‘It’s a science’: John Kani on the power of art to transform society

Dr John Kani is giving a masterclass to the actors of one of those TV series that have been running for years. I imagine it’s like getting a masterclass from the queen if you were Harry pre the tragic fall-out.

This is how you keep an audience spellbound when you have to occupy a role for what feels like a lifetime.

He is explaining how to turn on the full force of the Kani magic I have been in thrall to since we sat down to breakfast at Nice in Parkhurst. I suggested Nice because it is a seriously underrated quality and much maligned adjective. God, Cyril and Eskom all know we need more much more of it these days. And the cafe has been supplying it for years, a rarity of consistency.

So here I find myself about to receive a serious insight. 

“It’s to rediscover that feeling you had when you were first told you got the part, and you walked in and you acted your heart out.”

This is profound — how to bring a beginner’s mind to your role in life or in your soapie, even if you find you have done and said and endured the same predictable thing a million times.

“You have to break it down. Within this journey, where do you come in, what role do you play? What sector of society do you represent? Unpacking the texts, understanding the script, understanding your role and seeing yourself in the whole picture.” 

I'm thinking he could do this on a much grander scale than just for the cast of a soap opera so that they beam into our lounges and bedrooms with renewed conviction. He could unlock a nation’s blocked psyche. Which is the kind of magic you go to the theatre for. In that darkened liminal space they are holding up a mirror to the audience and begging us to answer the big questions of our lives.

It's damn nice listening to Kani tell me all his stories. He has a lifetime’s worth of fresh material and a planet of adulatory fans — not least for his most recent forays into the popular consciousness in the Marvel Universe, on Netflix and at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Most crucially he is about to revoice Rafiki in The Lion King. He also confirms that there is such a thing as Hollywood star treatment and he is a happy recipient. 

“There's a press conference when I land at Heathrow; I am picked up at the door of the plane at JFK — that's being a star. But as soon as I step off the plane in South Africa and my wife picks me up at the airport, all that is gone.” He laughs. 

It may be why he still has access to his beginner’s mind, which was sparked into existence in another darkened hall in his hometown in the Eastern Cape. He would do on-the-spot translations of the characters in movies for friends who spoke no English as they caught the matinee on Saturdays at the Vice in Port Elizabeth.

“I would be the kid the elders would be shushing in the back — ‘he said ... now he said'. I remember somebody telling me 'you would actually make a good actor'. Then in 1961 in high school in New Brighton my teacher liked to adapt the novels that were part of the set work so we could really internalise them. If it wasn’t Murder in the Cathedral, it was Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet. That’s where I felt a bit of excitement.

“My friend Winston Ntshona was good in sport — he was good at every bloody thing, he was the victor ludorum, rugby, cricket. But when I got the role in the school play — a tragic isiXhosa drama, Uzani u Baba — that’s when I realised, I like this.”

He says it as though he has a sweet, lingering taste in his mouth.

But it was in 1965, when he was preparing to set off into exile to take up the armed struggle, that a flirtation with amateur theatre turned into a lifetime’s passion.

“I had heard about an amateur group called The Serpent Players. People called them the Excuse Me group — they spoke too much English. They were not like the township Gibson Kente musical thing. That was the first time I met Athol Fugard. He was standing outside smoking a pipe. They were rehearsing at the old Rhodes University campus, which was in Port Elizabeth. I thought he was the caretaker.

“They were doing a play called Antigone by Sophocles. I walked right past him and inside to the actors.”

It was a brush with fate.

“A friend of mine who was playing a guard said: ‘Oh, Athol, this is John. John this is Athol.' It was the first time a white man was introduced to me on a first-name basis. I was black and militant. I wasn’t happy that this group had a white person. I was going to Tanzania, Russia. I said to my friend: ‘What is going to happen in the revolution? Because I am going to kill him.’” 

Instead, they forged a non-homicidal relationship that played a huge role in the anti-apartheid movement. And their work on Sizwe Banzi Is Dead that played in theatres across the world caused real existential questioning.

“We need more protests. We need artists to speak. We need every human being to stand up in the same way we stood in those queues on April 27 1994.”

When I ask him about present-day South Africa, he says with conviction: “I don’t think people understand how powerful the arts are in creating that harmonious society, seeing each other, dealing with each other, even forgiving each other.

“It’s a science, not just an entertainment. We are in the business of moulding a human being who understands humanity, who understands the role of citizenry, that they have to come and make a difference.”