AFRICAN DRAMA ATHOL FUGARD: Sizwe Bansi is Dead Discuss the theme of racial discrimination in the play.

Answer Details

Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead is a powerful protest against South Africa's apartheid system, and racial discrimination is its central theme. The play exposes how a whole legal and social order was built to degrade black people and strip them of identity, dignity and freedom of movement.

The pass laws and the reference book. The most concrete instrument of discrimination in the play is the passbook, the identity document every black South African was forced to carry. It controls where a black man may live, work and travel. Sizwe Bansi's tragedy begins because his passbook is not stamped to allow him to seek work in Port Elizabeth; without the correct stamp he is ordered back to King William's Town, where there is no work. The passbook reduces a human being to a set of official stamps that white authority may grant or withhold at will.

Loss of identity and the assumption of a dead man's name. Discrimination is dramatised most sharply when Sizwe, in order to survive and support his family, must abandon his own name and take on the identity of a dead man, Robert Zwelinzima, whose passbook is in order. That a black man can only live by becoming legally someone else shows how apartheid denies black people the right even to their own names and selves. The very title of the play, and Sizwe's anguished cry over who he really is, expose the erasure of black identity.

Economic and social oppression. The play also shows how discrimination confines black men to poverty and menial labour. Styles's account of his time at the Ford factory reveals the humiliation black workers endured, ordered about, spoken of contemptuously, and expected to be grateful for scraps. The photographic studio Styles opens becomes a small act of dignity, a place where ordinary black people can record their humanity in a world that denies it.

The human cost. Through Sizwe's suffering and Styles's memories, Fugard makes visible the psychological wounds of a system that treats people as inferior because of their colour. The characters must constantly scheme and compromise simply to exist, and their dilemmas expose the cruelty of institutionalised racism.

Conclusion. Racial discrimination in Sizwe Bansi is Dead is embodied in the pass laws, the theft of black identity, and the economic degradation of black workers. Fugard uses Sizwe's desperate assumption of another man's name to protest that apartheid robbed black South Africans of their names, their dignity and their humanity.