Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He co-created the plays that took apartheid to the world's stages, won a Tony for them, and is still working in film half a century later.
Bonisile John Kani joined the Serpent Players in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, in 1965 — a company of Black actors rehearsing in a township with Athol Fugard, in a country where a mixed cast performing to a mixed audience was illegal.
With Fugard and Winston Ntshona he devised Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. Both were made in rehearsal rather than written in advance, precisely so there would be no script for the police to seize, and both were performed first in township halls. Sizwe Banzi turns on a man taking a dead stranger's passbook to get the work permit his own does not carry; The Island is two prisoners on Robben Island rehearsing Antigone. Kani and Ntshona were arrested and held for weeks after performing them in the Transkei.
The plays went to London and to Broadway, and in 1975 Kani and Ntshona shared the Tony Award for Best Actor for them. For a great many people abroad, those two plays were the clearest account of what apartheid actually did to a person.
He went on to run the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, wrote and starred in Nothing but the Truth about the returning exile and the brother who stayed, and in his seventies reached an entirely new audience as King T'Chaka in Black Panther and as Rafiki in the remade Lion King.
With Fugard and Winston Ntshona he devised Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island. Both were made in rehearsal rather than written in advance, precisely so there would be no script for the police to seize, and both were performed first in township halls. Sizwe Banzi turns on a man taking a dead stranger's passbook to get the work permit his own does not carry; The Island is two prisoners on Robben Island rehearsing Antigone. Kani and Ntshona were arrested and held for weeks after performing them in the Transkei.
The plays went to London and to Broadway, and in 1975 Kani and Ntshona shared the Tony Award for Best Actor for them. For a great many people abroad, those two plays were the clearest account of what apartheid actually did to a person.
He went on to run the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, wrote and starred in Nothing but the Truth about the returning exile and the brother who stayed, and in his seventies reached an entirely new audience as King T'Chaka in Black Panther and as Rafiki in the remade Lion King.
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