Healing apartheid's wounds

By Don Shirley

Sept. 26, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

During the angry years of apartheid, Athol Fugard tried to avoid black immigration agents when he entered the U.S. “I’d look for a kind face, on a white immigration official,” says the celebrated playwright, who is white. He was trying to prevent any trouble over his despised South African passport.

Fugard tells this story to his former colleague and fellow South African John Kani, who immediately reacts with his own passport story. During the ‘80s, the white South African government wouldn’t give Kani, who is black, a passport. “I traveled with this thing that said ‘Nationality Undetermined,’ which I got from Pretoria. This thing was valid for only one year. And I always got it after three months, which means it was actually [valid for] nine months.”

The two are swapping stories and insights from those years, as well as their hopes for the future, around a table in downtown Los Angeles, far from their homeland.

Kani is in L.A. to stage and star in his play “Nothing but the Truth,” opening today at the Mark Taper Forum -- where Fugard most recently directed his own script, “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” in 2002. Both plays address the post-apartheid tension between those who had fled the country and those who stayed.

The men first worked at the Taper nearly three decades ago. Fugard, Kani and Winston Ntshona collaborated on the sizzling anti-apartheid one-acts “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island,” which ran there in 1975. These works also brought Kani and Ntshona a joint Tony Award for best actor.

Now, a decade after Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa amid the ruins of apartheid, Fugard has left his American home in Del Mar to talk with Kani face to face for the first time since 1997.

Greeting each other joyfully in a hallway, they immediately begin speaking in Afrikaans. Asked a few minutes later for a translation, Fugard says he told Kani, 61, he had “lost a lot of weight.” But Kani’s interpretation is different: “He told me, ‘You’ve got a bit of fat on you.’ He means that I look prosperous. It’s a multilayered meaning.”

Speaking now in English, Kani tells the 72-year-old Fugard that he looks the same.

“No change?” replies Fugard. “Now that’s bad news. I’ve grown in wisdom, John. And you’re looking obviously ready to run the country because you’re looking like [South African President] Thabo Mbeki. The spitting image of Thabo.”

Since arriving in L.A., Kani took in a performance of Fugard’s latest, “Exits and Entrances,” at the Fountain Theatre. He knew nothing about it in advance, he says. His capsule review of the play, which is set backstage in South African theaters in 1956 and 1961: “Such a tiny little story, such a huge heart.” A character who corresponds to the young Fugard reminded him of the younger Fugard-based character in “Master Harold ... and the Boys.”

“The air conditioner didn’t work, the lights were bright, not a person moved,” Kani says, describing the atmosphere at the Fountain. “A couple people were waving the program, but very gently so as not to miss a word. And those artists re-created my world.”

Fugard then asks Kani about “Nothing but the Truth,” which he plans to see soon. Kani begins by speaking about his younger brother Xolile, nicknamed Sweet Potato, who was shot to death when police opened fire on a crowd at a funeral in 1985.

Many similar incidents were examined during hearings by the country’s “truth and reconciliation” commission in the ‘90s. But Kani’s mother decided she had already heard enough about other incidents and chose not to attend the hearings, so Kani’s brother’s case was never reviewed to his satisfaction.

In 2000, Kani realized, “There was no closure in me. Every time I thought about my younger brother I got angry ... I got tight. And every time you look at what’s going on in the country you ask yourself, ‘Is that what he died for?’ -- whether it was good or bad, there were always these questions. So I was going to write a letter to him and just file it somewhere. To say to him, ‘I understand, I accept, and I’m proud that you gave your life so that I could vote and I could be what I am today.’ I started this letter, which suddenly developed into a long, very angry [piece of] nonsense. And having done all this material, I thought ‘OK, there’s a play here.’ ”

As he wrote the play, however, his subject changed. The script is primarily about the father of a young man who was killed at a funeral under circumstances similar to the death of Kani’s brother. This fictional father, Sipho, is a librarian who has spent most of his life resenting his own brother, a womanizing anti-apartheid exile who lived and finally died in England without ever returning to South Africa. Now, the brother’s daughter has returned to South Africa with her father’s remains. The play’s characters are Sipho, his English-reared niece and his own daughter, who has been working as a translator during the “truth and reconciliation” hearings.

Kani says he didn’t want to write a story about reconciliation between blacks and whites, preferring to explore the fault lines between blacks and other blacks. “The reconciliation has to happen in this house,” he says.

“That’s a real act of emancipation to see a South African story that is not black and white.... Wonderful. We’re growing up,” responds Fugard.

A different perspective

The exile in Fugard’s “Sorrows and Rejoicings” is white, as is his wife. However, his South African mistress, with whom he had a daughter, is black. This is very different from Kani’s play, Fugard says. “My experience was rooted in my white reality. We have to face the fact that as South Africans, brothers as we call ourselves, we nevertheless come from different worlds. With John’s play, [the audience] is going to get -- for the first time, because no other black writer has done that -- a take on the black experience [in exile] and the consequences of all of that in the lives of black South Africans. That is a story I couldn’t have written.”

