AFRICAN DRAMA ATHOL FUGARD: Sizwe Bansi is Dead. Discuss the use of symbols in the play.

Answer Details

In Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, symbols carry much of the play's meaning. Through a few powerful objects and names, Fugard exposes the dehumanising machinery of apartheid and the desperate struggle of black South Africans to survive with dignity.

The passbook (the dompas). The most important symbol is the passbook that every black man is forced to carry. It stands for the whole apartheid system of control: it dictates where a man may live and work, and without the right stamp he is denied employment and can be arrested or expelled. The passbook reduces a human being to a set of official entries, symbolising the state's power to define, restrict and dehumanise black life.

The photograph. The photograph that Sizwe has taken in Styles' studio symbolises identity, memory and the wish to be remembered as a real, dignified person. It is the means by which Sizwe sends proof of himself to his family, an assertion of individual existence against a system that treats black men as anonymous units of labour.

The name Sizwe Bansi. The hero's name is itself symbolic. Suggesting the strength or the people of the nation, it represents black South Africans as a whole. When Sizwe is forced to abandon his own name and take that of the dead Robert Zwelinzima in order to obtain work papers, the title "Sizwe Bansi is dead" symbolises the death of black identity and manhood under apartheid: a man must bury his very name to survive.

The dead man and the new identity. Robert Zwelinzima's corpse and the pass taken from it symbolise how the system compels the living to trade away their true selves. Survival demands a kind of self-erasure, a symbolic death of the individual so that the body may go on living and working.

Styles' photographic studio. The studio symbolises a small space of freedom and self-assertion. In having their pictures taken, ordinary black people record their dreams and dignity, momentarily controlling their own image in a society that otherwise denies them agency.

Significance. Together these symbols dramatise the central conflict between the individual's humanity and a state determined to erase it. They allow Fugard to make an abstract political injustice concrete, immediate and deeply moving.

In conclusion, the passbook, the photograph, the name Sizwe Bansi, the dead man's identity and the photo studio all function as potent symbols through which Fugard exposes the cruelty of apartheid and the heavy cost at which black South Africans preserve their lives and dignity.