by CONOR<\p>DOYLE
SOUTH African playwright Athol Fugard’s modern, apartheid-era classic Sizwe Banzi is Dead is being preformed this week at City Hall. On Tuesday, reporter CONOR DOYLE had a chance to speak with actors Niyi Coker and Matthew Amend. Mr. Coker (whose first name is pronounced ‘Knee”) is a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and is the director of the play. Mr. Amend is a student of Mr. Coker’s. The pair spoke to the Mid-Ocean News in between rehearsals of their two-man show.
>Q: Mr. Coker, can you give me a little of your own personal background?
NC:<$> I was born in Nigeria in West Africa. Did some theatre there in high school, and college and then attended school in England. Then I went back to Africa for my undergraduate—and then went to grad school in New York. I made up my mind I would do academics—I wouldn’t wait tables or drive cars, so I decided to get my PhD. My degree is in cultural aesthetics specialising in African culture and literatureQ: I read that you studied under Nobel Prize winning writer Wole Soyinka. What was that like?
NC:<$> It was exceptional in the sense that it exposes you to so much really early—to have a person of such brilliance, a Nobel laureate as your mentor, is really life altering.Q: What do you consider the role of art and literature in society?
NC: <$>Literature actually helps humanise us as a global community—when apartheid was pretty much at its peak, newspaper stories, TV stories, especially by the BBC, were all banned if they covered apartheid. The only way people in the west knew what was going on was the plays coming out of Africa. The eighties was a very vibrant time in South African theatre. There were plays that told people what was happening there. The role of arts in human relations is nothing I could underestimate.Q: Do you believe black literature is given the attention it deserves?
NC<$>: No, not yet. We do have three African writers who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. So it’s not all gloom and doom, we do have a lot of writers who have received recognition for their work
Q: I take it you’ve been to Bermuda before?
NC: It’s one of my favourite places to bring students to study abroad because students in International Affairs are always fascinated that colonisation is still here. It’s something in there lifetime. So of course they want to see what it’s like. They want to see(points at this reporter’s knees) <$>the shorts! (laughs)
MA: <$>The play takes place in South Africa at a time when everyone had a permit which tells you where you work, what area you live in and what you do. My character Sizwe Banzi is from King William’s Town where it’s very hard to find work—he has a wife and four children, so he’s moving to the city and is trying to find a job to support his family. But by branching off, it’s illegal—if he gets caught he goes to jail. There’s a raid, and he gets caught. They put a stamp in the book, but he’s illiterate—so he can’t read it. Then he learns that he has to be back in King William’s Town, but it’s too late, he had to be there four days ago. So he has the option to return home with nothing to bring to his family or to sacrifice something of him, to give up his name (to assume the identity of a dead man). The play itself correlates to a lot of what’s going on now, our own everyday struggleB>Q: Tell us a bit about your interpretation of the play.
MA:<$> There are three characters, but Niyi plays two of them.
NC: <$>But you know when it was originally produced they couldn’t have the script. It was a crime during apartheid so they had to memorise their lines and to improvise the rest. If the security forces found the script they would have been in deep troub
MA<$>: A lot of people who went to see the play were shocked, some even left the theatre. It was a very rebellious y.Q: Do you believe Bermudians will relate to this play?
NC: Bermuda has a history of discrimination - that’s in its history. Bermuda still has the problem of race, so there’s much to learn.
NC: But a lot of people don’t like to talk about that in Bermuda. Someone told me once ‘We don’t have a border, so we don’t have border problems’.
From the little I know so far - from everything I have deduced there needs to be a serious shift in curriculum because that’s where the main problem lies. The curricula are there to reflect cultures—and not glorify one and denigrate another. The race problem might begin to abate and solve as the next generationkes hold.Q: You did a scene of this play at Westgate this morning. How was that?
MA: They loved it. It ended up a long discussion on race and discrimination; I think it will get people talking—regardless of who you are. I just hope people t about it.
NC: And I hope they ask themselves, ‘Why is this play still relevant?’ Because if it’s still relevant, something’s very wrong. Why haven’t we resolved these plems?Q: Do you believe art can be a tool of social progress?
NC: Completely. In every way. I subscribe to Bertolt Brecht’s theories—he changed the way audiences react to plays—the audience couldn’t just sit there passively, the audience created the stories for the actors.
MA: Without people talking about it you can’t change anything. Plays like this are things that can spark change just through conversation. Once you come to an understanding—that’s how you change the world.
Here’s an example.
Several years ago I worked for a company in Sweden. They were having a problem post 9/11 where the population there was beginning to burn mosques and beginning to drive out Muslims. We tookplay called Raisin in the Sun about a black family trying to buy a house in a white neighborhood—and the white citizens come together to buy that house so they can’t move in. When they saw that play they were comfortable enough to say: “That happens in America.” After six weeks, switched the play and set in Sweden and used the real situation with Muslims who were being bought out and pushed out. They were not moved to tears by Raisin in the Sun, they were moved to tears when they saw themselves.
I really hope people will see the play and be galvanised to do something. We must improve the human condition.
