Kani’s pen is mightier than his computer
New play, written by hand, takes on love, home and government fat cats
JOHN Kani walks a little slower these days and reveals a fragility, the result of a recent back injury, when he eases himself into a chair.
But there is no slowing down when it comes to the 70-year-old playwright’s work. His latest play, Missing, opened at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town last week. Like all his other work, it was written in pen because Kani has no time for the interruption of a computer’s spellchecker.
The back injury, suffered just days before the play was due to open, occurred when he and three of his sons tried to pick up his gate, which had been knocked over by a motorist. Kani had insisted on helping because he was “tired of being treated like an invalid”.
A spinal disc had shifted and he was put on bed rest of 72 hours. But he was back at work after only 48 — and he has even included the injury in the play.
Missing is about Robert Khalipa, who marries an heiress while in exile in Sweden. The idea came to Kani sometime ago, but he made some movies before settling down to write it in 2012.
“I write by hand, you see. The computer confuses me. No, it doesn’t. It interrupts me. Because when I write a word, I know it’s spelt correctly, but the spellchecker says it’s wrong because of the American spelling and then I lose track. But when I write by hand, it just flows,” he said.
What flowed on that day in 2012 when he sat down to write was a play about love, home and also a firm dig at the government fat cats who have emerged in post-apartheid South Africa.
Kani said he would never go into politics because his role as an artist was as a “mirror of society” and “the thermometer that measures the heat in my community”.
In the play, Khalipa tells Peter Tshabalala, a deputy minister with a shiny suit and pointy shoes, that he has got fat and lost the physique of a freedom fighter. Kani said his observations were not inspired by one person.
Unlike Khalipha, who fled the country to go into exile, Kani left to tour the world as an actor and playwright, garnering international fame with his plays Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island. He said he hoped to take the new play to Johannesburg and Durban and “possibly abroad”.
In January, he will put on a new production in the US, but said he could not talk about it, except to say that he was still deciding if he would act in it.
For Kani, the idea of home is “where the heart rests comfortably”.
“I live in Johannesburg. I was born in Port Elizabeth. If I go to Port Elizabeth, I say I’m going home. I am John Kani only in Johannesburg. In Port Elizabeth, I am Bra John and they call me by my clan name, umThembu, and that’s fantastic.”