The Robben Island Bible
by Drew Lichtenberg

In 1971, the political activist Sonny Venkatrathnam was imprisoned on Robben Island. Located five miles off the coast of South Africa, the island had held prisoners since 1652, when Dutch ships arrived. Between 1948 and 1994, it became infamous for housing political opponents of the apartheid system of institutionalized racism and segregation.

In response, Venkatrathnam smuggled a book inside, covered with Hindu greeting cards. He told the guards it was a holy text, but he kept its true contents secret, so it wouldn’t be confiscated. It would later become known as the “Robben Island Bible.”

It was a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

If the Robben Islanders had a common culture and text,” writes historian Anthony Sampson, “it was not the Bible or the Koran, but Shakespeare.”

On December 16, 1977, an inmate signed his name under this passage, from Julius Caesar:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

That inmate was Nelson Mandela.

A fellow prisoner on Mandela’s block, Billy Nair, wrote his name beneath a different passage, Caliban in The Tempest:

This island’s mine, by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. [...] Here you sty me
In this hard rock whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.

At almost the exact same time, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were working on a play with Athol Fugard that would shake apartheid to its foundations. Kani and Ntshona, who grew up in the racially segregated township of New Brighton, met Fugard in nearby Port Elizabeth in 1965. “It was the first time in my life a white man was introduced to me on a first-name basis,” says Kani. Working with Black performers on townships, Fugard devised performances based on adaptations of Greek and modern classics.

Technically, these performances were criminal contraband, much like the Robben Island Bible.

During apartheid, there were few spaces where Black and white South Africans were legally permitted to be in the same room as equals.

In 1972, Kani, Ntshona, and Fugard began workshopping the plays that would become The Island and Sizwe Bansi Is Dead. They worked in secret in Fugard’s garage. Kani and Ntshona pretended to be Fugard’s domestic servants. Kani pretended to be Fugard’s driver—even though the white man didn’t own a car—and Ntshona his gardener.

The Island tells the story of two prisoners who work all day on Robben Island. At night, they gather to rehearse Antigone by Sophocles. To circumvent censorship at the play’s premiere, Kani and Ntshona performed under pseudonyms. There was no script (meaning it couldn’t be confiscated) and they kept the true title secret. When they performed in townships before an all-Black audience, the play provoked shouting and passionate debate. The work "gave back to the people their voices,” Kani says.

Fugard would later write of these performances. “As I stood at the back of the hall listening to it all I realized I was watching a very special example of one of the theatre’s major responsibilities in an oppressive society: to try to break the conspiracy of silence that always attends an unjust social system. A performance on stage had provoked a political event in the auditorium.”

In 1974, the Royal Court Theatre in London invited Kani and Ntshona to perform the play. They would take the production to Broadway, with Kani and Ntshona winning an unprecedented co-Tony Award for Best Actor. When they returned to South Africa in 1976, police arrested them, citing Clive Barnes’ review in The New York Times as evidence of the work’s “inflammable, abusive and vulgar subject matter.” They were released after 23 days—including 15 in solitary confinement, during which time Kani went on sleep strike. There had been an international outcry. British actors including Glenda Jackson and Albert Finney lent their outraged voices to a statement. In New York, Broadway actors marched, demanding their immediate release.

***

Kunene and the King premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2019. The play is set 25 years after Mandela’s release, a period of remarkable change in many ways. Today, Dr. Kani no longer needs a pass to enter a white man’s house. Instead, he is invited to Shakespeare’s birthplace and given awards. He has portrayed T’Chaka in Black Panther and Rafiki in The Lion King, bestowing world-historical gravitas upon Disney fantasias.

But the past has a funny way of not remaining in the past tense, as Kani’s play reminds us. Much like The Island, the play features two characters in a confined space confronting the limits of their own tolerance. And much like that earlier play, the legacy of European classicism collides with a modern-day drama of African conscience.

Jack Morris (played in this production by Edward Gero) is a liberal, apolitical Shakespeare actor living in Killarney, a wealthy suburb outside of Johannesburg. Morris, who affects a British and aristocratic air, proclaims his apoliticism even as he waxes nostalgic for the days of apartheid. Dying of stage four liver cancer, he is getting ready to play King Lear.

Lunga Kunene (played by Kani) is Morris’s Black male nurse and no less a lover of Shakespeare. He grew up reading Shakespeare translated into his native isiXhosa. Shockingly, Kunene does not know King Lear. Apartheid-era township schools banned all of Shakespeare’s plays except for Julius Caesar.

As the two men talk, it becomes clear that South Africa remains a society divided, still suffering from the inequalities of apartheid and centuries of violent settler colonialism. Shakespeare is the only place where the two men feel something like safety, a space for them to stop arguing and begin having a conversation. Instead of telling them what to think, he shows them what to think about.

The second scene opens with Lunga reading King Lear. We watch as he reads the play’s mysterious final lines for the first time, pondering them.

John Kani never signed the Robben Island Bible. In this moment, the fruits of an incomparable career, we hear the passage he might have chosen:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Kunene and the King
By John Kani
Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Produced in association with Octopus Theatricals

A celebrated South African classical actor has just been given a career-defining role as King Lear and a life-changing diagnosis—and Lunga Kunene (John Kani) has been charged with his care. As Jack Morris (Edward Gero) confronts his mortality, two men brought together by necessity discover the unifying power of Shakespeare a quarter century after the fall of apartheid. Written and performed by Tony-winner John Kani (Black Panther, The Island, Sizwe Banzi is Dead), Edward Gero (The Lehman Trilogy) joins this “poignant two-hander” (The Guardian) in the play’s U.S. premiere.