E-Book, Englisch, 112 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-77619-133-8
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Bonisile JOHN KANI (born 30 August 1943) is a South African actor, activist, author, director and award-winning playwright. The more famous of his plays are Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, both co-written with Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. Kani's work has been widely performed around the world, including New York, where he and Winston Ntshona won a Tony Award in 1975 for Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island. He is known for portraying T'Chaka in Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Black Panther (2018), Rafiki in the 2019 remake of The Lion King and Colonel Ulenga in the Netflix film Murder Mystery (2019) with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston.
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Introduction
Friendship – true friendship – is very demanding. It is deeply rewarding, too, which is precisely why it is demanding. To be a genuine friend to someone is to care deeply for them and about them; it is also to see them, truly. We do not always pay attention to moral questions because it is hard work to focus deliberately on the requirements of morality. It requires ethical literacy to do so. This is a skill not readily available to everyone. It must be taught. For the most part, as social beings, we simply get on with life. But think deliberately for a moment about friendship. Why do we distinguish – linguistically in the first instance, but also in our material lives within which language is embedded – between, say, being acquainted with someone and being friends with someone? Why do we also distinguish between (mere) friendship and deep or close friendship? We do so because the varying social connections that these different descriptions pick out speak to a range of relationship types that could be located within: some will be shallow and might not even meet the requirements of friendship, while others will be deeper and may or may not meet the aspirational expectations of close friendship. Once you are, deliberately or through slow and inadvertent relationship-building, inside an unambiguous friendship, you may be confronted periodically with moral questions about yourself and about your behaviour within that relationship. While meditating on the legendary John Kani’s excellent latest work, Kunene and the King, I kept thinking about this work in relation to the philosophical questions that friendship raises. It is a play about two old men. One is 65-year-old Jack Morris, a well-known white South African actor and resident of Killarney in northern Johannesburg, who has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. The other is 69-year-old Lunga Kunene, a black male nurse from Soweto, who ends up caring for Jack as his private nurse, bringing his enormous experience as a senior nurse from the high-care unit of an oncology ward to Jack’s benefit. Most of the dialogue between the men plays out in Jack’s Killarney apartment, and the final scene is in Lunga’s sparse abode in Soweto. We get to know Jack as he experiences the horrible changes in his body because of cancer, and we get to know Lunga as the consummate health professional who negotiates his ill-tempered patient. But, crucially, we also get to know them as two South African men with different histories, ensnared in an unlikely relationship. This is where it gets particularly interesting. Of course, Jack and Lunga were never likely to be true friends. Everything in South Africa’s history and in their personal biographies militates against that possibility. The very beginning of the play reveals racial and misogynistic South African realities as Jack views Lunga with deep suspicion when he enters his apartment. Jack expects a white woman to be sent to look after him but is greeted, instead, by a black man. He responds with casual racism, revealing the consequences of white supremacist thought that colonial and apartheid-era thinking instilled in too many white South Africans. Jack is no exception, even with his apparent education, class positionality, and presumably cosmopolitan values (or at least such values that one might expect in an artist who has had to portray the lives of people very different to himself). Lunga, in turn, responds to Jack in a remarkably, but not unusually, generous manner. He is firm when he needs to be, like calling Jack out for having expected a white woman to look after him. And, in an important assertion of his own self-worth, Lunga makes it clear that he will leave Jack’s apartment if he treats him as some kind of object, the way domestic workers are typically treated. Lunga insists, for example, on sleeping in the apartment, an insistence that challenges a white person who has never shared domestic space with ‘the other’. Jack has no choice but to abandon bits of his own bigotry in those moments. But Lunga is also very patient with Jack. He puts up with a lot of other instances of bigotry, and even with his patient’s needless insolence and aggression. It is not clear whether Lunga tolerates this simply because he is an experienced nurse who understands