AFRICAN DRAMA ATHOL FUGARD: Sizwe Bansi is Dead. Examine the significance of Sizwe's "death".

Answer Details

The "death" of Sizwe Bansi in Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi is Dead is not a physical death but the giving up of his name and identity so that he may survive under apartheid. This symbolic death is the central event of the play and carries its whole meaning.

What happens

• Sizwe Bansi has come to Port Elizabeth to look for work, but his passbook is not in order and he is ordered to return to King William's Town, where there is no work.
• Out with Buntu one night, they find the corpse of a man, Robert Zwelinzima, in a back alley. His passbook carries a valid work-seeker's permit for the city.
• Buntu persuades Sizwe to switch the photographs and take over the dead man's identity. From then on Sizwe Bansi is "dead", and he must live as Robert Zwelinzima.

Significance of the death

• Survival under an inhuman system. Sizwe can only stay and work in the city by killing off his real self. Apartheid forces a man to choose between his name and his livelihood.
• Loss of identity and dignity. The passbook, not the person, decides whether a black man may live and work. A human being is reduced to a number and a stamp; individual identity is worthless without the right papers.
• Protest against the pass laws. The episode is a bitter indictment of a regime that makes a man's own name a death sentence and forces him to become someone else to eat.
• Symbol of the black condition. Sizwe's dilemma stands for the plight of all black South Africans, robbed of self and freedom by unjust laws.

The moral question

• Sizwe at first resists, clinging to the pride of his own name and manhood: "How do I live as a ghost?"
• Buntu's harsh logic, that a name is worth nothing if it cannot buy bread for one's family, finally persuades him. Survival demands the sacrifice of self.

Conclusion

The significance of Sizwe's "death" lies in its exposure of apartheid's cruelty. To live, a black man must die to his own identity and wear the papers of a dead stranger. The symbolic death dramatises the system's denial of human dignity and gives the play its powerful protest.