“These aren’t teething problems. The teeth are falling out of your mouth, and you want to know what the hell is going on.” - John Kani on the state of South Africa’s democracy
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in London
THE trouble with asking John Kani questions is that he will answer them. And keep answering them; more arrestingly, intelligently and quotably with every enveloping sentence.
He steers the conversation from the highway into the weeds and the bundu beyond, then onto a quiet street, then back to the fast lane, all in the same few paragraphs.
Never should journalists complain that their interview subjects offer too much, but Kani vibrates at an uncommon output frequency. Interviewing him is catching wave upon wave of words that transport you to a place of warmth and happiness. Transcribing him is a bastard of a job.
And he walks his talk. His new play, “Kunene and the King”, co-starring Antony Sher and directed by Janice Honeyman, ended its opening run — at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon — on April 23. The next morning he was off to New York to receive an award, and then to Cape Town, where “Kunene” opened at the Fugard on April 30 and will be until May 25. He’s due on a film set one of these weeks, and after that there are invitations to take the play to London and New York. And another thing: Kani is 75.
“I’m 12 years older than my wife, Mandi, with an i,” Kani said pointedly, padding for the punchline. “So I can’t be old, or I’ll be divorced.”
His laugh is a wide embrace delivered in a voice somehow smooth as well as cracked that, despite decades of internationality acquired from his Johannesburg base, remains thick with the dust of his native Eastern Cape — a place out of step with his headlong rush through life.
“If I don’t know what’s following when I finish something I develop a rash and a restlessness, to the point that my family says, ‘Go do something, even if it’s an advert. Go! We can’t deal with you’.”
With that he veers onto what would be a cobbling of tangents if they weren’t so apposite.
“Everything is urgent. I’m disturbed by this relaxed, lackadaisical, easy attitude that everybody is displaying; almost a non-awareness.
“We’re getting to a point where the millennials are questioning our role in the negotiations to end apartheid.
“We’re even faced with very reckless utterances that maybe we sold out and didn’t negotiate a good deal, and that maybe Mandela wasn’t the leader we thought he was. These things are beginning to worry me.
“We’re running out of time. We can’t allow history to say we did this badly. Don’t let the next generation inherit the confusion.”
“Kunene” seeks to cut through that confusion. The plot pits two South Africans of a certain age against each other, prejudices, personal experiences, and all. One is a white actor preparing to play Lear who discovers he has liver cancer, the other his black care-giver.
“He assumes the nurse who’s going to live with him is blonde with blue eyes and big tits, and he finds out it’s a black man,” Kani said.
Sher has indeed played Lear. At 69 he is the grand duke of the British stage who since December 2015 has been married to Gregory Doran, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s creative director.
In November 2017 a schoolchild in India asked Prince Charles who his favourite actor might be, perhaps expecting him to say Shah Rukh Khan. Instead, the royal reply was, “Gracious me! When I think about it there are so many of them. There is a very good actor called Sir Antony Sher who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor, and everything else.”
So, do we call him Sir, a title bestowed in 2000? A drawled chuckle: “Well, only officially.”
Cape Town-born Sher moved to England in 1968 and has officially been British since 1979. But his voice brims with the breeze of the Sea Point promenade on a Sunday afternoon, when all that’s slower is the traffic oozing from Camps Bay.
Being back from whence he came was, as always, “on an emotional and spiritual level, very powerful”, Sher said.
“I’ve lived in the UK for 51 years; much longer than I lived here. Yet I only have to step off the plane at Cape Town airport and I feel a rush of familiar sensations to do with the smells and the nature of the light — the colours of things — that is just irrisistable. It’s in my blood, my DNA. There’s something very rewarding and satisfying about coming back.”
Being parachuted in in the throes of election season hadn’t burst his bubble: “The politics is quite a different thing; so vastly different and better than the South Africa that I left.
“I worried a great deal about South Africa under Zuma, but I hope, if Ramaphosa gets in, the country will be in much safer, more stable hands.”
Herding personalities as contrasting as Kani and Sher onto the same stage successfully is a challenge, even if they are firm friends. But Honeyman, a Capetonian transplanted to Joburg, has directed each of them five times. She put up with both in The Tempest in 2008, when Sher played Prospero and Kani his Caliban in a production that went from the Baxter in Cape Town to Stratford and five other venues in England.
“We trust each other,” Honeyman said. “It’s been fascinating weaving very different people into a harmonious whole.”
No doubt the plot helped — “The dynamic of the play is one of conflict moving towards harmony,” Honeyman said — but taking the production from one hemisphere to the other, and across cultures, came with complications.
For instance, the “stoep” polish spoken of on the Fugard’s stage was “floor” polish in Stratford. Not that all the differences were that easily resolved.
“English audiences are fascinated by the process of dismantling apartheid and getting to 25 years of democracy,” Honeyman said. “South Africans have lived through it, and that puts pressure on us.”
Good thing, then, that Kani thrives on exactly that. Whatever it is, bring it.
His art?
“The individual fascinates me. I see someone standing at a bus-stop, in the street or in front of their house, and I want to do a brain operation and listen to their inner thoughts which are unadulterated by the environment they’re in.”
His politics?
“We have been able to hold the country together, mounted on the pillars of our democracy and ubuntu, drawn from the Freedom Charter of 1955. And we have not veered out of that. We have not become a dictatorship or a failed state, or — like the Americans do sometimes — shut down the government. This is a project in progress.
“I’d give us a B, if I had to grade us. But the outstanding 20% make us look so bad. The corruption! These aren’t teething problems. The teeth are falling out of your mouth, and you want to know what the hell is going on.
“We have over 58-million people, and they want to be part of a postcard with a picture of democracy. And those people have different definitions and understandings of that democracy.”
There was much more where that came from. Easily enough to base a movie on.
* Kunene and the King is at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town until May 25.
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