Insight

Sizwe Bansi is Dead

Published

4 years ago

July 13, 2021

The world renowned South African play, Sizwe Bansi is Dead was created and improvised by white dramatist, Athol Fugard and black dramatists John Kani and Winston Ntshona. It was finally put into written form by Athol Fugard in 1972.

Its catchy title comes from the tormented letter that Sizwe writes to his wife about the dire situation in Port Elizabeth. The iconic and most memorable statement from that letter is: “Dear Nowethu, in a manner of speaking, Sizwe Bansi is dead!”
The genesis of the play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead can be traced to Fugard’s experiences as a law clerk at the Native Commissioner’s Court in Johannesburg. At that time, it was required that every black and coloured citizen over the age of sixteen carry a passbook that restricted employment and travel within certain areas in South Africa.

The passbook that every black man was forced to carry at the time, imposed limits on the employment and travel of all black citizens in South Africa. It took away their freedom of movement and choice, making them less than men. Their entire lives were contained in this passbook, and with a single stamp, one white man could totally alter a black man’s future and determine his fate.

The characters depicted in the play struggle to maintain their own identities and sense of themselves as human beings under this oppressive rule. Within these circumstances, however, Styles, Sizwe, and Buntu realise that all they own is themselves. The only legacy they have to leave behind is the memory of their lives. While working in court, Fugard the playwright saw the repercussions of this law: blacks were sent to jail at an alarming rate.

The play opens in the photography studio of a man named Styles. The studio is located in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. After reading a newspaper article on an automobile plant, Styles tells a humorous story to the audience about an incident that occurred when he worked at the Ford Motor Company. Styles continues to read the paper and talks about his photography studio.
His musings are interrupted when a customer, Sizwe Banzi, arrives. Sizwe asks to have his picture taken, but when Styles asks him for his deposit and name, Sizwe hesitates, then says his name is Robert Zwelinzima. Styles asks Sizwe what he will do with the photo, and Sizwe tells him he will send it to his wife. When the picture is taken, the moment is frozen into what the photograph will look like. It comes to life and Sizwe verbally dictates the letter to his wife that will accompany the photo.

In that watershed letter in South African drama, Sizwe Bansi gradually tells his wife that Sizwe Banzi is dead! He writes that when he arrived in Port Elizabeth from their home in King William’s Town, he stayed with a friend named Zola who tried to help Sizwe find a job. His employment search was unsuccessful; as a result, he was told by the authorities that he must leave in three days. Sizwe went to stay with Zola’s friend, Buntu.
The play returns to the present time. Staying at Buntu’s house, Sizwe tells Buntu about his problems that — unless a miracle happens, he will have to leave the town in three days. Buntu is sympathetic to the problem and suggests that Sizwe work in the mines in King William’s Town. Sizwe rejects the idea as too dangerous. Buntu decides to take Sizwe out for a treat at Sky’s place, a local bar.

The focus switches back to Sizwe as he continues to compose the letter to his wife. He describes his experiences at Sky’s shebeen, where he was served alcohol by a woman in a respectful manner. The scene shifts to the outside of Sky’s after Sizwe and Buntu have been drinking.
Buntu decides that he needs to get home to go to work tomorrow. He goes into an alley to relieve himself and finds a dead man there! Sizwe wants to report the body to the police. Buntu rejects the idea, but he retrieves the dead man’s identity book to find his address. Buntu finds that the man, named Robert Zwelinzima, has a work-seeker’s permit — the very thing that Sizwe needs to stay in town! They take the book from the corpse.

At Buntu’s house, Buntu switches the photographs in the books. He proposes that they burn Sizwe’s book — effectively making Sizwe dead — and have Sizwe adopt the dead man’s identity so that he can stay in Port Elizabeth. Sizwe is unsure about the plan; in particular, he worries about his wife and children.
After much discussion, Sizwe agrees to the switch. Sizwe finishes dictating the letter to his wife. In it, he tells her that Buntu is helping him get a lodger’s permit. The scene shifts back to Styles’ photography studio; Sizwe is getting his picture taken.

There are numerous technical, structural and political influences behind this play. Technically and structurally the play takes after the modern and postmodernist style of Beckett, Pinter and, Brecht and others which became most prominent in the 1950’s.
Modernism is driven by the philosophy that since history and social order have failed humanity (as seen through the first and second world war), the individual must create their individual order in order to serve their needs. Also, the world is absurd and an absurd style of drama, as in all the arts, can better describe that world.

