In spring of 2001, the Wordsworth
Press will be producing a schools edition of this play.
It provides an interesting possibility for study as
the 20th century drama text under the AQA/NEAB GCSE
English Literature syllabus.
The Island
was devised in 1973 by the playwright Athol Fugard and
the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. The setting
for the play is the notorious prison camp on Robben
Island, just off shore from Cape Town in South Africa.
Robben Island was a prison for political
opponents of the South African government at the
time
the play was written. It’s most famous inmate was Nelson
Mandela but in its time it held thousands of other
men
who had been imprisoned because of their resistance
to the racist regime which governed their country from
1948 until 1994.
During these years, South Africa
was run by the white Afrikaner National Party. They
introduced a hideous catalogue of laws to secure
white
supremacy. This system was called "apartheid", an Afrikaans word meaning "separateness".
Although some governments in the developed world shamefully
supported the white South African regime during the
apartheid years, there are few who would now try to
defend the overtly racist policies which contravened
the human rights of the large majority of non-white
South Africans for 40 years.
There were two main opposition groups
to the National Party whose members were imprisoned
on the Island: the African National Congress (ANC),
led by Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, and the
Pan
African Congress (PAC) whose leader was Robert Sobukwe.
The ANC had originally been opposed to the use of
violence
to overthrow the apartheid government. But in March
1960 the PAC organised a protest about the Pass Laws.
At Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, 67 black protesters
were shot dead and another 186 were injured. This
changed
Nelson Mandela’s view and the ANC decided that the
only way to meet white oppression was to mobilise a
black
liberation army. However the government raided the
secret headquarters of the ANC at a farmhouse in Rivonia
and
rounded up the ANC leadership. They were tried for
treason and on 11th June 1964 Nelson Mandela, Walter
Sisulu,
Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew
Mlangeni, Ahmed Kathrada and Dennis Goldberg were sentenced
to life imprisonment.
The play The Island is about
the prison experience of those members of the liberation
movement who were incarcerated on Robben Island. Some
of the events of the play draw directly on things which
actually happened. There was, for example, a production
of the Greek play Antigone. Nelson Mandela played
the part of King Creon, and according to his biographer,
Mandela:
"…saw Creon as
a leader who was originally wise and patriotic but
who showed himself
merciless and inflexible in refusing to let Antigone
bury her dead brother, while Antigone was a freedom
fighter who defied the law on the grounds that it
was
unjust."
Mandela: The Authorised Biography,
Anthony Sampson 1999
Because of the clear links to the
South African situation, the play Antigone had
an obvious appeal to the freedom fighters of the ANC,
(though there may well have been some, like the character
Winston in the play, who were less than enthusiastic
performers!)
Other events in the play are dramatisations
of the conditions under which Robben Island inmates
lived. Remorseless and soul-destroying hard work and
inhuman treatment by warders were the norm on the Island
in the early days. In his prison memoir, Island in
Chains, Indres Naidoo, who spent ten years on Robben
Island, describes a typical incident:
"An enormous grass
roller, the biggest I had ever seen, stood on a piece
of soft
sandy land. It was solid metal, about seven feet high,
weighing a couple of tons, with an axle bar and handle
so heavy that even two people could not lift it.
In
addition, there were long chains attached to each side,
and a place for people to push from the back; it
was
much, much bigger than a steam roller and about fifty
of us were ordered to set it in motion.
We were the unfortunate ones who
had been pulled out at random for work that day on the
dreaded landbou (agricultural) span by
Piet Kleynhans: one of the three Kleynhans brothers
who were all warders on the Island. Tall and thin,
powerfully
built, clean shaven and with crew-cut hair, he placed
himself on top of the crossbar of the axle with a long
leather whip in his hand and, even before we started
pulling and heaving, we had the picture of a slave
master
driving his slaves to work…..
We went round and round
in a large circle, round and round and round, from
about seven
o’clock that morning, heaving and straining, a continual
agony, never once pausing, not even for a moment. Occasionally
a prisoner would break away from the roller to have
a quick drink of water or to urinate, but the roller
never stopped….
At one stage in the morning, one
of the prisoners on the axle, John Malambo, was pulled
out of the group and accused by Kleynhans of being a
hardebek kaffir (hard-mouthed kaffir). Apparently
he had protested against the work and Kleynhans called
out two common law prisoners doing light work nearby
to dig a hole slightly away from where we were pulling
the roller – prisoners would soon learn who was baas here….
Kleynhans got off the
roller and was standing on the spot supervising the
digging, and
we continued heaving the roller round and round without
him, until after a while we noticed the digging had
stopped. Then we heard Kleynhans order Malambo to
get
into the hole and, later, as we made the next circuit,
we saw Malambo’s head jutting out of the ground. Two
prisoners were shovelling sand around his shoulders
into the hole and, by the time we got back, all we could
see was Malambo’s head sticking out at ground level.
His shiny, shaven cranium looked as if it had just
fallen
off and rolled to the ground and although we could
not make out any expression, we knew how baking hot
the
sun was and felt agonised for him…
Some hours later, just before lunch,
Kleynhans leapt off the roller and went up to Malambo.
He was in good humour, enjoying himself.
‘Kaffir, do you want water? No,
I won’t give you water, I’ll give you whiskey, the very
best.’ Amid gales of laughter from the other warders
he opened his fly, pulled out his penis and started
urinating on Malambo’s face."
