people about AIDS and how to vote. Other programs aimed to motivate those who'd left school to work for liberation to go back to the classroom, and to help people understand that democracy did not mean that the government was going to do everything for them.
There was also the matter of the healing of the nation. To deal with the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, which would investigate human rights abuses between 1960 and 1994 and would allow families of those killed to find out how their loved ones died and who the perpetrators were.
Artists played a role there, too. "We needed to write plays and do workshops in the townships about the benefits of forgiving and reconciliation and understanding the process and how it would benefit the nation in a bigger way," he says.
Suddenly, Kani says, new voices emerged. "Our history was misrepresented, or not written. The younger people began to write plays that would tell the story. One wrote a piece about when Zulus attacked a small British garrison. The Zulus were led by 70 old men who ran miles barefoot, using all the military strategies to outwit and defeat the British."
The musical, "The Zulu," he says, was presented four years ago at the Market Theatre.
After Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela as president in 1999, Kani felt he finally could go back to his own writing.
"Nothing but the Truth" didn't begin as a play, he says. Its roots were far more personal: Kani's younger brother, Xolile, one of South Africa's firebrand political poets, was shot while reading his poetry at a funeral in 1985. He was 25.
When the TRC came to Kani's town, he was reluctant to go. "I was afraid to confront the perpetrator or policeman or soldier who shot my brother," he says. "I didn't know what I would do if he asked me for forgiveness. I wasn't ready to respond to that question, because every time I thought about him, I got very angry, very bitter."
In 2001, he decided it was time to confront his feelings, so he sat down and wrote a letter to his brother. A story began to form about a young poet. But then it shifted, and became an homage to one of the people who contributed to the struggle without recognition or fanfare.
"I thought I would use this play to pay tribute to [that man]," Kani says. "I wanted to pull him out of the crowd, give him a face, give him a name."
But Kani, still needing a connection to his own story, made Sipho's son a poet who is killed. "There still was the link. I kept that little part of me in the story."
The play, he says, is both about reconciliation and the desire for revenge, even a small one. Each man had his own disappointments. Themba thought he'd be called out of exile by the new black political leaders to help with a new government, but he never was. Sipho is passed over for a deserved promotion to head librarian for a younger man who got advanced degrees while living in exile.
"Nothing but the Truth" played in Los Angeles, where word quickly spread. "We had a flood of young people coming from the universities around and the Latino and African-American communities," he says. "There was an incredible mixture in the audience and a vibe that 'we need this reconciliation too. We also have issues we need to deal with.' "
Kani found a different kind of audience when the show played in New York: white South Africans who had fled their homeland.
"In New York, they would do a semi-confession of why they left and what happened in their lives and how much they feel guilty that they left," Kani says. "Some of them say, 'When we watched the TRC, we realized how much we were kept in the dark, how much we didn't know.' And you ask yourself, could you really not know? Can a government really, really make it impossible for you to know?''
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com. 