Passbooks/Reference Books Symbol Analysis

In Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, passbooks represent the racist refusal of South Africa’s apartheid government to recognize Black South Africans’ human dignity and individuality. This refusal deeply harms the play’s Black characters, but they also find ways to exploit it. In apartheid South Africa, passbooks (also called Reference Books) were an identity document that the law required Black South Africans to carry. The government used passbooks to monitor and restrict Black South Africans’ travel, places of residence, and employment. The play first mentions passbooks in the stage directions, when the Black photographer Styles advertises on his studio’s name-board that he can take photographs for people’s Reference Books. Styles later claims the real purpose of his business is not to churn out passbook photos but to memorialize his clientele’s dreams, affirming their humanity—yet Styles still clearly advertises passbook photos. Styles’s advertising for passbook photos suggests that economic concerns have coerced him into complicity with South Africa’s white-supremacist government, tainting his personal aspirations as a photographer. On the other hand, Styles, a young Black man, has found a way to earn money from the racist passbooks, showing how Black characters do not merely suffer oppression but actively seek to survive and thrive under oppressive conditions.

The character Sizwe Bansi’s troubles reinforce and deepen the symbolism surrounding passbooks. Sizwe moves to a city, Port Elizabeth, to look for jobs because he wants to support his family. Yet when the authorities discover from Sizwe’s passbook that he does not have permission to be in Port Elizabeth, they order him to return home—showing their indifference to his dignity as a human being and as a father seeking to support his children. After Sizwe and his acquaintance Buntu find a passbook containing a Port Elizabeth work permit on a dead man’s body, Buntu convinces Sizwe to take the dead man’s passbook—an identity theft that will allow Sizwe to stay in Port Elizabeth and get a job. The identity theft relies on the white-supremacist government’s blindness to Black individuality: Buntu and Sizwe are assuming that white authorities rely almost solely on passbooks to identify Black people and won’t notice the difference between Sizwe and the dead man unless the police have reason to fingerprint Sizwe. Sizwe’s original passbook cruelly thwarts his aspirations, showing apartheid’s refusal to treat Black South Africans as full citizens or human beings with dreams—yet Sizwe eventually uses a new passbook to trick the government, again showing how Black South Africans did not suffer oppression passively but avoided or resisted it.