Reflections on Sizwe Banzi is Dead by Greg Karvellas
News Story
Seven decades of radical Royal Court playwriting. One landmark radio collaboration.
This week, we’re celebrating 70 years of the Royal Court with BBC Radio 4, bringing some of the most groundbreaking plays and playwrights from our history to audiences across the UK.
Among them is Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’sSizwe Banzi Is Dead, first staged at the Royal Court in 1973. Written and first performed during apartheid, the play’s exploration of identity, bureaucracy, oppression and survival continues to resonate more than 50 years later.
Ahead of the radio broadcast, Greg Karvellas, inaugural Artistic Director of The Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, reflects on the history of Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, its journey to the Royal Court, and why, more than 50 years after it was written, the play remains so timely.
Greg Karvellas, Inaugural Artistic Director of The Fugard Theatre*, Cape Town
Sizwe Banzi Is Dead tells the story of a Black man from King William's Town in apartheid South Africa who travels to Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) looking for work, only to find his passbook doesn't authorise him to stay there. A passbook, or the "dompas" (from Afrikaans, literally "dumb pass"), was the document all black South Africans were legally required to always carry under apartheid. Facing deportation back home and separation from his wife and four children, Sizwe falls in with a local man named Buntu, and one drunken night, the two of them come across a dead body in an alley, a man named Robert Zwelinzima, whose passbook is in perfect order, work permit and all. Buntu convinces a reluctant Sizwe to take the dead man's passbook and become him.
The apartheid pass laws and the dompas were designed to control exactly how many Black people were let into the cities and on what terms, allowing just enough labour in to serve white economic interests while making it a criminal offence to stay without the right permit, and this often meant families being separated by nothing more than paperwork, by hundreds of petty and deliberate laws stacked on top of each other until a person's whole life was decided by a stamp. John Kani, talking about the origin of the play in a 2024 interview, described the passbook as "91 pages of a nightmare…" because of just how endless and insidious the laws were.
What makes this piece so prescient, and its broadcast now as part of the Royal Court's 70th birthday celebrations so timely, is that it doesn't only remind us of what apartheid did at the time it was written, but over 50 years later, it holds up a mirror to the world now, exploring the cruelty of bureaucracy and how it can dictate who belongs where, and what it costs when a person is reduced to a document, because of who they are and where they come from.
The text was devised in 1972 by three titans of South African theatre, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona and had its world premiere at The Space Theatre in Cape Town, directed by Fugard, performed by Kani and Ntshona. The play arrived at the Royal Court in 1973 and transferred soon after to the Ambassadors where it won the London Theatre Critics Award.
That Sizwe Banzi Is Dead has been included in the Royal Court's 70th anniversary celebration broadcast is very special.
*The Fugard Theatre, opened by Eric Abraham in 2010, operated for ten years in honour of Athol Fugard, and though it closed in 2021, it now exists as a living archive at www.thefugard.com, keeping Athol Fugard fierce spirit and plays alive.