In the dramas of the absurd, there is use of the surreal rules for example no concept of linear time. There is no concept of consistent identity. No concept of specific place and subject as seen in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
In Sizwe Bansi is Dead, there is a play inside a play inside a play. You see it, for instance, when Styles plays himself, his workmates, his boss, his clients at the studio all by himself on stage.
At some point Styles becomes director and producer of the play by facilitating Sizwe’s story, beginning with the photograph.

Much later, Buntu helps Sizwe rehearse the different roles of Robert Zwelinzima. This helps us reflect on various meanings of the word acting in this play. Life for black people under apartheid becomes a series of acting. They end up acting even the acting!
At the level of basics, the play sets out to expose the awkwardness of apartheid South Africa’s pass book laws. However, this basic issue opens up finer challenges (physical and spiritual) that Africans face in the system of apartheid.

Brian Crow and Chris Branfield, refer to what they call “a social theatricality” in the play. This refers to a complex play about a society in which people are playing at being what they are not in order to survive.
This means that on stage, we see a play that says life is a play. Sizwe is looking for a job but he has neither a pass nor a job permit. He risks arrest and deportation back to the homeland. When Sizwe and Buntu pick the late Robert’s pass-book and a valid worker’s permit, Sizwe has to now spend his life acting Robert in order to live. Therefore there is a brute collapse between acting and living:

“All right, I was only trying to help. As Robert Zwelinzima you could have stayed and worked in this town. As Sizwe Bansi …? Start walking, friend. King William’s Town. Hundred and fifty miles. And don’t waste any time!”
Dying and death operate at various and related levels, but with huge ironies. Indeed Sizwe dies physically in as far as no one with the official identity of Sizwe will be seen again.
Sizwe has died and becomes Robert and because this is the only the way to make Sizwe live a more economically convenient life. That suggestion of resurrection is rude, sinister and absurd:

“Are you really worried about your children, friend, or are you just worried about yourself and your bloody name? Wake up, man! Use that book and with your pay on Friday you’ll have a real chance to do something for them…”
The black workers are numbers and not people. So adopting a number in the register and pass allows one to live. You could say that the system loses through its practices.

This brings out the issue of invisibility sometimes referred to as ghostliness. The black people are just a number in the eyes of the white system, their individuality does not matter:
“No? when the white man looked at you at the Labour Bureau what did he see? A man with dignity or a bloody passbook with an N.I. number? Isn’t that a ghost? When the white man sees you walk down the street 132 and calls out, “Hey. John! Come here”…to you, Sizwe Bansi…isn’t that a ghost? Or when his little child calls you “Boy”…you a man, circumcised, with a wife and four children…isn’t that a ghost? Stop fooling yourself. All I’m saying is be a real ghost, if that is what they want, what they have turned us into. Spook them into hell, man!”

Sizwe is in the grips of identity crises. If he wants to stay in Port Elizabeth, he has no choice but to adopt Robert Zwelinzima’s identity; and if he wants his own identity intact he has to go back to King William’s Town, because the government’s regulation under apartheid does not allow anyone with improper documentation to stay put in Port Elizabeth.
Fugard’s major concern is only to expose the exploitative and oppressive system by dramatising it. The system is criticised without grappling with ways of changing it. Legitimate as it could be, radical nationalist critics have taken issue with the play.

In an essay, Hillary Seymour makes several observations: First, in this play, Styles is able to see exploitation but his response remains individualised. His potential even as a unionist or spokesman is not explored. He quietly goes away, establishes the studio so that he can solely live.
Secondly, in the studio, Styles ends up exploiting his fellow black people and his success depends on the gullibility and blindness of his fellow blacks. The blacks become as dry as the system.

Fugard was born in Cape Town in 1932. When he was three years old, his family moved to the diverse city of Port Elizabeth. Growing up, Fugard was keenly aware of the racial divisions in the city and their economic and social consequences. In 1958, Fugard took a job as a clerk with a local court in Johannesburg to support his family. In court, Fugard saw racial injustice firsthand. Ever since his first play called No-Good Friday, Fugard became a key voice in South African drama. He has had popular plays such as Boesman and Lena, The Island, among many others.

Memory Chirere

Insight

A wasted opportunity to reset

Published

8 hours ago

January 20, 2025

The Post

The year 2024 is behind us now. It was a year in which we were told Basotho were 200 years old as a nation. The facts tell us differently. If we follow them, Basotho nation was 204 years old in 2024. Also, if we follow the facts, Basotho nation was established in Botha Bothe, not Thaba Bosiu.

None of this may matter very much but it must be known. Botha Bothe has been denied its rightful place as a place where the Basotho nation was formed.

Like an older man who is fond of younger girls, or an older woman who is fond of younger boys, we reduced our age mainly in order to suit the significance that has been accorded Thaba Bosiu at the expense of Basotho’s other mountain fortresses — for example, Mount Moorosi and Botha Bothe Mountain.