Kani knows that story from several perspectives. As a black South African who was able to travel outside the country more than most, he encountered jealousy from people both inside and outside the country.

As for those who stayed at home, “you got resented because you got a television set, let alone leaving the country,” Kani says. “When we came back from America and winning the Tony Award, [Kani’s home township] New Brighton was not interested in celebrating that thing at all. We had to organize some small reception at the St. Stephen’s Church hall, and the people just came for the food. They didn’t wait for the speeches about what a Tony Award was. The fact that you had more food than the others -- you got resented.”

After apartheid ended, some of the rancor grew, Kani continues. “There was huge resentment on the part of exiles who weren’t called back to be part of the government.” Although some of the most famous exiles received ticker tape welcomes, “ordinary members of the movement just came into the country as if they had gone on holiday. There was no one at the airport to meet them, there was no preparation of where to put them, and the government was fully staffed now.”

Yet at the same time, for many of those who had stayed home, “there seemed to be a preference to those who came from abroad.... It created a new tension, with everyone pretending it didn’t exist. In fact we coined the word -- you were either in inxile or in exile.” The so-called inxiles figured that “because we were throwing stones and in the trenches and fighting the brutality of that government while the exiles were in universities abroad, when they came back, they had the skills we didn’t.”

That was the ‘90s. Now South Africa faces even newer problems. Kani and Fugard joke about the youngest generation of South Africans who speak a combination of American and English that Kani calls “Amerilish.” Too many of them don’t remember the landmarks of the struggle against apartheid or else think of them only as “fairy stories,” Fugard says.

“There is incredible movement now in the South African community,” says Kani, who stepped down last year as artistic director of the country’s flagship Market Theatre. “The honeymoon and the celebrations and the euphoria are over. There is a knuckle-down to the issues that face us day to day. People are beginning to realize how many of us are unemployed, how many houses have not been built, how many schools are doing good work; in the theater, how many new works are emerging. The turnstile is suddenly not the message. It’s now the substance of the work itself. We are now producing far less plays, but those we do are of better quality.... It’s time to tell the stories that would have been deemed irrelevant.”

‘Your stories choose you’

Kani and Fugard resist any suggestion that playwrights should pointedly address such hot topics as AIDS or crime in the new South Africa. “That was a mistake with so much of the literature that came out of South Africa during the apartheid years,” Fugard says. “It was written to a political agenda. As a result, 80% of the theater writing that came out of South Africa during those apartheid years was tissue-thin. It was admirable for its political content and the message it tried to tell, but that rich element of ambiguity and paradox, those dense qualities eluded these pamphleteering works. The simple truth is that you don’t choose your stories, your stories choose you. I know that between one play and the next one that what I’ve got to do now is just wait.”

Kani agrees but speaks of the difficulty of facing that blank piece of paper on the table. “I’ll tell you how to handle that page on the table,” Fugard responds. “Wait for the moment when it’s not looking at you. You’ve got to catch it off guard.”

Fugard now spends much of his time in Del Mar, near his daughter Lisa and opportunities for occasional work with students at UC San Diego. “I’m just across the road from a very beautiful wetland and beach. The bird life is extraordinary. And I have come to know that little bit of America and to love it in a way that should have made me feel like I was betraying my country. Because I’ve never allowed myself to fall in love with another piece of land other than my homeland. I walk historic Highway 101, with this marsh on one side, serene, silent, and the bloody traffic a yard a way from me. It’s a very schizoid experience.”

He still returns to South Africa every summer (winter in North America). And he still votes there and follows what’s happening in its fledgling democracy.

“This thing called democracy,” jokes Kani, “which I had interpreted as getting [politician-activist] Helen Suzman’s house and she moving to Soweto -- I found that democracy doesn’t mean that. It means that I stay exactly where I am and just work harder.”

“Democracy is a very complex political instrument,” Fugard responds. “You can’t just make it on paper and say here’s a constitution -- you are now a democratic nation. The citizens have to understand what that word means -- what responsibilities and freedoms go with it.”

Speaking of nation-building efforts, Fugard is “so proud of the stand my government has taken” in its refusal to join the U.S. war in Iraq. He believes the war is based on “blatant lies. Bah! Cut it, deal us out. Weren’t you proud, John?”

“Very, very proud,” Kani replies. “We feel strongly that coming from that history of 300 years of occupation, we have created a nation with integrity that is part of the global community, and we cannot be party, for whatever reason, to the occupation of another country.”

Kani doesn’t feel as comfortable as Fugard does outside South Africa. “When I’m abroad it’s almost like I’m in a transit lounge. I’m only comfortable when I know the date of departure.”

Yet travel is much easier for Kani now than it was in the ‘80s -- his “Nationality Undetermined” years. In 1991, as apartheid was collapsing, he applied for a real passport. To his astonishment, it was delivered to his home by courier. No one will ever have trouble determining Kani’s nationality again.

‘Nothing but the Truth’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Opens 4 p.m. today. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays; 2:30 p.m. Nov. 3

Ends: Nov. 7 matinee

Price: $34 to $52

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Where: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Dec. 19

Price: $25

Contact: (323) 663-1525