Playwright John Kani on apartheid: ‘You had to tell stories that were important to you’

When apartheid ended 25 years ago, everything changed for John Kani. Until then, the actor and playwright’s every artistic choice had been driven by “the struggle” against South Africa’s systemic racial divide. “It liberated me from the responsibility of relevance,” says Kani, letting out a rich, rolling laugh. “After I voted in 1994, I could do No, No, Nanette without having to explain why.”

Kani was 51 when South Africa held its first democratic elections. Having joined Athol Fugard’s Serpent Players, so called because they performed in a disused snake pit at an old zoo in Port Elizabeth, he had spent 30 years acting against apartheid. “Someone once asked me what I missed most. I said, ‘My youth.’ I’ve never been a boy who could run around, go crazy, do this, try that. There wasn’t time for that.”

People worked against apartheid in all kinds of ways. Priests picked their readings accordingly, teachers took pains to correct the curriculum. Theatre was Kani’s weapon of choice. “Acting became a powerful tool for change. You had to tell stories that were important to you.” If the secret police were sniffing around, they would disguise rehearsals as church services. “We’d sing hymns, praise Jesus, and still they would watch.”

Kani’s career took him around the world. Two shows devised with Fugard and actor Winston Ntshona, who died last year, transferred to London, New York and elsewhere, and were repeatedly revived over 35 years. Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972) protested against the pass laws that required black South Africans to carry identification and restricted their movement. Set between a Ford factory and a Bantu photography studio, it philosophised on identity — the way black men carried themselves in front of their white bosses, compared with how they saw themselves on film. The Island (1973) portrayed two political prisoners rehearsing Antigone. “It was born out of tribute to the men and women on Robben Island.”

The shows made it to Broadway and won a joint Tony award, but what Kani most treasures are his encounters with other indigenous audiences: Aborigines in Australia, written out of law; Maoris who had fought for their rights in New Zealand. “That stayed with me,” he says. “That stayed with me.”

Now 76, the sprightly, slim youth of those shows has slowed down and solidified. Kani’s hair is cloudy white and his left eye, lost to a police beating in 1985, is prosthetic. He speaks, softly and deeply, in short sentences that give him a gentle gravitas to go with that resounding laugh that seems to keep him young.

His new play, Kunene and the King, reflects on South Africa’s recent past, rather than seeking to change its future. He plays a nurse, Lunga Kunene, caring for an ageing, alcoholic white actor (Antony Sher) who is battling liver cancer while preparing to play Lear. The two men have led very different lives and see democratic South Africa very differently but, Kani stresses, “they have to share a square yard and deal with each other”.

In part “a critical review of 25 years of democracy, its failures and successes”, Kunene and the King targets the reactionary politics that keeps rearing its head. “There are a number of white people who believe that if Mandela was still on Robben Island, everything would have been a giant nightmare and we’d all wake up [and say] ‘Oh, South Africa’s exactly as it once was’.”

On stage, that past is brought back into being: irascibility erupts into racism, patient-carer relationships tip into colonial power play. Despite everything, there’s still a divide. Economic inequality makes it so, and Kani wanted to show that side of South Africa to the world. “We talk about democracy but when I look at the postcard, I can’t see my face in that picture.”

Kani himself faced arrest and assault at home, even an assassination attempt in which he was stabbed 11 times after kissing a white actress on stage in Miss Julie. His brother, a poet, was shot when police stormed a funeral. In spite of that, Kani today is stoical: “The cost was irrelevant. I’d rather tell you what it paid me: my freedom.” He says that growing up, he’d been drilled not to fear death.

Kunene and the King hinges on King Lear because “it deals with death”. That, Kani explains, is the great leveller: the thing that puts the white actor on a par with the black nurse. “In exploring the play together, they enrich each other’s lives. Jack teaches Lunga about Shakespeare, but Lunga teaches Jack about humanity.”

The Bard has been a big part of Kani’s own life. The first black South African to play Othello at home in 1987, he filmed Coriolanus with Ralph Fiennes in 2011, and has played both Claudius and Caliban for the Royal Shakespeare Company — the latter as a slave to Sher’s colonialist Prospero.

Was he ever conflicted about perpetuating the culture of a colonial power? “You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking the colonised accepted that they were colonised,” he replies, sagely. “They knew the enemy was occupying their land and they were in a struggle.” Appreciation isn’t acceptance, in other words. “We read something different. As you read these books, there were these subliminal messages underneath.”

Kani saw himself in Shakespeare and he stresses his universality. “You can give me any of Shakespeare’s plays and I’ll tell you a parallel African folktale,” he says. “You say Macbeth, I immediately remember Shaka Zulu in KwaZulu-Natal, who wanted to be King while his uncle was still reigning.” Living under apartheid — “so isolated that people believed there was no world beyond the township” — he says Shakespeare expanded one’s horizons. Looking back today, he sees the plays as a reminder “that we have no monopoly on suffering in life. We’re walking on footsteps that were walked by other generations.”

Stories matter, as does representation. Since the success of Sizwe Banzi is Dead Kani has kept up a career in the movies, and in recent years has become a figurehead in black Hollywood, playing T’Chaka, King of Wakanda, in the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther, alongside his son Atandwa.

This summer, his voice will animate the mandrill Rafiki in Disney’s CGI remake of The Lion King, which also stars Donald Glover and Beyoncé. “This is happening in Africa. These are African lions in an African story,” he stresses. As such, his Rafiki is no fool — and Kani seems well cast. “In my mind, he’s an old sage, a wise man crackling with humour and subtlety.” And with good reason. As Kani says, “The struggles are something we’re going to live with throughout our lives.”

‘Kunene and the King’, to April 23, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, rsc.org.uk; ‘The Lion King’ is released worldwide in July

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