Word: banzi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sizwe Banzi is Dead begins with a rambling, anecdotal, seemingly spontaneous monologue that makes up almost the first half of the play. It is a way of setting the stage for an American audience--Styles (John Kani) leafs through a newspaper commenting on whatever happens to catch his eye, joking about expresidents and the like, and finally settling into a long, bitter description of the servility of black workers in a Ford motors plant and the frenzied preparations in the plant when Henry Ford descended from rich mythical America for a visit. There is a swift transition to the play...
...drunken self-righteousness and rebellion, he at first refuses to steal the bewysboek and take on the dead man's identity, because for a black man in South Africa, his name is all that he has, the last proof of his manhood. But he finally relents, and Sizwe Banzi is dead...
...pantomime of toil and fatigue, blood and pain. The rest of the play is inevitably an anti-climax that never fully lives up to the expectations and intense atmosphere set up by the play's beginning. When Kani exhibits the quick comic energy that worked so well in Sizwe Banzi, although the audience is laughing and the comic relief much needed, it is as if the high drama of the opening is reduced to situation comedy. John's comic exasperation in teaching the plot of Antigone to slow-witted Winston seems out of place, almost blasphemous beside the agonized beginning...
...SIZWE BANZI AND The Island are expositional, didactic and propagandizing. That would be a simple criticism if the didactic aspect of the plays were a necessary, extra-literary appendage--soothing balm for liberal consciences, good drama with a cause, candy-coated political message. But the message is not so simple...
...fact, the two plays have been criticized for presenting a blunted, inadequate condemnation of apartheid, and avoiding the brutality and inhumanity of South African racism. Sizwe Banzi accepts the rules of apartheid in sacrificing his identity for the immediate reward of being able to work in Port Elizabeth. The prisoner, John, is overjoyed by his imminent release, and submits even more servilely to the daily humiliations in order not to jeopardize it. His mind is wholly filled with the expectation of domestic happiness, meeting his wife, his family. He never questions the authority that jailed him in the first place...