Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, a play set in apartheid South Africa, suggests that documents are rarely reliable tools for understanding marginalized people’s lives. The play opens with a Black South African photographer, Styles, reading newspaper headlines aloud. When he reaches a headline about a new automobile plant, he comments that he used to work at an automobile factory—and while he read a lot of headlines about factory owners planning to better the conditions in which Black employees worked, those headlines never resulted in real changes, like raises. Though Styles takes photographs both for official documents like passbooks and for personal keepsakes like family portraits, he argues that his real calling is documenting the existence of “my people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books.” Yet Styles isn’t trying to document the strict reality of the people he photographs; instead, he uses props and backdrops to record their aspirations and “dreams.” Moreover, he’s running a business; while he may photograph the simple people, he’s photographing simple people who have enough money to pay him, which suggests that there may be another population of people too poor to be documented at all. Thus photographs, which may seem to record visual reality, can invent alternate realities and exclude impoverished realities. In the same vein, another character, Sizwe Bansi, uses a dead man’s passbook—an identity document the government uses to monitor and limit Black South Africans’ movements—to steal a new legal identity; though the passbook is supposed to document reality, it ends up serving as a tool to hide Sizwe Bansi’s identity. The play thus calls into question the legitimacy of seemingly trustworthy documents like newspapers, IDs, and photographs for understanding the lives of oppressed people.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Documented Reality vs. Lived Reality ThemeTracker
Documented Reality vs. Lived Reality Quotes in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead
STYLES: I worked at Ford one time. We used to read in the newspaper . . . big headlines! . . . ‘So and so from America made a big speech: “. . . going to see to it that the conditions of their non-white workers in Southern Africa were substantially improved.”’ The talk ended in the bloody newspaper. Never in the pay packet.
STYLES: This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statutes erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn’t for Styles. That’s what I do, friends. Put down, in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children’s children will remember a man . . .
STYLES: Something you mustn’t do is interfere with a man’s dream. If he wants to do it standing, let him stand. If he wants to sit, let him sit. Do exactly what they want! Sometimes they come in here, all smart in a suit, then off comes the jacket and shoes and socks . . . [adopts a boxer’s stance] . . . ‘Take it, Mr Styles. Take it!’ And I take it. No questions! Start asking stupid questions and you destroy that dream.
STYLES: Here he is. My father. That’s him. Fought in the war. Second World War. Fought at Tobruk. In Egypt. He fought in France so that this country and all the others could stay Free. When he came back they stripped him at the docks—his gun, his uniform, the dignity they’d allowed him for a few mad years because the world needed men to fight and be ready to sacrifice themselves for something called Freedom […] When he died, in a rotten old suitcase amongst some of his old rags, I found that photograph. That’s all. That’s all I have from him.
STYLES: Always helping people. If that man was white they’d call him a liberal.
BUNTU: It’s your only chance!
MAN: No, Buntu! What’s it mean? That me, Sizwe Bansi . . .
BUNTU: Is dead.
MAN: I’m not dead, friend.
BUNTU: We burn this book . . . [Sizwe’s original] . . . and Sizwe Bansi disappears off the face of the earth.
MAN: A black man stay out of trouble? Impossible, Buntu. Our skin is trouble.
