Exhibition pays tribute to Dr John Kani

Few artists have done more to shape South African theatre over the past six decades than Dr John Kani.

The Apartheid Museum will honour actor Dr John Kani ’s contribution to the arts with an exhibition that revisits key moments his stage and screen career that, over six decades, has taken him from Port Elizabeth rehearsal rooms to Hollywood studios.

For over 25 years, Kani has helped guide the direction the museum as chairman of the board. This was in parallel to his development as a playwright, through which the veteran actor began to ask pertinent questions about the shortfalls of democracy and reconciliation in a society that remains unequal.

The exhibition opens tomorrow. It draws on images, text, artefacts, and film, to showcases the ideas that have occupied Kani on and off the stage, informing his vision.

Kani was born in the Gqeberha township of New Brighton in 1943. He was already dabbling in acting in high school, but his approach to the art form was altered dramatically following his encounter with the Serpent Players in 1965.

This was an amateur group formed in New Brighton in the early 1960s that soon began collaborating with playwright Athol Fugard. Fugard considered them “the only significant provocation and stimulus to myself that I have encountered in South Africa.”

The group shifted from their initial reliance on the classics, increasingly creating theatre from their personal experiences, significantly after the arrest of fellow actor Norman Ntshinga in 1965.

His arrest before the group was set to perform Sophocles’ Antigone influenced Kani , Winston Ntshona, and Fugard as they workshopped their two-hander, The Island , just weeks before they stormed England in 1973. Their historic run over the next few years catapulted Kani and Ntshona to global fame and instituted them as a cornerstone in what came to be known as protest theatre.

Through the transition, Kani took up leading administrative roles at various cultural institutions, not least the Market Theatre Lab and the National Arts Council, where he was a founding chairman from 1996 to 2004. His continued role at the museum is in keeping with his views that nurturing the vision of a thriving post-apartheid South Africa requires unwavering vigilance and commitment.

Kani has been exemplary in building structures to increase opportunities for actors on all levels and in all disciplines. “We need to create vibrant film, television, and theatre industries so that we do not look up to Hollywood as the only solution for our dreams and the only way our stories can be told,” he told the American Repertory Theatre artistic director, Robert Woodruff, in 2004.

The exhibition celebrates a man who, sometimes at great personal cost, has ensured that the performing arts have a fighting chance to speak to the present moment. It runs until November 30.