They say history is written by the victors, and the powerful. Until our current social order changes, what the powerful consider to be the truth will remain as it was given to us in 2024 — that, as a nation we were 200 years old in 2024, and that the Basotho nation emerged at their one and only fortress, Thaba Bosiu.

This story had to remain this way because too much political and financial investment has gone into Thaba Bosiu, and we cannot afford to change stories about it.

This article is not about quibbling about how old we are as a nation, and where the Basotho nation was formed. Rather the article is about what we achieved in 2004 in our celebration of 200 years of our nationhood.

Out of lack of any interest, or out of lacking any ideas, our politicians kept mum about what they would like to see the nation achieve as part of our celebrations. So, justifiably, they can tell us to bugger off, if we ask them whether they have anything to show from the 2024 celebrations. We cannot bother them about what we achieved because they never made any promises.

In November, 2024, a friend was asked at a public seminar: What lessons have we learnt about Basotho pre-colonial political leadership during our 200th anniversary celebrations?

In response, he made one of the most brilliant statements that can be made about what happened in Lesotho during 2024. He said, in 2024 all we did was, on the one hand, to be nostalgic about the good old past where political leaders (i.e. chiefs) respected their followers, communities shared what they had, and, within communities, human security was guaranteed everyone.

On the other hand, we continued to treat one another the way we always do: we continued to employ socio-economic systems—and to practise policies—that are responsible for socio-economic inequality in Lesotho, where many families, including children, go to bed hungry every day.

One of the things we should have done to celebrate 2024 years of our existence as a nation was to re-consider our adoption of systems and policies that leave many Basotho poor and hungry.

For having done none of this, as a nation, we remain with serious problems that need to be stated repeatedly because it seems that those in power do not get to see them in reality.

Being given just the numbers of hungry families, and being told, with satisfaction, that they are falling, will always be meaningless when you meet a hungry woman with a child on her back, and holding another by the hand—as we do in our villages—asking for food, or money to buy food.

In official statistics, she may be a single case that does not change the fact that government is succeeding in the distribution of food aid. That is not the way she may see things.

To her, she and her children are not part of some percentage—20%, 10%, 15%, etc.—that government may not have reached. She and her children are 100%, and more. They are not 20% hungry; they are more than 100% hungry.

Neither did the killing, the rape and abuse of children and the elderly stop in 2024, nor did we take the celebration of our nationhood as an opportunity to think about how to stop all this.

We are a deeply unequal society with very unacceptable indicators of human security. Action to address the welfare of the most vulnerable sections of society—women, children, the elderly—remains terribly inadequate.

Their lot remains poverty, hunger and fear for their lives.

In our celebrations of 200 years of our nationhood, perhaps one of the things we should have done is to commit ourselves to the formulation of a socio-economic system that secures the welfare of the most vulnerable sections of society.

Insight

Down in the Dump: Conclusion

Published

2 months ago

December 2, 2024

The Post

I closed last week by recording the dreadful news that trashy Trump had been elected called to mind WB Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” This is the poem whose opening lines gave Chinua Achebe the phrase “things fall apart.”

Yeats observes “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

It was written in 1919 and controversially uses Christian imagery relating to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming to reflect on the atmosphere in Europe following the slaughter of the First World War and the devastating flu epidemic that followed this.

It also reflects on the Irish War of Independence against British rule.

In lines that I can now read as if applying to the recent American election, Yeats mourns: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

And then I can visualise Trump in the poem’s closing lines: “What rough beast is this, its hour come round at last, / Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Trump is certainly a rough beast and isn’t the choice of verb, slouching, just perfect? For a non-allegorical account of the threat posed by the Dump, I can’t do better than to quote (as I often do) that fine South African political journalist, Will Shoki. In his words: “Trump’s administration simply won’t care about Palestinians, about the DRC, about the Sudanese.

It will be indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden and the oppressed, who will be portrayed as weak and pathetic. And it will give carte blanche [that is, free rein] to despotism and tyranny everywhere.

Not even social media, that once revered third-space we associated with subversion and revolution in the first quarter of the 21st century can save us because Silicon Valley is in Trump’s back pocket.”

So what follows the triumph of the Dump? We can’t just sit down and moan and bemoan. In a more recent piece of hers than the one I quoted last week, Rebecca Solnit has observed: “Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want . . . We must lay up supplies of love, care, trust, community and resolve — so we may resist the storm.”

Katt Lissard tells me that on November 7th following the confirmation of the election result, in the daytime and well into the evening in Manhattan, New York, there was a large demonstration in support of the immigrants Trump despises.

And a recent piece by Natasha Lennard gives us courage in its title “The Answer to Trump’s Victory is Radical Action.”

