Sizwe Banzi is Dead

This for those who may not know is the title of a play starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona, dating back to the 1980s. I get goose bumps from the thought of the sheer courage of those involved with this play back then during the repressive days of the National Party. Anyway, Stha and I were privileged to watch this amazing piece of theatre, performed by the original cast. The make up of the audience was interesting at the least. The old people among the audience were the most fascinating to watch; for instance they did not quite care about seat numbering and so on, they just sat where they thought would be best. I chuckled as I watched a young man walk up to his assigned seat only to find gogo happily sitting in it. The young man smiled coyly and asked gogo for her ticked and proceeded to go find gogo's seat - leaving gogo to sit in his. That was nice to see. Back to the performance.

The performance is entertaining, it causes you to laugh at things that - when you do a double take, you are not sure if you were supposed to laugh at in the first place. It is all in the delivery I guess. The story is not new nor is it different to the stories that can be told by any black perso who was an adult at the time of influx control and dompas (a type of an identity document black adults were required by law to carry, which was in turn used by the authorities to determine who was allowed to be in the metropolitan areas of South Africa). My own parents tell these stories. My father worked for a bakery which (given the technology of the time) meant that he started work too early for the curfew set for black people to be lawfully in white areas, which in turn meant that he required permission from the commissioner of bantu affairs to be allowed in the white area before 5am so that he could go to work. He tells me that the commissioner's office only issued these curfew permissions during lunch time on Fridays. Of course he also needed permission from his baas (literally translated "boss" but used as a title for every whiteman regardless of whether or not he employed you) to go to the commissioner's office. You can see how things can go wrong for my father and they have. This story and others like it, are always told with humour yet they always manage to get me upset.

My mother's story is no different. She too carried a pass-book. The story goes that while she was not paying attention, her eldest son, yours truly, then a baby, got hold of the wretched pass-book and sought to remove his mothers face from the book. The damage done to my mother's photograph caused one policeman to suspect my mother of foul play and wanted to arrest her with yours truly in her arms - so the story goes. Fortunately for my mother a certain man, I believe he was a taxi driver, threatened decency and common sense into the policeman. My mother tells this story like it is the funniest thing that happened to her. There are many other stories like that; of brothers who used the same pass-book and the cops were non the wiser and many others.

These are stories of survival, courage and cowardice all wrapped in one, with blurry boundaries.

The same evening that I saw this play, I got home to the umpteenth screening of the Pianist on television, a movie about the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis told among others, through the "Pianist" and his family. Watching this Jewish family go through the realisation of their oppression and the brutality of the Nazis I realised that unlike Sizwe Banzi, they are not dead and they are not forgotten.

Of course white south africans had nothing to do with Sizwe Banzi's death, after all he died at the hands of one or more of his own. Our memory of the events of those years are not meant to feed resentment and revenge. Our memories should feed a commitment that never again shall a group of human beings, however we may classify or brand them, suffer the indignity we suffered. This is not a call for forgiveness neither is it a call to forget, it is a call to remember with dignity and to rise above the bigots.

I often wonder where this whole journey is going to end. All evidence show that it will never end. Take time to read the online version of "The Times" newspaper and see some of the comments made. The supremacy and anger is nothing short of astounding.