what end-of-life fears do to human beings, or whether he is being kind towards a white man because many black South Africans, especially of his generation, had been socialised to prioritise unidirectional kindness over bidirectional respect. This ambiguity is useful because the audience must grapple with whether this is a moral flaw in Lunga or whether these scenes simply reveal one’s own racialised baggage as an audience member. Perhaps Lunga is simply kind and magnanimous, and it is those of us who wish him to be tougher on Jack whose responses are overdetermined by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. At any rate, what is clear to me by the end of the play is that Jack and Lunga were never true friends. They had a functional relationship and one that was sophisticated enough to include mimicry of genuine friendship. They could share a joke. Friends do that. They showed a range of emotions to, and in front of, each other. Friends do that. They had fights. Friends do that. They showed kindness towards each other. Friends do that. And yet, as I argued at the outset of this introduction, if we put our moral-philosophy hats on, true friendship requires that we truly see each other. Lunga was never seen by Jack and he never felt seen. Perhaps the most powerful moment of the play occurs in Lunga’s home when he says as much, scolding Jack for always having seen him as a nurse rather than as Lunga Kunene. Lunga asks of Jack: ‘Do you ever talk to me? Lunga Kunene, not Sister Kunene’. Jack is confused and they start arguing, and in the middle of the argument Jack again calls Lunga ‘Sister Kunene’. Lunga responds: ‘There is no Sister Kunene in this house. There is no caregiver in this house. There is a man in this house called Mr Lunga Kunene. You owe him – me – the respect that I give you in your house.’ Jack, drunk and unrepentant, says he can indeed now ‘see’ Lunga, and that he sees an ‘angry black man’, one who wants him dead because he is part of the ‘old white guard’. Soon thereafter the play ends in existential tragedy. Friendship does not have to be continuously a site of joy, and always conflict-free, to count as friendship. In fact, it would be hard to recognise a relationship as genuine friendship if it were always free of conflict. So, I am not arguing that Jack and Lunga are not true friends just because there is so much conflict in their relationship. It is the moral quality of their relationship that, for me, makes it fall short of genuine friendship. Jack does not truly see Lunga. Jack does not take a deep interest in Lunga as Lunga. To truly see someone is to take a substantial interest in what makes them tick to understand their personal history, and not just to reduce them to a familiar racial type. One of the classic manifestations of racism is precisely when we think that someone’s phenotype gives us sufficient information to know that individual. That is a profound moral error. Jack commits this when he reduces Lunga to an ‘angry black man’. He does not attempt to see both the social and structural realities of the man before him; he does not make a serious effort to understand him as an individual with unique personality traits and a complex inner landscape that isn’t knowable by looking at his skin colour. This is why true friendship is not easy: it requires an investment of time and energy, and intentional behaviour, to connect fully with the person you deem to be a friend. Jack and Lunga never get that far in their relationship. The trip that Jack takes to Soweto therefore feels like an unconvincing use of creative licence. Being in Soweto allows Lunga to say things he cannot say in Killarney. This means that there is an instrumental benefit to this scene playing out in Lunga’s home. One of the very reasons why cross-racial friendships in South Africa remain in an impoverished state is precisely because blacks go to the suburbs, but the residents of the suburbs anthropologise townships from afar, seldom caring enough to ‘go there’. Not enough white South Africans do the hard social labour required to forge genuine friendships with black South Africans. This makes the final scene of Kunene and the King necessarily comical. But it is, perhaps, a forgivable sin on the part of Kani because the political and social value of the dialogue that plays out as Jack commutes by minibus taxi to Soweto, and the dialogue that unfolds inside Lunga’s home, enables the playwright to show us Nothing But the Truth, as it were, about contemporary South Africa. The more things change, the more they stay the same, including our awkward, messy, morally complex relationships. If more South Africans were truly friends, and met the moral requirements of true friendship, such as caring genuinely and profoundly about their ‘friends’ – seeing them, truly – then many of those racial challenges we still bemoan would recede. The continuous mutual suspicion between Jack and Lunga shows us that we are a long way from a post-racist nirvana. I thought that the themes of illness, dying and death – themes which, at the time of writing this introduction, I am working on in my own new work – would dominate my responses to Kunene and the King. After all, the main premise of this play is that Jack is...
