Interviewing John Kani is a humbling experience. The Tony Award winning actor, film star and playwright was one of the key South African artists who used theatre as a tool to fight Apartheid and more recently to highlight some of the continuing problems facing the Rainbow nation.

’My brother was a poet. In 1985, he went to funeral and I was about to tell him don’t go to this one, I had a feeling that things were not going to right. By the time I went to the kitchen he had already gone out, he went to the funeral and while reciting the poem all hell broke loose. I stayed with that pain and I stayed with that anger. I stayed with that bitterness...he should have been here today, so that we can enjoy this beautiful democracy. I decided to write a play to deal with this anger in me. The play was cathartic, asking the question - do I forgive. Yes or no? For me Nothing But The Truth is a family drama, it is about a sibling rival, it si about the perplexity of democracy. About those that left the country and came back victoriously with the ticker tape and the welcome. This made us that stayed in South Africa feel that we were being ignored. In a way my story wanted to address that through the characters themselves and I allowed the debate on Truth and Reconciliation to be talked about through the two brothers.’

The demeanour of Kani as he talks about South Africa is all the proof that is needed that he has finally managed to forgive.

When it was first performed in Grahamstown, it was considered one of the greatest productions in South African theatre. It has been called Theatre for Reconciliation , criticising the black standpoint of amnesty for the atrocities of apartheid and for not taking into consideration the differences between blacks themselves.

Kani himself gives a towering performance as Sipho Makhaya, the first black assistant librarian in an all-white library whose only ambition is to be chief librarian.

Despite the political themes that run through the play - complicated issues of liberty, forgiveness and tradition - it is most remarkable for Kani’s uplifting humanity and compassion. 

The brooding dignity of John Kani , the veteran South African actor turned solo playwright for the first time in Nothing But The Truth...is shatteringly powerful as he searches for his soul to find forgiveness for his late brother, whose ashes have now been brought home.

...this play about a citizen of a post-apartheid society coming to terms with the struggles and sacrifices of the past offers moving hope for the future.

Nothing But The Truth is hte famed writer-performer John Kani’s new drama about post-apartheid South Africa.

In the end, the blend of personal and political anger becomes fierce and absorbing. Kani’s performance is impressively study and pained, especially in his big climactic speeches.

 

 

His brother was murdered and he survived a knife attack by the secret police, but the antiapartheid campaigner and actor John Kani eventually found the strength to forgive in a play, he tells Ian Johns.

Only by writing and appearing in his play Nothing But The Truth...did Kani finally find some peace. But he admits it was a tough process. ’I first came up with 15 pages of the worst political rhetoric you can imagine’, he says with a smile...’Then I came up with the story of two brothers, and the play took shape.’

’The play...is one of the first since South Africa gained democracy in 1994 that hasn’t been tentative in its criticism of the Government. After apartheid, those returning from exile were celebrated,’ he explains. ’They came back with skills and education and gained important positions. It caused a cultural rift with those who had stayed behind. I partly wrote the play to recognise the unsung souls who stayed and took the full brunt of the apartheid regime.’

’I most vividly remember our passion for the truth during apartheid,’ Kani says. ’It took time to regain that passion when democracy came... As artists we had to ask: Where do we go from here?’

’I feel like I am participating in writing the new history of a country. There are so many stories to tell.’ 

John Kani not only wrote this 100-minute play, but also takes the central role as a conservative, hardworking librarian nursing grievances in post-freedom South Africa. Sipho Makhaya’s bitterness is not reserved soley for the white police who used to terrorise blacks. This play is more refreshing- and heartening - than that.

Mr Kani’s performance is beautifully subtle...

This charming play is gently touching as it suggests that just as the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission has helping keep South Africa vaguely in one piece, so a little truth and reconcilliation in family life is needed from time to time.

John Kani is one of the most dignified men I have ever seen on a stage. Even when stripped to the waist and engaged in hard labour in The Island... there is something in his bearing that is not quite magisterial, but so substantial as to suggest that no man should be punished like this. So it is in his first solo-authored play....

Sipho begins to rail against the world that had denied him a senior job, denied him justice for his son’s murder and, in the person of Themba, denied him most of his life. In most circumstances and most performances, this would collapse into a mean-spirited whine. But Kani the actor imbues Sipho with a sense of self that earths all the currents of self pity... And Kani the author knows...that this drama is a microcosm of South Africa’s own process of truth and reconcilliation.

