“Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” played at BAM through April 19, 2008
Sizwe Banzi at birth, Robert at death. Robert is Sizwe Banzi, that is, until he he had the wrong stamp in his identity passbook and was prohibited from staying in Port Elizabeth. He is given a choice: return to the hometown that strangles him economically thus physically or stay. Sizwe Banzi reluctantly chooses to stay.
Set in “apartheid-era” South Africa, “Sizwe Banzi” is about a government that mandated its black inhabitants to carry with them an assigned identity. The passbook confined a person to a specified region, an assigned sense of identity. In a sense, the play seems to argue, blacks living at that time were dead at birth in as much as living often entailed killing one’s own individual identity.
The play debuted on October 8, 1972 in Cape Town, South Africa. It was not well received by the South African government. In 1976, the government arrested the original cast for treason and sentenced them to solitary confinement. They were released after several weeks as a result of a series protests. The New York Times reported on the April 2008 performance at the BAM, which featured both members of the original cast, Kani (Styles) and Ntshona (Robert), that: “Perhaps because the play does not possess the political urgency it once did, the performances have an inviting warmth that draws fully on the comic flavorings of the characters.” I agree, there was quite a bit of warmth on stage as Styles breached the 4rth wall to drag up and interrogate members of the audience, though with the proper historical primer, I think the urgency can be returned. The present day Robert, says the Times as they feed on the caricatured figure, is a “smiling black man carrying a pipe, a walking stick, and a newspaper.” Yet, without knowing anything about Apartheid South Africa, the serious nature of Sizwe’s “death” can seem pretty somber with the application of a little imagination and empathy. Perhaps though, empathy was unavailable to the reviewer. Though many have declared that the politics and tragedies of American race politics have also lost their “political urgency” there are large populations of Americans who might disagree, though they are probably not in positions that would allow them to expound their opinions. The politics of identity and racism is a present day problem. Let the New York Times look to the prisons. Perhaps it is only the media that finds the problems of race and discrimination to be less urgent.
To quote Styles, “You must understand one thing…There is nothing we can leave behind when we die, except the memory of ourselves.”Some of us must be constantly rebuilding and reimagining those memories. That’s a lot of work, just to be remembered.
Maisie
