"No Way Out": Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and the Dilemma of Political Drama in South Africa

Abstract

In the play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, which was devised (1) Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Sizwe Bansi is stranded without work permit in Port Elizabeth. solution to his dilemma is summarized in Kafkaesque terms by his benefactor Buntu: talk to the white man, you see, and ask him to write letter saying he's got job for you. take that letter from the white man and go back to King William's Town, where you show it to the Native Commissioner Native Commissioner in King William's reads that letter from the white man in Port Elizabeth who is ready to give you the job. He then writes letter back to the Native Commissioner in Port Elizabeth. So you come back here with the two letters. Then the Native Commissioner in Port Elizabeth reads the letter from the Native Commissioner in King William's together with the first letter from the white man who is prepared to give you job, and he says when he reads the letters: Ah yes, this man Sizwe Bansi can get job. So the Native Commissioner in Port Elizabeth then writes letter which you take with the letters from the Native Commissioner in King William's and the white man in Port Elizabeth, to the Senior Officer at the Labour Bureau, who reads all the letters. Then he will put the right stamp in your book and give you another letter from himself which together with the letters from the white man and the two Native Affairs Commissioners, you take to the Administrative Office here in New Brighton and make application for Residence Permit, so that you don't fall victim of raids again. Simple. (25-26) problem is that Sizwe Bansi knows no white man to start with. In the circumstances, Buntu's evaluation of the situation is straightforward: There's no Sizwe. You're not the first one who has tried to find it. Take my advice and catch that train back to King William's Town (26). However profound the personal implications for Sizwe Bansi may be, the problem as formulated by Buntu appears to be purely social one. Within moments, however, another dimension grows from it. When Buntu suggests, as the other way out, job on the mines, Sizwe refuses point-blank. You can there. Whereupon Buntu, prompted into taking possibly his first real look at Sizwe, remarks, You don't want to And Sizwe affirms, don't want to die (26-27). statement is echoed in Antigone's acknowledgment in Island that know I must die (76), and in the resignation to a susceptibility to death in Statements after Arrest under the Immorality Act (82). This is Unamuno territory: The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who (Unamuno 1). man who dies and who does not want to die. It is also Camus territory, as we know from Fugard's illuminating Notebooks, and from Dickey and many other commentators. It is not irrelevant to note that, according to Walder, one of the Serpent Players' major productions, months before Sizwe Bansi, had been Camus' Les Justes (AF 81). Much of the impact of this moment in Sizwe Bansi derives from the in which it represents interface between the play's two key dimensions: the sociopolitical and the existential. Sizwe Bansi has long been recognized not as an indictment of the depravity and inhumanity of apartheid (Vandenbroucke 123), but also as watershed of new theatre in South Africa (Mshengu 46). Stanley Kauffmann even dismissed the play as superficial because it was, he believed, only about the troubles of South African blacks (Rev. of Sizwe 26). On the other hand, it is well known that Fugard himself has always aimed at transcending the merely sociopolitical. Significantly, in the seven-page introduction that precedes the three Statements plays, he concerns himself with some of the dramaturgical and philosophical problems he confronted in them, without single reference to their ideological or sociopolitical context. …