Island in Chains Indres Naidoo
1982
In one sense, then, The Island
is very much a play about apartheid. It's about
events in South Africa in the recent past, before the
election
of a democratic government in 1994. The play itself
was part of the liberation struggle. Athol Fugard has
said it was devised to "shatter white complacency
and it’s conspiracy of silence". John Kani saw
it as a play for black people, about black people.
But it is much more than just a
historical re-enactment. It is just as relevant today
for what it has to say about the experience of imprisonment
in general and about the way human beings cope in adversity.
It also raises universal questions about the nature
of state power and natural justice. Above all, it is
a fine example of the way in which modern drama can
bring all of these issues alive for us on a stage.
John Kani talks about THE
ISLAND
The following extract is taken
from an interview with John Kani by Martin Phillips
in February 2000.
"The plays we devised together grew
out of a process we called "an experiment in play
making". It was that process where we used Athol’s
experience as a writer, us as actors, and aspiring
writers,
to explore and investigate a situation which affected
our lives.
With The Island there was
an interesting situation. Everybody knew there was a
Robben Island, Mandela was on Robben Island; everybody
knew there were people in detention, people underground;
everybody knew people in exile. But people were afraid
to touch this subject. We had to find a way of talking
about these things, of telling the story.
What we discovered after creating
Sizwe Bansi was that we couldn’t have the
text written down. This was because it would have
been a
document; it would have meant that the police would
have evidence that could be presented to a District
Attorney who might lay charges against us. So we
kept
continuing to improvise according to the interactions
and response with the audience. That way we used
our
life experience, structured it around a story, to take
the audience on a journey through to the end of
the
evening.
After Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, we
decided to explore the subject of Robben Island.
To
start off with, we put a blanket on the ground. We
stood on it and began to move with Athol watching.
We began
to halve the blanket, halve the blanket, until there
was just enough space for four feet to stand. We
realised
the restriction of space, and there it was – confinement.
And there it was – prison.
Thus began the process.
We said to ourselves "alright, what do we know about Robben
Island? It is the maximum security prison for black
political offenders. Only men. Who is on Robben Island?
People like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan
Mbeki, father of our president today. And all those
men – why were they there? Is it right for them to be
there? Is the government right? No- it is wrong. What
is they were fighting for?" Those were the questions,
in the context of our lives, as we lived them day by
day, we started with. The things we see - what’s happening
to my neighbours son, what’s happening to my brother,
what’s happening to the husband on the other side of
street? So we put together all this information – and
then we ask "so how do we tell it?" For this
we turned to stories.
We heard stories
about the way the warders used to punish these
men in order to break their
spirit. Things like if you were strong, unbreakable,
you’d be taken to the beach, you’d dig a hole in the
sand, you’d get a bucket and you’d work from nine to
four without a break, without pausing, emptying the
sea into that hole. It sounds like a joke but when the
sinews in your muscles hurt, when your back is aching,
you just continued unless you went and apologised to
the white warder and said, "I’m sorry baas (master)".
Then you could go back to the cell. Men, it is said,
used to cry - but continue the punishment without giving
in, without saying "I’m sorry".
There was this particular warder
who became so infamous that he had a team which became
knwn as the Hodoshe span. So when warders reported
you as problematic, you’d be transferred to this particular
warder. And that is where those stories came from –
the stories of moving rocks from one side to the other.
Of shifting sand dunes. That’s where that work sequence
from the opening of The Island came from. From
true stories.
So each day we would
improvise. Each day Athol, Winston and I looked at
what we’d done
the day before, revisited it. So we say "these
men have done the punishment, where do we take them
from here?" The answer was "back to the cell".
But when they are in the cell, licking their wounds,
one man forgets his pain for his brother’s pain. They
rest. They sleep. They grumble. Are these men going
to complain about oppression, about suffering? We said
" no; life continues. One of them is there for
ten years, one is there for life, so they’re not going
to sit there grumbling about these things".
Next we concocted the idea of a
concert. It would take place in the canteen, with prisoners
entertaining the other prisoners. Then we remembered
an experience we had back in 1966 in our own theatre
group. We were doing Antigone, the Greek play
by Sophocles. This play is about the dilemma
of Antigone, whether to bury her dead brother, which
was against the law of the state, or whether to adhere
to the laws of God and decency and bury her brother.
She chose to break the law of the state rather than
the law of humanity. She was arrested. It sounded familiar
to our situation! But the actor who played Hemon, the
son of Creon who was to be betrothed to Antigone,
disappeared two days before our first performance.
It turned out he’d been arrested, alleged to have been
a member of the ANC. He ended up on Robben Island for
seven years.
Now he never knew his lines for
Antigone. I had to prompt him one word at
a time. So we received letters from Robben Island
that Shark,
that was this actor’s name, is entertaining the prisoners
as they work at the quarry with a one-man performance
of Antigone ! The biggest joke was "how?" He
never knew his lines! So for The Island, for
the idea of a concert, we said okay, these men are preparing
to stage Antigone , but one man doesn’t know
a thing about theatre.
This is how we developed The
Island in rehearsal. Through improvisation.
Then on the first night, with an audience, it was us
watching it being born, it moving. And we watched the
audience reaction and continued to mould the play,
as
you build a human being according to response that’s
the process we used. Our lives, our stories to our
people."
