In South Africa, still waiting for equality

You don’t need to know much about apartheid-era South Africa to feel for a man like Sipho. Abandoned by the wife he loves, he works hard, raises his children and tries to shield them as his black township is swept into the movement against apartheid.

Sipho does all this under the shadow of his brother, a dashing anti-apartheid activist who marches at the head of every protest, is irresistible to the wives and girlfriends of his “comrades” and who flees to glamorous exile in London with a foreign wife who works for Amnesty International.

Even Sipho’s own son worships his father’s celebrity brother, though when the boy tries to emulate his uncle by joining a student uprising, he is shot dead by police.

These are the fault lines of the classic fraternal rivalry that fuels “Nothing but the Truth,” a taut drama written by South African actor John Kani -- he also portrays Sipho -- whose exploration of post-apartheid tensions goes far beyond black and white. It is Kani himself who is the astonishing force behind Sipho, the South African Everyman who marches forward with the rank-and-file of history, while his brother becomes a political elite.

Sipho’s brother never comes back to South Africa, not even when their father dies, though he turns the funeral into a hideous political spectacle. And he doesn’t return when sainted political prisoner Nelson Mandela is released in 1990 or when he becomes South Africa’s first black president in 1994.

Finally, the brother’s cremated ashes do return, brought by Sipho’s niece, a mod Londoner with platform shoes who lectures her South African relatives on their country’s political transition but can’t seem to pronounce their African names. While the family argues over whether the government should find and punish white torturers and killers, they unravel a wounding sexual secret that must be reckoned with. As they stumble closer to this toxic truth, it’s hard to brace for the next line: It might be hilarious, or painful enough to bring tears to your eyes.

Imprisoned and stabbed

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the play that is bringing down the house in Johannesburg was created by Kani, a Tony Award-winning stage veteran whose numerous film roles include “A Dry White Season” and “Sarafina!” Kani was once harassed, hounded, imprisoned and even stabbed by thugs sent by the apartheid government. Now Kani is chairman of the National Arts Council and director of the downtown Market Theater, where the play is staged.

Reviewers have called “Nothing but the Truth” one of the most significant dramas of the post-apartheid era. A columnist for South Africa’s Sunday Times said she was “awestruck by the depth of storytelling.” Mandela called the play “a powerful drama, very political, but in a subtle way.”

The Market Theater once showcased the anti-apartheid theatrical outrage of Athol Fugard, the country’s best-known playwright. Kani and another actor, Winston Ntshona, co-wrote two works with Fugard, “The Island” and “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” and went on to share the Tony for best actor in 1975. Under Kani, the Market is hosting a new wave of playwrights whose work sorts through the fallout of the new South Africa.

“I now say I’m no longer a victim. I’m a member of the ruling class,” said Kani, 59, emerging from backstage after a two-hour performance and taking a seat, dressed in jeans, in the silent, empty theater.

Kani drew on a mix of feelings familiar to many South Africans when he created Sipho, “the ordinary township man who never did anything spectacular, but was always one of the faceless people in the crowd. I wanted to pull one of those faces out of the crowd. I wrote to pay tribute to all those unsung heroes.”

But Kani also wanted to send a message to South Africa’s fledging democratic government: “Don’t forget the little people.”

“These are people who want to see what their vote meant,” he said. “People ask themselves, what does this democracy mean, when I’m still in a township with no money and no job. Who have waited and waited and want it now. I wanted to say, ‘Speed up delivery, lest they lose hope.’ ”

Like Sipho, Kani grew up in a township in Port Elizabeth. As a teenager, he joined a small local theater group whose members were all black -- except for one young white man: Fugard. Kani, who saw whites as the enemy, was shocked.

“I couldn’t believe these black actors were working with a white person,” he recalled. “That opened my eyes to the fact that not every white person was the enemy. I told him, ‘Athol, you messed with my revolution.’ ”

Thus began an intensely creative partnership. Kani collaborated with Fugard and Ntshona in “The Island” and “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” in which Kani portrayed a man on whom apartheid has taken a harsh toll.

Like Sipho, Kani chose to remain in South Africa, though many other artists of his stature fled into exile. He stayed even after his passport was confiscated by authorities in 1981, forcing him to travel for 10 years on a document that defined his nationality as “undetermined.” In 1990, he became the director of the Market Theater, and he used his position to push the envelope of the new society. In 1995, when he played opposite a white woman in Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” it created such an uproar that police escorted him to performances in Cape Town and 120 audience members walked out in Johannesburg. There were bomb threats and hate mail.

A brother’s death

Originally “Nothing but the Truth” was conceived as a tribute to Kani’s brother Xolile. Xolile, too, was a romantic hero, “a poet for the struggle, whose words would mobilize the people, who was always in trouble with police,” Kani said. In 1985, while attending the funeral of a little girl killed by a police tear gas canister, Xolile was shot and killed when police dispersed the mourners.

Later, in the 1990s, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings in the township on apartheid-era abuses, but Kani’s mother decided not to testify. After watching on television as another mother told of her son’s killing, she told Kani: “Her story was my story.”

“That was the end of it for my family, but not for me,” Kani said. “I always felt there was no closure.”

When he first sat down to write, Kani said, he was paralyzed by anger. Gradually the story evolved from his family history and began to trace the cultural rift between those who stayed in South Africa during the anti-apartheid tumult and African National Congress activists who went into exile, agitating for sports boycotts and for the divestment of foreign investment in the apartheid government.

Many of the emigres -- South Africa’s current president, Thabo Mbeki, was among them -- attended Cambridge or Oxford and moved in sophisticated circles in the United States and Europe, putting them in line for the better jobs upon their return.

Kani does not mean to diminish the importance of the work they did to bring down apartheid from abroad. But when the exiles came back, “there was a feeling they had a little bit of arrogance,” he said. “The people who stayed here felt belittled.”

When “Nothing but the Truth” starts out, Sipho has just been passed over for the job of his dreams. Not a huge dream: A lover of books, he was befriended and promoted up the ranks by the elderly, apartheid-era white librarian, who groomed him to succeed her as head of a public library. But a novice political appointee of the new black majority government gets the job instead. Crushed, Sipho pours himself a strong drink and mulls it over in the company of his adult daughter, Thando.

Then Sipho’s London niece flounces into the township on her first visit to Africa, pulling out of her leopard-spotted bag the ashes of her recently deceased father.

The family’s horror only increases when they realize she has abandoned her African name -- Mandisa Makhaya -- for the Briton-friendly “Mandy McKay.”

Mandy’s misty nostalgia over life in Africa -- “the township, the smell of the people ... the dogs, the rubbish, all making the smell of life” -- contrasts with her absolute certainty that South Africa’s reconciliation commission is mistaken in allowing apartheid-era abusers to apply for amnesty if they confess their crimes and prove they had a political motive.

“Someone is guilty. Someone must be made to pay,” Mandy says.

“We had a choice,” counters Sipho’s daughter, a translator for the township’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “We could have gone for revenge. We had a country to rebuild. Where would revenge get us, except more violence?”

No one in South Africa has the last word in this conversation.

Sipho, too, has some things he must forgive, or at least forget. At heart, Kani said, his play “is a family story. It is a family reunion, about jealousy, secrets, truth and reconciliation, and most important, about the complexities of freedom. It’s about grasping, ‘What does this democracy mean?’ ”