So, my Basotho readers, how about the peaceful bearing of some placards in front of the US Embassy in Maseru? Because the Dump doesn’t like you guys and gals one little bit.

One last morsel. I had intended to end this piece with the above call to action, but can’t resist quoting the following comment from the New York Times of November 13th on Trump’s plans to appoint his ministers.

I’m not sure a satirical gibe was intended (the clue is in the repeated use of the word “defence”), but it made me guffaw nonetheless. “Trump will nominate Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host with no government experience, as his defence secretary. Hegseth has often defended Trump on TV.” You see, it’s all about the Dump.

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.

Insight

A question of personal gain

Published

2 months ago

November 26, 2024

The Post

Recently, an audio recording featuring the distressed MP for Thaba-Bosiu Constituency, Joseph Malebaleba, circulated on social media. The MP appears to have spent a sleepless night, struggling with the situation in which he and his associates from the Revolution for Prosperity (RFP) party were denied a school feeding tender valued at M250 million per annum.

In 2022, Lesotho’s political landscape underwent a significant shift with the emergence of the RFP led by some of the country’s wealthiest individuals. Among them was Samuel Ntsokoane Matekane, arguably one of the richest people in Lesotho, who took the helm as the party’s leader and ultimately, the Prime Minister of Lesotho.

The RFP’s victory in the general election raised eyebrows, and their subsequent actions have sparked concerns about the motivations behind their involvement in politics.

In an interview with an American broadcasting network just after he won the elections, Matekane made a striking statement, proclaiming that he would run Lesotho exactly as he runs his business.

At first glance, many thought he was joking, but as time has shown, his words were far from an idle threat. In the business world, the primary goal is to maximize profits, and it appears that the RFP is adopting a similar approach to governance.

Behind the scenes, alarming developments have been unfolding. A communication from an RFP WhatsApp group revealed a disturbing request from the Minister of Communications, Nthati Moorosi, who asked if anyone in the group had a construction business and could inbox her.

This raises questions about the RFP’s focus on using government resources to benefit their own business interests.

The government has been embroiled in a series of scandals that have raised serious concerns about the ethical conduct of its officials. Recent reports have revealed shocking incidents of misuse of public funds and conflicts of interest among key government figures.

Over the past two years, the RFP has been accused of awarding government contracts to companies affiliated with their members, further solidifying concerns about their self-serving agenda. For instance, vehicles purchased for the police were allegedly sourced from suppliers connected to a Minister’s son and MP.

The MP for Peka, Mohopoli Monokoane, was found to have hijacked fertiliser intended to support impoverished farmers, diverting crucial resources away from those in need for personal gain.

Such actions not only betray the trust of the public but also have a direct impact on the livelihoods of vulnerable communities. Monokoane appeared before the courts of law this week.

While farmers voice their concerns regarding fertiliser shortages, it seems that Bishop Teboho Ramela of St. Paul African Apostolic Church, who is also a businessman, is allegedly involved in a corrupt deal concerning a M10 million fertilizer allocation, benefiting from connections with wealthy individuals in government.

The procurement of fertiliser appears to be mired in controversy; recall that the Minister of Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition, Thabo Mofosi, was also implicated in the M43 million tender.

The renovation of government buildings with elaborate lighting systems was contracted to a company owned by the son of an MP. The RFP’s enthusiasm for infrastructure development, specifically road construction and maintenance, is also tainted by self-interest, as they have companies capable of performing these tasks and supplying the necessary materials, such as asphalt.

Minister Moteane finds himself in a compromising situation regarding a lucrative M100 million airport tender that was awarded to his former company. Ministers have even gone so far as to award themselves ownership of diamond mines.

Meanwhile, the nation struggles with national identification and passport shortages, which according to my analysis the RFP seems hesitant to address until they can find a way to partner with an international company that will benefit their own interests.

The people of Lesotho are left wondering if their leaders are truly committed to serving the nation or simply lining their own pockets. As the RFP’s grip on power tightens, the consequences for Lesotho’s democracy and economy hang precariously in the balance.

It is imperative that citizens remain vigilant and demand transparency and accountability from their leaders, lest the nation slide further into an era of self-serving governance.

In conclusion, the RFP’s dominance has raised serious concerns about the motives behind their involvement in politics. The apparent prioritisation of personal profit over public welfare has sparked widespread disillusionment and mistrust among the population.

As Lesotho navigates this critical juncture, it is essential that its leaders are held accountable for their actions and that the nation’s best interests are placed above those of individuals.

Only through collective effort and a strong commitment to transparency and accountability can Lesotho ensure a brighter future for all its citizens.

Ramahooana Matlosa