Apartheid Museum renames its gallery after John Kani

The living legend, cultural icon and industry elder Dr John Kani was honoured by the Apartheid Museum last weekend with the renaming of the museum’s art gallery. 

The inauguration of the John Kani Gallery is a visual representation of the thespian’s artistic journey, a walk down memory lane tracing his brotherhood with Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard who have both transitioned to another realm as well as a graphic documentation of his anti-apartheid activism.

A cultural icon and globally revered industry elder

On the evening of Saturday 29 August, a few hours before John Kani’s 83rd birthday, the Apartheid Museum honoured the man who is one of South Africa’s greatest cultural icons of our lifetime by renaming its art gallery after him.

Previously a space for temporary installations, the now permanently renamed gallery has previously held exhibitions about other struggle heroes including Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol and Oliver Tambo.

Today the gallery is adorned with various John Kani memorabilia including his travel documents that were issued by the apartheid government, declaring his nationality as “undetermined”.

The walls are a wealth of history as demonstrated by the Free John Kani and Winston Ntshona documentation of protests that took place around the world following the pair’s arrest after a Sizwe Banzi Is Dead performance just four months after the 1976 Student Uprisings.

The previous year, they had celebrated bringing home the first ever Tony Award by African artists, sharing the Best Actor award for Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island.

Since then, his star glimmered brighter and brighter with the Order of the Ikhamanga in Silver awarded to Kani by then president Thabo Mbeki, the Order of the British Empire by King Charles III (2023) and Gold Medal from the Kennedy International Committee on the Arts (2018) to name a few.

Needless to say, the historically rich gallery walls also carry the iconic photo of John Kani, Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona taken by James Jackson in London in 1973.

It was his presence as King T'Chaka that completely revolutionised the language in Black Panther, questioning why the directors believed that an uncolonised African country would be dominated by English.

“There's this wonderful thing when you're filling out forms nowadays where they ask how you'd like to be addressed. And then there's a block that says, 'How would you like to be addressed? He/him, she/her, they/them.' Every time I come across that box, I pick elder.”

Celebrating John Kani

Programme director at the unveiling of the gallery, Hlomla Dandala fittingly referred to the man of the moment as The Voice of Africa.

“If we are the legacy of our ancestors and the hope of our descendants, I do not know anyone who embodies both as well as John Kani does,” said Hlomla.

I was a young journalist working in community media when I first interviewed this legend, nearly dropping to the floor from heart palpitations induced by being star-struck, coupled with the absolute disbelief that I was engaging with his calibre of global greatness.

A few years later, he would instruct me to refrain from addressing him as Dr Kani but simply as Tata.

When I interview Tata about the gallery, his love for family is central to the conversation as he shares that his storytelling was a gift he imbibed from one of his three grandmothers (his grandfather had three wives).

In fact, his wife and some of his children who were in the country on the day were present at the unveiling.

“Even when I reported my brother for misbehaving, my father would say he’s family so it's your responsibility. So in everything I do, I know that it’s family that's truly important.”

Even through pain he honours family, and his globally celebrated play Nothing but the Truth which won both the Obie and Excellence in International Theatre Award in the same year (2003) epitomises this.

The play was a lamentation and perhaps a vessel through which he processed his grief over losing his brother Xolile who was an anti-apartheid activist in his own right, with poetry as his medium of choice.

Xolile was gunned down less than a month after the Kani brothers had lost their father.

“I was very, very angry. I was part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission where I could tell people to forgive while I was not able to convince myself to do the same thing.

After 15 pages of the first draft, I realised I was too angry to deal with this subject and I went to sleep,” Tata shares.

But even after having achieved so much in his life, and after his family has generously shared him with the rest of us, Tata struggles with being celebrated.

“I’m just uTata uKani, and I don't want to be more than that because one day I'm not going to do a good play or a good movie and you're going to hate me for it. Even you, Mbali, who has written such good things about me, are going to write about me in utter disgust,” he says between chuckles.

He concludes by saying he only wants people to remember the times where it was said that he was a beautiful human being.

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