For more than 25 years, Dr John Kani has helped guide the direction of the Apartheid Museum, an institution whose purpose has long reflected the questions he has explored through his own work as a playwright, actor and cultural activist.
From August 30 to November 30, the Apartheid Museum will celebrate Kani’s contribution to South African arts and culture with "John Kani: A Living Legend", an exhibition looking back at key moments from a career that has spanned more than six decades.
The exhibition will draw on images, text, artefacts and film to revisit a life that has taken Kani from New Brighton in Gqeberha to stages and screens around the world.
It will also mark the inauguration of the John Kani Gallery at the museum, with the first exhibition offering what he describes as a “slice” of his 60 years in the creative sector.
Speaking to “The National”, Kani was pleasant and openly proud as he moved through the stories behind the exhibition and the many parts of his life that shaped it.
At 83, he still answers with the detail of someone who has not only lived through history but spent much of his career trying to make sense of it for others.
When asked to reflect on the greatest moment of his life and career, one story placed the interview inside his childhood home, where his grandmother unknowingly gave him one of his earliest lessons in storytelling.
Another returned to 1985, when his father, who had struggled to understand his decision to become an actor, finally introduced him to a friend with words Kani has never forgotten.
“This is my son, John Kani, he’s an actor.”
His father died three months later. For Kani, that moment remains bigger than any of the awards and international honours that followed.
A museum built so that South Africa does not forget
Kani’s relationship with the Apartheid Museum goes back to its beginnings.
He recalls conversations more than two decades ago about the need for a memorial site that would document apartheid and the lives affected by it, while giving future generations a place to understand the past.
The aim, he explained, was never to create a museum that simply exposed the evils of apartheid or became a place of blame.
“This is for the purposes of learning,” he said.
The museum was designed as an experience. Visitors entering the main exhibition receive tickets that classify them as white, black or coloured, before being directed through separate entrances. The system, he said, is deliberate, giving visitors a small sense of the separation imposed under apartheid.
The journey then moves through the country’s history before ending on a more hopeful note, with visitors encouraged to make their own commitment to peace, humanity and Ubuntu.
The museum looks back, but it is not asking younger generations to carry the anger of the past as a burden.
“The baggage of the past is part of our history. It is not that we must hand over to the next generation as a burden for them,” he said.
He has seen how the museum has helped fill what he calls a “conspiracy of silence” around apartheid, particularly among young South Africans whose families never spoke openly about the past.
Over the years, more than a million schoolchildren have walked through the museum, and many leave with questions about why they had never heard these stories at home.
Kani has experienced that gap in his own family. He recalled walking through town with his granddaughter and passing a Wimpy restaurant. He told her that during apartheid, he had not been allowed to eat there.
Her response was “why would he want to eat there anyway when the food was bad?”
Kani laughed at the memory, but it also made him realise something about how younger generations relate to history. Years later, one of his grandsons asked him for help with a school assignment on the Sharpeville Massacre. But the teenager had a conditional request.
“Please let’s not start when the ANC was formed. I don’t want to hear when the PAC broke off,” his grandson told him. “I just want to know what happened that morning. I’ve got two paragraphs.”
“I thought, I’m learning,” Kani said.
The museum, in his view, exists to make history available without forcing younger generations to inherit the pain of those who lived through it.
It has also become a space to celebrate the lives of South Africans whose contributions should not be forgotten. Its exhibitions have honoured figures including Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, George Bizos, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko, while also making room for less celebrated stories and ordinary South Africans.
The decision to name one of those spaces after Kani came as a surprise to him, he shared.
As chairman of the board, he had been part of discussions around the museum’s exhibitions and the people it should honour. Then the board suggested naming a gallery after its founding chairman. That founding chairman, he realised, was him.
“I said, well, you know, I don’t know what’s…” he recalled, laughing at the memory.
There are already theatres, halls and even a road carrying his name. Still, the board had made its decision. The John Kani Gallery will now open with an exhibition dedicated to him and his contribution to the arts.
The timing has given the honour an added meaning. The exhibition will open a day before Kani celebrates his 83rd birthday.
“I’m honoured by the gesture. I’m honoured and humbled that I did my work without any expectation of a reward or a ‘thank you’. I just do what I believe is important,” he said.
Over the years, Kani has received recognition from around the world, including a Tony Award, an OBE from King Charles in recognition of his contribution to the arts and the WWF’s Living Planet Award for his work in nature conservation.
“Your reference must be life”
As the exhibition looks back at Kani’s body of work, it also raises a question: what is the responsibility of an artist? His answer begins with his grandmother.
“My grandmother used to tell stories,” he said.
When she announced that she was about to tell a story, the family already knew someone had done something wrong.
Her stories were not simply for entertainment. By the end, everyone would understand the lesson and know who had failed to wash the dishes or clean the yard. One day, she asked a young Kani to tell her a story. He told her he did not know how.
“Tell me one of my stories,” she replied.
He refused, saying her stories were too long and that he would be asleep before she got halfway through them.
Then she gave him the instruction that, in his telling, set him on his path. “Make it up.”
“That’s why I became a writer, an actor and a director,” he said.
However, for Kani, storytelling cannot exist separately from the world around the artist.
“Your reference must be life,” he said.
An artist from a rural part of Limpopo, the Eastern Cape or Mpumalanga will tell stories about mountains, fields, birds and nature. An artist from Soweto, he said, has to be able to speak about the matchbox houses, the townships and the realities people live with.
“You cannot ignore your environment as an artist and sing songs of happiness when pain is obvious as you walk down the pavement streets and the rural towns of this country,” he said.
“An artist must reflect the environment in which the artist operates.”
He described the role of the artist as that of a mirror.
“We’re like a mirror. We hold a mirror to the society and the society sees itself and put it in a brutal, honest way.”
It is an idea that goes back to his own years making protest theatre.
Kani recalled being detained by the Special Branch in the 1980s and being asked why he always wrote plays that criticised apartheid.
“The problem is not with me, the problem is the mirror. My work is the mirror. What you see in the mirror is the reality on the other side,” he responded.
He said younger artists should also have a cause, even if they are not making political or socio-political work.
Kani is not asking every artist to write protest theatre or turn every song into a political statement. However, he believes artists should not completely ignore the realities around them.
For his generation, the cause was freedom and liberation. While politics dealt with liberating the country, Kani said the arts were also concerned with “liberating the mind”.
“We knew we were part of the nobler struggle, our work with Matsemela Manaka, Zakes Mda, Winston Ntshona, I could go on with the list of great people who were referred to as the protest theatre era. We were part of liberating our people in our country,” said Kani.
The artists of today, he said, have their own challenges to confront, from unemployment and youth struggles to school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, gender-based violence and femicide.
“Please go write bubblegum music, go paint the cities of Joburg because you like seeing people standing, but do not neglect the reality in which you operate in.”
“Whatever you do, I’m not asking you only to do political works or socio-political work, but I’m saying do not completely ignore that your uncle is still in Mapetla standing in front of that two-room house, and yet he stands on those long queues voting for a better life and a better South Africa,” he concluded.
That is perhaps what makes an exhibition about Kani more than a look back at a celebrated career.
For more than 60 years, he has used stories to hold up a mirror to South Africa. Through theatre, film, writing, cultural institutions and his work at the Apartheid Museum, Kani has returned to the same belief that his grandmother taught him without ever saying it directly: stories matter because they help us see ourselves.
nomathamsanqa.sithathu@nationalmg.co.za