Actor, playwright and activist John Kani is a legend in South Africa. He was arrested, beaten and almost left for dead because of his work developing and starring in plays that were often searing indictments of apartheid. But he didn't let up.
"When you grow up in a war torn or an oppressive regime and you are at the receiving end of that injustice, born in you, inside, is an unbroken commitment to the liberation of your people," Kani said.
Kani is perhaps best known in the United States for voicing Rafiki in two Lion King movies and playing King T'Chaka in Black Panther and Captain America: Civil War.
But he's been compared to Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier – lions of acting who were also significant activists for racial justice.
He's been recognized by several governments for his work, including an Order of Ikamanga from South Africa, and an Order of the British Empire. He also received a Gold Medal in the Arts from the Kennedy Center, in addition to an OBIE and a Tony Award.
Dressed in a baseball cap and down jacket, Kani recently reflected on his career during a break from his new play Kunene and the King, currently on stage at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.
A life-long creative partnership
In the 1960s, Kani began a close creative partnership with white South African playwright Athol Fugard, who died earlier this week.
Kani, along with Fugard and fellow actor Winston Ntshona, developed Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island, plays that look at the harsh realities of apartheid. They performed them for racially mixed audiences in South Africa which was rarely done at the time.
New York Times critic Clive Barnes, who saw The Island on Broadway, called it "the most terrifyingly realistic play of prison life I've ever seen" and a reminder "of man's unending inhumanity to man in many parts of the world."
Later, Kani would go on to perform in the Fugard anti-apartheid masterwork Master Harold…and the Boys, which was initially banned in South Africa.
A few days before Fugard died, Kani spoke warmly of his long-time collaborator and friend. "Even within my own family, I never had a friend for such a long time. And we've done so many things together. We've been in trouble together. But because of white South African laws, I would be detained – he would be given a stern warning.
"And then they took his passport or they would restrict his movement, or they would constantly put the secret police to observe his movements – but I was the one who would get the brutal strike from the law."
Those experiences, he said, cemented their trust in each other.
Telling the rest of the world about apartheid
Together, Kani, Fugard and Ntshona brought stories of the plight of Black South Africans to stages in Europe and the United States.
Fugard's daughter Lisa Fugard said their work gave overseas audiences a more visceral experience than what they were reading in the newspapers. "It informed and educated and got audiences outside of South Africa thinking and questioning," she said.
Meantime, within South Africa, "The secret police … was always just lurking around on the edges of the work that my dad and John were doing together," Lisa Fugard said.
Not long after Kani and Ntshona jointly won Tony Awards for best actor in a play in 1975 for Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island, two plays often performed together, they were imprisoned in South Africa.
"The birth of John's theater life was in that crucible of apartheid with all those restrictions and struggle," she said. "In the fight against apartheid in South Africa, John was just day after day after day in his art, in his creative life, taking that on and speaking for people who didn't have a voice."
In 1982, Kani was stabbed 11 times after starring in a play about an interracial marriage. Five years later, undeterred, he starred in another interracial play, becoming the first Black actor to play Othello in a South African production.
South Africa's 'Harry Belafonte' or 'Sidney Poitier'
When director Ryan Coogler first saw Kani as King T'Chaka in Captain America: Civil War, he knew he wanted to work with him in Black Panther.
"I was just so profoundly impressed," said Coogler, singling out Kani's charisma.
It was Kani's idea that he and his son T'Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman, should speak to each other in Kani's native Xhosa language. Ultimately it was decided that Wakandan would actually be Xhosa.
Coogler said that it was a privilege to get to know Kani during filming. "It was very clear that he had laid it on the line for the dignity of Black South Africans," he said.
The lingering effects of apartheid
At age 81, Kani continues to write about the lingering effects of apartheid. He wrote and stars in Kunene and the King, on stage in Washington, D.C. In it, a prominent white South African actor and a Black South African nurse come together in a tense, sometimes humorous dialogue about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, guilt, Shakespeare and death.
The white South African, Jack, is preparing to play Shakespeare's King Lear. He's also dying of cancer. Lunga, played by Kani, is a nurse sent to his home to take care of him. Both men are in their 60s.
Jack doesn't feel guilt over the oppression of Black South Africans during apartheid, because he says he never physically harmed anyone himself. Lunga tries to explain to him that his silence made him just as culpable as if he had.
"Silence makes him an accomplice to the suffering of the majority," said Kani.
"There comes a time in post-apartheid that you find many people even denying that apartheid was bad," he said. "You find even white people eloquently saying, 'Despite all the evils of apartheid, there was some good in it because it gave people skills to survive under such terrible and difficult conditions.'"
Kani said his goal with Kunene and the King was to get these two polar opposites "in one room and just make them talk to each other and I'll be the witness and watch it."
'Cultural activist'
While Kani's work explores the impact of South African politics on humanity, he describes himself as a "cultural activist," which he said is different from being a political activist.
"Cultural activists are more sensitive to the feelings of the people on the ground," he said. "I see what they see. I feel what they feel. I have the same fears. I have the same hopes. I have the same nightmares. Therefore, that makes me feel like I serve my community much closer to them in the most intimate way."
Kunene and the King is running at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., through March 23.
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for air and web. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
Copyright 2025 NPR