Not shatteringly original, but powerfully realised in Kani’s writing and Janice Honeyman’s production. Especially at this moment in our history, it should be required viewing for my Northern Irish compatriots.

This new play deals with memories, personal and national, and the problems of combining humanity with the ongoing political and social struggle.

...this is a fine performance, well supported by the two women... a thought-provoking and touching drama that deals with issues at once simple and complex. The image of Sipho’s childhood toy, a wire double-decker bus that his wayward brother destroys, will stay with me for a long time.

...authentic voice of the new South Africa.

 

 

In the background of this engrossing family drama run the working of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission...Kani’s compelling - and universal - focus is, however, on the struggle for truth and reconciliation in the home.

What, he askes, makes a hero? One who stays and keeps his head down in dangerous times, or one who leaves for safety in a blaze of glory? It’s a rich dramatic seam, meriting return visits by Kani and others.  

Just occasionally, one comes across a work that makes criticism seem impertinent and John Kani’s deeply felt, profoundly moving drama...is one of them.

...There is no mistaking the work’s moving depth of feeling, and there is something of a rugged grandeur of Ibsen in Kani’s writing. The author, sonorous, grizzled and with an extraordinary magnetism about him, gives a tremendous performance as Sipho, a man aching with grief, loss and resentment who has to come to terms with his tragic family history. There is a lovely, rippling pride as he describes his career as a librarian, a touching tenderness for his daughter, and, at the end, the sheer power of his emotion as he battles his way towards forgiveness is as affecting as anything on the London stage.

Janice Honeyman’s gripping production features terrific support from Motshabi Tyelele as his loyal and loving daughter and from Rosie Motene as her feisty, London-raised cousin. This is play that restores one’s faith in the power of theatre and I cannot recommend it too highly.

Give or take Winston Ntshona, who is his friend and fellow-performer, John Kani is South Africa’s greatest actor and, as most of his compatriots know, enough of a writer to have helped to fashion several plays attributed to Athol Fugard. But Nothing But The Truth is all his own work, a play that has had a huge impact in his native land and, as Janice Honeyman’s production proves, one with the capacity to move us British too.

The two actresses are excellent, but he’s something else: an overbearing father and unsmiling grouch whose posthumous reconciliation with his brother touches the heart - and an actor who himself has survived the murder of his brother, attempts on his own life and humiliations galore to write a play of first-hand bite.

It’s impossible not to warm to John Kani... he has an immense stage presence that combines gravitas and passion.

In Janice Honeyman’s lovingly detailed production, Kani himself massively and expertly embodies his hero’s contradictions. His Sipho is an emotional conservative who demands radical progress, an angry revenge-seeker who learns the need for healing forgiveness. This play moves one as much for what it says as the way it says it: that progress is only possible once you confront the wounding ravages of the past.

When John Kani’s play Nothing But The Truth opened in July 2002, the audience in Grahamstown, South Africa, gave it a five minute standing ovation. Kani, who also played the lead role, went back stage and wept. ’The gates opened and it just flooded out.’ The play won three Fleur de Cap awards.

Kani has written honestly about the difficulty of forgiveness: the forgiveness that was vital to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), that Kani and many South Africans agreed was necessary for the country to move on, but that demanded so much of individuals.

’Sizwe is the beginning of protest theatre; Nothing But The Truth is post-apartheid South Africa, ’Kani says. ’So you can see the role of theatre: where we came from and where we are today.’

The play has provoked a huge response, not just in South Africa. In New York, a discussion of the play’s themes had to move to a bigger venue when 1000 people turned up, asking questions about the relevance of truth and reconciliation for Iraq, the Middle East, Rwanda and Northern Ireland.

And in Sydney, Kani recalls, he became ’a counsellor’: ’People came backstage and sat and just wept. Some of them, ex-South African’s, would say, ’How do you feel about people like us, who never went back?’ I would say ’If you contribute towards a co-existence that is fruitful and free of racism, you will serve South Africa where you are - because you know the pitfalls of allowing the evil racism to manifest itself in a society.’’